Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain: A Critical Overview 9781442689053

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Introduction
PART ONE: The New Zealand and Early London Years, 1860–73
1. From Canterbury Settlement to Erewhon: Butler and Antipodean Counterpoint
2. Butler, Memory, and the Future
3. The Ironies of Biblical Criticism: From Samuel Butler’s ‘Resurrection’ Essay and The Fair Haven to Erewhon Revisited
PART TWO: The Evolutionist, 1874–86
4. ‘The written symbol extends infinitely’: Samuel Butler and the Writing of Evolutionary Theory
5. ‘A Conspiracy of One’: Butler, Natural Theology, and Victorian Popularization
6. Evolutionary Psychology and The Way of All Flesh
7. Samuel Butler as Late-Victorian Bachelor: Regulating and Representing the Homoerotic
8. Mind Matters: Butler and Late Nineteenth-Century Psychology
PART THREE: On the Margin, 1887–1902
9. Samuel Butler, Local Identity, and the Periodizing of Northern Italian Art: The Travel Writer-Painter’s View of Art History
10. Samuel Butler’s Photography: Observation and the Dynamic Past
11. Butler’s Narcissus: ‘A Tame Oratorio’
12. Why Homer Was (Not) a Woman: The Reception of The Authoress of the Odyssey
13. Butler after Butler: The Man of Letters as Outsider
Chronology
Select Bibliography
Contributors
Credits
Index

Citation preview

SAMUEL BUT LER, V IC TO R I A N A GA IN S T T HE GR A IN : A CR I TI CA L OV ERV IEW

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EDITED BY JAMES G. PARADIS

Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain A Critical Overview

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R ON TO P RE S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9745-3

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Samuel Butler, Victorian against the grain : a critical overview / edited by James G. Paradis. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9745-3 1. Butler, Samuel, 1835–1902 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Butler Samuel, 1835–1902. 3. Novelists, English – 19th century – Biography. 4. Critics – Great Britain – Biography. 5. Essayists – Great Britain – Biography. I. Paradis, James G., 1942– PR4349.B7Z915 2007

828c809

C2007-904294-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii List of Illustrations ix Abbreviations xi

Introduction 3 james g. paradis PART ONE: THE NEW ZEALAND AND EARLY LONDON YEARS, 1860–73 1 From Canterbury Settlement to Erewhon: Butler and Antipodean Counterpoint 21 roger robinson 2 Butler, Memory, and the Future gillian beer

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3 The Ironies of Biblical Criticism: From Samuel Butler’s ‘Resurrection’ Essay and The Fair Haven to Erewhon Revisited 58 elinor shaffer PART TWO: THE EVOLUTIONIST, 1874–86 4 ‘The written symbol extends infinitely’: Samuel Butler and the Writing of Evolutionary Theory 91 david amigoni

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Contents

5 ‘A Conspiracy of One’: Butler, Natural Theology, and Victorian Popularization 113 bernard lightman 6 Evolutionary Psychology and The Way of All Flesh sally shuttleworth

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7 Samuel Butler as Late-Victorian Bachelor: Regulating and Representing the Homoerotic 170 herbert sussman 8 Mind Matters: Butler and Late Nineteenth-Century Psychology 195 ruth parkin-gounelas PART THREE: ON THE MARGIN, 1887–1902 9 Samuel Butler, Local Identity, and the Periodizing of Northern Italian Art: The Travel Writer-Painter’s View of Art History 223 clarice zdanski 10 Samuel Butler’s Photography: Observation and the Dynamic Past 251 elizabeth edwards 11 Butler’s Narcissus: ‘A Tame Oratorio’ 287 ellen t. harris 12 Why Homer Was (Not) a Woman: The Reception of The Authoress of the Odyssey 317 mary beard 13 Butler after Butler: The Man of Letters as Outsider james g. paradis Chronology 371 Select Bibliography Contributors 393 Credits 397 Index 399

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Acknowledgments

This volume is the result of many contributions by scholars, archivists, and colleagues, beginning with a small and lively centenary seminar on Samuel Butler at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, in the spring of 2002, at which five of the thirteen contributors presented papers (Beer, Shaffer, Edwards, Beard, and Paradis). Eight additional essays were solicited from various scholars whose areas of expertise matched up with Butler’s diverse output. I am grateful to these scholars (Amigoni, Harris, Lightman, Parkin-Gounelas, Robinson, Shuttleworth, Sussman, Zdanski) for agreeing to contribute original essays on topics that would help trace out Butler’s long and complex career. I am also grateful for financial and archival assistance from Butler’s alma mater, St John’s College, both in hosting the original seminar and in supporting the publication of this volume. Jane Heal, who was the College Master at the time of the original seminar, was especially supportive. Mark Nicholls, Head of the Library, and Johnathan Harrison, Special Collections Archivist, provided much help to me and other contributors in negotiating the Butler collection and in furnishing many of the illustrations. For additional and crucial financial support, I would like also to thank Philip Khoury, former Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT. I am also grateful to the President and Fellows of Clare Hall for a fellowship that enabled me to spend time in the Butler collection at St John’s College, and I thank my host at Clare Hall, Dame Gillian Beer. I very much appreciate the generous archival assistance and support of Robert Volz, Custodian of the Library, and Wayne Hammond, Assistant Librarian of the Chapin Library at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which houses a substantial Butler collection of its own. Other colleagues and staff I am grateful to for advice and technical

viii Acknowledgments

support include Elinor Shaffer, who has spent many hours with me in person and online sharing her extensive knowledge of Butler’s career. I thank also Renato Lo Schiavo of Trapani, Sicily; Ulinka Rublack; Roger Parsell; Peter Maling of Christchurch, New Zealand; and Nicholas Altenbernd and Dudley Simons (for photographic reproductions). For additional illustrations, I am grateful to the Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand. I very much also appreciate many discussions of Butler over the years with my Darwin seminar colleague, Alvin Kibel of MIT. The intrepid and inestimable Philip Alexander, my editorial associate for this collection, has earned the admiration and deep gratitude of all of the contributors to this collection. He has worked tirelessly to improve the bibliographical, factual, and stylistic accuracy of the volume, and deserves special thanks for his work on assembling the bibliography and putting it into final form. I also thank Jill McConkey and Barbara Porter, editors at the University of Toronto Press, for their patient encouragement and for guiding this project through the publication process. As before, my wife Judith has provided me the warm support that made project problems seem curiously distant and manageable. And my daughters, Em and Roz, have indulged my Butler talk with goodnatured affection. James G. Paradis

List of Illustrations

Introduction Figure 1 Butler at age 54, 1890. Photograph by Alfred Cathie. Chapter 1 Figure 1.1 Samuel Butler, Sketch of his homestead, Mesopotamia Station, New Zealand. Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 Butler’s Royal Academy exhibition painting, Mr Heatherley’s Holiday (1873). Chapter 5 Figure 5.1 Darwin and Butler in 1878: (a) Darwin, last photograph, by his son Leonard; (b) Self-portrait, Butler, 1878. Chapter 6 Figure 6.1 The Butler family. Chapter 7 Figure 7.1 August Blue (1894), by Henry Scott Tuke. Figure 7.2 Rose, the model. Photograph by Butler, ca. 1867. Chapter 9 Figure 9.1 Sacro Monte at Locarno. Drawing by Samuel Butler, from Alps and Sanctuaries, 1881. Figure 9.2 One of Butler’s two frontispiece maps for Alps and Sanctuaries, 1881 (adaptation). Figure 9.3 Interior of the church of San Nicolao at Giornico. Drawing by Samuel Butler, from Alps and Sanctuaries, 1881.

x List of Illustrations

Chapter 10 Figure 10.1 (a) and (b): Worshippers outside the church at Madesimo. Figure 10.2 Magazine seller, Ludgate Circus, London. Photograph by Paul Martin, 1900. Figure 10.3: Marketplace at Novara. Figure 10.4: The Chapel of the Marriage at Cana at the Sacro Monte at Crea. Figure 10.5 (a) and (b): The Stoning of St Stephen, St Eusebio Chapel at the Sacro Monte at Crea. Figure 10.6 (a) and (b): Tabachetti’s Crucifixion Chapel at the Sacro Monte at Varallo. Figure 10.7: Women looking in at the Sposalizio Chapel at Crea. Figure 10.8. Girl adjusting her stocking, Novara. Figure 10.9: An old priest reading in the Church of the Addolorata, Monte Erice, Sicily. Figure 10.10: Public spaces: (a) Piazza St Carlo at Varallo, Italy, 21 September 1891; (b) Two priests on a steamer on Lake Como, Italy, 25 August 1891. Photographs by Samuel Butler. Chapter 11 Figure 11.1 Title page of Narcissus, A Dramatic Cantata, by Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones, 1888. Figure 11.2: Summary of characters and argument, Narcissus. Figure 11.3: First page of chorus, ‘Oh Speculation,’ by Samuel Butler. Chapter 12 Figure 12.1 Portrait of the Muse Polymnia (Nausicaa) from the frontispiece of The Authoress of the Odyssey. Chapter 13 Figure 13.1 Entry from Samuel Butler’s Note-Books, 1899. Figure 13.2: Terracotta figure in the Ecce Homo Chapel, Sacro Monte at Varallo. A self-portrait, attributed by Samuel Butler to Tabachetti. Photograph by Butler. Figure 13.3: Il Vecchietto (The Old Man). Terracotta figure in the Chapel of the Descent from the Cross, Sacro Monte at Varallo. A selfportrait, attributed by Butler to Tabachetti. Photograph by Butler.

Abbreviations

All shortened endnote references in the essays of this collection are given in full in the Select Bibliography. The following abbreviations are used in referring to Butler’s writings. For the particular edition cited, see each essayist’s endnotes. See also the Select Bibliography, which lists important editions of Butler’s major works. AO

AS DD EON EOR ER EV

FH

FY

The Authoress of the Odyssey, where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism’ Evolution, Old and New; or, The Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as compared with that of Mr. Charles Darwin Erewhon, or Over the Range Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, both by the original discoverer of the country and by his son Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte, or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia, with some notice of Tabachatti’s remaining work at the Sanctuary of Crea The Fair Haven. A work in defence of the miraculous element in Our Lord’s ministry upon earth, both as against Rationalistic impugners and certain Orthodox defenders. By the late John Pickard Owen, edited by William Bickersteth Owen, with a memoir of the author A First Year in Canterbury Settlement

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LC

Abbreviations

Luck, or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? An attempt to throw additional light upon the late Mr. Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection LE ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ LH Life and Habit NB Note-Books QD ‘Quis Desiderio ...?’ SS Shakespeare’s Sonnets reconsidered, and in part rearranged with introductory chapters, notes, and a reprint of the original 1609 edition TL ‘Thought and Language’ UM Unconscious Memory: A comparison between the theory of Dr. Ewald Hering, Professor of Physiology at the University of Prague, and the ‘Philosophy of the Unconscious’ of Dr. Edward von Hartmann, with translations from these authors, and preliminary chapters bearing on ‘Life and Habit,’ ‘Evolution, Old and New,’ and Mr. Charles Darwin’s edition of Dr. Krause’s ‘Erasmus Darwin.’ WOAF The Way of All Flesh

SAMUEL BUT LER, V IC TO R I A N A GA IN S T T HE GR A IN : A CR I TI CA L OV ERV IEW

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Introduction james g. paradis

Samuel Butler (1835–1902), Victorian satirist, critic, and visual artist, possessed one of the most original and inquiring imaginations of his age. Author of two culture-probing satires, Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), Butler’s intellectually adventurous explorations along the cultural frontiers of his times appeared in volume after eccentric volume. Evolutionary free-thinker, he rejected natural selection and traditional natural theology alike in a series of evolutionary studies – including Life and Habit (1877), Evolution, Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck or Cunning? (1886) – that placed evolutionary thinking within a new historical framework and that asserted, in a neo-Lamarckian context, the role of memory in shaping the organism. Butler was an innovative travel writer and art historian who used the creative insights of his own extensive painting, photography, and local knowledge to invent a vibrant Italian culture, in works like Alps and Sanctuaries (1881) and Ex Voto (1888), that contrasted with the spiritually frigid experience of his High Church upbringing, challenging what he saw as the stultifying impact of academic art and its growing critical authority. He was a self-fashioner, an insider cultivating the persona of an outsider, whose political and social conservatism was accompanied by an intellectual radicalism that challenged cultural authority. His pervasive irony ranged from the humorously whimsical to a withering blend of satire and scepticism that often amounted to an assault on mainstream Victorian culture. Butler thus both amused and offended many of his generation with his canny critique of the age. If he was controversial, few Victorian writers penetrated more deeply into the cultural fabric of the times, and the insights offered by a critical evaluation of his work, now, a century after his death, are considerable and unique.

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1 Butler at Age 54, 1890. Photograph by Alfred Cathie.

Introduction 5

The flow of research on Butler is currently at a low point, having dropped to a listing or two in annual research bibliographies. Yet Butler’s posthumous reputation at its peak in the years leading up to and away from the First World War was very great among modernists, fiction writers, and intellectuals in general. In a well-known gesture of support in 1907, George Bernard Shaw, one of Butler’s early admirers, declared him, in his own department, the greatest writer of his generation.1 E.M. Forster, who once planned to write a book on Butler, considered him, along with Jane Austen and Marcel Proust, one of ‘the three authors who helped me most over my writing,’ adding that Butler ‘did more than either of the other two to help me look at life the way I do.’2 Ford Madox Ford observed in 1919, in a review of Henry Festing Jones’s two-volume memoir of Butler, that Butler was ‘the greatest Englishman the nineteenth century produced, and The Way of All Flesh ... one of the four great imaginative works in the English language.’3 Virginia Woolf, like many writers of the Bloomsbury Circle, held Butler in high regard, observing in her celebrated exchange with Arnold Bennett concerning character in fiction that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed,’ and tracing the first signs of the change to ‘the works of Samuel Butler.’4 Writers like D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves, Theodore Dreiser, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all learned from him, many of them generously acknowledging their debt.5 Compton-Burnett found Butler’s cranky contrarian sense of independence a liberating alternative to George Eliot’s oppressive Victorian sensibility of self-sacrifice for the higher good.6 Fitzgerald considered Butler his favourite author, and the Erewhonian doctrine that wealth frees the souls of the very rich from the debilitating burdens of material entanglement echoes ironically in Jay Gatsby’s transforming insight that Daisy Buchanan’s voice ‘is full of money.’7 These writers viewed Butler as an innovator, a challenger, and thus definer of limits set by the dominant cultural authority. If Butler was important to writers, his reception among critics was controversial, beginning with – perhaps especially with – his contemporaries, who were often puzzled or offended by his free-thinking, audience-baiting irony. The powerful Victorian editor of The Times, John Delane, reflected this discomfort when he wrote to Napier Broome in 1873: ‘Erewhon, I won’t touch. It could not be reviewed as favourably as perhaps it deserves without alarming the “goodies” – and they are powerful.’8 Butler was never in favour with Victorian ‘goodies’ as an artist and intellectual. Yet, as Northrop Frye noted, Butler is one of

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those writers who when ‘out of fashion ... often indicate the limitations of the age that considers them so.’9 Lee Holt concluded after an exhaustive study of Butler’s critical reception that Victorian reviewers were ‘generally blinded to [his] real value by their moral, religious, scientific and literary preconceptions.’10 Even post–Second World War commentary, Holt noted, was uncomprehending, much of it failing to rise to the ‘intellectual challenge’ of Butler’s work or unable to grasp the humanistic impulse behind his complex humour and ironic interaction with Victorian culture.11 As Jacques Barzun pointed out, ‘[William] Bateson’s recognition of Butler’s importance in 1909, Shaw’s successful campaign to give him his due place in English thought, and the numerous biographies of him which have appeared to date, do not begin to exhaust the points of interest in his mind and personality.’12 The modern critical engagement with Butler’s work remains sketchy. Although Butler enjoyed a period of influence and enthusiastic critical reception in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the publication of Henry Festing Jones’s memoir gave rise to a moralizing strain of psychological criticism, in which pathology and hate figured more centrally in Butler’s work than what earlier commentators had seen as the pervasive sense of irony and intellectual adventurousness that produced it.13 As Butler’s companion of some twenty years, Jones had imbibed the contrarian spirit reflected in Butler’s caustic wit, which he sought to recount with Boswellian exhaustiveness. Fortified by a vast body of notes, chronologies, papers, photography, and correspondence that Butler had meticulously prepared for posterity, he emerged after a decade of toil with a pedestrian, shapeless portrait. The effort to recreate Butler as the enfant terrible of his time fell flat, producing, rather, the unflattering portrait of Butler as a disgruntled, bigoted curmudgeon driven by a desire to revenge himself on those responsible for his unjust neglect. Jones’s tell-all memoir was widely reviewed, and left a negative impression on former enthusiasts like Shaw, John Middleton Murry, Walter de la Mare, and Philip Gosse, who all expressed new reservations about his personality.14 Contrariety was increasingly taken to be bigotry, as personality began to trump content. Shaw’s enthusiasm faded noticeably, and Butler became the cautionary exemplar, the genius ruined by the parsonage.15 For some, the larger vision behind Butler’s caustic irony vanished. Ford Madox Ford, however, spoke for many in considering the memoir itself a failure: an unvarnished portrait of the great man by his awkward and uncomprehending assistant. ‘The world of today is infinitely his debtor,’ Ford insisted,

Introduction 7

‘just as Butler is infinitely greater than the shivering and fearful wretch that Mr. Jones presents us with.’16 The strain of moral-psychological criticism, notwithstanding the cautions of the New Criticism, has influenced modern commentary on Butler, but it has by no means been the only approach. Historians of the novel like Morton Dauwen Zabel and Arnold Kettle have insisted on the centrality of Butler’s The Way of All Flesh in the emergence of the modern novel, and a variety of biographers and critics such as Clara Stillman, and, more recently, Lee Holt, U.C. Knoepflmacher, Herbert Sussman, Peter Morton, Elinor Shaffer, Hans-Peter Breuer, and Peter Raby have continued to explore dimensions of Butler’s satire, intellectual world, and artistic work.17 Still, for a writer of Butler’s range and achievement, whose fiction, criticism, and visual art engaged so deeply with the cultural developments of the times in key and still widely read works like Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, there remains a surprising dearth of analytical commentary. No edition of critical essays has ever been published on Butler. Hence, we lack a critical overview that places his multifaceted body of work in the cultural framework of the Victorian age. This collection of essays aims to provide such an overview. The thirteen essays that follow are arranged in an order that traces the chronological emergence of Butler’s literary, intellectual, and artistic interests. They are a map, an imperfect Butlerian map, of the formation of Victorian England’s ultimate polymath and autodidact, an artistic and intellectual ventriloquist who assumed an extraordinary range of roles – as satirist, exegete, novelist, evolutionist, natural theologian, travel writer, art historian, composer of oratorios, biographer, classicist, painter, and photographer. Butler’s appropriations were rarely straightforward efforts to gain support or a following within the framework of prevailing art forms or intellectual specialties. They were made, rather, with overtones of reversal that reflected back in various whimsical and sceptical ways upon the voice and, thus, specialty or profession, itself.18 As Dame Gillian Beer notes in her essay, Butler invites the reader into an alliance, ‘but an alliance that is of its nature fitful and sometimes mortifying. We may rush to agree with his brilliant inversion of what we expect only to find that we are the butt of his jest.’ Indeed, nearly all of Butler’s work resists easy alliances. One always senses the presence of a writer working against the grain, a writer who deliberately, even provokingly, is masking his intentions in an irony capable of rebounding against the reader. Butler’s career is sorted here into three phases: The New Zealand and

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Early London Years, 1860–73; The Evolutionist, 1874–86; and On the Margin, 1887–1902. 1. The New Zealand and Early London Years, 1860–73 In the New Zealand and Early London years, roughly 1860–73, we find Butler experimenting with literary form, irony, and voice, and discovering in the new evolution of Charles Darwin a naturalistic world view capable of displacing the Christian humanistic one of his Anglican upbringing, education, and early preparation for Holy Orders. The incommensurability of these world views becomes a rich source of Butlerian ironic secularism.19 This phase culminates with the publication of Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) and The Fair Haven (1873), and with the start on his Pontifex novel (The Way of All Flesh). Butler’s early years (1860–4) as the New Zealand emigrant and sheep farmer, after graduating in 1858 with a classics degree at St John’s College, Cambridge, proved to be a crucial formative experience. Not only did he firmly establish himself in the general world of colonial business affairs in Christchurch, but he also forged an identity as an independent thinker. More extensive than is generally realized, his New Zealand writings include numerous anonymous sketches and a series of early evolution-inspired essays, for the Christchurch Press, that formed the germ of Erewhon; a series of humorous sketches of New Zealand life for his college journal and his family that were edited by his father into the small classic of colonial New Zealand literature, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863); and an extended study of the inconsistencies of the four Gospels that appeared in London anonymously in 1865 under the title The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists, critically examined. Roger Robinson’s essay, ‘From Canterbury Settlement to Erewhon: Butler and Antipodean Counterpoint,’ captures the formative nature of Butler’s colonial experience and the unfolding of his imagination through the stimulating displacement of life in New Zealand. Robinson finds a crucial correlation between the characteristic ‘shape-shifting, ambiguous, multi-perspective character of Butler’s prose’ and the experience of antipodean life, suggesting that experience was a powerful stimulator of the Butlerian contrapuntal irony. This colonial experience, Robinson argues, demanded of Butler what Butler demands of his readers in Erewhon: that they entertain a world ‘that can be made superficially to look like England, yet in reality is disturbingly different.’ In the

Introduction 9

situational displacements of colonial experience, we see a confirmation of Butler’s pervasive sense of the irony governing experience, as expressed first in A First Year, then in The Evidence for the Resurrection, and finally, in Erewhon itself. Yet another displacement Butler experienced in his years in New Zealand – this time an intellectual one – was his discovery of evolution, as presented in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which he read enthusiastically the year after his arrival. Butler’s immersion in the vast New Zealand landscape, so evident in his First Year, and his growing agricultural experience with breeding as a sheep-station owner, not to mention his intimate familiarity as a Cambridge undergraduate and preparer for Holy Orders with the arguments of natural theology, primed him for reading Darwin’s work. An exuberant, if unorthodox, embrace of evolution became one of the most enduring and distinctive characteristics of Butler’s thought. His unsigned article at the end of 1862 in the Christchurch Press, ‘Darwin on the Origin of Species: A Dialogue,’ is a masterful summary of key elements of Darwin’s argument and was much admired by Darwin himself, who sought to have it published in England. In ‘Butler, Memory, and the Future,’ Dame Gillian Beer explores the characteristic paradoxical style of temporal thinking that Butler’s appropriation of evolution led to in works like Erewhon, Life and Habit, The Way of All Flesh, and Erewhon Revisited. For Butler, Beer notes, evolution is a pathway to the unconscious and the totality of human experience, which declares itself in the form and mental capacity of the individual. Memory, transmitted though the generations, makes the past an inescapable presence in the future. In both artistic and intellectual production, Butler is primarily an ironist, a pervasive, far-ranging, and versatile purveyor of paradox, parody, burlesque, and satire. Robinson’s essay traces some of the experiential origins of this double vision in the colonial experience, as reflected in the divide between appearance and reality in Erewhon. Beer locates an ontological origin of Butlerian paradoxical speculation in the dualism of body and mind that was reinvented by Victorian evolutionary thought. The third essay treating Butler’s formative years, Elinor Shaffer’s ‘The Ironies of Biblical Criticism,’ traces the literary tradition that helped to shape Butler’s irony. Examining a variety of Butler’s works, from his comparative analysis of Resurrection accounts (1865) and his varieties-of-unbelief satire/hoax in The Fair Haven (1873) to his parody of the Resurrection in Erewhon Revisited (1901), Shaffer explores Butler’s innovative uses of irony as a secularizing tool against the back-

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ground of available models of irony in his time. Butler’s mastery, she argues, both of traditional models of literary irony found in the work of Jonathan Swift and Edward Gibbon and of the irony in polemical disciplinary debate, as it developed in the tensions between religion and science that dominated mid-Victorian culture, gave him a range, power, and subtlety of discourse that has not been fully registered. These varieties of irony, deployed throughout his fictions, represent, she contends, a new form of Victorian prose which uses fiction itself to enter imaginative worlds that logic and experiment may have called into question. 2. The Evolutionist, 1874–86 The mid-1870s marked the beginning of more than a decade of personal and professional struggle for Butler. His early career as an artist and writer after his return to London in 1864 was abruptly interrupted at the beginning of 1874, as he was forced to deal with his failing Canadian investments and the looming loss of his financial independence. His artistic efforts had met with some success, Mr Heatherley’s Holiday, perhaps his most accomplished painting, being selected for the Royal Academy Exhibition that year. But he was still, after more than a decade of art study at Carey’s and Heatherley’s art studios, searching for a distinctive style of his own. Erewhon had attracted considerable notice, but the reception of The Fair Haven had not been enthusiastic, especially when he revealed himself to be the author of both works in a new 1873 preface to the latter work. It became clear that the earnest exploration of varieties of religious doubt by The Fair Haven’s leading character had been intended as a satire on religious credulity. As Butler struggled to define himself as an author and artist against the background of his collapsing finances and renewed financial dependence on his scornful father, his work increasingly assumed the alienated voice of the intellectual and artistic outsider. Although 1874–86 were years of intense mid-life struggle for Butler, they were also the most productive and decisive of his life, his interests in evolution thoroughly dominating. Butler became one of Victorian England’s most prolific evolutionary speculators and controversialists, developing a neo-Lamarckian position as an alternative to Darwinian natural selection. Not only did he write four books on evolution, but he also completed the manuscript of the evolution-saturated novel The Way of All Flesh, the first two volumes of his Note-Books, his Italian

Introduction 11

travel memoir Alps and Sanctuaries, and a considerable number of journalistic pieces for The Examiner, including an 1879 series on the theology of evolution titled ‘God the Known and God the Unknown.’ In their two essays, ‘“The written symbol extends infinitely”: Samuel Butler and the Writing of Evolutionary Theory’ and ‘“A Conspiracy of One”: Butler, Natural Theology, and Victorian Popularization,’ David Amigoni and Bernard Lightman examine Butler’s emergence as an evolutionary thinker, in contrast to the Darwinian evolutionary consensus. Amigoni explores the semantic struggle for existence in competing terminologies of evolution in Victorian culture, and the way in which Darwin’s language, and its extension in his scientific circle and the broader cultural background, resisted Butler’s revisionism and the historical evolutionary position he sought to revive. Lightman, exploring Butler’s costly clash with Darwin and his circle, situates Butler’s evolutionary writings in the context of Victorian science popularization and natural theology. ‘It was,’ he argues, ‘the linkage of two powerful Victorian intellectual traditions – natural theology and the wider world of science popularization – that led Butler into a confrontation with scientific naturalism.’ Where Lightman sees Butler as a scientific popularizer whose loose commitments to the tradition of natural theology led him to challenge the scientific establishment, Amigoni sees Butler more as a cultural critic, offering a sophisticated analysis of the limits of professional discourse. Butler’s recognition that evolutionary development theory offered a secular alternative to traditional religion was clear with the publication of Erewhon in 1872, in which he grounded a society naturalistically, if satirically, on the principles of artificial selection. He resisted the scientific naturalism of commentators such as T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall, objecting to what he saw as their dualistic diminishment of mind. Two essays here examine Butler’s exploration of the psychological dimensions of mind in an evolutionary world: one looks at his probing of human motivation in fiction, the other at the naturalization of homoerotic desire throughout his work. Both essays are centrally concerned with The Way of All Flesh (1903), which he completed at the end of 1884 – the Bildungsroman and novel of ideas that many have considered his greatest literary achievement. In her analysis of Butler’s novel, ‘Evolutionary Psychology and The Way of All Flesh,’ Sally Shuttleworth explores this work of fiction against the backdrop of other evolutionary works, like Life and Habit and Evolution, Old and New, which Butler was writing at the same time.

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Focusing on the tension between the natural historian’s notion of a generic ‘hereditary memory’ and the fiction writer’s need for a ‘unified sense of selfhood,’ she argues that ‘[Butler’s] challenge in The Way of All Flesh is to unite the Bildungsroman form with a biological and ontological theory that does not recognize the boundaries of individual identity.’ Where Shuttleworth explores the tensions between biology and individuality in Butler’s great novel, Herbert Sussman, in ‘Samuel Butler as Late-Victorian Bachelor: Regulating and Representing the Homoerotic,’ examines the thematics of same-sex desire both in Butler’s bachelor life and in the projection of his homoerotic sensibility in works like Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh. Desire, Sussman observes, is a greater evolutionary force in Butler’s view than Darwinian natural selection: ‘Without faith and desire,’ Butler wrote, ‘neither “natural selection” nor artificial breeding will be able to do much in the way of altering any structure.’ In his analysis of Butler’s treatment of bachelorhood in The Way of All Flesh, Sussman sees Butler as a full participant in a late nineteenth-century trend of treating sexuality, including homoerotic sexuality, as part of the natural world. Throughout this middle period of his career, Butler’s embrace of evolution moved steadily towards a secular psychophysical theory of mind. Evolution bound together the realms of the material and mental worlds in a complex irony that for Butler resisted reductive naturalistic formulas. In ‘Mind Matters: Butler and Late Nineteenth-Century Psychology,’ Ruth Parkin-Gounelas examines Butler’s theories of mind against the emerging late-century models of evolutionary psychology. Expanding on many of the issues concerning evolutionary psychology raised in the earlier essays in this section, Parkin-Gounelas explores Butler’s important translation of Ewald Hering’s landmark essay, ‘On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter,’ in the context of other Victorian psychological speculators like Herbert Spencer, T.H. Huxley, W. Stewart Duncan, James Ward, and William James. 3. On the Margin, 1887–1902 Several developments in the last fifteen years of Butler’s life considerably changed his personal, intellectual, and artistic horizons. With the death of his father at the end of 1886, a moderately substantial inheritance freed him from the looming threat of bankruptcy and guaranteed his independence. His effort to earn income from his writing – a thoroughly fruitless struggle throughout his career – mercifully lost its

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urgency. His prospects for gaining a literary following among his contemporaries had been seriously clouded in the 1870s by his satires on religious orthodoxy in Erewhon and The Fair Haven, and by his assaults, often expressed with bemused contempt, on men of science. Attacking Charles Darwin in Evolution, Old and New and Unconscious Memory had been especially costly. But after his father’s death, Butler was left with a sense of freedom to experiment artistically, as well as a feeling, articulated at length in his expanding Note-Books, that he was commenting on Victorian culture from its margins. In these last years, he produced the second of two works on Northern Italian art (the first had appeared in 1881), a series of musical works, a two-volume biography of his grandfather, a sizeable body of photography, and a series of occasional essays. He also completed a study on the origins of the Odyssey, demotic prose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, an analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the novel Erewhon Revisited, and four additional manuscript volumes of his Note-Books. Eccentric and many-faceted, this considerable body of work is full of a self-conscious sense of provoking his contemporaries – indeed, writing about his contemporaries – for the amusement of an audience of another age. Although Butler came out with Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881) well before the death of his father, this work, combined with the second on Northern Italian art, Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte, or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia in 1888, represents a major departure from the theological and evolutionary preoccupations of his early and middle career. For Butler, Italy was a powerful cultural alternative to England, as colonial New Zealand had been many years before. The Italian personality, from workers and innkeepers to the intellectuals, clergy, and advocates he grew intimate with during his annual extended Italian tours, was relaxed and devoid of the stiff English self-consciousness he termed ‘priggism’ in The Way of All Flesh. Clarice Zdanski’s essay, ‘Samuel Butler, Local Identity, and the Periodizing of Northern Italian Art: The Travel Writer-Painter’s View of Art History,’ examines Butler’s two Italian art volumes from the perspective of his identification with the local spirit of Italian art. Butler’s resistance to the habit of English travel writers and art critics of imposing the categories and biases of art academism on Italian art, Zdanski argues, resonates with the views of the Pre-Raphaelites. This secular opposition to cultural authority, especially the academic in all its forms and expressions, is found throughout Butler’s work, beginning with his satire on the ‘Colleges of Unreason’ in Erewhon and continuing with his

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attack on scientific orthodoxy in Evolution, Old and New, and his satire on professional classical studies in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). The month after his father’s death, as he was engaged in writing Ex Voto, Butler purchased two cameras, one for snapshots and another for time exposures, with the idea of using photography to illustrate many of his arguments and to capture the extraordinary graphic drama of the Italian chapel dioramas. As his command of photography grew, Butler produced and mounted, with the help of his assistant Alfred Cathie, more than three thousand photographs of every conceivable subject. In her study of Butler’s photography from 1887 to 1900, ‘Samuel Butler’s Photography: Observation and the Dynamic Past,’ Elizabeth Edwards examines Butler’s mastery of the photographic ‘rhetorics of the period,’ and his development of an ‘archaeological imagination [that] excavates, reveals, and positions in the present that which is ... invisible within a sense of the past.’ Butler’s photography, Edwards concludes, not only constitutes work of ‘astonishing accomplishment,’ but, while idiosyncratic in the manner of much of Butler’s work, it was ethnographic in spirit, emphasizing the localized role of the observer as an interpreter of culture. In the same period immediately after his father’s death, Butler redoubled his efforts at collaborating with his companion Jones on a comic operatic piece in imitation of George Frideric Handel, the creative genius whom he idolized. Butler and Jones, whose one deeply shared interest was musical performance, had published their Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues, and Other Short Pieces for the Piano in 1885, after which they set their sights on a more ambitious work – an operatic burlesque that would reflect their mutual admiration for Handel in the popular contemporary idiom of the operettas of Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan. The new work, Narcissus: A Dramatic Cantata (1888), followed a comic storyline involving shepherds in a bucolic pastoral setting inspired by Butler’s traumatic stock investment failures in the mid1870s. Ellen T. Harris, in ‘Butler’s Narcissus: “A Tame Oratorio,”’ traces the composition’s complex echoes of Handel, Offenbach, and Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as the Handelian motifs that surface throughout Butler’s work, including Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. Finding that previous music historians have misunderstood the humour of the work, she argues that Narcissus is indeed a satire on Handel, but one that at the same time reflects profound admiration. In her essay, we glimpse the extraordinary musical sensitivity and understanding that drove Butler to make the Victorian musical performance scene so integral a part of his London life.

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Although Butler worked continually throughout the 1890s, he published no major new work after Ex Voto and Narcissus – which appeared a month apart in 1888 – until the two-volume Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler in 1895. During this period, he brought out a revised edition of Ex Voto (1889) and an Italian translation of the same work in 1894. He also wrote a number of occasional essays for Harry Quilter’s The Universal Review and elsewhere, including an important three-part essay in 1890 on ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism’ (see the essays here by Amigoni and Lightman). The preparation of his grandfather’s Life and Letters occupied a major chunk of his time, but his consuming new interest of the early 1890s, an outgrowth of his collaboration with Festing Jones on a second oratorio, Ulysses (1904), was with the authorship of The Odyssey itself and the localization of Scheria and Ithaca. This fascination took him to Trapani on the western shores of Sicily, where he spent a series of summers, beginning in 1892, developing new theories on the female authorship of the Odyssey, on which he lectured and published several new essays in the early 1890s. This work culminated with the publication, in November 1897, of The Authoress of the Odyssey: Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands. In ‘Why Homer Was (Not) a Woman: The Reception of The Authoress of the Odyssey,’ Mary Beard examines the staying power of what was perhaps Butler’s most flamboyant book. Asking ‘Why does the chimera of The Authoress not go away?’ Beard notes that, contrary to claims by past and recent scholars that this work had been ignored in Butler’s time, it was in fact widely noticed (more than sixty reviews in Britain and abroad) and went on to exert influence on James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Graves, Harold Bloom, and many other authors. Moreover, even among classical scholars, Beard finds, the Authoress has had a lasting, ambiguously stimulating presence that has taken readers and scholars closer to the Odyssey itself, offering a radical challenge to the dominance of the academy over one of the great canonical texts of Western civilization. Butler’s work, in fact, ‘still claims a powerful posthumous presence in classical scholarship and pedagogy more than a hundred years after she was first devised.’ Butler’s questions, Beard concludes, remain our questions. In the last five years of his life, Butler produced, in addition to his two controversial prose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey (1898, 1900), two new works, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered in 1899 and Erewhon Revisited in 1901, as well as a revised edition of Erewhon, or Over the Range (1901). In these final works, jarring revisionism com-

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bined with what by now had become an inscrutable but amusing (or annoying) Butlerian ambiguity resistant to interpretation, as seen in his theory that the beloved W.H. of the Sonnets was a male galley cook (see Sussman’s essay) and his blatant parody of the Resurrection myth in Erewhon Revisited (see Shaffer’s essay). James Paradis argues, in the concluding essay of this collection – ‘Butler after Butler: The Man of Letters as Outsider’ – that Butler had by now set his authorial sights on posterity. He spent a great deal of time during his last decade meticulously revising and arranging his literary remains, especially his six NoteBooks and his correspondence. As Butler’s contemporary audiences diminished, his self-image as an author dramatically changed in relation to his Victorian audience. One of the artefacts of this change was an outsider personality that we can see taking shape in Butler’s NoteBooks, the publication of which (1912) helped to re-establish a posthumous Butler persona that would prove of considerable influence in the next generation. It is this future-directed critique of Victorian culture by a self-fashioned outsider, whose family origins and education are those of an insider, that made Butler one of the inventors of Victorianism. As the essays of this volume collectively show, Butler’s intellectual and artistic range was exceptionally wide. This diversity in subject matter and artistic form, which we find as early as Erewhon, was important to his development as one of Victorian England’s greatest general ironists and cultural contrarians. ‘One aim of [Life and Habit],’ Butler wrote characteristically, ‘was to place the distrust of science on a scientific basis.’20 Similar observations could be made of his aims in much of his work: to expose and question orthodoxy and the new cultural authority of professionalism. Yet Butler was not a rejecter of convention, but, more often, its conservative if ironic defender. From Erewhon to Erewhon Revisited, he held that contemporary culture was the product of convention, grossly mistaken though it might be, and this conviction becomes the source of a core of relativism in Butler’s work, an appreciation of the enduring presence of the arbitrary.21 A common-sense accommodation with reality emerges out of his distrust of any claim of orthodoxy or specialization to privileged truth. It is not a common sense born out of the experiential pragmatism of a Benjamin Franklin or the scientific naturalism of a T.H. Huxley, but, rather, one emerging from an appreciation that the professional vocabularies of the time – whether religious, scientific, artistic, or intellectual – are often inconsistent within themselves and with each other.22 ‘An essential contradiction in terms meets us at

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the end of every enquiry,’ Butler concluded.23 Solutions, whether evolutionary, religious, or social, are accommodations, and the more ancient in origin, the more tried and reliable they are likely to be. In his far-ranging odyssey as a man of letters, Butler became the willing champion of the ironic and held ambiguity as an inescapable presence in Victorian culture.

NOTES 1 Shaw, ‘First Aid to Critics.’ 2 Forster, ‘The Legacy of Samuel Butler,’ 955. See also E.M. Forster, ‘A Book that Influenced Me,’ in Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 219–23; and Holt, ‘E.M. Forster and Samuel Butler.’ 3 Ford, ‘Biography and Criticism,’ 198. Although Ford does not identify which four works he is thinking of, in his memoir, Return to Yesterday ([New York: Horace Liveright, 1932], 171), he writes: ‘I suppose that The Way of All Flesh and The Playboy of the Western World are the two great milestones on the road of purely English letters between Gulliver’s Travels and Joyce’s Ulysses.’ 4 Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’ 194. 5 See O’Connor, ‘Samuel Butler and Bloomsbury.’ 6 See Hilary Spurling, Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, 1884–1919 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1974), 266–9. 7 Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 82. 8 Iverach McDonald, The History of The Times, vol. 2, The Tradition Established, 1841–1884 (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 491. 9 Frye, ‘Some Reflections on Life and Habit,’ 13. 10 Holt, ‘Samuel Butler and His Victorian Critics,’ 159. See also Holt, ‘Critical Opinion Concerning the Work of Samuel Butler, 1835–1902.’ 11 Holt, ‘Samuel Butler up to Date.’ 12 Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 111. See also W. Bateson, ‘Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights.’ 13 Jones, Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon’ (1835–1902). For a detailed summary of this line of criticism, see Cohen, ‘Stamped on His Works.’ This approach found its ultimate expression in Malcolm Muggeridge’s attack on Victorianism, The Earnest Atheist, in which Butler became (with Karl Marx) the ultimate ideologue and Victorian. For a brief but incisive critique of Muggeridge, see Dupee, ‘Butler’s Way.’

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14 See Cohen, ‘Stamped on His Works.’ 15 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Samuel Butler: The New Life Reviewed,’ review of Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon, by Henry Festing Jones, in Major Critical Essays, XXIX: Pen Portraits and Reviews (1919; New York: H.M. Wise, 1932), 58–9. 16 See Ford, ‘Biography and Criticism,’ 199. 17 See Zabel, ‘Samuel Butler: The Victorian Insolvency’; Kettle, ‘Samuel Butler: The Way of All Flesh’; Stillman, Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern; Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel; Sussman, ‘Evolution and the Machine’; Morton, ‘Butler on Heredity’; Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye; Holt, Samuel Butler; and Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography. For an extensively annotated bibliography of commentary on Butler, see Breuer and Parsell, Samuel Butler: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him. 18 See, for example, A. Dwight Culler’s discussion of Butlerian reversal in ‘The Darwinian Revolution and Literary Form,’ in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 232–5. 19 See, for example, Zemka, ‘Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism,’ for a discussion of the Butlerian tension between utopian humanism and scientific materialism. 20 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, Volume I (1874–1883), ed. Breuer, 266. 21 See Christopher Herbert on Butler in Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 133–4. 22 Butler’s ironic origins have a modern parallel in Richard Rorty’s conception of the ironist in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 73. 23 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Jones, 299.

PART ONE The New Zealand and Early London Years, 1860–73

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1 From Canterbury Settlement to Erewhon: Butler and Antipodean Counterpoint roger robinson

During his four years as a New Zealand sheep farmer, Samuel Butler drew a sketch of his new property, marking its features with medieval mock-heroic captions. The backdrop is a rugged range of ‘ye mountaynes’ (their peaks shown as from 7,000 to 11,000 feet), covered in ‘snowe,’ broken by ‘ye horryble glaciers,’ ‘ye vexatious gullies which are painfulle in ye traversynge,’ and ‘ye terraces caused by ye gt. dryfte.’ In the foreground are three modest shacks, ‘mi hutte,’ ‘ye sodde hutte,’ and ‘Caton hys olde hutte.’ Prominent in the left front of the view is the square of ‘ye garden, so orderlie and precise,’ its orderly rectilinear plantings and precise boundaries conspicuously incongruous (as the caption emphasizes) amid a scene of primeval Alpine wildness. In Erewhon, the most evocative description of the Rangitata Gorge scenery makes the same contrast. Sitting high on the vast mountainside, the shepherd-narrator looks down on the river, ‘that torrent pathway of desolation,’ and remarks on ‘the two white specks of huts in the distance, and the little square of garden behind them.’1 It is the same little square that he drew in the sketch, ‘so orderlie and precise,’ a speck of human activity and English tidiness in a landscape of potent mobility and intense desolation. The convention of settler-romance, which initially this purports to be, is for the ‘little square of garden,’ and the European order and control it represents, to prove a mighty fortress that stands firm against the wilderness. As the settler-narrator in the next chapter schemes to outwit the naive native Chowbok, that is where this story seems to be going. But Chowbok proves less gullible, more sure of his own values, and his trance in the woolshed exposes the narrator to dimensions of experience beyond his comprehension. He can call it only ‘grotesque fiendishness,’

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1.1 Samuel Butler, Sketch of his homestead, Mesopotamia Station, New Zealand (ca. 1862, ink drawing).

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on the edge of being ridiculous, yet has to acknowledge how close it comes to the sublime. Suddenly the narrative is in a world that horticultural rectangles and mock-heroic maps cannot contain, where European orderliness is irrelevant and European knowledge powerless: ‘Of his meaning I had no conception. How could I? All I could feel sure of was, that he had a meaning which was true and awful to himself’ (EOR, 57). For Samuel Butler, too, there were moments in Canterbury Settlement when he had no conception of the true meaning. Many of his early experiences there were of surprises, contrasts, incongruities, encounters with the incomprehensible and the inexpressible. How he learned to comprehend and express them would affect his whole development as a writer. Arriving when he was twenty-four, Butler spent four and a half years in New Zealand. Rather later than the norm, these were his formative literary years. At Shrewsbury School and St John’s College, Cambridge, he had worked his way through a Victorian classics curriculum that trained memory, precision, and analytical reading, but not individual expression or verbal inventiveness. His creative outlets as a teenager were sketching and music, not words. His youthful letters are undistinguished, anxious mainly to please. His first published writings, the essays ‘On English Composition, and Other Matters’ and ‘Our Tour,’ for the St John’s College student magazine, the Eagle, show glimpses of his characteristic vigour and clarity of style in formation, but not the challenge, versatility, agility, and ingenuity that would make Erewhon a great satire. He learned those, or at least learned to use them, in New Zealand. There, too, in a world that for the settler from Europe was in real dayto-day ways back-to-front and upside-down, where the winter months are summer and the cold winds come from the south, he found a dominant ironic metaphor for his satire on Victorian English values, and so created an imagined world where churches are banks, invalids are criminals, and universities teach unreason. Reversal, absorbed into his imagination as he looked back on his New Zealand years, is the essential strategy of Erewhon. The development of these two literary characteristics so distinctive to Butler – the contrapuntal agility of his style and the ‘antipodean’ reversals of his greatest satire – can be traced through the texts he wrote in and about the new colony, that unprecedented context and subject. He arrived, an inexperienced dropout from ordination hoping only to make some money, in 1860. It was 26 January, and so (to remind) high

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summer. The wind was the notorious Canterbury nor’wester, gusting strongly across the plains, all its moisture having dropped on its progress over the Southern Alps, and therefore utterly dry and enervating by the time it reached the east coast. The first words he wrote about the new place were ‘Oh the heat!’2 The heat and dust that open chapter 3 of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, as well as the ‘scattered wooden boxes of houses,’ the ‘shaggy-bearded, rowdy-hatted ... men,’ the soil and the scrub and the sheer scale of the terrain (FY, 31), were outside anything known or expected. Canterbury was supposed to be a safely English outpost. Butler’s father, Canon Thomas Butler, had approved his emigration there because of its respectably Church of England origins and mission. The Protestant gentlemen who sponsored the Canterbury Association were based in Christ Church, Oxford, and gave the college’s name to the capital city. The Association was led by Lord Lyttelton, whose name went to the primary port, and its president was the archbishop of Canterbury, after whose Church of England archdiocese the whole province was named. The first settlers in 1850 called themselves Canterbury Pilgrims, and included a considerably higher proportion of the educated English middle class than was typical of colonial ventures. (The Scots and Irish went mostly to other parts of New Zealand.) Their aspirations were appropriately more Anglican, liberal, utopian, and perhaps elitist. On the face of it, Canterbury was the most conventional and self-consciously English of all colonies. But before Butler even set foot ashore, the official Lyttelton pilot ‘gave us a roaring republican speech on the subject of India, China, &c.’ (FY, 28).His first impression of the place reassuringly named Christchurch, with its winding river called the Avon, was a mere ‘little townlet, for I cannot call it town,’ a scrappy confusion of scattered houses, ragged scrubby empty spaces, unkempt brown tussock and the tropical-looking ‘huge wide-leafed flax,’ with a pub that seemed ‘so foreign and yet so English,’ and stores ‘supplying all heterogeneous commodities’ (FY, 31). That ‘heterogeneous’ is the key word of the paragraph. The landscape was even more disparate, the rugged volcanic hills between port and town suddenly opening to the ‘long stare’ of a dead flat measureless plain backed by towering mountains (FY, 33). He found the people of the settlement busy with ‘grasses, paddocks, bush, and so forth,’ unearthing bones of the giant moa bird and Maori battle axes, yet also dutifully building a replica English society with its cathedral, churches, gentlemen’s club, private boys’ school, cricket matches, and grand annual

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Jockey Club race meeting (FY, 31–7). Oxford and Cambridge graduates already spoke a distinctive local idiom, with a peculiar emphasis and intonation that he records in First Year – ‘Don’t you believe it’ and ‘It is so’ – and are still characteristic (FY, 34). The familiar and the foreign were an inseparable jumble. Butler also recorded a way of life among these classically educated frontiersmen that embodied incongruity equal to that of the town and the landscape, ‘a kind of mixture of that of a dog and that of an emperor.’ In a primitive hut ‘beyond the pale of civilisation,’ with neither chairs nor sheets, where you washed in the lake and the blankets were likely to be fly-blown, he found Tennyson’s Idylls of the King under the bed, and met a bullock-driving farmer who now and then left shepherding and cooking to be examiner in the classics at Christ’s College (FY, 49). A guest in an even more remote hut discovered books in Italian and Latin while his shepherd-host was doing the baking. In Christchurch, Butler watched a Maori woman nicknamed Mary in the Clouds from a tribe over the range smoking a black cutty pipe in front of a shop called Turnbull, and was struck by ‘the sensation of what a jumble it all was.’3 The jumble, like Chowbok’s grotesque and sublime trance, was hard to comprehend and harder to describe, but unexpectedly liberating. A break from conventional English cultural preoccupations came readily to someone who had suffered so rigorously under them: ‘there is much nonsense in the old country from which people here are free. There is little conventionalism, little formality, and much liberality of sentiment; very little sectarianism and, as a general rule, a healthy sensible tone in conversation, which I like much’ (FY, 50). Liberated in this way, Butler’s accounts of this strange new world of incongruities, this bewildering jumble of disparate impressions, show how quickly he acquired the written idiom to cope with them. The description of Mary in the Clouds outside Turnbull’s comes in his first attempt at settlement narrative, the ‘Forest Creek manuscript.’ That was written, he explained, by way of excusing its incoherence, sitting on a ‘stone in my V hut,’ interrupted by duties like ‘carrying a heavy log of timber to the scene of the building operations’ (‘Forest Creek,’ 55). Whether that is the reason or not, stylistically in ‘Forest Creek’ he is noticeably almost overwhelmed by the ‘jumble.’ The opening paragraph is characteristic, with its sudden ‘in medias res’ beginning, its muddle of time and tenses, the unfamiliar names and miscellaneous impressions, its switches between close-up and long-range, between the main narrative and background factual information, the confusion

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as to which river is actually being crossed at the time, the Defoe-like scatter of dashes (mostly replaced in the published text cited here by semi-colons), the lurches between formally descriptive and casually colloquial language. The whole mode and tone of the prose are as changeable and unsatisfactory as the weather: We had had some difficulty in crossing the Rakaia having been detained there two days before even the punt could cross; on the third day they commenced crossing in the punt behind which we swam our horses; since then the clouds had hung unceasingly upon the mountain ranges and though much of what had fallen would be in all probability snow, we could not doubt but that the Rangitata would afford us some trouble, nor were we even certain about the Ashburton a river which though partly glacier-fed is generally easily crossed anywhere by anybody. We found the Ashburton high, but lower than it had been in one or two of the eleven crossing places between our afternoon and evening resting places; we were wet up to the saddle flaps – still we were able to proceed without any real difficulty. That night it snowed, and the next morning we started amid a heavy rain being anxious if possible to make my own place that night. (‘Forest Creek’ 36)

The writing in the ‘Forest Creek manuscript’ is energetic and sometimes vivid in a hand-held camera way, but it often seems unable to cope with the quantity, diverseness, and unfamiliarity of the information it has to convey. Its structure, as in the following passage of advice about ‘burning off,’ dissolves into dashes much more often than might be expected in a narrative intended for Cambridge readers (as the Latin and phrases like ‘out here’ show): A match is the first step in the subjugation of any large tract of new country – thence data tabula nova as it were – the match had better be applied in spring – such at least is the general opinion out here – and I think the right one, though I was at first inclined to think that Autumn must be better. The fire dries up many swamps – at least many disappear after country has been once or twice burnt – the water moves more freely ... (‘Forest Creek,’ 41)

But by A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, which was prepared for publication little more than a year later, Butler is already having nimble fun with the adjustments of viewpoint that had to be made, and that

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had swamped him on the river crossing in the ‘Forest Creek manuscript.’ He is in literary control, for instance, when he describes his breathless excitement on first seeing Mount Cook: ‘The moment it comes into sight the exclamation is, “That is Mount Cook!” – not “That must be Mount Cook!” There is no possibility of mistake’ (FY, 66). And he continues in control as the tone changes. He enthuses about Mount Cook in consciously inflated language, that ‘he who first scales it will be crowned with undying laurels,’ and then quickly checks and reprimands himself: I am forgetting myself into admiring a mountain which is of no use for sheep. This is wrong. A mountain here is only beautiful if it has good grass on it. Scenery is not scenery – it is ‘country’, subaudita voce ‘sheep’. If it is good for sheep, it is beautiful, magnificent, and all the rest of it; if not, it is not worth looking at. I am cultivating this tone of mind with considerable success, but you must pardon me for an occasional outbreak of the old Adam. (FY, 66)

The adjustment from an aesthetically awestruck attitude to a hardnosed agricultural-economic one is there made a simple joke. Sometimes in colonial writing, irony comes from the failure of the raw new world to emulate the culture of the old, or from the inadequacy of imported responses to the new experience. With Butler, the movement from response to irony is more complex, and ultimately much more interesting. The writing of First Year draws mobility and versatility from the recurrence of the effort, evident in the passage above, to find a ‘tone of mind,’ an attitude, a viewpoint, a discourse, a style. It has moved beyond the confused spontaneity of ‘Forest Creek’ to become a dynamic search for a set of values or appropriate stylistic response to things without place or precedent in European systems. It thus provides a fascinating opportunity to watch a writer in the process of developing the style and strategies to articulate previously unknown experience.4 The writing is, and needs to be, varied and mobile. Changing and sometimes conflicting modes of response are juxtaposed, yet now without confusion or raggedness. At its simplest, this takes the form of noticing the lack of human traces, and European comforts, in the raw terrain of Canterbury: ‘How one does long to see some signs of human care in the midst of the loneliness! How one would like, too, to come occasionally across some little auberge, with its vin ordinaire and refresh-

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ing fruit!’ (FY, 62). But the incongruity between inherited expectations and the necessities of the new context is also becoming part of the prose. He enthuses over the ‘very beautiful narrow gorge’ of the Waimakariri River, and the ‘lofty mountains’ above it that make ‘the scenery here truly fine,’ and then switches without a break to the economic potential of the river bed, with ‘a good deal of lignite and ... an extensive bed of true and valuable coal’ (FY, 61). The words ‘truly’ and ‘true’ have been applied first to the aesthetic value of scenery, and then to the commercial value of coal, within a half dozen lines. It is in First Year that Butler first begins to place variant perspectives alongside each other, drawing reference and idiom from diverse and incongruous sources: We started, as I said, from the bottom of this valley on a clear frosty morning – so frosty that the tea-leaves in our pannikins were frozen, and our outer blanket crisped with frozen dew. We went up a little gorge, as narrow as a street in Genoa, with huge black and dripping precipices overhanging it, so as almost to shut out the light of heaven. I never saw so curious a place in my life. It soon opened out, and we followed up the little stream which flowed through it. This was no easy work. The scrub was very dense, and the rocks huge. The spaniard ‘piked us intil the bane,’ and I assure you that we were hard set to make any headway at all. At last we came to a waterfall, the only one worthy of the name that I have yet seen. This ‘stuck us up,’ as they say here concerning any difficulty. We managed, however, to ‘slew’ it, as they, no less elegantly, say concerning the surmounting of an obstacle. (FY, 63–4)

An ancient Italian town, Genoa, and a medieval Scottish border ballad, the Lyke-Wake Dirge (‘piked us intil the bane’), lie side by side with the racy new idiom of Canterbury settlers (‘stuck us up,’ ‘slew it’). The poetic resonance of Tennyson (‘black and dripping precipices’) alternates with pragmatic prose directness (‘The scrub was very dense,’ ‘hard set to make any headway’). Local usage is half mocked (‘as they, no less elegantly, say’) but is adopted, as the only effective way of rendering the event (of being ‘stuck up,’ or ‘slewing’ an obstacle). ‘Pannikins’ and ‘spaniard’ (a prickly native shrub much hated by horses) are used without explanation. It is the account of a man accustomed to think of mountain scenery as picturesque and culturally referenced, coming to terms through his prose with the utterly practical demands of making his way through it. The resulting writing is strong, vivid, versatile, and appropriate.

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When Butler refers to the Lyke-Wake Dirge, or elsewhere in First Year travels a bare valley ‘like ... the young prince in the story of Cherry, or the Frog Bride’ (FY, 74), or burns off the spiky spaniard plant with a quotation from Aeschylus (FY, 75), it is not sufficient to accuse him fashionably of Eurocentricity. That implies a refusal to observe and transcribe the new scene in its own terms, whereas Butler’s prose in First Year is a page-by-page effort to find and use those terms, while also making them comprehensible to readers with a different and inherited set of references. For instance, when he compares the hot, dry, enervating nor’wester to ‘the Italian sirocco,’ it is not to evade describing it in its own context, since he immediately gives a whole page to a detailed, meteorologically accurate, verbally powerful, and rhythmically gusting account of that distinctly local phenomenon: Suddenly a little cloud of dust is driven down the river-bed a mile and a half off; it increases, till one would think the river was on fire, and that the opposite mountains were obscured by volumes of smoke. Still it is calm with us. By and by, as the day increases, the wind gathers strength, and, extending beyond the river-bed, gives the flats on either side a benefit; then it catches the downs, and generally blows hard till four or five o’clock. (FY, 108–9)

It is a dramatic sentence, holding back its key phrase – ‘blows hard’ – with a sense of timing that may bring skills learned from Latin to the language of the South Canterbury weather. And throughout this section Butler properly calls the winds by their local names, ‘sou-west’ and ‘nor-wester.’ It was the editor or publishers of First Year who ‘corrected’ the form in the running page headline to ‘North-Westers.’ Every comparison with England in First Year, starting with his first meal at the Mitre – ‘so foreign and yet so English’ – makes the reader aware of the differences at least as much as the similarities. Describing the road out of Christchurch, Butler writes of the English grass and grain, but concludes: ‘The copy, however, is slatternly compared with the original; the scarcity of timber, the high price of labour, and the pressing urgency of more important claims upon the time of the small agriculturalist, prevent him, for the most part, from attaining the spickand-span neatness of an English homestead’ (FY, 82). There is neither nostalgia nor criticism there, only a pragmatic understanding of the economic realities that underlie styles of landscape and the allocation of work. Such is the poise with which he begins to incorporate these different

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elements into the writing that Butler is capable of mocking what we would call ‘Eurocentricity’ long before the term was coined. He translates the nomadic movements of straying bullocks into a tongue-incheek version of English geography that only accentuates the vastly greater scale of the New Zealand terrain, and the emptiness of its spaces, by being overlaid onto the small-scale English map, with its intimate, long-established markings of town, county, and buildings. It is a funny passage (he usually is funny about bullocks, a word that he claimed he could feel ‘eating itself in indelible characters’ into his heart): You are at Cambridge, and have lost your bullocks. They were bred in Yorkshire, but have been used a good deal in the neighbourhood of Dorchester, and may have consequently made in either direction; they may, however, have worked down the Cam, and be in full feed for Lynn; or again, they may be snugly stowed away in a gully half-way between the Fitzwilliam Museum and Trumpington. (FY, 92)

In Alps and Sanctuaries twenty years later, he would recall that he eventually found the best way to locate your bullocks was to go into a pub and buy drinks till someone came in who had seen them. In First Year he makes another transition in mode, from this mock-English gazetteer to an informative account of the nutritional needs and pedestrian habits of the bullocks, and then another change to a self-mocking narrative of the frustrations of the search and joy of the discovery (‘gloating over their distended tongues and slobbering mouths’) and a mock-solemn account of bullock psychology. Tongue-in-cheek comedy, double levels of reference, serious explication, self-mockery, mocksolemnity – those devices, moving from one to the other in just that kind of rapid prose kaleidoscope, would become characteristic of Butler’s satiric writing in Erewhon and beyond. The prose in parts of First Year is of shifting and varied composition, already liable, unless you have your wits about you, to lure the reader down a screeslope of irony. The mature Butler was fond of applying the term ‘counterpoint’ to his work, taking it from his study of Handel. First Year, with its idiom and tone still evidently in process of formation, shows how a multi-perspective, contrapuntal mode of writing was stimulated by the challenge of telling Cambridge candidates for ordination about slobbering bullocks on the Rakaia, encountering the jumble of colonial experience,

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and communicating it to readers in England as directly as they could cope with. By Erewhon, this style had become systemic. If there is still some selfconsciousness about using local terms like ‘stuck up’ and ‘slew it’ in First Year, there is none when Erewhon’s narrator dangerously shoots the rapids in a vivid paragraph of fast-moving action – ‘Everything in a second flew past me, and I ... had no more control over the raft; neither can I remember anything except hurry, and noise, and waters’ – that ends with the typical laconic kiwi shrug: ‘But it all came right’ (EOR, 72). The low-key dismissal of danger and drama with ‘it came right,’ or ‘she’ll be right,’ is still characteristic in New Zealand vernacular. Butler’s ear was a good one, and the phrase shows him in precise control over his narrative’s shuttling shifts in tone and idiom. The rigours of the back-country were not the only factor in formulating the complex literary strategies that, when fully developed, would place Erewhon alongside More’s Utopia and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Butler was also able to listen to new voices, especially Darwin’s, and articulate a response to them, in a place relatively free of ambient noise. Darwin himself, when he kindly forwarded Butler’s ‘Darwin on the Origin of Species’ dialogue to an English journal, remarked slightly patronizingly that it was ‘remarkable from being published from a colony exactly 12 years old, in which it might have [been] thought only material interests would have been regarded.’5 In fact, even that early, and though far from having a developed intellectual life, New Zealand was not a cultural void. Canterbury especially, with its liberal Anglican Christian aspirations and high level of education among the first migrants, was literate and intellectually lively. The first settler ship carried a newspaper printing press, with an experienced editor already appointed. The settlement’s first poem was written aboard ship in 1850, and the first newspaper (the Lyttelton Times) started publication after only a few weeks. Perhaps because so many settlers were relatively young, well educated, and conscious of the colony’s idealistic self-image, Canterbury quickly fostered critical rigour and satiric irreverence. In its first anthologies, Literary Foundlings (published in 1864, only fourteen years after the first arrivals, and with Butler among the contributors) and The Book of Canterbury Rhymes (1866, two years after Butler left), the dominant tone is a wittily subversive irony, chiefly derogatory of the province’s utopian aspirations. When the Press started publication in May 1861, the province had two vigorous and highbrow newspapers. Canterbury was just the kind of

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small and intellectually energetic place for a feisty young thinker like Butler to get published (under various pseudonyms), noticed, and argued about (all the more because of the pseudonyms) more quickly than could ever have happened in London. His writings in the Christchurch Press are a phase of transition from First Year’s agility of idiom to Erewhon’s fully developed complex of ironic controversy. The extended correspondence about Darwin is too complicated to follow fully here, although it becomes less complicated and even more interesting if you suspect that some of Butler’s opponents may in fact be Butler. These are not matters that can be readily proved, as his mischievous traces were deliberately perplexing. The mix of intellectual controversy and prominent but anonymous publication was a heady one for a young man of Butler’s daring but vulnerable temperament. Butler at least initiated the controversy with ‘Darwin on the Origin of Species’ (20 December 1862), a dialectic between two imaginary opponents, their highly personal reactions to Darwin and each other often making for comedy as well as argument ad absurdum. ‘F’ is an enthusiast who provides a populist summary of Darwin’s main ideas, ‘C’ a grumpy conservative disinclined to listen to anything ‘horrid’ and ‘caring very little whether my millionth ancestor was a gorilla or no’ (FY, 163). Arguing with himself in this dialogic way was clearly congenial to Butler’s mind, and a development from the contrapuntal processes of First Year. Within the broad characterizations of F and C, Butler also introduces variations that keep the reader alert, including, for the first time as the imagined recipient of his writing, the local reader. F’s first account of competition between species is illustrated entirely in Canterbury terms, referring to the breeding of sheep and the destruction of New Zealand bird life by the introduction of cats, which quickly becomes a digressive drama with its own energy. When C protests that Darwinism is ‘utterly subversive of Christianity,’ F’s reply shows a glimpse of the elusive flickering between logic and near-nonsensical self-contradiction that would be characteristic of the later Butler. There is a dash of pepper too (the first of many) in the eyes of his father, whose boyhood essay on ‘consistency’ was such a source of pride to him and became such a recurrent target for his satirical son: ‘I believe in Christianity, and I believe in Darwin. The two appear irreconcilable. My answer to those who accuse me of inconsistency is, that both being undoubtedly true, the one must be reconcilable with the other, and that the impossibility of reconciling them must be

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only apparent and temporary’ (FY, 162). The shape-shifting, ambiguous, multi-perspective character of Butler’s prose is becoming evident, and is not easy reading for those ardent for consistency and coherence. When ‘The Savoyard’ (possibly the bishop of Wellington) intervened, Butler responded (‘Darwin on Species,’ 21 February 1863), under the guise of a third person attacking both the Savoyard and his own original two-sided arguments. After a series of letters to the editor that appeared under various jocular names, he irrefutably re-entered the fray with ‘Darwin Among the Machines’ (13 June 1863), which was later expanded into ‘The Book of the Machines’ chapters in Erewhon. This and his next contribution, the supposedly inebriated ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ (29 July 1865), defend Darwin’s theories by extending them to absurd extremes, taking the tactic of the brief ‘inconsistency’ passage in the first Press contribution as their main strategy. For the first time, the procedure of these articles is the characteristic Butler seismology of down-to-earth commonsensical argument that shakes and topples unpredictably into comic fantasy, an essentially ironic rhetoric in which intellectual integrity and imaginative nonsense are inseparable. The mix demands active participation, not passive receptiveness, by the reader. ‘Lucubratio Ebria,’ which was submitted by mail to the Press after Butler’s return to England in 1864, says as much in its opening paragraph: We know that what we see is but a sort of intellectual Siamese twins, of which one is substance and the other shadow, but we cannot set either free without killing both. We are unable to rudely tear away the veil of phantasy in which the truth is shrouded, so we present the reader with a draped figure, and his own judgment must discriminate between the clothes and the body. A truth’s prosperity is like a jest’s, it lies in the ear of him that hears it. Some may see our lucubration as we saw it, and others may see nothing but a drunken dream or nightmare of a distempered imagination. (FY, 187)

That is a good account of how irony (Lucian’s, or More’s, or Swift’s, or Butler’s, or a little later some of Joyce’s) must often be read. It is the thought of a mature and inventive writer who understands the source and effect of his inventiveness. ‘Darwin Among the Machines’ skids between ratiocination and absurdity, between argument and parody. One paragraph develops the serious and astute insight that machines tend always ‘to decrease in

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size,’ the next slides into a parodic mock-religious adoration of ‘the serene might of those glorious creatures,’ with their minds ‘in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets’ (FY, 182). A sensible observation about interdependence between humanity and machinery moves likewise to an over-excited vision that ‘there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines,’ and then the ecstatic assertion ‘that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question’ (FY, 184–5). ‘Truly’ is again a decoder; and when Butler affirms that no one can question something, he is usually doing so. ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ is even more serious and absurd. It takes the fact that our lives are modified by the machines we own and use, and then extends that observation into the ludicrous fantasy of ‘he who can tack a portion of one of the P. and O. boats on to his identity,’ and a whole scheme for judging a wealthy man ‘by his horse-power, by the number of foot-pounds which he has money enough to set in motion’ (FY, 192). The First Year technique of multiple vision and contrasting perspectives is developed in both these articles into a closely worked contrapuntal fabric. Both provided material that eight years later was directly incorporated into Erewhon. Butler had by then returned to England, leaving Lyttelton on 15 June 1864. In 1865, when he corresponded with Darwin, he still thought, ‘I may go back to New Zealand’ (FY, 152). He had begun his modestly successful career as an artist, privately published The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists, critically examined (1865), and befriended the astute Eliza Savage. With her encouragement he began a new venture, to write a satire. His six years back in England’s large pond, anxious about his censorious family, certainly left some mark on the book, yet Erewhon became essentially a continuation of his literary manner as it had evolved in New Zealand, developed to a higher level of complexity and power. The technique that in the autobiographical journal, First Year, came from an almost spontaneous response to the disparate jumble of colonial experience, and that was developed into the roguish dialectics of the Press articles, has now become an ingeniously sustained ironic procedure. The prose of Erewhon is consistently inconsistent, as Butler would enjoy saying. The voice of the eager explorer who could switch from truly fine scenery to truly valuable coal without taking a breath has evolved into a highly mobile strategic weapon.

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The chameleon narrators of More, Swift, and Thackeray are clearly an influence, yet it is a distinctively Butlerian narrative protagonist who reflects with such earnest ingenuousness on his efforts to convert the Maori Chowbok, and immediately slides, with only the tonal dissonance to guide the reader, into an acerbic satire on religious self-delusion and malevolent missionary arrogance: On the evening of the same day that I baptized him he tried for the twentieth time to steal the brandy, which made me rather unhappy as to whether I could have baptized him rightly ... He was indeed stony ground, but by digging about him I might at any rate have deprived him of all faith in the religion of his tribe, which would have been half way to making him a sincere Christian. (EOR, 73–4)

And it is a voice trained to respond to the jumble of New Zealand settlement that can follow a vigorously narrated action sequence, culminating in a dangerous leap and narrow escape from drowning, with the sly, sublimely contrapuntal remark, ‘but as luck would have it, Providence was on my side’ (EOR, 67). The imagined world satire that became Erewhon was shaped from various materials. Butler had returned to the articles he wrote for the Press, enlarging ‘Darwin Among the Machines’ for publication in The Reasoner, as ‘The Mechanical Creation,’ in July 1865. The manuscript (in the British Library) shows that the parts incorporated first in the proposed book were early drafts of the chapters dealing with ‘Ydgrun and the Ydgrunites,’ but without the reversed spellings, ‘Birth Formulae,’ and ‘The World of the Unborn.’ The story’s location at that stage was called merely Grundy, and the inhabitants Grundyites.6 If we judge Erewhon from these early sections, it appears less ingenious, less disparate, and less provocative than the full ironic fantasy we know; and less wickedly funny. Most striking, it is less back-tofront. Butler perhaps thought a little later of using his early antipodean impressions of a world in reverse, meditating on the New Zealand location (though it remains unidentified) that he had chosen for the opening chapters. If that is so, he then developed the image creatively and ingeniously. The recurrent trope of reversal and inversion gives the final Erewhon world ironic potency, imaginative force, and a peculiar coherence. It also gives Erewhon as much satiric firepower as the images of discrepant size give to the first two books of Gulliver’s Travels. The most stimulating chapters, those that are most vigorously written, that most disturbed Victorian readers, and that still apply most dis-

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concertingly to our twenty-first century world, are those that were apparently incorporated later, the subversive, revealing exercises in reversal: illness and crime, religion and commerce, organic and inorganic, thought and mechanism, education and repression. Perhaps it was the idea (in the ‘World of the Unborn’ chapter) of the inhabitants believing that ‘it was by chance only that the earth and stars and all the heavenly worlds began to roll from east to west, and not from west to east’ (EOR, 159–60) that took Butler in imagination back to where the whole world could appear to be in reverse image. Without being over-literal, it is unlikely to be coincidence that such an image should emerge from a place where the first settlers optimistically built their houses facing south for the sun, where the midday zenith is in fact in high north, the south wind brings sleet from the Antarctic, Christmas is a midsummer festival and spring lambs are born in September, an Aframed hut was called a V-hut, a gentleman was judged by his competence as a butcher and bullock driver, a would-be utopia had been located in a foggy bog, awesome mountains with ‘horryble glaciers’ suddenly thrust up from an extensive plain, and the unrecognizable night sky disoriented (and still disorients) every new arrival. Butler was not the first to see the satiric potential of antipodean inversion of European norms. Richard Brome’s (or Broome’s) play, The Antipodes; The World Upside Down (performed 1638, published 1640) is probably his closest precursor in English. A dreamy young man is so absorbed in the fashionable travel literature of the time that he is neglecting his affectionate wife, and is deluded by friends into believing that he has been transposed to the antipodes. Delighted to be realizing his travel obsession, he eagerly takes on life as king of an inverted fantasy nation (enacted by a group of hired performers), where lawyers are honest, doctors knowledgeable, senior citizens busy with full-time study, and politicians humane and benevolent. Brome is satirizing society by parodying a literary craze. It is unlikely that Butler knew the play. But he had real antipodean experience to draw on, and his use of it is more sharply focused and more satirically resourceful. It has been usual among commentators on Erewhon to see only the opening narrative of sheep farming and exploration as derived significantly from New Zealand. Yet these satiric reversals, ingeniously varied from chapter to chapter, provide a strange, intense, comically surrealist version of the antipodean settler’s experience. The Erewhonians, like Canterbury sheep farmers, live in a world that could be made superficially to look like England, yet in reality was disturbingly

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different. Thus, Butler the ironist asks his reader in Erewhon to make the same effort he had made in Canterbury, examining at the most fundamental level the values by which he and his society had been living, and the idiom through which experience there could be communicated. It is never easy. Just as the word ‘Erewhon’ does not exactly reverse ‘nowhere,’ the book provides no simple or consistent code by which the imagined location can be translated into the known. The back-tofront English names, Yram, Thims, Senoj, and Nosnibor, are the most obvious and simple reversals; yet unpredictably among even those come names of Maori origin and romantic allure, Arowhena and Mahaina, and the exotic Zulora, a name more Rider Haggard than Jonathan Swift. There is no pattern or predictability. Never in literature has a heroine of romance adventure been burdened with such a disjunct name as Arowhena Nosnibor. Mere reversal has become something more complex. The chapter titles show a similar pattern of challenging antinomy. ‘The Musical Banks,’ ‘The World of the Unborn,’ ‘The Colleges of Unreason’ – the surprising counterpoint of such verbal combinations became Butler’s signature. He loved later to give his works titles that imply oxymoron or counterpoint, and that often carry a challenge to received opinion: Life and Habit; Evolution, Old and New; Alps and Sanctuaries; Luck, or Cunning?; Unconscious Memory; The Authoress of the Odyssey; God the Known and God the Unknown; The Humour of Homer; even The Iliad of Homer Rendered into English Prose and Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh. Butler’s irreverent and independent mind was stimulated by such unexpected antitheses. He accepted none of the platitudes of the Victorian age at face value – not the benefits of machinery, nor the educational primacy of Greek and Latin, nor the sincerity of the clergy, nor the advantage of knowing the future; not even Darwin, Homer, Shakespeare, Dr Samuel Butler, or the benevolence of the family as an institution for nurturing the young. He worked with extraordinary intelligence and assiduity to master, understand, and more fully evaluate each of these, never merely to demolish them. New Zealand had trained if not implanted this habit. It first took literary form when he declined in First Year to accept at face value the Englishness of a hotel called the Mitre by a river called the Avon in a town called Christchurch. It developed into a challenging and radical irony that declines to take at face value that a savage’s superstitious ritual is grotesque. By

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the central chapters of Erewhon the contrapuntal collisions are striking sparks that ignite intense intellectual and imaginative fires. Irony is not often seen as imaginative in the way that science fiction, for instance, is. But Erewhon is an imagined world, a satiric fantasy, and in those terms it is a place where the gravity is disturbingly unpredictable. And as that pun implies, these mobile and resourceful reversals make potent ironic metaphors. Butler’s half-absurd, half-realistic, constantly shifting imagined world reflects Britain back to itself like a hall of distorting mirrors that reverse, enlarge, exaggerate, isolate, destabilize, subvert, and humiliate the most revered and rigid of British institutions and values. Each works differently. Counterpoint has now entered the texture of the writing. The central ironic chapters have an antithetical poise that could almost be Augustan, but for the tonal dissonances and an undertow of agonized personal strife. On the cashiers of the musical banks, for instance, Erewhon’s version of the Anglican clergy, Butler writes a complex of dissonant clauses that keep changing direction, alternately condoning and condemning, while the whole passage is stressed with the underlying but evident personal tension of describing a fate that he had narrowly (but as luck would have it, Providence was on his side) escaped: A man’s expression is his sacrament; it is the outward and visible sign of his inward and spiritual grace, or want of grace; and as I looked at the majority of these men, I could not help feeling that there must be a something in their lives which had stunted their natural development, and that they would have been more healthily minded in any other profession. I was always sorry for them, for in nine cases out of ten they were wellmeaning persons; they were in the main very poorly paid; their constitutions were as a rule above suspicion; and there were recorded numberless instances of their self-sacrifice and generosity; but they had had the misfortune to have been betrayed into a false position at an age for the most part when their judgment was not matured, and after having been kept in a studied ignorance of the real difficulties of the system. But this did not make their position the less a false one, and its bad effects upon themselves were unmistakable. (EOR, 137)

The remarkable contrapuntal force of such prose is not only personal in origin. It derives also from the intellectual energy and imaginative

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invention with which the ironic images of reversal are pursued throughout Erewhon. We think of Swift as the ironist who forces us to confront the hollowness of some of humanity’s most treasured fantasies, as one by one Gulliver learns the futile vanity of wishing to possess giant size and strength, of living forever, and of aspiring to behave wholly rationally. But Butler stands with him when he offers for consideration the fantasy of foreknowledge: Sometimes again they say that there was a race of men tried upon the earth once, who knew the future better than the past, but that they died in a twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused them ... Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which he must perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no better than the brutes, if he get it he is more miserable than the devils. (EOR, 160)

There is a Struldbrug-like horror in that idea. The only thing worse than death, for Swift, is immortality. The only thing more miserable than being ignorant of the future, for Butler, is to know it. That deeper level of imaginative disturbance is evident again when Butler moves to the ultimate extension of his man/machine reversal, the idea from ‘Darwin Among the Machines’ that humanity will serve and worship machinery. It is not so much an extension of the metaphor ad absurdum as extending the intellectual enquiry into possibility until it leads, like the narrator’s probing of Chowbok’s spiritual beliefs, to the revelation of a profounder truth: If all machines were to be annihilated at one moment ... we should become extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man’s very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks and feels as he feels through the work that machines have wrought upon him. (EOR, 189)

This is irony that gives a glimpse into a dark fiction, a vision of an imagined world deprived of machines where therefore a few desperate human survivors are reduced to an animal existence. The very tone and cadences are melancholy. It is, in miniature, an apocalyptic satiric fantasy, of a post-technological horror that current dystopian novels like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) continue to amplify.

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Erewhon is full of such disturbing visions, reversed and distorted versions of reality that reflect back a deeper truth. The judge’s summing up against the man on trial for pulmonary consumption lays bare the obtuse cruelty of our own society’s attitude to criminal behaviour. Erewhon is as vindictive as Europe in its punitive systems, and in enforcing the psychological consequences of punishment, despite criminological codes that seem opposite to each other. Mahaina is a sad as well as satiric portrait of duplicity for the sake of social approval. The sense of loss in the youth who has wasted fourteen years of life studying the hypothetical language exposes the rigid, constrictive callousness behind such compulsion in education. Society’s self-deception in the ritual of the musical banks is shown to be hypocrisy as deeply damaging as Victorian England’s own religious righteousness. Zeal in countering mechanization becomes the pretext for cruelty and repression. Chowbok as a calculatingly zealous Christian is far more ‘grotesque’ than when he is enacting and protecting the culture of his people. The revelation at the book’s conclusion, that missionary zeal can be cover for vicious commercial slavery, is done by quoting an actual item from the London Times, thus showing how our reality can be directly transposed into Erewhon’s satirized absurdity, without any change in wording or intent. It flashes the reflection back from Erewhon into the eyes of the perpetrators. There is nothing ‘orderlie and precise’ about Butler’s images of reversal. They are ‘horryble,’ ‘vexatious,’ and ‘painfulle in ye traversynge.’ Some of the personal force evident in the passage about the clerks of the musical banks may also be active in Butler’s whole imagined retrospect on New Zealand. The manuscript of Erewhon shows an emotional dimension that he edited out of the published text. Excised from the account of tending his sheep on the mountainside above the Rangitata in chapter 1, for instance, are phrases, much amended, over-written, and over-scored, like ‘Nay – enough perhaps for the reader but not for me’; ‘There are certain places which haunt one ... for life and so this with myself ... Many years have gone by’; ‘I can never reach it ... but I dream ... even in my sleep.’ These deleted fragments sound more like the passionate reawakening of intense feeling than the tone of amiable reminiscence he seems to have tried to strike in the text as published. The fictional narrator of the journey to Erewhon also had dreams about it afterwards. In Erewhon Revisited (1902), an introduction supposedly by his son John describes how his father was ‘haunted’ (that

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word again, from the Erewhon deletions) by the sense that he had wronged his wife Arowhena by inflicting a life of homesickness on her, and how after her death his ‘hankering after a return to Erewhon’ became ‘a burning desire.’7 Whether or not these remarks have autobiographical import, the sense of laying a haunting guilt – of fulfilling a burning desire – gives power and descriptive vividness to the mountain sections at the beginning and end of Erewhon Revisited. The writing there is of a different order from the satirical sections between, where Butler thirty years on (rather than the ‘twenty years later’ of the subtitle) seems tired, his ironic imagination flagging, so that even the image of reversal gives him nothing more inventive than a professor wearing a European suit back-to-front, and a schoolboy being caned for telling the truth. The journeys through the mountains and over the range are undertaken first by the aging narrator of Erewhon, now given the name Higgs, and then at the end by his son John. Both narratives read like the imagined fulfillment of a long-held wish. And the experience of crossing that terrain is the last that Higgs thinks of. On his near-delirious deathbed in England after his visit to Erewhon, he returns one last time in imagination to the South Canterbury mountains: He seemed to see some horrible chasm in front of him which he had to cross, or which he feared that I must cross, for he gasped out words, which, as near as I could catch them, were, ‘Look out! John! Leap! Leap! Le ...’ but he could not say all that he was trying to say and closed his eyes, having, as I then deemed, seen that he was on the brink of that gulf which lies between life and death; I took it that in reality he died at that moment. (ER, 303)

The echo is unmistakably of the episode in Erewhon that leads to the ‘Providence was on my side’ joke: I went into the chasm (though by no means without fear), and ... completely lost my head; the sides of the rift became hundreds of feet in height ... I had many falls and bruises ... once I had to leap down a not inconsiderable waterfall into a deep pool below, and my swag was so heavy that I was very nearly drowned. (EOR, 67)

When a writer who knows he is dying describes the death of his narra-

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tive persona, it is worth taking notice, especially when the text is so specific: ‘in reality he died at that moment’ (EOR, 303). It might fairly be said that Butler chose, in imagination, to die in the New Zealand mountains. He certainly knew how important the New Zealand years were in allowing him to grow into a writer independent of home, fatherland, and church. Though Ernest Pontifex does not go to New Zealand in the autobiographical The Way of All Flesh, the key scene of his release from prison, when he dramatically rejects his parents and begins the process of emancipation, is carefully dated as ‘the 30th of September’ [1859] – the exact day Butler had embarked for New Zealand. It is one more elusive counterpoint, the formative decision of his personal and literary life clearly acknowledged in a narrative that does not mention it. Whatever New Zealand meant or came to mean to Butler emotionally, the literary benefits of his time there were crucial. He had to write about a jumble of incongruities and reversals never before encountered, about a country only ten years old as a settlement that was busily trying to impose Englishness on an alien terrain. He saw better than most colonial writers that the terrain made its own demands, on prose as much as on exploration or farming. He responded to the challenge by devising a mobile rhetoric that began as a way of inscribing the new land and the effort of exploring it, and as a way perhaps of reconciling the strange inseparability there of the ridiculous and the sublime. It became a new and potent mode of ironic dialectic, a complex of counterpoint. He also took the reversals and inversions of antipodean life, and turned them into fresh and wickedly subversive satiric images of universal significance.8 In part, Butler’s New Zealand work might be read as an early example of the revitalization of English literature by the reverse migration of new perspectives, new idiom, new rhetoric, from colonies and former colonies, a process that continues today with gathering force. He also exemplifies the development of a literature distinctive to the new place itself, much earlier than anyone expected, and in defiance of the expectation that the tidy square literary garden would soon prevail against the vastness of mountain and plain. Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited are focused on English follies, and intended for English readers, but neither could have taken the form they did without the experiences and the literary development of his New Zealand years. For reading, enjoying, and assessing Butler’s total work, to follow his New Zealand writings is to recognize the elements of strategy, style, and imagery that made

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him, in his often perverse way, such an inventive and vital voice in Victorian thought and literature.

NOTES 1 Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range, ed. Hans-Peter Breuer and Daniel F. Howard (1872; Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 51 (this edition hereafter cited in text as EOR). 2 A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, ed. R.A. Streatfeild (1863; London: A.C. Fifield, 1914), 31 (hereafter cited in text as FY). 3 ‘Butler’s “Forest Creek” Manuscript,’ in Maling, Samuel Butler at Mesopotamia, 43 (hereafter cited in text as ‘Forest Creek’). 4 Some caution is necessary in drawing critical conclusions from Butler’s New Zealand texts. The only fully authentic autograph before Erewhon is the 14page ‘Forest Creek manuscript.’ Comparison between that and the version published as part of one of the ‘Our Emigrant’ narratives in the Eagle shows that the text was much modified, as Butler authorized the editors to do. Passages in the same manuscript source that passed into First Year show that Canon Thomas Butler felt the same impulse to refine his son’s vigorous prose style. For instance, he spares the reader the specifics of how sheep convey grass seed ‘in their dung,’ and of sleeping in maggot-infested blankets. We need to be aware that what were considered to be rough edges by the editors of ‘Our Emigrant’ and First Year received the same sort of stylistic buffing that later befell The Way of All Flesh. 5 The correspondence with Darwin and three of Butler’s Darwinian contributions to the Press are reprinted in Streatfeild’s edition of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement; see note 2. A further three are reprinted as appendices in Joseph J. Jones, The Cradle of Erewhon. 6 The development of the text of Erewhon is discussed in notes to Breuer and Howard’s edition (see note 1), including the naming of the book’s location first as ‘Grundy’ (Erewhon, 152) and then ‘Pantatenallagenoitonia,’ which the editors, acknowledging advice from Brian Hill and Elroy Bundy, explicate as ‘Where everything would become different’ (Erewhon, 105). 7 Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, both by the original discoverer of the country and by his son (London: Grant Richards, 1901; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1910), 9 (hereafter cited in text as ER). 8 Sue Zemka argues, differently, that Erewhon more coherently represents ‘the death of the humanist subject that animates the utopian myth of idyllic expansion and its imperialist subtext,’ and supplants it by ‘a thoroughgoing

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2 Butler, Memory, and the Future gillian beer

Samuel Butler everywhere challenges assumptions with a mixture of frankness and irony that invites the reader into alliance, but an alliance that is of its nature fitful and sometimes mortifying. We may rush to agree with his brilliant inversion of what we expect only to find that we are the butt of his jest. His wayward originality can seem captious, and yet from the array of positions he adopts emerge insights that have staying power. In this essay I explore his thoughts on how change comes about and the degree to which future forms of life rely on unconscious memories and then outwit memory. He also suggests how the human propensity to make myths outgoes reason, sometimes as folly, sometimes as new capacity. Butler’s assertive empathy with forms of being that are quite unlike the human always clusters around the idea of knowledge: ‘Crystals know a lot, and they occur early in the scale of evolution. Look at snow crystals.’1 Knowledge, for him, declares itself as memory: Plants and animals only differ from one another because they remember different things; plants and animals only grow up in the shapes they assume because this shape is their memory, their idea concerning their own past history.2

That word ‘idea’ – here loaded with the concept, ‘form’ – is at the centre of Butler’s paradoxical structure of argument about memory. Here, it implies awareness in kinds of life not often, in human judgment, accorded consciousness: plants and animals have an ‘idea’ concerning their own past history. At the same time, Butler emphasizes repeatedly that ‘the phenomena of heredity, whether as regards instinct or struc-

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ture [are] mainly due to memory of past experiences, accumulated and fused till they had become automatic’ (LH, 295). That is, memory need not imply personal recollection; rather, it is a process of sustained learning by forebears that declares itself in the individual organism. Heredity, Butler argues, is a particular mode of memory. He centres Life and Habit on a series of statements whose sense relies upon his inversion of the usual assumption that the past has been left behind. Instead, he argues, the past lies always in wait for us embedded in the future. This can have happy phases, as in youth: A living creature well supported by a mass of healthy ancestral memory is a young and growing creature, free from ache or pain, and thoroughly acquainted with its business so far, but with much yet to be reminded of ... It is the young and fair, then, who are the truly old and truly experienced; it is they who alone have a trustworthy memory to guide them. (LH, 298– 9)

Experience, therefore, is not contained only within the single life span, but extends both temporally and laterally. He writes: ‘Everything knows something and has had some experiences; and everything is a record of its own experiences; knowledge and condition are as convertible as force and heat’ (NB 1951, 176). This may sound much like Lamarck’s theory of inheritance, and indeed Butler acknowledged Lamarck’s strong presence in his thinking. But whereas Lamarck emphasizes the inheritance of acquired characteristics in terms that admit self-help, Butler emphasizes the role of unconsciousness in this genetic memory: ‘it is not likely that the moth remembers having been a caterpillar, more than we ourselves remember having been children of a day old’ (LH, 97). Moreover, for him evolution need not imply progress: ‘crystals know a lot, and they occur early in the scale of evolution.’ For Butler, what is needful is to know what you need. He keeps in suspension the energies of ‘free-will’ and of necessity, refusing to settle which is dominant: The element of free-will, spontaneity, individuality, so omnipresent, so essential, yet so unreasonable and so inconsistent with the other element not less omnipresent and not less essential, I mean necessity – this element of free-will which comes from the unseen kingdom within which the writs of our thoughts run not, must be carried down to the most tenuous atoms,

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whose action is supposed most purely chemical and mechanical; it can never be held as absolutely eliminated, for if it be so held there is no getting it back again, and that it exists even in the lowest forms of life cannot be disputed. Its existence is one of the proofs of the existence of an unseen world, and a means whereby we know the little we know at all. (NB 1951, 197)

‘The unseen kingdom within which the writ of our thoughts runs not’ is here both individual unconsciousness and the material world beyond the human. Yet even this emphasis on unconsciousness is sometimes overtaken by Butler’s pleasure in imagining the eagerness of other life forms: so, in Erewhon he writes appreciatively of the ‘low cunning’ of potato tubers creeping towards the light. ‘The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of languages. What is consciousness, if this is not consciousness?’3 And in Life and Habit he argues that ‘even the corn in the fields grows upon a superstitious basis as to its own existence, and only turns the earth and moisture into wheat through the conceit of its own ability to do so, without which faith it were powerless’ (82). The hubris of corn is the creative principle, it seems. Likewise, Butler imagines the lichen on the rock: ‘The lichen only grows upon the granite rock by first saying to itself, “I think I can do it”; so that it would not be able to grow unless it thought it could grow, and would not think it could grow unless it found itself able to grow’ (LH, 82). From time to time Butler appropriates the language of acoustics as a route to escape the dilemmas he is producing for himself by his insistence on uninterrupted memory. In Luck, or Cunning? ‘vibrations’ are the means of transmission and ‘the harmonics of life are present in death as the harmonics of death are in life.’4 Or, as he puts it in the Notebooks, ‘There must be harmonics of God in the Devil, and of the Devil in God’ (171). In a more extreme and lowly form he tries out the idea again in Luck, or Cunning?: ‘The vibrations from a pat of butter do, then, actually put butter into a man’s head’ (311). Notice the sly use of ‘actually’ there, sliding between intensifier and realization. Butler relishes the whirligig of these imaginings and is always ready to take his argument out to the edge of absurdity in order to awaken and unsettle his reader. The passages about the wilfulness of corn and lichen quoted above, for example, emerge in a longer argument moving in a different direction and concerned to demonstrate that the word ‘person’ is based on a superstitious belief in coherence, itself the product of arguing in a circle.

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This is where Butler begins to dig a trap for himself. Will has its place in growth. But, his theories suggest, the spontaneous acts of an organism have already been performed by its progenitors, and re-enactment is inescapable. The idea that personal identity is already predicated in the parent form – that parents and children can never be divided – may seem acceptable in a discussion of other forms of life, but becomes claustrophobic when applied to the human, and almost unbearable when referred to Butler’s own life. He seeks ways out of this dilemma by estranging the future and making it the bearer of unnamed transformations. The third paragraph of The Way of All Flesh tells us a good deal about Butler’s construction of memory and time: Mr. Pontifex was a carpenter by trade; he was also at one time parish clerk; when I remember him, however, he had so far risen in life as to be no longer compelled to work with his own hands ... My father, who took the living of Paleham about the year 1797, became possessed of a good many of old Mr. Pontifex’s drawings, which were always of local subjects, and so unaffectedly painstaking that they might have passed for the work of some good early master; I remember them as hanging up framed and glazed in the study at the rectory, and tinted, as all else in the room was tinted, with the green reflected from the fringe of ivy leaves that grew around the windows. I wonder how they will actually cease and come to an end as drawings, and into what new phase of being they will then enter.5

The shock comes with that last sentence of the paragraph. We have moved from Mr Pontifex’s prehistory (carpenter, parish clerk) set in relation to the narrator’s own age at encountering him when he was no longer compelled to work with his own hands. We have passed through a concentrated memory trace – the reflected green from the ivy leaves – which tinctures the whole recollection with the colour of memory: a green we seem to recognize. Then suddenly we are in the throes of decay and re-emergence into an unimaginable future state. But this decay and re-emergence is confidently predicted, not for old Mr Pontifex but for the drawings: do they cease as paper, as reference to local subjects, as ink or pencil? Whatever their coming to an end may entail, it seems that this whole exercise of memory has been at the service of implying a new phase of being. That is, memory is intimately bound up for Butler with future states.

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Narrative fiction indeed works without embarrassment on the premise that the past, which is held in the book as an object, is also the characters’ future, here enacted in the reader’s present. These shifting levels of time can produce freedom or constraining irony. The Way of All Flesh shapes its entire sequence on the recollections of the narrator who knows what will happen (has happened) to Ernest Pontifex. For a book with so closely autobiographical a grounding, the separated narrator is an important source of narrative past enclosing Ernest’s futurity. Ernest seems to be capable of choice. The narrator demonstrates that those choices have already been frozen as narrative outcome. This is the deathly aspect of Butler’s insistence on lineage as pre-enactment. In contrast, the undescribed future is for him a form of liberation, since memory may by then have undergone a process of transformation akin to the activity that moves caterpillar into butterfly. And, in The Way of All Flesh, the split of recollecting narrator from actant Ernest allows affection between them, like a redeemed version of the antagonistic father and son performing in the narrative. The human nuclear family is only one kind of hereditary organization and a very inefficient one at that, Butler mockingly demonstrates. In his later writing on evolution, he attempts to escape from the strictures of familial shared identity by imaging life as a lateral organization associated by unconscious ties performed through the persistent activity of waste and repair. Life and Habit develops this insistence on the lateral to its fullest extent. In an enormous sentence that seeks to encompass the whole range of questions of consciousness and then refuses to answer them, he provocatively maps a landscape of buried ties and traces, and a swarm of cross-identifications that outgoes the possibility of classification: How it is that the one great personality of life as a whole, should have split itself up into so many centres of thought and action, each one of which is wholly, or at any rate nearly, unconscious of its connection with the other members instead of having grown up into a huge polyp, or as it were coral reef or compound animal over the whole world, which should be conscious but of its own one single existence ... (LH, 102)

So runs the first section of the sentence which adduces, strikingly, images we might associate with Darwin’s early writing in The Voyage of the Beagle – the polyp, the coral, the compound animal. Butler’s key point so far is that the unconsciousness of connection

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has allowed diversity to thrive in ‘the one great personality of life.’ He then turns to the question of waste: how it is that the daily waste of this creature should be carried on by the conscious death of its individual members, instead of by the unconscious waste of tissue which goes on in the bodies of each individual (if indeed the tissue which we waste daily in our own bodies is so unconscious of its birth and death as we suppose). (LH, 102)

Note that turn-aside into identification with the least regarded (and most intimate) of life forms. Bodily tissue and excrement carry their own forms of consciousness, he hints, and thus of memory. Next Butler thinks about reproduction and its manifold performances: ‘how, again, that the daily repair of this huge creature life should have become decentralised, and be carried on by conscious reproduction on the part of its component items, instead of by the unconscious nutrition of the whole from a single centre, as the nutrition of our own bodies would appear (though perhaps falsely) to be carried on’ (LH, 102–3). The peroration reaches its climax – and refuses it: ‘these are matters upon which I dare not speculate here, but on which some reflections may follow in subsequent chapters’ (LH, 103). Nevertheless, he has here done enough to bruit the idea of Gaia well in advance of James Lovelock. Similarly, Freud only a little later, and persistently, shares with Butler – though perhaps not knowingly – the argument that any explanation of individual human behaviour must have recourse to the communal memory of the human race at periods long before concerted conscious memory can survive. In Totem and Taboo (1914), and ‘The Wolfman,’ and then again in the early 1930s in Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud turns to phylogenic traces to explain individual somatic and psychic experience. In my discussion here, I have deliberately set in abeyance Butler’s acrid controversy with Darwin. Much has been written about it and any account of the full to-and-fro is time-consuming and debilitating. Butler said of himself: ‘I have been unorthodox and militant in every book I have written’ (NB 1951, 262). He worked always athwart the dominant views available. He was therefore also often dependent on those views. The books on evolution mingle an exasperated onslaught on what he sees as Darwin’s wilful repression of his intellectual forebears (an attitude particularly distasteful to one so preoccupied with

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memory and kin) with an emphasis on mind as the energizing principle of evolutionary process. That is why Butler presents, sometimes in anthropomorphic and fanciful terms, the various creatures imagining their own growth and then learning to do without the language of description, and just performing the growth. Action in his terms is a form of memory released from the labour of remembering. His understanding of design, which differs from that of either Paley or Lamarck, was one that insisted on ‘past selves’ living ‘at this moment with the accumulated life of centuries.’6 And living, whether of human, animal, vegetable, or atoms, has for him ‘the element of free-will, spontaneity, individuality, so omnipresent, so essential, yet so unreasonable and so inconsistent with the other element not less omnipresent and not less essential, I mean necessity’ (NB 1951, 197). It is out of this contradiction between individual spontaneity and triggered performance that Butler finds ways of describing transformation. He removes the barriers of birth and death and imagines memory freely traversing present and past identity, identity that declares itself in unknowable and yet implicit future forms. In much of his writing, his grudge against God is the claim that God is unchanging: There is little hope of him improving. He was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal. Hence the same old ‘As I was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen, from everlasting to everlasting, without a sign of any effort at amendment of life on God’s part. (NB 1951, 255)

Butler’s schoolmasterly complaint against God’s self-satisfaction is given added relish in another entry which does imagine change, but not at God’s behest: ‘God: He might begin the Day of Judgment, but he wd probably find himself in the dock long before it was over’ (NB 1951, 191). Butler is never afraid to take things a step further than propriety or logic would allow: ‘logic and consistency are luxuries for the gods, and the lower animals, only’ (LH, 294). Thus, he uncovers possibility and gives it form. He uses inversion, humour, shifts in linguistic register, and attack to break open the taken-for-granted and to broach questions set athwart high-minded assumptions. Improvement, progress, future life all fall to his pen, yet he hopes for transformation. It is in his fictions, or semi-fictions, that Butler most extensively explores the future life. In his late work Erewhon Revisited (1901),7

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indeed, the traffic between past and future is at its most complex. This work is both inventive and poignant. Here, in contrast to The Way of All Flesh, there is free affection between the narrating son and his father. The father is the original narrator of Erewhon, now named Higgs, who in this work has returned after twenty years to Erewhon to find it strangely altered. On his return home after this journey, in the interludes of his failing memory, his son has heard his story and now seeks to draw it together as an adventure story, a fable, and an ironic commentary on current beliefs. The present of the narrative is therefore in the form of a present twice postponed: it draws on Higgs’s return to a place known long before but now fundamentally altered by his own earlier visit, and it is told to us subsequent to the father’s death by a son working with partial materials. Yet the book as a whole explores the future of a society. Moreover, that society includes another son whose birth has been unknown to his father and who is discovered in a scene of hidden tenderness. Deeds may become people, living their own lives apart. The book wittily tracks the change in belief systems after the events described in Erewhon, even while the work acknowledges the unregenerate behaviour of rascally humans through all time (in the persons here particularly of Professors Hanky and Panky). Without himself knowing or willing it, Higgs has produced a communal conversion based on other people’s understanding of his escape in the air balloon as miraculous. An entire system has been built up from testimony, gossip, regulation, interpretation, and hermeneutic authority: it demands his absence and is threatened by his return. In a letter to Mrs FullerMaitland, who had objected to some passages, Butler denied the obvious parallels between the Sunchild and Christ, arguing that he wanted rather to demonstrate ‘how myth, attended both by zealous good faith on the part of some and chicane on the part of others, would be very naturally developed in consequence of a supposed miracle.’8 But he does not leave it there, asserting that such a myth has ‘accreted round the supposed miracle, not of the Ascension, but the Resurrection.’ So the parallel between events, at least, remains. It is hard quite to credit Butler’s assertion: ‘And I did not mean to poke fun at Christianity. Anything but.’ Nevertheless, it is clear that what fascinates him is the process of accretion and transformation, the uncontrollable process by which a person’s life or opinions or presence come to mean something quite beyond, and other than, his intention. One of the most striking and extensively developed arguments in the

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book is President Gurgoyle’s pamphlet, ‘On the Physics of Vicarious Existence.’ Throughout this work, Butler’s ironies are at their most heartfelt and wayward. He conjures various characters who now subscribe to the new religion in Erewhon, a religion founded on the belief in the Sunchild (Higgs), his miraculous ascent, the miracles associated with his name, and the sayings he has bequeathed (almost all of them recognizably mis-ascribed, misunderstood, or deliberately reversed by his later adherents, and many of them fragments of Christ’s utterances). The satire on the history of Christianity is both manifest and oddly temperate. Eyewitnesses are shown to be unreliable, interpreters domineering, many practitioners self-seeking and sceptical, yet a residue of wisdom remains. The attractive aspect of Butler’s imagining of the new Erewhonian religion of ‘Sunchildism’ is that out of this gallimaufry of half-understood and sometimes inverted material, new perceptions have been gained by the Erewhonians and are shared with us as readers. In particular, the idea of ‘vicarious existence’ is clearly profoundly attractive to the author who lies behind that sequence of Gurgoyle, Higgs, and the narrator: Samuel Butler. Instead of death and a future life in heaven or hell, Gurgoyle argues for an existential present and future which he calls the ‘vicarious’ life: how we are perceived by others, remembered by others, and act upon them more often unknowingly than knowingly. The body, he points out, is unconscious of its own processes and at its most unconscious when most healthy. Moreover, the whole being of a person is not pent within the body only. Two forms of unconsciousness are at work: unconsciousness of our physical being and unconsciousness of our effects that move through the world as avatars both now and after the dissolution of the body – ‘The consciousness of the doer has less to do with the livingness of the deed than people generally admit’ (ER, 130). Gurgoyle argues: ‘The part of our bodily life that enters into our consciousness is very small as compared with that of which we have no consciousness’ (ER, 130). He then enters into the next phase of his argument, about continuance through life and after death, and – not by chance – turns for his example to the experience of a writer: A man, we will say, has written a book which delights or displeases thousands of whom he knows nothing, and who know nothing of him. The book, we will suppose, has considerable, or at any rate some influence on the action of these people. Let us suppose the writer fast asleep while others are enjoying his work, and acting in consequence of it, perhaps at long

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In such passages of Butler’s writing we can hear his hope that his writing life that so often felt to him squandered and disregarded, nevertheless was effective and might have mounting effectiveness in the future, after his own bodily death. In that, he was not entirely misled. The figure of Gurgoyle, gurgle and gargoyle together, can stand as a fantasized and covert version of his own insights even while he need own no allegiance to his fictive representative. The Erewhonian view of death is deeply sympathetic to their author. Memory carries those who are dead into the future through others – not always for long, but sufficiently. We hear sympathy in the changes of tone, for example in the way an epitaph for an old lady in chapter 10 is alluded to in chapter 1. It is not quoted; rather, the reader must find it for herself. It is the son’s epitaph for his father, and a form of self-epitaph for the hidden author of the whole – a secular and comedic father, son, and holy ghost occasionally breaking from irony into tenderness towards his creation and his own creativity: I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds Of those I loved, Into which, while the power to strive was yet vouchsafed me, I fondly strove to enter.

Gurgoyle acknowledges that after death one of ‘the great factors of life is annihilated’: ‘For to live is to be influenced, as well as to influence; and when a man is dead how can he be influenced? He can haunt, but he cannot any more be haunted’ (ER, 132). Nevertheless, he argues, the after-death life of mortals, as well as their unknowing effects during life, are as fully – or more fully – their life as is their action in the body. Such an argument was of comfort to Butler, who had felt his lack of convinced readership throughout his career. Since future readers will have different views, ‘it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be pleased, it can only be at the cost of repelling some present readers’ (LC, 2).

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Indeed, futurity has borne out some of Butler’s most important arguments: the ‘Book of the Machines’ in Erewhon not only foresees the development of computers but prognosticates their miniaturization, their capacity to undertake computations that outrun human capacities, and their capacity for self-reproduction. The fictive writer of the ‘Book of the Machines’ moots with alarm their possible vitality and prophesies that evolution must take place through their means. The only attempt to reply to him argues that ‘Man [is] a machinate mammal ... A machine is merely a supplementary limb; this is the be all and end all of machinery’ (EOR, 270). The rich first acquire these ‘external limbs’ and are paid respect because they have freed themselves from matter and made these instruments perform their wills: Man has now many extra-corporeal members, which are of more importance to him than a good deal of his hair, or at any rate than his whiskers. His memory goes in his pocket-book. He becomes more and more complex as he grows older; he will then be seen with see-engines, or perhaps with artificial teeth and hair: if he be a really well-developed specimen of his race, he will be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a coachman. (EOR, 218)

Change the examples and the trend of the argument holds. ‘Machines are the manner in which man is varying at the moment’ (LH, 255). Butler foresees the impossibility of controlling the outcome of machines. Among those future-making machines is, of course, the printed book which survives well past the life of its progenitor and which Butler hoped would eventually justify him. Now, in the next century after his death, we have entered a phase of machine production and communication that Butler did not quite describe but whose organization he did begin to imagine: We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see the machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualise it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual which springs from a single centre of reproductive action; we therefore assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single centre; but this assumption is unscientific. (EOR, 255)

Yet, as always with Butler, the sayings seem stable but their contexts

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undermine that stability. This, after all, is an extract from a treatise justifying the Erewhonian destruction of all machines, including watches and clocks with their inexorable progress into a future not yet known. The writer of the ‘Book of the Machines’ believes that if only we could know enough about the past we would be able to descry the future in all its detail. Butler does not share that confidence elsewhere. Indeed, in the last book published within his lifetime, Erewhon Revisited, he relishes the scope of ‘vicarious’ life that will propel the present into extraordinary future transformations, quite beyond the consciousness of the originator. That process for him began, of course, with the publication of The Way of All Flesh one year after his death. Reflecting on his achievement in 1919, Virginia Woolf uses the language of plant breeding. He is ‘awkward, opinionated, angular, perverse’ yet ‘more alive’ than ever: Then, again, we had fancied that some idea or other was of our own breeding. But here, on the next page, was Butler’s original version, from which our seed had blown. If you want to come up afresh in thousands of minds and books long after you are dead, no doubt the way to do it is to start thinking for yourself. The novels that have been fertilised by The Way of All Flesh must by this time constitute a large library, with well-known names upon their backs.9

Woolf’s own novel of family life, To the Lighthouse, followed less than a decade later.

NOTES 1 Butler, Notebooks: Selections, ed. Keynes and Hill, 176 (hereafter cited in text as NB 1951). This edition follows the editorial method of Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Bartholomew, while adding material from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Jones, collated against manuscript sources. 2 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit, rev. ed. (1910; London: Wildwood House, 1981), 298 (hereafter cited in text as LH). 3 Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 193 (hereafter cited in text as EOR). 4 Samuel Butler, Luck, or Cunning? 2nd ed., 2, 169 (hereafter cited in text as LC).

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5 Samuel Butler, Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh, ed. Daniel F. Howard (London: Methuen, 1965), 3–4. 6 Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory (1880; London: A.C. Fifield, 1910), 18. 7 Samuel Butler, Erewhon Revisited (London: A.C. Fifield, 1901) (hereafter cited in text as ER). 8 Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon’ (1835–1902), 2:338. 9 ‘The Way of All Flesh,’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 3:59; first published in TLS, 26 June 1919, 2.

3 The Ironies of Biblical Criticism: From Samuel Butler’s ‘Resurrection’ Essay and The Fair Haven to Erewhon Revisited elinor shaffer

‘A country is sometimes not without honour save from its own prophet,’ wrote Samuel Butler, characteristically calling both parties into doubt and undermining a truism. Despite this perception, Butler himself often donned the prophet’s robes long enough to display dishonour in high places. Basil Willey summed up Butler’s career in this way: ‘The showing-up of orthodox Christian theology was only an incidental motif in Erewhon, but it remained Butler’s central preoccupation until about 1877, when it began to be superseded by the showing-up of Darwin.’1 This disjunction and chronological succession is not altogether accurate. Describing, in The Way of All Flesh, the momentary intellectual calm as Ernest Pontifex went up to Cambridge in 1858 (the year Butler came down), he remarks that ‘the wave of scepticism which had already broken over Germany was setting towards our own shores – nor was it long, indeed, before it reached them.’2 The theological context is clear: Ernest had hardly been ordained before three works in quick succession arrested the attention even of those who paid least heed to theological controversy – I mean Essays and Reviews, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Bishop Colenso’s Criticisms on the Pentateuch. (WOAF, 180–1)

But equally, Butler’s religious concerns were from the start saturated with the demand for what Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s most energetic and successful champion, called ‘the Scientific Authority, as represented by Reason and Fact,’ and were explicitly opposed to ‘the Infallible Authority, as represented by the Holy Father and the Catholic Church’(the two authorities, religious and scientific, equally capital-

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ized, but with science first).3 It was on grounds of Reason and Fact that scepticism notoriously made its inroads into belief. Butler, unlike Huxley, however, was inclined to put the two Authorities, science and religion, on all fours with one another, as in the ironic closing pages of Erewhon Revisited: As in our English body politic there are two parties opposed to one another, neither of which can thrive if the other is unduly weakened, so in our spiritual and intellectual world two parties more or less antagonistic are equally necessary. Those who are at the heart of science provide us with the one party; those whom we call our churchmen are the other. Both are corrupt, but we can spare neither, for each checks as far as it can the corruptions of the other.4

As he noted presciently of Huxley, John Tyndall, and their scientific ilk, they ‘would soon repeat all the trickery of the Roman Catholic pseudomiracles. They would cook their experiments just as the priests made their madonnas wink.’5 Yet after a lifetime of single combat against both the Religious and the Scientific Authorities and their corruptions, it is clear that to the very end Butler’s scientific concerns perpetuate his religious history in a consciously adapted form. The ironic turn that he is able to realize not only within traditional forms but within the aesthetic defences of religion characteristic of the lines of thought associated in English with Coleridge (or, in J.S. Mill’s famous term, the ‘Germano-Coleridgean’ tendency) develops throughout his major fiction. Even in the simple chronology of his writings the interweaving of these themes is maintained throughout, as it is in the finer structures of his individual works. That theological occasion, the publication of the Origin of Species (1859), prompted his first work of note, the brilliant ‘Darwin Among the Machines,’ a letter written to the Christchurch Press, in 1863, during his sheep-farming days in New Zealand, which together with two other short pieces formed the germ of Erewhon. Written in the first flush of his enthusiasm for Darwin, the sketch imagines the gradual evolution of the machine, which will succeed man, amidst the applause of the subject race of human beings – for ‘there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines.’6 Before the completion of Erewhon, however, Butler’s pamphlet The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists,

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critically examined appeared, anonymously, in 1865. His friend and biographer Henry Festing Jones considered it his ‘apologia for declining to become a clergyman,’ on the grounds that he could not see ‘the moral rectitude of lying.’7 Correspondence cited in Jones, but not otherwise surviving, indicates that Butler was working on it in New Zealand, when the need to justify his stance against his father was weighing on him.8 If it was an apologia, it was not his final word on the subject, for he returned to the topic of the Resurrection on a number of occasions and in various forms. In 1872 Erewhon appeared, also anonymously, but acknowledged as his own after some months, bringing him his first and only taste of public approbation and literary lionizing (for the wellreceived The Way of All Flesh was, of course, published posthumously). But he returned almost immediately to the topic of the Resurrection. This was necessarily a central topic in the history of biblical criticism, as it was a central doctrine of Christianity, whether viewed as a dogmatic or as a historical religion. Butler chose to treat it in the form of a novel, The Fair Haven (1873), one of his most fascinating works, misunderstood at the time and neglected since. Elaborating his ‘Resurrection’ pamphlet, he prefixed to it the fictional memoir of John Pickard Owen by his brother, William Bickersteth Owen. The complex counterpoint of fictional belief systems turns it into a wholly ironic account of the familiar Victorian conversion story, from early faith to doubt and disbelief and back again, in a new key, to faith, to the ‘everlasting Yea’ of Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus, the ‘spiritual autobiography of Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh,’ was hailed as ‘the Pilgrim’s Progress ... of the nineteenth century, from doubt and despair to “blessedness” and belief.’9 Nearly all of Butler’s critics (and his private readers) took it in earnest as a defence of the faith. He caught the tones so precisely of a range of religious positions seriously occupied and maintained by eminent Victorians that almost no one was able to hear the irony. As Erewhon had benefited from being received as an attack on Darwin, which at that stage of Butler’s development he had not intended, The Fair Haven might have enjoyed a vogue as a sincere fiction of the reconverted unbeliever (like Mrs Humphry Ward’s popular novel Robert Elsmere [1888], whose hero leaves the church, but refinds his mission in secular charity). Yet Butler, annoyed and disappointed by the reception of his novel, issued a new edition within a few months with a preface pointing out the abysmal dull-wittedness of his reviewers. In the same year, his father having charged him with killing his

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mother with his books, Butler began the autobiographical fiction, Ernest Pontifex, which includes his mother as well as his father as recognizable though fictionalized objects of satire. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to view the novel simply as autobiographical; it is narrated by the unobtrusive bachelor uncle, Overton, whose presence is just as pervasive as that of the more overtly intrusive Editor of The Fair Haven.10 In our present context, we need to remember that Butler himself refused to be ordained, whereas Ernest was already ordained when the destabilizing criticism reached ‘our own shores’; and that Ernest’s experiences of religious disillusionment are not the same as Butler’s or Pickard Owen’s. Nevertheless, the story of Ernest’s gradual disillusionment with his vocation again turns technically on the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, and the attempts to harmonize them. While continuing to work on the Pontifex novel that was to become The Way of All Flesh, Butler published Life and Habit, in 1877, and two further attacks on Darwin: Evolution, Old and New, in 1879, and Unconscious Memory, in 1880. Returning to his Pontifex novel, he created Ernest’s fictional reading list or bibliography, beginning with Essays and Reviews.11 Laying aside the novel substantially complete, in 1883, he published the last of his Lamarckist works, Luck, or Cunning? in 1886. Finally, in Erewhon Revisited in 1901, the last work published in his lifetime, he took up once more the matter of the Resurrection, as the protagonist of Erewhon, Higgs, who had escaped from Erewhon in a balloon, returns to find to his dismay that his ascension to heaven as the Sunchild in a horse-drawn chariot is being celebrated all over Erewhon, which has officially adopted the new religion. As Butler described his purpose, the whole is dominated by ‘the attempt to realise the effect of a single supposed great miracle’ (ER, 8). The matter of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus, the model for the ‘single supposed great miracle,’ had stood at the centre of the historical critical inquiry into the reliability of testimony. As Marc Bloch has written in The Historian’s Craft, ‘Christianity ... is essentially a historical religion: a religion, that is, whose prime dogmas are based on events.’12 It is not surprising, then, that despite claims to inspiration, the authenticity of biblical texts was implicated in the development of historical criticism from its inception. Bloch points to the near-simultaneity of the emergence of Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, Mabillon’s attempt in De re diplomatica (1681) to distinguish between genuine and false Merovingian charters, and Richard Simon’s formulation of rules of criticism which, as Pierre Bayle pointed out, ‘can be useful, not

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only for the understanding of the Scriptures, but also for the profitable reading of many other works.’13 These critical methods in turn became closely linked with ironic modes of writing. Butler, heir to the sophisticated development of these techniques in religious, historical, and scientific contexts in the subsequent two centuries, reached back consciously to the seventeenth century for generic and stylistic models. It is significant that Ernest Pontifex’s book is hailed (in the novel) by a reviewer of ‘one of our most gushing weeklies’ as ‘the finest thing that had been done since the Provincial Letters of Pascal’ (WOAF, 344). Les lettres provinciales (1656–7) is an ironic attack on the Jesuits undertaken as a means of defending his Jansenist friend, Antoine Arnauld, who had been formally arraigned before the divinity faculty of the Sorbonne for his heresies on the subject of grace. Pascal, speaking as a convert to Jansenism, who condemned the worldly corruption of the Jesuits, invented a splendid persona, a Jesuit father of the most complete and cunning moral laxity, bearing the traditional name of Suarez, together with his fictional ‘authority,’ Escobar’s casuistical volume of Moral Theology, which offers ready reasons for every form of moral turpitude known to man.14 The Victorian scientific community deployed the same weapons of irony against the Church Establishment, with ever-increasing freedom. Huxley, for example, refuting St George Mivart’s claim that Catholic theology is not at odds with evolutionary theory, expressed his astonishment that Mivart should cite Father Suarez ‘as his chief witness in favour of the scientific freedom enjoyed by Catholics’: ‘But in these days, when Judas Iscariot and Robespierre, Henry VIII, and Catiline, have all been shown to be men of admirable virtue, far in advance of their age, and consequently the victims of vulgar prejudice, it was obviously possible that Jesuit Suarez might be in like case.’15 Irony was a major weapon in the whole free-thinking tradition from Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, to Bayle’s Dictionnaire and the English Deists, especially Anthony Collins (who conveyed some of Spinoza’s insights concealed in a ‘drolling manner’).16 It was polished by Voltaire, and given philosophical depth in Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion (which powerfully argued against the possibility of miracles, on the grounds that nothing that is outside the laws of nature can occur), and passed to the later Encyclopaedists, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, the polemicists of the German Enlightenment (especially Reimarus and Lessing), and the higher critics of the Bible, from Johann Gottfried Eichhorn to David Friedrich Strauss, whose Leben Jesu (1835)

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[Life of Jesus] incorporates the work of his predecessors on a massive scale.17 Collins was a master of the extended use of the persona, most familiar to us now from Swift’s religious and political controversy, especially A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposal, as well as Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver comes to stand for all that Swift hated most in the new Whiggism. The (concealed) distance of the persona from the views of the author was crucial. Collins, in his Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, elaborated a web of irony controlled by a persona of a conservative Christian of great fair-mindedness and hyper-righteousness who objected to the practice of those great divines who pay little deference to the New Testament, substituting their own opinions for it. By attending to the NT text, the persona established a point of central importance for the historical-critical contentions, namely, that the Reformation claim that the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament were shown in the New to have been fulfilled in Christ could not be sustained. A unified whole of biblical narrative had only been achieved by employing two contrary modes of interpretation: literalism combined with figural interpretation by which the NT events were construed as fulfilling the prophecies of the OT to create a model for a spurious historical reality. As Hans Frei sums up Collins’s contribution, ‘a historical criterion had now come to adjudicate the meaning of the history-like narrative Biblical texts.’18 Collins’s fellow Deist, John Toland, author of Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), was well versed in Scriptural learning and in biblical criticism, for only in this way, by adopting the personae of Christian and scholar, could he enter the world of discourse in which his opposition to the alliance of churchly authority and state power could be expressed within the bounds of censorship. Transgressive projects had to be articulated within the idiom of orthodoxy. Strikingly, Toland ‘very rarely meant what he actually said.’19 As Samuel Butler was later to put it, in the wholly ironic manner of the editorial persona of The Fair Haven: Every Protestant is a Rationalist, or else he ought to be ashamed of himself. Does he want to be called an ‘Irrationalist’? Hardly – yet if he is not a Rationalist what else can he be?20

Thus Butler, too, pointed to the trap in which the Protestant, by claiming his position was based on reason, found himself caught as reason made increasing inroads against his faith.

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If irony in the Enlightenment was a weapon employed against formidable opponents in church and state, it was also a major refuge from prosecution, imprisonment, dismissal, condemnation, censorship, confiscation, and more minor forms of harassment. As Collins put it: ‘The greater the Weight is, the bitterer will be the Satire. The higher the Slavery, the more exquisite the Buffoonery.’21 So exquisite was the ‘buffoonery’ of the ironists sometimes required to be that their meaning was not only unstable, shifting, covert, or ‘private,’ but permanently obscured. Butler’s awareness of the modes of irony in religious contexts was, of course, extensive. The tradition of learned invective was closely linked to the development of fiction. As Ortega y Gasset has said, ‘The Novel is born out of an act of satire.’22 He was speaking of Don Quixote, but a number of critics have elaborated his insight in other contexts. Ronald Paulson, for example, has shown the parallels between the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, that egregious production of the Scriblerus Club that led also to Pope’s Dunciad, and the first six books of Tristram Shandy, with its ironic treatment of the learned professions. It is one of Butler’s striking contributions that he drew attention to the use of irony in scientific contexts. Only in Butler’s day, after the impact of the Origin of Species, could a Scientific Authority begin to range itself on something like equal terms against the ecclesiastical authority. If Butler was one of the first to take up his pen against the presumption of the new learned establishment of science, he was also a connoisseur of the ironic forms in which eighteenth-century scientists had had to conceal or dissemble their enterprise from the dominant religious authority. Irony was employed defensively by scientists whose work impinged on religious questions, such as the reliability of the Mosaic account of the Creation, the age of the world, the pace of geological change, and the fossil record as it bore on the extinction of species. Buffon’s Histoire naturelle was a central case. Butler himself is a most persuasive and ingenious exponent of this view of Buffon, devoting a chapter (9) of Evolution, Old and New to ‘Buffon’s Method – The Ironical Character of His Work.’ As the scientific conclusions of Buffon’s Natural History gained ground among scientists, in 1751 the Sorbonne demanded an explanation from Buffon for fourteen propositions in the first three volumes. There was no general agreement as to whether, as Butler avers, ‘a vein of irony pervades the whole, or much the greater part of Buffon’s work, and ... he intended to convey, one meaning to one set of readers, and another to another,’23 or whether as

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Buffon’s countryman and fellow scientist Geoffroy St Hilaire thought earlier in the nineteenth century, his entire originality in the doctrine of the variability of organic types engendered in him a long hesitation, ‘during which one can watch the labour of a great intelligence freeing itself little by little from the yoke of orthodoxy.’24 When challenged by the church Buffon conformed, signing a statement that any proposition that contradicted the account of the formation of the world given in Genesis was wrong; but, as Butler notes, ‘perhaps, from that time forward, he contradicted himself a little more impudently than heretofore.’25 The literal account of the Creation in Genesis was either false or a myth. When once this ground had been prepared – an independent historical criterion adduced for the guidance of biblical exegesis, and the Mosaic account of the Creation identified as a myth – the way was open for the minute examination of the life of Jesus viewed as an historical account, and for the gradual increase, in the sixty years between Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s early writings on the Pentateuch or five Books of Moses and David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835), in the amount of material ascribable to myth rather than history.26 By the turn of the nineteenth century the notion of myth began to emerge as a possible defence of religion, rather than as it had been in Bayle and Voltaire a source of satire on the ‘oriental’ deceptions of all religions originating in the East, including Christianity. Although in general the establishment of an independent historical criterion for the assessment of biblical narrative powerfully assisted in the establishment of realistic fiction, nevertheless the emphasis on the inward, ‘interpretive perspective’ of the narrator was also of vital importance for the claims made for the centrality of irony by Friedrich Schlegel as the seminal theorist of the Romantic movement. These two directions were more closely intermingled in Victorian fiction than has sometimes been recognized, and Butler was heir to them both. They came to him through his immersion in religious and scientific controversy rather than through fiction itself, towards which his attitude was ambivalent and often belittling, or downright abusive. His witty confidante Miss Savage, who constantly urged him to try his hand at a novel and bombarded him with recommended novels, became particularly insistent after the publication of The Fair Haven, when she saw how the public was affected with sympathy for the profoundly ironized central character. Martin Swales has argued, in a refreshing defence of the importance of the German Bildungsroman for the poetics of the Euro-

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pean novel as a whole, that the Bildungsroman ‘is animated by a complex irony – a quality often missing from the discursive statements about “Bildung.”’27 Schlegel’s perception of the continuous irony of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795), then, finds its justification in the formal development of the entire genre. How far-reaching the implications of these investigations into biblical narrative were is manifest in Strauss’s conclusion to the Life of Jesus: To all belief, not built on demonstration, doubt is inherent, though it may not be developed; the most firmly believing Christian has within him the elements of criticism as a latent deposit of unbelief, or rather as a negative germ of knowledge, and only by its constant repression can he maintain the predominance of his faith, which is thus essentially a re-established faith. And just as the believer is intrinsically a sceptic or a critic, so, on the other hand, the critic is intrinsically a believer.28

The results of criticism, Strauss held, were so sweeping that the narrative life of Jesus had to be abandoned in favour of its mythic value or its dogmatic import. The oscillation between inherent doubt and reconstructed belief, which is a feature of Romantic irony, pervades not only the conversion fiction proper – Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler’s The Fair Haven – but the subsequent history of the novel. What Hegel perceived as the central issue of the novel – the conflict ‘between the poetry of the heart and the resisting prose of circumstances,’29 a view repeated ever since with remarkable unanimity by theorists of the novel – is only a restatement of the results of the ‘quest for the life of Jesus’ in more general terms. The connections are made explicit in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s brilliant essay on biography attached to his Lectures on the Life of Jesus (1819). Strauss had heard Schleiermacher lecture in Berlin in 1832 and obtained two sets of student notes of the Lectures on the Life of Jesus, which set him off on his own monumental work. So sharp was the historical-critical attack on the veracity of the Gospel writers that, by the time of Strauss, the mythological interpretation had become a mode of apologetics, a way of salvaging the credibility of the narrative on another level. Strauss uses this ironically, forcing the reader to flee from one untenable position into another. Fresh means to harmony had to be sought; yet reason continued its inroads. Eichhorn’s dating of the composition of the Gospels had shown that they cannot be considered the direct testimony of those whose names are traditionally

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attached to them, nor of any one individual.30 Schleiermacher, the Romantic theologian and friend of Schlegel, supplied in On Luke (1807) (translated into English with a substantial introduction by Connop Thirlwall31 in 1825, and read by Coleridge among others), a finely ironic piece of polemical scholarship in which the Synoptic Gospels were shown to be mere compilations of fragments of oral testimony by several hands collected over time, undermining all hope of a Gospel harmony such as Butler’s bête noire, Dean Henry Alford, was still promising half a century later. Looking more closely at the matter of the Resurrection, which runs like a leitmotif through Butler’s literary production, we shall see the irony of the Enlightenment and its higher-critical heirs take on fresh guises in which to challenge specifically Victorian claims to authority. Butler’s early ‘Resurrection’ essay was written at a time of sudden popular interest in the life of Jesus, following the publication in 1863 of Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, or ‘Fifth Gospel.’ The whole question was reaching the lay public. In Germany Strauss published his revised ‘popular’ edition of the Leben Jesu in 1864,32 while in the same year Schleiermacher’s lectures on the life of Jesus, first given in 1819, which also contained his view that the evidence of the Synoptic Gospel writers consisted of mere compilations of scraps of oral testimony by many hands, were published for the first time. Strauss’s text went through a number of popular editions, often much abridged; Alfred Russel Wallace was able, while a young and impoverished itinerant surveyor, to read a version of Strauss’s arguments in a four-penny pamphlet.33 In Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus, Theodore Ziolkowsky reminds us that Mrs Humphry Ward’s popular novel, Robert Elsmere, is a reflection of the ‘intense intellectual excitement’ of those years. But Ziolkowsky fails to mention Butler even in the index. This omission is an egregious example of the neglect into which Butler has fallen. Well-versed though he was in religious disputation, Butler was nevertheless a young layman, coming fresh to the higher-critical controversies, and his ‘Resurrection’ pamphlet, characteristically vigorous though it is, has the same quality of ‘belatedness’ that sounds in Bishop John Colenso’s pained surprise at his discovery that ‘writers of the liberal school in Germany take so completely for granted, – either on mere critical grounds, or because they assume from the first the utter impossibility of miracles or supernatural revelations, – the unhistorical character and non-Mosaic origin of the greater portion, at least, if not the whole, of the Pentateuch.’34 The doubts about the nature of ‘testifying’

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and the character of a ‘witness,’ both interpreted in strict legal terms – which had been stressed by Hermann Samuel Reimarus in his notorious work, the Wolfenbüttel Fragmente (1774–8), edited by the leading German Enlightenment writer and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (widely suspected of being the author, in the humble guise of ‘Editor’) – play a powerful role in Butler’s essay, and in all his fiction. Butler’s whole strategy in the essay of 1865 is to reduce the so-called eye-witness accounts of the Resurrection by the four independent Apostles to the garbled relation of a hysterical and grief-stricken woman, none too reliable at the best of times, namely, Mary Magdalen. Butler described the events as follows: All we can say for certain is that before the fourth Gospel was written, and probably shortly after the first reappearance of Christ, Mary Magdalene believed, or was thought to have believed, that she had seen angels in the tomb ... Mary was a woman – a woman whose parallel we must look for among Spanish or Italian women of the lower orders at the present day; she had, we are elsewhere told, been at one time possessed with devils; she was in a state of tearful excitement, and looking through her tears from light into comparative darkness.35 (FH, 157)

Peter and John were men; they went into the tomb and saw nothing but the grave clothes, which were probably of white linen; Mary thought she saw two angels. Butler makes great play with this contrast, not simply because it underlines the likelihood that eyewitnesses will disagree, and that sensory experience cannot be depended upon (both points stressed by the eighteenth-century critics), but also because it suits his antipatriarchal purposes to reduce the foundations of the central Christian miracle – without which, in his view, all else would fall – to the unsubstantiated credulity of a tear-besotted prostitute. Of such stuff was the unreliable testimony of the Gospels. This ironic use of a narrative persona distinguishable from the author’s view is parallel to Butler’s later claim in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) that the author of the Odyssey was not Homer, but a woman, a claim that was deliberately aimed at offending the guardians of the classics and well-schooled patriots who (like Gladstone) held that young men could be taught the arts of war, seamanship, and imperial government by reading Homer.36 Butler suggested, rather, that the authoress was homebound and her sailing instructions highly dubious. Despite his attempt to undermine the chief witness in the eyes of the

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Victorian reader, Butler did in fact hold that Christ was seen again after the Crucifixion. As Strauss put it: Hence, the cultivated intellect of the present day has very decidedly stated the following dilemma: either Jesus was not really dead, or he did not really rise again. Rationalism has principally given its adhesion to the former opinion.37

Butler, in short, ranged himself with the rationalists, though not with the more extreme exponents of the explanation through fraud – fraud, either with or without Jesus’ own connivance, or simply through the kidnapping of the body after death, which intentionally or unintentionally gave colour to the story that he had risen. Butler was convinced that the shortness of the time on the Cross, compared with the length of time needed for the Roman penalty of crucifixion to produce death, the difference in the treatment of Jesus and of the thieves, the contemporary evidence in the historian Josephus and elsewhere of survivors of crucifixion, and the delivery of the body into the hands of Jesus’ friends Joseph and Nicodemus made a natural recovery by Jesus the simplest explanation of the stories of his having been seen again. Butler, then, makes familiar antipapist sport at the expense of Mary Magdalen, which saves Jesus himself from the charge of collusion, and to an extent saves the credit of the Apostles (although he rejects Matthew’s testimony as to the supernatural occurrences uncorroborated by the others). Reimarus, by contrast, held that the Apostles ‘secretly removed the body’ from the tomb in Joseph’s garden ‘before corruption had well set in; and when it became known that the body of Jesus had gone, they pretended to be full of astonishment, and ignorant of any resurrection, and proceeded with others to the spot in order to survey the empty tomb.’38 Lessing had taken advantage of his editorial role to append a dissenting footnote to this passage: ‘I cannot endorse this part of Reimarus’s theory. It seems more reasonable, and does less violence to the narrative, to believe that Jesus never died on the cross but was resuscitated by the kind exertions of Joseph, and was enabled to escape from the tomb in the disguise of the gardener’s dress; that he fled away into Galilee, and that the knowledge of his real survival of the crucifixion animated the disciples to expect the return in glory. Editor.’39 Strauss adopted a third solution (known as the ‘hallucination theory’), which suggested a more complex psychological and imaginative response on the part of the traumatized disciples: ‘the disciples, their fantasy

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aroused by profound emotion, and unable to conceive that their master could be dead, imagined him as again in life.’40 Butler did not rest in simply repeating or reverting to the satirical sport and ironic subterfuges of eighteenth-century rationalism. Although a layman, he had been destined during most of his education for ordination, and with Bishop Colenso he resented and deplored the concealment of these matters from the young men who were to be made responsible for the church’s destiny. Once begun, he probed the matter more fully. He read Strauss; he examined the church’s instruction, in the form of Dean Alford; and he wrote The Fair Haven. The ‘search for the historical Jesus,’ whether textual or biographical, continued to turn on the ‘authenticity’ of the text and witness. Indeed, one aspect of Reimarus’s undertaking – the ironizing of the ‘Sayings of Jesus’ themselves – not only lent itself to the critical sifting of the authenticity of the ‘sayings,’ but created an ironic genre of such interest that it deserves separate treatment. Butler employed this genre directly in his ‘Sayings of the Sunchild,’ attributed to Higgs after the new-minted myth of his ascension by horse-drawn chariot was made dogma. And as Collins had said, the persecuting spirit raised the bantering one, in a fresh form. If Butler tracked certain themes and even certain individuals in a relentless way, this pertinacity in banter stems from his powerful sense that his pastors and masters had betrayed and victimized him. His account of the education of Ernest Pontifex at home and at school is still a classic of the wave of anti-Victorian exposé that followed his death and that of the queen in the following year. Butler acknowledged his roots, writing the Life and Letters of his grandfather – Dr Butler, the much esteemed head of Shrewsbury School, second only to Dr Arnold perhaps in the ranks of the great Victorian schoolmasters – but he also used the headmaster in his own day, Dr Benjamin Hall Kennedy, as the model for his satire on ‘Dr Skinner of Roughborough’ in The Way of All Flesh. One of the most memorable chapters in Erewhon Revisited is ‘The Visit to the Provincial Deformatory,’ presided over by Dr Turvey, again modelled on Shrewsbury, where Butler and later Darwin (whose chemical experiments displeased the classicists) were pupils. Even at the very end of his life we feel Dr Butler’s grandson still wince at ‘the two sharp cuts with a cane,’ administered ‘for truth-telling’ (ER, 286). Religion had been instilled into Butler by the same authorities. We shall not be surprised, then, by the portrait of John Pickard Owen’s

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‘spiritual wandering,’ as he fell in with one group after another, ‘each in his own way as literal and unspiritual as the other – each impressed with one aspect of religious truth, and with one only’ (FH, 16). William Bickersteth Owen relates, in the Memoir that occupies a little more than a fourth of the book, that he and his brother received their religious education from their mother, who ‘threw her whole soul into the work’; their father was, ‘I am assured, of a deeply religious turn of mind, and a thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England,’ but he believed that religion was the mother’s duty, and in any case, died when his sons were seven and eight. The mother ‘had been trained in the lowest school of Evangelical literalism.’ ‘Whatever she believed, she believed literally, and, if I may say so, with a harshness of realisation which left very little scope for imagination or mystery’ (FH, 3). From these beginnings Pickard Owen’s dawning scepticism is traced, through the incident of the lady visitor who said her prayers when she thought the boys awake, and omitted them when she thought them already asleep; their mother’s belief in the duty of private judgment and independent study of the Scriptures, and her faith in the absolute accuracy of the Gospels, which came to seem contradictory; his discovery that baptism or lack of it made no difference in the distribution of good and bad dispositions of the boys in the Sunday school class he taught (this, like much of the portrait of the mother is part of Butler’s own autobiography, and is also part of Ernest Pontifex’s experience in The Way of All Flesh); his conclusion from this that what was needed was genuine baptism, and his consequent conversion to a Baptismal sect leading to total immersion ‘in a pool near Dorking’ (FH, 15). Falling out with them over predestination, he fell in with a Roman Catholic; objecting to the Catholics’ ‘stifling of all free inquiry,’ he fell in with a pure Deist, and ‘was shorn of every shred of dogma which he had ever held, except a belief in the personality and providence of the Creator’ (FH, 16). The fraternal memoirist takes a dim view of these ‘pitiable vagaries,’ but concludes that ultimately they helped his brother to ‘see the Christian scheme as a whole’ (FH, 17). Thus, he concludes the first chapter, with manifest irony, ‘he became a truly broad churchman’ – and not in ‘the ordinary and ill-considered use of that term,’ which merely refers to yet another sect, ‘which is no broader than its own base’ (FH, 18). Sectarianism of all stripes is thus quickly traversed and dismissed. Despite certain overlaps with Ernest Pontifex’s and Butler’s own limited personal experiences, which are those of a fictional and an actual individ-

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ual respectively, Pickard Owen becomes the paradigm case for the progress of disbelief. As Pickard Owen moves into the dangerous regions of heterodoxy, Butler takes the opportunity to refer in the most offhand but damaging way to a whole series of critical attacks on the reliability and authenticity of the Gospels. We recall Jones’s illuminating view of his intentions: I believe he seriously hoped that The Fair Haven would induce people to reconsider the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion and resurrection. He thought that the book would be read by some who would never open a professedly unorthodox book; he hoped that such readers would come to think matters over for themselves. (Memoir, 1:181)

Butler intended these revelations to shock unprepared readers, while they felt themselves secure in reading of a man who had returned to the fold, by whatever unorthodox routes. The matter is made more complex, however, as the editorial and brotherly persona takes a more liberal view of the necessity of admitting and altering the unhistorical elements in the biblical accounts than his brother did in the final maturity of his views. Yet Bickersteth Owen concludes by praising his brother’s ‘boldness’ and ‘the freedom with which he contemplated all sorts of issues which are too generally avoided’: What temptation would have been felt by many to soften down the inconsistencies and contradictions of the Gospels. How few are those who will venture to follow the lead of scientific criticism, and admit what every scholar must well know to be indisputable. Yet if a man will not do this, he shows that he has greater faith in falsehood than in truth. (FH, 33)

The body of the book consists of essays written by Pickard Owen in his last days, a ‘fragment,’ unfinished at the moment ‘when his overworked brain gave way and he fell into a state little better than idiocy’ (FH, 49), intended ‘to explain the two contending Parties to one another’: to show to Rationalists that Christians are right upon Rationalistic principles in all the more important of their allegations; that is to say, to establish the Resurrection and Ascension of the Redeemer upon a basis which would satisfy the most imperious demands of modern criticism. This would form the first and most important part of the task. Then should fol-

The Ironies of Biblical Criticism 73 low a no less convincing proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to the historical accuracy of much which has been too obstinately defended by so-called orthodox writers. (FH, 48)

Now it was not surprising that Pickard Owen’s overtaxed brain should have given way, for as we know, Butler considered this aim impossible of realization. Yet Pickard Owen’s fond question – ‘Was there not reason to hope that when this was done the two parties might understand one another, and meet in a common Christianity?’ – was the basis of all the important apologetic positions of the period. Within this attempt at a heterodox scheme of Christian unity lies all Butler’s irony at the expense of orthodox Christianity as finely honed by the Enlightenment, and – here lies his originality – at the new positions which had grown up through the mythological school of critics from Eichhorn to Strauss. In the course of The Fair Haven, he rejects Strauss’s hallucination theory and the Romantic underpinnings of the mythological apologetics through the affirmation of the power of myth and its close alliance with the poetic imagination; he rejects the aesthetic affirmation of the significance of religion; he rejects the Hegelian ChristIdeal, which Strauss had propounded at the end of the Life of Jesus, and which provides the title and the climax of the final chapter of Pickard Owen’s ‘fragments.’ That final section Basil Willey admitted he could hardly read as ironic, so close was it to positions held by sincere men at the end of the nineteenth century.41 As Miss Savage gleefully reported, on reading Albert Réville’s review of Strauss’s Der alte und der neue Glaube [The Old Belief and the New] in the Revue des deux Mondes of 15 March 1873: ‘You see, my dear Mr. Bickersteth, that les beaux esprits se rencontrent and that there are “milliers” of persons who have found their representative man in your late lamented brother Pickard.’42 In short, Butler struck a vein in Victorian culture. He rejected the whole development of Romantic theology in Germany as transplanted, adapted, and given substantial poetic and critical form in England by Coleridge and his heirs in the Broad Church movement43 and the aesthetics of the Oxford Movement – ‘that other school,’ as Butler put it, ‘with its bituminous atmosphere of exclusiveness and self-laudatory dilettantism.’44 We recall that it was an encounter not with a Catholic (as for Pickard Owen) but with an adherent of the Oxford Movement that disenchanted Ernest in The Way of All Flesh. Individuals, too, were implicated; as Darwin wrote to Butler, on the publication of The Fair Haven:

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Elinor Shaffer If I had not known that you had written it I should not have even suspected that the author was not orthodox, within the wide stated limits. I should have thought that he was a conscientious man like Blanco White, whose autobiography you doubtless know. (Quoted in Memoir, 1:181)

Henry Festing Jones observed that Huxley had arrived at much the same conclusion on the Resurrection in his Agnosticism: A Rejoinder. Ultimately, then, it is against what Butler took to be the forms of selfdeception peculiar to the nineteenth century that he directed his attack; and the more powerful and subtle the apologetics, the more exquisite his buffoonery. That his irony should have gone unappreciated by his contemporaries is itself a tribute to his perception of the finesse of the humbuggery he took his contemporaries to be practising. As Bickersteth Owen remarks, ‘The Reader will not fail to notice the growth not only in thought but also in literary style which is displayed by my brother’s later writings’ (FH, 33). In Pickard Owen’s chapter 2, ‘Strauss and the Hallucination Theory,’ Butler and the purported author coincide in their rejection of Strauss’s view; for if Butler had ranged himself with the rationalists, Strauss had not, but held that Jesus indeed died on the Cross, in order to underline his view that the story of the Resurrection was based on elements of Jewish tradition and messianic expectation rather than on any actual reappearance. At the same time, the text is so phrased that in attacking Strauss it reveals his views, as well as implying the solution both of Reimarus (fraud) and of Lessing (resuscitation). The ironic edge of Strauss’s own defence of Christianity as a myth is sharpened: ‘... the double supposition of self-delusion, first in seeing the visions at all, and then in unconsciously antedating them, reduces the Apostles to such an exceedingly low level of intelligence and trustworthiness that no good and permanent work could have come from such persons’ (FH, 81). Butler was unable to find consolation in the Romantic view of myth, which affirmed its close kinship with the primitive power of the imagination in those mists of time when the poet was the acknowledged legislator of mankind. In Erewhon Revisited he exclaimed: ‘What wonder, then, that the mushroom spawn of myth, ever present in an atmosphere highly charged with ignorance, had germinated in a soil so favourably prepared for its reception?’ (ER, 228). Thus, the backward Erewhon supplies a parallel to the primitive conditions obtaining at the time of Christ, according to the mythological school, and the period of nearly thirty years has elapsed since the event, as between Christ’s disappear-

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ance and the first written accounts. Moreover, Butler’s wonderful Blakean visionary, Mr Balmy, re-enacts Strauss’s scenario in describing Higgs’s ascension, the balloon having since been metamorphosed by the authorities into a chariot and four horses, proof of which has just been unveiled in the temple in the form of a relic, a large piece of dung. Balmy tells Higgs: I too witnessed the ascent; at the moment, I grant you, I saw neither chariot not horses, and almost all those present shared my own temporary blindness; the whole action from the moment when the balloon left the earth moved so rapidly that we were flustered, and hardly knew what it was that we were really seeing. It was not till two or three years later that I found the scene presenting itself to my soul’s imaginary sight in the full splendour which was no doubt witnessed, but not apprehended, by my bodily vision. (ER, 294)

Pickard Owen, in his next major section, ‘A Consideration of Certain Ill-judged Methods of Defence,’ turns his attention to the English side, pointing out that he has just taken on and routed the formidable Strauss: But the wonder, and, let me add, the disgrace, to English divines, is that the battle itself should have been shirked so long. What is it that has made the name of Strauss so terrible to the ears of English Churchmen? Surely nothing but the ominous silence which has been maintained concerning him in almost all quarters of our Church. (FH, 111)

Butler proceeds to take up cudgels against his favourite opponent, Dean Alford. In the ‘Resurrection’ pamphlet, where Alford was still the only quoted authority, Butler declared roundly that though Alford is ‘more candid than Christians generally are,’ yet ‘I am lost in wonderment that Dean Alford should suppose that such a style of argument could pass muster with any ordinarily intelligent person’ (Resurrection, 37–9). In The Fair Haven he is even more emphatic about Alford, in the light of his (and Pickard Owen’s) reading of Strauss: We feel rather as though we were in the hands of some Jesuitical unbeliever, who was trying to undermine our faith in our most precious convictions under the guise of defending them, than in those of one whom it is almost impossible to suspect of any such design. What should we say if we

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Elinor Shaffer had found Newton, Adam Smith or Darwin, arguing for their opinions thus? What should we think concerning any scientific cause which we found thus defended? We should exceedingly well know that it was lost. And yet our leading theologians are to be applauded and set in high places for condescending to such sharp practice as would be despised even by a disreputable attorney, as too transparently shallow to be of the smallest use to him. (FH, 158)

Again, as in Reimarus, the rules governing the court of law are invoked, but are now on their way to replacement by the criteria governing the validity of science. It is at this turning point that Butler worked. As Huxley put the challenge in his usual tone, less artful than contemptuous: ‘If any one is able to make good the assertion that his theology rests upon valid evidence and sound reasoning, then it appears to me that such theology will take its place as a part of science.’45 In The Way of All Flesh, too, Dean Alford plays a crucial role in the recognition that the religious arguments have become unviable. Ernest Pontifex’s first acquaintance with the dean’s notes on the Greek Testament took place when he returned to Cambridge in May term of 1858. He ‘and a few other friends who were also intended for orders’ (this had been Butler’s own case) took ‘a more serious view of their position, attending chapel more regularly, and holding rather furtive evening meetings to study the New Testament, committing the Epistles of Paul to memory in the original Greek.’ More particularly: ‘They handed themselves over to the guidance of Dean Alford’s notes on the Greek Testament, which made Ernest better understand what was meant by “difficulties,” but also made him feel how shallow and impotent were the conclusions arrived at by German neologians – with whose works, being innocent of German, he was not otherwise acquainted’ (WOAF, 190). Dean Alford’s acquaintance with the German neologians (or neologists, those ‘coiners’ of a new, rationalist theology) was capable of another effect, however. In the account Butler gives of the newly ordained Ernest’s progress towards doubt, Mr Shaw the freethinker’s challenge to him to get clear in his mind the differences among the four Gospels on the events of the Resurrection plays a powerful initial role (we recall that Butler’s opening card in his ‘Resurrection’ pamphlet was the remark that few clergymen whom he had asked to outline the differences were able to do so). ‘Following the shock he felt on reading Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, his next step was to study Dean

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Alford’s notes upon the various Evangelistic records of the resurrection.’46 His shocked afternoon at the British Library reading Chambers is sufficient to pinpoint Ernest’s naive evangelicalism at that stage in his life, but also to indicate it was not worth lengthier consideration. Vestiges had already been shown not to be a serious work; as Butler’s narrator Overton points out, ‘The “Vestiges” were forgotten before Ernest came up to Cambridge’ (WOAF, 180). Alford was another matter. The MS of The Way of All Flesh goes on, ‘he remembered how Pryer’ – Pryer, that High Church friend who fleeced Ernest of all his funds on the pretext of investing it for the benefit of their proposed joint venture, a College of Spiritual Pathology – ‘had warned him against these notes, and this very recollection stimulated his ardour.’ ‘When he had finished Dean Alford’s notes he found them come to this, namely, that no one yet had succeeded in bringing the four accounts into tolerable harmony with each other, and that the Dean, seeing no chance of succeeding better than his predecessors had done, recommended that the whole story should be taken on trust – and this Ernest was not prepared to do’ (WOAF, 230). If we inspect Alford’s work at closer quarters, we can see more clearly what Ernest means. Butler, of course, was far from alone in his complaints against the church’s refusal to face up to German historical criticism. From early on we begin to hear heartfelt objections like that of John Sterling, in 1840: More than half of all German theology, for the last fifty years has turned upon the controversy about the literal accuracy and plenary inspiration of the book we call the Bible ... No English book gives a plausible share of this kind of information. After long and very painful resistance of mind, I was forced to admit, that if I am to follow honestly the best light afforded me, I must own there is error in the Scriptures, and that the denial of this is, in an adequately instructed man, a mere lying for God, – one of the most absurd and suicidal of all human superstitions.47

A more familiar statement is Colenso’s in 1865, which follows immediately after his outline of current German criticism: A very wide-spread distrust does exist among the intelligent Laity in England, as to the soundness of the traditionary view of Scripture Inspiration. But such distrust is generally grounded on one or two objections, felt strongly perhaps, but yet imperfectly apprehended, not on a devout and

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Elinor Shaffer careful study of the whole questions, with deliberate consideration of all that can be said on both sides of it. Hence it is rather secretly felt, than openly expressed; though it is sufficiently exhibited to the eye of a reflecting man in many outward signs of the times, and in none more painfully than in the fact which has been lamented by more than one of the English Bench of Bishops, and which every Colonial Bishop must still more sorrowfully confess, that the great body of the more intelligent students of our Universities no longer come forward to devote themselves to the service of the Church, but are drafted off into other professions. The Church of England must fall to the ground by its own internal weakness, – by losing its hold upon the growing intelligence of all classes, – unless some remedy be very soon applied to this state of things. It is a miserable policy, which now prevails, unworthy of the Truth itself, and one which cannot be maintained, to ‘keep things quiet.’48

Colenso, a missionary Bishop in South Africa, was obliged to return to London to face charges of heresy; and, as he feared, the Anglican Church officially resisted recognition of the higher criticism up to the year 1892.49 Butler, however, was as usual at the advance guard of the action. In attacking Dean Alford, he was attacking the liberal wing of the church, which believed it had faced up to criticism, and this is the real force of his analysis. Henry Alford’s Greek Testament was an important work of its time in England, a milestone on the way to recognition of German criticism by the church. The first volume appeared in 1849, the last in 1861. As Butler began work on The Way of All Flesh, the seventh edition was appearing. Alford ‘recognised from the first the superiority of the German Critics’ – these are the words of the Dictionary of National Biography at the end of the century – and went to Bonn in 1847 to make himself master of the language. His text was taken from Philipp Buttmann and Karl Lachmann; his commentary incorporates the work of the German neologists, and his ‘Books cited’ lists many of the major works of German criticism. His own position is a moderate one: he holds to a liberal belief in inspiration, dissociating himself from the mechanical and verbal theory of scriptural inspiration. The Apostles were inspired ‘by virtue of their office,’ while retaining their individual characters as men, and enabled by inspiration to report words and events beyond their power to imagine. But his thorough acquaintance with German criticism had made it clear to him that it was futile to attempt again a formal harmony of the Gospels. It was Alford’s recognition of the

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impossibility that had distressed the naive Ernest. Instead, Alford had recommended, we should ‘thus simply and reverentially receive their records, without setting them at variance with one another by compelling them in all cases to say the same things of the same events.’50 It is Strauss’s Life of Jesus, with its relentless attacks on the harmonists, that lies behind Alford’s decision that it is the better part of wisdom to abstain from any further attempts. How vital Strauss himself took the divergences to be, particularly in the Resurrection accounts – and here he is still a faithful pupil of Reimarus – appears in the ‘Concluding Dissertation,’ on the ‘Dogmatic Import of the Life of Jesus,’ in which he argues that the work of criticism has been so complete that the only recourse of the Christian must now be to Hegelian ‘import’ rather than to narrative history: ‘The root of faith in Jesus was the conviction of his Resurrection.’51 Even more strongly: ‘For the belief in the Resurrection of Christ is the foundation stone, without which the Christian church could not have been built ... the Christ who died could not be what he is in the belief of the church, if he were not also the Christ who rose again.’52 Only at this point can we appreciate the full force of the irony Butler brings to bear on Pickard Owen’s solution to the difficulties: that ‘all ideas gain by a certain amount of vagueness’ (FH, 20) – a Romantic position most ably represented by Coleridge, in his writings on symbolism – and that ‘the corruptions inseparable from viva voce communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the idea’: ‘Hence, far from deploring the fragmentary, confused, and contradictory condition of the Gospel records, he saw in this condition the means whereby alone the human mind could have been enabled to conceive – not the precise nature of Christ – but the highest ideal of which each individual Christian soul was capable’ (FH, 20–1). In the virtues of vagueness, imprecision, and inconsistency, then, Pickard Owen came to find his rest (FH, 42). In the final chapter, ‘The Christ-Ideal,’ these qualities are presented as essential to an aesthetic, antiscientific appreciation of religion, illustrated by a series of analogies to painting. Never is Butler more devastating – and never is his irony more likely to go unremarked by his contemporaries (and even by Professor Willey) than in such passages: We can see through these things – that is, the distorted renderings of the Gospels, as of early Italian paintings – as through a glass darkly, or as one looking upon some ineffable masterpiece of Venetian portraiture by the

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Elinor Shaffer fading light of an autumnal evening, when the beauty of the picture is enhanced a hundredfold by the gloom and mystery of dusk. We may indeed see less of the actual lineaments themselves, but the echo is ever more spiritually tuneful than the sound, and the echo we find within us. Our imagination is in closer communion with our longings than the hand of any painter. (FH, 196–7)

In case even now these parodic late Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite effusions should still exert some attraction, Butler concludes in a passage of unmistakable, even Nietzschean irony: How infinitely nobler and more soul-satisfying is the ideal of the Christian saint with wasted limbs, and clothed in the garb of poverty – his upturned eyes piercing the very heavens in the ecstasy of a divine despair – than any of the fleshly ideals of gross human conception such as have already been alluded to. If a man does not feel this instinctively for himself, let him test it thus – whom does his heart of hearts tell him that his son will be most like God in resembling? The Theseus? The Discobulus? Or the St. Peters and St. Pauls of Guido and Domenichino? Who can hesitate for a moment as to which idea presents the highest development of human nature? And this I take it should suffice; the natural instinct which draws us to the Christ-ideal in preference to all others as soon as it has been once presented to us, is a sufficient guarantee of its being the one most tending to the general well-being of the world. (FH, 208–9)

The word ‘son’ is the clue here: for even without Butler’s evolutionary studies and the dawning public recognition of the mechanism of natural selection it would be evident that every sane, sound, and healthy natural instinct strains against the acceptance of any such ‘ideal’ for the individual or the race. His choice of artists is also very deliberate, for while these well-known Greek sculptures such as ‘The Discobulus’ (The Discus Thrower) remained high in public esteem, the Italian baroque artists’ reputations were in decline.53 The ‘morality’ drawn from such sources must be rejected: ‘And I say emphatically that the morality which most men profess to hold as a Divine revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash nor wear, but was woven together from a tissue of dreams and blunders, and steeped in blood more virulent than the blood of Nessus’ (FH, 37). The technical matter of the higher criticism, then, supplies the method of Butler’s irony and the structure of the book. He sets off from

The Ironies of Biblical Criticism 81

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3.1 Butler’s Royal Academy exhibition painting, Mr Heatherley’s Holiday (1873), showing ‘The Discobulus,’ and other casts of Greek sculpture.

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the disharmonies of evidence at the textual level and proceeds to undermine all the current forms of ‘papering over’ the cracks, to the final disharmony: the impossibility of reconciling the rationalists (even in modern aesthetic dress) with the orthodox believers. It is of no small significance that Theobald Pontifex had spent much of his life compiling ‘with such exquisite neatness’ the harmonies of the Old and New Testaments, a more futile endeavour as Dean Alford had recognized, with respect to the Gospel harmonies, even than Mr Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The Victorian intellectual world abounded in Casaubons. On Theobald’s death, his harmonies, together with ‘a huge collection of MS sermons,’ were sold for ‘nine pence a barrow load’ (WOAF, 352). Both of his sons declined to buy. Butler’s use of Alford, then, is complex; he takes his place in the long tradition of learned satire and invective on real and invented personae. He is also closely akin to the ‘representative men’ in Matthew Arnold’s analysis of class interests in Culture and Anarchy. He has also his fictional embodiment, in part in the elder Pontifex, and his satirical incarnation in Professor Panky of Erewhon (Hanky and Panky are the professors of Worldly Wisdom and Unworldly Wisdom respectively, who between them brought the nation to its knees before the relic of horse dung; later they became St Hanky and St Panky, and begat Hocus and Pocus). Not least, Alford had his living equivalent and opposite number in the scientific establishment – Charles Darwin – whom Butler took to task for his theological use of scientific terminology. In this intricately pursued and varied ironic portrait of an individual, Butler brings to a fine flowering the tradition of learned invective and paves the way for Lytton Strachey’s Cardinal Manning and indeed for Eminent Victorians as the portrait of an age. Yet finally, the programmatic irony of The Fair Haven brings Butler close to the form of specifically Romantic irony which Friedrich Schlegel had developed at the turn of the nineteenth century out of the same historical-critical sources – that irony which takes its origin in the chaos created by criticism, and then seeks to re-establish harmony, which in turn is perceived as specious. It is for this reason that the position of Pickard Owen was so tempting to the reader, and Butler in spite of himself created a fictional spiritual experience on the part of his intended straw-man of a persona. Pickard Owen expressed not simply the range of apologetic religious positions but the new aesthetic form of irony itself with its embrace of contradiction and chimerical symbol: ‘The

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true spiritual conception in the mind of man could be indirectly more certainly engendered by a strife, a warring, a clashing of versions, all of them distorting slightly some one or other of the features of the original, than directly by the most absolutely correct impressions which human language could convey’ (FH, 19). In short, then, the method of alternating between the artificial or induced harmony, the moment of tranquil willed delusion, and the relentless uncovering of discord so characteristic of Butler’s irony – as very simply in the famous line, ‘As luck would have it, Providence was on my side’ – owes a great deal to the dean of Canterbury’s way of dealing with, or failing to deal with, the German historical critics. Butler’s perception that the new authorities, the scientific authorities who were taking over from the religious authorities, would don all the robes of office and carry out the equivalent of miraculous legerdemain in their own idiom, has been amply borne out in the hundred years since his death. Just as his intense and unrelenting analysis of religious crisis went unappreciated by his contemporaries, so our own contemporaries have still to plumb the depths of his critique of the new Scientific Authorities.

NOTES

1 2 3 4 5 6

7

An early version of this paper was given as a plenary lecture to the Victorian Studies Society of Ontario at the University of Toronto in 1978, and an abstract was published in Victorian Studies Newsletter (autumn 1978). Willey, Darwin and Butler, 80. Samuel Butler, Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh, ed. Daniel F. Howard (London: Methuen, 1965), 180–1 (hereafter cited in text as WOAF). T.H. Huxley, ‘Mr. Darwin’s Critics,’ in Darwiniana: Essays by Thomas H. Huxley (London: Macmillan, 1894), 145–6. These are the words of Higgs, the protagonist of Erewhon Revisited (1901; London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1932), 362 (hereafter cited in text as ER). Note-Books, vol. 2, 13 November 1883. MS, Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Samuel Butler, ‘Darwin among the Machines,’ first printed 13 June 1863, in the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand; reprinted in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones, 46. Jones, Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon,’ 1:122 (hereafter cited in text as Memoir).

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8 See letters to his cousin Philip Worsley (10 January 1861) and to his college friend William Thackeray Marriott (8 August 1861), in Memoir, 1:97. 9 Francis Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1893), 57. 10 Recent critics have pointed to the ubiquity of ‘bachelor narrators’ in the Victorian novel; see, for example, Katherine V. Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which, however, fails to mention the egregious example of Overton in The Way of All Flesh. 11 Essays and Reviews (1860) attracted notice because seven reputable churchmen called into question the foundations of Anglican belief by openly embracing the Straussian position on the mythological status of the New Testament and the compression of geological time in ‘Genesis.’ See Ieuan Ellis, Seven Against Christ: A Study of ‘Essays and Reviews’ (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980); and Josef L. Altholz, Anatomy of a Controversy: The Debate over ‘Essays and Reviews’, 1860–1864 (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1994). 12 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), 31. 13 Cited in Bloch, ibid., 83. 14 Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (Basingstoke: Allen Lane, 1967), Letter V, 79. 15 Huxley, ‘Mr. Darwin’s Critics,’ 125. 16 Anthony Collins, A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing, ed. with an introduction by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (1729; Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1970), 10. 17 For an account of the background of the higher criticism as Coleridge experienced it in the 1790s through his contacts with Unitarian and German thought, and its later development in Britain, see E.S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). The book also contains chapters on Robert Browning, George Eliot (the translator of Strauss), and ‘Orientalism.’ 18 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 85. 19 Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 12–16. 20 Butler, The Fair Haven (1873; London: Watts, 1938), 47 (hereafter cited in text as FH).

The Ironies of Biblical Criticism 85 21 Collins, A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony, 24–5. 22 José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín (New York: Norton, 1961), 139. 23 Butler, Evolution, Old and New (1879; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 70. 24 Isidore Geoffroy St Hilaire, Histoire naturelle générale, 3 vols (Paris: V. Masson, 1854–62), 2:383. 25 Butler, Evolution, Old and New, 73. 26 See Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem (23, 127–9) for Eichhorn on OT myth and on the approach to the mythologising of the NT in the 1790s, and (122–7) on the formation of a new conception of myth. 27 Martin Swales, ‘The German Bildungsroman and “The Great Tradition,”’ in Comparative Criticism, ed. Elinor Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1:92–3. 28 David Friedrich Strauss, Life of Jesus, translated from the 4th German edition (London: Chapman, 1846), 757. Mary Ann Evans [George Eliot] was the anonymous translator. The 4th edition (1840) was Strauss’s strongest statement of the mythological sources of the NT. 29 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, ed. Friedrich Bassenge (Berlin: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1951–5), 983. 30 For a discussion of the impact of historical criticism on the viability of claims to ‘apostolic authorship,’ and the emergence of a new definition of canonicity, see Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem, 74–82 (on the dating of the Gospels) and 84–5 (on canonicity). 31 Thirlwall, a liberal Anglican biblical critic associated with Julius Hare, and Schleiermacher’s major translator in Britain, was forced to resign his Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, when he wrote a pamphlet advocating the admission of Dissenters to degrees and criticizing the rote teaching of the compulsory paper in Religion. Thirty years later he argued successfully in the House of Lords for the admission of Dissenters (Abolition of the Test Act, 1871). 32 David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1864); an English translation by R.W. Mackay followed the next year, A New Life of Jesus (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1865). 33 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 26. 34 John W. Colenso, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1862), xxiii. Colenso, a missionary bishop in Natal, who on publication of his book was accused of heresy, returned to Britain to plead his cause with the Anglican authorities.

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35 The account is virtually identical with the passage in the ‘Resurrection’ pamphlet; but it is no longer the view of the author or the editor, but part of the chapter (7) purporting to represent in Pickard Owen’s words ‘the difficulties felt by our opponents.’ 36 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 167–204. 37 Strauss, Life of Jesus, 736–7. 38 Fragments from Reimarus: consisting of brief critical remarks on the object of Jesus and his disciples as seen in the New Testament, trans. and ed. Charles Voysey (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1879), 95. 39 Lessing’s note, ibid. 40 David Friedrich Strauss, Hermann Samuel Reimarus und seine Schützschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1862), 283–4. 41 Willey, Darwin and Butler, 100–2. 42 Miss Eliza Savage to Samuel Butler, letter of 3 May 1873, quoted in Jones, Memoir, 1:192. 43 For Coleridge’s subtle aestheticizing of the religion of reason, see E.S. Shaffer, ‘Kant and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection: The Metaphysics of Culture,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 2 (April–June 1970): 199–218; updated in Shaffer, ‘Coleridge and Kant’s “Giant Hand,”’ in Anglo-German Affinities and Antipathies in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Rüdiger Görner (Munich: iudicium; London: Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, 2004), 39–56; and Shaffer, ‘Confessions: Goethe’s Bekenntnisse einer Schönen Seele and Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit,’ in Goethe and the English-Speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary, ed. Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), 144–58. 44 Preface to the 2nd edition of The Fair Haven (1873), xi. 45 Huxley, ‘Mr Darwin’s Critics,’ 148. 46 Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844, an ‘evolutionary epic’ encouraging a secular developmental point of view without being scientific, was widely noticed. The authorship of Robert Chambers, popular journalist and author, was uncovered by late 1847, which served to discredit the book on the grounds of the author’s known politics and past publications, as well as his lack of scientific credentials. As one review had it, ‘That man should spring from the loins of a monkey was scarcely more distasteful than that a theory of creation should be propounded by Mr Chambers’ (Fife Herald, 18 October 1849), quoted in James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 293.

The Ironies of Biblical Criticism 87 47 John Sterling, Twelve Letters (London: J. Ollivier, 1851), 3 (letter to William Coningham, 6 May 1840). 48 Colenso, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua, 17. 49 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966–70), 2:98. 50 Henry Alford, The Greek Testament, vol. 1, The Four Gospels, 7th ed. (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1874). 51 Strauss, Life of Jesus, 758. 52 Ibid., 772. 53 For Butler’s role in the revaluation of artists and his critique of the art establishment, see Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye.

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PART TWO The Evolutionist, 1874–86

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4 ‘The written symbol extends infinitely’: Samuel Butler and the Writing of Evolutionary Theory david amigoni

Butler’s ‘covenanted symbols’: Evolutionary Theory in the ‘Departments’ of Writing In the notice announcing the reissue of Samuel Butler’s works under the imprimatur of Fifield, the publisher quoted George Bernard Shaw’s assessment of Butler as ‘the greatest English writer of the latter half of the 19th century.’ However, Shaw prefaced that judgment with a qualifier: ‘in his own department.’ But what was Butler’s ‘department’? Shaw’s preference for the singularity of ‘department’ was challenged by the publisher’s account of Butler’s polymath identities: ‘novelist, philosopher, satirist and classicist.’ Fifield’s notice helps to frame, initially, a question about how to read and evaluate Butler’s writings on evolutionary theory, for these writings have proven hard to assess. Butler’s public quarrel with Charles Darwin about the originality and viability of the theory of natural selection was not, on the face of it, edifying. His championing of earlier, Enlightenment theories of transmutation of a clearly Lamarckian cast can seem obscurantist; so too can his allied contention that Darwinian scientific and theoretical advances were hopelessly ‘deadlocked’ in their refusal to recognize the role that design and will played in evolution. Fifield’s notice raises an additional question about how to construct and assess the relations of Butler’s writings on evolution to the broader range of his compositions. R.A. Streatfeild edited Butler’s ‘literary remains,’ and in doing so, had to arrange Butler’s miscellaneous writings on a variety of topics into some order. For instance, Butler’s incidental lectures and essays on evolutionary theory that will figure in this chapter – ‘Thought and Language’ (1890, 1894) and ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism’ (1890) – were

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clearly extensions of his book-length critiques of Darwinian natural selection from the late 1870s and 1880s: Life and Habit: 1878), Evolution, Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck, or Cunning? (1887). The essays were first collected together in a posthumous 1904 collection edited by Streatfeild and published by Grant Richards, Essays on Life, Art, and Science, a volume that Fifield reissued in 1908. But the essays were reissued again in 1913 under the title of The Humour of Homer, Butler’s essay of that title having been added, despite Streatfeild’s contention in 1908 that he had seen no need to reprint Butler’s views on Homer and the authorship of the Odyssey.1 As this chapter will suggest, the ‘wide field’ (Streatfeild) that Butler’s writings traverse invites readers to make connections between the ostensibly separate ‘departments’ of evolutionary theory, ‘literary’ questions of authorship, the proliferation of written symbols, and the implications of these for questions of cultural identity and power. For literature was, in one manifestation, a rhetoric of power in Butler’s view; according to Butler in the first in the series of essays comprising ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism,’ Charles Darwin’s pre-eminence in the field of evolutionary speculation owed a great deal to the fact that ‘a powerful literary backing at once came forward to support him.’2 In Evolution, Old and New, Butler traced this literary power in action, illustrating the ways in which metaphors and rhetoric in the hands of savant publicists such as John Tyndall could produce a powerfully resonant image of Darwin’s thought and its transcendence over all that preceded it, and those who might doubt it.3 The question of literary power simultaneously invites a different kind of reflection on the range and extension of Butler’s own ‘written symbols,’ in particular the dialogic engagement with the present and the past that his writings generate. While Butler’s ‘written symbols’ conduct a dialogue with intellectual figures from his present – Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Friedrich Max Müller – his writings also sustain a dialogue with writings by others from the past. If Butler alleged that Charles Darwin was apt to forget the debt he owed to precursors – in particular Erasmus Darwin – Butler himself was keen to echo and keep alive in new contexts the writings of previous authors who bore the name ‘Butler,’ such as Bishop Joseph Butler, author of The Analogy (1736), and the seventeenth-century satiric poet Samuel Butler. Thus, in Butler’s lecture on ‘Thought and Language,’ when arguing against Max Müller by positively endorsing the capacity of animals to entertain ideas, Butler cites what ‘my great namesake said some two

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hundred years ago, “they know what’s what, and that’s as high as metaphysic wit can fly.”’4 Samuel Butler’s quotation from his namesake’s Restoration mock-epic Hudibras (1663–78) is a significant echo: the first Samuel Butler’s satire mocked the pretensions of both theology and science, a project that the prose writing of the Victorian Samuel Butler extended.5 Thus ‘the written symbol’ – its complex orientation towards the present, past, and future, and its organization into the conventions of literary, scientific, and philosophical discussion – is the common ‘contrivance’ that connects the various ‘departments’ addressed by Butler. As James Paradis has indicated in his introduction to this volume, Butler’s forward-looking irony made satiric capital out of the emptiness of a whole range of conventions supporting Victorian intellectual life and culture. Not surprisingly, Butler was interested in how conventions worked, and in his essay ‘Thought and Language,’ he reflected on their formation and conditions of possibility. Butler’s preoccupation with the idea of the symbol in ‘Thought and Language’ can plausibly be linked to a meaning of the ‘symbol’ that signified the operation of conventional character marks in chemistry and mathematics, and which, as the OED indicates, enjoyed wider currency as a result of the expansion of nineteenth-century scientism. Indeed, it could be argued that scientific discourse and theory reformulated the idea of the symbol: Herbert Spencer’s notion of ‘symbolic conceptions’ in First Principles (1862) mixed the traditional idea of the symbol as substitutive denotation with the more recent sense of the symbol as a convention of notation. For Spencer, ‘symbolic conceptions’ marked the point at which established conventions of representation substituted for the hard data of empirical cognition once the limits of the latter had been reached. This led Spencer to acknowledge that within every religious and scientific idea was an element of fiction not fully controllable by its writer.6 Spencer’s theory of ‘symbolic conceptions’ opened up space between representation and actuality in which, as Butler was to observe in his wide-ranging account of symbolic exchange, symbols might extend infinitely. In ‘Thought and Language’ Butler argued that ‘language’ could positively occur in situations where there was, minimally, a shared and recognized convention (TL, 191), an institutional view of symbolic exchange that enabled him to identify ‘effectual language’ in a wide variety of contexts, including among humans without speech who constructed alternative codes based on gesture and sign (TL, 213). In addition, Butler’s view embraced species-centred, naturalistic varieties of

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codes and conventions evolved by non-human communicants who still ‘know what’s what.’ Turning to a metaphor of bodily design and organization, Butler argued that ‘our own speech is vertebrated and articulated by means of nouns, verbs and the rules of grammar. A dog’s speech is invertebrate’ (TL, 212), and, for a dog, ‘that’s as high as metaphysic wit can fly.’ In ‘Thought and Language’ Butler intervened into the field of language philosophy and evolutionary theory. Gillian Beer and Stephen Alter have shown how important nineteenth-century language theory was to evolutionary theory in the earlier nineteenth century.7 Initially, philology had lent to the theory of descent some of its most telling metaphors and analogies as it struggled to put together evidence that could not be provided by an incomplete fossil record; philologists faced similar genealogical difficulties in constructing the history of languages as they descended from a common progenitor. Later, the conjunction between philology and evolutionary theory gave rise to philosophical questions about the nature of language as defining the essence of human reason and consciousness. After the publication of the Origin of Species, a pressing issue of debate for philologists and evolutionists seeking to mark out the limits of ‘man’s place in nature’ had been framed by Max Müller’s Kantian idealism, and its contention that language was the Rubicon that ‘no beast would dare to cross.’8 Butler, as a convinced evolutionist, disagreed. He conceded that language needed ideas before it could be language; but his idea of the ‘idea’ places him outside the traditions of Kantian and (from the perspective of the English tradition) Coleridgean idealism. For Butler, ideas could be rudimentary and low-level, and communicated through bodily – even beastly – activity: ‘some ideas crawl, some run, some fly’ (TL, 187). In other words, the ‘ideas’ conveyed by a given set of linguistic conventions are embodied in an organic ‘device,’ be it body or institution, in which the language practice takes shape. Moreover, Butler’s metaphors for ideas – crawling, running, flying – imagine language as transportation, movement, and extension. In defining language, Butler draws attention to its derivation from the French ‘langue,’ or ‘tongue,’ a derivation that privileges the ‘selfpresence’ of speech. However, he also sees writing as its own distinct form of language; if ‘tonguage’ privileges the organ that shapes speech, then writing is also the different material embodiments that enact and convey its inscriptions; Butler describes these as ‘handage, inkage and

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paperage.’ In contrast to speech, these material embodiments and contrivances give writing remarkable powers of extension; as Butler acknowledged, ‘the written symbol extends infinitely’ (TL, 198). This emphasis on infinite extension is important in two senses: first, because writing permits the practical ‘transportation’ of ideas through signs and notations inscribed by ‘handage’ with ‘inkage’ on ‘paperage’; the results can separate from their author and circulate widely. But second, because extension also happens by transportation within and between practices of signification: ‘scratch the simplest expressions,’ Butler observes, ‘and you will find the metaphor. Written words are handage, inkage and paperage; it is only by metaphor, or substitution and transposition of ideas, that we can call them language ... it is in what we read between the lines that the profounder meaning of any letter is conveyed’ (TL, 195). As I shall argue, ‘reading between the lines’ involves the transposition of significations between ‘departments’ of thought. For Butler this was the means by which identity and the modes of authority that fixed it were satirically interrogated, dispersed, and reconceived with new insight. Butler was peculiarly alert to the ‘extended’ workings of writing as an advanced human symbolic practice in theology and science in which conventions were open to literary modification or a ‘sleight of mind’ that invites an understanding of ‘a new covenant as to the meaning of symbols’ – a formulation that echoes with biblical, theistic connotations. This language is repeated in Butler’s contention that ‘much lying, and all irony depends on tampering with covenanted symbols’ (TL, 205). That Butler should set lying and irony side by side suggests a great deal about his response to the nineteenth-century conflict between science and religion. Irony was Butler’s literary weapon of choice, his own act of symbolic tampering upon realization that he had been ‘lied to,’ that is, when he deemed the covenants supporting belief and intellectual inquiry to have been unreasonably manipulated. Indeed, Butler felt that he had been told untruths in respect to two keystones of nineteenth-century belief and thought that were propelled into conflict: first, Christ’s Resurrection as the ‘factual’ basis for orthodox Christian doctrine; and, second, Charles Darwin’s ‘original’ theory of evolution by natural selection. In both instances, ‘covenanted symbols’ had seemingly been re-cast by a ‘sleight of mind.’ Henry Festing Jones, in his memoir of Butler, makes this connection explicitly in seeking to explain the strength of Butler’s response to Charles Darwin’s ‘failure,’ in But-

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ler’s view, to acknowledge the contribution of his precursors to the elaboration of a theory of evolution: ‘It now appeared that Mr Darwin was not the first to announce a theory of descent with modification ... Butler felt he had been taken in ... it was the alleged death and resurrection of Jesus Christ over again.’9 Butler’s sense of dual betrayal was perhaps exacerbated by the fact that he had shared with Darwin his critical accounts of the Resurrection story.10 This episode is illustrative of a disconcerting blend in Butler’s writing between plain common sense founded on an almost childlike simplicity, and a degree of sharp intellectual sophistication that was wielded upon the realization that simple trust had been betrayed. Butler’s blend of childlike simplicity and ironic sophistication was invoked to defend ‘plain people’ from a literary rhetoric of power shared by ‘priests and men of science.’ As Butler observed, resorting to a playful use of metaphor to render the idea of ‘swallowing’ truth, in his essay of 1889, ‘A Medieval Girl’s School,’ this rhetoric of power was itself premised on an incommensurable game, for priests and men of science ... and plain people ... are trying to play a different game, and fail to understand one another because they do not see that their objects are not the same. The cleric and the man of science (who is only the cleric in his latest development) are trying to develop a throat with two distinct passages – one that shall refuse to pass even the smallest gnat, and another that shall gracefully gulp even the largest camel; whereas we men of the street desire but one throat, and are content that this shall swallow nothing bigger than a pony.11

Butler’s writing of evolutionary theory thus intervened into a view of incommensurable relations between, on the one hand, clerical and scientific intellectuals, and, on the other, the common readers that Butler aimed to serve and defend – though was never confident of reaching. Yet Butler himself could read ‘covenanted symbols’ and swallow more than was on the menu, so far as prosaic natural historians were concerned. In an early letter to Charles Darwin (1 October 1865), he conceded his ignorance of natural history, yet praised the Origin of Species because it ‘enters into so many deeply interesting questions, or rather it suggests so many.’12 Butler pushed at the suggestion-laden margins of Darwin’s theory of descent by modification to extend the most challenging implications of evolutionary theory, that is to say, those meanings that were latent in evolutionary theory but that had to

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be transported between the lines of the written discourse in order to become explicit. For Butler, evolutionary theory set in motion a disconcerting play between sameness and difference with paradoxical implications for both epistemology and ontology: evolutionary theory, be it Darwinian or Lamarckian, depends on an assumption that there is unbroken continuity between the earliest known life and human life, an assumption that is strangely troubling for the human concept of individual identity as absolute uniqueness. As Butler put it in the third of his late essays entitled ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism,’ the implications of this can only be grasped in the form of a paradox: Everything both is and is not. There is no such thing as strict identity between any two things in any two consecutive seconds. In strictness they are identical and yet not identical, so that in strictness they violate a fundamental rule of strictness – namely, that a thing shall never be itself and not itself at one and the same time. (DD, pt. 3, 319)

The strictness of the principle of non-identity or difference is paradoxically violated by the stricter concept that everything both is and is not simultaneously. Butler’s day-to-day approach to identity pragmatically acknowledged that in the end it was important to deal ‘in a practical spirit with time and space,’ for ‘logic is told to stand aside when people come to practice. In practice, identity is generally held to exist where continuity is only broken slowly and piecemeal’ (ibid.). And yet, while the Victorian Butler mounts a pragmatic defence of identity very similar in argument to an appendix to Bishop Butler’s work of eighteenthcentury natural theology, The Analogy,13 the underlying force of the paradox that everything both is and is not is forced squarely into consciousness by nineteenth-century evolutionary theory: evolutionary theory traces surprising, indeed disruptive and even ironic, patterns of identity within ostensible relations of difference. Thus, while Butler was suspicious of literary rhetoric that powerfully asserted the claims to authority of theology and science, he was attracted to the paradoxes thrown up by evolutionary theory. They enabled him to write interrogative symbolic experiments, ‘other’ forms of literature – satires, dialogues, and ironic parodies, which could be used to explore and rethink received ideas about culture, authorship, and identity. This occurred in the context of his public dispute of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

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Between the Lines: Dialogues with Charles Darwin and the ‘Machinery’ of Evolutionary Writing In Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer observes in an endnote that ‘Butler’s creative response to Darwin is ... complicated, and to some extent limited, by his preoccupation with the plagiarism he imputed to Darwin.’14 Plagiarism was, however, not the exclusive writing crime that Butler alleged against Darwin, and it is helpful to be reminded of the complex contours of the quarrel of the 1870s, following as it did Butler’s initial positive contact with Charles Darwin in the early 1860s, evidence for Gillian Beer of a more ‘creative’ response to the theory of evolution by natural selection. There are stronger continuities between Butler’s first ‘creative’ response to Darwin and the later controversy than is often acknowledged. Butler’s quarrel with Darwin originated over the translation from the German, and publication in English, of Ernst Krause’s essay on Erasmus Darwin (November 1879), for which Charles Darwin had written the biographical preface. Butler, as a reader of the work, objected to the following assessment of Erasmus Darwin’s system, voiced by Krause, in his conclusion: ‘to wish to revive [his system] at the present day, as has been seriously attempted, shows a weakness of thought and a mental anachronism which no one can envy.’15 Butler objected because he was the writer of the recently published Life and Habit (1878), advancing an account of evolutionary development committed to agency and purposefulness, and of Evolution, Old and New (May 1879), comparing the systems of Erasmus and Charles Darwin, ‘the preference being decidedly given to the earlier writer.’ Butler was at this point on friendly terms with the Darwins, particularly Francis Darwin, to whom he had sent two copies of Life and Habit, one of which was destined for Charles Darwin.16 We have already seen how Butler shared his critical work on the Gospel narrative with Charles Darwin; at the same time, he was also sending Darwin his imaginative journalistic responses to the Origin, written in New Zealand. Butler surmised that his mature work on evolution could have been construed as the ‘serious attempt’ to revive the early nineteenth-century systems of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, and knew that he was the target when a review of Evolution, Old and New in Popular Science Review named his book as the purveyor of ‘anachronism.’17 Butler searched for, but could find no trace of the offending passage in the German original, published in the scientific journal Kosmos. He con-

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cluded that the passage must have been interpolated by Charles Darwin in an attempt to discredit a rival system of thought recently defended in the public domain. Butler put the charge to Darwin, who denied it by stating that Krause had provided the translator, W.S. Dallas, with a revised manuscript that had included the materials to which Butler objected. In Butler’s eyes, Darwin’s attempted defence exacerbated the crime. Darwin had written: ‘This [Krause’s revisions] is so common a practice that it never occurred to me to state that the article had been modified.’18 For Butler, Darwin’s failure to admit an error violated the ‘standards of good faith and gentlemanly conduct which should prevail amongst Englishmen.’19 A lengthy and increasingly acrimonious public spat ensued in which Butler contended that little written by Darwin on evolution was original: Darwin may have convinced the public of the truth of evolution, but natural selection was not a viable theory with which to demonstrate its truth. For Butler, earlier writers had elaborated more convincing – as well as more coherent – theories of evolution. Moreover, in Butler’s eyes, Darwin failed to acknowledge the debt owed to these writers whilst continuing to elaborate his theory of ‘random variation and selection,’ a theory of chance that, for Butler, could only produce obfuscation in its publicly dogmatic refusal to countenance the minimal presence of design, intelligence, and agency. Letters appeared in periodicals and newspapers, and the scientific elite rallied around Darwin to mount the ‘powerful literary’ defence of which Butler later complained. Butler’s writings on evolution came increasingly to be styled as maverick and marginal. The dispute had not been resolved when Darwin died in 1882. Thus Gillian Beer’s point, that Butler’s creative response to Darwin was limited by the dispute, perhaps needs to be examined from another angle. This way of reading the dispute enables us to get inside the literary mechanics and dynamics of creativity and claims to theoretical originality. It is important to grasp that while the dispute revolved around issues in the history of thought, it also had at its heart the complex divisions of labour to which modern literary production had given rise: writing ‘spawns’ acts of translation, editing, proofreading, and further writing (an essay on Erasmus Darwin ‘demands’ a biographical sketch). Amidst these divisions and conditions of labour, Butler was keen, as we have seen, to draw attention to – and indeed to uphold – ‘standards of good faith and gentlemanly conduct.’ In other words, authors are gentlemen who must take responsibility for their writings.

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Yet a process of reading, writing, translation, proofreading, publication, and archiving produced a literary enterprise in which authorial agency is but one element in an ensemble of practices, and sovereignty difficult to presume. Butler’s satire on his own authorial identity, ‘Quis Desiderio ...?’ (1888), was, as I shall show towards the end of this essay, framed by this sense of a loss of control and diminution of agency and identity – the very condition, paradoxically, that his writing on evolution was committed to opposing. In some sense, Butler’s position anticipates some of the most recent revisionist work on nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, which has brought to light the importance of questions of authorship and literary production. James Secord’s seminal work on Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation examines the great Victorian ‘sensation’ of Robert Chambers’s pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory in the context of the history of book production, reception history, and the methods of literary study embedded in cultural history. Secord observes something important about ‘literary power,’ the very thing that troubled Butler so about the way in which Darwin was defended: Secord argues, ‘Every act of reading is an act of forgetting ... Those books that allow us to forget the most are accorded the authority of the classic.’20 Secord’s point about the Origin is thus similar to Butler’s complaint about the status accorded to Darwin’s work. As Secord’s extensive research reminds us, networks of reading activity in the nineteenth century were so complex because the ‘texts’ through which evolutionary thinking was conveyed were enormously varied: the grand book-publishing events such as the Vestiges and the Origin were but one node in a network; discussions of evolution were sustained, extended, and addressed to different audiences through periodical essays, book reviews, public lectures, and a ‘culture’ of ‘salon’ as well as ‘Monmouth Street’ conversations. Butler’s own ‘Thought and Language’ was first delivered as a lecture to the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street, London (1890), in the manner of Huxley’s great ‘Lay Sermons’; the essays comprising ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism’ were written for publication in the periodical Universal Review. Secord’s work also reminds us that the question of authorship was an important one in the dissemination and elaboration of evolutionary theory. The very absence of an authorial figure in the case of the Vestiges – Chambers took elaborate steps to preserve his anonymity for as long as he could – did nothing to prevent, indeed it prompted and prolonged, discussion of who the author might be (and indeed whether he

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was a ‘gentleman,’ given the politics that turned on what Secord describes as ‘the paradoxes of gentility’).21 In turn, this casts a fresh light on Darwin’s initial reluctance (the famous ‘twenty year delay’) to go public with his theory of natural selection, to become the named author of a theory. Thus, Butler’s seemingly whimsical ‘literary’ question – ‘who was the author, or rather authoress, of the Odyssey?’ – which by 1913 had come to be set alongside his essays on evolution, had already been practically active in the ‘department’ of evolutionary speculation since 1844. The questions that Butler asked about Darwin’s ‘originality’ can perhaps be read in light of his thoughts expressed in ‘The Humour of Homer’ – another lecture addressed to the Working Men’s College – as well as in the context of the ironies and paradoxes that he set in motion when writing about himself as an author in the essay ‘Quis Desiderio ...?’ While Butler argued in the first essay in ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism,’ ‘The personal element cannot be eliminated from the consideration of works written by living persons for living persons’ (DD, pt. 1, 251), locating ‘the personal’ in history and writing is always fraught with complexity. Butler’s initial responses to Darwin were certainly conceived in terms of personal dialogue, of delight in the fruits of Darwin’s authorship and seeking to please in return: ‘I always delighted in your Origin of Species as soon as I saw it out in N.Z. ... I therefore feel all the greater pleasure that my pamphlet should please you, however full of errors it may be’ (1 October 1865). Yet it is overstating the case to argue that there were two phases to Butler’s response to Darwin, early warm enthusiasm followed by antagonism. Elements of Butler’s later position appear in his initial response. As a colonial sheep farmer in the Canterbury Settlement, New Zealand, Butler wrote as an enthusiastic supporter of the theory of natural selection. On 20 December 1862, a short anonymous article in the form of a philosophical dialogue, entitled ‘Darwin on the Origin of Species,’ was published in the Press, the colonial newspaper that served Canterbury Settlement. The article commented on Darwin’s style and method of argument. Unusually for an early newspaper comment on the Origin, it had a clear understanding of the theory of natural selection. In addition, it showed an awareness of the conceptual importance of Malthus’s population theory to natural selection. Finally, it turned to the question of whether the Origin was subversive of religion, and suggested that it was not: ‘the impossibility of reconciling them must only be temporary, not real.’22 Remarkably, the article came to Darwin’s attention in Down: it

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impressed him ‘for its spirit and for giving so clear and accurate a view of Mr. D.’s theory.’ He thus forwarded the ‘New Zealand Newspaper’ to English newspaper editors in the hope that they would reprint the piece. When Butler revealed his identity to Darwin as the author of the Press articles (in his letter of 1 October 1865), he feared ‘you will be shocked at an appeal to the periodicals mentioned in my letter, but they form a very staple article of the bush diet, and we used to get a good deal of superficial knowledge out of them.’ Darwin responded positively to Butler’s self-image as the intellectually undernourished colonist: ‘with your rare powers of writing you might make a very interesting work descriptive of a colonist’s life in New Zealand.’23 Butler had already written that work in the form of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863); it was a book that did not satisfy him, written more for his father than for himself. He preferred to exercise his paradoxical imagination: increasingly, it was addressed to Darwin’s theory, and ended up with a number of articles in which Butler extended the implications of Darwin’s theory by constructing analogies between the adaptations selected by and in nature to human powers of invention culminating in machines. The articles that Butler wrote – ‘Darwin among the Machines’ and ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ – were to form the basis of his inventive ‘Book of the Machines’ chapters in Erewhon (1872). In the course of this, his response to Darwin’s theory became more and more playful; as he acknowledged in the preface to the second edition of Erewhon, though ‘few things would be more distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr Darwin,’ his writing appeared to be satirizing and diluting the integrity of Darwin’s theory.24 Butler achieves this effect by drawing an analogy between modifications to natural organisms and the refinement of mechanical contrivances, so that the ‘primordial types of mechanical life,’ such as the lever, can develop into Brunel’s ‘Great Eastern’; he draws the conclusion that ‘man has played that part among machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdom.’25 In making this claim Butler was all the time dissolving the theoretical coherence and exclusiveness of natural selection, and melding it with a conception of mind-guided adaptation and inheritance that he was to advance and defend in his later evolutionary writings. He would not come to recognize this strain of thought as ‘Lamarckian,’ and quite radically opposed to Darwin’s natural selection, until it was pointed out to him when the writing of Life and Habit was almost complete.26 Butler then added the chapter entitled ‘Lamarck and Mr. Darwin’ to Life and Habit; here he

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makes explicit the conceptual bridge that he observed between Lamarck’s evolutionary theory and the adaptive power of machinery under human ‘cultivation,’ which he further conceives as a challenge to Darwin’s chosen starting point, the Origin’s theory of ‘variation under domestication’: ‘Plants and animals under domestication are indeed a suggestive field for study, but machines are the manner in which man is varying at this moment.’27 Butler’s much earlier ‘Lucubratio Ebria,’ first published in the Press in 1865, was thus Lamarckian without recognizing itself as such. It remains a particularly striking piece because of the way in which it mingles ideas of machinery with ideas about the written symbol as a technology of both governance and disruption. In the essay, Butler becomes a transmutational speculator who muses on the simian origins of humanity: Good apes begot good apes, and at last when human intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi-simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could of his own forethought add extra-corporaneous limbs through the members of his own body, and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate machinate mammal into the bargain. It was a wise monkey that first learned to carry a stick, and a useful monkey that mimicked him.28

In this narrative of technological development, representing the emergence of contrivances that transpose and extend limbs and bodily frame into the domain of the ‘machinate,’ wisdom and mimicry are placed in a complex relationship. The breakthrough, it is stated, occurs when human intelligence enlightens the imitative gestures of ‘semisimious’ mimicry. But it also suggests that mimicry can take as its object enlightened wisdom, as in the case of the ‘useful’ monkey who imitates the first wise monkey to carry a stick. In effect, Butler’s evolutionary narrative implies that wisdom and mimicry both are, and are not, what they are taken in essence to be. By extension, his parodies and satires on evolutionary thinking both are, and are not, mimicry; and they simultaneously are, and are not, wisdom. In imagining the original moment of simian stick wielding, ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ becomes an allegory on the origins of governance, violence, and the exercise of power. Indeed, the ‘contrivance’ of symbolic practice itself is central to that exercise of power: man ‘learnt to perceive the moral government which held the feudal tenure of his life – perceiving

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it, he symbolised it’ (LE, 188–9). It is notable that Butler should locate his own writing outside of strict moral governance, a suggestion conveyed by the title of his piece. ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ roughly translates as ‘Drunken Meditations in Writing,’ and the speaker of the piece declares that he is most likely to be condemned for offering ‘a drunken dream or the nightmare of a distempered imagination,’ one that exists outside of the presumed rules that govern symbolic exchange, in the manner of the early Corinthians who spoke in unknown tongues: ‘we cannot understand our own speech, and we fear lest there be not a sufficient number of interpreters present to make our utterance edify’ (LE, 187). In this example of Butler’s early dialogue with Darwin’s work, writing equates to a loss of control, the failure to understand one’s own speech. In the manner of the wise monkey who always faces the possibility of being mimicked, Butler confronts the difficulty of fully possessing and remaining in control of one’s own symbolic practice. The difficulty of controlling the interpretation and effects of one’s symbolic practice haunted Darwin’s approach to writing: famously, in his chapter devoted to ‘the struggle for existence’ in the Origin, Darwin warned his reader that ‘I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense.’29 Butler, in Life and Habit, drew attention to the space for interpretative latitude that Darwin’s appeal to such ‘symbolic conceptions’ generated when he satirized the looseness of Darwin’s anti-Lamarckian use of the term ‘domestic productions’: ‘Mr. Darwin tells us, in the preface to his last edition [6th] of the “Origin of Species,” that Lamarck was partly led to his [erroneous] conclusions by the analogy of domestic productions. It is rather hard to say what these words imply; they may mean anything from a baby to an apple dumpling.’ In a letter to Francis Darwin explaining how Life and Habit came to be written, Butler claimed not to be in control of this aspect of his ‘disrespectful’ symbolic practice: ‘I could not resist, and can only say that it was not I that did it, but sin that was working in me.’30 Such close readings of linguistic slippage were in a sense the basis for Butler’s later, more systematic, defence of Lamarckian purposefulness, and his critique of Charles Darwin’s ‘incoherent’ theory of natural selection. In Luck, or Cunning? and again in ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism,’ Butler pointed to differences between the main body of the Origin, where an anti-purposive argument was maintained, and Darwin’s peroration to the work in which the author slipped into something more Lamarckian. ‘In his later editions,’ Butler maintained, ‘he retreated indefinitely from his original position, edging always more and more

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continually towards the theory of his grandfather and Lamarck.’ This led Butler to the paradoxical conclusion that Darwin ‘was at no time a thorough-going Darwinian, but was throughout an unconscious Lamarckian, though ever anxious to conceal the fact from himself and his readers’ (DD, pt. 1, 256–7).31 As with the authorial voice in the satiric ‘Lucubratio Ebria,’ Butler contends that Darwin did not fully understand his own writing; he claimed to have developed a new theory, but he was unconsciously repeating ‘ancestral voices’ that were contrary to the positions that he publicly professed. Questions of authorial identity, the creation of ‘original’ theories, and the extent to which an author is in control of writing are posed between the lines of Butler’s critique of Charles Darwin’s version of evolution. In a transposed sense, Butler’s rewriting of Darwinian evolutionary theory, making explicit its implications, can be read between the lines of his satire on his own authorial identity. Inside and Outside of the Name: Authorship and the Descent of Identity in the Cultural Archive ‘Quis Desiderio ...?’ is Butler’s playful, satiric reflection on his literary identity, authorship, the ‘uses’ of books, and the ordering of writing; it appeared in Universal Review (1888) where it followed on from a piece by Wilkie Collins. In answer to its own question – ‘what is absent?’ – Butler’s essay proposes a number of missing objects: it is the book that usually assists Butler in the act of writing in the British Museum; it is also Lucy Gray of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy poems’ (in a satirically inappropriate ‘forensic’ reading of the poem, Butler contends that she is dead because Wordsworth has murdered her). Finally, the absent object may be Butler’s literary identity itself. In addressing literary identity, the essay also subtly transposes this topic into the ‘department’ of evolutionary speculation. Again, James Secord’s work enables us to grasp the resonance of this connection. Citing one of Charles Darwin’s letters to his wife Emma in 1844, in which he instructs her regarding the piecing together of his theory using his library and filing system in the event of his early death, Secord notes the terms in which Darwin conceived his personal library as an extension of his identity.32 In ‘Quis Desiderio ...?’ Butler, by contrast, represents his own literary identity entering into an ambiguous relationship with the archive ordering the descent of literary and philosophical creativity itself. His essay reflects on books and archives as modes of cul-

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tural contrivance that support, shape, but also complicate and question identity. Before Butler can begin expounding his ‘literary experiences’ to his readers – the brief of the piece – he goes to the British Museum to consult the catalogue that will remind him of what he has written. This excursion represents a false start; the beginning of writing immediately confronts the prospect of its termination. The reason involves a digressively eccentric account of an absent object: there are no sloping desks at the British Museum; Butler needs a sloping desk on which to write; in the absence of a sloping desk, he habitually resorts to using a book as a support. The book that he uses – John Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians – has, to his alarm, been moved from its usual shelf; he cannot ‘compose freely’ in his habitual manner. Butler is thus confronted by the possible closure of his ‘literary existence,’ though this does not terminate writing itself, for he continues to write about the impediments to writing. Writing both is, and is not, taking place. In writing about not writing, Butler’s satiric targets multiply. They include, of course, the irony directed against orthodox Christianity: Frost’s book on edifying Christian lives is used for distinctly non-edifying purposes; Butler’s use of this book is solely functional and takes no account of its content. In making this point, Butler’s writing echoes his own excursions into the writing of evolutionary theory, and the controversies that these prompted. Reporting on his quest for a contrivance to make a sloping desk, he reflects that ‘like every other organism, if I cannot get exactly what I want, I make shift with the next thing to it.’33 And he lights upon Frost’s work ‘more by luck than cunning’ (QD, 100). The essay concludes with a note by another hand, responding to Butler’s closing plea for help from the superintendents of the reading-room, to assist him in writing again. Dr Richard Garnett, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, and a friend of Butler, reports on the restoration of the writer ‘to literature’; Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians has been restored to its former shelf (‘the frost has broken up’), and ‘England will still boast a humorist.’ Garnett concludes by observing that ‘the late Mr. Darwin (to whose posthumous machinations the removal of the book was owing) will continue to be confounded’ (QD, 109). Butler’s (and Garnett’s) accumulating satiric objects thus allude to the dispute with Darwin and the philosophical terrain that it covered. Butler’s literary playfulness was consequently a serious symbolic practice that interrogated and extended the boundaries of the dispute. It is worth reflecting further on Garnett’s humorous allusion to the

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idea of ‘posthumous machinations’ set in motion by dead authors and their books. As Butler’s satire on writing and the systems by which it is archived demonstrates, the works of dead authors intrude upon his literary identity, and upon the ‘department’ it is called upon to occupy. As Butler contemplates ending ‘Quis Desiderio ...?’ (‘I have no heart for continuing this article’), he paradoxically continues to write, recollecting the disputes that he has had with the ‘authorities of the British Museum’ over his place in the catalogue. In part, the reference to ‘authorities’ was an in-joke between Butler and Garnett. But in part, Butler was also playing with the idea of scholarly ordering and authority, for at issue was the mistaken attribution to Butler of writings by others. The ‘authorities’ undertake to rectify the mistakes ‘if I would only tell them what I was.’ In the catalogue, Butler finds himself suspended between ‘Samuel Butler, bishop’ (his grandfather, headmaster of Shrewsbury School and bishop of Lichfield – Bishop Joseph Butler, author of The Analogy would not have been far away); and ‘Samuel Butler, poet.’ In his own entry (‘Samuel Butler of St John’s College, Cambridge’), Butler finds a volume of ‘my excellent namesake’s Hudibras’ listed among his own works. ‘Samuel Butler’ is, simultaneously, both himself and other long-dead ‘Butlers.’ Yet he is consoled, observing that ‘I have great respect for my namesake, and always say that if Erewhon had been a racehorse it would have been got by Hudibras out of Analogy. Someone said this to me many years ago, and I felt so much flattered that I have been repeating the remarks as my own ever since’ (QD, 108). Jones’s posthumous memoirs of Butler always cited, beneath his name, a means of identifying Butler’s distinctiveness: ‘Author of Erewhon.’34 Butler’s own reflection on his literary identity in this context35 seems to confirm this, yet at the same time complicates it with a map of generic evolutionary descent: Erewhon, as the key to Butler’s authorial identity, is actually not an ‘original’; instead, its generic hybridity is parodied through a version of the language of variation under domestic breeding that Darwin appealed to in the Origin. Again, the dispute with Darwin is echoed between the lines, even in the matter of Butler’s evaluation of Erewhon’s genealogy, uttered by somebody else, passed off by himself as his own. Possible sources of self-parody aside, ‘Quis Desiderio ...?’ suggests that evolutionary accounts of cultural artefacts create estranging conditions for assessing one’s own literary identity. As Butler observes in reply to the Museum’s suggestion that he should add ‘MA’ after his name to place clear alphabetical catalogue space between himself, the

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bishop, and the poet: ‘I keep all my other letters inside my name, not outside’ (QD, 107). Despite this, Butler’s writing of evolutionary theory, whatever the Lamarckian position it committed him to as an opponent of Darwin, simultaneously placed him in a paradoxical ‘literary’ position through which his identity kept spilling beyond the letters marking out his name. Conclusion: Writing Identities in the Field of Evolution; Symbols and Their Machination Butler defended a view of evolution as a process of accumulating functional adaptations, brought into existence consciously or unconsciously by an organism’s ‘cunning’ in meeting its needs. Accordingly, in the human domain Butler explored the machinate extensions represented by cultural artefacts and the bearing that they had on identity. Books could become machinate extensions of the human: Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians was more (and less) than a book; it was also a contrivance in the form of a desk that helped, indirectly, to bestow on Butler a sense of identity. Such insights into evolutionary processes helped Butler to formulate an imaginatively unsettling ‘ethnographical’ perspective on the relations between biology, racial familiarity, and otherness, and the place of material culture in the formation of identity. For instance, while E.B. Tylor’s influential text book on anthropology (1881) acknowledged that the white races – which grew ever ‘more dominant intellectually, politically, morally’ – derived a proportion of this dominance from ‘the appliances of culture,’ he still insisted that ‘it must not be supposed that such differences as between an Englishman and a Gold Coast negro are due to slight variations of breed.’ On the contrary, ‘they are of such zoological importance as to have been compared with the differences between animals which naturalists reckon distinct species.’36 By contrast, Butler’s ethnographic symbolic work – ‘ethnographic’ precisely because it exploited -graph as an imaginative manipulation of the technology of the written symbol – radically re-inscribed and defamiliarized the hierarchical relationship between biological race, European material culture, and the formation of identity as received from evolutionary anthropology. Thus in ‘Lucubratio Ebria,’ Butler observed pithily that ‘he who can tack a portion of one of the P. and O. boats onto his identity is a more highly organised being than one who cannot’ (LE, 192).

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Butler’s writings on evolution could thus move engagingly and rapidly between questions of literary identity and questions of racial identity. Enabling such transportations in thought were language’s metaphorical powers of symbolic substitution and extension that were, for Butler, machinate: Words and thought interact upon and help one another, as any other mechanical appliances interact on and help the invention that first hit upon them; but reason or thought, for the most part, flies along over the heads of words, working its own mysterious way in paths that are beyond our ken, though whether some of our departmental personalities are as unconscious of what is passing, as that central government is which we alone dub with the name of ‘we’ or ‘us’, is a point on which I will not now touch. (TL, 227)

Butler’s arrival at a Lamarckian view of evolution thus led him to conceive of words and thoughts as machines with profound inventive capacity, driving the evolution of culture: ‘language is a device evolved sometimes by leaps and bounds, and sometimes exceedingly slowly’ (TL, 229). And yet there is also a dimension to ‘thought’ that, for Butler, eludes mechanistic accounts of inventive cultural ‘transportations’ even in the moment of their formation. In making this point, Butler resorts to the language of ‘departments’ that George Bernard Shaw would use in seeking to categorize and delimit him as ‘the greatest English writer’ of the latter half of the nineteenth century – ‘in his own department.’ Inflecting the covenanted symbols for describing the human subject, Butler conceived of the person in terms of a constitution overseen by a ‘central government,’ in other words, the ‘we’ or ‘us’ that could be governed by that literary rhetoric of power that underpinned the authoritative status of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary science. However, as Butler’s close reading of the slippages manifest in Darwin’s ‘symbolic conceptions’ indicate, he was concerned that this ‘central government’ of the person remained determinedly ‘unconscious’ of – or resistant to – the thought flights, transportations, and extensions to which symbolic exchange is necessarily subject. But Butler also recognized that outside of, and beyond, this central government of the self were ‘departmental personalities’ that could connect imaginatively with these transportations and extensions. These were the ‘departments’ of the person that Butler’s writings on evolution sought to inhabit, engage, and extend. They made, and continue to make, evolu-

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tionary discourse an unconditioned and contested cultural acquisition, and to help us to see Samuel Butler’s writings in the ‘department’ of evolution as more than just the musings of a maverick.

NOTES 1 R.A. Streatfeild, Introduction, in Samuel Butler, Essays on Life, Art, and Science (London: A.C. Fifield, 1908), vii. 2 Samuel Butler, ‘Deadlock in Darwinism,’ pt. 1, Essays on Life, Art, and Science, 243 (this essay hereafter cited in text as DD). 3 Butler, Evolution, Old and New (1911; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 34, 41, where Butler cites from ‘the more rhapsodical parts’ of John Tyndall’s essay ‘Virchow and Evolution,’ Nineteenth Century 21 (November 1878): 809–33. This essay is in part intellectual autobiography, in part a defence of Darwin’s mind and the theoretical coherence of his work; Butler would undoubtedly have been struck by Tyndall’s concluding reference to ‘the denier who would be isolated’ (832–3). 4 Samuel Butler, ‘Thought and Language,’ in Essays on Life, Art, and Science, 215–16 (this essay hereafter cited in text as TL). 5 Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Butler quotes from First Part, Canto I, lines 149–50; for the poet’s satire on scientific learning, see Second Part, Canto III. 6 See Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 6th ed., The Thinker’s Library (London: Watts and Co., 1937), chapters 1–3. 7 Gillian Beer, ‘Darwin and the Growth of Language Theory,’ in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature 1700–1900, ed. John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 152–70; and Stephen G. Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 8 See Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language: First Series, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Green, 1862), 356; see also David Amigoni, ‘Proliferation and Its Discontents: Max Müller, Leslie Stephen, George Eliot and the Origin of Species as Representation,’ in Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace, Texts in Culture Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 122–51. 9 Jones, Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon,’ 1:271–2. 10 Butler had responded to problems posed by contradictory accounts of the Resurrection set out in the Gospels as early as 1865 with his privately

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11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

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printed pamphlet, The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists, critically examined; Butler re-used much of this material in his playful hybrid (part autobiography, part parody of the format of the edited ‘literary remains’), The Fair Haven (1873); Butler sent both works to Charles Darwin (Jones, Samuel Butler, 1:125, 187); Darwin acknowledged receiving them, and, in the case of The Fair Haven, commented on the work’s ‘dramatic power’ and concluded to Butler that he ‘could write a really good novel’; Butler annotated the point ruefully: ‘All scientific people recommend me to do this,’ as though irony and satire should bar him from their domain. Butler, ‘A Medieval Girl’s School,’ in The Humour of Homer, and Other Essays (London: A.C. Fifield, 1913), 179–80. Jones, Samuel Butler, 1:123–4. Joseph Butler, ‘Dissertation I: Of Personal Identity,’ The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed, in Works, ed. W.E. Gladstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 1:388–96. Butler acknowledged reading this sermon and its having an impact on his thinking about evolution; see chap. 2 of Unconscious Memory (1880; London: A.C. Fifield, 1910), 17. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 2nd ed. (1983; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 254n12. Ernst Krause, Erasmus Darwin, trans. W.S. Dallas, with a preliminary notice by Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1879), 216. For an account of the Butler-Darwin dispute, see Jones, Samuel Butler, vol. 1, chap. 18; vol. 2, Appendix C, ‘The Butler-Darwin Quarrel’; see also Butler’s own account in Unconscious Memory, chap. 4, and Paradis, ‘The ButlerDarwin Biographical Controversy.’ Butler, Unconscious Memory, 46. Quoted in Jones, Samuel Butler, 2:448. Jones, Samuel Butler, 2:463. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 515. Ibid., 403. Butler, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, with Other Early Essays, ed. R.A. Streatfeild (1863; London: A.C. Fifield, 1914), 162. Jones, Samuel Butler, 1:124–5. Samuel Butler, Preface to the Second Edition, Erewhon, or Over the Range, New Popular Edition (1872; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), viii. Butler, ‘Darwin among the Machines,’ A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, 179–80.

112 David Amigoni 26 Butler provides an account of this growing realization, and the part that the work of St George Mivart played in it, in chap. 2 of Unconscious Memory, 22–5. 27 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1878; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 255. 28 Samuel Butler, ‘Lucubratio Ebria,’ in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, 188 (this essay hereafter cited in text as LE). 29 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859; Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1982), 116. 30 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit, 255; letter, Butler to Francis Darwin, 25 November 1877, in Jones, Samuel Butler, 1:257–60, 259. 31 Samuel Butler, Luck, or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? (London: Trübner, 1887), 179–80. 32 Secord, Victorian Sensation, 429; Charles Darwin, Correspondence, ed. Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985-), 3:43–4. 33 Samuel Butler, ‘Quis Desiderio ...?,’ in The Humour of Homer, 99 (this essay hereafter cited in text as QD). 34 The main two-volume memoir carries this on the title page; so too does the memoir written by Henry Festing Jones in 1902 that appeared first in the Eagle (St John’s College, Cambridge) and was reprinted in The Humour of Homer. 35 In other contexts, Butler’s self-description could vary: concerning the matter of the identifying marker in the British Museum catalogue, Butler proposed the title ‘Samuel Butler, philosophical writer,’ for the mechanical reason that it kept him between Butler the bishop and Butler the poet. Thanks to Jim Paradis for reminding me of this, and many other things. 36 E.B. Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization, The Thinker’s Library (1881; London: Watts, 1930), 1:86, 91, 5.

5 ‘A Conspiracy of One’: Butler, Natural Theology, and Victorian Popularization bernard lightman

As a mournful nation tried to come to grips with the death of Charles Darwin on 19 April 1882, Samuel Butler continued to nurse his personal grudge against the renowned evolutionist. In his Note-Books he recorded his criticism of the many notices of Darwin’s death that depicted him as an innovative scientific genius. An entry for April 1882 presented Darwin’s success as being due to the social stability of the mid-Victorian period, which allowed the world to reconsider the potentially dangerous ideas of the Enlightenment. Moreover, Darwin had the advantage of being a rich man who ‘played his cards socially remarkably well.’ Darwin ‘courted all rising men and litterateurs,’ just as he had courted Butler after he wrote Erewhon. Butler rejected the statement in the Times that Darwin’s discoveries were due to his rigorous adherence to proper scientific method. ‘The great method which Darwin used,’ Butler declared, ‘was personal social influence and a plausible manner – but this is not a new discovery.’1 In May 1883 he returned in his Note-Book to the theme of Darwin’s posthumous reputation and observed that Darwin’s followers were ‘continually crying out that he should have the credit of having discovered evolution – not because he discovered it, but because he popularised it.’ Darwin could not be credited with discovering evolution, Butler objected, that had been accomplished by his predecessors, men such as Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck. ‘He ought to have the credit of having got people to believe in it,’ Butler wrote, though it was a distorted form of evolution in its emphasis on natural selection as the primary agent of change (NB 1984, 241).2 Darwin, then, in Butler’s eyes, was primarily a popularizer of science and nothing more. By

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knocking Darwin off the pedestal of scientific genius and discoverer, Butler could confront him on a level playing field as a fellow popularizer, as one who offered a more scientifically valid, and less materialistic, theory of evolution (fig. 5.1). At first, scholars refused to take Butler seriously as a scientific figure of any significance, let alone as an important popularizer of science. Representative of the older scholarship, George Gaylord Simpson argued that Butler’s approach, methods, and intentions were literary, artistic, non-scientific, and even antiscientific. Frank Turner’s portrait of Butler as a critic of scientific naturalism caught ‘between science and religion’ was among the first of a series of more valuable studies in the 1970s and 1980s to offer a sympathetic analysis of Butler’s scientific role. Philip Pauly treated Butler as the catalyst behind the breakdown of unity within evolutionism after Darwin’s death, while Peter J. Bowler argued that ‘Butler symbolized the emergence of a new Lamarckism’ integral to the eclipse of Darwinism. In his review of Peter Morton’s The Vital Science, Hans-Peter Breuer defended Butler against charges that his adoption of teleological concepts prevented him from making a ‘pertinent contribution to the evolutionary debate.’3 Although scholars have since the 1970s paid more attention to Butler’s scientific work, they have virtually ignored his role as a popularizer of science.4 In his biography of Butler, Lee Holt asserted that ‘the books on evolution represent Butler at the height of his literary power and constitute a very important part of his life’s work.’ But later in the biography, when Holt lists the diverse roles that Butler assumed throughout his life – such as painter, satirist, and Shakespearean critic – he included ‘scientist’ among them, rather than popularizer of science. Raby offered a similar list in his biography of Butler, but included ‘philosopher’ to designate Butler’s scientific activities.5 Our conception of any intellectual figure is often shaped by how they are categorized. If we look at Butler as if he were a popularizer of science – as one who presented a synthesis of contemporary scientific knowledge to the Victorian reading public – what new insights might we gain? Viewing Butler as a popularizer of science offers fresh perspectives on Butler as an intellectual figure. It is well known that he fell under the spell of Darwin while he was still a sheep farmer in New Zealand in the early 1860s, and that he cultivated Darwin after his return to England in 1864 in the hopes that it would further his literary career as a freethinker. Between 1865 and 1877 Butler sent most of his essays and all his books to Darwin in order to gain his approval. They

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5.1 Darwin and Butler in 1878: (a) Darwin, last photograph, by his son Leonard; (b) Self-portrait, Butler, 1878.

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also corresponded and Butler visited Darwin twice at Down.6 It is also known that Butler became increasingly critical of Darwin, starting with the publication of Life and Habit in 1877, and that this led to his excommunication from the Darwinian circle. Like Bastian, Wallace, and Mivart, Butler was an important insider turned outsider. Scholars have not sufficiently appreciated, however, that it was how Butler exercised the role of popularizer that turned him into an outsider and that this affected his position as man of letters. In Luck, or Cunning? (1886), Butler acknowledged publicly that his attempts to popularize his anti-Darwinian evolutionary theory had ‘got me into the hottest of hot water, made a literary Ishmael of me, lost me friends whom I have been sorry to lose, [and] cost me a good deal of money’ (LC, 14). He was still complaining only a year before his death about the way his popular science works had adversely affected his literary ambitions. Whereas nobody seemed to care about his attack on Christianity in The Fair Haven, ‘when I attacked Darwin it was a different matter.’ ‘For many years,’ Butler declared in 1901, ‘Evolution Old and New and Unconscious Memory made a shipwreck of my literary prospects; I am only now beginning to emerge from both the literary and social injury which those two perfectly righteous books inflicted on me. Butler went so far as to blame Darwin for the commercial failure of his writings. He had not realized when he was writing Life and Habit either ‘Mr. Darwin’s character, or his irresistible hold on the public.’7 In Butler’s eyes the reaction to his science works had had a crucial impact on the trajectory of his entire literary career. Butler’s decision in the mid-1870s to adopt the role of popularizer of science had brought him into contact with a genre of science writing infused with the themes of natural theology. He shared the aims of many popularizers of science who did not adhere to the secularizing agenda of scientific naturalism. He was a theological thinker of considerable depth and ambition, whose discussions of Paley and Darwin reveal a thinker self-consciously working in the great tradition of Victorian natural theology. It was the linkage of two powerful Victorian intellectual traditions – natural theology and the wider world of science popularization – that led Butler into a confrontation with scientific naturalism. Whereas other popularisers appeared to defer to Darwin and his circle, a strategy dictated by their desire to claim scientific authority in an age of professionalization, Butler’s satirical attacks on the scientific establishment brought out into the open the gulf that existed between scientific naturalists and scores of popularizers. This is what

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made Butler dangerous, and not only to the Darwinians but also to his fellow popularizers. Butler and the Role of Popularizer In 1876 Butler began work on his first science book for a popular audience, Life and Habit (1877). What led Butler, a man with no scientific training, to think that he could suddenly publish a book on evolutionary theory? He had already reinvented himself several times, rejecting the clerical career laid out for him by his parents, and taking on a succession of new professions, including sheep farmer, novelist, company director, and artist. He was an expert at assuming roles for which he had little or no previous experience. By the 1870s there were already a large number of popularizers of science who were churning out books and essays and who had no more scientific training than Butler. Although he could draw on his experiences as a sheep farmer, Butler learned his science primarily through reading. The growth of an educated middle class combined with the invention of new printing technologies gave birth to an unprecedented mass market, which by the middle of the century provided new opportunities for careers in science journalism and writing.8 Butler may have been an artist with a taste for literature when he first started in on Life and Habit, but by the fall of 1877 his fascination with evolutionary theory led him to undertake activities that displayed many of the distinctive features to be found in the careers of the prominent popularizers of his time.9 Over the next ten years Butler published four major popular science books: Life and Habit; Evolution, Old and New (1879); Unconscious Memory (1880); and Luck, or Cunning? (1886). In each of these books Butler returned repeatedly to the development of his own neo-Lamarckian theory of evolution and to a critique of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. He also tried his hand at science lecturing, speaking twice at the Working Men’s College in 1882, again in 1887, and once more in 1890 on such topics as memory, the genesis of feeling, the subdivisions of the organic world into animal and vegetable, and on thought and language.10 Besides engaging in activities typical of a popularizer of science during this period, Butler presented himself as a popularizer to his readers. In the opening and closing chapters of Life and Habit, he carefully positioned himself as the popularizer who addressed a general reading audience rather than the practitioner who offered novel scientific theo-

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ries based on experiment or field work. ‘In the outset, however,’ Butler declared in the first chapter, ‘I wish most distinctly to disclaim for these pages the smallest pretension to scientific value, originality, or even to accuracy of more than a very rough and ready kind.’ Like other popularizers, his aim was ‘simply to entertain and interest the numerous class of people who, like myself know nothing of science, but who enjoy speculating and reflecting (not too deeply) upon the phenomena around them.’ He acknowledged that ‘my book cannot be intended for the perusal of scientific people; it is intended for the general public.’11 Butler also resembled other popularizers of science whose work featured a strong literary dimension. Some popularizers, such as Jane Loudon, Mary Kirby, Agnes Giberne, and Margaret Gatty, moved effortlessly between the genre of fiction and the discourse of science.12 Several popularizers even made the exploration of scientific themes central to their fictional works. According to one scholar, Grant Allen’s fiction was merely an extension of his popularizing zeal and it drew extensively on his evolutionary ideals.13 Similarly, evolutionary themes were integral to Butler’s fiction. Moral issues of evolutionary change underlie the fictional worlds of both Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903). Just as the fictional works of some popularizers explored scientific themes, their scientific works conveyed information through a form of storytelling. Telling dramatic stories – stories and lessons, fraught with cosmic significance – was an effective way to communicate huge masses of scientific information to a popular audience.14 For a significant number of popularizers writing about evolution, there was one grand story in particular that seemed to interest the reading public: the evolutionary epic. As James Secord points out, Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) provided a ‘template’ for the evolutionary epic later adopted by such popularizers as Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, Grant Allen, Arabella Buckley, David Page, and a host of others.15 This epic tells the story of evolution extended far beyond biology into the ‘cosmic’ or the ‘universal,’ often while presenting a synthetic overview of a significant portion – or even all – of the sciences. It is a story that continues to charm contemporary reading audiences.16 In his Life and Habit, Butler outlined the crucial features of evolutionary theory by treating his readers to a dramatic voyage from the unconscious mind of the individual to a fantastic vision of the unity of all life. In this interesting adaptation of the evolutionary epic, Butler begins with a discussion of actions and habits acquired after birth, such as talk-

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ing, walking, writing, and reading. These actions and habits, which involve complex actions, no longer require conscious self-analysis. They have become automatic, instinctual. But there are actions and habits, such as swallowing and breathing, that we have acquired before birth. How can we explain a baby’s ability to breathe or swallow when they have not had the infinite practice required to perform such complex processes? The only explanation, according to Butler, is that we must be born with the memories of our progenitors. Whereas habits such as swallowing and breathing are acquisitions of our pre-human ancestry and are comparatively recent, habits of which we are most unconscious and have the least control over – such as digestion – are ones that we have in common with our invertebrate ancestry and are habits of extreme antiquity (LH, 42). Butler placed this notion of unconscious memory at the heart of his evolutionary theory, and it is for this reason that Laura Otis has referred to him as ‘one of the leading advocates of organic memory in the late nineteenth century.’17 In Life and Habit Butler then moves on to a discussion of the continuity of identity, life, and memory between successive generations. His aim is to build his notion of instinct as inherited memory into a grand picture of life as a single, vast compound animal. The sense of a personal identity is an illusion. We ‘are only component atoms of a single compound creature, LIFE’ (LH, 105). In the remainder of Life and Habit, Butler argues that his theory of evolution, based on the concept of inherited habit, offers a better explanation of biological facts than Darwin’s emphasis on natural selection. This is an epic that contains its heroes (Lamarck and Mivart), and its villains (Darwin), while presenting a dramatic vision of how evolution produces one gigantic organism over time. However, Butler’s resemblance to other popularizers does not end here. His evolutionary epic celebrates the existence of purpose in the natural world. Scholars, such as Breuer, have recognized that teleological themes played a crucial role in Butler’s thought.18 However, they have not noticed that Butler’s attempt to retain a significant role for teleology in science was shared by other popularizers. For those popularizers such as Margaret Gatty, Arabella Buckley, and Eliza Brightwen, who did not accept the secularizing agenda of scientific naturalism, it was important to demonstrate to their reading audience that nature remained a source of moral inspiration and a place imbued with purpose, Darwin’s theory of natural selection notwithstanding.19 Butler’s popular science works confront this issue head on by challenging the dysteleological

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nature of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Whereas Darwin forced a choice between teleology and evolution, Butler argued that embracing evolution did not require the sacrifice of the teleological view of nature in the name of science. Instead, Butler insisted that the choice was really between two types of evolution, one teleological and the other not. Here, unlike most popularizers, Butler was actually intervening in the scientific debates over the nature of evolution, by criticizing Darwinian theory and countering it with a theory of his own. Butler first sounded this theme in his Evolution, Old and New, where he juxtaposed the evolutionary theory of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck with that of Charles Darwin. In his concluding chapter he asserted that the ‘question – Evolution or Direct Creation of all species? – has been settled in favour of Evolution.’ Now, he believed, the battle was between the evolution of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, the founders of the theory, or the evolution of Charles Darwin ‘which denies the purposiveness or teleology inherent in evolution as first propounded.’20 The same theme is central to Butler’s Unconscious Memory, where he asserted in the opening chapter that the true question at issue between the original propounders of the theory of evolution and Darwin was whether ‘variations are in the main definite or indefinite?’ He returns in his conclusion to this question, now characterizing the opposition between the two groups as a battle of the greatest importance. ‘It is a battle between teleology and non-teleology,’ Butler declared, ‘between the purposiveness and the non-purposiveness of the organs in animals and vegetable bodies.’21 In his last great work of popular science, Luck, or Cunning?, Butler emphasized even more the choice that had to be made between the two alternatives. Whereas Darwin’s predecessors had given cunning, or mind, a crucial role in the means of organic modification, Darwin, Wallace, and their supporters are ‘the apostles of luck’ (LC, 80). Butler’s discussions of teleology, although aimed at a popular audience, were pitched at a higher level than those of many of his fellow popularizers. His sophisticated handling of teleology was due to his doctrinal education at Shrewsbury School and Cambridge, and the work he put into mastering theological literature in preparation for a clerical career. Whenever Butler confronted his readers with a choice between two evolutionary alternatives, he hammered away at the moral and religious deficiencies of Darwinism. Since he had grounded evolution on the dysteleological notion of natural selection, Darwin had banished purpose and mind from nature. ‘The theory that luck is the main means

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of organic modification,’ Butler wrote, ‘is the most absolute denial of God which it is possible for the human mind to conceive’ (LC, 235). Butler stood behind ‘cunning’ rather than ‘luck.’ He wrote to a friend in 1886 that Luck, or Cunning? was directed ‘against the present mindless, mechanical, materialistic view of nature.’22 Butler therefore attempted to disengage ‘natural selection’ from the theory of evolution. One of the major goals of Evolution, Old and New was to suggest that the theory of natural selection was not synonymous with the theory of evolution. Darwin’s predecessors had put forward a viable theory of evolution that did not stand or fall with evolution by means of natural selection (EON, 314). Later, in Luck, or Cunning?, Butler tried a slightly different tactic. Here he argued that there are actually ‘two natural selections, and two survivals of the fittest,’ one random and the other teleological (LC, 70). Rather than jettisoning natural selection from the lexicon of evolutionists, Butler acknowledged that selection was part of evolution but that it took place within a larger teleological process. In contrast to Darwin’s spiritually objectionable theory, Butler’s proposed the adoption of the teleological evolutionary theory presented by Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, revised and updated in light of Prague physiologist Ewald Hering’s hypothesis of heredity as memory. Though Lamarck may have not been aware of it, ‘his system was in reality teleological, inasmuch as ... it makes the organism design itself.’ Rather than view adaptations as ‘the results of perfectly blind and unintelligent variations’ like Darwin, Lamarck made ‘effort, intention, will, all of which involve design’ underlie ‘progress in organic development’ (LH, 220; LC, 7). Later, the terms of the scientific debate forced Butler to move from discussions of variations as the result of effort and intelligence to considerations of whether or not modifications of structure or instinct due to use or disuse are inherited. In his final public pronouncement on evolution, ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism’ (1890), Butler argued that Darwin’s disciples were struggling with an irresolvable contradiction in their master’s theory. Darwin had admitted some role for use and disuse and thereby gave Lamarckians ‘leverage for the overthrow of a system based ostensibly on the accumulation of fortunate accidents.’23 Notions of use and disuse implied that living beings introduced purpose into nature through their will, desire, and intelligence. To Butler, that was enough for the construction of a non-orthodox notion of God, tinged with idealism. The essence of his Luck, or Cunning?, he wrote to a friend, was ‘to insist on the omnipresence of mind and intelligence throughout the universe

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to which no name can be so fittingly applied as God.’24 Butler outlined his conception of God as ‘comprising all living units in His own single person’ in ‘God the Known and God the Unknown’ (1879). This vision could only be seen once the ‘old teleological Darwinism of eighty years ago’ had been grasped.25 But Butler not only retained a prominent place for teleology in his scientific works, similar to his fellow popularizers, he also adopted the role of natural theologian. Butler as Natural Theologian On 11 February 1879, Butler wrote to his sister May that ‘the Darwins will be very angry’ with his next book, Evolution, Old and New, now nearly completed, ‘as I stand up for Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s view of evolution as more right than that of his grandson.’ Butler had a book to recommend to May, telling her to ‘read it at once.’ The book that ‘delighted’ him so much was William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), ‘which I have used largely and wd have used more if space permitted.’26 Butler had likely encountered Paley as an undergraduate at St John’s College in the 1850s and may have studied his work in preparation for the ministry at the end of the same decade.27 But Paley was certainly an unexpected source of inspiration for a former convert to Darwinism who had rejected the orthodox Christianity of his father. To be sure, Butler was critical of Paley’s notion of an immaterial, divine designer standing apart from nature, which he referred to as ‘an omniscient and omnipotent vacuum’ (EON, 24). But as a result of rereading Paley, Butler began to present himself in his popular science works as a defender of the great tradition of Victorian natural theology, though he pushed this tradition in a humanistic and idealistic direction. Butler joined the ranks of popular science writers who drew their readers’ attention to the intricate design in the natural world and who offered a revised and updated version of natural theology in a post-Darwinian world. In Paley, Butler found the key to undermining the analogy between human and natural selection that anchored the argument in Darwin’s Origin of Species, as well as a weapon for attacking the mechanistic determinism of scientific naturalists like Huxley. By drawing on Paley’s emphasis on design, Butler could provide evidence for the existence of purpose in nature. His teleology and his natural theology were complementary in a uniquely new way, as teleology was ‘internalized’ in the purpose of the organism itself. To many popularizers, constructing a revised natural theology was

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integral to the goal of explaining the larger significance of scientific developments to a popular audience. Natural theology also provided the means for demonstrating that despite the success of Darwinism, it was still possible to reconcile science and religion. Gatty, Brightwen, and Buckley all tried to evoke a sense of wonder in their readers as they described the contrivances in nature. Richard Proctor (1837–88) and Agnes Clerke (1842–1907), two important popularizers of astronomy, also perpetuated the natural theology tradition.28 But perhaps the best example of how popularizers adapted natural theology to the postOrigin environment can be found in Nature’s Teachings (1877) by the Reverend John George Wood (1827–89). Published just two years before Butler’s Evolution, Old and New, Wood aimed in this book to demonstrate the designed quality of nature through a discussion of the anticipations in nature of human inventions.29 Like his fellow popularizers, steeped in the natural theology tradition, Butler maintained that science and religion, when rightly conceived, were never at war. ‘Religion is the quintessence of science,’ he declared, ‘and science the raw material of religion.’ Reconciliation was necessary because Christian leaders and scientific naturalists both tried to enhance their cultural authority by appealing to scientific or religious arguments. Butler asserted that ‘when people talk about reconciling science and religion they do not mean what they say; they mean reconciling the statements made by one set of professional men with those made by another set whose interests lie in the opposite direction’ (LC, 193). Just as Butler attempted to show the underlying harmony between science and religion, he also pointed to the congruence between evolution and natural theology. As a popularizer, one of his main goals was to counter the widespread notion that a denial of design and purpose in nature was ‘the inevitable accompaniment of a belief in evolution’ (EON, 8). Butler’s attitude towards Paley may have been somewhat ambiguous prior to the end of the 1870s.30 But he later recognized that he could draw on aspects of Paley’s natural theology to help him articulate his teleological view of evolutionary theory. Starting with Evolution, Old and New, Butler included lengthy discussions of Paley in his popular science works. Although Paley’s work should have been well known, Butler believed that ‘at least nine out of ten of my readers ... have forgotten its existence.’ He hoped to spark nothing less than a revival of Paley’s popularity. The opening chapters of Evolution, Old and New, for example, take up the theme of Paley and evolution. Here Butler gives

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his audience a brief history lesson, reminding them that ‘from the days of Plato to our own time, there have been but few objectors to the teleological or purposive view of nature.’ Even the first evolutionists presented a theory of development that was ‘intensely purposive.’ Their opposition to natural theology was merely apparent, as they avoided the idea of purpose only because it was associated in their minds with theological design. Only recently, Butler contended, had the purposive view of nature been displaced as ‘the prevailing opinion either in this country or in Germany.’ It was all too clear who was responsible for this unfortunate turn of events. ‘It was reserved for Mr. Charles Darwin,’ Butler declared, ‘and for those who have too rashly followed him to deny purpose as having had any share in the development of animal and vegetable organs; to see no evidence of design in those wonderful provisions which have been the marvel and delight of observers in all ages.’ This was a great irony, according to Butler. Darwin had ‘drawn our attention more than perhaps any other living writer to those very marvels of co-adaptation’ and yet he ‘is the foremost to maintain that they are the result not of desire and design, either within the creature or without it, but of blind chance’ (EON, 10, 3, 32, 3, 35–6). To counter Darwin’s pernicious influence on the public, Butler launched into a detailed analysis of Paley’s ideas. He quoted at length from Natural Theology, beginning with a page and half quote from the first chapter where Paley presented his famous watch analogy. Then he included a series of long excerpts from Paley showing that complex structures in the human body, such as joints or the ligaments and tendons of the feet, are so superbly designed that they cannot be accounted for by an accidental evolutionary process (EON, 11–19). Butler’s goal was to use Paley to push the reader into accepting the idea that we can definitely see ‘signs in the structure of animals and plants, of something which carries with it the idea of contrivance so strongly that it is impossible for us to think of the structure, without at the same time thinking of contrivance, or design, in connection with it’ (EON, 1). Even after his extended treatment of Paley in Evolution, Old and New, Butler continued to find his ideas useful. In his last statement on evolution in ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism,’ he insisted that Darwin and Wallace’s theory, which they ‘have persuaded the public to accept, is demonstrably false.’ The demonstration involved a discussion of Paley’s work. Butler affirmed that ‘Paley, in his Natural Theology, long since brought forward far too much evidence of design in animal organisation to allow of our setting down its marvels to the accumula-

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tion of fortunate accident, undirected by will, effort, and intelligence.’ He concluded that ‘the two facts, evolution and design, are equally patent to plain people’ (DD, 9). Although Butler looked to Paley as a valuable resource in his attack on Darwinism, he recognized that he parted company with him and the natural theology tradition when it came to at least one important theological principle. Butler, after all, was a freethinker and not an orthodox Anglican. Whereas Darwin and his disciples denied design ‘any appreciable share in the formation of organism at all,’ the problem with Paley and his followers was their insistence on ‘a designer outside the universe and the organism’ (EON, 27). Butler was willing to draw on Paley’s arguments to prove that there was design in nature and to demonstrate the existence of a designer. But he did not follow Paley in identifying the designer as immaterial and intangible. In an imaginary dialogue with Paley, he stated that he could point to a ‘living tangible person’ who through a process of trial and experiment fashioned ‘each organ of the human body.’ It was this person that Butler claimed as ‘the designer and artificer of that body, and he is the one of all others the best fitted for the task by his antecedents, and his practical knowledge of the requirements of the case – for he is man himself.’ By ‘man himself’ Butler meant ‘man in the entirety of his existence from the dawn of life onwards to the present moment’ rather than a particular individual (EON, 26). In effect, Butler offered a secularized interpretation of Paley’s design argument. After rejecting Darwin and Paley, he therefore chose a third option: the one developed by Buffon, improved by Erasmus Darwin, and expressed by Lamarck, that ‘the design which has designed organisms, has resided within, and been embodied in, the organisms themselves’ (EON, 25–7). Living things evolved slowly, ‘step by step, through many blunders.’ But though animals and plants are not conscious of the purpose in much that they do, the end result is still purposive. ‘If each one of the small steps is purposive,’ Butler argued, ‘the result is purposive, though there was never purpose extended over more than one, two, or perhaps at most three, steps at a time’ (EON, 38, 46). This was Butler’s secular revision of the natural theology tradition, and it allowed him to reconcile it to evolutionary theory. Despite his divergence from the great natural theologian on the issue of a transcendent designer, Butler found in Paley a form of analogical reasoning that proved to be a rich resource for articulating his complex conception of the evolution of conscious design unaware of itself and

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without direction from an external deity. The analogy between human invention and the designed quality of nature lay at the heart of Paley’s Natural Theology. For Paley, a machine – a watch – symbolized how contrivance manifested itself in nature. Understand the relation between humans and machines and you could comprehend God’s fashioning of the universe.31 Butler followed Paley in making technological invention the model for grasping how design operated in an evolving natural world, and managed to separate this idea from the subsequent move by orthodox natural theologians to a transcendental designer.32 If variations were seen as due to effort and intelligence of beings not fully aware of the larger purpose of things, then organic development paralleled human progress. Butler claimed that ‘the development of man from the amoeba [is] part and parcel of the story that may be read, though on an infinitely smaller scale, in the development of our most powerful marine engines from the common kettle, or of our finest microscopes from the dew-drop.’ Just as teleological evolution operated on a trial and error basis, ‘the development of the steam-engine and the microscope is due to intelligence and design, which did indeed utilise chance suggestions, but which improved on these, and directed each step of their accumulation, though never fore-seeing more than a step or two ahead, and often not so much as this.’ The fact that the man ‘who made the first kettle did not foresee the engines of the Great Eastern, or that he who first noted the magnifying power of the dew-drop had no conception of our present microscopes ... does not make us deny that the steam-engine and microscope owe their development to design’ (DD, 10). If we cannot deny that technological progress is due to design, then we cannot deny that the evolutionary process is teleological in nature. Butler reproduces Paley’s move from the contrivance of a watch to the design in nature. Just as humans design machines, organisms design themselves. Actually, Butler pushed this one step further: the design in human technology mirrored the contrivances in nature because it was just a part of the larger evolutionary process. Adopting Paley’s form of analogical reasoning provided Butler with at least two advantages. First, he could undermine Darwin’s form of analogical reasoning in support of the theory of natural selection in the Origin of Species, which pointed to the analogy between variation under domestication and variation under nature. Darwin argued that through selective breeding humans had been able to effect tremendous change in animals and plants. But nature was far more powerful in its ability to

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select, so powerful that varieties transmuted into distinct and new species. For those who wanted to really understand how evolution worked, Butler recommended that they focus on humanly created technology rather than on selective breeding. ‘Plants and animals under domestication are indeed a suggestive field for study,’ Butler wrote, ‘but machines are the manner in which man is varying at this moment. We know how our own minds work, and how our mechanical organisations – for, in all sober seriousness, this is what it comes to – have progressed hand in hand with our desires.’ Butler maintained that a study of man, ‘the very animal which we can best understand, caught in the very act of variation, through his own needs,’ would allow us to see ‘how the whole thing works.’ Butler concluded that he would ‘therefore, strongly advise the reader to use man, and the present races of man, and the growing inventions and conceptions of man, as his guide, if he would seek to form an independent judgement of the development of organic life’ (LH, 208–9). In Butler’s eyes, Paley’s analogical reasoning was far superior to Darwin’s as an aid to understanding the operation of the evolutionary process. Second, Paley’s analogical reasoning from contrived machine to designed nature provided Butler with the means to challenge the mechanistic and deterministic materialism of scientific naturalists like Huxley. For Huxley, the analogy between machines and living things meant that in his scientific analyses he could treat animals as if they were soulless automatons whose behaviour was entirely predictable. But for Butler the same analogy, viewed rightly, could serve as a model for volitional, designed evolution.33 All organs, Butler argued, are but ‘living tools’ that are ‘used by its possessor as an instrument or tool for the effecting of some purpose which he considers or has considered for his advantage.’ They are as admirably fitted for the work required of them ‘as is the carpenter’s plane for planing,’ and therefore they ‘must have been designed or contrived, not perhaps by mental processes indistinguishable from those by which the carpenter’s saw or the watch has been designed, but still by processes so closely resembling these that no word can be found to express the facts of the case so nearly as the word “design.”’ Like Paley, Butler pointed to the eye as an example of an organ that was designed by a living intelligent being (though not a transcendent God) (EON, 1–2). To Butler, organs were material manifestations of desire, or inventions of cunning, self-designed organisms. In effect, he attempted to rescue the nature-as-machine analogy from the clutches of deterministic and materialistic evolutionists and to bring it

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back to the meaning that Paley had originally given it. By reinterpreting the comparison of organic life to the machine, Butler could place this analogy within his scheme of vitalistic and teleological evolution. Although Paley was a devout Anglican, Butler was willing to see him as an ally in his debate with Darwin and his circle. It was through Paley and the natural theology tradition to which he belonged that Butler was able to build a powerful teleological dimension into the evolutionary theory of Darwin’s predecessors. In his dramatic conclusion to Unconscious Memory, where Butler declared that a crucial battle between teleology and non-teleology was taking place, he made it clear that neutrality was not an option. When it came to listing who belonged on either side, he declared that ‘according to Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and Paley, organs are purposive; according to Mr. Darwin and his followers, they are not purposive’ (UM, 205). Ultimately, Paley was on the side of the angels, with Butler, the original evolutionists, and many of the other popularizers of science. Along with the duke of Argyll, Frederick Temple, George Henslow, Aubrey Moore, Mivart, and perhaps even Wallace, Butler is a strong candidate for the title of the last great natural theologian of the nineteenth century.34 It was Butler who single-mindedly attempted to develop a new teleology. He recognized that evolutionary thought had displaced the teleological arguments of traditional Anglican natural theology. He made one of the last efforts in the nineteenth century to formulate a rational, updated, popularly accessible, biologically integrated natural theology. Butler’s synthesis of the traditions of natural theology and popularization led him to formulate a new natural teleology, which in turn led to his collision with Darwin and his circle, whose philosophy was centred on the essential randomness at the core of natural selection. Resisting Scientific Naturalism In July 1885, Butler recorded a note that described a revealing conversation with the popularizer of evolution, Edward Clodd. According to Clodd, Grant Allen thought it was a pity that Butler was so suspicious of men of science. Though he was aware that practitioners seldom mentioned his name and that this injured the sale of his books, Butler did not have ‘the faintest idea that there is any greater conspiracy against me than there always is on the part of orthodoxy against unorthodoxy.’ On the contrary, Butler wrote, it was he who was ‘in a conspiracy of one

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against men of science in general.’35 The majority of popularizers ignored the points of conflict between their agenda and that of practitioners. But for some, such as Robert Chambers, Margaret Gatty, Frank Buckland, and Richard Proctor, who could not abide the agenda of practitioners, silence was too high a price to pay in exchange for establishing their authority as scientific authors. Gatty obliquely satirized Darwinism in one of her short stories, while Buckland’s opposition to evolutionary theory took the form of private criticism and the republication of his father’s Bridgewater Treatise.36 Proctor attacked astronomers such as Airy and Lockyer, though he spoke with respect about Darwin and Huxley.37 As the anonymous author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chambers protested against the attempt of practitioners to exclude the public from discussions of controversial theories like evolution, but he later stayed on good terms with the scientific naturalists.38 Butler was much bolder than Gatty, Buckland, Proctor, and Chambers. He took direct aim at Darwin, eminent scientific naturalists, and even the emerging notion of professional scientist. He presented a powerful critique of Darwinism as a new form of repressive orthodoxy far worse than the Anglican orthodoxy it had replaced. Butler’s attacks on Darwin in Evolution, Old and New took on a far more biting tone since it was clear to him when he wrote that book that his concept of conscious memory was not being taken seriously by Darwin and his inner circle. Butler’s criticisms of Darwin for his rejection of teleology, design, and mind in nature were part of a campaign to question Darwin’s scientific and moral stature. Butler held Darwin responsible for clouding all discussion of evolutionary issues. He looked back fondly to the early 1850s. ‘Those were the days,’ Butler remarked, ‘before the Origin of Species had been discharged into the waters of the evolution controversy, like the secretion of a cuttle fish’ (EON, 292). The octopus-like Darwin had discharged into science the obscure concept of natural selection as a means of modification, which led to the mistaken idea that it was a cause of variation (EON, 304–5). ‘It will take years,’ Butler insisted, ‘to get the evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it’ (LC, 45). The theory of natural selection, according to Butler, was extremely problematic from a scientific point of view. A tautological concept, it merely asserted that variation causes variations (EON, 325). It threw no light on the cause of variation (UM, 6). Natural selection ‘cannot create the smallest variation,’ Butler insisted. Although he agreed that it

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played a role in the evolutionary process, natural selection ‘operates on what it finds, and not on what it has made.’ By confusing natural selection with an explanation of the true causes behind evolution, Darwin had provided the scientific world with ‘a shield and hindrance to our perception of our own ignorance’ (LH, 216, 203). According to Butler, Darwin’s moral sins included his attempt to conceal the contributions of other evolutionists in order to boost his own claims to originality, especially in his historical sketch at the beginning of the Origin of Species (EON, 173). Butler dismissed Allen’s statement in his Charles Darwin that Darwin had laid no claim to originality or ownership of the doctrine of descent. On the contrary, Butler insisted, ‘no one can claim a theory more frequently and more effectually than Mr. Darwin claimed descent with modification’ (LC, 144). To back up his assertion, Butler quoted ninety-seven passages from the Origin that referred expressly to ‘my theory,’ and he calculated that in the original edition of 490 pages Darwin’s claim to the theory of descent ‘was made on the average about once in every five pages.’ Although Darwin later regretted that he had not admitted his debt to his predecessors, even altering some passages so that ‘my theory’ became ‘the theory,’ he could not bear to give up his claim to originality. Driven by his vanity, Darwin was forced to bury ‘his face, ostrich-like, in the sand.’ ‘I know no more pitiable figure in either literature or science,’ Butler declared (LC, 176, 165, 183). He even questioned Darwin’s reputation for being ever ready to help those trying to advance science. Darwin was willing to help only those who were sufficiently ‘obsequious’ (LC, 217). By setting such a low moral standard and by encouraging scientists to behave like sycophants, he was responsible for ‘the hotbed of intrigue which science has now become’ (UM, 54). Darwin’s followers, the Darwinians, were also subjected to a stinging critique. As Holt has pointed out, ‘Butler was to become one of the most dogged, perceptive, and forceful opponents of Darwinism in the nineteenth century.’39 Pauly has analysed Butler’s searching analysis of the contradictions within Darwinism and demonstrated that he contributed to the break-up of a Darwinian consensus after Darwin’s death.40 In his confrontation with the Darwinians, Butler often resorted to the strategy of depicting them as a new form of tyrannical orthodoxy defending Darwinism with the zeal of fanatical Christians.41 Even in Life and Habit, before he became a mortal enemy of Darwinism, he voiced his concerns about the coming religion of science. ‘It may well be,’ Butler announced, ‘we shall find we have escaped from one set of taskmas-

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ters to fall into the hands of others far more ruthless. The tyranny of the Church is light in comparison with that which future generations may have to undergo at the hands of the doctrinaires’ (LH, 34). In Evolution, Old and New, he again sounded the theme of the parallels between scientists and priests, referring to the ‘professional and orthodox scientist’ as part of ‘that new orthodoxy which is clamouring for endowment, and which would step in the Pope’s shoes to-morrow, if we would only let it’ (EON, 317). Huxley was often singled out for abuse. Butler suspected Huxley of writing a negative review of Evolution, Old and New in the Saturday Review and ‘pitched into him in Unconscious Memory to pay him out.’ He was critical of Huxley’s ignorance of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, and bristled with resentment when Arabella Buckley told him that in Huxley’s opinion studying them would mislead Butler (NB 1984, 273). Huxley was the prime target in Luck, or Cunning? when Butler discussed the attempt by Darwinians to eliminate mind, though he mentioned W.K. Clifford and Tyndall as following the same line (LC, 118–21). In Unconscious Memory, Butler attempted to use Huxley’s article on evolution in the Encyclopaedia Britannica to drive a wedge between the Darwinians. Here Darwin’s bulldog declared that it remained to be seen how far natural selection sufficed for the production of species. Butler exclaimed that to those ‘who know how to read between a philosopher’s lines, the sentence comes to very nearly the same as a declaration that the writer has no great opinion of “natural selection”’ (UM, 204–5). Butler perceptively picked up on Huxley’s refusal to endorse the theory of natural selection definitively until more scientific investigation proved its validity beyond a shadow of a doubt.42 Butler pounced on this chink in the armour of a united Darwinism and tried to expose it for all to see. Butler extended his criticisms of Darwin and the Darwinians into an attack on the would-be professional scientist, though Darwinians often supplied his examples. In Unconscious Memory, Butler advised his readers not to be downhearted by ‘the bad language with which professional scientists obscure the issue [of spontaneous generation], nor by their seeming to make it their business to fog us under the pretext of removing our difficulties.’ A quote from Huxley served as an example of the obscurity of would-be professional scientists (UM, 198). But Butler reserved his choicest barbs for those who attempted to exclude nonpractitioners like him from the discussion of important scientific ideas. In Luck, or Cunning? he outlined the two general criticisms brought

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against his popular science works. First, ‘it is said that I ought not to write about biology on the ground of my past career, which my critics declare to have been purely literary.’ Butler responded by pointing out that literary men possessed valuable skills, such as reading accurately, thinking attentively, and expressing themselves clearly. Turning the tables on his critics, he wished that he ‘could see more signs of literary culture among my scientific opponents’ and then asked how they would respond if he questioned their right to write books due to their purely scientific background. The second complaint against him, that he never made any original experiments, ‘but have taken all my facts at second hand,’ he dismissed as irrelevant and then turned the complaint back on his critics. He was using facts collected by acknowledged scientific authorities and synthesizing them into broader conclusions. ‘What are fact-collectors worth if the fact co-ordinators may not rely upon them?’ Butler asked. If the facts were reliable, then he had every right to speculate on their larger meaning and to have his theories taken seriously. He could also challenge the theories of Darwin because the facts that he had supplied ‘would not bear the construction he tried to put upon them’ (LC, 11–13). Essentially, Butler restricted the role of the practitioner to the collection of facts. His negative views on Darwin, Darwinism, and professional science were unique in light of his intellectual position. No doubt leading Christian thinkers expressed similar reservations, but Butler must be counted as the most outspoken critic of scientific naturalism from the secular wing of the British intelligentsia. Butler shared much in common with his fellow popularizers. His books were addressed to the reading public, he offered a variation of the evolutionary epic to capture the imagination of his audience, and he presented a teleological version of natural theology that had been updated in light of the development of evolutionary theory. Like many other popularizers, he resisted the secular agenda of the scientific naturalists who supported Darwin. He had his own secular agenda, though it was combined in an unorthodox fashion with a form of idealism. But whereas Butler aired his differences with Darwin and his circle in full view of the public, popularizers such as Buckley and Allen were anxious to mute their opposition.43 Edward Clodd, a banker and another popularizer of evolution, had invited Butler to his house several times in the late 1870s. But the invitations came to an end when Butler attacked Darwin. According to Butler, ‘Clodd dropped me when I became so unpopular through my row with Darwin; he met me once or

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twice and would hardly speak.’44 By deferring to Darwin and other practitioners, popularizers were able to draw on their authority in order to further their careers as science writers. Butler’s commercial failure as a popular science writer was actually an object lesson to other popularizers. They learned that if you attack Darwin, or any of the other important scientific naturalists, the repercussions could be disastrous. As a result of his assault on Darwin and the Darwinians, Butler had to devise strategies for establishing his authority as popularizer of science that did not rely on deference to practitioners. Scientific Authority and ‘Popular Science’ In his review of Butler’s Unconscious Memory in the journal Nature, George John Romanes launched a withering attack on Butler’s scientific credentials. Romanes observed that in Evolution, Old and New, as well as in Unconscious Memory, Butler ‘formally enters the arena of philosophical discussion,’ whereas before he was ‘acting in a suitable sphere’ of literature. Butler, Romanes contended, was ‘in no way adapted’ to the scientific arena ‘either by mental stature or mental equipment; and therefore makes so sorry an exhibition that Mr. Darwin may well be glad that his enemy has written a book.’ Romanes insisted that Butler had written ‘nonsense’ about ‘the philosophy of evolution and the history of biological thought.’ Any man who ‘in the full light of Darwin’s theory’ returned to Lamarck only showed that ‘in judgement he is still a child.’ Romanes asked, who was Butler to challenge Darwin? ‘A certain nobody,’ Romanes sneered, ‘writes a book accusing the most illustrious man in his generation of burying the claims of certain illustrious predecessors out of the sight of all men.’ Butler was just an ‘upstart ignoramus’ who until two or three years earlier considered himself a painter by profession. Romanes recommended that Butler go back to being a painter, but if the painters would not have him, he could ‘make some third attempt, say among the homeopathists, whose journal alone, so far as we are aware, has received with favour his latest work.’45 Romanes’s review touched on the main problem confronting Butler, establishing his authority as a scientific writer when the scientific establishment was ranged against him. Other popularizers, who were comfortable with deferring to practitioners, could rely on quotes from their works, or sometimes even their endorsement in a preface or a review. Those popularizers who made the design in nature the centre of their

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work could also draw on the Bible, the church, and the work of orthodox natural theologians to bolster their authority. In the face of attacks on his credibility as popular science writer, Butler was forced to devise a series of strategies to ensure that his voice was heard. His situation was not unique. In an era of professionalization, where the strategy of Huxley and his allies depended on excluding the Anglican clergy, women, unqualified amateurs, and the entire popular audience from a serious active role in scientific decision-making, all who wrote on scientific issues needed to establish that they possessed the proper expertise.46 But Butler had to be creative since the option of drawing on support from Christian authorities was not open to him and since he had challenged the raison d’être of professional science. Early in his career as popularizer of science, Butler used the strategy of deferring to Darwin, even when he was undermining the theory of natural selection. In Life and Habit, written when he still hoped that Darwin would look favourably upon his contribution to evolutionary theory, Butler commented on the advantages of quoting from Darwin. ‘Mr. Darwin – from whom it is impossible to quote too much or too fully,’ Butler announced, ‘inasmuch as no one else can furnish such a store of facts, so well arranged, and so above all suspicion of either carelessness or want of candour – so that, however we may differ from him, it is he himself who shows us how to do so, and whose pupils we all are’ (LH, 159). Scattered throughout Life and Habit are references to Darwin’s work that, in Butler’s eyes, supported essential aspects of his neoLamarckian version of evolution, such as the notions of unconscious performance of complex movements, the inseparability of the personality of the offspring from the parent, the retention of latent memory of past existence in the young, and the compound organism (LH, 44, 82, 170, 87). Butler also appealed to Darwin’s authority to confirm the importance of use and disuse, the tendency to overemphasize the role of natural selection, and the existence of design in orchids (LH, 206, 211, 222). In his works written after his break with Darwin, Butler does not rely nearly as much on this strategy. Nevertheless, in Luck, or Cunning? he does point out that Darwin did not entirely exclude the action of use and disuse, and that this ‘at once opens the door for cunning’ (LC, 79). He also asserts that ‘Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed’ (LC, 47). In ‘Deadlock in Darwinism’ Butler made the provocative claim that Darwin was actually an unconscious Lamarckian who

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in later editions of the Origin of Species retreated from his original position and edged towards the theory of his grandfather (DD, 14).47 In his later popular science books, Butler more often attempted to shore up his scientific credibility by appealing to the works of scientists who were not Darwinians. He could not entirely dispense with some form of deference towards practitioners. For his ideas on heredity as a mode of memory, he appealed to Hering’s authority, making it clear that the theory was Hering’s and not his (LC, 14). Butler was willing to give up the claim to scientific originality in exchange for establishing his qualifications as a popularizer of science, but he realized it was far more effective to turn to British scientists for support. Early on Mivart was often pressed into service. In chapter 14 of Life and Habit, titled ‘Mr. Mivart and Mr. Darwin,’ Butler drew on quotes from Mivart’s works to challenge Darwin’s notion of blind adaptation. In Evolution, Old and New he quoted at length from Mivart’s Lessons from Nature on how natural selection was an empty concept (EON, 326). However, Butler’s ‘ace-in-the-hole’ was actually Herbert Spencer, whose unquestionable authority combined with his neo-Lamarckian views provided a perfect opportunity to mount an effective opposition to Darwinism. In Luck, or Cunning? Butler discussed Spencer’s cogent reservations about natural selection and Darwin’s inability to respond to them (LC, 91). Butler regretted that Spencer had weighed in so late on the issue of Hering’s theory of unconscious memory. In 1884 Spencer wrote a letter to the Athenaeum, where he claimed to have anticipated Hering’s theory. Spencer’s declaration would have been welcomed earlier, Butler wrote, as then he could have ‘appealed to his authority.’ Even though Butler denied that Spencer had priority over Hering, he welcomed Spencer’s public acceptance of a theory that lay at the heart of his own evolutionary perspective (LC, 16–20). While Butler was not averse to adopting a deferential attitude towards some scientists, he put much more emphasis on locating the source of his authority in his reading audience. He drew on a republican image of scientific community that, according to Susan SheetsPyenson, had begun to disappear in the new popular science journals of the 1860s.48 Butler used this strategy in his earliest popular science work, Life and Habit. Frank Turner has argued that Butler modified the purpose of Life and Habit in the midst of composition when W.B. Carpenter told him that practitioners would not accept his theory and that untrained men should not speculate on technical issues. According to Turner, Butler included a protest against the cultural domination of sci-

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entific experts and he tried to establish the right of non-scientifically trained writers to publish a scientific treatise.49 In Life and Habit Butler maintained that ‘nine fairly intelligent and observant men out of ten’ would opt for cunning, not luck, as the main driving force in evolution (LH, 202). In the conclusion of Evolution, Old and New, he appealed to ‘the support given me by the general public’ as one of the ‘sufficient proofs that I have not written in vain’ (EON, 359). In ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism’ he explicitly asked, who should decide on the validity of the idea of transmission of acquired habits? The question, Butler maintained, should depend on ‘what a reasonably intelligent and disinterested jury will believe,’ not on the views of the expert scientist (DD, 43). In private he was even more direct. In a letter written on 5 May 1879, he told Clodd that he had heard that Huxley did not like his Life and Habit because Butler did not have the ‘grasp of science which would enable me to deal with such questions satisfactorily.’ After declaring Huxley’s rationale to be ‘nonsense,’ Butler wrote that ‘the matter is one which any barrister or business man can judge of just as well as Huxley himself.’50 Butler’s claim, that the reading public possessed the knowledge to judge between his evolutionary theory and Darwin’s, challenged the would-be professional scientists’ position that judgment could be reserved only to those who were properly trained. Conclusion: The Evolution of Scientists In his Life and Habit, Butler discussed the impact of his evolutionary theory, based on the idea of inherited memory, for an understanding of the status of the practitioner. He asserted that there were ‘two distinct classes of scientific people.’ First, there were those accorded the title ‘scientific,’ and they were the pioneers who wanted to push forward the boundaries of science. The other class, deeply versed in those sciences that were already the common property of humanity, constituted a vast army. As important as the pioneers were to the army, they were ‘still not the army itself, which can get on better without the pioneers than the pioneers without the army.’ In fact, Butler insisted that the members of the army were more deserving of the title of ‘scientist.’ ‘Surely the class which knows thoroughly well what it knows,’ Butler argued, ‘and which adjudicates upon the value of the discoveries made by the pioneers – surely this class has as good a right or better to be called scientific than the pioneers themselves.’ Strikingly, Butler granted the members of the army – rather than the pioneers – the right

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to decide on the validity of new scientific theories. He was even willing to include the illiterate within this army of scientists, since the chief criterion for membership was the ability to draw on the evolutionary heritage contained within unconscious memory. So long as a man has unconscious knowledge, Butler believed, ‘consisting of sense and instinct,’ then ‘he is a man of science, though he can hardly read or write’ (LH, 26–7). Here, Butler deftly drew on his idea of the inheritance of unconscious memory to support the notion that everyone had the potential to be a true scientist. Evolution, in a sense, produced the best scientists, not the training of so-called professional scientists. By using evolutionary theory to challenge the very notion of who deserves to be called ‘scientist,’ Butler had hoisted Darwin and his colleagues on their own petard. Butler defied Huxley and the would-be professional scientists who claimed that he could not write about scientific issues without their authorization. He provided a scientific vindication of both the authority of popularizers who had no formal scientific training and of the reading audience for whom they wrote. It turned the hierarchical vision of would-be professional scientists upside down. In taking on the role of mediator between the practitioner and the public, the popularizer was not required to passively convey the theories of the professional: criticism was within their domain. Moreover, the innate knowledge provided to every member of the reading audience by the evolutionary process qualified them to judge the validity of scientific theories, whether they were presented by popularizers or practitioners. Butler went as far as a popularizer of science could go in challenging the Darwinians and their dreams of a professionalized science. And he paid for it. He rejected their claims to authority, using his formidable powers as satirist, his grasp of the history of science, and his ability to educate himself on the intricacies of evolutionary theory. In his critique of the theory of natural selection, he engaged in a theoretical argument with Darwin, thereby breaching an unwritten compact between scientific specialists and popularizers in which popularizers were expected to expand upon but not challenge the scientific theories of practitioners. Moreover, he tapped into the still powerful natural theology tradition, which still appealed to the Victorian reading audience and many of his fellow popularizers. Butler’s program of teleological speculation was self-consciously developed as an effort to popularize biological, evolutionary thinking and to thereby remove it from the intellectual stranglehold of the new

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pseudopriesthood of scientists. He was therefore both one of the last great natural theologians of the nineteenth century and one of the most outspoken popularizers of science of his age. Victorian intellectuals responded to him as a natural theologian of force, originality, and consequence, though scientific naturalists did not wish to give him any intellectual purchase on the debates of the day. Although he saw himself as a conspiracy of one, Butler was actually part of a cadre of popular science writers who, whether or not they wished to acknowledge it, represented a threat to the emerging scientific professionalization of Darwin’s era.

NOTES

1

2

3

4

Permission to quote from Samuel Butler’s Note-Book of Oct. 1883–Apr. 1887 courtesy of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler: Volume 1 (1874–1883), ed. Breuer, 190–1 (hereafter cited in text as NB 1984). The author is indebted to Jim Paradis for the original idea of treating Butler as a popular science writer. Paradis’s perceptive insights about Butler, natural theology, and scientific naturalism lie behind a number of the points presented in this paper. The author also wishes to express his gratitude to Suzanne Le-May Sheffield and James Moore for their helpful suggestions for revising an early draft, and to Sally Kohlstedt for her thoughtful questions about popularizers and deference. Later, in his Luck, or Cunning?, Butler asserted publicly that Darwin did not merit the designation of scientific genius. He was unable to see more than ‘average intellectual power’ even in Darwin’s later books. The great contribution of the theory of natural selection, he said, ‘cannot be rated highly as an intellectual achievement.’ See Samuel Butler, Luck, or Cunning? (1886; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 213 (hereafter cited in text as LC). Simpson, ‘Lamarck, Darwin and Butler: Three Approaches to Evolution,’ 248; Turner, ‘Samuel Butler: The Man of Temper’; Pauly, ‘Samuel Butler and his Darwinian Critics’; Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 72; and Hans-Peter Breuer, ‘Darwinism in Victorian Letters,’ Literature and Medicine 6 (1987): 134. In a piece written at the same time as Simpson’s, Claude T. Bissell draws attention to the unsympathetic interpretation of Butler’s role in William Irvine’s Apes, Angels and Victorians. Bissell characterizes Butler as a ‘transmitter of evolutionary ideas, and a transmitter who is effective chiefly on the liter-

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5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21

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ary plane.’ Bissell therefore acknowledges that Butler was a popularizer of science. However, like Simpson and other scholars of that period, he ultimately dismisses Butler’s importance by limiting his influence to the ‘literary plane,’ denying that he was a serious scientific antagonist to Darwin and presenting him as representative of the nineteenth-century man of letters who was influenced by evolutionary ideas. See Bissell, ‘Samuel Butler and Evolution,’ 197, 189. Holt, Samuel Butler, rev. ed., 116; Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography, 1. Turner, ‘Samuel Butler: The Man of Temper,’ 172. Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss E.M.A. Savage, 1871–1885, ed. Keynes and Hill, 40, 160. Bernard Lightman, ‘“The Voices of Nature”: Popularizing Victorian Science,’ in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 187–211. Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of ‘Erewhon,’ 1:243, 254. Holt, Samuel Butler, 89–90. Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1877; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 1 (hereafter cited in text as LH). Bernard Lightman, ‘The Story of Nature: Victorian Popularizers and Scientific Narrative,’ Victorian Review 25, no. 2 (winter 2000): 1–29. David Cowie, ‘The Evolutionist at Large: Grant Allen, Scientific Naturalism and Victorian Culture’ (PhD thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 2000), 45–6. Lightman, ‘The Story of Nature’; Lightman, ‘“Voices of Nature.”’ James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 461. Lightman, ‘The Story of Nature,’ 17–20. Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 19. Otis traces the history of the idea of organic memory in physiology, neurology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and, most extensively, in literature, from 1870 to 1918. Breuer, ‘Darwinism in Victorian Letters,’ 128–38; Breuer, ‘Samuel Butler’s “The Book of the Machines” and the Argument from Design.’ Lightman, ‘“The Voices of Nature.”’ Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old and New (1879; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 336 (hereafter cited in text as EON). Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory (1880; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 10, 205 (hereafter cited in text as UM).

140 Bernard Lightman 22 Jones, Samuel Butler, 2:41. 23 Samuel Butler, ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism,’ in Collected Essays: Volume II, ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 40 (hereafter cited in text as DD). 24 Jones, Samuel Butler, 2:41. 25 Samuel Butler, ‘God the Known and God the Unknown,’ in Collected Essays: Volume I, ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 46, 40. 26 The Correspondence of Samuel Butler with His Sister May, ed. Howard, 77. 27 For Paley’s influence at Cambridge, see Aileen Fyfe, ‘The Reception of William Paley’s Natural Theology in the University of Cambridge,’ British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1997): 321–35. 28 Lightman, ‘“The Voices of Nature”’; Bernard Lightman, ‘Constructing Victorian Heavens: Agnes Clerke and the “New Astronomy,”’ in Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, ed. Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 61–75; Bernard Lightman, ‘Astronomy for the People: R.A. Proctor and the Popularization of the Victorian Universe,’ in Facets of Faith and Science, ed. Jitse van der Meer (Lanham, MD: Pascal Center for Advanced Studies in Faith and Science; University Press of America, 1996), 3:31–45; Bernard Lightman, ‘The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina,’ Isis 91 (2000): 651–80. 29 Lightman, ‘The Story of Nature,’ 15–17. 30 Butler was still in his freethinking, Darwinian phase before the end of the 1870s. In the ‘Book of the Machines’ in Erewhon (1872), he broadly satirizes Paley. A specific reference to Paley in this novel would seem to indicate that at this time Butler was not overly impressed with the design argument as articulated in Natural Theology. Butler’s protagonist discovers a fatal flaw in Paley’s reasoning. When the Erewhonians first find a watch in his possession the protagonist thinks of Paley and how ‘he tells us that a savage on seeing a watch would at once conclude that it was designed.’ Just as the protagonist is thinking ‘what a wonderfully wise man Archdeacon Paley must have been,’ he observes a look of horror and dismay on the face of the Erewhonian magistrate, ‘a look which conveyed to me the impression that he regarded my watch not as having been designed, but rather as the designer of himself and of the universe.’ At this point, he is struck by the notion that the magistrate’s view ‘was quite as likely to be taken as the other by a people who had no experience of European civilisation, and I was a little piqued with Paley for having led me so much astray.’ Here Butler presents Paley’s argument as culturally conditioned, but later he seems

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32 33 34

35 36

37

38

39 40 41 42

43

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to have accepted elements of it as valid enough to form the basis of his teleologically inflected evolutionary theory. See Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 48. Neal C. Gillespie has forcefully argued that references to the complex mechanical technology of the Industrial Revolution lay at the heart of Paley’s argument for divine design. See his ‘William Paley and Divine Design,’ Isis 81 (1990): 214–29. Herbert L. Sussman, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 142. Ibid., 141. For a collection of primary sources on natural theology in the post-Darwinian era, see Richard England, ed., Design After Darwin: 1860–1900, 4 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003). Jones, Samuel Butler, 1:417. Suzanne Le-May Sheffield, Revealing New Worlds: Three Victorian Women Naturalists (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), 57–59; George C. Bompas, Life of Frank Buckland (London, Edinburgh, Dublin & New York: Thomas Nelson, 1909), 371. Bernard Lightman, ‘Knowledge Confronts Nature: Richard Proctor and Popular Science Periodicals,’ in Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan Topham (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2004), 199–210. Richard Yeo, ‘Science and Intellectual Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain: Robert Chambers and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,’ Victorian Studies 28 (1984): 5–31. Holt, Samuel Butler, 38. Pauly, ‘Samuel Butler and His Darwinian Critics,’ 163. Breuer, ‘Darwinism in Victorian Letters,’ 137. Michael Bartholomew, ‘Huxley’s Defence of Darwin,’ Annals of Science 32 (1975): 529, 533–5; Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 156–8. Butler had an altercation with Buckley in 1880 that involved the publication of a two-part biography of Erasmus Darwin, by Charles Darwin and Ernst Krause, that appeared shortly after Butler had sent the great evolutionist a copy of Evolution, Old and New. Purporting to be an English translation of a previously published paper by Krause, Erasmus Darwin contained several new passages which, according to Butler, borrowed from Evolution, Old and New without acknowledgment and, worse still, which questioned Butler’s sanity in championing the grandfather’s version of evolution over the

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44

45 46

47

48

49 50

grandson’s. When Butler demanded an apology, he was ignored by Darwin at the advice of Huxley and other friends. When Butler saw Buckley at the British Museum in November 1880, she defended Darwin’s actions (see NB 1984, 122–3). For the definitive account of the Butler-Darwin controversy, see James G. Paradis, ‘The Butler-Darwin Biographical Controversy in the Victorian Periodical Press.’ Allen’s review of Evolution, Old and New was critical of Butler for using ‘unseemly and contemptuous language toward an old and honoured scientific chief, whom even his adversaries should respect for his noble devotion to truth and his lifelong pursuit of knowledge.’ See Grant Allen, ‘Evolution, Old and New,’ Academy 15 (17 May 1879): 426–7. Samuel Butler, ‘Clodd, Grant All[*] and Myself,’ Note-Books, vol. 2, 152–4, unpublished MS, St John’s College, Cambridge University. Used with permission. G.J. Romanes, ‘Unconscious Memory,’ Nature 23 (27 January 1881): 285–7. For an interesting discussion of the challenges facing Victorian women intellectuals when they entered the scientific arena, see Evelleen Richards, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals,’ in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 119–42. Darwin’s growing Lamarckism is discussed by both Vorzimmer and Moore. See Peter J. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin, The Years of Controversy: The ‘Origin of Species’ and Its Critics, 1859–1882 (London: University of London Press, 1972), 71–95; and James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 127–31. Susan Sheets-Pyenson, ‘Popular Science Periodicals in Paris and London: The Emergence of a Low Scientific Culture, 1820–1875,’ Annals of Science 42 (1985): 563. Turner, ‘Samuel Butler: The Man of Temper,’ 173. Edward Clodd, Memories (London: Watts, 1926), 260.

6 Evolutionary Psychology and The Way of All Flesh sally shuttleworth

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda Birth has been made too much of. Samuel Butler, Life and Habit

Where should the history of a life begin? Whilst Sterne famously took his starting point back to the (mis)conception of his hero, Tristram Shandy, the favoured entry point for the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel remained that indeterminate period when youth verges on adulthood. In the Victorian period, when forms of historical understanding and explanation became paramount, the novel frequently took a step backwards to include the domain of childhood. To understand a life one had to understand its history, its antecedents. The Mill on the Floss (1860), for example, offers an entry point to Maggie Tulliver’s life through an account of the natural and social history of her environment, the Floss and St Ogg’s. Yet, despite George Eliot’s awareness of the pressures of social and biological determinism, and the weight of evolutionary history, she nonetheless takes her narrative structure from the shape of an individual life, commencing in midchildhood.1 For Samuel Butler, starting to write The Way of All Flesh in 1873 after fifteen years of evolutionary debate, the choice of entry point was more difficult. The Bildungsroman no longer formed the obvious structure for his narrative. Despite, or indeed because of, his ongoing disputes with Darwin, Butler undoubtedly took the ideas of biological evolution more seri-

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ously than any other nineteenth-century novelist. He broke off from the composition of The Way of All Flesh (which he finally set aside in 1884) to extend his meditations on human development in a whole series of philosophical texts: Life and Habit (1877/8), Evolution, Old and New (1879), and Unconscious Memory (1880).2 The origins of The Way of All Flesh and Life and Habit were roughly coeval. Butler traced the genesis of the latter text to a note made in 1874: ‘It is one against legion when a man tries to differ from his own past selves. He must yield or die if he wants to differ widely ... His past selves are living in him at this moment with the accumulated life of centuries.’3 It is this sense of the power of hereditary memory, and the consequent difficulties of defining or maintaining a unified sense of selfhood, that lies at the heart of both Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh. Critics have tended to see the evolutionary theories articulated in The Way of All Flesh as a distraction from the novel’s brilliant dissection of the dynamics of Victorian family life. Richard Hoggart asks, for example, ‘Yet how much does the theory behind the book imaginatively inform its better parts? Very little, surely.’4 Alternatively, the novel has been read, painstakingly, as a direct expression of Butler’s evolutionary theories, with attempts to extract both progressive and degenerative interpretations of social evolution.5 The relationship between the fiction and evolutionary theory, I would argue, is more complex and problematic than either of these scenarios suggests. Although there are undoubtedly similarities of ideas between Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh, and indeed direct quotation from one to the other, the primary link is a shared motivating energy – a desire to explore, in all its bewildering and contradictory aspects, the nature of identity. The complex, riddling form and narrative tone of the novel are not themselves distractions from the serious issues of the text, but rather a form of their expression. Butler’s ‘Story of English Domestic Life’ explores the relations between fathers and sons on multiple levels: the fierce psychological struggles for self-definition are set within the biological context of the pressures of shared evolutionary identity. Theobald is not only an oppressive Victorian patriarch, bent on suppressing Ernest’s individual personality, but also Ernest’s own ‘past self,’ which lives within him. Evolutionary theory becomes a way of thinking through what Freud was later to term the ‘family romance,’ where the sense of conflict with the father is actively created by a strong sense of identification, of shared selfhood. Generational entanglement governs both the narrative structure and content of the work.

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In a literary re-enactment of the processes of evolution, Butler’s novel spawned a further generation of texts, equally concerned with a child’s tortured, conflicted relations to the family and society that brought him into being. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was strongly influenced by The Way of All Flesh, whilst Virginia Woolf noted: Then, again, we fancied that some idea or other was our own breeding. But here, on the next page, was Butler’s original version, from which our seed had blown. If you want to come up afresh in thousands of minds and books long after you are dead, no doubt the way to do it is to start thinking for yourself. The novels that have been fertilised by The Way of All Flesh must by this time constitute a large library, with well-known names on their backs.6

Butler’s text appealed to the modernists who were themselves trying to throw off the shackles of a Victorian past. In its playful violation of realist form, and interrogation of the nature of identity, it not only participated in the birth of modernist experimentalism, but also anticipated some of the more recent developments in postmodernism. The Way of All Flesh has never been out of print, appealing to new generations of readers who find expressed there, as Woolf suggests, their own ideas in ‘germ.’ It is a text that reaches backwards as well as forwards. In The Mill on the Floss Eliot had explored how the young attempt to rise above the ‘oppressive narrowness’ of their society ‘to which they have nevertheless been tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts.’7 Butler intensifies both elements, heightening the sense of estrangement, and indeed revulsion, whilst making the emotional tie an even more compelling biological one. In place of the seriousness of Eliot’s high-Victorian realism, with its sense of order and process, he creates a novel that is deliberately playful and disjointed, that challenges the reader in its very form. Yet one feels throughout a sense of driving emotion which holds all the elements together in creative tension. The Way of All Flesh is not an autobiography. It is, however, undoubtedly fuelled by Butler’s own family dynamics. Butler’s notebook of this period shows a preoccupation with family relations, most specifically with ‘My most implacable enemy ... my father.’8 It also shows him working out his theories of the ‘Unity of Nature’ (NB, 177) and the ideas of inherited memory, which gave rise to the first principle of Life and Habit, ‘the oneness of personality between parents and offspring’ (UM, 18). The two positions, at first sight so bafflingly antithetical, lie at the

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heart of his fiction and his science. To comprehend, in part, the dynamics at work here, and Butler’s development of his idiosyncratic interpretation of evolutionary psychology, we need to consider his relations with another father figure, Charles Darwin. Butler read On the Origin of Species when it first came out and responded enthusiastically, no doubt in part because it offered a system of explanation of life and development that had nothing to do with his father’s religion.9 Disillusionment soon set in, however, with a model that seemed, oppressively, to give no reward to personal effort, and to suggest that change could only come about as a result of ‘luck.’ In creating his own, more Lamarckian theory, he nonetheless drew on Darwinian elements, such as the descent of all life from the primordial cell: ‘We therefore prove each one of us to be actually the primordial cell which never died nor dies, but has differentiated itself into the life of the world, all living beings whatever, being one with it, and members one of another.’10 Identity is extended across not only the ‘family of man’ but all organic nature. Butler wishes his readers to grasp thoroughly ‘the conception that we are all one creature, and that each one of us is many millions of years old’ (LH, 203). Taken as a biological fact, this statement might not appear exceptionable, but it becomes extraordinarily disruptive if, following Butler’s theories of organic memory, it is applied to the domain of mind and consciousness.11 While Herbert Spencer had laid the foundations of evolutionary psychology in his Principles of Psychology (both in the preOrigin version of 1855 and the second expanded edition of 1870–2), he did so in the most abstract of terms, not exploring the implications of inherited memory for the experience of lived identity. Evolutionary psychology in the hands of Spencer and his successors, from Ribot to Romanes, concentrated on the idea of inherited traits, of pathways laid down in the mind by generally remote ancestors, both animal and human.12 Butler, by contrast, focuses on the immediate and the specific. His suggestion that there is a ‘oneness of personality between parents and offspring’ finds no parallel in contemporary scientific texts. From the generally accepted premise of shared traits he moves to the startling claim of an indivisible ‘personality’ spanning the generations. Butler delighted in paradox and contradiction; in reflecting on the implications of evolutionary theory for our understanding of individual selfhood, he took the opportunity to take apart systematically all the normative boundaries of human identity. ‘Birth,’ he suggests in Life and Habit, ‘has been made too much of.’ Rather than the point at which

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we begin to live, it is ‘the point at which we leave off knowing how to live.’13 Whereas the embryo is in harmony with its past lives, this union is disrupted by birth. ‘Personal identity’ has been fundamentally misconceived, Butler argues; it is a mere ‘superstition’ constructed for the convenience of law courts, and the pressures of daily life. We think we know what is meant by a ‘person,’ yet if we try ‘to determine wherein we consist, or to draw a line as to where we begin or end, we find ourselves completely baffled. There is nothing but fusion and confusion’ (LH, 82, 79). Personal identity, he maintains, is not bounded by birth and death; nor even by material existence, since, following recent cell theory, there is no single cell in a man of 80 which was present when he was born. Indeed, there is greater continuity between the embryo and past lives, than between the infant and the octogenarian he will become (LH, 78–103). Identity, for Butler, stretches infinitely back in time. Our understanding of consciousness is also subject to radical revision. Following his Lamarckian desire to see nature as imbued with purposiveness, he endows all organic nature with a form of will and even consciousness.14 For the individual human life, consciousness ceases to be an attribute solely of mind, since ‘every individual person is a compound creature, being made up of an infinite number of distinct centres of sensation and will, each one of which is personal, and has a soul and individual existence, a reproductive system, intelligence, and memory of its own’ (LH, 104–5). In addition to this multiple form of internal existence, identity is also extended to include elements of the external world which become joined to us, and even to our waste matter which, Butler suggests, might not be ‘so unconscious of its birth and death as we suppose’ (LH, 103). In this vision of the possible consciousness of excrement, Butler is at his most playful (is this one of the aspects of the work that Darwin’s son, Francis, found ‘excellent fun’?).15 Yet one can never be sure he is not partially serious, as one of his notebook entries indicates: ‘Offspring: A man’s waste tissues and excrementa are to a certain extent offspring. The molecules have a certain greater aptitude for organisation for their having been connected with him’ (NB, 260). Set in the context of his novel about parents and offspring, there is a certain poignancy here: is there an implication that there is greater care for waste tissue than the human child? In his reconstruction of notions of personal identity, Butler breaks down all the binaries that define Western ideas of selfhood: life/death; mind/body; internal/external; past/present. Although his main quar-

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rel with Darwin was over the role given to will in the process of evolution, by extending a sense of personal agency and consciousness itself to all organic (and even inorganic) matter, he explicitly undermines the very concept that in the past had given meaning to consciousness: a discrete personal identity. He thus sets himself severe challenges for the construction of his novel. What does the act of will, or the experience of consciousness, mean if it cannot be understood with reference to an individual life? And how does one write the history of an individual life if you have abolished the category? In dissolving the boundaries between self and ‘past selves,’ Butler also reconfigures the question of moral responsibility, so central to George Eliot’s fiction and the Victorian realist novel. Can Theobald be held responsible for his paternal tyranny if he himself is but an iteration of his previous ‘selves’? Law courts, Butler suggests, need to invoke a necessary fiction of personal identity in order to establish accountability and pass judgment. Within the framework of Butler’s evolutionary psychology, such certainty is put into question. The Way of All Flesh expresses a sense of outrage at the abuses enacted in the name of parenthood which rivals that of Dickens, but holds such anger in tension with a more complex understanding of the nature of responsibility. It is impossible to separate Butler’s scientific writings from his novel: the same anxieties, preoccupations, intellectual ambition, and sheer love of paradox fuel both forms of experiment. On reading The Fair Haven, Darwin had written to Butler, he records, ‘telling me he thought I should do well to turn my attention to novel-writing. All scientific people tell me to do this’ (NB, 131).16 Although Butler chooses to interpret the suggestion as a rebuff, from scientific expert to amateur, he nonetheless deliberately adopts in both Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh a style that pushes at the boundaries of genre, whether novel or scientific thesis. ‘There is nothing,’ Butler observes in Life and Habit, in almost Wildean fashion, ‘in such complete harmony with itself as a flat contradiction in terms’ (LH, 28). His challenge in The Way of All Flesh is to unite the Bildungsroman form with a biological and ontological theory that does not recognize the conventional boundaries of individual identity. The form of The Way of All Flesh necessarily breaks with tradition. We are offered neither the omniscient narration of The Mill on the Floss, with its privileged access to Maggie’s internal traumas, nor the first-person retrospect of David Copperfield, which blends the intense immediacy of childhood experience with adult reflection. Instead, we are asked to view Ernest’s life through the somewhat distanced eyes of Overton, an

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elderly writer of burlesques who dislikes his friend Theobald, and has little time for the infant Ernest. He deploys his cynicism, however, to offer a dissection, at once chilling and comic, of the abuses of power within the twinned structures of the Victorian family and religion. Could any decrepitude, he muses, be ‘so awful as childhood in a happy united God-fearing family?’ (WOAF, 27) The irony hangs heavy on the page, creating for the modernists who were to follow, however, a heady sense of emancipation.17 The time frame of the novel does not, mercifully, extend back to the primordial cell, but rather three generations, to Ernest’s great-grandfather, the idealized Old Mr Pontifex, country carpenter, organ builder, and musician. In Butler’s chronology, the novel spans over 150 years, from the birth of Old Pontifex in 1727 to the death, not, significantly, of Ernest himself but rather of his nemesis, Theobald, in 1881.18 We pass quickly from the life of Old Pontifex, through the rapid social rise of his son George in the mercenary London world of religious publishing, before lingering on the life of Theobald, whose inability to stand up to the tyrannies of his father led in turn to his own petty domination of his wife and children. Butler’s original title – ‘Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh,’ with its swift transplantation of the individual by the general – expresses many of the tensions within the text. The positive Lamarckian image of creativity, of making bridges, is undercut by the sombre biblical overtones of the subtitle, which suggests the vanity of all human life in the face of death. Yet, with another twist, Butler’s own theories challenge this concept of death: in his reworking of the idea of the primordial cell, all flesh is linked in one continuous life form, back to the dawn of time. As he had suggested satirically in Erewhon, it is not death but birth which is to be feared. Irony also plays around the name Ernest, selected by his grandfather because ‘the word “earnest” was just beginning to come into fashion’ (69). It functions, as in Wilde’s later play, as a satire on the moral hypocrisy Butler so abhorred in Victorian society, giving expression to his family’s aspirations for him. Similarly, Pontifex, in its meaning of spiritual leader (or more narrowly, pope), creator of a bridge between earth and heaven, gives voice to Christina’s fantasies about Ernest’s future destiny – although as Carlyle noted in Sartor Resartus, in an irony that Butler no doubt appreciated, our first Pontifex, or bridge builders, were Sin and Death, ‘who built that stupendous Arch from Hell-gate to the Earth.’19 As befits a novel presenting a hero without a strongly delimited self-

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hood, Ernest, and indeed Theobald, are almost absent presences in their own lives during childhood, unable to fight the ‘past selves’ which dominate them. The narrative’s fierce sense of injustice therefore springs not from childhood perception itself, but from the reflections of Overton (with supporting commentary by an older Ernest). Overton speaks of the ‘long and savage cruelty’ (239) with which Ernest had been treated in childhood. It is a form of savagery distinguished by its unremarkable nature; not the exceptional sadistic tyranny of a Murdstone, but rather the unrelenting pressure of paternal rule in a ‘God fearing family.’ The seemingly innocuous epigraph of the novel – ‘We know that all things work together for good to them that love God – (Rom. 8:28)’ – quickly takes on a more sinister range of meanings. Love of God becomes a mode of parental self-justification that takes away any need for self-questioning or doubt, creating ‘the atmosphere of lying and self-laudatory hallucination’ within which Ernest was raised. The cruelty Theobald and Christina inflicted, Overton observes, was ‘none the less real for having been due to ignorance and stupidity rather than to deliberate malice.’ He wishes to hold them to account, to ‘sentence’ them to severe ‘mental suffering,’ but then acknowledges the role their own histories have played in defining them. The narrative sways back and forth, harsh judgment followed by mitigation, but the conclusion is grim. Theobald and Christina would have to be born again ‘of a different line of ancestry for many generations’ if they were to become more supple of mind. As it was, the best thing was ‘to humour them ... till they died – and be thankful when they did so’ (239– 40). One of the parental articles of faith in this ‘God-fearing family’ is the doctrine that ‘the first signs of self-will must be carefully looked for, and plucked up by the roots at once before they had time to grow’ (79). Overton offers up a cry of outrage, on behalf of the silenced child, to a culture that does not appear to recognize a category of childhood. In one of his most telling juxtapositions, he notes that Theobald began to teach Ernest to read at the age of two: ‘He began to whip him two days after he had begun to teach him’ (81). The swift substitution of days for years mimics the culture’s seeming obliviousness to the temporal nature of human development. The most famous scene in the novel, where Ernest, in attempting to sing his favourite hymn, repeatedly sings ‘tum’ instead of ‘come,’ and is whipped for being ‘self-willed,’ similarly hinges on an adult refusal to recognize the necessary stages of child development (85–6). Language, for the Victorians (and indeed for

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many current theorists), is what distinguishes us from the animals. One can trace in this desire to accelerate the processes of reading and speech acquisition a fear of that taint of animality that might seem to hover around the pre-literate child. (Butler, of course, denied this distinction between human and animal life, arguing in his essay ‘Thought and Language’ that ‘the thought or reason on which the language of men and animals is alike founded differs as between men and brutes in degree but not in kind.’)20 Yet, in a final irony, within a culture that insistently refuses the child a right to selfhood, childhood incapacity is nonetheless interpreted as a precocious assertion of self-will. Overton employs Darwinian terms to explain the surprising resilience of the child: ‘Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances’ (25). The irony is not directed against the idea of the survival of the fittest, which Butler, in his own way, endorsed; its sting lies rather in adopting Darwin’s celebratory language regarding the ‘exquisite adaptations’ within nature, and deftly switching death to the first term.21 The ultimate act of powerlessness – dying – is figured as an active and indeed positive response, with the further implied suggestion that perhaps death might indeed be preferable to other forms of ‘adaptation.’ Overton continues: ‘Even if [children] are unhappy – very unhappy – it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness’ (25). There follows a diatribe against ‘moral influence,’ which Overton, in a range of mixed metaphors, variously describes as carrying the guns, loading the dice, or holding the trump card (25–6). It consists entirely, he suggests, in a form of abuse of power, where children’s own perceptions are stifled at birth and replaced by the parental view of their own worthlessness and moral inferiority. In its representation of childhood, the novel offers an analysis of the systematic imbalance of power within Victorian culture. Butler is not offering a plea on behalf of specific constituencies, such as factory children, nor singling out particular cases of abuse, but rather pointing to inbuilt structural inequalities across the cultural and social fabric. As Ernest struggles to the awareness that he ‘did not love his papa and mama, in spite of all their goodness both in themselves and to him,’ he starts to realize that ‘he had duties towards everybody, lying in wait for him upon every side, but that nobody had any duties towards him’ (110). Duty, that Victorian imperative, is assumed to operate in only one direction – upwards, from child to parent. Overton, reflecting on chil-

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dren’s unhappy relations with their parents, suggests that the church catechism is in part to blame: ‘That work was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who wrote it did not get a few children to come in and help him’ (30). Not only does the catechism stress the confirmee’s duty to father and mother, it includes a binding commitment to ‘submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters.’22 The sheer comic implausibility of Overton’s suggestion that children should have been involved in the composition of the catechism highlights the ways in which the hierarchical structure of the church is replicated within the family. This is the religion of God the Father, with a studious avoidance of the possibilities suggested by God the Son.23 The catechism, Overton observes, leaves the general impression ‘that the mere fact of being young at all has something with it that savours more or less distinctly of the nature of sin’ (30). Butler brilliantly depicts the ways in which children are taught to imbibe such notions, adopting even in infancy a sense of their own unworthiness and worthlessness, whilst parents like Theobald and Christina rest ‘happy in that best of all happiness, the approbation of their own consciences’ (111). In a telling phrase, Overton notes that Theobald and Christina’s early married years were overshadowed by the grief that ‘no living children were born to them’ (65), the implication no doubt being that they had managed to stifle any previous embryos – or would–be embryos – before they had the temerity to be born. Overton, in a form of ironic self-plagiarism by Butler, draws on the arguments of ‘The World of the Unborn’ in Erewhon, ‘that embryos look upon life much as we do upon death’ and that ‘there is no such thing as life in any true sense of the word except in the womb’ (26). This is not just an ironic inversion, designed to interrogate the assumption that the experience of childhood within ‘a happy united God-fearing family’ actually merits the designation of ‘life,’ but also a development of his theories of evolutionary identity: birth constitutes a disruption of identity which in terms of self-recognition therefore constitutes a death. Although Butler’s initial differences with Darwin were motivated by his desire to introduce a more Lamarckian sense of the power of human agency within evolutionary development, the text of The Way of All Flesh seems to be weighed down at times by an almost overwhelming sense of biological, psychological, and cultural determinism. The child is oppressed both by its psychological inheritance of parental patterns of behaviour, and by its parents’ cultural repetition in adulthood of the

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6.1 The Butler family. Clockwise from top left: Sam, Etta (sister-in-law), Tom, Canon Butler, May, Mrs Butler, Harrie.

oppressive pattern of power relations they experienced when young. In Ernest’s case, Theobald’s failure to withstand his own father leaves his offspring no power to rebel in childhood. He does not, like David Copperfield, bite the hand that beats him, but seems singularly supine as a child. Although many of Overton’s bitterest remarks on childhood occur in the context of describing Theobald’s upbringing, the text struggles to maintain sympathy for him as a fellow victim. His failures, as child and as father, are seen to ruin Ernest’s life. Paradoxically, given the explicit anticlerical nature of the text, Butler draws repeatedly on the Old Testament to express his sense of the unremitting power of biological inheritance: the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons. Theobald meanwhile meditates, as he returns from delivering Ernest to school, on the tenth plague of Egypt (the slaughter of the first born): ‘if the little Egyptians had been anything like Ernest, the plague must have been a very doubtful one’ (108). The reflection is simultaneously

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comic and chilling: the tenth plague becomes an expression of the Victorian paterfamilias’s infanticidal impulses. Butler playfully manipulates within his novel the Old Testament texts that had dominated his childhood, producing a range of more subversive interpretations. The child Ernest, so willing to believe in his own moral depravity as defined by the religion of his parents, is nonetheless spoken to by ‘that other Ernest that dwelt within him and was so much stronger and more real than the Ernest of which he was conscious’ (115). This other self urges him to disobedience, to discard his conscious, priggish self: Obey me, your true self, and things will go tolerably well with you, but only listen to that outward and visible old husk of yours which is called your father, and I will rend you in pieces even unto the third and fourth generation as one who has hated God; for I, Ernest, am the God who made you. (116)

Violent, Old Testament retribution is to be visited on Ernest if he obeys the fifth commandment and honours his father and mother. His father’s God has here been transmuted into the progressive force of evolution, which he ignores at his peril. Biological inheritance, extended into past generations, allows him to access, however unconsciously, a ‘real self’ which will lead to his later decision to cut his parents out of his life. There is real glee in this turning of the violent patriarchal text against itself, licensing the son’s rebellion. This vision of fatherhood as a mere ‘old husk’ to be cast off is replicated in Life and Habit where Butler, in another act of filial insubordination, draws on Darwin’s Animals and Plants under Domestication to vindicate his position. In Darwin’s account of some Echinoderms, ‘the animal in the second stage of development is formed almost like a bud within the animal of the first stage, the latter being then cast off like an old vestment, yet sometimes maintaining for a short period an independent vitality’ (LH, 97). Applied to human life, this notion of the parent maintaining independent vitality for only a short time after reproduction is clearly wishful thinking on Butler’s part, a comic inversion of the tenth plague. As is usual with Butler, the stages he moves through to reach his position – that the father is a mere ‘husk’ or ‘old vestment’ – are dazzlingly contradictory. He starts with the observation that it is difficult for us to break the spell of words and to realize that ‘two or more per-

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sons may unite and become one person, with the memories and experiences of both, though this has been actually the case with every one of us’ (LH, 94). This terrifying notion of union with parents in memory, experience, and personality is then used, however, to justify the dispensability of parents, who become the mere ‘residuum’ of life, which is more fully contained in the offspring. Yet, as Butler notes sardonically, social practice does not follow this biological imperative: ‘The residuum has generally the upper hand. He has more money, and can eat up his new life more easily than his new life him’ (LH, 95). In this invocation of Darwin’s survival of the fittest, the mere ‘husk’ or ‘residuum’ of life becomes a cannibalistic parent, consuming his own children. The ground is prepared for Ernest’s glorious diatribe against the family in The Way of All Flesh, and his argument that the family is a principle that is ‘incompatible with high development’ and should be confined ‘to the lower and less progressive races.’ Ants and bees ‘sting their fathers to death as a matter of course’ and yet are still ‘universally respected’ (WOAF, 91). The Freudian struggle between father and son is played out in The Way of All Flesh through Butler’s engagement with evolutionary theory, although Butler, with comic emphasis, dates its origins even earlier than Freud. According to Ernest, ‘A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year before he is born’ (305). The struggle is rendered all the more severe by Butler’s belief that the child is at one with its parents in terms of experience and memories. Interestingly, Theobald is gently mocked for not placing credence in the unity of child and parent. Distressed by the fact that his life is being taken over by children he does not like, he reflects: ‘Theorists may say what they like about a man’s children being a continuation of his own identity, but it will generally be found that those who talk in this way have no children of their own. Practical family men know better’ (77). The theorist is of course Butler himself, who has no children of his own, but assumes a greater understanding than this ‘practical’ father who would have preferred his children to arrive as ‘full-grown clergymen in priest’s orders’ or to be bought ‘ready-made’ at a shop (78). In order to understand what Butler meant by his assertions of the oneness of parents and offspring, it will be helpful to look briefly at the contemporary scientific context. The physiological psychology of Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes had prepared the way for ideas of instinctive actions, inherited traits, and organic memory, which were reinforced by Ernst Haeckel’s theory articulated in 1866 that

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‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ (the pattern of the individual life follows that of the species), and by publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871).24 Butler explored these theories in his attempt to work out what evolutionary theory might mean for the experience of the individual life, but is repeatedly dismissive. ‘What is this talk that is made about the experience of the race,’ he demands in Life and Habit, ‘as though the experience of one man could profit another who knows nothing about him?’ (LH, 49). His own impulses are to dwell on the immediate and specific transfer of individual memories. He was to find a confirmation of his theories in the work of the German scientist Ewald Hering, which, as Otis notes, was to make theories of organic memory respectable.25 Butler wrote Life and Habit in ignorance of Hering’s 1870 lecture ‘On Memory as a Function of Organised Matter,’ but subsequently translated it in Unconscious Memory in support of his own position. One possible earlier influence on Butler’s theories of organic development was The Elements of Social Science (1854), by the iconoclastic medic George Drysdale, whose theories and personal family dynamics offer uncanny parallels to those of Butler. The seeming innocuous main title of the work, a copy of which was owned by Butler, hides its explosive contents, half-suggested by the subtitle, ‘Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion.’ At the height of its notoriety, Elements of Social Science, Miriam Benn claims, ‘was the most notorious [book] of its age, read in the guiltiest secrecy.’26 Published anonymously, it advocated birth control – what Drysdale termed ‘preventive intercourse’ – but also dwelt on the evils of both sexual excess and, more tellingly, sexual abstinence: ‘At present, in this country, abstinence or self-denial in the matter of sexual love is much more frequently a natural vice than a virtue; and instead of deserving praise, merits condemnation, as we may learn from the mode in which all-just nature punishes it.’ Henry Festing Jones records on the flyleaf of Butler’s copy: ‘This book belonged to Samuel Butler. I do not know when he became possessed of it but I think he must have had it before he wrote Erewhon and I suspect it influenced him in writing that work.’27 The influence probably runs deeper than Jones suspects, fuelling not only Butler’s speculations on the world of the ‘unborn,’ but also his ideas on sexuality and familial reproduction. He would no doubt have been in full sympathy with this anonymous author who notes in his preface that he would have put his name to the text, but for fear of causing pain to a relative: ‘I earnestly hope that the time is not far distant, when each individual shall be

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enabled freely to bring forward his conscientious beliefs, without incurring the intolerance of others.’28 Despite these very evident family tensions, in the section ‘Sexual Religion,’ Drysdale, like Butler, puts forward theories that stress the identity of parent and child: We call each human being a distinct individual, because he has been produced by an act of generation, and lives independently. But in truth we are not distinct individuals. Each of us is formed of a part of his two parents, a part of which is indeed separated from them, but which once was included in their individuality. Hence we are merely a part of our parents.

The arguments are those Butler advances in Life and Habit in the section on ‘Personal Identity’ (LH, 93–103). From this categorical rejection of the notion of individual identity, Drysdale moves to an assertion of the biological unity of mankind: ‘the “whole human family” forms one great consanguineous whole. The progenitors of all of us have at some time or other formed parts of the same body. Thus, mankind may be termed one great composite individual.’29 Like Butler in Life and Habit, Drysdale moves from the possibly troubling notion of oneness with parents to a wider vision of evolutionary identity. He returns once more to speculate, however, on what being part of one’s parents means. Every child, Drysdale asserts, ‘must include in itself the mingled qualities of its two parents ... every child is the mingled essence of its two parents, and must, if we look deep enough, be a thorough representation of them.’30 Scarcely a comforting thought for a defiant child. Drysdale is unusual for the period in the stress he places on the direct replication of the traits of both parents in the child, and the fact that the child does not possess any individuality of its own, but is rather the ‘mingled essence’ of its parents. His heretical ‘Sexual Religion’ encompasses both the injunction to sexual exercise (‘every man, who has not a due amount of sexual exercise, lives a life of natural imperfection and sin’) and his theories of the oneness of parents and offspring.31 Butler, who similarly antagonized his parents by publishing his work, and who mercilessly satirized the sexual puritanism of the age in The Way of All Flesh through Christina’s renunciation of black pudding,32 no doubt took pleasure in drawing upon Drysdale’s work as he framed his own theories of identity. Taking Drysdale’s very explicit notions of hereditary transmission, he develops his own theories of organic memory to explain the precise forms of parental replication.

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Where other theorists had envisaged the inheritance of memories deeply ingrained in the mind through centuries of repetition, Butler imagines a startling specificity of union of memory between parent and child. A child at birth is endowed with memories of all its parents’ experiences, as well as their repertoire of inherited memories. While it can be hard enough to accept that one is of the same flesh as one’s parents, to be of one mind and memory is clearly even more disturbing. Thomas Hardy, who was also to be influenced by Hering’s theories of organic memory, created that woeful apology for a child, Father Time, a figure so weighed down by the memories of the past that he ceased to be a child.33 Ernest is similarly ‘like a puny sallow little old man’ (83), without the buoyancy of childhood. Is he like that ‘old-fashioned child,’ Paul Dombey, pressed out of life by the weight of expectation placed upon him, or is he, following Butler’s theories, oppressed by adult memories which have no place within a child’s mind? At the end of Life and Habit, Butler draws back from some of the more disturbing implications of this theory of the oneness of child and parent in memory and experience. Although the ovum is ‘instinct with all the memories of both parents,’ these memories are not brought into play, he suggests, until the ovum and its surroundings replicate the conditions of the earlier life: The memory will then immediately return, and the creature will do as it did on the last occasion that it was in like case as now. This ensures that similarity of order shall be preserved in all the stages of development, in successive generations. (LH, 298)

On the one hand, the new life is powerless to prevent itself replicating parental experience, but on the other, Butler has now built in safeguards: such unwitting mimicry will only come into play if all the conditions are the same. Similarly, due sequence is to be observed; the child, presumably, is to be protected from feeling at age three the lusts its parent felt at thirty. In moving from the language of inherited instincts or traits employed by his peers to a looser, more capacious language of memory, Butler has entered relatively uncharted waters.34 He turns therefore to ideas of staged development of traits to keep at bay the perturbing vision of a child mind awash with inappropriate adult memories. Earlier on Butler has suggested, almost as an afterthought, that there are no memories of ‘the parental life on the part of the offspring later

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than the average date of the offspring’s quitting the body of the parent’ (LH, 197).35 Children, it would seem, are not to be visited in infancy with memories of old age, but if the laws of ‘similarity of order’ are not preserved, presumably they could still be forced to experience the enactment of desire which led to their own conception. In his notes to himself about possible additions to the novel, Butler included the intriguing suggestion, ‘Charlotte on his father’s death offers him his father’s underclothing.’36 The sense of insult, coupled with the disturbing elision between Ernest and the sexual body of his father, suggests why Butler was keen to include this detail. Butler’s replacement of hereditary instinct with the notion of inherited memory is clearly fraught with difficulties, not least of which is his conception of childhood. In attempting to combat the mechanistic, arbitrary aspects of Darwin’s theory of natural selection through notions of consciousness and memory, he created from the perspective of the individual life an even greater sense of powerlessness refracted through The Way of All Flesh in a tortured sense of Ernest’s identity with his despised father. Under Butler’s theories of inherited memory, and oneness of personality between parents and offspring, is it possible to be a child – a being defined by innocence and lack of experience? Overton gives a humorous reinterpretation of New Testament versions of salvation: ‘If a man is to enter into the kingdom of heaven he must do so not only as a little child but as a little embryo, or rather as a little zoösperm – and not only this but as one that has come of zoösperms who have entered into the kingdom of heaven before him for many generations’ (241). The vision is not so much that of conscious effort and will, but of the difficulties of an individual life, weighed down by the burden of inheritance. Ernest is hence, designedly, a decidedly unheroic child (to be heroic, Butler argues in Life and Habit, one needs to have had ‘good forefathers for many generations’) (LH, 41). He is unable to withstand his parents and is at the mercy of his mother’s ‘domestic confidence trick’ as she imprisons him on the sofa to extract his confessions (WOAF, 151–2). While Theobald attempted to fight his father over his ordination, Ernest’s first major rebellion is to embrace an evangelical form of Christianity that hastens his ordination. The letters he now writes home are ‘saturated with Christina’ (198). Without a direction of his own, he is also an easy prey to Pryer and his unsavoury schemes for a college of ‘Spiritual Pathology.’ His salvation comes not from any informed decision, but rather from the dual loss of his money and the sexual blunder

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that lands him in prison for six months. He undergoes a complete breakdown, which helps to break the hold of heredity: ‘he felt doubtful how far any shock less severe than the one from which he was still suffering would have sufficed to free him’ (245). With his gradual rebirth comes the strength to break his family ties. The text appears to celebrate Ernest’s bitter rejection of his parents, with Overton enthusiastically endorsing his decision to ‘cut’ them entirely. Why, Ernest laments, are there orphanages ‘for children who have lost their parents’ but ‘no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?’ (257). His descent into poverty is carefully cushioned, of course, by Overton, who ensures he still has access to a piano and a room where he can write; even the disastrous marriage to Ellen is magically dissolved by the fortuitous discovery of her bigamy. As Overton observes, ‘poverty is very wearing; it is a quasi-embryonic condition through which a man had better pass if he is to hold his later developments securely, but like measles or scarlet fever he had better have it mildly, and get it over early’ (301). Ernest does indeed have only a mild dose of poverty, and is reborn into a social environment where, thanks to his aunt’s money, his development is as carefully protected as his earlier life was doomed and defenceless. The psychological damage inflicted on Ernest by his heredity and upbringing is too deep, however, to be easily overcome. The laughter of the ‘Comic Spirit’ (in George Meredith’s phrase) is strong in this latter section of the book, as Ernest attempts to thwart the overwhelming pressures upon him.37 The doctor who examines him after his nervous collapse recommends a good dose of ‘crossing,’ ‘the great medical discovery of the age’: ‘Seeing is a mode of touching, touching is a mode of feeding, feeding is a mode of assimilation, assimilation is a mode of recreation and reproduction, and this is crossing – shaking yourself into something else and something else into you.’ He spoke laughingly, but it was plain he was serious (306). But how serious is Butler? There is a comic quality in the doctor’s recommendation to Ernest that he should spend time trying to ‘cross’ himself with animals at the Zoological Gardens: certainly the elephants and pigs, but not the monkeys because they ‘are not a wide enough cross’ (307). Like the doctor, Butler would appear to be both laughing and serious. If there is indeed no division between the internal and the external, self and environment, then self-recreation, or ‘reproduction,’ need not be sexual and generational but could be achieved by the individual’s self-conscious selection of ideal forms of associates. Ernest is

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shown to benefit from his association with the elephants, and subsequently attempts to ‘cross’ himself with more congenial specimens of the human species. He travels the world, staying only where ‘he found the inhabitants unusually good looking and agreeable’ (338). In a sense the text is offering, in the idea of ‘crossing,’ a kind of biological model of self-help that can work to counteract, if not entirely mitigate, the pressures of heredity, and offer some hope for redemption and self-determination. Such hope seems deeply qualified, however, and its ideals, which focus on the power of money and the virtues of good breeding, appear rather unappealing. Butler described himself as a radical in ideas and a conservative in politics. These contrasting qualities are both present in the text: iconoclastic in its form and attacks on the institutions of family and religion, its satire resists the pressures for a socially transformative vision such as we find, for example, in Dickens. Clearly the finale of marriage and procreation, which functions metonymically in the Victorian novel as a model of social resolution, is not available for this text. The closest we come to a figure of the ideal is in Towneley, an idle man about town, who frequents prostitutes. Like Steerforth in David Copperfield, Towneley was idolized by Ernest as a child, but he never seems to suffer an equivalent moral fall. Although Overton does not participate in the adult Ernest’s eulogies of Towneley as ‘the very best man I ever saw in my life,’ he gravely confirms he is ‘ a good fellow’ (314). Towneley can be seen as an expression of Butler’s theories of ‘grace’ outlined in Life and Habit: a state attained when knowledge, through generations of good breeding, becomes thoroughly unconscious and incarnate. (Butler’s bête noire, the professional scientist, is thus forever debarred from reaching this state.)38 Prevented by his biological inheritance from ever attaining this plain of perfection, Ernest spends his time as a man of letters writing works such as a parodic form of Essays and Reviews which offered ‘good breeding’ as the cornerstone of faith. On how many levels does this parody work? Ernest felt bound to separate himself from Towneley since he intended, in his writing, ‘to say a great many things ... [he] will not like’ (314). Is this essay the form of his emancipation? A rejection of the class-based notions of breeding that contribute to the social dominance of a figure like Towneley, who knows how to carry his clothes well? The target of Ernest’s book would thus be the emerging discourse of eugenics, whilst also offering a comically reductive version of Butler’s own preoccupation with the attainment of biological grace.39

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Ernest does of course breed himself, but the text pays extraordinarily little attention to his offspring with Ellen. In an early version of the manuscript, Butler had included Ernest’s observation ‘that if he had a son of his own he was certain he should be his father over again, or a trifle worse, himself’ (149). This brooding sense that there is no escape from the self-righteous tyranny of fatherhood lies behind Ernest’s adult decision to distance himself from his own children: ‘“I shall be just as unkind to my children,” he said, “as my grandfather was to my father, or my father to me ... I can make sure that they shall not know how much they would have hated me if they had had much to do with me, but this is all I can do”’ (305). Whilst Dombey could be reclaimed, and the institution of fatherhood vindicated, The Way of All Flesh offers a far more despairing vision of the workings of paternity. Ernest cannot emancipate himself from his belief that he is at one with his father, and hence doomed to repeat his mistakes. The text suggests further, in anticipation of Freud, that enmity is a structural condition of the father-son relation. Such enmity can be mitigated by absence, or a more positive inheritance of memories, but never overcome. Ernest thus cannot afford to invest emotionally in the upbringing of his offspring, for fear of damaging them, and the text replicates this distance. The children, who have not even been given names at this stage, are placed first with his laundress, and then at Gravesend, to be brought up in the healthy country air by a bargeman and his wife. There is the suggestion that these children, freed from the influence of their own father and brought up in poverty so that they can make their own way, if they wish, up the social scale, will offer a fresh start for the Pontifex line.40 The text does not address, however, the question of how far these infants, released from direct parental interference, will be able to free themselves from inherited memories. Will a complete break in environment be sufficient to prevent the staged reliving of ‘past selves’ in the persons of their parents? The question is all the more pressing given the children’s maternal legacy of drunkenness. Contemporary scientific thinking argued that drunkenness in parents was the first step in an ongoing process of degeneration, whilst Butler’s own theories of inherited parental memories would suggest a likely resurgence of the habit.41 The text’s overwhelming preoccupation with the nature of fatherhood, however, helps to account for this silence. It is as if George and Alice are viewed only as Ernest’s offspring, and the legacy of the mother has been annulled, along with the marriage. From the evidence of another mysterious

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child, this time writing from a public school to his ‘Pa,’ Overton is led to believe that Ernest might have privately married again, but this information rests in the domain of gossip (it is based on a letter retrieved by the redoubtable Mrs Jupp from his waste paper basket). The narrative hints at a more engaged paternity for Ernest, and moves swiftly away. The conclusion dwells less on the future generation than on another collection of children, Ernest’s siblings. Where a mid-Victorian text might have focused on the community of feeling amidst these fellow sufferers, Butler paints a more pessimistic picture. Joey and Charlotte are clearly fellow victims – Joey is said to dislike Theobald even more than Ernest does – but they are also, disturbingly, unpleasant replications of their parents. Joey, who had become his father’s curate, was, Ernest notes, ‘only Theobald and water’ (330), while Charlotte has all the ‘self-laudatory hallucinations’ exhibited by Christina. The powerful union of psychological inheritance and upbringing have made any form of family life for Ernest, even after his parents’ deaths, untenable. For their part, Joey and Charlotte look set to create future generations of Theobalds and Christinas. The ending of The Way of All Flesh is necessarily muted. Neither marriage nor paternity can serve as an adequate conclusion. For a text preoccupied with the workings of heredity, and with the intertwined lives of successive generations, the difficulties of establishing a point of beginning are matched by those of ending. That other great study of filial relations in this period, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, concludes with the son’s bravura declaration that he threw off his ‘yoke of “dedication”’ and ‘took a human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself.’42 Butler’s text has exposed the mythic nature of this romantic conception of self-fashioning, however; emancipation is not only painful, but impossible to achieve. The novel therefore ends on a rather subdued note, yet with the suggestion of a minor triumph: Ernest in pursuing his career as a writer has achieved a state of mind that would be ‘Chinese’ to his father and grandfather. The spectres of George and Theobald still loom over these final words, but they are to be baffled and frustrated as Ernest attempts to counteract the forces of heredity – to make himself inaccessible to parental dominion – through linguistic experiment. The Way of All Flesh is itself a deeply experimental text. Butler took up the narrative challenge of writing a Bildungsroman while undercutting its central premise: the belief in a discrete ‘personal identity’ bounded by life and death. Playfulness and parody abound. The for-

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ward-reaching narrative trajectory through four generations is constantly disrupted, and intercut with philosophical and psychological reflections, often quotations from Butler’s own works, which are themselves invariably parodic. The reader is constantly kept off-guard, forced to reread and ponder, to keep interpretation at bay. ‘No man’s opinions,’ Ernest observes in conclusion, ‘can be worth holding unless he knows how to deny them easily and gracefully upon occasion in the cause of charity’ (356). Like Oscar Wilde, that other late-Victorian rebelling against his culture, Butler tries to distance himself from the self-righteousness of moral seriousness. The material of the novel is that of tragedy, but its form that of comedy. We are not permitted, as in The Mill on the Floss, an empathic relation with our suffering protagonist. Even at the moments of greatest poignancy, the dominant tone is comedic. Ernest’s struggles to emancipate himself from the past are re-enacted in formal terms in Butler’s attempts to find a more radical narrative structure to suit his material. He takes delight in paradox and contradiction, which in themselves contain the germs of new, possible alternate structures. The teasing suggestion, made in Life and Habit, and quoted as if from an independent authority in The Way of All Flesh, that ‘it is the young and fair who are the truly old and truly experienced’ (125), is one such germ, that Overton himself develops. ‘How would it be,’ he asks, ‘if we began life with death and lived it backwards, beginning as old people and ending our days by entering into the womb again and being born?’ (27). The possibilities are intriguing. Would it be possible to write a novel that both moves backwards in time and also shifts our understanding of wisdom or ‘experience,’ moving from the dreariness of age to the vital coming into knowledge of infancy?43 In Time’s Arrow; or, The Nature of the Offence (1991), Martin Amis has recently explored the possibilities of writing a novel that moves backwards in time. His work is a meditation on the Holocaust and moral responsibility. What it suggests is that by moving backwards in time, disrupting causal sequence, we thereby remove moral responsibility and therefore the possibility of apportioning moral blame. For all its playfulness and ironic inversions, The Way of All Flesh is still too deeply a Victorian text to take this step. While recognizing the powerlessness of Ernest’s parents in the face of their own heredity, Butler’s novel nonetheless creates an evolutionary version of Old Testament law: Theobald and Christina Pontifex, who created a bridge from the heaven of the unborn to the hell of childhood in a ‘happy united God-fearing family,’ must be held to account for their deeds. All experimentation has its limits.

Evolutionary Psychology and The Way of All Flesh 165 NOTES 1 George Eliot’s awareness of the difficulties of creating a discrete narrative frame, as signalled by the opening epigraph to the later Daniel Deronda (1876) cited above, was given expression, however, by the dual level of opening to the novel where the natural history of St Ogg’s is itself framed within the workings of memory and dream which confute and disrupt the external, social dimensions of time. 2 The Way of All Flesh was not published until 1903, a year after Butler’s death. He had begun his reflections on human development in the playful, semi-fictional work, Erewhon, in 1872. In-text citations in this essay refer to Daniel F. Howard’s edition, Ernest Pontifex; or The Way of All Flesh (London: Methuen, 1965), hereafter cited as WOAF. 3 Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory (1880; London: A.C. Fifield, 1920), 18 (hereafter cited in text as UM). Chapter 2 of this work is titled ‘How I came to write “Life and Habit,” and the circumstances of its completion,’ 12–25. 4 Richard Hoggart, Introduction to The Way of All Flesh (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 12. 5 Guest, ‘Acquired Characters,’ offers one of the most recent contributions to this debate, coming down firmly on the side of a pessimistic projection of cultural, rather than biological, evolution. 6 Virginia Woolf, Contemporary Writers (New York: Harcourt, 1965), 35. 7 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 2 vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1878–80), 2:6. 8 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler: Volume I (1874–1883), ed. Breuer, 222 (hereafter cited in text as NB). Butler systematically revised his original notes, transcribing them in finished form into a series of notebooks. The ordering of the notes, therefore, is due not to random variation but rather to design. See Breuer’s ‘General Note on the Text,’ xi-xvi. 9 Darwin had liked Butler’s dialogue on the Origin, published in the Christchurch Press, and had written to him in New Zealand to express his appreciation. See Butler’s account in Note-Books, 129: ‘My Visits to Charles Darwin at Down.’ The original essay was reprinted in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, with Other Early Essays, in The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew (London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 1:188–95. 10 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1877/78; London: A.C. Fifield, 1916), 86 (hereafter cited in text as LH). 11 For an excellent discussion of nineteenth-century theories of organic memory, see Otis, Organic Memory, 1–40, and on Butler, 19–27. See also Stephen

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12

13

14

15 16

17

18 19

Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 96–100. T.A. Ribot’s most relevant work was Heredity: A Psychological Study of Its Phenomena, Laws, Causes and Consequences (1873; trans. 1875). George Romanes, who saw himself as Darwin’s heir in the field of evolutionary psychology, published an utterly scathing review of Unconscious Memory in Nature (27 January 1881). His own works included Animal Intelligence (1881), Mental Evolution in Animals (1883), and Mental Evolution in Man (1888). Butler, Life and Habit, 59–60. These thoughts are a continuation of Butler’s cynical reflections in ‘The World of the Unborn’ (Erewhon), where the unborn commit suicide in order to join the ranks of the living. Erewhon, or Over the Range, ed. Peter Mudford (1872; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 168. In Unconscious Memory Butler even extended this consciousness to the inorganic world, thus developing the playful analogy he had deployed in ‘The Book of Machines’ in Erewhon: ‘What we call the inorganic world must be regarded as up to a certain point living, and instinct, within certain limits, with consciousness, volition, and power of concerted action. It is only of late, however, that I have come to this opinion’ (Unconscious Memory, 15). For Francis Darwin’s responses to Life and Habit, see Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of ‘Erewhon,’ 1:257–65 (264). As the lengthy subtitle might suggest to anyone now familiar with Butler’s work, The Fair Haven is anything but a defence of the Gospels, offering the very rationalistic dissection its title seeks to deplore. The lengthy memoir that prefaces the text is Butler’s first attempt at biographical fiction. George Bernard Shaw, who had been a great supporter of Butler during his lifetime, greeted The Way of All Flesh on publication as ‘one of the great books of the world’ (Daniel F. Howard, Introduction to Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh, xv). It lies behind the meditations on father-child relations in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The chronology is printed in WOAF, 364–5. There is no doubt a reference backwards here to The Fair Haven, where John Pickard Owen’s mother has even more elaborate religious fantasies than Christina about her son’s future religious glory and martyrdom. In Sartor Resartus, which like The Fair Haven is a fictional memoir, the supposed editor, trying to make sense of Teufelsdröckh’s life and writings, observes: ‘Never perhaps since our first Bridge-builders, Sin and Death, built that stupendous Arch from Hell-gate to the Earth, did any Pontifex, or Pontiff,

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20

21

22 23

24

25 26

27

28

29 30

undertake such a task as the present Editor’ (Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus [1834; London: Macmillan, 1901], 67). Samuel Butler, ‘Thought and Language,’ in Essays on Life, Art, and Science, ed. R.A. Streatfield (London: A.C Fifield, 1908), 233. The essay was first given as a lecture at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street in 1890. In introducing his ideas of natural selection, Darwin speaks lyrically of ‘exquisite adaptations’: ‘in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.’ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 51. ‘A Catechism, an Instruction to be learned of every person before he be brought to be Confirmed by the Bishop,’ The Book of Common Prayer. Butler, however, is no great defender of Christ. In one of his most heretical notes, he observes: ‘If I had been born in the times of Jesus Christ, I trust I should not have been among his disciples. I hope I might even have been among those who crucified him, but one must beware of spiritual pride’ (Note-Books, 139). See Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (1855), and the second more evolutionary version (1870–2); G.H. Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life (1859–60), and Problems of Life and Mind, 5 vols (1874–9). For Haeckel, and for other nineteenth-century discussions of the workings of memory, see Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 308–11, 141–62. Otis, Organic Memory, 10–11. J. Miriam Benn, The Predicaments of Love (London: Pluto, 1992), 10. Benn offers a helpful account of Drysdale’s work on birth control, which led to the founding of the Malthusian League in 1877. [George Drysdale], The Elements of Social Science; or Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion, by a Graduate of Medicine, 3rd ed. (London: E. Truelove, 1860), 80. The inscription is on the flyleaf, and the copy is held in the Butler Collection, St John’s College, Cambridge. The book was first published in 1854, but without the more neutral first section of the title. Ibid., preface, n.p. In Drysdale’s case the parent he feared to offend was not his father, who was dead, but his mother. Butler’s quarrels with his own parents were of course intensified by the publication of Erewhon. Ibid., 73. See Butler, Life and Habit, 103, on mankind as a ‘compound animal.’ Drysdale, Elements of Social Science, 74.

168 Sally Shuttleworth 31 Extracts from Drysdale’s section, ‘Sexual Religion,’ are reproduced in Bourne Taylor and Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves, 217–22 (219). 32 St Paul had commanded the Christian community to abstain from ‘fornication, from anything strangled and from blood’ (Acts 15: 19–20). Christina’s resolution to abstain from black pudding is her interpretation of this injunction. ‘She did abstain, and was certain that from the day of her resolve she had felt stronger, purer in heart, and in all respects more spiritually minded than she had ever felt hitherto’ (WOAF, 64). Jones suggests that these details were taken directly from the life of Butler’s mother (Samuel Butler, 1:24). 33 See Sally Shuttleworth, ‘“Done because we are too menny”: Little Father Time and Child Suicide in Late-Victorian Culture,’ in Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, ed. Phillip Mallett (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 133– 55. 34 See, for example, Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Sexual Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1888), 228, where Darwin discusses inheritance at corresponding periods of life. 35 In Unconscious Memory, Butler outlines the four principles which underpin Life and Habit (although in the text itself they appear to emerge as he writes, rather than governing the direction of the argument from the outset): ‘the oneness of personality between parents and offspring; memory on the part of offspring of certain actions which it did when in the persons of its forefathers; the latency of that memory until it is rekindled by a recurrence of the associated ideas; and the unconsciousness with which habitual actions come to be performed’ (UM, 19). 36 The Way of All Flesh, ‘Addenda for the Pontifex Novel,’ 362. 37 See ‘Prelude’ to The Egoist: An Annotated Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Robert M. Adams (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1979), which introduces the reader to the Comic Spirit who is to preside over the unmasking of the Egoist. Meredith suggests that ‘in Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the stroke of honourable laughter’ (5). It is an open question whether charity is really in operation in either The Egoist or The Way of All Flesh. Although there are strong similarities between the works of Butler and Meredith in their playfulness, narrative experimentation, and preoccupation with evolution, Butler had little time for Meredith who, as publisher’s reader for Chapman Hall, had refused the manuscript of Erewhon. 38 Ernest observes, ‘The people like Towneley are the only ones who know anything that is worth knowing, and like that of course I can never be. But to make Towneleys possible there must be hewers of wood and drawers of

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39

40

41

42 43

water – men in fact through whom conscious knowledge must pass before it can reach those who can apply it gracefully and instinctively like the Towneleys can’ (287). In chapter 2 of Life and Habit, ‘Conscious and Unconscious Knowers – The Law and Grace,’ Butler develops his theories of grace in opposition to the practice of the modern scientist whose strivings to acquire knowledge are dismissed as worse than useless. The truly scientific, he suggests, are ‘our English youth, who live in the open air, and, as Lord Beaconsfield finely said, never read’ (35). In The Way of All Flesh Butler argues that the scientist is far more dangerous than the Theobalds of the church, since ‘The spirit behind the Huxleys and Tyndalls is as lying as its letter’ (334). Life and Habit was dedicated to Butler’s friend, Charles Paine Pauli, who is usually seen as a model for Towneley (see Jones, Memoir, 2:8). Butler quotes from an essay in Ernest’s book: ‘That a man should have been bred well and breed others well; that his figure, head, hands, feet, voice, manner and clothes should carry conviction on this point, so that no one can look at him without seeing that he has come of good stock and is likely to throw good stock himself, this is the desiderandum’ (WOAF, 344). Francis Galton had not yet coined the term ‘eugenics’ when Butler was writing, but had begun publishing in the field with Hereditary Genius (1869) and ‘Hereditary Improvement,’ Fraser’s Magazine 7 (1873): 116–30. Ernest gives voice to Butler’s theories that children need to start in a lower position than their parents on the social scale and ‘go through the embryonic stages with their money as much as with their limbs’ (340). Henry Maudsley, for example, had suggested in Body and Mind (1870) that drunkenness in parents was the first step in a slide to idiocy and insanity in succeeding generations (see Bourne Taylor and Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves, 326–9). Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, ed. Peter Abbs (1907; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 251. Butler had anticipated the unsettling of temporal boundaries in Erewhon, where the unborn commit suicide in order to enter earthly life. He had not, however, attempted to construct a narrative where time moved backwards.

7 Samuel Butler as Late-Victorian Bachelor: Regulating and Representing the Homoerotic herbert sussman

Samuel Butler fashioned himself and was comprehended by his contemporaries within the late-Victorian category of the bachelor. At Heatherley’s Art School, reports Henry Festing Jones, the ‘lady students’ on the lookout for a husband recognized that their well-to-do, handsome schoolmate was not a candidate, but rather called Butler ‘the incarnate bachelor.’1 Butler himself saw Melchisedec as a ‘really happy man’ in being an ‘incarnate bachelor.’2 And to praise the ideal wisdom dispensed by Overton, his mentor, about marriage, Ernest says to him, ‘You are an incarnate bachelor.’3 ‘Incarnate’ means embodied, and its repeated use by Butler and those who knew him suggests the apprehension that bachelorhood was a way of his flesh, the socially acceptable mode for managing male same-sex desire that is innate, unchangeable, fixed in his bodily self. In Foucauldian terms, Butler’s performance of late-Victorian bachelorhood, a role readily available in the repertoire of masculinities in lateVictorian England, provided a technology of the self that enabled him, albeit with severe tensions, to manage his homoerotic impulses while keeping within the boundaries of social respectability.4 The bachelor culture of the later nineteenth century that Butler exemplifies occupied an edgy position between bourgeois propriety and the emerging, increasingly public gay subculture; it functioned as a social compromise that allowed certain bourgeois men, as well as workingclass men, to reject marriage for discreet, romantic friendships with other men. But the respectability of the bachelor style began to disintegrate during Butler’s life in England. When Butler returned from New Zealand with Charles Paine Pauli in 1864, they took quarters on separate floors of Clifford’s Inn, ‘breakfasting and generally spending the evening together.’5 In the 1860s, such circumspect male domesticity was

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socially acceptable. But from the 1870s, and especially in the 1890s with the notoriety of Oscar Wilde, the bachelor life had become suspect, the bachelor compromise compromised as a masquerade of abnormal sexual desire. Butler’s intense adherence to the bachelor style even into the 1890s indicates his personal investment in containing his homoeroticism within the limits of bourgeois propriety. And yet as he engaged and to some extent internalized the late nineteenth-century discursive shift towards the conceptualization of same-sex desire as abnormality and perversion, in his idiosyncratic fashion he generated a reverse discourse.6 His private and public writings, his Note-Books, and his theoretic musings code his search for a thematics, a language for what he saw as the naturalness and innateness of the male same-sex desire he was so assiduously and constantly controlling. Much of what seems merely quirky and even risible in his intellectual, literary, and emotional life can be seen as consistent with this effort to create, in the absence of an accepted discourse in England, a justification for his homoerotic impulses. It is as a participant in the emergent gay literature of the late nineteenth century, along with his bachelor contemporaries Walter Pater and Henry James, that Butler assumes an important position within the tradition of the modern.7 Bachelor Style There can be little doubt as to the intensity of Butler’s same-sex desire and the intensity with which he deployed the bachelor mode to regulate it. Victorian bachelorhood enabled a middle-class man who rejected compulsory matrimony to remain distinctly middle class, for above all the bachelor was respectable, working often within professions such as medicine, as does Dr Jekyll, or the law, as does Jekyll’s friend, Utterson. Butler chose to live in close proximity to the Inns of Court, whose homosocial, convivial community is idealized by Herman Melville in ‘The Paradise of Bachelors.’8 Butler’s daily life, like that of any other dedicated professional man, allowed no time for sloth or dissipation. As Jones is at some pains to set forth in the Memoir, Butler followed a meticulous work schedule: ‘I get away to the British Museum as quickly as I can; I am there always about 10.15–10.30 ... I work at the Museum till 1 ... From 3 till 5 or 5:30 I write letters at home while Alfred [Cathie, his servant] typewrites for me, either my Homer or notes for my commonplace book’ (Memoir, 1:256). For Butler, as for Pater and James, the aim of bachelordom was always

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to contain the homoerotic within the respectable. When not working, the bachelor was devotedly domestic. Butler’s relation with a young man usually took the form of a tête-à-tête within his chambers, rather than a public spectacle in the later manner of Wilde. For his longer lasting homoerotic relations Butler chose serial monogamy, as in the case of Pauli and later Jones, or including the male object of desire within an allmale family, as in the case of Hans Faesch, the young Swiss man whom Butler and Jones adopted as surrogate son in 1893. The difficulty of this domestication of desire is well illustrated in Butler’s relationship with Pauli. In New Zealand, Butler had been immediately smitten with Pauli, ‘suddenly intimate with a personality quite different to that of anyone whom I had ever known’ (Butleriana, 41). Although ‘intimate’ does not carry the modern overtones of physical sex, the confession of passion indicates the strength of the same-sex male desire that Pauli picked up and employed to live off his closeted victims. Back in London in 1864, Butler and Pauli lived at Clifford’s Inn in a respectable male marriage, an eerie re-enactment of life at Langar rectory that continued for one year until Pauli moved to a location in the West End that he refused to reveal to Butler. Until Pauli’s death in 1897, this wall of male domesticity had the veneer of social acceptability. Yet Butler could maintain this bachelor style only by abjectly using cash payment to hold on to a man for whom he felt the ‘white heat of devotion’ (Butleriana, 93). Butler’s passion for Pauli was shaped by the nexus of homoeroticism and class exemplified in the cult of athleticism that Butler encountered at Shrewsbury and Cambridge. Butler’s desire focused on the healthy male body of the class to which he aspired. Such longing is nicely evoked by Muggeridge: ‘In the boathouse [at Cambridge] he [Butler] watched the self-confident thighs, the sting of cold water on broad chests, the soft, rippling surface of athletic backs, reveling in all that was the opposite of Langar and himself’ (30–1). Pauli was a Winchester and Oxford man, ‘a fine handsome fellow, with such an attractive manner’ (Butleriana, 42). For the besotted Butler, he was ‘everything that I should like myself to be but knew very well that I was not ... I knew that I was far from being all that I should wish myself either in body or mind’ (ibid.). With Pauli, and with Jones and Faesch, Butler most likely kept within the homosocial boundaries of his time. There is no evidence of genital contact with other men, although the temptations of overstepping the line strained his close male relationships. Jones tells that while travel-

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ling in Italy, he and Butler were forced to share a double bed, a practice not uncommon for men in the nineteenth century, but one that Jones notes was somewhat unusual for them. The attention Jones gives to this seemingly inconsequential detail indicates the strain for both manifested in the sleepless night; his urge to set the event in the comic register suggests the stress of maintaining chastity in a long-term relationship grounded in strong homoerotic attraction: ‘He is afraid his snoring will disturb me and says I am to wake him if he snores. The consequence is we neither of us go to sleep; he is afraid if I do he will snore and I shall not be able to wake him, and he won’t like that’ (Memoir, 2:56–8). Even the scheduled excursions into heterosexual sex functioned less to relieve the sexual tension of maintaining the chasteness of bachelorhood than to act out the intense same-sex desire for one’s daily companions. Butler visited the prostitute Lucie Dumas every Wednesday afternoon. Jones visited on Tuesdays. Even Alfred confessed he ‘took her out once or twice’ (Muggeridge, 164). In characteristic Victorian fashion, then, like the bachelor pursuers of Dracula, these men perform their sexual bond through the body of a woman. As Steven Marcus notes in his study of Victorian pornography, the fantasy of ‘two men entering a woman at the same time ... [is] a form in which male homosexual play is still disguised in heterosexual activity.’9 When Lucie Dumas died, Butler noted that it was ‘a very heavy blow to Jones also, as well as to myself’ (quoted in Henderson, 174). Even with the regular visit to the female prostitute, the right of the married bourgeois, the bachelor mode still ran counter to the Victorian expectation that boys would become men by leaving behind that homosocial, even homoerotic, world encountered by Butler at public school and university for the supposed heterosexual delights of marriage. Butler’s life, in contrast, displays a continuous effort to exemplify and to oppose the compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory marriage imposed on Victorian men by advocating lifelong bachelorhood as a discipline for those of homoerotic inclination. Butler was not only a bachelor, but he wanted others whom he thought shared his temperament to become bachelors also. His bachelor agenda looked towards establishing a community of single men united against, on the one side, obligatory marriage, and on the other, overt same-sex sexuality. Although only realized in Butler’s private circle, this impulse shows Butler engaging in the process of ‘reverse’ discourse so well described by Foucault and so apparent throughout Europe in the nineteenth

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century, through which the definition of the sexually non-normative generates bonded communities defined by such socially-defined abnormality.10 This bachelor agenda is typified in Butler’s relationship with the younger painter Henry Scott Tuke, who, like Butler, was caught between respectability and homoerotic impulse. Tuke had become well known in the late nineteenth century as a painter of distinctly homoerotic images of nude adolescents swimming, such as August Blue (1894) (fig. 7.1), a work whose title is taken from Swinburne’s ‘Sun-Dew’ (1866) as homage to this earlier sexual pioneer.11 Butler had heard of Tuke in 1879 from Tom Gotch, an older mutual friend whom Butler had met at Heatherley’s Art School, a reminder of the sexual looseness of the milieu of bohemian bachelor artists in which Butler travelled from the 1860s through the 1870s.12 Butler was clearly attracted to Tuke after their first meeting, and the close friendship continued. When Tuke confided to Butler his connection to a young woman, Butler wrote to Tuke begging him not to get engaged, or if he were engaged to break off the engagement. As it turned out Tuke probably had not proposed, and continued to visit Butler and Jones for bachelor conversations about Handel.13 That Tuke’s rejection of marriage is due less to the fevered urgings of Butler than to the sexual inclinations manifested in his obsessively painting and repainting naked boys swimming in the waters off Falmouth does not diminish the fact of Butler’s fervour in attempting to maintain a homoerotic circle against the threat of marriage. And yet, an upstanding Victorian, Butler translated the imperatives of bourgeois marriage and family into his own terms, into a life of male marriage and all-male family solidified by homoerotic bonds. Having met Hans Faesch on the Continent, Jones brought him to London in 1893 to see Butler, who, Jones notes, ‘was much attracted by him’ (Memoir, 2:163). Faesch was soon drawn into a familial bourgeois routine, ‘constantly with us, coming out for walks on Sunday and spending the evening with us’ (Memoir, 2:165). In this ménage, Butler and Jones acted as parents to the younger and more dependent Faesch who, as sons so often do, finally left his adopted parents. Butler and Jones were then afflicted with the pain of all parents when their favoured child departs, a pain intensified by unrequited homoerotic desire. The bachelor style so vulnerable to dangerous erotic eruptions, as in the moment of Faesch’s departure, and to long-term sexual abjection, as in Butler’s continued payments to Pauli, demanded a specific affective style – in Sedgwick’s nice phrase, a ‘sexual anesthesia’ (161) as a

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7.1 August Blue (1894), by Henry Scott Tuke.

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defence against the springing of the beast in the jungle, the display of homoerotic desire. Butler’s continuous low-level homosexual panic moved him to disengage from the world to live in his secular cloister with a tiny circle of admirers. And a dialectic of desire and control, a tension between his intense same-sex male desire and his devotion to bourgeois mores, emerges in the indeterminacy and instability that mark his accounts of the homoerotic. Thematics of the Homoerotic Late-Victorian culture offered Butler no agreed-upon thematics of the homoerotic, no articulated identity for a male with homoerotic desire. The wish to reveal and to conceal his male desire is a constant presence in Butler’s conversations, in his private writings such as the NoteBooks, in his utopian satires, and in his evolutionary speculation. The sexual desire that Butler finally comprehends in the last decades of his life does not speak its name because there is, as yet, no name. Yet he is occupied with finding his own names in such terms as ‘health’ or ‘unconscious memory,’ in his characteristic idiosyncratic fashion participating in the late nineteenth-century discursive shift in sexuality – delinking the sexual from the moral, employing a historical relativism, moving the sexual from the domain of the theological into the domain of the biological. Butler’s public and private examination of the self, and particularly of his own self, is marked above all by an occupation with innateness as defined in his own idiosyncratic terms, the belief that the person and personal desire, particularly homoerotic desire, are fixed – unchangeable and unchanging – and that this personal core must, finally, be identified and heeded. Travelling in Greece in 1895, he met an official who told him that he was ‘troubled in mind’ because he was fifty and not married. Asked for his opinion, Butler replied, tactfully, that ‘it had evidently been the will of Allah that he should not get married’ (Memoir, 2:221–2). Within his own reformulation of divine will in biological terms, Butler saw his own unmarried state as also attributable to a force beyond his control, to an inherited homoerotic desire that demanded a life lived as a bachelor. For Butler, then, his own sexual temperament is inborn. In the first of the three guilt-ridden sonnets he wrote in 1901 after the death of Eliza Savage, he employs the tropes of heterosexuality, saying rather cruelly and rather crudely that had she not been ‘plain and lame and fat and

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short ... she might have found me of another mind’ (Butleriana, 151). But in the second sonnet, he shifts the ground of his inability to enter a heterosexual relation with Savage from her body to his own psyche, to the innate same-sex desire against which conscious choice is powerless: She said she wished I knew not wrong from right; It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite, Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen.

Again, control lies in the way of his flesh: ‘A man will yield for pity, if he can, / But if the flesh rebels what can he do?’ (Butleriana, 152). For this innate sexual temperament, Butler’s evolutionary idea of ‘unconscious memory’ becomes a particularly useful category for theorizing the inheritability of homoerotic desires and thus their naturalness, and for situating same-sex attraction in the realm of the biological rather than that of biblical morality. Butler’s paradoxical notion of memories of which we are unaware, that have become habit, provides a powerful figure for the presence of inherited but unvoiced feelings, for desire that is inborn yet not fully apprehended. In his evolutionary speculation, Butler participates in the late nineteenth-century intellectual move that relocates the sexual, and especially the homoerotic, from the religious to the biological – a shift manifested in the emergence of sexology, the ostensibly scientific study of sex represented on the Continent by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and in England by Havelock Ellis. Ellis writes in Sexual Inversion (1897) of ‘the sexual instinct’ and of the harm caused by the ‘wealth of moral energy [exerted] in directing or misdirecting it.’14 Butler sees what his Darwinian opponents call instinct as a set of habits that have been acquired over time, inherited, and moved below consciousness, much like our ability to breathe or digest. Reproduction, then, is not the effort to follow the biblical injunction to multiply, but rather a biological urge – a form of unconscious volition, in Butler’s paradoxical vocabulary – that seeks to pass on personal identity: ‘We should expect to find a predominance of sexual over asexual generation, in the arrangements of nature for continuing her various species, inasmuch as two heads are better than one, and a locus poenitentiae is thus given to the embryo – an opportunity of correcting the experience of one parent by that of the other. And this is what the more intelligent embryos may be supposed to do.’15

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Butler’s idiosyncratic evolutionary theory, then, provides a vocabulary for the shape and the power of his own desires. Indeed, what Butler terms ‘desire,’ erotically charged longing, is the single greatest force that drives his concept of evolution. Desire is a greater evolutionary force, in Butler’s view, than Darwin’s natural selection. In Life and Habit he says, ‘Against faith, then, and desire, all the “natural selection” in the world will not stop an amoeba from becoming an elephant ... Without faith and desire, neither “natural selection” nor artificial breeding will be able to do much in the way of modifying any structure’ (65). Butler typically merged the evolutionary and the erotic. Like the sexologists, he often reduced sexual desire to a purely biological drive analogous to hunger. With a satirical thrust worthy of the author of Erewhon, Havelock Ellis wrote in 1897: ‘Let my friends try to transfer their feelings and theories from the reproductive region to, let us say, the nutritive region, the only other which can be compared to it for importance. Suppose that eating and drinking was never spoken of openly, save in veiled or poetic language, and that no one ever ate food publicly, because it was considered immoral and immodest to reveal the mysteries of this natural function.’16 Similarly, Butler wrote in his NoteBooks: ‘There is no true love short of eating and consequent assimilation’ (NB 1917, 205). As a hunger of the flesh, sexual desire can be satisfied without the need of emotion. As hunger is satiated in visiting a restaurant, so sexual desire can be satisfied by a visit to a prostitute, a practice of Butler in his own life: ‘When we really mean business and are hungry with affection, we do not know that we are in love, but simply go into the love-shop – for so any eating-house should be more fitly called – ask the price, pay our money down, and love till we can either love or pay no longer’ (NB 1917, 206). The identification of evolutionary process with the homoerotic appears in one of Butler’s few overt comments on ‘love’ as same-sex male desire; this is in a letter of 1884 to Edward James Jones describing Butler’s attraction to Edward’s brother, Henry Festing. As in The Way of All Flesh and Erewhon, desire is naturalized in biological terms, here through language that echoes Pater’s ‘Conclusion’:17 We know the closeness of the analogy between growth, the repair of wasted tissues, and reproduction ... It is curious that this analogy extends to the mental condition which precedes both eating and the act of generation; in each case there is an appetite – a strong desire to unify some foreign body with ourselves as closely as possible. Love involves an effort

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after identifying something with ourselves, which ends either in assimilation, by eating, or in connection and reproduction, and consequently in assimilation after all. (Memoir, 1:431)

Another example of Butler’s biologizing of the homoerotic comes from 1895 when, writing lovelorn and bereft to the absent Hans Faesch, he employs a vocabulary of desire indistinguishable from his speculation about evolution as the unconscious creation of tools: ‘The true life of anyone is not the one they live in themselves, and of which they are themselves conscious, but the life they live in the hearts of others; our bodies and brains are but the tools with which we work to make our true life which is not in the tool-box and tools we ignorantly mistake for ourselves but in the work we do with them; and this work, if it be truly done, lives more in others than in themselves’ (Memoir, 2:204–5). In considering Butler’s biologizing of the homoerotic, we should note that he specifically attributes what the late nineteenth century called inversion – the presence of a female in a male body, or a male in a female body – not to moral failing, but to the process of inheritance: ‘The offspring is almost invariably either male or female, and generally resembles rather the one parent than the other, but also that in spite of such preponderance of one set of recollections, the sexual characters and instincts of the opposite sex appear, whether in male or female’ (LH, 136). If inversion is ‘one set of recollections’ that have been passed down, then such inherited unconscious memories can be brought to consciousness and become a guide to authentic behaviour, as in the case of Ernest Pontifex. For Butler, then, the criteria of morality shift from the biblical prohibitions of the rectory to the biological, and quite consistently to the health of the body, particularly to the young, beautiful male body. Butler speculates about the ‘course of conduct’ in his Note-Books: ‘If it does no harm to the body we ought to be very chary of calling it immoral, while if it tends towards physical excellence there should be no hesitation in calling it moral’ (NB 1917, 26). Even though he cannot name same-sex desire, even to himself, he speculates about it within the parameters of physical misshapenness: ‘The world can ill spare any vice which has obtained long and largely among civilised people. Such a vice must have some good along with its deformities’ (NB 1917, 27). Butler’s feeling for male beauty and physical health as moral validation was invigorated by his experience of an alternative world outside England. On landing in New Zealand, he was overwhelmed by the

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physical health and unselfconscious good looks of the white male colonists. With his homoerotic sensibility shaped by the all-male schools of England and by study of the ancient Greeks, Butler saw in New Zealand an all-male utopia, the body freed from the deforming confines of puritanical morality and manifesting a Whitmanesque bodily vigour undistorted by intellectual pursuits. Butler wrote home: ‘New Zealand seems far better adapted to develop and maintain in health the physical than the intellectual nature ... Yet, after all, it may be questioned whether the intellect is not as well schooled here as at home, though in a very different manner. Men are as shrewd and sensible, as alive to the humorous, and as hard-headed’ (Memoir, 1:78). And indeed, in his interval of intense bodily action in successfully running a sheep station, so different from his sedentary life in Clifford’s Inn, Butler himself achieved for a brief moment this ideal of a healthy body through a physically active life removed from the world of women, as well as a habit of intellectual antiintellectualism. Erewhon is in many ways a projection of the life lived among the all-male, antiintellectual society he so admired and of the physically hardy type that he actually became for a short time in New Zealand. Erewhon sets forth a fantasy realm in which his own admiration of manly bodily beauty finds an incarnation. Although masked by the narrator’s attention to women, male desire informs the work. Not only are the Erewhonian men physically attractive, a dream of Cambridge men as primitives, but within this fantasy the narrator, Butler in his New Zealand persona, is included within the world of athletes he so admired from afar at Cambridge: ‘I liked them and admired them, for their quiet selfpossession and dignified ease impressed me pleasurably at once. Neither did their manner make me feel as though I were personally distasteful to them.’18 The male Erewhonians fuse the muscularity of Cantabrigians with the racially inflected homoerotic attraction that motivated a lifetime of journeys by Butler and Jones to the Italian Alps: ‘Their type was more that of the most robust Italians than any other; their manners also were eminently Italian, in their entire unconsciousness of self’ (EOR, 50). Within the highly coded validation of homoeroticism in Erewhon, animal vigour, the good health of the Erewhonians as of the ‘robust Italians’ and the ancient Greeks, becomes a sign of a homoeroticism marked by an ‘entire unconsciousness of self.’ The Erewhonian linkage of disease with volition, and even with crime, resonates as another instance of Butler’s move to sever same-sex desire from the moral realm, to make

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the well-being of the body the basis of sexual ethics. As the free play of the body is linked with the primitive, the natural, and the normal, the opposite – within Butler’s topsy-turvy world, the practice of heterosexuality – is associated with the civilized, the unnatural, and the abnormal, in short with disease as deformation of the body. The road to health, then, is the free play of male same-sex desire. Men can thus choose to control or avoid disease through such sexual play. In a typically hidden mode, then, Butler seems to be saying that if men chose to free their bodies, as in the example of the Cambridge New Zealanders, disease would disappear. Not to make this choice is crime as violation of the body and of the health of the body politic. Sentencing the man with consumption, the judge says: ‘I do not hesitate therefore to sentence you to imprisonment, with hard labour, for the rest of your miserable existence. During that period I would earnestly entreat you to repent of the wrongs you have done already, and to entirely reform the constitution of your whole body’ (EOR, 110). Here is a coded, deeply subversive Whitmanesque message: that ‘reform’ of the body, bodily health, could be achieved by repenting of ‘wrongs ... done already,’ as repudiating the heterosexual life in order to engage in healthful homoerotic masculine desire. The relation in Erewhon of crime and disease registers a radical comment – that criminalization of male-male sex in late nineteenth-century England, rather than healing the sexual body of the nation, has instead generated disease seen in the unhealth of the men of England. If we move from the highly defended published work to the private life, we see a Butler untouched by the air-brushing of Jones and his own self-fashioning, taking a ribald, even scatological interest in the male body. At age 34, Butler, then a student at Heatherley’s Art School and newly interested in the new field of photography, took a photo of ‘Rose, the model.’19 In this image (fig. 7.2) of what Butler calls ‘the finest torso I ever saw’ (Memoir, 1:141), only the torso is shown, the arms drawn back so as to thrust forward the articulation of the abdominal muscles. The genitalia are shown in full frontal nudity, a Victorian Full Monty. Nor is the body embedded in a narrative apparatus, as was the case in most Victorian representations of the male nude.20 With the head cut off, Rose is shorn of personality, becomes only a beautiful male body. As with the Erewhonians, the image moves to the healthy body itself as the ground of interest, of beauty, of value, and of desire. Butler’s rather witty subversive speculation on the image reimagines the Victorian idealizing of the classic, as well as painterly religiosity, as grounded in the homoerotic gaze. Of Rose, Butler says that this body

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Image Not Available

7.2 Rose, the model. Photograph by Butler, ca. 1867.

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brings us to the real, to the actual male bodies that so inspired the Greeks: ‘All the markings which we see in the antique and accept, though we never fully see them in real life, were not only there but in as full development as I ever saw in the antique; with the exception, of course, of the obviously exaggerated Hercules’ (Memoir, 1:141). Butler also gleefully notes that Rose ‘was the model used by Poynter for his well-known picture “Israel in Egypt”; all the Jews in that picture are Rose’ (Memoir, 1:141). That ‘all the Jews in [Poynter’s] picture are Rose’ suggests for Butler not only the secret of that staid Victorian artist’s desires, but also that even Victorian Hebraism itself as represented by Poynter is informed by the homoerotic gaze. This male desire, so central to Butler’s imagination yet so defended against in his public writing, was allowed free and bawdy expression within his all-male circle. Butler is amused that ‘Rose got this wonderful development of arms and torso through turning a sausage machine,’ an evident play on ‘sausage’ for the attraction of this phallic body. In humorously lewd terms and with the suggestion of sex as the basis of a new religion, he equates the sacred, the phallic, and the homoerotic: ‘He seems to have ground beauty into his own body. I suppose he ground his sausages to the Lord’ (Memoir, 1:142). The repartee as these bachelors admire Rose sub rosa in the privacy of their bachelor quarters provides a glimpse of what must have been for Butler a safe space for homoerotic musings within this homosocial band of artists, as well as in his more private conversation with Jones. These private speculations about the biological basis of male desire, the universality of such desire, and its association with physical health suggest Butler’s growing self-awareness of the nature of his own desires and his consequent fearful sense, especially in the last decade of the century, that the bachelor style provided only a fragile protection against his being identified with the emerging and increasingly public gay subculture. This homosexual panic that intensified in the last decade of his life is exemplified in the complex history of the poem ‘In Memoriam H.R.F.’ that he wrote, on the departure of Faesch for Singapore in 1895, to express the baffled desire so well controlled by the familial routines of Clifford’s Inn: Therefore let tears flow on, for so long as we live No such second sorrow shall ever draw nigh us, Till one of us two leaves the other alone And goes out, out, out into the night.21

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Jones notes that Butler called the poem ‘an In Memoriam because he had persuaded himself that we should never see Hans again’ (Memoir, 2:201). In marking his own poem as a homage to Tennyson, Butler not only sees his separation from the young man as an emotional death, but also sees himself as participating within a tradition of homoerotic poetry that he recognizes in Tennyson’s great Victorian elegy. What is even more striking in regard to Butler’s self-awareness of his same-sex desire and of his modulation into a writer of homoerotic literature is that Jones characterizes this poem to Faesch as Butler’s ‘Calamus poem’ (Memoir, 2:200) – a clear reference to Whitman’s set of poems on male desire, poetry that was widely known in England, clearly associated with male love, and familiar to Butler. Butler himself wrote, ‘America will have her geniuses, as every other country has, in fact she has already had one in Walt Whitman’ (NB 1917, 179). Jones’s characterizing the poem as a homage to Whitman suggests not only the immersion of both Butler and Jones in the gay literature of their time, but also their own recognition of the homoerotic basis of their relation to Faesch. The realization that homoerotic feeling had visibly erupted in the poem generated a fit of homosexual panic that set in motion a frantic return to the secretiveness practised under the sign of the bachelor. Butler had sent the poem, which he considered ‘the best thing I ever wrote,’22 out for publication. He wrote Faesch in March of 1895: ‘I am not comfortable about publishing it, but of course all names will be carefully concealed. I wanted to set you and Jones and myself together, as it were, in a ring where we might stay and live together in the hearts of the kind of people we should have loved had we known them’ (Memoir, 2:205). The rather vague circumlocution of ‘the kind of people we should have loved had we known them,’ defensively formed in a ‘ring,’ suggests Butler’s identification with other men of the same proclivity. Such self-identification in terms of sexual inclination marks a sharp move from his earlier identification of himself as an asexual bachelor. In June of that same year, Butler wrote to journals and newspapers to withdraw the poem from consideration. He wrote again to Faesch: ‘Things have happened in England which make Jones and me decide not to publish it even anonymously’ (quoted in Raby, 261). As Butler’s own note on the letter to Faesch indicates, the thing that has happened is the Wilde trial. When told earlier by Jones of the trial, Butler had replied: ‘I note what you say about “being Oscared”’ (quoted in Raby, 261) – a sexual double entendre, the play on ‘being buggered’ in keep-

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ing with his own scabrous private treatments of homoerotic desire, as in the bachelor banter over Rose the model. Indeed, Butler’s attitude to Wilde displays a marked attraction-repulsion grounded in an intense identification with what by this time he fantasized as his own possible fate of public exposure: ‘If he were not such a swaggering conceited charlatan and coxcomb I could find it in me to pity the poor wretch’ (quoted in Raby, 261). Butler is simultaneously quite paranoid and quite acute in seeing the type of the bachelor morphing into the type of the homosexual as pervert. And yet in his last years, he challenged his own fate by outing himself, identifying with Wilde by reworking Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ of 1889 into a belated account of his own homoerotic life.23 Wilde’s criticism as fiction or fiction as criticism plays with the notion that the ‘Mr W.H.’ to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are dedicated is a young man, Willie Hughes, whose name is hidden within several sonnets. Although Butler does not acknowledge Wilde, his Shakespeare’s Sonnets reconsidered,24 published in October 1899, employs Wilde’s strategy in his essay on the sonnets, with Shakespeare as a mask through which to convey as an open secret his own passion for young men. Butler’s advocacy of the naturalness and the universality of the homoerotic is here applied to Shakespeare and, by not so indirect implication, to Butler himself. Always eager to tweak received ideas, Butler rejects the impersonal or non-biographical theory of the sonnets – an appealing notion for a homophobic time in its suppression of any sense that Shakespeare might be attracted to young men – for an autobiographical theory grounded in Shakespeare as a man of homoerotic temperament. With the ironic rhetoric of seeming politesse, Butler notes, ‘I credit the upholders of this theory [the impersonal theory] with adopting it mainly because they hope by doing so to free Shakespeare from an odious imputation’ (SS, 70), indirectly arguing that if Shakespeare does it, it can’t be odious. Characteristically setting his general revaluation of the homoerotic within the domain of historical relativism, he writes: ‘Shakespeare should not have let himself be lured, but the age was what it was, and ... Shakespeare was very young’ (SS, 82) – a statement whose comic, distanced tone anticipates Virginia Woolf, an admirer of Butler, whose Orlando also portrays bisexuality as the norm in Renaissance England.25 Butler’s autobiographical theory forces Shakespeare’s life, and this is a work of critical imagination as much as Wilde’s, into the pattern of

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Butler’s own. His scheme is quite convoluted as he shapes the sonnets to provide an exact playing out of his own obsessive devotion and eventual loss of Pauli: ‘There is no one idea running through them [the sonnets] save what was running through every day of Shakespeare’s life, i.e. his passion for Mr. W.H. and his gradual estrangement from him’ (Memoir, 2:317). The penultimate paragraph of Shakespeare’s Sonnets provides a coda to Butler’s transformation from mid-Victorian bachelor to reluctant gay advocate writing in the age of Wilde. Here he sets out, albeit displaced into literary figures, his acknowledgment of his own male desire, and of the power, the beauty, and the long tradition of such desire: Fresh from the study of the other great work [Much Ado About Nothing] in which the love that passeth the love of women is portrayed as nowhere else save in the Sonnets, I cannot be struck with the fact that it is in the two greatest of all poets that we find this subject treated with the greatest intensity of feeling. The marvel, however, is this; that whereas the love of Achilles for Patroclus depicted by the Greek poet is purely English, without taint or alloy of any kind, the love of the English poet for Mr W.H. was, though only for a short time, more Greek than English. I cannot explain this. (SS, 145)

The Way of All Flesh In the early 1870s, Butler found in the Bildungsroman a form for registering his own private speculations about homoeroticism and for resolving in the fantasy of fiction the tensions of the bachelor life. In The Way of All Flesh, begun in 1873 and kept from publication until after his death, Butler slyly shapes this popular nineteenth-century genre so as to subvert received ideas about normative sexuality and to set out his justifications for masculine desire. The novel is a cunning and coherent manifesto for the homoerotic as natural, healthy, and universal, and advocates the bachelor mode as the proper style for men of homoerotic temperament living at the boundary of the homosocial and the homosexual. Butler’s late-century novel continues the masculine plot26 of earlier Victorian literature, a trajectory showing the male protagonist moving through the temptations of heterosexuality and marriage towards closure achieved through entry into an all-male society bonded by samesex feeling. Drawing upon the late nineteenth-century discursive shift

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to categories of sexual ‘perversion,’27 The Way of All Flesh provides a homoerotic reshaping of this Victorian narrative. Working against the grain of compulsory heterosexuality, the novel validates homoerotic desire and sees authentic identity achieved in a recognition of authentic non-normative sexuality. Closure comes in a union with other men of like temperament, figured in an idealized portrayal of the bachelor style as the means of living as a gay man in the world. The Way of All Flesh, then, is a deeply motivated work of gay literature, a narrative of discovering, accepting, and coping with a homoerotic temperament, a fictive dream through which Butler recapitulates and reconciles the tensions of his own homoerotic life. The title that Butler eventually came to is in keeping with his private habit of double entendre, a way for Butler to name what was otherwise unnameable. The emphasis on ‘All’ suggests, as much as the beautiful male bodies of Erewhon, the universality of male desire. Homoeroticism is indeed here incarnate. Ernest comes to realize the true way of his flesh. Although Butler’s advocacy of his evolutionary theories has been foregrounded in reading the novel,28 it is equally productive to see the biological subtext as a vehicle for the sexual occupations of the novel. In this Bildungsroman the engine of the plot is unacknowledged, inherited masculine desire that Butler explains in a reference to his own theories of unconscious memory: ‘There is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our own lives’ (WOAF, 22). These inborn homoerotic passions below the level of awareness emerge in Ernest’s later adolescence to focus on Towneley, who appears as a magical presence throughout the tale, the ideal of social distinction and male beauty modelled on the jeunesse dorée of Cambridge and on the figure of Pauli. For Ernest, who ‘was not as a general rule sensitive to the charms of the fair sex’ (WOAF, 143), the masculine passion is evident: ‘He [Towneley] was big and very handsome – as it seemed to Ernest the handsomest man whom he ever had seen nor ever could see’ (WOAF, 188). Yet throughout the novel the homoerotic gaze is charged with homosexual panic: ‘He liked looking at him if he got a chance – and was very much ashamed of himself for doing so’ (WOAF, 188). And this panic is exacerbated by lightly masked, uncontrolled sexual fantasy: ‘Ernest was frightened out of his wits. Why, I do not know, but young men are so silly. I suppose he thought Towneley would eat him

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alive’ (WOAF, 189). Such musings about being eaten bring into this work, that Butler would allow into print only after his death, the private scatological language of which he was so fond. We should remember that the opposite of Towneley is the Simeonite ‘Badcock of John’s’ (WOAF, 190). In the next stage of his progress, Ernest engages the most villainous of his tempters, Pryer. The intensity in this demonizing of the only overtly homosexual character is charged by fear of genital relations. With the sexual crudeness that Butler so well hid, the cleric’s name suggests not only that ability to ‘pry’ into the closeted personality, but also to ‘pry’ open and enter the body: ‘As soon as the two were alone together he [Pryer] eyed him all over with a quick penetrative glance and seemed not dissatisfied with the result’ (WOAF, 202). Like Pauli, who depended for his power on manipulating the repressed desires of the hustled, Pryer as Devil rouses a strong attraction as well as repulsion; Ernest has ‘glimpses of a pretty large cloven hoof ... peeping out from under the saintly robe of Pryer’s conversation’ (WOAF, 229). Like Wilde’s Lord Henry, the Mephistophelean figure he anticipates, Pryer speaks Paterese: ‘No practise is entirely vicious which has not been extinguished among the comeliest, most vigorous, and most cultivated races of mankind’ (WOAF, 205). This echo of Paterean vocabulary calls attention to Butler’s beginning the novel in 1873, the year Pater’s The Renaissance was published. The novel, then, may be contextualized not only in the age of Darwin, but in the age of Pater. The powerful threat embodied in Pryer is that he tempts Ernest not only to act out his masculine desire, but also to identify with a publicly transgressive sexual style. As with Butler’s panicky rejection of Wilde in the 1890s, the rejection of Pryer shows the necessity for Butler of refusing the aesthete, the representative of the emergent gay subculture who might tempt the hero from the closeted, bourgeois life of the bachelor. Reading within the conventions of a straight novel of initiation, one might expect that Ernest, rejecting homosexuality and driven by innate, normal heterosexuality, would finally turn to women. But Butler subverts such received ideas about the naturalness of opposite-sex desire, the Victorian justification of heterosexuality that came to be grounded in the Darwinian belief in an instinct to reproduce. After Pryer, Ernest does make some moves on women, but for gay-inflected reasons. While he is attempting to convert the prostitute, Miss Snow, Towneley, the incarnation of Ernest’s own desires, magically appears at the door saying, again with Butlerian double entendre, ‘I’m come before my time.’

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Catching sight of Ernest, he says, ‘What? you here Pontifex! – Well upon my word’ (WOAF, 231). Ernest flees. Having left Towneley to his sexual encounter with Miss Snow, Ernest, in an ambiguous phrase, ‘knew well enough what he wanted now’ (WOAF, 231), goes to the room of Miss Maitland and propositions this innocent woman. ‘Two policemen’ (WOAF, 232) appear and Ernest is taken to jail. Yet this conventional account of bourgeois youthful indiscretion with a female of the lower orders is motivated not by heterosexual, but by homoerotic desire. Imagining Towneley having sex with a prostitute, Ernest is driven by a fantasy of penetrating Towneley’s body by penetrating the body of the same prostitute, or at least the surrogate body of a supposed prostitute next door. Butler’s alter ego acts out in fiction the same fantasy acted out in his own sharing of the prostitute Lucie Dumas with Henry Festing Jones. In the fiction, however, the homoerotic contact through the body of the same woman is tinged with guilt, punished by the sexual policing of Ernest. In a similar subversion of the naturalness of heterosexuality, Ernest’s marriage to Ellen plays with the conventional plot of the middle-class boy sexually attracted to the working-class girl. Here, Ernest’s motivation for marriage outside his class is wholly non-sexual, driven by an inauthentic acceptance of marriage as obligatory and by naive antibourgeois sentiment. As Overton ironically notes, ‘He must marry someone. That was already settled. He could not marry a lady. That was absurd. He must marry a poor woman’ (WOAF, 273). And Overton, Ernest’s bachelor mentor, exhibits the jealousy displayed in Butler’s own efforts to prevent the marriage of his young male acquaintances, as well as the generalized misogyny that marks the bachelor: ‘I never yet heard that any young man to whom I had become attached was going to be married without hating his intended instinctively, though I had never seen her; I have observed that most bachelors feel the same thing’ (WOAF, 275). The elimination of heterosexual desire from the marriage plot here anticipates the Sybil Vane plot in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, a similarly gay retelling of the conventional Victorian seduction narrative, where marriage threatens the bachelor society, and the attraction to the working-class woman is attributed not to sexual attraction but to fetishistic aesthetic pleasure. Even Ernest’s abandonment of his children, often read as exemplifying Butler’s bachelor selfishness, subverts received ideas about sexuality, albeit with characteristic indeterminacy. That Ernest fathers children supports the idea that heterosexuality manifests the instinct for contin-

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uation of the species. But that feeling for the children, beyond financial support, is found neither in the instinctual makeup nor in the unconscious memory of Ernest suggests that to a subspecies of men – to those men who wisely live as bachelors – fatherhood is an unnatural act. The guidance of Ernest to a life beyond heterosexual marriage is provided by two unmarried and asexual sages, Overton and his aunt Alethæa, whose name is the Greek word for truth. Butler’s admiration of Greek life and of Greek love emerges also in the tie of Overton to Ernest that suggests the relation of the elite Athenian adult male to the adolescent of the same class, a bond merging mentoring and sexual relations. As in the attachment of Lord Henry to Dorian, such recasting of Athenian life in Victorian clothing implies, as an open secret, the homoerotic valence of the tie. And the transhistorical quality of this relation suggests Butler’s advocacy of both the universality and the value of such homoerotically charged male-male bonds. Closure of Butler’s Bildungsroman comes with a form of male marriage, the chaste consummation of the extended courtship plot between Overton and Ernest conducted with the discretion and moderation of the Athenian ideal. Having forsaken physical sex both with women and with men, Overton and Ernest settle into a celibate bachelor bond. Ernest realizes the destiny written into his flesh as he becomes ‘an incarnate bachelor’ (WOAF, 297). And yet, given Butler’s pleasure in the scatological double entendre, it would not be too crude to see Overton as not only ‘overt’ in his appeal to male desire, but also as ‘over’ the young man, as in our current parlance, a ‘top.’ Overton functions as the Superego for Ernest’s Id, an internalized sexual police for the homosexual desire that is always prone to break its bounds. But for all the similarity to Butler’s circle in Clifford’s Inn, this bachelor society of two – or of one man split into two – offers a dream of comfort free from the pressure of homoerotic passion that overcame Butler in his passion for Pauli and that generated the homosexual panic informing and limiting his life. The ending is as much a wish fulfilment as the idealized Eden of male bodily beauty over the range. As much as the novel limns a personal fantasy, the work does offer a more general vision. The longing for an untroubled society of bachelors, consistent with Butler’s efforts in his own life to create such a circle, suggests his awareness of the need for the cohesion of people with the same non-normative sexual desires – as he wrote to Faesch, ‘the kind of people we should have loved had we known them’ (Memoir, 2:205). His allegiance to the bachelor mode in life and in fiction, then,

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takes on importance as, in Foucauldian terms, the generation of reverse discourse, the process through which the defining of what is sexually ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ generates resistance as people identify and unify around society’s definitions of sexual deviance.29 I have noted the ways that Butler’s Bildungsroman anticipates the crafty subversion of compulsory heterosexuality in Wilde’s Bildungsroman, Dorian Gray. In conclusion, I would like to look a bit further forward to a novel that The Way of All Flesh resembles even more closely, E.M. Forster’s Maurice, written in 1913–14.30 In each, a none too bright, rather ordinary Oxbridge man of respectable background and philistine inclination comes to realize his own innate homoerotic temperament after several ill-fated encounters with women and with homosexual men. While Forster provides a fantastical closure in the move of Maurice and his working-class lover to the ‘greenwood’31 beyond social class and respectability, Butler’s ending in a respectable sexually controlled life is no less a wish fulfilment in its chaste serenity. Each work asserts that homoerotic desire is innate in certain men, and the choice of protagonists counters the notion, popularized by Pater and Wilde, that such desire is necessarily linked to effeminacy and aestheticism. Both Forster and Butler forbade publication of their autobiographical works until after their deaths, each fearful of disclosing the open secret of their homosexual desire. And each chose, finally, the bachelor style. Forster’s many years living in bachelor quarters at King’s College, Cambridge, resembles Butler’s at Clifford’s Inn. This similar retreat into bachelorhood suggests, finally, one reason for the high value Bloomsbury placed on Butler. His novel and his life in opposition to Wildean flamboyance and overt sexual transgression, like that of Forster’s, offered for men of homoerotic inclination the possibility of an artistic career lived within the boundaries of respectability.

NOTES 1 Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–1902): A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1919), 1:140, 2:14 (hereafter cited in text as Memoir). 2 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (1912; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917), 33 (hereafter cited in text as NB 1917). 3 Samuel Butler, Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh (1903; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 297 (hereafter cited in text as WOAF).

192 Herbert Sussman 4 Critics have centred on Butler as bachelor. George Bernard Shaw faults Butler’s ‘perverse self-limitation and old-bachelorism’ in his introduction to The Way of All Flesh (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), viii. Philip Henderson uses as the title of his still important study Samuel Butler, the Incarnate Bachelor (hereafter cited in text as Henderson). But neither these nor later critics connect ‘bachelorism’ with Butler’s homoeroticism. 5 Butleriana, ed. Bartholomew, 47 (hereafter cited in text as Butleriana). 6 ‘A strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity” ... also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.’ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978), 101. 7 For the standard account of the emergence of an increasingly public gay subculture, see Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). The most influential work on the relation of homoeroticism and the bachelor in the late-Victorian period is the study of Butler’s contemporary, Henry James, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,’ in The Masculinity Studies Reader, ed. Rachel Adams and David Savran (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 157–74 (hereafter cited in text as Sedgwick). Quite remarkably, critics have averted their eyes from Butler’s same-sex desire. Malcolm Muggeridge is one of the few to name Butler’s ‘homosexuality,’ but as acerbic as he can be about Butler, his discussion of homoeroticism evokes a Victorian idealizing by attributing Butler’s reluctance to ‘drop helpless on another body’ to the ‘spirit’s hunger.’ Muggeridge, The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937), 126 (hereafter cited in text as Muggeridge). And in our time, Butler’s advocacy of the closet is a primary reason for his inability to attract the modern reader. 8 Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 259–71. 9 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 234. 10 See n. 6. 11 See the account of this painting in Alison Smith, Exposed: The Victorian Nude (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2002), 271. The description of the relationship between Tuke and Butler is based on David Wainwright and Catherine Dinn, Henry Scott Tuke 1858–1929: Under Canvas (London: Sarema Press, 1989).

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12 For a discussion of such homoerotically inflected bonding in all-male Victorian artist communities, see Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 140–4. 13 Wainwright and Dinn, Henry Scott Tuke, 47. 14 Excerpted in Robert A. Nye, ed., Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 147. 15 Life and Habit (1878; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 140 (hereafter cited in text as LH). 16 Excerpted in Nye, Sexuality, 147. 17 ‘Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them – the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the brain under every ray of light and sound.’ Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald J. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 186. 18 Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872; New York: Random House, 1955), 50 (hereafter cited in text as EOR). 19 Butler’s work as photographer is discussed in Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye. 20 The inhibition about showing male genitalia and the setting of nude men in narrative contexts is discussed in Smith, Exposed: The Victorian Nude, 12–14. 21 The full text of ‘In Memoriam H.R.F.’ can be found in Memoir, 2:201–2. 22 Quoted in Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography, 261 (hereafter cited in text as Raby). 23 The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 152–220. 24 Samuel Butler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets reconsidered, and in part rearranged with introductory chapters, notes, and a reprint of the original 1609 edition (1899; London: Jonathan Cape, 1925) (hereafter cited in text as SS). 25 Woolf thought well of Butler. In ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1923), she wrote that ‘on or about December, 1910, human character changed ... the first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular.’ Mitchell A. Leaska, ed., The Virginia Woolf Reader (New York: Harvest, 1984), 194. 26 See the description of the masculine narrative in Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, especially chapter 3. 27 The most important statement of this shift is provided in Foucault, The History of Sexuality, in his account called ‘The Perverse Implantation.’ His influential definition of the homosexual as pervert quite strikingly outlines the structure of The Way of All Flesh as case history: ‘The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in

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28 29 30 31

addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology’ (43). See Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel, for a fine example of this method. See n. 6. Forster’s admiration for Butler is discussed in Holt, ‘E.M. Forster and Samuel Butler.’ E.M. Forster, Maurice (New York: Norton, 1971), 231.

8 Mind Matters: Butler and Late Nineteenth-Century Psychology ruth parkin-gounelas

Samuel Butler is a writer known for his oppositional strategies, and as such has frequently been referred to as an ‘exile’ or ‘Ishmael.’1 But few who have explored his work in any depth would say that he was not a man of his time – a writer, in fact, of remarkably informed (however oppositionally informed) opinions in a wide range of cultural and scientific areas. This paradoxical position was particularly evident in Butler’s engagement with the rapidly developing field of psychology in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Butler’s name in the history of science is associated with the debates within biology, his attack on Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the means by which evolution occurs and advocacy of volition and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. What is not usually recognized is the way this interest led him to a decade-long study of theories of mind being tested out in the new field now known as evolutionary psychology. This essay attempts to explore the terms of Butler’s inquiry, the specific theories that were to put him, in the opinion of the leading contemporary psychologist, James Ward, ‘on the highest wave of contemporary speculation’ in the field.2 In the decade following the publication of his Life and Habit (1878), Butler’s debates with contemporaries over the definition of mind led him to conclusions that prove him to have been a major player in the change of climate between Herbert Spencer’s mid-Victorian landmark, The Principles of Psychology (1855), and William James’s classic textbook with the same title thirty-five years later, in 1890. The fact that this contribution has remained largely unacknowledged, I shall conclude, must be attributed in the final analysis to divisions within Butler himself. The evidence for its significance, however, seems to me to be clear.

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Much of the difficulty in understanding Butler’s aims in the psychological debates stems from his dependence on dichotomies, a dependence common to all post-Cartesian thought but particularly common in the period of anxious readjustment after Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared. In the years following 1859, scientific or philosophical concepts of mind were often entangled with mind as a theologically inflected synonym for the design or purpose that orders the development of things. As agnostic and advocate of a Lamarckian position, Butler set himself the task of inserting mind (often in both senses) back into the universe, and in so doing resorted instinctively to ‘matter’ as a necessary antithesis. In Life and Habit, for example, the binaries were lined up in battle order, neatly symmetrical: faith, desire, will, and memory (all ‘mind’) on the side of the allies; chance, the mechanical, and the materialistic in enemy territory. Throughout the following decade, as I hope to demonstrate, a considerable shift took place in Butler’s thought as he moved towards the idea that mind and matter are far from antithetical, that materialism is not necessarily a dangerous position. The terms, however, remained slippery within the multiple developments in the natural history of sensation at the end of the century. It was to this tradition, I shall now argue, that Butler’s debt was greatest. The Natural History of Sensation Since the late eighteenth century, when David Hartley’s theory of associationism began to be taken seriously by the medical profession, attention had been increasingly focused on ways of viewing mind and body as other than closed circuits, on finding a vocabulary as well (later) as an experimental method to explore their relationship. Hartley had attempted an explanation of the physical mechanism of thought by drawing on Newtonian concepts of vibration and gravitation. Nerve fibres, he argued, set up permanent connections between different centres in the brain, providing an automatic link between sensation and idea. The theory ceased to play a significant role in English thought of the early nineteenth century, but in the second half of the century was taken up again, this time by philosophers rather than psychiatrists – and, through the writing of Herbert Spencer, G.H. Lewes, J.S. Mill, Alexander Bain, and others was used to reintroduce principles of the mechanics of motion back into the study of mental processes. The reinterpretation of associationism was to leave a lasting imprint on modern medical psychology, as Robert Hoeldtke has argued.3 It was also to play a crucial role in Butler’s education at Cambridge.

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As a candidate for honours in the Classical Tripos at St John’s College in the 1850s, Butler was trained in mathematics – Euclid, in particular – a discipline which suited him more than Greek and Latin poetry.4 The prevailing intellectual tendency at the university, wrote Henry Sidgwick, who came up to Cambridge one year after Butler, was a preference for ‘exactness of method and certainty of results,’ with a ‘training in mathematics and physics’ regarded as a ‘natural preparation for taking part in methodological controversy.’5 This view is endorsed by Noel Annan in his biography of Leslie Stephen, another contemporary of Butler’s, when he writes that all the major Cambridge thinkers of the time ‘gravitated to empiricism away from metaphysics which flourished in Oxford, the home of Aristotle.’6 A prominent example was Charles Darwin, another Cambridge graduate, whose empirical method in the Origin of Species was to captivate the young Butler in his early reading of the book. As a centre of natural history and philosophy at mid-century, Cambridge was most hospitable to the work of Spencer, Mill, Bain, and Lewes – as opposed to Oxford, which for two generations was dominated by German idealism. Graduates of Cambridge in the 1850s were reared on Mill’s System of Logic (1843),7 which in turn drew heavily on the associationist psychology of Locke, Hume, and Hartley.8 Crucial to the development of psychology as a science distinct from philosophy was the rejection by the neo-associationists of the doctrine of innate mental qualities, which Mill challenged most notably in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865). Mill’s disciple Alexander Bain, whose work at this time did as much as anyone’s in Britain to prepare the ground for the study of psychology as an empirical science, set himself the task of ‘construct[ing] a Natural History of the Feelings, upon the basis of a uniform descriptive method,’ as he put it in the Preface to his Senses and the Intellect (1855).9 The terms of this call were identical to those which Butler was to take up in the 1880s. Butler’s first writing, emerging from his Cambridge experience, had to do with the theory that machines may be regarded as extensions of human limbs – a material embodiment, as it were, of the human desire to develop improved adaptational skills.10 His early enthusiasm for Darwin, as is well known, came up against its first major obstacle during the writing of Life and Habit when he considered the significance of the evolution of instincts. Like many of his contemporaries, including Darwin himself at times, Butler balked at the idea that complex instincts such as breathing could have developed in random stages. If we look at the development of the steam engine, he argued, it becomes obvious that such complexity can only be possible not through ‘distant foresight’

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(as the theologians would have it), but rather in slow stages, on the basis of changing needs and use.11 Experience alone, in other words, can account for change. At the same time, however, it was necessary to account for the means by which these experiences can be accumulated, and it was here that the associationist (or ‘sensationalist’) tradition came naturally to Butler. ‘No matter how complex and difficult the process,’ he wrote, ‘if the parents have done it sufficiently often (that is to say, for a sufficient number of generations), the offspring will remember the fact when association wakens the memory’ (LH, 154). ‘Memory depends on association,’ he argues, citing from Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect as cited in Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: ‘No other force, save that of association, [has the] power to kindle ... into the flame of action the atomic spark of memory’ (LH, 155–6). We may talk as much as we like about ‘mental’ factors, he wrote, but ‘unless a deep impression [has been] made upon the cells of the body ... we could not expect it to be remembered with any definiteness or precision’ (LH, 159). Butler’s theory of instinct as a form of memory, seen outside the context of neo-associationist thought, has appeared to some critics as little more than a form of metaphorical play. In fact, it was an analogy used frequently by his contemporaries writing within the same tradition. Behind much of the speculation lay the work of the physiologist William B. Carpenter, whose Principles of Mental Physiology (1874) Butler cites from at length in Life and Habit. Carpenter was influential throughout the second half of the century in his demonstration of ‘the tendency of the organism to “grow to” the mode in which it is habitually exercised.’ According to physiological principles, he argued, there is a form of ‘storing up’ of ideas as memory, which causes physical changes in the cerebrum, where it leaves permanent ‘traces’: ‘every state of ideational consciousness which is either very strong or is habitually repeated leaves an organic impression on the cerebrum; in virtue of which that same state may be reproduced at any future time, in respondence to a suggestion fitted to excite it.’12 For Carpenter, as for others like G.H. Lewes, G.J. Romanes, and James Ward, reflex actions do not exclude consciousness but rather function in alternately physiological and psychological modes. Many scientific texts in this period were pondering such questions as those posed by Carpenter as to how to explain the jerking of a frog’s legs after it has been cut in half, or the scratching of newborn chicks on gravel. For Carpenter, as cited by Butler, local centres of ‘sensation and will’ have been induced to act according to a ‘memory’ left traced upon the organism. But for another contemporary working closely in the field in France, there was a different explanation.

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Théodule Ribot, in his book Heredity (1873), had argued that ‘The reflex act, which is physiological, differs ... from the psychological act ... [in] that it is without consciousness’ (quoted in LH, 98). Consciousness and instinct are thus for Ribot innate, anterior to all individual experience (LH, 161), which Butler, following J.S. Mill, rejected vehemently. ‘No line can be drawn,’ he protested, ‘between psychological acts and those reflex acts which he calls physiological’ (LH, 99). Within the neo-associationist school of psychology, however, there was a crucial split – between monists like these writers, who described mental phenomena as functioning interactively with physiological phenomena, and dualists such as T.H. Huxley, who argued that mind is a mere by-product of cerebration. In his famous essay ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata’ (1874), Huxley had written that ‘the consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steamwhistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its mechanism.’13 To argue this, Butler protested, is to regard animals as ‘mere sentient pieces of exceedingly elaborate clockwork’; the thesis that animals are automata, he observed, is the exact opposite of his own Erewhon argument that ‘automata are animated.’14 G.H. Lewes, whose Physical Basis of Mind (1877) is cited with approval by Butler in Evolution, Old and New, also fought a long-running battle with Huxley, arguing that everything needs to be defined in terms of ‘sensibility,’ whether this means the objective fact of neural activity or the fact of subjective experience. Lewes’s answer to the question ‘Has a bee consciousness? Has a snail volition?’15 was, like Butler’s, a resounding ‘yes’; like Butler, too, he was to concern himself with the way conscious actions, frequently repeated, lapse into unconsciousness, thus forming a habit or instinct. These writers were all deeply indebted to the grandfather of British neo-associationism, Herbert Spencer, whose work Butler was to acknowledge only belatedly, as we shall see. The Memory of Matter: The Psychophysical Solution As has often been recounted, most reviewers of Life and Habit in 1878 were puzzled by the book, not knowing whether to take it seriously in the wake of Butler’s reputation as an ironist in Erewhon and The Fair Haven. Another factor was almost certainly the central division within the book itself, which, though solidly embedded within the empirical and associationist discourses employed by Darwin, was revised at the

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last minute, a few weeks before going to press, to include the attack on natural selection.16 It was a pattern Butler was to repeat with Luck, or Cunning? several years later. Meanwhile, however, he attempted to challenge doubts as to his seriousness by writing Evolution, Old and New, in order to cite a weighty catalogue of biological and psychological predecessors. The response, however, was little better, with critics like Grant Allen wondering whether he was sending up the whole scientific enterprise.17 Butler’s response this time was a radical one. The moment was ripe to take up Bain’s call for a properly systematic method for a natural history of sensation – to discover, as Carpenter had urged, the ‘mechanism’ by which instincts were worked out (quoted in LH, 56). To do this, Butler was beginning to understand, as were a handful of others, that the way forward lay in the direction of Germany.18 The case of Freud serves as a characteristic example of the new emphasis in mental science in central Europe. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, as part of his medical training, Freud worked in the field of histology, the anatomy of the nervous system. His teacher, Ernst Brücke, had come from the famous Berlin circle of positivist science that included Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Hermann Helmholtz, who had supported a rigorously mechanistic approach to neuroanatomy.19 Freud’s original orientation, then, was close to that of the associationists in its concentration on chains of stimuli and reaction as a psychophysical continuum. In his early Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) – a text, incidentally, which is referred to repeatedly in debates in neuropsychology in our own new century – he introduced his aim as being ‘to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles.’ It was in this text that he first broached the crucial question of memory, one that had preoccupied, after the associationists, the German school of psychophysics founded by Gustav Fechner in 1860. Freud wrote: ‘A main characteristic of nervous tissue is memory: that is, quite generally, a capacity for being permanently altered by single occurrences.’20 The reception of German experimental psychology in Britain in the 1870s and 1880s is intimately tied up with the journal Mind, founded by Bain in 1876, a journal that would become a point of reference for Butler in his own negotiation of the German and British approaches. Along with the specifically British philosophical disputes between the intuitionists and the neo-associationists, Mind published work on German psychophysics, which from the start had set itself the task of exploring the relationship between ‘feeling’ and ‘force’ – two terms, as we shall

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see, that were to guide Butler in his 1880s explorations into mind and matter. Butler read Mind regularly from at least 1879 onwards, if not from its foundation three years before, as references in his mostly unpublished notes indicate. An article in the issue of October 1883 attracted his attention for its argument that so-called automatic action is in fact ‘secondarily automatic’ – that is, ‘either in the experience of the individual, or of his ancestors, volition preceded habit.’21 The author of this article was James Ward, who was, like Butler, pondering the connection between the voluntary and the involuntary in ways that were at this time beginning to be picked up by early analysts of the unconscious. Another (London and) Cambridge graduate who had continued his studies at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin, finally returning to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1881 as a lecturer in philosophy, Ward was to play a central role in the history of British psychology at this time, as well as in the reception of Butler’s work. It was he, as Philip J. Pauly has shown,22 who wrote the positive but unsigned reviews of Butler’s work in the Athenaeum. Pauly’s point, like that of several other recent analysts of the scientific debates at this time, is that Darwin had vacillated over natural selection being the sole evolutionary mechanism, that the view of instinct as inherited habit was seriously entertained by Darwin to the end of his life, and that Butler incurred scientific wrath not so much because of his science as because of his challenge to Darwin’s integrity. It was on this very point that James Ward insisted in his several unsigned reviews in the Athenaeum. Butler, Ward stressed, had been central in preparing the climate for the ‘new phase into which Darwinism has now entered.’23 For Ward as evolutionary psychologist, the theory of evolution has to explain the development of mind as well as that of organism: ‘biology must shortly come to terms with psychology,’ as he put it.24 It was here that Butler attracted his attention; in his attempt to demonstrate that heredity is due to memory, Butler had focused on the nature and function of instinct, thus ‘open[ing] up very large questions as to the meaning of consciousness’25 and ‘draw[ing] attention to the degradation (he would call it elevation) of conscious into unconscious action, a problem of equal importance with the origin of consciousness.’26 As a ‘philosophical psychologist,’ as he called himself,27 Ward was interested primarily in consciousness and, thus, in the way Butler’s theories probed at the crucial question of its origin (in organic matter) as well as its relation to unconscious forms of behaviour. In 1886, Ward wrote a book-length entry on psychology for the latest

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edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, where he assessed recent developments in the field within Britain and Germany. Drawing on Bain and Wilhelm Wundt as the two most prominent psychologists of the day, he located the origin of the subject within the associationist tradition, which he followed Kant and Johann Friedrich Herbart in calling ‘presentationism’ (Vorstellung). Locke’s definition of the ‘idea’ as ‘whatever is the immediate object of thought, perception or understanding’ had been in Ward’s opinion a crucial move away from the ‘faculty psychology’ of earlier periods. It meant that ‘attention on the side of the subject implies intensity on the side of the object,’ so that the physical and the psychical are necessarily inter-implicated.28 Hartley and Spencer were right, he suggests, to define volition in terms of sensori-motor and ideomotor actions. The whole field of consciousness must be defined as a ‘presentation-continuum,’ a constant revival of previous presentations through contiguity, presentations passing over the threshold of consciousness into the unconscious through repetition. Here he cites from Wundt’s Physiologische Psychologie (2nd ed., 1880), the leading text of the psychophysical school, using terms identical to Butler’s definition of memory at this time: ‘Consciousness of the presentation and the nervous activity cease together, but the latter leaves behind it a molecular modification of the nervous structure which becomes more and more permanent with exercise, and is such as to facilitate the recurrence of the same functional activity.’29 Along with James Sully,30 Ward was to be among the first to introduce the new German physiology of mind to the British public. A key figure for Ward and Sully, as he was to become for Butler, was Gustav Fechner, whose Elements of Psychophysics in 186031 had laid the theoretical foundations of the science, to be followed soon after by others like Weber, Müller, Helmholtz, and Wundt.32 Around 1880, Butler was to attempt a translation of Ewald Hering’s interpretation of Fechner’s work on psychophysics, which I shall return to shortly. The translation has remained unpublished, but the move was timely, as German experimental psychology was beginning to attract attention in London. In May 1876, for example, Butler’s friend Eliza Mary Ann Savage wrote to him that she was reading a lecture by Helmholtz that explored the physical intricacy of the aural sensations proving, as she expressed it, that ‘we have in our ears little microscopic key boards, with keys and cords and dampers all complete – in fact it seems as if the Lord had tried to imitate Broadwood and Erard.’33 Butler’s decision to learn German in early 1880 was characteristic of his attraction to the winds of

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change. His Unconscious Memory, published in 1880, contained the first English translation of the German psychophysical explanation of memory by Ewald Hering, a work that has since been recognized as a landmark in the history of psychology, the first treatment of memory as a biological phenomenon.34 Hering’s ‘On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter’ (1870), as translated by Butler, sets itself to reconcile the three terms of its title: memory, function, and matter. For Hering, enthusiastically championed by Butler, the debates between materialists and idealists led nowhere. Mind and matter are not in opposition, but must be considered as a ‘function’ of each other – that is, as ‘two variables ... so dependent upon one another in the changes they undergo in accordance with fixed laws that a change in either involves simultaneous and corresponding change in the other’ (UM, 73). All living tissue, Hering argued, following the Wundtian position outlined above, has the ability to be permanently altered by sense impressions, by a biochemical process that leaves what he called ‘material vestiges’: ‘after both conscious sensation and perception have been extinguished, their material vestiges yet remain in our nervous system by way of a change in its molecular or atomic disposition, that enables the nerve substance to reproduce all physical processes of the original sensation, and with these the corresponding psychical processes of sensation and perception’ (UM, 75). With the respect he commanded as a physiological experimentalist in fields such as optics and respiratory feedback, Hering inspired confidence for many decades in his theory of the association of instinct, habit, and memory, in spite of the fact that he did not specifically identify the molecular or atomic mechanism involved.35 It is significant, for example, that when Freud came to describe the transgenerational transmission of the death drive in his famous 1920 essay, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ he resorted to this same explanation of memory as a fundamental property of all living matter.36 Chapter 5 of Unconscious Memory presents Butler’s introduction to Hering’s lecture on memory and his assessment of its significance for evolutionary psychology. Hering, he wrote, ‘puts the backbone, as it were, into the theory of evolution,’ explaining memory on a physical level, something that Butler as a mere ‘spectator’ of scientific experimentation was unqualified to do (UM, 58–9). In describing memory as a matter of ‘vibrations,’ in Butler’s Hartleyan reading of him, Hering gives a new and significant definition of personal identity – as ‘consist[ing] in the uninterruptedness of a sufficient number of vibrations,

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which have been communicated from molecule to molecule of the nerve fibres, and which go on communicating each one of them its own peculiar characteristic elements to the new matter which we introduce into the body by way of nutrition.’37 In this way, Butler continues, Hering ‘resolves the phenomena of personal identity into the phenomena of a living mechanism,’ leaving the future open to science, as Butler put it, ‘to understand more about the vibrations’ (UM, 60). This was a far cry from a rebellion against the mechanical and the materialist. In focusing attention on the German psychophysical investigation of the relation between stimulus and sensation, Butler was advancing the growing understanding in evolutionary psychology that it is not body that is dependent on mind but the other way round. For all his apparent emphasis on the dominance of mental factors (will, intelligence, purpose), Butler was in fact moving increasingly towards a psychophysical (and, I would add, a very modern) monism which treats mind as a physiological entity. Fechnerian Interaction versus Huxleyan Concomitance It was within this context that Butler undertook the translation (never published) of another work by Hering, one that attempted a further exploration of the physiology of mental phenomena. ‘On the Connection between Body and Mind’ was a lecture Hering gave in 1875, the first part of which was dedicated to the work of Fechner, whom Hering refers to as his ‘revered master.’ As the acknowledged founder of the psychophysical school, Fechner was a constant source of reference within German psychology throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and had a profound and lasting influence on Freud. His work had received little attention in Britain, Ward’s article entitled ‘An Attempt to Interpret Fechner’s Law’ in Mind for October 1876 being a prominent exception. Butler’s translation of Hering on Fechner, consisting of thirty-eight folio sheets, seems to have been written around 1880. Though ‘incomplete and [e]ntirely unrevised,’ as Butler wrote on the title page of the manuscript, the work offers further insight into Butler’s attempt, via psychophysics, to take as far as possible the theory of the functional relation between the mental and the physical. Fechner’s work in the 1850s had been on the quantitative relation between objective stimuli and subjective sensations, moving to his famous conclusion that the intensity of sensation increases arithmetically in relation to a geometri-

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cally increasing stimulus. (Thus, for example, if one bell is ringing, the addition of a second bell makes much more impression upon us than the addition of one bell to ten.) The importance of this work, Hering writes, is ‘as on a level with Newton’s law of gravitation as the foundation of all connection between mind and matter.’ His own additions to Fechner’s work have led him in an even more Fechnerian direction than Fechner himself, he states, in relation to the functional connection between body and mind.38 For the psychophysicist, the approach is ‘from the side of the dependence of the mind on the body rather than the contrary, for it is only the physical that is immediately open to measurement, whereas the measurement of the psychical can be obtained only as dependent on the physical,’ as Fechner explained in his Elements of Psychophysics.39 The terms, which are fundamentally materialistic, are very similar to those that Butler began to use at this time; through his reading of Fechner and Hering, Butler was in fact moving further towards a materialist position than fellow associationists like Ward.40 From around 1880 onwards, the term ‘function’ appeared regularly in Butler’s work as a way of describing the interdependence of body and mind. Fechner’s view of the relation, notes the historian of psychology Edwin G. Boring, was ‘what has been called the identity hypothesis.’41 Much of the force of Butler’s work in the 1880s, I have already suggested, was directed against theories of ‘concomitance’ being tested out at the time by scientists like Huxley and Tyndall, according to which physical processes in nerve action act concomitantly with mental ones but are independent and complete in themselves. His own theory Butler expressed as either that of (Fechnerian) ‘identity,’ or that of ‘alternation’ or interactive parallelism.42 As he moved continually closer to an all-embracing monism, all distinctions began to dissolve, even that between the organic and the inorganic. Looking back on the dualisms in philosophy and science, he wrote in his Note-Book in the early 1880s: No sooner do we think we have got a bona fide barrier than it breaks down. The divisions between varieties, species, genus, all gone; between instinct and reason, gone; between animals and plants, gone; between man and the lower animals, gone; so, ere long the division between organic and inorganic will go and will take with it the division between mind and matter.43

The intoning ‘gones,’ which I have italicized here, indicate the emotional satisfaction at stake for Butler in sweeping away dichotomies.

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This was to be a monism of new naturalistic proportions, purged at last of the humbug of spiritualism. It was within this context, also, that Butler foregrounded contemporary debates, mostly issuing from Germany again, on the definition of the unconscious. The ‘von Hartmann phenomenon’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century forms a well-known episode in the history of psychology. In his Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), Eduard von Hartmann had undertaken a massive survey of what he saw as the twenty-six aspects of unconscious mental activity – from reflexes, will, and instinct to sexual love, feeling, and mysticism. Although this work failed to impress later analysts,44 it had an enormous influence on his contemporaries, reaching its ninth edition in Germany by 1882. Butler’s translation into English of the chapter on instinct in Unconscious Memory was the first of its kind (the complete work would not be translated until four years later). As James Ward noted, for all his protests to the contrary, Butler had much in common with Hartmann:45 a rejection of natural selection, as well as a denial that instinct ‘is the simple action of a mechanism which has been contrived once for all’ (UM, 114). But Hartmann’s unconscious was too mystical for the tastes of Butler (EON, 49–50) who, as empiricist, held that unconscious action comes about only after long ‘practice,’ the initial steps being taken with the full consciousness of purpose. Above all, Butler rejected Hartmann’s suggestion that instinct is independent of bodily organization; neither, for him, can claim precedence. His expression of this is characteristic, both of his violent opposition to dualism (I have italicized the negatives below, hammered out with furious insistence) and of the way his definition of the relation of mind and body is described, in Fechnerian terms, as a ‘function’ of each other. In his book, Hartmann had claimed that instinct is not due to organization so much as organization to instinct. Not so, retorted Butler, for the fact is that neither can claim precedence of or pre-eminence over the other. Instinct and organization are only mind and body, or mind and matter; and these are not two separable things, but one and inseparable, with, as it were, two sides, the one of which is a function of the other. There was never yet either matter without mind, however low, nor mind, however high, without a material body of some sort; there can be no change in one without a corresponding change in the other. (UM, 154)

Butler was not alone in his dissatisfaction with these binaries. By the 1870s, as Lancelot Whyte puts it, Europe was ready to discard the Car-

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tesian distinction between the mental and the material, but was not prepared to wait for physiology to provide the answers.46 Neuroanatomy, as the young Freud discovered, was not yet sophisticated enough to establish the links; this sophistication would not be achieved until well into the next century. Two into One or One into Two? Between Unconscious Memory (1880) and Luck, or Cunning? seven years later, Butler continued to develop his thought along Fechnerian-Heringian lines, reading widely in German physiological psychology and naturalizing it within the British context. It was here that Herbert Spencer began to receive belated acknowledgment, for all Butler’s ambivalence towards him.47 In 1879, Butler attempted to enlist Spencer on the Lamarckian side, citing his developmental theory on how the use or disuse of organs may be inherited (EON, 292–3). As a pre-Charles-Darwinian evolutionist, Spencer was useful in undermining Darwin’s claims to priority. What is more, Spencer himself entered the fray on Butler’s side in letters to the Athenaeum in the mid-1880s, albeit to insist on his own priority (in his Principles of Psychology, 1855) in the theory Butler was championing under the Hering banner.48 On the other hand, Spencer’s omnipresence was suffocating; it was as if he had covered the entire field of thought, from First Principles (1862) to Principles of Psychology (1855), Principles of Biology (1864–7), Principles of Sociology (1876– 96), and Principles of Ethics (1879–93). Butler complained, as fellow Spencerian William James was complaining at the time,49 of the ‘inscrutab[ility] and prolix[ity]’ of his prolific predecessor. Reading him, Butler said, made you feel ‘as a bee must feel when it goes buzzing up and down a pane of glass always hoping to be able to get out into the open air beyond, and never succeeding.’ Such prolixity had its temptations, he added wryly; it would be ‘pretty safe to father anything on him that one pleases, for no one will ever find it out.’50 But a paternity of this kind, from one so all-pervasive and close to home, would undoubtedly come at too high a cost to individuality. Spencer’s psychology, however, had undoubtedly prepared the ground for Butler’s. In a note of November 1880, Butler had already acknowledged Spencer’s precedence, albeit ‘dimly and confusedly’ expressed, in the ‘theory of rhythms and vibrations’ which he had ascribed to Hering.51 What particularly attracted Butler about Spencer’s broadly associationist ‘synthetic philosophy’ was its ‘dynamic’ approach, which derived from the theory of the conservation of energy

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popular at mid-century. For Spencer, every object undergoes constant alterations of state; energy or force is not only ‘persistent,’ but could also be called the ‘ultimate of ultimates.’52 Chemical evolution, he argued, ‘has been from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous,’ presupposing the original existence of ‘one homogeneous substance’ out of which all compounds have developed.53 In 1881, a book by W. Stewart Duncan with an explicitly Spencerian thesis was published which, as its full title indicates, offered much that Butler had been looking for: Conscious Matter, or the Physical and the Psychical Universally in Causal Connection.54 Butler read the book as soon as it appeared, but it was not until 1885–6, when he was completing Luck, or Cunning?, that he made extensive notes on it for inclusion in his book. His summary of the ‘pith’ of Duncan’s argument reads as follows: ‘“I feel and think; when I do this I am in a psychical state: I act; when I do this then I am in a physical one – I am therefore alternately psychical and physical – and so is all matter.”’55 For Duncan, the ‘causal’ connection between mind and body constituted what he called a ‘Theory of Alternation,’ as opposed to the ‘Concomitance Theory’ of Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford.56 The word ‘physical,’ Duncan complained, had become hopelessly ambiguous, chiefly as a result of being defined in antithesis to ‘mental.’ The difficulty is removed, however, if we give up defining matter as an assemblage of solid, indivisible atoms and define it instead as force-groups or force-elements. A modern psychology required a definition of the physical as ‘the energetic phase or property of matter,’ Duncan continued, just as it required a new definition of the psychical – as ‘the sentient or feeling phase or property of matter.’ The antithesis between mind and matter, therefore, needed to be replaced by that between ‘feeling and force.’ All matter ‘is alternately psychical and physical when it alternates between the two states of receiving an influence and imparting the received influence.’57 It was in this sense that matter can be described as ‘conscious,’ not (as Duncan explained in the preface) in the sense of ‘intelligence’ but rather as ‘sentience.’ The closing pages of the book raise the emotional volume of his argument into something little short of a panegyric on matter. It was a characteristically 1880s move, whereby the terms of a fairly rigorous materialism were softened by the infusion of a quasi-religious vocabulary and syntax. From this Spencerian tradition was to emerge the final stage in Butler’s biopsychology, his definition of the psychical as the sentient or ‘feeling’ phase of matter. As we have seen, sentience had constituted a

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dominant concern in both the associationist tradition more generally and the psychophysical school in particular. (Ward had linked the two in the section called ‘Feeling’ in his Encyclopaedia Britannica essay on psychology in 1886.)58 Having inherited from both traditions the notion that we ‘feel’ at the points of reception and imparting of force,59 Butler dedicated a section to feeling in the last chapter of Luck, or Cunning? – adding that the significance of the topic in fact warranted ‘a book to itself’ rather than a short section (LC, 226). Here he put forward the theory – one, significantly, which has recently been endorsed by neuroscientists of affect such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux60 – that feeling ‘is not a part of mind itself’ as a separate entity, but is rather consequent upon bodily reaction to outside objects: It would seem as if, in the first instance, we must have arbitrarily attached some one of the few and vague sensations which we could alone at first command, to certain motions of outside things as echoed by our brain, and used them to think and feel the things with, so as to docket them, and recognize them with greater force, certainty, and clearness. (LC, 227–8)

This formulation, expressed in the mode of popular science at which Butler had become an adept, seems to have been directly influenced by views being expressed at the time in Mind (April 1884) by William James, whose article entitled ‘What is an Emotion?’ was commented on by Butler in his Note-Books two months later.61 For James, writing similarly from within an anti-Huxleyan associationist tradition,62 ‘emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable’: ‘the emotion is nothing but the feeling of the reflex bodily effects of what we call its “object,” effects due to the connate adaptation of the nervous system to that object.’63 Poised as he was between physiological experimentation in mental functioning and neo-associationism, James cited the same sources as Butler – Carpenter, Wundt, Ward, and Spencer – in order to launch his project for what he was to call a ‘radical empiricism,’ in essays throughout the 1870s and 1880s that were to be collected together as Principles of Psychology (1890). Memory, he argued, must be regarded as a form of lapsed intelligence which leaves physical traces in brain tissue (although the exact physical process was yet to be fully explained by science). The main difference between his own views and those of early associationists is that, for him, it is not the ‘idea’ that is recalled but the actual ‘thing thought of’ or ‘object’ itself, thus dissolving the distinction between thinker and thought, ego and non-ego.64 In

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a later essay, ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ (1904), James argued that ‘there is only one primal stuff or material in the world’ of which the thinker and the thought are merely different manifestations.65 Referring to Mendelejeff’s ‘Periodic Law’ of the relation between chemical elements in Luck, or Cunning?, Butler supported an identical view: communicating its vibrations ... to our brain a substance does actually communicate what is, as far as we are concerned, a portion of itself. Our perception of a thing and its attendant feeling are symbols attaching to an introduction within our brain of a feeble state of the thing itself ... The vibrations from a pat of butter do, then, actually put butter into a man’s head ... Thought and thing are one. (LC, 230–2)

Without access to Butler’s manuscript Note-Books, some critics have ridiculed or misread such formulations. This particular passage, writes P.N. Furbank, shows Butler out of his depth: ‘Whatever meaning there might be behind this is blanketed by its phraseology ... making one suspect an attempt to cover a confusion of thought.’66 E.S. Russell, writing in 1916, joined an enthusiastic early-century Bergsonian approach to Butler by arguing that though Butler was ‘perhaps not fully aware of [the] philosophical implications’ of his theory of life and habit, he ‘was of course completely antagonistic to the naturalistic conceptions current in his time.’67 The philosopher C.E.M. Joad, following this trend a few years later, wrote that underlying Butler’s theories is a Bergsonian creative force working ‘to achieve an ever greater degree of emancipation from matter.’68 My reading of Butler, however, has led me to a very different conclusion – that, had he continued his work another decade, Butler would, like James, have stood firmly against Bergson who, in his Matter and Memory (1896), attacked physiological psychology and its attempt to locate memory in matter. Many of the points of Butler’s late theorization of mental physiology were tested out in ‘Essay upon the Art of Feeling,’ which he wrote immediately after the publication of Luck, or Cunning? at the end of 1886, but which remained uncompleted and was never published.69 Here he took up Spencer and Duncan’s views on sentience again, elaborating further on the idea that forces in action tend towards equilibrium, as do feelings, and from this, like many of his immediate contemporaries, providing an explanation for the way that feelings, through repetition, lapse into unconsciousness. There was only one point that worried him with Spencer and Duncan’s theory, he notes in

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this essay, and this was that in postulating as they did the idea of ‘one homogeneous substance,’ no matter how dynamic, they were excluding the possibility of antithesis necessary to all concepts. Units of energy, he argued, must be regarded as capable of existing in two extreme modes – of equilibration and unequilibration. ‘With whatever substance we may posit, we must alloy it with harmonics of that whatever other substratum may be most opposed to it,’ because ‘till we have got one into two, it [“one ultimate and homogeneous substance”] is incomprehensible.’70 ‘Getting one into two,’ I shall conclude by arguing, was for Butler as much a psychological necessity as a scientific premise. Controverting Mindlessness To read Butler’s Note-Books and correspondence from 1880 to 1886 and beyond is to chart the course of late-Victorian psychology on the brink of change – into what were soon to become distinct branches emerging shortly after William James’s death in 1910: behaviourism, physiological psychology, Gestalt psychology, and psychoanalysis, among others. Already, experimental investigations into the physiology of the brain were beginning to introduce a major terminological shift in psychology.71 The notes Butler made on a host of biopsychological subjects ranging from animal and plant intelligence to the constitution of the atom reflect these changes and were to have gone into the book that eventually became Luck, or Cunning?, as Butler himself records in its preface and conclusion. In the event, however, all the material – or rather, a brief summary of three aspects of it – was crammed into the very last chapter, the preceding eighteen chapters being dedicated to yet another attack on Darwinism, this time prompted by the appearance of Grant Allen’s Charles Darwin in 1885. In the book that was to have constituted a considered response to developments in 1880s psychology, Butler ended up repeating the same arguments against Darwin so pugilistically and repetitively expounded in the three previous books on the subject. Even the loyal James Ward, reviewing Luck, or Cunning? in the Athenaeum, expressed impatience. Butler, he wrote, is an admirably ‘fearless speaker’ who ‘is on the right track in seeing the motive power of evolution in mind not matter.’ But ‘the fact is [that] Mr. Butler is too much occupied with his opponents to devote sufficient thought to the establishment of his own position.’72 To understand what the book might have been, we need to search

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among the ‘Scraps Cut Out from Luck or Cunning,’73 as well as many of the scattered writings of this period, mostly unpublished. Butler’s description of how this change in subject occurred is instructive. The book, he writes, is very different from what he had ‘originally intended,’ and he has ‘omitted much that I had meant to deal with.’ ‘Such, however, as the book is, it must now go in the form into which it has grown almost more in spite of me than from malice prepense on my part’ (LC, 221, emphasis added). ‘Intentions,’ ‘meaning to,’ and ‘prepense’ had in the end to make way for oppositional or controversial impulses emerging, like all unconscious defence, ‘in spite of’ him. The paradox is that Butler’s ‘intentions,’ his dedicated exploration of the period’s changing definitions of mind, had led him not so much towards materialism as towards a modification of the distinction between mind and body/matter to the extent that the distinction became unimportant, a relic of Enlightenment Cartesianism that was no longer of service. In the search for what constituted ‘mind,’ Butler had come up (hard, we might say) against ‘matter,’ conscious and unconscious. It is symptomatic, however, that the terms of attack on Darwinism that Luck, or Cunning? ended up rehearsing were once again in the name of ‘mind’ in the generalized, theologically inflected sense of ‘soul and design’ (LC, 122), as dichotomously pitted against the ‘mechanical fit’ (LC, 221) which he accused the Darwinians of having been seized by. For the controversialist, the compulsion to repeat old antitheses will always take precedence. A full explanation of the logic of this compulsion towards dichotomies (friend-foe, mind-matter) would require a separate study. A brief hypothetical summary, however, seems appropriate as a conclusion here, given the starkness of the contradictions in Butler’s case between his conscious and his unconscious aims. A valid starting point, I think, is the model of reading made current by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), whereby the process of writing is described as a ‘wrestling’ with influential predecessors in an Oedipal battle for priority. Individuation, Bloom argues, cannot be effected without strife. The structuralist critic Ralf Norrman, describing Butler’s rhetorical strategies, has written persuasively about his obsession with the number two. Every concept Butler tackled, Norrman demonstrates, was first dichotomized in order that the opposing principles could be played off against each other.74 Although Norrman steers clear of a psycho-critical reading, many others before him have been less hesitant, dwelling at length on Butler’s hostile relation to a paternal object as the source of his controversial impulses.

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This antagonistic impulse was clearly a dominant force throughout Butler’s professional career. But it has been my contention here that there was another impulse behind his intellectual trajectory: a simultaneous move involving the accommodation with and absorption of the psychology of his day, both as he inherited it as a young man and as he developed it in dialogue with new theories. This impulse to accommodate formed a central focus of analysis in the post-Freudian theories of Melanie Klein, and was called by her the act of ‘reparation’ made after hostility. In Klein’s schema, the infant’s primarily aggressive instincts, during what she calls the paranoid-schizoid position of the very early months, give way to guilt and depression, and in the resulting ‘depressive position’ the subject seeks unconsciously to repair the damage caused by the initial antagonism to the primary loved object. It is from such reparative impulses that develop the human capacity for love and identity, for compromise, and for creativity.75 Something of this process, I would argue, can be seen at work in Butler’s polemical strategies. The initial move in his work from Life and Habit onwards was a straightforward battle for priority, resulting in the terms of belligerence familiar to all Butler readers. Subsequent to this, however, came a move of a very different order, where previously asserted dichotomies or antagonisms (mind versus matter) began to break down, and the controversial stance modified. It could not be called a truce, as the old hostilities were too deeply entrenched not to need constant reiteration – hence the undying battle cry against ‘materialism.’ But something else was alternating with the hostility, as Klein argued that the depressive phase alternates with the hostile phase throughout all normal lives. This explanation, I think, helps to account for Butler’s extreme conservatism, his well-known recommendation of moderation, good sense, the middle ground. A lifelong advocacy of the ‘golden mean,’ used as an epigraph to so many of his books, was in effect a way of keeping opposites in balance, returning to a compromise position after an initial attack. When it came to the field of psychology, therefore, it was natural that behind the loud opposition to ‘materialism’ and to ‘Darwinism,’ Butler was all the time working towards the point of conjunction between the mental and the physical as well as the voluntary and the involuntary, edging ever closer to the form of materialist psychology that was beginning to be articulated in scientific circles in Britain and abroad in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Thus the ambivalence of the word ‘matters’ in the title of this essay, ‘Mind Matters,’ has perhaps this appropriateness: that all the while that Butler

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the controversialist was insisting it is mind that matters, not matter, the mattering of mind was becoming an incontrovertible truth to him as an evolutionary psychologist worthy of respect in the history of the science.

NOTES

1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

I am very grateful to the editor of this volume, James Paradis, for his detailed suggestions for revision of this essay. Cannan, Samuel Butler: A Critical Study, 28, 35, 173. Butler described himself (in 1902) as occupying ‘a very solitary Ishmaelitish position’ – quoted in Jones, Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon,’ 2:382. Clara Stillman writes that Butler ‘was alone among English writers in thoroughly transcending the current philosophic and psychological assumptions of his period.’ See her Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern, 7. James Ward, unsigned review of Butler’s Selections from Previous Works (London: Trübner, 1884), in Athenaeum, 22 March 1884, 378. Robert Hoeldtke, ‘The History of Associationism and British Medical Psychology,’ Medical History 11, no. 1 (January 1967): 46–65. Henderson, Samuel Butler, the Incarnate Bachelor, 21; Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography, 45. Henry Sidgwick, ‘Philosophy at Cambridge,’ Mind 1 (1876): 244–5. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1951), 140. Sidgwick, ‘Philosophy at Cambridge,’ 244; Annan, Leslie Stephen, 141. J.S. Mill, Autobiography [1873], ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989), 69–70. Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: Parker, 1855), 1. See in particular the 1865 essay entitled ‘Lucubratio Ebria,’ reprinted in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (1912; London: A.C. Fifield, 1918), 47–53. The same theory was elaborated later in Erewhon (1872). Life and Habit (1878; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 198 (hereafter cited in text as LH). W.B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology (London: Henry S. King, 1874), 339, 345. T.H. Huxley, ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata,’ in Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1893–5), 1:240; originally published in Fortnightly Review, November 1874.

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14 Luck, or Cunning? (1887; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 118–19 (hereafter cited in text as LC). Butler also refers to Huxley’s article at length in a note of February 1886 in his manuscript Note-Books [Copy A: 8 vols, Butler Collection, Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.], II, ff.162–3 (hereafter cited as MS Note-Books). All citations from Butler’s Manuscript Note-Books are from the ‘A’ copy and are given with permission from the trustees of the Chapin Library at Williams College. 15 G.H. Lewes, ‘Consciousness and Unconsciousness,’ Mind 2, no. 6 (April 1877): 163. This essay was to form part of Lewes’s forthcoming volume, The Physical Basis of Mind. 16 Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory (1880; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 23–7 (hereafter cited in text as UM). 17 Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old & New (1879; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 340 (hereafter cited in text as EON). See, for example, Grant Allen, review of Evolution, Old and New, by Samuel Butler, Examiner, 17 May 1879, 646–7. 18 Describing the shifts in public science in the 1870s, Frank M. Turner writes: ‘The British scientific community, many of whose members had been trained in Germany, envied the organization, public recognition, and financial support enjoyed by German science ... there is little question that British research lagged behind that of Germany.’ See his Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 206. 19 Richard Wollheim, Freud (London: Fontana, 1971), 21–2; Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (London: Papermac, 1988), 32–6. 20 Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, trans. James Strachey (1886–9; London: Vintage, 2001), 296, 299. 21 MS Note-Books, II, ff. 7–8. 22 Pauly, ‘Samuel Butler and his Darwinian Critics.’ 23 See James Ward’s unsigned review of EON, Athenaeum, 26 July 1879, 116. 24 Ward’s reply to Romanes in Athenaeum, 29 March 1884, 412. Robert J. Richards’s seminal study of evolutionary psychology (Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]) makes no reference to Ward and only passing reference to Butler. 25 Athenaeum, 22 March 1884, 379. 26 Ibid., 26 July 1879, 116. 27 Ibid., 22 March 1884, 379. 28 James Ward, ‘Psychology,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. 20 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1886), 41. 29 Ibid., 43, 46–7, 48.

216 Ruth Parkin-Gounelas 30 James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Aesthetics and Psychology, was published in 1874. Sully read Bain, Mill, and Spencer at University College, London, before studying for a year at Göttingen. In Unconscious Memory, Butler deals extensively with Sully’s interpretation of Eduard von Hartmann on the unconscious. 31 For an early assessment of Fechner’s contribution, see William James’s 1904 Introduction to Fechner’s Life After Death, trans. Mary C. Wadsworth (New York: Pantheon Books, 1943), 13–20. 32 Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17. In the late nineteenth century, distinctions were made between the ‘new’ psychology (the experimental tradition of Fechner and Wundt) and the older tradition dating back to Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke, the branch of philosophy relating to the phenomena of mental life such as perception, memory, thought, and reason. See Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (London: D. Appleton Century, 1929), vii–viii. Spencer had drawn a similar distinction in the 1870s between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ psychology. 33 Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss E.M.A. Savage, 1871–1885, ed. Keynes and Hill, 120. This was probably Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863), translated into English in 1875. 34 Beatrice Edgell, Theories of Memory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 5. See also Otis, Organic Memory, 10–14. 35 Hering’s essay, as Otis notes (Organic Memory, 10–11), became the most cited work on memory as a fundamental ‘reproductive’ capacity of living matter, respected by scientists well into the twentieth century. 36 Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, vol. 11, Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin, 1991), 295 ff. In the mid-1920s, Freud translated into German a section of Israel Levine’s The Unconscious, which dealt with Butler’s translation and interpretation of Hering’s essay on memory (which Freud called a ‘masterpiece’). See Appendix A, ‘Freud and Ewald Hering,’ in On Metapsychology, 211. Hering had studied medicine in Leipzig in the 1850s and then in the following decade worked in Vienna with Josef Breuer (who was soon to collaborate with Freud), conducting research into respiration towards the formulation of what is today known as the Hering-Breuer reflex. 37 This apparently odd idea of the role of nutrition in memory was, it seems, a commonplace of Carpenterian physiology. Cf. Principles of Mental Physiology, 345.

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38 ‘On the Connection between Body and Mind, Part 1, on Fechner’s Psychophysical Theory,’ by E. Hering (autograph MS of the translation by Butler, Library of St John’s College, Cambridge), ff. 33 and 1–2. 39 Gustav Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics, trans. Helmut E. Adler (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 1:8. 40 Ward later protested that Wundt’s disciples had taken psychophysical parallelism too far. ‘“Modern Psychology”: A Reflexion,’ Mind n.s. 2, no. 5 (January 1893): 54. 41 Boring, History of Experimental Psychology, 277. 42 See ‘On the Genesis of Feeling,’ in Collected Essays of Samuel Butler (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 1:191, 207. 43 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 78 (emphasis added). This note is an amalgamation of three notes made in 1881, 1883 and 1885. See MS Note-Books, I, 102; I, 203; II, 117. 44 Lancelot Whyte summarizes the reasons for its later neglect in The Unconscious before Freud (London: Tavistock, 1967), 165. 45 Review of EON in Athenaeum, 26 July 1879, 116. 46 Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud, 165–6. 47 In LC, Butler stated that he had ‘no hesitation in saying that if [he] had known the Principles of Psychology earlier, as well as [he knew] the work now, [he] should have used it largely’ in earlier works (35). 48 Herbert Spencer, ‘Mental Evolution in Animals,’ Athenaeum, 5 April 1884, 46. 49 In the chapter ‘Habit’ in his own Principles of Psychology, James repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Spencer, but complained that ‘Mr. Spencer’s data, under a great show of precision, conceal vagueness and improbability, and even self-contradiction.’ The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), 1:109n. 50 MS Note-Books, I, f. 230; II, f. 14. 51 Ibid., I, f. 94. 52 Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862; London: Williams and Norgate, 1870), 169. 53 Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891), 1:156–7 (first published in Westminster Review, July 1858). 54 ‘Notes on Duncan’s “Conscious Matter,”’ 21 MS leaves, bound in with other material (32 leaves of typescript and ca. 150 leaves of handwritten MS) under the title ‘Extracts, Notes and Drafts’), are held in the Chapin Library; all citations from this work are given with permission from the trustees of the Chapin Library at Williams College. Butler’s own annotated

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55 56 57 58

59

60

61

62

copy of the book is held in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge. His object, Duncan wrote in the preface, was to ‘remove certain formidable barriers to the progress of Modern Psychology ... to suggest a slight rearrangement of its tenets, to enable it to harmonise with physical science.’ Conscious Matter (London: David Bogue, 1881), n.p. MS Note-Books, I, f. 99. Duncan, Conscious Matter, 73. Ibid., 21–2, 63. James Ward, ‘Modern Psychology,’ 66–72. Here Ward, citing an article on Freud, puts forward an associationist and psychophysical position that ‘psychical life consists in the main of a continuous alternation of receptive and reactive consciousness’ (66), and that ‘receptive states lead through feeling to active states’ (67). The terms of Butler’s 1887 lecture ‘On the Genesis of Feeling’ are very close to those of both Spencer and Ward. See his Collected Essays, 1:194–5. Butler objected to the narrowness of Duncan’s definition of feeling as ‘the result of an influence being received,’ arguing that ‘one does not feel the receipt of a force more ... than the imparting of it. We are only sentient of either of these states at points of change and resistance ... the moment they occur in either stage, there is feeling.’ ‘Notes on Duncan’s “Conscious Matter,”’ f. 65. See, for example, Antonio R. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (London: Vintage, 2004), and Joseph E. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (London: Phoenix, 2004). For an assessment of James’s theories of feeling within this context, see Richard Wollheim, On the Emotions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). This was James’s first formulation of the theory he amplified in 1890 and modified in 1894, a challenge to the common-sense idea that perception gives rise to emotion, which in turn gives rise to a physical reaction (such as tears). On the contrary, he argued, the physical reaction follows the perception of an exciting factor, what we call emotion being merely a feeling of these reflex bodily effects. Butler’s summary of the article was that ‘we do not cry because we are sorry, but are sorry because we cry.’ MS Note-Books, II, ff. 77–8. Butler is bound to have read James’s article in Mind 4, no. 13 (January 1879) entitled ‘Are We Automata?’ He would have approved of James’s attack on ‘“scientists” (loathly word!)’ such as Clifford and Huxley (22) for their ‘desire ... not to have their physical reasonings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelings’ (2) and their view of feeling as ‘a mere col-

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63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75

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lateral product of our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies’ (1). For a full summary of Butler’s attack on the Huxley-Clifford position, as summed up by Douglas A. Spalding in Nature (2 August 1877), see LC, 120–1. James, ‘What is an Emotion?’ Mind 9 (April 1884): 194. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:659, 653. In an 1880 note on Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, Butler commented on Spencer’s view that ‘knowing implies something acted upon and something acting upon it,’ suggesting a more Jamesian approach: ‘The ego and the non-ego cannot be separated so sharply,’ he objected. MS Note-Books, I, f. 94. James, ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 4. P.N. Furbank, Samuel Butler, 1835–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 64. E.S. Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology (London: John Murray, 1916), 341. C.E.M. Joad, Samuel Butler (London: L. Parsons, 1924), 186–7. The ‘Essay,’ dated December 1886, is held in the Chapin Library. ‘Essay upon the Art of Feeling,’ ff. 4, 140; ‘Notes on Duncan’s “Conscious Matter,”’ f. 58. For detailed studies of the context of this shift, see Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Athenaeum, 22 January 1887, 131–2. MS Note-Books, II, ff. 193 ff. Ralf Norrman, Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus (London: Macmillan, 1986). Melanie Klein, ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935), in Love, Guilt and Reparation, and Other Works 1921–1945 (London: Virago, 1994), 262–89.

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PART THREE On the Margin, 1887–1902

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9 Samuel Butler, Local Identity, and the Periodizing of Northern Italian Art: The Travel Writer-Painter’s View of Art History clarice zdanski

As for the old masters, the better plan would be never even to look at one of them, and to consign Raffaelle, along with Plato, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Dante, Goethe and two others, neither of them Englishmen, to limbo, as the Seven Humbugs of Christendom. Samuel Butler, ‘Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art’

Samuel Butler’s Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino is an animated, often charming diary of a Victorian travel writer-painter’s several summers of holiday rambling about Switzerland and Northern Italy. Published in 1881, it is a potpourri of Butler’s reflections on life, art, architecture, and religion in local settings far from Europe’s art capitals, copiously illustrated with engravings of his own extensive sketching in the countryside. At the volume’s centre, however, Butler offers the reader an essay on art academies, both ancient and modern, and their effects on the production of art, titled ‘Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art,’ and we are alerted to the fact that we have embarked with Butler not only on a genial tour of his favourite out-ofthe-way sketching locales, but also on a sustained attack on the art establishment of his day. Painting had always been one of Butler’s passions.1 As a schoolboy at Shrewsbury School, he was taught by the popular watercolour painter Philip Van Dyck Browne (1801–68), and he developed a knack for satiric graphics by sketching caricatures of his mathematics instructor, A.J. Paget. Expected to enter the ministry, as many of his forebears had done, he refused to be ordained after leaving university and declared his intentions to become a painter instead. His father rejected the idea but agreed to give him a ‘stake’ to raise sheep in New Zealand

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and, if the young Butler succeeded in business, he could then do as he wished. On his return to London in 1864, after doubling his father’s investment, Butler began to study painting seriously. He tried several art schools before settling on Heatherley’s, where he passed the time copying ancient sculpture, a skill required for entrance to the Royal Academy. He had some success with this, but soon became disenchanted. His travels in the 1870s coincided with a period of dissatisfaction with his own painting, along with deep reflection on the nature of artistic genius. Like John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, Butler developed an appreciation for ‘primitive’ Italian painting before Raphael, in particular the fifteenth-century Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini. His search for the ‘primitive’ in art was, however, deeply rooted in his personal experience of Italy rather than derived from the views of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his circle, towards whom Butler felt a strong aversion.2 Butler first went to Italy with his family in the winter of 1834–5, about the same time he began taking art lessons. An exhibit of art treasures in English collections hung in Manchester (1857) inspired his later travels on the Continent and visits to major galleries there.3 Modelled after the Old Masters exhibits initiated by the British Institution in 1806, this exhibit was the first in England – and, in fact, the first in Europe – to draw attention to Northern European art by direct comparison with Italian works. It undoubtedly influenced Butler’s concept of the history of Italian painting and its alleged ‘decline,’ the central issue in Alps and Sanctuaries. Old Masters exhibits began as the British Institution’s initiative to raise the standards of public taste and to promote contemporary British art by enabling living artists to study great masterpieces of the past.4 By mid-century these exhibits were a well-established part of British cultural life, but the ‘idyllic collaboration between old and new’ gave way to an emphasis on the ‘old.’ The Manchester show, organized by ‘experts’ under the influence of German erudition and scholarship, was designed to illustrate the history of art in a systematic arrangement of works by periods and schools. For a public exhibition to present with such scholarly and didactic aims indicates how rapidly the professionalization of art education had migrated into the museum sector and the realm of public art consumption. The notion of superiority in the Central Italian schools and the concept of the ‘Old Master’ goes back to the late sixteenth century, with the realization that even though the golden age of Michelangelo, Raphael,

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9.1 Sacro Monte at Locarno. Drawing by Samuel Butler, from Alps and Sanctuaries, 1881.

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and Leonardo had passed, these artists continued to represent the pinnacle of achievement.5 The sixteenth century also marked the birth of the art academy, child of the Italian Renaissance artist’s will to raise the status of the profession from a trade to an intellectual discipline through reforms in art education and treatises on art history, criticism, and theory. Drawing after ancient sculpture was fundamental to this scheme, and had been ever since Baccio Bandinelli’s first ‘academies’ came together as informal evening sessions in Rome in the 1530s.6 The first history of art, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, appeared in 1550,7 followed by the first formally recognized academies – the Accademia del Disegno in Florence (1569) and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (1593). Drawing after canonical works became the cornerstone of academic practical instruction, with a theoretical basis in two notions influential in the writing of European art history: Vasari’s preference for Central Italian artists (especially Michelangelo) and his concept of periods of ‘progress’ and ‘decline’ in the arts.8 By Butler’s time, these notions were consolidated into a ‘canon-producing process’9 supported by the eighteenth-century German model of art history as formulated in Johann Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764).10 Luigi Lanzi applied Winckelmann’s idea of art as a ‘scientific’ discipline to the Vasarian biographical tradition in La storia pittorica dell’Italia (1795–6), on great artists and regional schools.11 In the 1840s, art history became a university discipline, and the second half of the nineteenth century is marked by a proliferation of art institutions and the development of key tools in modern art history: specialized museums, travelling exhibitions, scientifically based catalogues of collections and monographs on individual artists and national and regional schools of art, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, conferences, popular handbooks and travel guides, reproductions.12 Butler wrote Alps and Sanctuaries against the backdrop of this growing alliance between the academic art establishment and the art consumerism (including tourism) of his day. His knowledge of European art was considerable, but it was the encounter with local art in out-ofthe-way alpine towns and villages in Switzerland and Northern Italy, untouched by his ‘humbugs’ Raphael, Michelangelo, and the Greeks, that moved him most. In the middle of the book, Butler attacks art academism and art professionalization from two angles: the tradition of studio instruction imposing on would-be artists formal skills out of context and employing a limited set of ‘exemplary’ canonical works;

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and the tradition of art history, beginning with Vasari, organized around a chronology of canonical artists. Here Butler found common ground with John Ruskin, whose recognition of the originality and power of indigenous art led him to challenge assumptions about the superiority of the ancient masters.13 Butler’s publications on travel and art begin with Alps and Sanctuaries (1881), but his most substantial work in this genre is Ex Voto (1888), a monograph on the Sacro Monte above the town of Varallo in the Val Sesia in Northern Italy.14 His choice of subject built on the antiacademic spirit of his essay ‘Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art.’ The Sacro Monte originated in 1486, when Fra’ Bernardino Caimi set out to reproduce in the Italian Alps a so-called New Jerusalem with biblical settings from the Holy Land. Over time the complex evolved, and the original idea was transformed into a Via Crucis of chapels leading up to a church on a mountain top. In each chapel, painted backgrounds are integrated with lifesize painted terracotta statues to create lifelike scenes of the main events in Christ’s life and Passion. But as art historian Sydney Freedberg makes clear, the stark realism, intense emotion, and use of the grotesque in the Sacri Monti contributed to a negative view of their artistic value: Addressed to the least sophisticated level of the population, in the region least penetrated by the Renaissance, the contents of the Sacro Monte were not conceived of as works of art in the developed sixteenth-century sense. Art in them was wholly a means and not at all an end; its sole use was to recreate the utmost that it could of reality. At the Sacro Monte the various chapels that illustrate the history of Christ are identical in kind and purpose to what waxworks, or the dioramas of a natural history museum, are today.15

But precisely because it was so anticlassical, in terms of its ‘base’ medium and crude realism, this art form appealed to Butler and provided him with an anti-academic model for a parallel type of art history that might repudiate the common fixation on periodization, along with its chronological and hierarchical approach to the arts. In Alps and Sanctuaries, accounts of years of rambling about the alpine regions in Northern Italy and the Swiss Canton Ticino are merged into one continuous narrative. Butler’s initial idea was to produce a guide to ‘alps’ and sanctuaries in little-known mountainous regions, illustrated with prints of his drawings. Despite the interest of his publisher and

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9.2 One of Butler’s two frontispiece maps for Alps and Sanctuaries, 1881 (adaptation).

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friends, however, he ended up having to publish the book at his own expense. A saturated travel literature market was probably the reason why. Informative guides like Karl Baedeker’s Handbook for Travellers for Northern Italy or John Murray III’s Handbooks to Switzerland and Northern Italy had been published well before Butler’s time, and remained popular through numerous revised editions.16 A parallel contributor to the emerging Victorian tourist industry fostered by Thomas Cook, Baedeker aimed to supply the traveller with some information regarding the culture and art of the people he is about to visit, as well as regarding the national features of the country, to render him as independent as possible of the services of guides and valets-de-place, to protect him against extortion, and in every way to aid him in deriving enjoyment and instruction in his tour.17

Yet while these guides increased the traveller’s autonomy, they also tended to render the tourist experience rather sterile and uniform. By mid-century, a negative view of ‘tourism’ as compared to ‘travelling’ began to emerge. ‘Anti-tourist’ genres, like the impressionistic travel diary, became more popular. In such works the author’s cultural experiences in places ‘off the beaten track’ of standardized itineraries, as methodically laid out by Baedeker and others, came across as more authentic and unique, ‘against a backdrop of always assumed tourist vulgarity, repetition and ignorance.’18 Alps and Sanctuaries resembles the travel diary more than the handbook. An essentially antitourist stance emerges not only in scattered remarks about the few Englishmen Butler saw during his travels, but also in his critique of predictable reactions to canonical vistas, monuments, and works of the masters. For example, in chapter 2, on the scenery of the St Gotthard Pass, Butler sounds like his narrator in The Way of All Flesh,19 who objects to George Pontifex, Ernest’s grandfather, priggishly expressing ‘conventional ecstasy’ on seeing Mont Blanc and the collections of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence for the first time. Butler writes: As for knowing whether or not one likes a picture, which under the present aesthetic reign of terror is de rigueur, I once heard a man say the only test was to ask one’s self whether one would care to look at it if one was quite sure that one was alone; I have never been able to get beyond

230 Clarice Zdanski this test with the St. Gothard scenery, and applying it to the Devil’s Bridge, I should say a stay of about thirty seconds would be enough for me. (AS, 7)

He then affirms his unwillingness to structure his readers’ experience with the remark, ‘One pass will do as well as any other.’ Alps and Sanctuaries differs in several respects, however, from the typical impressionistic travel diary. Unlike Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée, Frances Trollope’s A Visit to Italy, or Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy, Alps and Sanctuaries is not just about travel: it is about art. Art is both a tool for exploration and a central theme for reflection. On holiday, sketching in places off the beaten track of Rome or Florence and far from canonical works and academic exercises, Butler could go back to what he considered the true source of artistic vision – ‘wild eyesight’ or ‘the ignorant eye’ – which Elinor Shaffer explains as his attempt to ‘shed the training in seeing and valuing imposed on it by “aesthetic terrorism” and find its way to the naïve.’20 Alps and Sanctuaries is thus more than a signpost in the history of antitourism; it challenges the intellectual foundations of the structured Continental tour by encouraging the traveller to see for himself rather than ‘by the book.’21 At the same time, it records Butler’s ‘conversion’ from guidebook writer to art historian. In chapter 6, Butler describes a visionary experience he had while on an excursion to the lakes above the village of Piora in the Lepontine Alps (AS, 61–5). At the Chapel of San Carlo, he dozed off and dreamed of the mountain landscape transformed into a sort of baroque illusionist scene of heavenly hosts rising upward. Green slopes gave way to threatening seracs, and clouds sailed through openings in the mountains before turning into crowds of musicians. The amphitheatre formed by the peaks around Lake Ritom (Foïsc, Camoghe, and Pizzo Taneda) became a great orchestra stage, and the pine trees on its shores turned into musicians. Two choirs dressed in white sprang from a glacier on one of the peaks, and a precipice was magically transformed into a great organ. The organist played a fugue before the chorus broke into ‘Venus laughing from the skies.’ When a raging storm woke him, Butler returned valleywards. This account serves as prelude to more serious discussions on reforming and salvaging the visual arts. As in the topsy-turvy world of Erewhon, Butler’s art world is one where the academic paragons Michelangelo and Raphael are humbugs and the minor, provincial artists of the Sacri Monti are true champions. Butler’s disillusionment with his own artistic training lay at the root

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of his search for a way to create and view art uncontaminated by academe. In the 1870s, after about a decade of study, academic methods had done little for him. Butler felt he had regressed, as he confided to his friend Eliza Savage in a letter written from Mendrisio, Switzerland, in 1876: ‘I never felt how badly I paint more than now – and after all these years. I ought to have done what I am doing now five years ago; I was on the right track then, only I did not know it. Never mind, I will go back to it now.’22 Thus, he found his voice as art historian while travelling, at a time when he was abandoning his lifelong dream to become a painter and when his interest in the ‘primitive’ was growing stronger. The next year, preoccupied with writing his evolutionary work Life and Habit, he did not return to Heatherley’s school. Geographically speaking, Butler’s itinerary in Alps and Sanctuaries follows the standard guidebooks. He begins in Airolo, at the foot of the St Gotthard Pass, and slowly works his way down the Val Leventina in the Swiss Canton Ticino. From the Lago Maggiore region, he eventually arrives in the Piedmont in Northern Italy. Instead of describing ‘sights’ or making recommendations to his reader, he seeks out ‘alps’ in the local sense of the word, ‘not, as so many people in England think, a snowy mountain ... An alpe is a tract of the highest summer pasturage just below the snow-line, and only capable of being grazed for two or three months in every year’ (AS, 17). Thus he seeks not the outsider’s quest for the picturesque – the awe-inspiring Jungfrau or Mont Blanc – but highlands with a character all their own. Likewise, with art, Butler is less interested in grand cathedrals than in intimate ‘sanctuaries’ where he might find ‘soul fossils’: Why is it, I wonder, that these little bits of soul-fossil, as it were, touch us so much when we come across them? A fossil does not touch us – while a fly in amber does. Why should a fly in amber interest us and give us a slightly solemn feeling for a moment, when the fossil of a megatherium bores us? (AS, 211)

Here the scientifically classified megatherium can be read as a construct of the increasingly professionalized Victorian museum culture that sought similarly to ‘fossilize’ art in periodized, classified museum forms. Butler is against the categorizing, cataloguing mind that would ‘museumify’23 the world. In the remote alpine villages, geographically and intellectually off the beaten track, he found a living art to which notions of ‘period’ and ‘decline’ did not apply.

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To get a feeling for Butler’s approach, we might compare different sources on Giornico, about halfway up the Val Leventina. Its major ‘sight’ is the church of San Nicolao, perhaps the finest example of Romanesque architecture in the Canton Ticino. Baedeker’s ‘informative’ guide briefly mentions Giornico’s picturesque environs, but says nothing about its antiquities.24 However, a short introduction to Italian art at the beginning of the guide lays out the main characteristics of the Romanesque style, which are labelled ‘rude and barbarous.’25 Among other substantive reference tools for Swiss art history at the time were Johann Rudolf Rahn’s Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in der Schweiz (1876), a general survey. One of the founding fathers of Swiss art history, Rahn belonged to the milieu of Jacob Burckhardt.26 Butler’s apparent ignorance of Rahn’s work is surprising, because the Swiss scholar wrote profusely on art in the Ticino, including a survey of wall painting (1881) and an inventory/guide to its medieval monuments (1893).27 Rahn also published a sketchbook produced during his Wanderungen, and was, so to speak, Butler’s foil from the world of institutional art history.28 Rahn’s inventory provides a detailed report on the church at Giornico, including floor plans, elevations, and illustrations of the interior.29 In Alps and Sanctuaries, Butler, too, provides a few illustrations of the main entrance portal and the interior looking towards the apse (AS, 54– 7), but there are no precise art historical details in his description of the ‘grand old church of S. Nicolao.’ Its age is not categorized in terms of ‘Romanesque,’ ‘Lombard,’ or ‘Gothic,’ but simply as ‘older than the church at Mairengo,’ and any indications of style or technique are reduced to ‘its original condition’ and ‘massive’ stones. Butler’s intention was to capture a sense of the cultural setting as he sketched and lived among the locals, whereas Rahn’s was more ‘scientific’ in its effort to measure, classify, analyse, and convey a picture of the whole in professional terms. In Alps and Sanctuaries, text and illustration complement each other so well that without the text, the pictures are meaningless; and without the pictures, we cannot ‘hear him [Butler] speaking’ (AS, xvii). In describing Giornico in chapter 5, Butler is both painter and writer – drawn to the green reflections produced by the bright sunshine outside into the church’s dark interior and inspired by a swarm of insects on a hazy summer afternoon. However, as the book progresses, Butler’s sensitivity to the errors and omissions of academic art history becomes more evident.

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9.3 Interior of the church of San Nicolao at Giornico. Drawing by Samuel Butler, from Alps and Sanctuaries, 1881.

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The first half of the book seems to be written with a different outlook from the second. After chapter 12, ‘Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art,’ Butler’s approach is more like an art historian’s. For example, in chapter 18, when he was unable to find any indication of the date of frescoes at the church in Mesocco, he carefully went through the evidence at his disposal – inscriptions on the walls and accounts of related historical material – to support dating them to the late fifteenth century. He included reproductions of the frescoes and rubbings of the inscriptions (AS, 183–99), and his stylistic analysis shows how he could use great Renaissance artists as reference points without belittling their less famous contemporaries. One of Butler’s reasons for dating the Mesocco figures to 1480 relies on a comparison with Leonardo: They were probably painted later, for in the St. Christopher there is a distinct hint at anatomy; enough to show that the study of anatomy introduced by Leonardo da Vinci was beginning to be talked about as more or less the correct thing. This would hardly be the case before 1480, as Leonardo was not born till 1452. (AS, 193)

By looking at art off the beaten museum track, and, what is more, trying to date it at a time when the basic tools of art history were still in the making,30 Butler could see the perils of periodization and an ‘evolutionary’ framework in which a few major personalities could change the course of art appreciation forever. The frescoes at Mesocco bear comparison with Leonardo, he says, but their intrinsic artistic merit is not diminished as a result. Later in the chapter, when asked by an Englishman visiting the site if he had seen the ‘horrid’ fresco at Mesocco, Butler defends the quality of the work and corrects the visitor on his erroneous date estimates (AS, 195). Butler was far more interested in these lesser-known artists than in the Old Masters and wanted to write an alternative, de-academized study that suited him better as artist, historian, and critic. The chapter ends with a stop at the Church of Santa Maria in Calanca before returning to Bellinzona. Butler admires a Battle of Lepanto signed by a certain Georgius Wilhelmus Constantiensis (1649), because ‘it displays very little respect for academic principles, but is full of spirit and sensible painting.’ He goes on to praise two others hanging above this as examples of, as it were, the last groans of true art while being stifled by academism – or it may be the attempt at a new birth, which was neverthe-

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less doomed to extinction by academicians while yet in its infancy. Such pictures are to be found all over Italy. Sometimes ... they have absolute merit – more commonly they have the relative merit of showing that the painter was trying to look and feel for himself, and a picture does much when it conveys this impression. (AS, 203–4)

This plea for ‘a book about the unknown Italian painters in out-ofthe-way Italian valleys during the times of the decadence of art’ (AS, 204) signals an interest in local art that, unlike Rahn’s, could not be contained within a classifying, categorizing approach. Butler’s own thwarted attempts to become an academic painter led him to view these sanctuaries as contemporary art’s – and his own – salvation from academe: As regards painting, the last rays of the sunset of genuine art are to be found in the votive pictures at Locarno or Oropa, and in many a wayside chapel. In these, religious art still lingers as a living language, however rudely spoken. In these alone is the story told, not as in the Latin and Greek verses of the scholar, who thinks he has succeeded best when he has most concealed his natural manner of expressing himself, but by one who knows what he wants to say, and says it in his mother-tongue, shortly, and without caring whether or not his words are in accordance with academic rules. (AS, 123)

Ruskin’s appreciation of the ‘savageness’ of Gothic art comes to mind: Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.31

Uncompromising truth of feeling – not skill or conformity with academic rules – becomes the sole criterion for determining artistic value, and Butler thrashes this problem out in ‘Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art,’ a roughed-out plan for resisting misguided academism. The dream in chapter 6, referred to above, marks a transformation in

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Butler’s intellectual life. Baedeker offers no attractions for Piora, the subject of the chapter; it is for him simply another village in the Val Leventina, with its ‘dreary scenery.’32 Luigi Lavizzari’s guide for excursionists, on the other hand, describes ‘magical Lake Ritom’ as a ‘gleaming mirror in the solitary environment, where the timid chamois comes to admire his reflection and swim in its limpid waters before fleeing to the bare mountain crests where his secret dwelling lies.’33 Butler, too, paints an evocative scene, with his allegory of the old innkeeper, Fate, or the disturbing little furnace-keeper, catalyst to the dream sequence, who is strangely ‘grave and quiet’ upon Butler’s return, almost as if a witness to the vision (AS, 61–5).34 Various scholars have commented on Butler’s curious dream. Carla Gnappi calls it a ‘parallel inner voyage’ and compares it to the beginning of Erewhon, where the narrator discovers an unknown land after getting lost during a trip in the mountains of New Zealand.35 Likewise, Shaffer does not separate Butler the utopian from Butler the traveller when she describes this peculiar quality as ‘mapping’ landscapes – real and fictional – onto one another. Like the narrator’s stupefied dream state when confronted with the great guardians-cum-musical statues, Piora is another ‘fable of perception’ that divides real geography (New Zealand / Switzerland) from a topsy-turvy world (Erewhon/Butler’s Renaissance). The dream takes us somewhere else: ‘the reader follows a fantastic map by which the traveller’s possible routes into Italy are superimposed, and again, we have the effect of Erewhon: the descent into the country of the imagination.’ It is like ‘word painting’: a visual evocation of the Renaissance – and an auditory one as well, since Butler includes scores for the music he hears in the dream.36 However, Butler was not looking for ‘evolutionary’ parallels to the rise and fall of classicism in Italian art. At the end of the dream at Piora, when the precipice becomes an organ and the glacier choirs burst into song, the scene all too closely resembles one of Correggio’s or Pietro da Cortona’s (or, closer to home, Gaudenzio Ferrari’s) tumultuous cupolas. The spirit of the Renaissance that Butler meets at Piora is the anticlassical late Renaissance verging on the Baroque, with all its theatricality and taste for the grotesque and the comic, as Shaffer points out. Butler’s sense of humour is reminiscent of di sotto in su celestial visions, where artists inserted comic details, like a cherub urinating (Giulio Romano’s ceiling frescoes in the Palazzo Tè, Mantua) or an angel musician holding bagpipes so that the bag part of the instrument seems like her breasts (Gaudenzio Ferrari’s cupola in Santa Maria dei

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Miracoli, Saronno) (AS, 64).37 In Butler’s vision, even the heavenly host adapts to the mountain environment, letting him see ‘underneath the soles of their boots as their legs dangled in the air’ (AS, 82). Scholarly debate on the notion of the Renaissance and the canon of the ‘ancient masters’ is central to the ‘crucial crossroads in the development of art history’ during Butler’s time.38 In this way, Butler is very much like Ruskin. For instance, ever since Vasari, the forerunners of the Renaissance have been recognized as Giotto in painting and Nicola Pisano in sculpture; Raphael’s and Titian’s careers develop into the High Renaissance style because of a classical, Roman sense of weight and monumentality. In The Two Paths, Ruskin inverts all this: the ‘builders of the Lombardic churches in the Adda and the Arno’ replace Giotto and Nicola, and the mature Raphael and Titian are not inspired by Greco-Roman art but by ‘the sculpture of the round arched churches of North Italy.’ In The Stones of Venice, too, Ruskin characterizes the Renaissance as a ‘corruption’ of the Gothic style.39 As Alps and Sanctuaries progresses, Butler’s shift in focus from travel literature to art history is evident on the most basic level in his increased use of ‘historianly’ terminology. He closes chapter 6 by identifying the church at Biasca in specific period terms: ‘a good though plain example of early Lombard architecture.’ In the next two chapters, on San Michele on the Monte Pirichiano near Turin, he corrects errors in Murray’s handbook, gives a history and detailed description of the monument, and contributes to the debate as to whether its style is Gothic or Lombard. Most of chapter 18 is devoted to problems in dating the Mesocco frescoes (AS, 66, 83–4, 183–98). While Butler’s later experiences in the valleys around Turin were less visionary than those he underwent in Piora, they are still useful for grasping his ideas on the purpose of art. A conversation with an amateur draughtsman intent on producing drawings for an illustrated guide to the area leads to an exchange of works included as illustrations in Alps and Sanctuaries (AS, 115–16). On another occasion, Butler’s discovery of a modern-day master, Dedomenici da Rossa, opens up an opportunity to explain what he values most in art. He values the colour of fifteenth-century Italian painting. He values drapery folds that are not modern but have ‘a sense of effort about them, as though the painter had tried to do them better, but had been unable to get them as free and flowing as he had wished.’ He values an unaffected sense of archaism, a ‘somewhat constrained treatment’ resulting from the artist’s working through an intricate problem and ‘giving as much as he

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could with a hand which was less advanced than his judgment.’ In short, what makes the work perfect are its slight imperfections, which is what Butler appreciates in votive pictures: ‘The meaning is so sound in spite of the expression being so defective – if, indeed, expression can be defective when it has so well conveyed the meaning’ (AS, 116–17, 124). Butler goes on to praise the self-taught artist: Dedomenici ‘never had any instruction, but picked up his art for himself’ (AS, 137–9). This calls to mind Ruskin’s definition of the third constituent element of the Gothic, naturalism, or ‘the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws.’40 The antiacademic implications of Lanzo lead to the central chapter of Alps and Sanctuaries, ‘Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art,’ where the concept of decline is the point of departure for Butler’s ideas on ‘natural’ art instruction. ‘Letting them do it,’ making mistakes, overcoming weaknesses, and ‘confusing’ ideas in order to create new ones become in Butler’s view the basic elements of artistic training. If Italian art is in a stage of decline, he believes, it is because artists of his time have learned to draw in the same way that schoolboys learn Greek, by memorizing form before understanding content: That system trains boys to study other people’s works rather than nature, and, as Leonardo da Vinci so well says, it makes them nature’s grandchildren and not her children ... taught to see nature with an old man’s eyes at once, without going through the embryonic stages ... All his individuality has been crushed out of him. (AS, 127)

In order to reverse the damaging effects on originality of three hundred years of excessive adulation for the insuperable Michelangelo and Raphael, Butler advocates a complete reform of art education. In his approach pupils would work independently and help each other. Art instruction would not be based on mastering formulas in canonical works, but on the ‘ignorant eye’ that can see for itself. By abolishing reliance on periodization, itself the product of misguided academism aspiring to a ‘scientific,’ professionalized art history, one might hope to reverse the inevitable decline in the quality of art resulting from centuries of rigid methodology and slavish imitation. The notion of ‘decline’ also had repercussions in travel literature. By Butler’s time, a short survey of art and antiquities by an eminent scholar was a standard part of the tourist handbook. John Ruskin, for

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example, had provided information on Italian painting for Murray’s handbook (1847).41 Baedeker’s guide to Northern Italy included a short survey of Italian art by the German scholar Anton Springer,42 the first to hold a chair in art history at Leipzig University (1873). Springer emphasizes travel as a means of acquiring knowledge of the great masterpieces of European art;43 his purpose, as he explains it, is to help the traveller in this quest by summarizing the main lines of development in Italian art from antiquity to the present. The classical world and the Italian Renaissance represent the high points that everything else either builds up to or declines from, and most of his essay is dedicated to these two periods. Springer concludes by calling his summary a ‘slight outline of the decline of Italian art.’44 Butler distances himself from this notion, opening his essay on decline with the declaration: ‘Those who know the Italians will see no sign of decay about them’ (AS, 120). But in stating that ‘modern Italian art is in many respects as bad as it was once good’ (AS, 121), he shares – as Ruskin did – some of Springer’s misgivings about contemporary art: ‘There has not before appeared a race like that of civilized Europe at this day, thoughtfully unproductive of all art.’45 Springer considered contemporary art inferior to that of past ages because it was, he said, derivative and devoid of originality. This position is paradoxical, as the academic approach, after all, was itself based on ‘derivation,’ on emulating the Old Masters. Butler, aware of the inherent contradiction, observes: For the last three hundred years, ever since the Carracci opened their academy at Bologna, there has been no lack of artistic education in Italy. Curiously enough, the date of the opening of the Bolognese Academy coincides as nearly as may be with the complete decadence of Italian painting. (AS, 126)

Springer also believed that the Italian artists of his time had ‘lost faith in the ancient ideals’ and were ‘incapable of new and earnest tasks. They breathe a close, academic atmosphere, they no longer labour like their predecessors in an independent atmosphere, and their productions are therefore devoid of absorbing and permanent interest.’46 What a disappointing end to the aspirations of Alberti and the Renaissance artist’s struggle to raise the status of the visual arts from the plebeian arti meccaniche to the more noble arti liberali, and to prove that art is an intellectual and theoretical discipline – not a mere trade.47

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In the centuries that followed the birth of the academy, art education evolved from apprenticeship in a workshop system based on mastering a hierarchy of manual skills to enrolment in an institution focused on drawing and copying a hierarchy of specific works of art. The curriculum aimed from the outset to structure the artist’s vision according to the principles of imitation and the authority of the classical world. These changes had not encouraged greater artistic liberty; on the contrary, academies had become stultifying arbiters of taste. Yet Butler’s era was also the age of artistic rebellion, exemplified by the Impressionists in France and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement in England.48 Butler’s relation to the avant-garde is ambiguous. Although clearly outspoken against the academy and its ‘aesthetic reign of terror,’ he dismisses ‘art for art’s sake,’ the great nineteenth-century cry for aesthetic freedom and release from the academy’s tyranny. ‘Who is Art, that it should have a sake?’ shows Butler’s intolerance for the elitism expressed in such maxims as ‘art is for artists, just as music is for musicians’ (AS, 135).49 Moreover, Butler’s criticism of the system for making pupils ‘nature’s grandchildren’ would hardly mesh well with the ‘intertextual networks’ and ‘criss-crossing references’ of nineteenth-century aestheticism.50 The aims and ideals of many of his contemporaries, however, from James McNeill Whistler to Oscar Wilde and the PreRaphaelites, were in some ways consistent with his own. Butler argues that a work of art should be produced for the artist’s own pleasure first and foremost, not for moral or financial reasons. Yet he remains pessimistic because conformity and rebellion seem to him part of a vicious cycle: Of course such a society as I have proposed would not remain incorrupt long. ‘Everything that grows, holds in perfection but a little moment.’ The members would try to imitate professional men in spite of their rules, or if they escaped this and after a while got to paint well, they would become dogmatic, and a rebellion against their authority would be necessary ere long as it was against that of their predecessors. (AS, 135–6)

After framing his theory of art and artistic expression in Alps and Sanctuaries, Butler went on to write Ex Voto, a historical treatise on Gaudenzio Ferrari, Tabachetti, and the other Sacri Monti artists, as he had promised to do in his preface to the earlier work.51 Butler scholars agree that, unlike Alps and Sanctuaries, Ex Voto is a ‘serious’ work of art his-

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tory.52 Butler was the first among non-Italians to write on the New Jerusalem complex and, although a few Italians had written on the Sacri Monti before him, only Gaudenzio Bordiga had written exclusively on Varallo.53 With Ex Voto, Butler abandoned the idea of an illustrated book, bought two new cameras, and concentrated on documenting his surroundings through photography rather than drawing.54 The use of photographic reproductions in a monograph represents another important innovation in Victorian art history.55 Yet while Ex Voto is more methodical, and more ‘scientific,’ Butler was just as concerned with the sense of local place in Varallo as he had been in the Ticinese Alps. After finishing his workday, he would spend evenings with his host, his assistant Dionigi Negri and Negri’s relatives, or other townspeople. Hence, Ex Voto is not just another monograph, but, like Alps and Sanctuaries, a ‘thank offering’ dedicated ‘to the inhabitants of Varallo and the Val Sesia.’56 Butler considered Italy his ‘second country’ and, through his many travels in the Canton Ticino and Northern Italy, he had become so thoroughly acculturated as to break tourist / native or insider / outsider barriers enough to write a history of art with a strong sense of local identity. The spirit in which his research was undertaken shows an insider’s concern for local culture. He made many friends, and felt something like a sense of community with others studying the Sacro Monte because they were all working on – and coming to terms with – art that was little known and certainly unrecognized compared to the classical tradition of marble and bronze sculpture.57 This spirit of fellowship extended, in a way, to art itself as the legacy not of any single genius or group of geniuses but of generations of local artists and the community that supported them.58 Local art is the great interest that drove Butler to study Varallo, and it permeates both Alps and Sanctuaries and Ex Voto. This aspect of his career deserves more recognition than it has received so far, not only because he was ‘first’ but also because like Ruskin, Burckhardt, Symonds, and Pater, he wanted to reform prevailing notions of the Renaissance.59 His discovery of the Flemish origins of Tabachetti, for example, contributes to the theory that Northern European art influenced the Italian Renaissance tradition. Butler’s profound understanding of the Sacro Monte and Gaudenzio’s style was far in the vanguard of later critics and historians like Giovanni Testori,60 the great champion of Italian provincial art, who praises Varallo as ‘the great theatre of the

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mountains.’ The ‘arcane, powerful simplicity of feeling’ of Gaudenzio’s art, Testori writes, depicts ‘all the fatigue, emotions, struggles, joys, disappointments, and pain that he shared every day with his people.’61 Butler’s ‘Italianness’ and his relationship with local residents while writing Ex Voto show how clearly he, too, had become part of everyday life in Varallo. The friendly chat, document exchanging, and spleen venting in the letters Alberto Durio compiled in Samuel Butler e la Val Sesia reveal a very Italianate Butler. In 1892, when Gaudenzio’s Christ in the Crucifixion Chapel was replaced with a more modern one, Butler not only brought this ‘unaccountable act of vandalism’ to the attention of the English public in a letter to the Times, he also refused to return to Varallo since he ‘could not find a better way of showing his disgust’;62 he did not go back until the following year, after the original was restored. In effect, he had marked off the Sacro Monte as ‘his’ territory. Whereas in Alps and Sanctuaries Butler uses the illustrated guide to reject the academic traditions of art criticism and training, in Ex Voto he shifts from travel literature to the field of art history. In Alps and Sanctuaries he admonishes young artists not to study accomplished masterpieces; in Ex Voto he warns against viewing all art through the cloudy spectacles of ‘decline’ and ‘schools.’ It was inconceivable to him that a single artist could influence, much less shape, an entire ‘school.’ Chronological comparison showed, after all, that Michelangelo was a mere apprentice in Florence when plans got underway for the Sacro Monte in Varallo; hence, he could not have been the inspiration for this monumental complex.63 In the introduction to Ex Voto, Butler insists on basing his approach to art history and criticism on the principle of seeing works for oneself and of verifying what ‘style’ and ‘influence’ mean in local or regional contexts. He dismissed Sir Austen Henry Layard, who had translated one of the seminal German manuals on art history, Franz Kugler’s Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei, for simply accepting the author’s ideas without independent verification. In chastizing Layard for not having gone to Varallo in person, Butler rejects academism and extends his ‘hands-on’ approach in art education into art history: ‘to see for oneself and to evade the pernicious type-casting of “Masters”, “Schools”, “periods”, and “isms.”’64 The difference between Layard and Butler on Gaudenzio Ferrari is also relevant to Butler’s critique of academism. In closely scrutinizing the scholarship, Butler rejects the accepted notion of Gaudenzio’s career as framed by a ‘blessed’ Raphaelesque early period followed by

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a later decadent Sacro Monte period inspired by the late Michelangelo and Mannerism. Instead, he emphasizes Gaudenzio’s independence of these great geniuses and his proximity to lesser known Lombard artists like Bergognone, and to Leonardo’s rival in Milan, Stefano Scotto. In the same way that his ‘Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art’ argues for unpretentious local art in Alps and Sanctuaries, Butler celebrates the continuity of an art form with its ‘nerve centre’ in Varallo, independent of Vasari’s ‘grande maniera.’65 In Alps and Sanctuaries, Butler outlines a program to bring Italian art out of the state of decline into which it has fallen, and in Varallo he finds a model for how this can work. At the Sacro Monte, in ‘ the region least penetrated by the Renaissance,’66 artisans and artists worked together to maintain a uniform, distinctive style despite stylistic ‘evolution’ elsewhere. In Alps and Sanctuaries, Butler overturns the prescriptive framework of the guidebook; in Ex Voto, he challenges the privileged position that periodization has awarded to the masters of the Central Italian Renaissance. Both books go against the grain in questioning a fundamental tenet of the art establishment: that the ancient Greco-Roman world and the Central Italian Renaissance should form the basis of art education, in the sense of both technical training and historical scholarship. Moreover, in an age with contradictory ideas about the ‘true’ Renaissance ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites’ preference for primitive art before 1480 to Burckhardt’s celebration of the mature Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, Butler offers his own program based on the intense realism and grotesque qualities of the Sacro Monte, as well as on the influence of Northern European art in Italy. This is reminiscent of the ‘wildness of thought and roughness of work’ that Ruskin so appreciated in Gothic art in The Stones of Venice.67 Butler realizes that the Sacro Monte originated in the local traditions of the Piedmont from 1480 to 1520 and beyond, regardless of where his contemporaries might place the high point of the Renaissance. In his ‘personal history of art,’68 as Shaffer has characterized it, the sacri monti represent a parallel evolution at a time when Italian art was said to have declined. These elaborate productions continued and expanded upon a tradition of Renaissance pageantry and theatricality that had nothing to do with possible rebirths in neoclassicism or rebellious romanticism. True feeling and artistic striving – not contrived artifice – survived in the ex votos and natural painting in remote alpine valleys far beyond the world of museums, artificial chronological divisions of institutional art history, and advice in travellers’ handbooks. Butler’s starting point

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is seeing for oneself, whether in creating, writing about, or looking at a work of art. When he set out to write an account of his Italian travels, it became clear that the standardizing approach of Baedeker or Murray would not work for him. Unlike them, Butler appreciated the characteristic but often intangible qualities of the places he visited. Amidst the alpine valleys, he had visionary revelations about the nature of artistic expression and his critical thinking about local art forms would not accept the notion of decline. The result was a book that started out as an illustrated guide to the Canton Ticino in Switzerland and Northern Italy, ended up as a scathing attack on academic traditions in art instruction and art history, and led him to prepare a monograph on the Sacri Monti and the genesis of his own ideas on Italian art. In highly original ways, Butler spoke out against the rise of professionalism in nineteenth-century art – both in the teaching of art as practice and in the writing of art history and criticism. As a piece of travel writing and art history, Alps and Sanctuaries is a highly innovative work in that the author created his own illustrations – drawings that were not simply casual afterthoughts to the text, but deeply integrated with his artistic theory and cultural vision. The work represents a radical departure from the format of the tourist handbook, which Roland Barthes has so aptly described as an ‘agent of blindness’ in foreign lands where ‘the human life of a country disappears to the exclusive benefit of its monuments.’69 To extend Barthes’s metaphor to the literature of art history, a survey or monograph can become an agent of blindness if written according to notions of decline. In both Alps and Sanctuaries and Ex Voto, Butler was concerned with new ways of seeing, in the sense both of providing images (illustrations of his own drawings or reproductions of the works he studied) and of motivating the viewer to reflect on the nature of artistic vision. Although he did not receive due recognition for this in his own time, he deserves a place among major figures in Victorian art criticism like Ruskin and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movements. Through the medium of art history, his reexamination of the idea of decline in the arts led him to a unique view of the Renaissance worth considering alongside the analysis of more widely read commentators such as Ruskin and Burckhardt. With Ex Voto, Butler was among the first to expand the history of Italian art to include a unique, regional art form that now, with the formation of a documentation centre and designation as a World Heritage Site by

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UNESCO in 2003, is at last receiving the scholarly attention it deserves.70 The scope of this paper does not permit an in-depth comparison between Butler’s perspective and the changing approaches to art education over the past hundred years. Since his time, revolutions in the world of art have taken place at the ‘geometrical ratio’ of the inventions in Alps and Sanctuaries (AS, 42). The process of professionalization underway in Butler’s time has continued down to our own day, producing a literature of art history so vast and diversified that the concepts of ‘decline’ and ‘progress’ are now relegated to discussions of the historiography of the discipline. Art history now embraces a host of fields and issues that Butler could not have contemplated; many stem from the rise of American institutions of higher learning, museums, and cultural organizations and disciplines, such as non-Western art history, the social history of art, and women and minorities in art.71 Alps and Sanctuaries shows Butler’s coming to terms with a profound concept of art and life. His refusal to encode and to glibly ‘recommend’ like Baedeker, to force his unusually broad knowledge of Italian art into Springer’s rigid scheme of the ‘decline and fall’ of the classical tradition, or to bombard his reader with facts and statistics as Rahn had done, underscore the uniqueness of his vision. Among his most valuable contributions was his critique of the limitations – perceptual and imaginative – underlying the notion of decline espoused by the art establishment of his day. The ‘authorities’ tended to divorce art from local cultural identity and, as a result, to thwart the ability of the observer – whether traveller, artist, or historian – to grasp the essence of art and life in an alpine village, in a museum, or through the pages of an art history text.

NOTES 1 See the brilliant reassessment of Butler’s long-neglected career as artist and critic by Elinor Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 3–66; Shaffer, Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh: Photographs, Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings by Samuel Butler (1835–1902), 7–11 (this work hereafter cited as Bolton Exhibition); Elinor Shaffer, ‘A Commentary on the Man, His Life and His Photos,’ The Way of All Flesh: Samuel Butler (1835–1902). A Centenary Exhibition at St. John’s College, 26 May-30 June 2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, n.d.), 3–4.

246 Clarice Zdanski 2 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 3–66. 3 Shaffer, Bolton Exhibition, 5. 4 Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 82–97. 5 Ibid., 3–4. 6 Grove Dictionary of Art, s.v. ‘Academy’; Alessandro Conti, ‘L’evoluzione dell’artista,’ Storia dell’arte italiana. Parte prima: Materiali e problemi. Vol. 2, L’artista e il pubblico (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 115–263; Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1973); Gill Perry and Colin Cunningham, eds., Academies, Museums, and Canons of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 7 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (Florence: Torrentino, 1550); see also T.S.R. Boase, Giorgio Vasari: The Man and the Book, Bollingen Series 35 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 8 See Grove Dictionary of Art, s.vv. ‘Art criticism,’ ‘Art history,’ and ‘Periodization’; E.H. Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance Concept of Artistic Progress and Its Consequences,’ and ‘ Norm and Form: The Stylistic Categories of Art History and Their Origins in Renaissance Ideals,’ in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 3rd ed. (1966; Oxford: Phaidon; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978), 1–10, 81–98; Gombrich, ‘Styles of Art and Styles of Life,’ in The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication (London: Phaidon, 1999), 240–61; Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts,’ in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 163–227; Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, 1. From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New York and London: New York University Press, 1990), 89–145; Udo Kultermann, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1990–6), trans. as The History of Art History (New York: Abaris, 1993) and as Storia della storia dell’arte (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1997), 54–120. I have used the Italian translation of Kultermann’s work, cited hereafter as Storia. 9 Barasch, Modern Theories, 109. 10 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden: Walther, 1764); Kultermann, Storia, 54–63. 11 Luigi Lanzi, La storia pittorica dell’Italia (Bassano: Remondino, 1795–6). 12 Kultermann, Storia, 44–144. 13 John Ruskin, Selected Writings, ed. Kenneth Clark (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), 123–36.

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14 Citations from Alps and Sanctuaries and Ex Voto are from The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, ed. Jones and Bartholomew, vols 7 and 9; references to Alps and Sanctuaries cited in text as AS. See also his Essays on Life, Art and Science, ed. R.A. Streatfield (London: Grant Richards, 1904). 15 S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500–1600, The Pelican History of Art, rev. repr. (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 393. Compare Ruskin’s ideas on the ‘grotesque Renaissance’ in John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Everyman’s Library, 213–15 (1907; repr., London: J.M. Dent & Sons; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1927), 3:102–51. For terracotta sculpture, see Grove Dictionary of Art, s.v. ‘Terracotta’; Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); Bruce Boucher, ed., Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 16 Karl Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers by Karl Baedeker. First Part: Northern Italy, Including Leghorn, Florence, Ravenna, the Island of Corsica, and Routes Through France, Switzerland, and Austria. With 8 Maps and 32 Plans. Fifth Remodelled Edition (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1879). Among Murray’s titles were John Murray III, Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of the Savoy and Piedmont (London: John Murray, 1838) and Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (London: John Murray, 1846). 17 Baedeker, Handbook, v. 18 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918 (1993; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 5–6, 157. 19 As cited in Buzard, Beaten Track, 158. 20 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 59; Bolton Exhibition, 9. 21 Buzard, Beaten Track, 157. 22 Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss E.M.A. Savage, 1871–1885, ed. Keynes and Hill, 133. 23 Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 38. 24 Baedeker, Handbook, 31. 25 Anton Springer, ‘Italian Art: An Historical Sketch,’ in Baedeker, Handbook, xxv–xli. 26 Johann Rudolf Rahn, Geschichte der bildenden Künste in der Schweiz (Zurich: Staub, 1876). For Rahn, see Ursula Hungerbühler, Johann Rudolf Rahn, Begründer der schweizerischen Künstgeschichte, Mitteilungen der Antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich 39, Neujahrsblatt 121 (Zurich: Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Antiquarische Gesellschaft, 1956). Jacob Burckhardt was the author of the seminal and much translated Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860).

248 Clarice Zdanski 27 Johann Rudolf Rahn, Die mittelalterlichen Wandgemälde in der italienischen Schweiz, Mitteilungen der antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich, Bd. 21, H. 1 (Zurich: Antiquarische Gesellschaft, 1881); Rahn, I monumenti artistici del Medio Evo nel Cantone Ticino, trans. Eligio Pometta (Bellinzona: C. Salvioni, 1894), originally published as Die mittelalterlichen Kunstdenkmäler des Canton Tessin (Zurich: Verlag der antiquarischen Gesellschaft, 1893). 28 Rahn, Kunst und Wanderstudien aus der Schweiz (Zurich: n.p., 1888). Butler’s Italian translator fancies what a meeting between the two might have been like: one with his sketchpad and the other with his yardsticks, at work in the same places but not daring to speak to one another. See Piero Bianconi, trans., Samuel Butler: Alpi e Santuari del Canton Ticino, 3rd ed., Il Castagno: Testimonianza e studi sulla Svizzera Italiana 2 (1984; Locarno: Armando Dadò, 1991), 13–15. See Jacques Gubler, ed., Johann Rudolf Rahn: Geografia e monumenti (Lugano: Società d’arti graphiche, 2004) for the catalogue to an exhibition of Rahn’s drawings held at the Mendrisio Art Museum in September 2004. 29 Rahn, Monumenti, 98–109. 30 Kultermann, Storia, 101–36. 31 Ruskin, Stones, 2:149. 32 Baedeker, Handbook, 31. 33 Luigi Lavizzari, Escursioni nel Cantone Ticino (Lugano: Velandini, 1863; repr., Locarno: Armando Dadò, 1992), 340. 34 Bellorini, ‘L’Italia di Samuel Butler,’ 153n15, also notes the old man’s ‘iniziatica’ quality. 35 Gnappi, ‘A Victorian Ulysses.’ See also Bellorini, ‘L’Italia di Samuel Butler,’ 151. Butler’s travels in the Southern Alps of Europe recall his adventures in New Zealand from 1859–64; the South Island also has its ‘Southern Alps’ mountain ridge (I thank James Paradis for pointing this out to me). 36 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 13, 69, 80; Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting,’ in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 36–58. 37 For Giulio Romano’s ceiling, see Raffaele De Grada, Capolavori d’Arte in Lombardia (Bergamo: Grafica & Arte, 1995), inside cover; Gaudenzio’s is illustrated in Shaffer, Erewhons, 165, pl. 90. 38 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, xix. 39 Ruskin, Selected Writings, 171; Ruskin, Stones, 3:2. 40 Ruskin, Stones, 2:166. 41 Buzard, Beaten Track, 73. 42 Baedeker, Handbook, xxvii–lxi; for Springer, see Kultermann, Storia, 117–35.

The Travel Writer-Painter’s View of Art History 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50

51 52 53

54 55 56 57

58 59 60

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Baedeker, Handbook, xxv. Ibid., lxi. Ruskin, Selected Writings, 204. Baedeker, Handbook, lix. Conti, ‘L’evoluzione’; Kristeller, ‘Modern System of the Arts.’ See, for example, the introduction in Prettejohn, Pre-Raphaelites, 1–14; see also Stephen F. Eisenmann, Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, From the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century (Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1966). This expression appeared in a letter to the editor of the Court and Society Review (29 July 1886), written by the artist W. Stott, a member of James McNeill Whistler’s inner circle. See Anne Koval, ‘The “Artists” Have Come Out and the “British” Remain: The Whistler Faction at the Society of British Artists,’ in Prettejohn, Pre-Raphaelites, 99. For a discussion of intertextual networks, as maintained and exploited by visual artists like Pater, Morris, Burne-Jones, and others, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting,’ in Prettejohn, Pre-Raphaelites, 43, 47. Butler, AS, xxiii; Ex Voto, 1. Henderson, The Incarnate Bachelor, 162; Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 98; Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography, 227. Gaudenzio Bordiga, Storia e guida del Sacro Monte di Varallo (Varallo: Tipografia F. Caligaris, 1830). See also Massimo Centini, I Sacri Monti dell’arco alpino italiano dal mito dell’altura alle ricostruzioni della Terra Santa nella cultura controriformista, Quaderni di cultura alpina 28 (Ivrea and Turin: Priuli & Verlucca, 1990); Giuseppe Frangi, Sacri monti delle Alpi (Milan and Bergamo: Il Sabato L.C.A. / Bolis, 1982). Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 208–9. Shaffer, Bolton Exhibition, 10–11. Butler, AS, 21; Ex Voto, vii. Raby (Butler, 225–7) comments on Butler’s sense of a common goal among scholars. Butler’s correspondence with his Varallo friends also shows a great willingness to engage in scholarly exchange. See Durio, Samuel Butler e la Val Sesia. Shaffer, Bolton Exhibition, 10. Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, xix, 69–70. Giovanni Testori, ‘Il gran teatro montano: Saggi su Gaudenzio Ferrari,’ in La realtà della pittura: Scritti e critica d’arte dal Quattrocento al Settecento di Giovanni Testori, ed. Pietro C. Marani (Milan: Longanesi, 1995), 31–91.

250 Clarice Zdanski 61 Ibid., 44. 62 Durio, Val Sesia, 43–5, 92–8. 63 Fra’ Bernardino Caimi planned the complex around 1486; Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio in 1488. See Grove Dictionary of Art, s.vv. ‘Michelangelo’ and ‘Sacro Monte’; and Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 85. 64 Butler, Ex Voto, 3–6; Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 105–7. 65 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 107–19. 66 Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 392. 67 Ruskin, Stones, 2:144. 68 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 100. 69 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957; New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 74–7. 70 For a reassessment of Butler’s career in this respect, see Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 69–100. Among the latest bilingual publications of the Centro di Documentazione, see the catalogue to the photography exhibit, Sacri Monti: l’Architettura dei Sacri Monti in Piemonte e Lombardia/Die Architektur der ‘Sacri monti’ im Piemont und in der Lombardei, text by Jörg Winde, photos by Jürgen Zänker (Bottrop: Druckerei Pomp, 2003) and Atlante dei Sacro Monti, Calvari e Complessi devozionali europei/Atlas of Holy Mountains, Calvaries and Devotional Complexes in Europe, ed. Amilcare Barbero (Novara: De Agostini, 2001); also, In montibus Sanctis: Il paesaggio della processione da Fontainemore a Oropa, ed. Tullio Galliano (Casale Monferrato: La Nuova Operaia, 2003). 71 Kultermann, Storia, 136–200.

10 Samuel Butler’s Photography: Observation and the Dynamic Past elizabeth edwards

I want to consider how we might view Samuel Butler’s photography in relation to the visual rhetorics of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as inflected through Butler’s very individual, idiosyncratic, and brilliant view of the world. Mine is the view of a visual historian and anthropologist rather than a literary scholar and is concerned with how Butler’s photographic work emerges not only from his particular, often contradictory, world view, but also from the clearly articulated dictates of the concept of ‘observation’ and description at the end of the nineteenth century. Just as it is impossible to contain Butler within one disciplinary rubric, his eclecticism knew no bounds and was connected with the key debates of the period, which saturate his work. My argument here will concentrate on two key strands in these debates. First, I shall explore Butler’s photography in relation to the cultural processes and parameters of shifting observational practices in the late nineteenth century, especially those emerging around the delineation of different cultures in protomodern anthropology. Such debates were profoundly inflected with a sense of the past. Salvage ethnography, especially, aimed to record that which was presumed – in the context of a Darwinian inevitability – to be dying out. It was also interpreted within a broad search for origins of human races and, by implication, human culture. My second consideration will be of photography as a form of and analogy for prosthetic memory, which goes to the heart of Butler’s neo-Lamarckian biological ideas. Both these strands are linked by what I am terming ‘archaeological imagination,’ which excavates, reveals, and positions in the present that which is ‘buried’ and invisible within a sense of the past, an inflection of historical consciousness projected onto a subject matter. Archaeological

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imagination thus connected a salvaged dying past with a reading of the present.1 While in the salvage paradigm this was an inert past of sterile and passive cultural survivals, in the contexts of Butler’s neo-Lamarckian ideas the ‘archaeological imagination’ becomes a dynamic element in the memory process, as an active past becomes formative of the future. Photography became the major visual medium of the latter part of Butler’s life. His photographs constitute work of astonishing accomplishment – yet, like other aspects of his work, they are eclectic, contradictory, defying categorization.2 In June 1888 the British Journal of Photography in reviewing Ex Voto, Butler’s art historical book that explored the Sacro Monte at Varallo, Northern Italy, marvelled at the quality of the photographs: ‘Mr Butler made his first acquaintance with photography only weeks previous to making that latest pilgrimage to Sacro Monte during which he has made so many artistic captures. We are indeed surprised, for altogether apart from the value of the photographs ... they are per se excellent and full of interest.’3 Although there is evidence that he was photographing considerably earlier,4 I am considering Butler’s photography from 1887–88 to 1900, a mere twelve years, and within this period I am concentrating mainly on his photographs of Northern Italy. Butler took up photography in earnest in order to provide, as the British Journal of Photography review itself suggests, essential illustrations for Ex Voto. ‘I shall start for Varallo,’ he wrote to his sister May in December 1887, ‘on Xmas eve – with cameras and dry plates – it is absolutely impossible for me to finish the book without going there.’5 At home he was also energetically involved with photography during this period. He reports to his sister in 1888, for instance, that he has just printed, toned, and fixed over 300 photographs and mounted a further 100. On another occasion, in July 1889, he mentions he is going to a meeting of the Camera Club.6 Through these experiences, he learned and developed a different way of seeing that reflected his individual approach. It is one that, I shall argue, is nonetheless saturated with the photographic, or, more precisely, the observational rhetorics of the period. It is this intersection of clear individual vision with the ideas, principles, and methods of photography as a sociocultural practice that makes Butler so rewarding a study. My object is not, however, to ‘understand’ Butler per se or to look, for instance, at how photography fitted into his radical history of art, artistic practice, and aesthetic theory – Elinor Shaffer has already done this admirably in her extended chapter in Erewhons of the Eye, ‘The Ignorant

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Eye.’7 Her approach is legitimately and effectively concerned with establishing Butler’s personal vision – ‘in photography he had at last found his true medium as a visual artist,’8 – and thus his undoubted contribution to the medium. However, here I want to invert her approach by questioning the shape of that ignorance of the ‘untamed eye’ that, for her, photography represented for Butler. How does this ‘untamed’ quality relate to certain forms of visual consciousness of the period? How does Butler’s use of the camera, conditioned by his radical ideas of art, of cultural history, and the biological, present us with a series of fault lines through which to understand the complexities of photographic vision? How had this vision become normalized and naturalized as the ‘consensual mode of representation’ through a whole range of cultural and photographic practices by the end of the nineteenth century?9 Such questions impact upon the key issues of the social and cultural practices of photography. What can we learn about observation, how does such an observational mode cohere with others, and, finally, how might these ideas of observation allow us to think about ‘Butler’s photography’? Butler worked largely with a Collins detective camera, which he purchased late in 1887.10 At this period the market was awash with such cameras. The name ‘detective’ is a little misleading, for it suggests something furtive and hidden. Most were not, and very soon, for just these reasons, the favoured description became ‘hand-held’ or ‘instantaneous.’11 What the term really meant was that the camera was unobtrusive; most were no larger than a small box, and one could photograph discreetly and unobserved as opposed to fighting with large plates, tripods, and cloths. More important than the technology was a shift in the way of seeing that emerged. This cannot necessarily be reduced to a technological determinism, because the technology itself addressed a number of late nineteenth-century anxieties about the modern world. The small hand-held camera, producing instantaneous pictures, had a moral dimension: it shifted the social, embodied dynamic of photography, the relationship between observer and observed, photographer and subject. It carried an assumption of directness and spontaneity of observation. Observation was, ideally, direct and not through viewfinder. The president of the North London Photographic Society commented in 1888 that the photographer was ‘better able to judge the correct moment for exposure by watching the object than looking in the very small screen of the finder’ and that ‘the operator should be free to attend to his subject not the camera.’12 That is, the

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instantaneous photograph of the hand-held camera stood for a direct, unmeditated translation of vision itself. As commentators from numerous disciplines have argued, the late nineteenth century was a period of intense and shifting visuality, visual awareness, and consciousness of appearance. It was also a world of fragment, where space and time were disrupted from what had until then been perceived as their natural flow. Photography – with its fragments of space, stilled time, and optically precise mapping of appearance – was integral to these processes. Indeed, in some ways photography was paradigmatic of modernist fragmentation. An Ethnographic Turn Within this pattern, integrally related to an emergent modernist angst, was what I shall call the ‘ethnographic turn,’ a strand of the archaeological imagination. This position emphasized the role of the observer as an interpreter of culture and, like Butler’s response to Northern Italy, turned to the periphery of European cultures and to Empire rather than the metropolitan centres to create its counter-narratives to the modern and, indeed, the canonical.13 The ethnographic model is appropriate for Butler. Throughout his writing and photography he has a sure eye for the significant detail and cultural pattern, as in his satirical quasi-ethnography of an inverted English culture in Erewhon. The ethnographic provided a powerful observational model at the end of the nineteenth century. Anthropology, from which it derived, was a key science of the day14 and one in which Butler took a keen interest, especially in its biological manifestations. The observational intensities of emerging protomodern anthropology were embedded in the visual practices of the scientific laboratory.15 The values of objectivity were perceived as being especially articulated through the indexical qualities of the photographic image, whereby traces of the physical world were mechanically inscribed.16 This apparently unmediated inscription reproduced the moral certainties of objective practice.17 Yet they were inflected with a naturalism resulting from photographic and visual discourse beyond the laboratory space. The 1899 edition of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s Notes and Queries on Anthropology stipulated that, in photographing, the ‘common actions of daily life should not be neglected.’18 The naturalism that concerned Butler was not only a style of photography but, in ethnographic terms, a style and quality of obser-

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vation, the informed person with a trained eye (or, in Butler’s way, trained to be untrained) who could record and interpret. This vision was as clearly articulated in photography as in anthropology. In his preface to Alps and Sanctuaries Butler himself makes this point, stressing that his drawings were made from direct observation,19 and later comments ‘we want less word painting and fine phrases and more observation first hand’ (AS, 156). The quality of observation was repeatedly stressed. Again, Butler himself links observation and authenticity with proximity, echoing the truth-values of anthropology in a way that could, in effect, stand for a statement of the classic observational paradigm of anthropology that dominated from about 1895 to 1950, tying cultural authenticity, quality of observation, and truth to one another: ‘The ways of the inn were ... exclusively Italian and I had better opportunity of seeing Italians as they are amongst themselves than I ever had before’ (AS, 123). This stress on direct observation might be linked to what Hoyt has defined as an emerging vitalist rhetoric of protomodern anthropology, which shifted the ethnographic object from the ghostly, static fossil to a living, vital ‘primitive.’20 In Butler’s context, however, observation might be seen not as a distanced gaze – as is often attributed to late nineteenth-century anthropology and travel – but as spatially engaged.21 Butler’s view in Alps and Sanctuaries appears not as monospectival, distanced observation, but as a series of encounters with people, places, and art works. His photographs give a sense of the distance he traversed – the mobile and engaged observer – as deeply spatialized narratives of an optical unfolding of experience expressed photographically. Moments of observation are echoed in his writing: ‘The ascent of the Sacro Monte begins ...,’ ‘The old road up the mountain was below.’22 As Shaffer has argued, Butler is constantly mapping one landscape or space onto another23 – for instance, aspects of New Zealand are mapped onto Erewhon. Alps and Sanctuaries is thus a spatial narrative of being, embodied in the observer, rather than simply a photograph of a referent, the image content itself. Echoing the almost photographic nature of careful, inclusive description in parts of Erewhon, a narrative structure of scenes carries Butler through a market or up the Sacro Monte at Varallo, itself a spatial narrative of the religious story enshrined in many a local guide book. Butler rarely takes just one photograph; he moves around and through a space, seeing it from all angles. He walks through market places and around churches so as to literally ‘see better,’ taking several photographs on single occasions (detective-style, hand-held cameras

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usually carried twelve plates at a time) – as for instance, his series of photographs of worshippers outside the church at Madesimo shows (fig. 10.1). These are not perfect images encapsulating an essence, but multiple layers of experience of things and of place.24 Alps and Sanctuaries represents the act of observation, in which the locus of observation is articulated with a highly experimental effect. It belongs to a broad cultural project in which the partnership of photography and realism as a visual rhetoric makes legible the territory of the mind. As Nancy Armstrong has argued, much nineteenth-century realist writing was a response not to place itself but to the represented world, as English fiction ‘convert[ed] a particular kind of visual information ... into what was both a way of seeing and a picture of the world that a mass readership could share.’25 Such fiction referred to a world that was photographable. One might argue this of the quasi-ethnographic quality of observation and description in an otherwise romantic conception of Erewhon. This idea might be linked to the argument that photography is not a representation of the world but a representation of the vision of that world, in which the experience of vision constantly refers to that which is beyond the frame.26 Embodied engagement of the hand-held cameras freed photographers from the static monoplace of the contained representation looking in. Representing space through the eye of the observer, photographers could develop narrative sequences encompassing and articulating their own visual experience of a series of linked moments.27 It is perhaps instructive, in the context of late nineteenth-century visualization, to look at another master practitioner of instantaneous photography. Paul Martin worked with a Facile detective camera in the same period,28 and, like Butler, rejected the self-conscious aesthetic of pictorialist photography in his own work.29 Although a professional photographer often working to the demands of the market, Martin affected a no-style style – an aesthetic suppression which signifies direct observation and a privileging of the ordinary. In his photographs, too, bodies intrude into frames and the focus varies within the frame. Again, the photograph is not necessarily a window on the world but an implication of what is beyond through the positioned observer. Martin photographed situations similar to those of Butler – streets, beaches, entertainers, people preoccupied, people sleeping. But the striking correlation between their subject matter cannot be explained away as simply ‘there’ or as an unproblematic visual equivalence. I would argue that it emerges from a deep consciousness about the nature and theatre

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10.1 (a) and (b): Worshippers outside the church at Madesimo, Italy.

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of observation, and its relation to place – an atmosphere of photographic awareness, which constitutes forms of alertness through which the two men formulated both subject matter and photographic expression as articulated through the idea of the mobile, hand-held cameras. For instance, the magazine seller at Ludgate Circus, in Martin’s photograph of 1900 (fig. 10.2), exists in the still space between the passing photographer and the passing traffic, a sense that is accentuated through the photographic moment. This resonates with Butler’s photographs of markets (fig. 10.3). Both photographers also consciously use the mobility of the hand-held camera to literally think around and move around their subject in a responsive way, placing the photograph on a mobile plane and giving a sense of the momentary. The same pattern of immediacy, linked to truth-values of observation, can be found in both anthropological science and the emergent genre of documentary photography, an antiaesthetic which constituted a response to the interventionist styles of the pictorialist movement. This ‘style’ constitutes an unconsciousness that becomes the dominant truth-value in photography. This shift in photographic values within science resonates with concerns expressed in ‘art’ photography – notably an argument of the 1880s between Henry Peach Robinson and P.H. Emerson on the nature of art, vision, and naturalism in photography, which was widely reported and which was central to the self-definition of photography during the period.30 The larger debate was mirrored in anthropology. For example, two papers given at the Anthropological Institute articulate very different renditions of observation and the construction of photographic truth within anthropology. Everard im Thurn argued, in 1893, that a noninterventionist, naturalistic style of photography was most fitted to anthropological observation, whilst M.V. Portman, in 1896, advocated a highly controlled intervention with the ‘scientific specimen’ before the camera.31 In the 1880s and 1890s, anthropological debates – like photographic debates – were widely reported and read; meetings of the Anthropological Institute were gazetted in newspapers such as the Times and short reports of meetings followed. Thus, anthropological debates, including those on photography, must be seen as part of a wider observational and representational discourse of the period. Given his interests, it is highly likely that Butler would have been aware of these debates. At their heart was the very nature and quality of photographic observation and inscription. It was into these concerns about the nature, and indeed function, of photography that the handheld camera emerged, further refiguring the medium.

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10.2 Magazine seller, Ludgate Circus, London. Photograph by Paul Martin, 1900.

Like Butler, Martin also expressed an ethnographic desire, an antiaesthetic desire, his interest being in ‘people and things as the man in the street sees them.’32 It is not impossible that Butler saw Martin’s photographs; they were shown not only in exhibitions, but in the window of Martin’s business in London. Like Martin, Butler had an astonishing understanding of the energy of the frame – the way in which the photographic frame contains its subject matter yet always refers to that beyond it, creating a tension for the viewer between the content depicted and that suggested beyond the frame.33 For instance, Butler’s framing of the Chapel of the Marriage at Cana at Crea (fig. 10.4) uses the photographic frame to suggest the activity beyond. The frame cuts off the figure on the left, while the figure on the right, elbow beyond the frame, looks out of the frame as if communicating beyond it. It is perhaps this strong compositional sense that acknowledged the possibilities of the hand-held camera and that prompted the British Journal of Photography’s use of the word ‘artistic.’ Significantly, both Martin and Butler were skilled at putting black

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10.3 Marketplace at Novara, Italy.

and white shapes within a frame and on paper. Martin had trained and worked as a wood engraver for the Illustrated London News, translating images – often photographic images – into lines and stipples and into black, white, and grey tones. Butler was trained in academy drawing. Much as he reacted against the ‘aesthetic reign of terror’ of the trained eye, which saturated both art production and the market, and as he aspired to the innocent and ignorant,34 a comparison with Martin suggests the extent to which Butler’s ignorant eye was shaped by the observational values invested in the randomness of technical inscription, and by the cultural values of the unmeditated as articulated through the no-style aesthetic of the snapshot. In the case of both Martin and Butler, their eyes had been ‘tamed’ by the demands of the frame.35 This sense of frame is no more powerfully played out than in Butler’s photographs of the Sacro Monte and similar shrines. Despite the fact that some photographs result from the timed exposures of the second camera, the snapshot aesthetic is still present in the framing, again stressing the deep observational techniques informing Butler’s photog-

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10.4 The Chapel of the Marriage at Cana at the Sacro Monte at Crea, Italy.

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raphy. His photographs here are redolent with the spatialized observation I have outlined, and there is an intentional and observational continuum with the rest of his work; as Shaffer has argued, it is through ‘the photographs of the world of Sacro Monte we become acutely aware of a Butlerian way of seeing.’36 This happens in several different ways, allowing the subject to be apprehended from several points of view, both literally and metaphorically, in what one can describe as an almost ethnographic density. First is the way in which Butler follows the spatial dictates of the Sacro Monte as it re-enacts Holy Land stories on an Italian hillside. Second, he reproduces the point of view of the tableaux as seen through the chapel grilles by worshippers. Third are the occasions when he and Henry Festing Jones are permitted to enter the space of the tableaux themselves. In this latter instance, the photography enters a different register that allows Butler to extend the experience of the tableaux figures. He moves around the groups of figures. He gets ‘beneath’ the sculptures, shifting the point of view from the classical to the naturalistic, from aesthetic to ethnographic, from the rigid to one of shifting perspective; for instance, the photographs of the St Eusebio Chapel at Crea have a piled-up realism (fig. 10.5) manifested in the indexicality of a photographically articulated observational rhetoric. Ironically, this is an ethnographic rendering of the academy view of photographing sculpture. Photographs, in the academy view, were deemed ‘correct’ or successful only if they represented ‘the point of view,’ the intention of the artist.37 But in photographs of Tabachetti’s Crucifixion at Varallo, Butler moves around the group ‘as if’ a spectator – the participant observer of anthropology (fig. 10.6a–b). This is the antithesis of the academy view. To quote Butler: ‘These [statues] can be seen from several points of view, and a fuller knowledge of the head is thus obtained.’38 The multiple images are framed ‘as if’ Butler is an observer in the crowd. This extends his observational rhetoric – positioning the observer within the performative subjective, ‘as if it were so’ as he actually enters the space of representational and material performance.39 For instance, in the journey to Calvary, the figure of Christ fills the foreground of the left of the frame, only just in focus. Butler again suggests the observer’s own space ‘beyond the frame’ and a direct observation in naturalistic space and time (fig. 10.6b). He literally enters into the theatrical realism of the tableaux – the ‘as if it were.’40 But Butler’s ethnographic observation also operates at another level, responding to the visualizing demands of the object and so reproduc-

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ing the affective tone of the tableaux of the Sacro Monte. He also photographed the tableaux through the normal frames of viewing, the point of view of the worshipper, creating the illusion of that experience as the perspectival optics reiterated the viewpoint.41 As visitors wound their way up the path, they stopped at each chapel to view the tableaux through grille-covered doorways, that is, through a frame. Here, photography reproduces the act of viewing. Nonetheless, there remains a spatially different representational ‘as if it were’ as the spectacle of religion and spatial theatre ‘performs’ the road to Calvary for those who were not there. The phenomenological effect of the Varallo chapels is not unlike contemporary natural history taxidermy dioramas; indeed, Butler himself uses a museological analogy of spectacle and visibility ‘to give people who have never seen the actual animals a more vivid idea concerning them’ (AS, 250). The chapels were thus intended to bring ‘the whole scene more vividly before the faithful by combining the picture, the statue and the effect of a scene upon the stage of a single work of art’ (AS, 176). There is a sense in which photographic representation is almost a form of vernacular, reproducing the intended effect not through idealization but through multiple and fluid levels of embodied observation. This is articulated by Butler’s photographs of women viewing the tableaux (fig. 10.7). As the photographic frame mirrors the framing of the tableaux through the grille, the viewing subject – the women looking through the grille of the chapel – is placed within the photographic frame, accentuating the layers of vision. The ethnographic mode fits also with Butler’s view of artistic development, which is premised not on singular individuals but in the vitality of a succession of small craftsmen embedded in social relations which support them and their production. Similarly, in the way Butler writes about the tableaux, many of his comments are grounded in the ethnographic mode of detailed observation and social contextualization with a dynamic society,42 rather than in the aesthetic, which he rejected. He describes the tableaux of the Birth of the Virgin in the Chapels of the Life of the Virgin at Oropa, for instance, as if witnessing a social event or ritual: Against the right-hand wall are two lady-helps, each warming a towel at a glowing fire, to be ready against the baby should it come out of its bath ... [T]he levatrice who having discharged her task, and being now so disposed, has removed the bottle from the chimney-piece, and put it near some bread, fruit and a chicken over which she is about to discuss the confinement with two other gossips.43

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10.5 (a) and (b) (opposite) The Stoning of St Stephen, St Eusebio Chapel at the Sacro Monte at Crea, Italy.

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10.6 (a) and (b) Tabachetti’s Crucifixion Chapel at the Sacro Monte at Varallo, Italy.

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10.7 Women looking in at the Sposalizio Chapel at Crea, Italy.

In similar ethnographic mode, one of the finest figures at Varallo, Il Vecchietto, is read not as simply ‘type’ peasant but with the ethnographic realism of the period, as the social and cultural are read off the appearance of the figure.44 Art is liberated through the ordinary, projecting into the future a whole new range of possibilities within a vital cultural model.45 These tableaux vivants spectacles and photographs of them constitute a continuum of visual conceptualization in that they are united within what Deborah Poole has termed a broad ‘visual economy.’ This embraces the conceptualization, production, consumption, and performance of visual forms within social, economic, and political matrices.46 For Butler, the facility and lack of discrimination possible in the production of photography lent it a welcome quality of artistic vulgarity which destabilized aesthetic canons, thus leading to the idea that photography might constitute a form of visual vulgate, a vernacular. This is emphasized in the way in which Butler is interested in the construction

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and reproduction of visual experience. His photographs are littered with notices, hoardings, and the visual energy of the street, people photographing, people selling religious engravings – the kind of microobservation that fills his writing. He constantly stresses the importance of this kind of observation. For instance, he criticizes certain artists for having ‘no eye’ for apparently trivial detail. It is the detail that is, for him, revealing (AS, 143–5). This strong sense of visual detail is accentuated through the juxtaposition of the visual and avisual worlds in Butler’s photographs: the blind man surrounded by text, reading with children, and sleepers with their faces buried in their arms – the unseeing centre of the observational space. Such photographs are, as Shaffer suggests, inflected with ideas of the seen and the unseeing, the status of observation, and ultimately with consciousness and unconsciousness.47 Photography and Memory Acquisition This brings us to a key sensibility in Butler’s photography. He took up photography in order to be able to record scenes for his writing: that is, to perform a memory function. The memory potential resonated through the late nineteenth-century photographic debate. However, here it links Butler’s photography, his visualizing rhetoric, and the sense of observation that permeates his writing with both his biological ideas and the photographic discourse of the period. Indeed, it is perhaps significant that Butler took up photography in 1887, the same year as the publication of the last of his evolutionary books, Luck or Cunning? Photography, for Butler, operates not only or simply as a personal aide-memoire, but is concerned more broadly with issues of memory, heredity, and thus evolution, in a way that derives directly from his neo-Lamarckian thinking. The nature of photography itself is fundamental to this argument. Through their indexical qualities, photographs have a random inclusiveness, recording mechanically and indiscriminately. This random inclusiveness – the root of ‘ignorance’ in Shaffer’s argument – destabilizes the constraining effects of singular observation through its infinite recodability, in that meanings can never be contained. Meanings are thus subjective interactions with the subject matter, as the trace or inscription can be both reactivated and moulded through consciousness. Butler plays on the random inclusiveness of the photograph very consciously, delighting in the mundane qualities and bizarre juxtapositions, probing the medium ontologically to a more extreme or height-

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ened form of observation. Despite its apparent randomness, however, photography cannot be reduced to a series of happy accidents. Rather, it is an intelligent interaction with randomness and unknowability, an impetus to give fluid meaning to the disordered mass of the seen world. As is well known, evolution was situated for Butler not only in the organic but in the inorganic, the external and the disembodied. Butler, following ideas such as those expressed in Mivart’s On the Genesis of Species (1871), postulated a teleological model of the inheritance of acquired characteristics in which the activity of the organism itself shaped the species through purposeful engagement with external forces:48 ‘The ability of living things to “remember” experiences by incorporating them into their own structures becomes the driving force of purposeful evolution through the inheritance of acquired characteristic.’49 This was, of course, his departure from Darwin’s view based in ideas of random selectivity and mechanical development.50 Observation and memory function can be seen as externalized through the camera and the act of photography. Likewise, photographs themselves mark out their neo-Lamarckian possibilities as externalized makers of experience and memory.51 If Butler’s writing on machines, especially ‘The Book of the Machines’ which appears in Erewhon,52 forms a parody and critique of Darwinism, his ‘archaeological’ readings of Italian art and culture – and, indeed, of Homer – are articulated through photographs. In this register photography forms part of a meta-archive of prosthetic memory in a socially situated, developmental dynamic as traces of the past are re-inscribed in the present, creating a constant dialogue between past, present, and future. The randomness of photography is, in Butler’s context, an active element in memory acquisition rather than a passive focus of random selectivity. It contains within it the seeds for re-engagement and re-cognition through dynamic rereadings of significance within the photograph – of the small and unnoticed, but perhaps also the evolutionarily significant. It is through the endless repetition manifested in engaging with photographs that the performance of recognition is repeated and thus ‘memory’ acquired. Photography was potentially another manifestation of Butler’s axiom in Life and Habit that ‘we know most intensely those things that we are least conscious of knowing’ as they imprint their subject matter within memory.53 The return of memory again depends on the return of ideas associated with the particular thing that is remembered. We

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remember nothing but for the presence of these ideas and, when enough of them are present, we remember everything.54 Photography might be seen as a site where the memory of past experience is embodied to be recollected under conditions similar to those when the impression was made (LH, 100). One of Butler’s notebook entries on memory could be describing the intentions of photography and its random inscriptions: ‘It is the business of memory and heredity to conserve and to transmit from one generation to another that which has been furnished by design, or by accident designedly turned to account.’55 To pursue the analogy, the immediacy of photography enables fluency. The consciousness of photographic observation – that moment of recognition or enquiry – might constitute a design or recognition reflecting Butler’s teleological theories of memory acquisition. It is in ‘fluency,’ in Butler’s evolutionary model, that the rules are forgotten and the codes and structures become naturalized. Through such processes habit is learned perfectly, rendering it unconscious. In a photographic context, this is instinctively performed through the instantaneous capability of the hand-held camera, which naturalizes the acquisition of skill, and thus of photographic vision, as an apparently unmeditated, spontaneous, and natural response to visual impression. We might read such a model of reproduction in one of Butler’s best known and most engaging photographs, of a young woman adjusting her stocking (fig. 10.8). The unconsciousness of both observer and observed in this minute action of human existence is projected forward as a discrete moment that invites recognition. There is a further photographic analogy to the memory process that Butler describes. At the moment of exposure, the moment of recognition passes and the observer’s consciousness becomes fixed in the mechanical ignorance of the camera. Inscribed on the photographic plate, the memory inscription remains latent: that consciousness can only be brought to light through chemical intervention – developing the plate and printing the image. Only then does the latent memory, vested in the negative, become conscious through engagement with the positive. Butler must surely have been aware of such an analogy. He processed and printed most of his own photographs. Indeed, many of his photographs are under-exposed and the negatives have been intensified in order to articulate their inscriptions more clearly. The metaphorical possibilities of this are clear. Butler himself uses photographic exposure as a metaphor for truth in ‘Deadlock in Darwinism’: ‘Truth is like a pho-

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10.8 Girl adjusting her stocking, Novara, Italy.

tographic sensitised plate, which is equally ruined by over and under exposure, and the just exposure of which can never be absolutely determined.’56 This association of photography, memory, and inheritance was not unique to Butler. The relationship between past and future held in photographs became a formative strand in later theorists, especially Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Indeed, the memory function of photography was central to its social function from its earliest manifestations. Crucial for our concerns here is a cultural dynamic saturated with ideas of prosthetic collective memory realized through photography. As such, photography projects its inscriptions into the future as a form of inherited memory, for with its reproductive and repetitive qualities, photography is, as I have suggested, a form of externalized memory par excellence, fulfilling the inscriptional and performative qualities of memory and cultural habit. In Life and Habit, Butler states: ‘The one great proof of memory [is] given by the actual repetition of the performance’ (LH, 130). Photography performs the past in the future, dissem-

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inating and multiplying it. As Roland Barthes puts it: ‘What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.’57 Archaeological Imaginings The practice of functional, realist photography in the late nineteenth century was saturated with the anxieties of cultural disappearance, and inflected with a fear of archival entropy.58 Such concerns colour Butler’s ‘ethnographic’ descriptions of Northern Italy, and it is the excavation of that which has disappeared and become invisible that underpins his book on Homer, The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). These works of both art history and classics are inflected with an archaeological imagination that reads the present as mapped through traces of the past. Perhaps we see this in Butler’s photograph of an old priest in the Church of the Addolorata, Monte Erice (fig. 10.9). Here the pose and light, reminiscent of Rembrandt, accentuated by the soft grey ranges of the platinum print, imbue the image with an ineffable past. Yet, placed in Butler’s album, it exists in a dynamic narrative of the present and of Butler’s experience of a living culture. More broadly, the archaeological imagination saturated evolutionary models of race and culture and the concern for origins that they implied. Yet these temporal inflections were far from unambiguous. If, on the one hand, the atemporal nature of photography reified ideas of people and place, at the same time, as I have argued, in a neo-Lamarckian frame the inclusive naturalism of the photographs merges with the naturalness of observation, formulating a dynamic memory projection into the future. The ambiguities of memory and the archaeological imagination are articulated through a number of photographic projects in the second half of the nineteenth century. While, unlike Butler’s, these projects were conceived of in a more overt salvage paradigm, memory and the potential of the heredity of acquired characteristics resonated through them. An example is the National Photographic Record Association, founded in 1897 by the wealthy Birmingham industrialist and Member of Parliament, Sir Benjamin Stone. It was informed in part by the debates in which Butler was so vocal and by a version of Tylorian theory of cultural survival – itself, of course, linked to evolutionary ideas.59 The project stressed the indexical truth value of photographs and their ability to map a scientifically observed reality that stood for the ancient

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10.9 An old priest reading in the Church of the Addolorata, Monte Erice, Sicily.

solidarity of national identity. It aimed to record ‘the manners, customs, festivals and pageants, the historic buildings, and places of our times’ and ‘aimed at showing those who will succeed us, not only our buildings ... but our everyday life of the people.’60 These are precisely, in intention if not outcome as far as the project was concerned, the environmental interactions and habitual actions of the everyday which so fascinated Butler. The Association may well have been known to Butler, as it was widely reported on at the time and closely related to many camera clubs.61 Like other similar projects, it was conceived as a form of prosthetic collective memory in both its real and metaphorical roles as a ‘holding’ of the past.62 Underlying all such photographic inscription was a strong idea of cultural authenticity, of a fading past or unrecognized past and the urgent need for salvage or inscription into society’s memory banks.63 This archaeological thesaurus was the most high-profile of many linked projects, surveying customs, antiquities, historical architecture,

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and remains, which were conceived as a way to inscribe and preserve collective memory.64 In ‘The Whole Duty of a Photographer,’ a series of essays by Cosmo Burton in the British Journal of Photography in 1889, the use of the detective or hand-held camera was advocated for recording all aspects of life, and the role of the archive as collective memory within the institutional structures of photography becomes apparent. For preservation purposes, Burton wrote, these records ‘ought to be inserted in great albums, sacred from the polluting touch of the silver print, kept at the Royal Photographic Society of the future. Such a society would have, as one of its highest and most trusted officials, a “keeper of albums” on whom would devolve the responsibility of choosing photographs, and seeing them mounted and fully labelled with every precaution for their preservation.’65 In Burton’s vision for photography, there are resonances of Erewhon in this conscious social management of the past. But importantly, there are also resonances of heredity in this externalization: ‘All this [progress] and much more might be told us by photography or accurate pictures of these things as they were and as they are, and Mr. Francis Galton would not require to spend his life hunting men’s memories for statistics of heredity.’66 In the edicts of the British Journal of Photography, as elsewhere, the permanence of photographic prints, ‘sacred from the polluting touch of the silver print,’ is paramount.67 Writer after writer stressed the importance of using permanent processes. Therefore, it is highly significant that Butler chose to use the platinum process in printing many of his album prints, not the easiest option available. Interestingly, Paul Martin also used platinum and carbon processes (both permanent). If technical choices reveal intention, and it is unusual to contact-print in platinum in a snapshot context, Butler’s suggest a desire for permanence to hold the random inclusiveness of his photographs forever. Thus in nineteenth-century record photography, we find the expression of an archaeological imagination that takes as its organizing principle the retrieval of its subject matter through collective memory. Hoyt has identified the archaeological imagination with the old-style evolutionary anthropology of the middle years of the nineteenth century in which survivals of the past, ‘the primitive,’ were believed to be inert and dying out.68 He argues that what marked anthropological observation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a shift to the recognition of cultures as ‘vital, contemporary, proximate and subject to synchronic social analysis.’69 However, in the neo-Lamarckian mode, the archaeological imagination was never inert, but integral to

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the recognition of a continuing dynamic within the past. By the end of the nineteenth century such work was on a cusp and photography embodied the intellectual ambiguities of these shifting values. While on the one hand photographs still time and place subjects inevitably in the past, on the other hand they are, as I have argued, constantly animated through re-engagement. Through this process, the past is repeatedly reread in the present. Within the context of shifting values of observation, to which I have already referred, photographs were made through the increasingly vitalist experience of direct anthropological observation by Franz Boas, W. Baldwin Spencer, A.C. Haddon, and others. It is precisely this that is inflected through Butler’s ethnographic mode discussed above. It linked the past, present, and future through the projection of the archaeological imagination. Despite his distrust of a historical and reconstructive aesthetic, such as that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as giving rise to a hypocritical and ‘sham art’ distant from art’s original values,70 Butler himself, nevertheless, is not free of these contemporary observational inflections. Again, we can link this to his interests in heredity. He both places his reading of art history on a contemporary template and positions his places and his art within a vital historical dynamic, reading contemporary communities through an archaeological imagination. He sees the originals of the tableaux sculptures in the small towns of Northern Italy: ‘I saw the living representative of Tabachetti, an old man now at 84 or 85. In my presence on the mention of his wife (who died this spring) he crossed his hands and threw up his face just as in Tab’s portrait.’71 Similar moments of ‘recognition’ can be found in Butler’s essay ‘Ramblings in Cheapside,’ where ‘Rameses II is a blind woman now and stands in Holborn holding a tin mug ... Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fit ... Dante is, or was a year or two ago, a waiter at Brissage on the Lake Maggiore, only he is better-temperedlooking, and has a more intellectual expression.’72 Likewise, he ‘recognizes’ and photographs Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ on the Clacton Belle steamer, one of his best-known photographs.73 This perspective is also articulated through parallels that can be drawn between Butler’s photographs of figures in the chapels, such as Il Vecchietto, and his portraiture on the street – the funny boy, tramps, market women, and street musicians.74 It is a mode of observation that seems to parallel, for example, that of anthropologist A.C. Haddon, in 1898, watching a man hollowing out a canoe at Kerepuna, New Guinea, using ‘precisely the same

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manner, save that there was no metal tool available, that our neolithic ancestors [used to] manufacture their canoes. It was an unexpected surprise to have this glimpse into the stone age.’75 This living dynamic – the survival of the past in the present, the animation of the continual and collective consciousness of the living organism – was as central to Butler’s thinking on biology and evolution as it was to the archaeological imagination. At one level observation is translated into the archaeological through the actions of photography’s relentless pastness, resonating with negatively inflected Tylorian notions of sterile survival. In Butler’s Lamarckian frame, however, archaeological imagination might be interpreted as constituting a teleological dynamic, where the seeds of the future are embedded in a dynamic past. As Bowler has argued, for Butler the memory analogy was ‘to become the foundation of a near-vitalist interpretation of Lamarckism,’76 being premised on a living, purposeful, teleological dynamic that privileged active ‘cunning’ over passive ‘luck.’77 As I have argued, photography in this register is redolent with possibilities for re-engagement with minute inscription – those naturalized details that are alive, potent, spontaneously engaged, and changing, the driving force of progress.78 While Butler’s photographs may not have had the intensity of intention of other projects, his photography operated within a broad culture of externalized collective memory. The camera was one of those machines that functioned as an external organ, and that, like prosthetic limbs, expanded the power of the individual and the potential of vision.79 Further, the instantaneous inscription of the cameras reproduced the ‘eye-brain’ relationship.80 Similarly, there is a sense in which the timed exposures used by Butler in the chapels mirror the moment of thought: ‘he often had to expose a plate for half an hour, or more, during which time he was forced to contemplate and meditate upon the statues. In this way he came to have a very intimate knowledge of them.’81 If, as Jonathan Crary has argued, the nineteenth century was the moment when vision becomes embodied physiologically in the eye of the observer and the eye itself is subject to scientific scrutiny, one could argue that the snapshot camera becomes an externalization of this embodiment, it becomes the physical eye.82 The random inclusiveness of the photograph dissociated ‘seeing’ from intention, consciousness, and embodiment.83 The eye’s apprehensions and appreciation of the world and its link to memory become externalized. Following Butler’s logic in ‘The Book of the Machines’ chapters in Erewhon concern-

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ing the extensions of human functions by machines, the camera can be seen as an extension of human visual consciousness and the photograph as the fixed moment of a mental state. Indeed, photography and all of its instruments might be seen as developing its own consciousness. The eye – or perhaps, we can argue, the camera – is ‘the big-seeing machine which revealed to us the existence of worlds beyond worlds to infinity’ (EOR, 205). The prosthetic spatialized the subject of the photograph beyond the body, enabling it perceptually to be seen from all angles.84 Butler’s use of the camera to translate the serendipitous, random, unnoticed, or partially glimpsed into memory becomes an optical unconscious in Walter Benjamin’s original sense of the articulation of the different nature of the unconsciously revealed.85 The reproducibility of photographs performs the repetition that constitutes memory. The hand-held camera, instantaneous photographs, and the observational practices merged in their naturalism and immediate insistence to both articulate and facilitate these prosthetic functions. The socially animated primitive embodied the potential for evolution, just as the emerging vitalist model in anthropology stressed the duration of human consciousness and the social continuity of the historical past.86 This animation of the continual and lived collective consciousness of the living organism was key to Butler’s thinking on evolution. The metanarratives of this formation of memory that permeated certain inflections of photographic observation of the period were active elements of the historio-cultural habitus that informed observation, an ambiguous backstop against the antihistoricism of cultural modernity. As Burton’s ‘duties of the photographer’ suggest, photography was used intentionally over a wide range of archival desires to fill the emerging void left by modernity’s destruction of the practices of memory in everyday life, in what McQuire has termed the crisis of memory.87 The burden of cultural reproduction in every element of social habitus, from work practices to celebrations, was fundamentally shifting. It is significant that the use of hand-held cameras was generally encouraged in the pages of the British Journal of Photography. Both Martin and Butler employed their instantaneous cameras in public spaces – markets, on transport, and the seaside, where people spoke to one another and exchanged ideas and values – quintessential sites of unconscious social interaction and thus of cultural reproduction (fig. 10.10).88 Photographs, inscribing and stilling, became an externalized backstop against modernity’s disappearance of memory. The arrest of

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10.10 Public spaces: (a) Piazza St Carlo at Varallo, Italy, 21 September 1891; (b) (opposite page) Two priests on a steamer on Lake Como, Italy, 25 August 1891.

the diminution of memory processes, in Butler’s model of sociobiological teleological evolutionary dynamism, was necessary for the furtherance of the species. Machines could be regarded as the mode of development by which the human organism is advancing (EOR, 205– 13). What is significant is the intensity and consistency with which photography, cultural excavation, salvage, and the archaeological imagination come together and operate, for Butler, within a dynamic progressive model, translated through the cohering naturalism of both observation and photography. Ultimately, both observation and photography are embodied in the eye of the observer and its external extensions, the camera and the photograph. This process is reinforced by the nature of photography itself, which performs the past in the present and stills the moment in apparent timelessness, yet remains infinitely dynamic.

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Conclusion The camera as prosthetic eye and the photograph as prosthetic memory have the potential to mould the future, for, to quote Butler: the ‘only reason we cannot see the future as plainly as the past is because we know too little of the actual past ... and the actual present. The more the past and present are known, the more the future can be predicted’ (EOR, 216). Photographs, within their random indexicality and infinite recodability, map the possibilities of that future as they project past moments into the future, their fluid imprint performing repeatedly in different contexts yet at the same time inscribing parameters. These elements, as I have argued, resonate through the complexities of Butler’s photography. Because of his polymathic richness, more than any other commentator of the age, Butler works through the photographic expression of social and scientific ideas. His commentary and production add immeasurably to our understanding of photography as one of the defining inscriptive processes of the period. I am not arguing that any

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one of these elements I have outlined is necessarily directly causal to Butler’s photographic practice in any self-conscious way. Rather, they constitute the habitus of the late nineteenth-century culture of observation and visualizing in relation to photography, which are inflected through Butler’s photographic practices and which constitute his visual rhetoric. What sets his photographs apart is the possibility, which I have attempted to address here, of reading his photographs not only in terms of the broader sociocultural matrices of late nineteenthcentury vision, but also through the very specific scientific views which permeated his thinking. This allows us to think not only about Butler in new ways but about photography itself, revealed as the site of the dynamic co-existence of ‘archaeological’ and ‘vitalist’ models. Ideas about modernity, change, observation, memory, and photographic inscription provide a matrix against which Butler’s photographs can be both measured and understood – perhaps, to put the issue in his own terms, conscious behaviour against reflexive habit, cultural flux against photographic permanence. These elements make connections that played back across Butler’s remarkable photographic corpus, and can help us understand both how he reflects the photographic culture of the period and also what is special about him.

NOTES I should like to thank St John’s College, Cambridge, for the invitation to explore Samuel Butler’s photography, and Mark Nicholls and Jonathan Harrison for all their help. All photographs except 10.2 are by Butler. I should also like to thank Kaushik Bhaumik, Ulinka Rublack, Simon Schaffer, and Elinor Shaffer for their useful comments along the way, and especially Jim Paradis for his discussion, encouragement, and keeping me on the straight and narrow. 1 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Surveying Culture: Photography and the Collection of Culture, British New Guinea, 1898,’ in Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s-1930s, ed. Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), 112–15. 2 These survive as over 3,000 glass and cellulose nitrate negatives, five albums of prints, and a large number of loose prints in the Special Collections of the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge. 3 Anonymous review of Ex Voto in British Journal of Photography, 1 June 1888, 349. It was unusual for books like Ex Voto to be reviewed in this journal.

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Perhaps the review came about through personal contact, maybe Henry Festing Jones. It refers to receiving the information on Butler learning photography ‘from a private source.’ Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of ‘Erewhon,’ 2:60; Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 209. Butler to his sister May, 13 December 1887, in The Correspondence of Samuel Butler with His Sister May, ed. Howard, 195. The sale of the residue of the production of Ex Voto included a packet of photographic prints of ‘works at Varallo and other photographs of the same.’ Sotheby, Catalogue of the Very Important Manuscripts and Books by and about Samuel Butler (London: J. Davy & Sons, 1930), 11. Butler to May, 12 November 1888; 1 July 1889, Correspondence, 196, 199. The Camera Club, which had premises on Charing Cross Road, London, was a leading association for those interested in photography, both amateur and professional. Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 205–94. Ibid., 208. Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 26. Collins was a small firm of photographic apparatus makers. At this time they were based at Cochrane Road, St Johns Wood, London. They made a number of models of small portable cameras in the late 1880s and early 1890s (see Norman Channing and Mike Dunn, British Camera Makers: An AZ Guide of Companies and Products [Esher: Parkland Designs, 1996], 33). Butler also had another unspecified camera for timed exposures, needed in order to photograph the dark interiors of the chapels of Sacro Monte. He also had a magnesium wire for flash. Henry Festing Jones records that Butler took lessons in photography late in 1887 (Memoir, 2:60–1). Although ‘detective’ came to be applied to hand-held or portable cameras, there were true ‘detective cameras’ – for instance, one disguised as a pocket watch introduced by Lancaster & Co. in 1887, and others that could be poked through coat button holes or disguised in hats. Some hand-held socalled detective cameras were also disguised as tool boxes, briefcases, or parcels. Michel Auer, The Illustrated History of the Camera from 1839 to the Present, trans. D.B. Tubbs (Kings Langley: Argus Books, 1975), 82–107; John Wade, A Short History of the Camera (Watford: Fountain Press, 1979), 50–7. Anon., ‘Notes,’ British Journal of Photography, 25 May 1888, 333–4. Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, xix. George W. Stocking, Jr, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987) and After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

282 Elizabeth Edwards 15 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Performing Science,’ in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, ed. Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–35. 16 The much-used term ‘indexical’ in photographic theory derives from semiotician C.S. Peirce’s tripartite model of icon, index, and symbol. The index is that which points to the existence of an entity – for instance, smoke suggests fire, a photograph of a dog suggests the existence of that dog. For a succinct commentary on Peirce’s notion of ‘indexicality,’ see C.F. Delaney, Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C.S. Peirce (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 128–9, 136–8. 17 For an extended discussion of these issues, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘Images of Objectivity,’ Representations 40 (1992): 81–128. 18 Alfred C. Haddon, ‘Photography,’ in Notes and Queries on Anthropology (London: Anthropological Institute, 1899), 235–40. 19 Samuel Butler, Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881; London: A.C. Fifield, 1913), 11 (hereafter cited in text as AS). 20 David Hoyt, ‘The Reanimation of the Primitive: Fin de Siècle Ethnographic Discourse in Western Europe,’ History of Science 39, no. 3 (2001): 331–52. Throughout I am following Hoyt in my use of the term ‘vitalist’ to mean an active cultural dynamic, rather than in the sense of nineteenth-century theories of biological vitalism. Although the concepts are clearly linked, they should not be conflated in my usage here. See Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 68–9. 21 Helen Barlow, ‘Truth and Subjectivity: Explorations in Identity and the Real in the Photographic Work of Clementina Hawarden (1822–1865) and Samuel Butler (1835–1902) and Their Contemporaries’ (PhD diss., University of Kent, 1994), has explored Butler’s photographs in terms of space and frame in the context of irony and subjectivity. 22 Vita-Finzi, ‘Samuel Butler and Italy,’ 85. 23 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 13. 24 Barlow, ‘Truth and Subjectivity,’ 278, makes a similar point, seeing banality as a basic condition that links the multiple aspects of reality. 25 Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 7. 26 Jonathan Friday, ‘Photography and the Representation of Vision,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59, no. 4 (2001): 353. 27 Similarly constructed descriptions, both textual and visual, emerge in anthropological writing of the period – for instance, in A.C. Haddon’s descriptions of the Torres Strait and, in perhaps the most famous position-

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ing of all, anthropological writing by Bronislaw Malinowski at the beginning of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922): ‘Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach.’ Malinowski, after all, yearned to be the Conrad of anthropology. Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 45. Martin customized his Fallowfield Facile Camera, which was disguised as a brown paper package. The camera was introduced in 1887 and took twelve 4¼” x 3¾” plates, similar to Butler’s Collins Camera. Shaffer also makes a link between Butler and Martin but only, with F. Meadow Sutcliffe, in terms of the comparison in the genre of seaside photography (Erewhons of the Eye, 218). For a detailed account of Martin’s career and contexts, see Roy Flukinger, Larry Schaaf, and Standish Meacham, Paul Martin: Victorian Photographer (London: Gordon Fraser, 1978). Cecil Beaton, introduction to Bill Jay, Victorian Candid Camera: Paul Martin, 1864–1944 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), 10. Margaret F. Harker, Henry Peach Robinson, Master of Photographic Art, 1830– 1901 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 78–9. Emerson based his stylistic arguments on theories of physiological vision, especially those developed by Helmholtz. See for example Ellen Handy, ‘Pictorial Beauties, Natural Truths, Photographic Practices,’ in E. Handy, ed., Pictorial Effect, Naturalistic Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson (Norfolk, VA: Chrysler Museum, 1994), 1–23. Martin also worked with composite negatives in Peach Robinson’s style after 1896. See Flukinger, Schaaf, and Meacham, Paul Martin, 59. Everard im Thurn, ‘The Anthropological Uses of the Camera,’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute 22 (1893): 184–203; M.V. Portman, ‘Photography for Anthropologists,’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute 25 (1896): 75–85. Martin, quoted in Beaton, introduction to Victorian Candid Camera, 10. Friday, ‘Photography and the Representation of Vision,’ 355–6. Elinor Shaffer, in Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh: Photographs, Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings by Samuel Butler (1835–1902) (Bolton: Bolton Museum & Art Gallery, 1989), 9. See Butler’s note ‘Eyesight Wild and Tame’ in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler: Volume I (1874–1883), ed. Breuer, 100. Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 228. Geraldine A. Johnson, ed., Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8–9. Samuel Butler, Ex Voto (1888; London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 207. Greg Dening, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 117–18.

284 Elizabeth Edwards 40 Queen magazine described the figures as so lifelike ‘that you feel that were a man of flesh and blood to get mixed up with the crowd behind the grating, you would have hard work to distinguish him from the figures that had never seen life.’ Alice Green, quoted in Butler, Ex Voto, xxi. 41 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 207. 42 Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye, 23–4. 43 Samuel Butler, ‘A Medieval Girl School,’ in Selected Essays, ed. Henry Festing Jones (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), 178–9. 44 Butler, Ex Voto, 221. 45 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 141. 46 Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 9–13. 47 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 216. 48 Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting an Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 97–8. 49 Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, 68. 50 Ibid., 74–5. 51 Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 122. 52 Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 198–226. 53 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1878; London: A.C. Fifield, 1910), 131 (hereafter cited in text as LH). 54 Samuel Butler, Essays on Life, Art, and Science, ed. R.A. Streatfeild (1908; Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970), 332. 55 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (1912; London: Jonathan Cape, 1926), 62. 56 Butler, Essays on Life, Art, and Science, 270. I am very grateful to Michael Gray, formerly of the Fox Talbot Museum, for pointing out to me Butler’s negative intensification. The analogy between the unconscious and the latent image becomes even more marked with later develop-out papers. 57 Roland Barthes, ‘The Rhetoric of the Image,’ in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Flamingo, 1984), 4. 58 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 73–109. 59 Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871). 60 Michael MacDonagh, introduction to Sir Benjamin Stone’s Pictures: Records of National Life and History (London: Cassell, 1906), iii. 61 For an extended consideration of the National Photographic Record Association in the context of memory, see Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photography, Englishness and “Collective Memory”: The National Photographic Record

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Association, 1897–1910,’ in Locating Memory, ed. Annette Kuhn and Kirsten McAllister (Oxford: Berghan Books, 2006), 53–79. Similar projects of folkloric or architectural recording are found in many European countries as a response to the forensic potential of the camera, linked to anxieties about social change and disappearance. For instance, as early as 1854 the French state instituted La Mission Héliographique to record the architectural heritage of France, clearly linking place and memory. Christine Boyer, ‘La Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory and Patrimony in France, 1851,’ in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 21–54. Engagement with the cultural past informed a wide range of anthropological ideas, from evolutionary paradigms to Boasian distribution-based reconstructions. See Peter James, ‘Evolution of the Photographic Record and Survey Movement, c.1890–1910,’ History of Photography 12, no. 3 (1988): 205–18; and Elizabeth Edwards and Peter James, A Record of England: Sir Benjamin Stone and the National Photographic Record Association, 1897–1910 (Stockport and London: Dewi Lewis Publishing and Victoria and Albert Publications, 2006). Cosmo Burton, ‘The Whole Duty of the Photographer,’ British Journal of Photography, part 2, 18 October 1889, 682. Ibid., part 1, 11 October 1889, 667. The reference here is to Francis Galton’s well-known work on heredity and intelligence – for instance, Hereditary Genius (1869) – which led to his development of eugenics. Silver-based photographic technologies are non-permanent in that the silver halides in the emulsion oxidize and cause fading. Hoyt, ‘The Reanimation of the Primitive,’ 339. Ibid., 331. Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, xvi, 28–9. Letter from Butler to Charles Gogin, 12 August 1892, quoted in Shaffer, Samuel Butler, 10. Butler, Essays on Life, Art, and Science, 26–7. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Jones, 262. Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 227–8. Alfred C. Haddon, Head Hunters: Black, White, and Brown (London: Methuen, 1901), 220. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, 68. It was certainly seen this way by Gregory Bateson, the idiosyncratic and brilliant anthropologist, who admired Butler greatly and referred to his

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78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88

work throughout his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Intertext Books, 1973). I am grateful to Richard Fardon for drawing this to my attention. See also Hoyt, ‘The Reanimation of the Primitive,’ 339–40. Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory (1880; London: A.C. Fifield, 1920), 16. Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 206. Jones, Memoir, 2:61. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), 218. Ibid., 219. This is opposed to the way in which the idea of an optical unconscious has been developed by the surrealists and later by Rosalind Krauss. Interestingly, Krauss links the optical unconscious, especially as constructed by artists, to an externalized visual field in conflict with the internal. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 178–80. Hoyt, ‘The Reanimation of the Primitive,’ 339. Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (London: Sage, 1998), 119–22. Anon., ‘Notes,’ British Journal of Photography, 25 May 1888, 325.

11 Butler’s Narcissus: ‘A Tame Oratorio’ ellen t. harris

George Frideric Handel sat atop Samuel Butler’s Parnassus of creative geniuses, ranking not only above all other composers but also beyond the reach of the best artists and authors. Far from shrinking in awe from Handel’s greatness, however, Butler approached him as a fellow musician and was quick to point out perceived weaknesses and flaws in Handel’s scores. His greatest personal tribute to the composer was to make his music a model for his own musical composition. Butler’s two completed oratorios in the Handelian style, Narcissus (1888) and Ulysses (1904, published posthumously), written and composed in collaboration with Henry Festing Jones, reveal a remarkable understanding of the composer’s practice – tinged with Victorian sensibilities. In this paper I will focus on Narcissus, which was completed, published, and performed in Butler’s lifetime. A quip in one of his letters during the period of composition captures some of the gargantuan effort and love poured into this project: ‘A tame oratorio is a delightful pet, but he is something like a tame elephant and would eat Jones and me out of house and home if we did not keep him in his proper place.’1 Butler admitted only two poets into his pantheon, as he acknowledged in a letter to the author of a study of Dante: ‘For me there exist two poets, Homer and Shakespeare; the others are doubtless very good sort of people but I have not, and never shall have, the honour of their acquaintance.’2 And yet, in Butler’s view, Handel surpassed Homer and Shakespeare. He writes in his Note-Books that Jones and he find Handel and Shakespeare ‘can alike stir us more than any one else can.’ But they deemed Handel the more assured and able to achieve exactly what he set out to do: ‘Neither was self-conscious in production, but when the thing has come out Shakespeare looks at it and wonders,

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11.1 Title page of Narcissus, A Dramatic Cantata, by Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones, 1888.

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whereas Handel takes it as a matter of course.’3 Butler greatly admired this decisive self-awareness in Handel’s music – the ability when he takes a licence to make it ‘a good bold one taken rarely’ and to know how to stop when he wanted to, ‘much as a horse stops, with little, if any, peroration’ (NB, 109 and 130). He concludes that Handel ‘is as much above Shakespeare as Shakespeare is above all others, except Handel himself.’4 Still, Shakespeare survives this evaluation. With Homer, Butler’s comparison was more stark: ‘Handel was a greater man than Homer’ (NB, 109). Given Butler’s assessment of Handel in relation to the only two poets he respected, it can be no surprise that he also placed Handel above all composers. It might not have been expected, however, that he would combine this preference with a stated lack of appreciation for so many great masters. He finds Bach’s music devoid of human emotion, arguing that to have Bach compete with Handel at all one would have to debar Handel ‘from the rendering of human emotion’ and free Bach ‘by giving him no human emotion to render’ (NB, 109). In a review written for the Drawing Room Gazette, his evaluation of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is devastating: ‘We believe it to be one of the dreariest, most untuneful, undramatic, and utterly unlovely works that ever came from the pen of any musician.’5 He associates Beethoven’s music with cleverness (gnosis) rather than feeling (agape): ‘But I do not greatly care about gnosis, I want agape; and Beethoven’s agape is not the healthy robust tenderness of Handel, it is a sickly maudlin thing in comparison. Anyhow I do not like him’ (NB, 107). Handel’s only companion on Butler’s Parnassus is the painter Giovanni Bellini. Butler wishes he could ‘except Handel, Giovanni Bellini, and others whom I revere’ and place them in a superhuman category, and suggests that if the reader ‘must believe in anything, let him believe in the music of Handel, the painting of Giovanni Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians.’6 Other great artists have no standing. He writes shortly before his death in 1902: And so in those days [thirty to forty years previous] I was enthusiastic about Titian? No doubt; but he has not held his own with me as Handel has done. Handel like Homer and Shakespeare, grips me ever with tighter hold; what hold Titian, Leonardo, Raffaelle, and Michael Angelo have over me (and – well, to speak quite plainly, I like none of them) is a hold on brain, not on heart.7

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Butler even judged people by their evaluation of Handel. He writes of his Cambridge friends Edward Hall and Harry Gurney: As long as they worshipped Handel I liked them, but when they began to turn up their noses at him, and say that they really could not go back to Handel after having known [the music of Charles] Lecocq and [Lecocq’s opera comique La fille de] Madame Angot, I began to drop them, and presently to dislike them.8

Another instance of this prejudice concerns the estimable composer and music historian William Smith Rockstro, from whom Butler and Jones took counterpoint lessons during the composition of Narcissus. Jones was ‘nervous as to what this might lead to, because Rockstro was a pupil of Mendelssohn, whose Life he had written, and among his fellow-pupils ... had been Madame Schumann.’ However, ‘Butler readily forgave Rockstro’s association with Mendelssohn and Madame Schumann ... because he found him to be as devoted a lover as himself of Handel, whose Life he had also written.’9 It is even possible to assess Butler’s view of his fictional characters on this basis. For example, in The Way of All Flesh, Old Pontifex (based on Butler’s great-grandfather) is shown to be able and compassionate on account of his ability to ‘play the Minuet in [Handel’s oratorio] Samson ... and the March in [Handel’s opera] Scipio’ on the organ.10 By contrast, the unsympathetic Christina Pontifex (based on Butler’s mother) not only had an imperfect singing voice, lacking in power and range, which forced her to transpose the aria ‘Angels ever bright and fair’ from Handel’s Theodora into a lower key, but she also felt the need to add accompanimental ‘embellishments of arpeggios from one end to the other of the keyboard’ because she considered the piece ‘rather heavy in the form in which Handel left it’ (WOAF, 75). Butler vehemently criticized cutting, altering, or adding to Handel’s scores, all of which modifications were common practice in the Victorian era. Sir Arthur Sullivan’s edition of Handel’s Jephtha, which Butler reviewed in 1871, provides a particularly good example.11 Sullivan’s arrangement of 1869 was prepared for performances to be conducted by his friend Joseph Barnby (1838–96). As was typical of the period, about a third of the work was omitted and the remaining movements of the three-act oratorio arranged into two acts. Sullivan added a full fourpart string orchestra to recitatives that Handel had set for simple harpsichord and cello accompaniment, and he filled out the string texture in

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movements where Handel had used a more reduced scoring. ‘Sullivan’s main task, however, was to create a totally new orchestral sound by adding wind, brass, and percussion parts according to the principles of contemporary orchestration.’12 In doing so, he eliminated Handel’s original parts for oboe, horn, and trumpet. He also made surprising motivic additions unrelated to the augmented orchestra, as in the instrumental introduction to the aria ‘Waft her, angels, to the skies.’13 Butler heard and objected to all of this, taking a position that aligns him not with his contemporaries, or even with the first half of the twentieth century, but with modern performance practice.14 As is known from the preservation of his library at St John’s College, Cambridge, Butler owned complete scores of a number of Handel’s oratorios.15 Either he followed his score of Jephtha closely during the performance conducted by Barnby on 15 November 1871, or had so studied it ahead of time, a practice he strongly recommends in the review itself, that he could hear the emendations in his head.16 He was particularly exercised about the cuts: The oratorio, Jephtha, was given at Exeter Hall on Wednesday the 15th, by Mr. Barnby’s choir. We have nothing to complain of, except that the excisions were too numerous. Fully one-third of the oratorio was omitted, and although it may be said truly that the length of Handel’s oratorios almost precludes their being given in their entirety, still there is moderation in all things, and the knife was used too unsparingly ... There was certainly no excuse for the suppression of ‘All that is in Hamor mine.’

Butler goes on to discuss the beauties of the work and of the performance, and concludes with commentary on the additional material: The additional accompaniments were not so apparent as they are sometimes; we fancied that we caught the introduction of a few notes in the opening bars of the accompaniment to ‘Waft her, angels’ which, though used by Handel later on, were not written by him for that place, and would have been better away; otherwise, we noticed nothing that might not perfectly well have been Handel and this is giving Mr. Sullivan great praise.17

Butler was so concerned about the contemporary preference for additional accompaniments that he even placed a hex on those who might consider doing this to the score of his Narcissus.

292 Ellen T. Harris May he be cursed for evermore Who tampers with Narcissus’ score; May he by poisonous snakes be bitten Who writes more parts than what we’ve written. We tried to make our music clear For those who sing and those who hear, Not lost and muddled up and drowned In overdone orchestral sound; So kindly leave the work alone Or do it as we want it done.

Given the few performances of Narcissus, this warning turned out not to be entirely necessary. As Jones dryly put it: ‘Hitherto the musical societies of the country have adopted the former of the alternatives proposed in the concluding couplet.’18 Despite his immoderate love of Handel’s music and strenuous objections to tampering with the scores, Butler nevertheless seems to have felt that his deep understanding of the style gave him, if no one else, the freedom to critique his idol. In the review of Jephtha, he grants, after all, the necessity ‘to shorten the oratorio’ and suggests that the ‘merciful way’ to do this ‘would consist in abolishing the repeats, except in the case of the very finest airs, and in cutting out the recitatives [the musical recitation of dialogue] wholesale.’19 Effecting such cuts would, however, cause significant problems. Handel’s arias typically follow the da capo pattern of having two distinct sections with a return of the first after the second: omitting the repeat without some adjustment would preclude harmonic closure and unbalance the formal structure, and, since the recitatives carry the story line, cutting them out ‘wholesale’ would make gibberish of the narrative and eliminate some of Handel’s deepest emotional utterances. The title character in Jephtha, for example, required by his own vow to make a human sacrifice of his daughter, expresses utter despair in the accompanied recitative ‘Deeper and deeper still.’ His vocal line progressively fragments until Jephtha ‘can no more’ and is silenced before the natural conclusion of the music, which progresses quietly, but relentlessly, to its end. Butler apparently would have willingly cut this movement along with all other recitatives. He states that ‘nobody wants them, except, perhaps, “Deeper and deeper still,”’ but adds parenthetically that he doubts even this recitative ‘would greatly move any one’ who did not already know it was the highly regarded ‘Deeper and deeper still.’ He continues: ‘It is a fine and

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appropriate recitative, but not Handel at his best.’ Butler gives Handel’s oratorios Theodora and Susanna a low ranking on account of their manner, which he finds ‘more difficult and more in the style of Bach.’ Yet even these he prefers to Judas Maccabaeus, which, ‘in spite of the many fine things it contains, I like perhaps the least of all his oratorios’ (NB, 117–8). He finds Jephtha ‘not equal to the Messiah, Samson, or Israel in Egypt, Alexander’s Feast, and some others of his very greatest works,’ prioritizing the same core of works as his fellow Victorians.20 Despite his praise of Handel for knowing when to stop (as opposed to Beethoven, who, granted, sometimes needs to beat a movement into submission), Butler worries that the overture to Saul is too long, but here, at least, he thinks it likely that ‘if I were to try to cut it down I should find some excellent reason that had made Handel decide on keeping it as it is’ (NB, 131). Butler considered Israel in Egypt the ‘ne plus ultra of the musical art’: ‘the only thing which the critic can do is simply to confess his own impotence to criticise, and to own that the work is not only above criticism, but positively above praise, so inadequate are all words to convey a worthy tribute of admiration to the stupendous dramatic and imaginative power which it displays.’21 Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries Israel was understood, incorrectly, to be complete in parts 2 and 3 of what Handel composed. As a result, the oratorio seemed to open unexpectedly with a solo recitative rather than an overture, this being, however, a relatively common beginning for a second act. The apparent formal departure was so striking that Felix Mendelssohn copied the form in his oratorio Elijah. Still, Butler regretted the lack of an overture and could not understand ‘why Handel should not have written one unless that he really felt himself unequal to the task.’ Butler thought perhaps he could help Handel out. In the same review of Israel in Egypt, he suggested that an overture could be fashioned from the Prelude to Handel’s Harpsichord Suite in B-flat major (HWV 494), which contains ‘about a dozen bars of tremendous consecutive chords, more full and Titanic than anything else which we know, – we had almost said in music.’ To make these chords consecutive demanded cutting out the middle section of arpeggios (almost half of the movement), which caused Butler no concern: ‘the chords will run from end to end without the arpeggios with hardly any manipulation, and when thus played, we can only say that we know nothing like them.’ Of course, the passage would also have needed to be fully orchestrated.

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Butler’s solution, therefore, included all the things he was likely to object to in others’ arrangements of Handel – the transposition of movements from one work to another, cutting of material, and use of newly written orchestrations. Nevertheless, in surprising harmony with his fellow Victorian arrangers, he thought Handel would approve. The ‘colossal character’ of this passage, he writes, ‘suits the oratorio to perfection, their effect, with a full orchestra, would be tremendous, and they would not take more than a minute and a half to perform. If Handel were alive, we believe that he would have given his consent to the experiment at once.’ To give Butler full credit, both Handel’s original overture and the orchestral introduction to the first chorus – neither of which was known to belong to Israel in the nineteenth century – have at their core similar passages of block chords that are atypical of Handel’s normal overture style. So Butler did, to a degree, get inside Handel’s head. He was reflective enough to say about his suggestion, ‘but one hardly dares propose it seriously.’ Butler did, however, find a way to use his arrangement. Within months of his recommendation of this ‘Titanic’ and ‘colossal’ passage as an overture to Israel, he published the keyboard movement, in exactly the emended version he had described, in his novel Erewhon as a vivid depiction of the terrible chanting of the Erewhonian statues.22 The use of Handel’s music in many of Butler’s writings as illustrative material indicates a critical aspect of his fascination with the composer. He considered visual depiction the very essence of music and Handel the most painterly of composers: ‘He who gave eyes to ears and showed in sound / All thoughts and things in earth or heaven above’ (NB, 428). That is, Butler saw images in music and heard music in images. He writes, ‘When last I saw the Wetterhorn I caught myself involuntarily humming “And the government shall be upon his shoulders.”’ The phrase comes from the chorus ‘For unto us a child is born’ in Messiah. Its setting climbs in jagged and uneven leaps finally discharging all of its weight and energy on the first syllable of ‘shoulders’ (thereby depicting the meaning of the text) and then runs fluidly back down the scale. For Butler ‘the big shoulder of the Wetterhorn seemed to fall just like the run on “shoulder”’ (NB, 115). In another example, Butler finds that the phrase ‘of them that sleep’ from ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ in Messiah reminds him of the peace he felt at Calpiogna (AS, 14). The setting of these words consists of a two-measure passage constructed over a harmony that moves from the home chord to the chord one step above, and then returns. The vocal

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line of four notes, which matches the text syllabically, first rises the interval of a fourth (four notes of the scale) from the base of the home chord; reaching a position one half-step (the smallest pitch increment) above the middle note of the home chord, the melody remains on this higher pitch for another syllable before relaxing comfortably down the halfstep into the home chord again. The phrase, of course, sets the text beautifully, evoking the restful rise and fall of the breath. Butler’s ability to recall such short passages from the middle of a movement, and sometimes from an inner voice, and to associate them with a specific visual image or ambience indicates how deeply he absorbed and responded to Handel’s music. When Butler and Jones first discussed writing a Handelian oratorio, it was, not surprisingly, the idea of text setting and word painting that first caught their imagination, as Jones makes clear in his description of their decision: Of course all our music was to be as like Handel’s as we could get it. The popular notion that Handel is a composer of sacred music exclusively is not correct ... Moreover, even when writing a sacred oratorio, secular subjects are introduced, and he was never at a loss in treating anything that came into his words by allusion or an illustration ... But with all his versatility there is one subject which Handel never treated – I mean the money market. Butler’s financial difficulties made him regret the omission.23

Although the collaborators found no precedent for their financial topic in Handel’s oratorios, they openly ‘adopted the opinion of Monsieur Jourdain’s Maître à Danser’ in Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme that those who sing on the stage must, for the sake of realism, be shepherds. The published vocal score provides the following synopsis:24 PART I Narcissus, a simple shepherd, and Amaryllis, a prudent shepherdess, with companions, who form the Chorus, have abandoned pastoral pursuits and embarked in a course of speculation upon the Stock Exchange. This results in the loss of the hundred pounds upon which Narcissus and Amaryllis had intended to marry. Their engagement is broken off, and the condolences of the Chorus end Part I. PART II In the interval between the parts the aunt and godmother of Narcissus has died at an advanced age, and is discovered to have been worth one hun-

296 Ellen T. Harris dred thousand pounds, all of which she has bequeathed to her nephew and godson. This removes the obstacle to his union with Amaryllis; but the question arises in what securities the money is to be invested. At first he is inclined to resume his speculations and to buy Egyptian bonds, American railways, mines, &c.; but yielding to the advice of Amaryllis he resolves to place the whole of it in the Three per cent. Consolidated Bank Annuities, to marry at once, and to live comfortably upon the income. With the congratulations and approbation of the chorus the work is brought to a conclusion.

The idea of writing about the stock market grew out of the nineteenth-century understanding that Handel himself had experienced bankruptcy (which he had not),25 and Butler’s identification with Handel due to his own financial problems.26 There is, however, at least one eighteenth-century dramatic precedent in The Lottery (1732), a ballad opera by Henry Fielding. In this work Chloe, a naive heroine from the countryside, believes that her lottery ticket is worth £10,000. Taking her for a rich woman, the London gambler Jack Stocks marries her, under the pseudonym Lord Lace, only to discover later that her ticket is a blank. Chloe (and Jack) are rescued when Lovemore, Chloe’s true love who has followed her from the countryside, offers Jack a thousand pounds if he will renounce Chloe, a deal Jack is only too willing to make. Most of the songs in the opera were newly composed by a Mr Seedo,27 but some others, as is typical of the genre, use borrowed melodies with new text. In the tradition of burlesquing serious opera, two of Lovemore’s songs are based on airs by Handel from recent operatic productions, indicating, not without irony, his higher social status than that of Jack Stocks.28 In its use of a stock market subject and its burlesque of Handel, The Lottery offers a possible model for Narcissus. Although Butler’s library, as preserved at St John’s College, includes no Fielding, Butler certainly knew Fielding’s novels.29 He might have read these in the library of the British Museum, where The Lottery would also have been available.30 Neither Butler nor Jones borrows directly from this work, however, and there is no firm evidence that either of them knew it. There is no reason to doubt Jones’s comment, therefore, that the idea derived from Butler’s own financial difficulties. In The Way of All Flesh, Butler writes that ‘life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject, and there must be nothing new’ (WOAF, 229). This is arguably true of Butler’s life and work, where the ‘fugue subject’ is repeatedly

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11.2 Summary of characters and argument, Narcissus.

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11.3 First page of chorus, ‘Oh Speculation,’ by Samuel Butler.

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his own life narrative. That is, despite the pastoral façade, Narcissus, like The Way of All Flesh, is a variation on Butler’s experience. Narcissus has saved £100 as a shepherd, loses it in a risky investment, and is bailed out by the bequest of £100,000 from his father’s aunt, his godmother. Ernest Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh receives a goodly bequest from his grandfather, loses it in risky investments, and is bailed out by the bequest of his aunt, which in the end amounts to £70,000. In Butler’s own life, he made a goodly sum sheep farming in New Zealand, lost it in risky investments, and was forced back into dependence on his father until his father’s death in 1886, when he came into his inheritance. Narcissus was completed a year and a half later in 1888. The Way of All Flesh also is connected to Narcissus through its depiction of Ernest’s guardian Overton as a writer of burlesques. At one point Overton speaks of collaborating with Ernest on one of his theatrical projects, much as Butler and Jones collaborated: ‘I was then at work upon my burlesque “The Impatient Griselda,” and was sometimes at my wits’ end for a piece of business or a situation; he gave me many suggestions, all of which were marked by excellent good sense’ (WOAF, 351). Earlier, Overton mentions that one of his burlesques was set to Handel’s music: I had written a good deal but my works had been almost exclusively for the stage, and for those theatres that devoted themselves to extravaganza and burlesque. I had written many pieces of this description, full of puns and comic songs, and they had had a fair success ... I had also dramatised The Pilgrim’s Progress for a Christmas Pantomime ... The orchestra played music taken from Handel’s best known works, but the time was a good deal altered, and altogether the tunes were not exactly as Handel left them. (WOAF, 140)

Of course, these descriptions not only can be related to the composition of Narcissus but also describe the musical works that provided a context for it. Burlesques of serious opera were an extremely popular entertainment.31 A few examples of operatic burlesques performed in London between 1878 and 1888 provide some indication of the style: Il sonnambolo, or Lively Little Alessio, 1878, based on Bellini’s La sonnambula; Il trovatore, or Larks with a Libretto, 1880, based on Verdi’s Il trovatore; Little Carmen, 1884, based on Bizet’s Carmen; and The Double Dutchman, 1885, based on Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Like the ballad opera of the

300 Ellen T. Harris

eighteenth century, the music for operatic burlesques came from a variety of sources: from the operatic repertory – from both the work travestied and other operas – from popular songs and ballads, and, in the case of the nineteenth century, from ‘the American black-face minstrel shows that took London by storm in the 1840s and 1850s.’32 Clearly the operatic burlesque, if not Fielding’s ballad opera, was a model for Butler and Jones. In fact, a specific model existed in the one theatrical piece of Handel’s that was regularly performed, often with the additional accompaniments by Mozart or Mendelssohn, and also burlesqued: the pastoral masque Acis and Galatea. Three burlesques survive: Acis and Galatea Burlesqued (1842), Acis and Galatea; or, The Nimble Nymph, and the Terrible Troglodyte! (1863), and A Very New Edition of Acis and Galatea; or, The Beau! The Belle! and the Blacksmith! (1869).33 In each, burlesque language replaces the elegant poetry of John Gay, the author of Handel’s original libretto, emphasizing instead contemporary allusions and ridiculing polite society and the pretences of the social class system. Although no musical scores survive from the productions, the text of Acis and Galatea Burlesqued of 1842 by William Oxberry directly parodies Gay’s original. In the aria, ‘Love in her eyes sits playing,’ the quatrain ‘Love on her breast sits panting, / And swells with soft desire; / No grace, no charm is wanting, / To set the heart on fire!’ is replaced with ‘Love on your busum’s panting / Oh! There I now could swoon / Full blown – your charms not wanting / Like the Nassau Balloon!’ The parallelism in the poetic metre strongly points to the continued use of Handel’s original music. Operetta, a kissing cousin of the burlesque, was similarly popular in the late nineteenth century. Ernest Pontifex’s love of music provides something of the Victorian norm: ‘He worshipped Handel; he liked Offenbach, and the airs that went about the streets, but he cared nothing between these two extremes’ (WOAF, 349). Like the burlesque, the operettas of Jacques Offenbach, written between 1847 and 1881, satirize contemporary society in their texts and operatic conventions in their musical settings. Offenbach’s humour included the quotation of familiar music and the incongruity of the settings, such as the can-can for the gods in Orphée aux enfers or the composition of ‘a grandiose operatic ensemble’ around a ‘banal phrase’ as occurs in La belle Hélène.34 The operetta as developed by Offenbach and the burlesque, although clearly related, also differed in significant ways. The operetta, for example, did not parody a single work and was distinguished by a wholly original and witty libretto. Offenbach might use musical quotation to humorous

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effect, but his scores are stamped throughout with his own musical style and are not a stylistic miscellany. The operettas of Sir Arthur Sullivan, written between 1867 and 1901, build on the pattern developed by Offenbach. That is, Sullivan ‘sought expression through his own musical style,’ which typically contained general stylistic reference to, rather than direct quotation of, ‘Victorian church music, drawing-room ballad and opera.’35 Whereas Handel was Butler’s distant ideal, Sullivan was his immediate model. To take only one example relevant to Butler’s later composition, ‘the entrance of the Learned Judge in Trial by Jury [1875] (“All hail, great judge”) refers to the musical style of Handel.’36 Butler contemplates the impact of nationality on musical creativity in his Note-Books, writing that the composer is normally a tenant for life of the estate of and trustee for that school ... which has obtained the firmest hold upon his own countrymen. An Englishman cannot successfully write like a German or a Hungarian, nor is it desirable that he should try. (NB, 125)

As a result, he muses ‘whether as writers, therefore, or as listeners, Englishmen should stick chiefly to Purcell, Handel [a naturalised British citizen], and Sir Arthur Sullivan’ (NB, 125). Certainly for Butler the answer was yes. After attending a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for example, Butler writes that the work ‘bored’ him and Jones and that they ‘like Narcissus better’: The plot [of Don Giovanni], of course, is stupid to a degree, but plot has very little to do with it; what can be more uninteresting than the plot of many of Handel’s oratorios? We both believe the scheme of Italian opera to be a bad one; we think that music should never be combined with acting to a greater extent than is done, we will say, in The Mikado ... and we agreed that we had neither of us ever yet been to an opera (I mean a Grand Opera) without being bored by it. I am not sorry to remember that Handel never abandoned oratorio after he had once fairly taken to it. (NB, 129)

It seems reasonable to assume from this comment that Butler felt allsung works, such as Italian opera and Handel’s oratorios, should not be staged but that Sullivan’s Mikado could be acted successfully because of the spoken dialogue. Regardless of this difference, however, Butler’s preference for Handelian oratorio and for Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado

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in both style and form over Mozart’s Don Giovanni provides an apt picture of Butler’s disparate musical models for Narcissus (and parallels Ernest Pontifex’s love of Handel and Offenbach with nothing in between). It seems odd, and is unfortunate, that Butler and Jones’s comic goals in Narcissus should have been so misunderstood by historians. In the earliest critical mention, Eric Bloom writes (1925) of Narcissus that the ‘subject is facetious’ and that ‘as a parody the words are capital.’ However, despite ‘unlimited opportunities for musical burlesque,’ ‘the trouble is that the music to “Narcissus” is not in the least comic, at any rate not intentionally so.’37 In an article closely modelled on Bloom’s earlier work, Robert Manson Myers (1948) agrees: ‘Butler’s facetious libretto provides unlimited possibilities for musical burlesque, but his music lacks humor and verve, and the general effect is flatly tedious.’38 More recently, Michael Allis (1998) has provided an unexpected rebuttal. Although flatly stating that ‘Myers has missed the point,’ he argues not that Butler’s music actually contains ‘humor and verve’ but rather that ‘it is the conventional aspect of the music which throws the satirical text into relief.’ Allis concludes that ‘with a humorous musical setting, the work would descend into farce.’39 The problem with this argument is the equation of ‘conventional’ with ‘serious.’ Allis insists that Butler ‘would never have attempted to satirise Handel’s music.’ However, this is just what the authors do, albeit lovingly. The appropriation of Handel’s style in such an unexpected textual setting provides the humour and, sometimes, uproarious fun of the musical imitation. Jones makes it plain they are parodying Handel’s style in his description of their original conversation on composing the oratorio. Calling it ‘a pity that Handel and Dr. Morell,’ one of Handel’s librettists, had not turned to the stock market as a topic, Butler and Jones immediately consider the musical possibilities. Taking the text ‘The steadfast funds maintain their wonted state,’ they devised a setting that doggedly clings to a single note except for a small rise on the first syllable of ‘wonted,’ after which the line returns to the ‘steadfast’ note: And if Dr. Morell had completed his couplet by adding ‘While all the other markets fluctuate,’ what would Handel have done with the words? Would he have sent the funds up above par and left them steadfastly there on an inverted pedal, while all the other markets fluctuated iniquitously round them like the sheep that turn every one to his own way in the Messiah?

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There was no answering such questions, and the only course seemed to be for us to attack the subject ourselves, and to treat it in a Handelian oratorio of our own.40

Although this couplet and its setting do not end up in the finished work, the example illustrates the musical humour of Butler and Jones as they considered the application of Handel’s method of text-painting to their topic. The proposed setting of the contrast between the steady funds and the fluctuating stocks recasts in humorous light something like what occurs in the ‘Hallelujah chorus’ when the sopranos sing ‘King of Kings and Lord of Lords’ to a single note, repeating it in a rising stepwise progression to indicate the ascendancy and steadfastness of the one God, while the rest of the chorus depicts bustling perpetuity by tossing the phrases ‘for ever and ever’ and ‘hallelujah’ around and around in an imitative circle. Or perhaps the idea was to copy a famous chorus in Joshua, an oratorio thought at the time to have a text by Dr Morell, where the parting of the River Jordan is depicted in the lines ‘In wat’ry heaps affrighted Jordan stood, / And backward to the fountain roll’d his flood.’ Handel sets the first line to a single repeated note for full chorus and sets the second with a musical line rolling downward from it. Butler specifically singled out this chorus among the select examples in his sonnet praising Handel’s text-painting: ‘Glad shepherds watching o’er their flocks by night ... / Or Jordan standing as an heap upright’ (NB, 428). As in Offenbach and, to a lesser extent, Sullivan, the humour of the settings by Butler and Jones lies in the incongruity, the use of Handel’s grand oratorio style to portray the stock market. Further, there can be no doubt that humour was the authors’ goal. Butler was not pleased, for example, when Narcissus was announced as a straight-faced work in the style of Handel, as he writes to his friend Miss Savage in October 1884: I have announced Jones’s and my Album of short pianoforte pieces and our cantata in this week’s Athenaeum. I said the subject of the libretto was some shepherds and shepherdesses who had lost their money through imprudent speculations on the Stock Exchange, and then went on to say that the music was in the style of Handel. The editor has cut out the bit about the libretto, presumably as too much savouring of levity, and left me announcing a cantata in the style of Handel, which is rather a stronger measure than I like, but it doesn’t matter.41

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In a description of his friendship with Jones dating from 1884, Butler himself designates Narcissus a comic work: ‘We are now fairly embarked upon our cantata, or serenata, or comic oratorio, or oratorio buffo, or whatever it is,’42 and, in February 1885, he writes in a letter to Miss Savage that ‘the cantata, which, by the way, is not a cantata but an oratorio buffo, grows.’43 In the event, the composers did not have the courage to use the newly coined genre title, ‘oratorio buffo,’ as Jones explains while leaving no doubt that this is what they thought the work to be: ‘Although we were trying to imitate Handel we did not dare to call our work an Oratorio, still less did we dare to call it an Oratorio Buffo, which is what it really is, so we called it a Dramatic Cantata, meaning by dramatic no more than that the singers are named, as in Saul.’44 Miss Savage, after hearing some of the score, compliments Butler on its ‘delightful’ qualities and, recognizing the musical parody, asks: ‘Are there singers who will be able to render its peculiar humour?’45 And after an early performance of the work, Butler writes to Mrs Bovill, a friend and an amateur singer then in Australia: Mrs. Beavington Atkinson did Narcissus the week before last, from beginning to end, songs, choruses (8 voices), and all; it took just 2 hours including the interval between the parts, and we thought everyone liked it and laughed very heartily.46

Finally, if there was any question about the intended humour of using Handel’s style for a work about the stock market, Butler answers it definitively in his Note-Books: The very people who are most angry with me for (as they incorrectly suppose) sneering at Homer are generally the ones who never miss an opportunity of cheapening and belittling Handel, and, which is very painful to myself, they say I was laughing at him in Narcissus. Perhaps – but surely one can laugh at a person and adore him at the same time. (NB, 109)

The stated model for the text of Narcissus was the work of Handel’s librettist Thomas Morell, including Judas Maccabaeus, Alexander Balus, and Jephtha, not for its stylistic specificity but for its lack of that quality. As Butler writes in his Note-Books: After all, Dr. Morell suited Handel exactly well – far better than Tennyson would have done. I don’t believe even Handel could have set Tennyson to

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music comfortably. What a mercy it is that he did not live in Handel’s time! Even though Handel had set him ever so well he would have spoiled the music, and this Dr. Morell does not in the least do. (NB, 112)

He puts this very directly in a letter to his sister in 1884: We are writing our own words as well as the music, and imitating the style of Handel’s librettist, Dr. Morell. We are surprised to find that the style is one which lends itself singularly well to music, and think that much better poetry would not have been half so well suited for the particular purpose that Handel had in view.47

Not surprisingly, direct parallels can be found between Morell’s librettos (or librettos thought by Butler to be by Morell) and Narcissus that border on parody – not just in terms of verbal echoes, but also placement within the work. The opening chorus of Narcissus, for example, seems to be modelled on the first chorus in Jephtha: Butler: No more upon the mountain’s brow We’ll tend our tedious flocks; ’Tis smiling commerce charms us now And fluctuating stocks. Morell: No more to Ammon’s god and king, Fierce Moloch, shall our cymbals ring, In dismal dance around the furnace blue. Chemosh no more Will we adore With timbrell’d anthems to Jehovah due.

Even more closely, the last aria in Joshua before the celebratory finale (beginning with ‘See, the conqu’ring hero comes!’) appears to be the model for the last aria in Narcissus (sung by Narcissus).48 Butler (first quatrain): Shall I to Egypt’s dusky bonds A portion of my wealth confide,

306 Ellen T. Harris Where Memnon’s fabled voice responds To morning’s ray o’er Nilus’ tide? Morell (first quatrain): Shall I in Mamre’s fertile plain The remnant of my days remain? And is it giv’n to me, to have A place with Abrah’m in the grave?

In neither case is the musical setting parodied. Handel was the primary, but not only, musical model for Butler and Jones. Like Sullivan, who is their contemporary model, the composers forged their own musical style out of a mélange, not of ‘Victorian church music, drawing-room ballad and opera,’49 as in Sullivan’s music, but, similarly, from folk song, hymn, and Handel. Sometimes the text provides a clue to the style. For example, Narcissus’s first aria – ‘Not loss of gold doth grieve me’ – with its simple vocabulary and short lines organized into four quatrains rhyming abab, sounds very little like Morell, but more like a folk song. The first quatrain reads: Not loss of gold doth grieve me, Not poverty I fear, But if my love should leave me ’Twere more than I could bear.

The musical setting by Jones follows suit, the vocal line a seeming derivative of ‘My bonny lies over the ocean.’ By contrast, the opening of ‘Ah! cruel fortune,’ an air for Amaryllis by Butler, sounds melodically and harmonically an exact copy of the hymn ‘Lead me Lord,’ by Samuel Wesley (d. 1837). Whereas the influence of folk song appears most often in the settings by Jones, the influence of hymns turns up more frequently in Butler. Around the time Butler and Jones were writing Narcissus, a storm was brewing concerning the discovery of Handel’s use of pre-existent material.50 Butler handsomely defends Handel in a long passage in his Note-Books entitled ‘On borrowing’ (NB, 120–6).51 But a passage of even greater interest appears in the entry entitled ‘John Sebastian Bach’ (NB, 118–9). After stating that Bach ‘does not appeal to me,’ Butler launches into a revealing and important defence of his own compositional method:

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Still, I own Bach does appeal to me sometimes. In my own poor music I have taken passages from him before now, and have my eye on others which I have no doubt will suit me somewhere. Whether Bach would know them again when I have worked my will on them, and much more whether he would own them, I neither know nor care. I take or leave as I choose, and alter or leave untouched as I choose. I prefer my music to be an outgrowth from a germ whose source I know, rather than a waif and stray which I fancy to be my own child when it was all the time begotten of a barrel organ. It is a wise tune that knows its own father and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents. Roughly, however, as I have said over and over again, if I think something that I know and greatly like in music, no matter whose, is appropriate, I appropriate it. I should say I was under most obligations to Handel, Purcell, and Beethoven. (NB, 118–19)

Butler goes on in the same extended Note-Book passage on Bach to describe an aria of his composition from Ulysses, ‘Man in vain.’ He writes that the listener ‘might think it was taken from “Batti, batti,”’ an aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and, indeed, Butler’s aria does at points (for example, at the setting of the words ‘Whom Jove hates he will undo’) resemble the flow of Mozart’s aria with descending vocal lines set against a more active bass accompaniment in shorter note values. However, Butler ‘should like to say it was taken from, or suggested by, a few bars in the opening of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata opus 78, and a few bars in the accompaniment to the duet “Hark how the songsters” in Purcell’s Timon of Athens,’ and he provides two-bar snippets that would seem to prove his point (NB, 119). One has to wonder, however, whether Butler actually had these bars in mind when he was composing or whether he found the resemblance after the fact to prove his music ‘the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.’ Although the derivative nature of Butler’s music can turn the hearing of a Butler score into something of a competitive parlour game for musicians, it remains difficult, and often impossible, to judge his intention. The air from Narcissus, ‘Ah! cruel fortune,’ previously cited, provides an illustration. The opening three measures with bar-length harmonies (moving from tonic to dominant and back) sustained against a faster-moving bass arpeggiating the chord tones is strongly reminiscent of the trio introducing the three Spirits in Mozart’s Magic Flute (‘Drei Knäbchen, jung, schön, hold und weise’). The harmony and descending melody from the end of bar 3 through bar 4 match the sec-

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ond phrase of Handel’s ‘Where e’er you walk’ (the setting of the words ‘Sweet gales shall fan the glades’) from Semele. The opening vocal line, as already mentioned, apparently quotes the opening of Wesley’s hymn ‘Lead me Lord,’ but it is also similar to the opening of the March of the Priests in The Magic Flute. There is no saying, however, whether Butler constructed this aria from these models or, indeed, whether he even recognized the similarities. Narcissus is full of such fragmentary echoes. Those from Handel were perhaps the closest to Butler and Jones’s consciousness, and their pervasiveness helps to lend the Handelian flavour to the score. A handful of examples, all by Butler unless Jones is specifically named, can serve to illustrate the various stylistic models. The fugue subject of the Overture (by Jones) has, in its rising, disjunct angularity, foster parents in Handel’s ‘O had I Jubal’s lyre’ from Joshua and Bach’s F major two-part invention. The opening of the air for Narcissus – ‘They say the darkest clouds’ – comes directly from the middle, solo section of the opening chorus of Handel’s pastoral Acis and Galatea (at the words ‘For us the winter’s rain’); at the final cadence of this air, the setting of ‘So when to mortal view’ hints of the first statement of ‘The kingdom of this world’ from the ‘Hallelujah chorus.’ Toward the end of ‘Should riches mate with love,’ another air for Narcissus, the opening of the refrain ‘Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves’ suddenly appears on the phrase ‘So Wealth was made too old to care for Love.’ The song ‘Rule, Britannia,’ later the unofficial British national anthem, was composed by Handel’s contemporary Thomas Arne for his patriotic opera Alfred (1740), but, curiously, Victor Schoelcher in his nineteenth-century biography of Handel (1857), thinking that Alfred dated from 1751, suggests that Arne borrowed the tune from Handel’s patriotic Occasional Oratorio (1746) – the opening line of Arne’s setting, ‘When Britain first at Heav’ns command,’ coming from Handel’s setting of ‘War shall cease, welcome peace!’ in the air, ‘Prophetic visions strike my eye.’52 Given that Butler owned Schoelcher’s biography,53 the reminiscence of ‘Rule, Britannia’ in Narcissus may have been based on the belief that this tune was by Handel. Of course, if there was any borrowing between Alfred and The Occasional Oratorio, it was Handel who borrowed from Arne. Butler sometimes mixes in other models with his Handel. The setting of ‘Oh wondrous scheme decreed of old on high’ in the chorus ‘One common doom’ has the stately chordal texture and melody of the Doxology (‘Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow; Praise Him, all crea-

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tures here below’). The opening fugue subject of this same chorus bears a familial resemblance to the chromatic opening of Handel’s fugue on the words ‘And every step he takes on his devoted head precipitates the thunder down,’ from the chorus ‘By slow degrees’ in Belshazzar. The end of the triplet introduction to the Messenger’s air, ‘O! Return to your home far away’ recalls the accompaniment in Bach’s setting of the chorale ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring.’ In the air ‘I never knew her worth till now,’ the highlighted chorale-like setting of the words ‘She would have changed her will’ again turns to the tune of the Doxology at its second line: ‘Praise him all creatures here below.’ Butler, like Handel, also borrowed from his own earlier works: the fugue theme of the chorus ‘Oh Speculation’ is adapted from his published Fugue in D Minor.54 Are these and other snatches of resemblance real or ephemeral? With Butler one cannot dismiss them out of hand. As discussed above, he himself identifies unexpected fragments of a few measures out of the middle of movements as particularly fine examples of Handel’s text painting, and he writes in one of his Handel sonnets that he always had Handel’s music in his head: Father of my poor music – if such small Offspring as mine, so born out of due time, So scorn’d, can be called fatherful at all, Or dare to thy high sonship’s rank to climb – ... You were about my path, about my bed In boyhood always and, where’er I be, Whate’er I think or do, you, in my head, Ground-bass to all my thoughts, are still with me; Methinks the very worms will find some strain Of yours still lingering in my wasted brain.

(NB, 428)

It seems likely that, in composing a phrase, the first two or three notes or chords could easily have reminded Butler of a familiar musical passage, which he then completed, consciously or not. Many of these come at cadences, where standard patterns are most common, but fragments can also appear anywhere in a movement. Although intriguing and seemingly capable of endless proliferation, the fragments are less interesting overall than the adaptation by Butler and Jones of Handel’s style more generally. Butler, as already quoted above, could happily have done without

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Handel’s recitatives, and this shows in Narcissus, the recitatives being especially bland or awkward. In particular, attempts at Handel’s bold licences tend to result in harmonic incoherence instead. In The Way of All Flesh, Butler describes Ernest’s difficulties in music composition, highlighting the problem of moving from one key to another ‘and being unable to get back again.’ He has Ernest describe this conundrum in an unforgettable travel metaphor: ‘Getting into the key of C sharp [an unexpected arrival coming from the stated key of C] ... is like an unprotected female travelling on the Metropolitan Railway, and finding herself at Shepherd’s Bush, without quite knowing where she wants to go to. How is she ever to get safe back to Clapham Junction?’ (WOAF, 426). Not surprisingly, Butler and Jones – like Ernest – periodically get themselves stuck at Shepherd’s Bush. For example, in the recitative for the Messenger and Narcissus – ‘My friends I bear ill tidings’ – Jones has the Messenger speak in the key of E minor; Narcissus responds, not unconvincingly, in the relatively distant key of G minor leading to a question posed on a chord that strongly calls for a G harmony; instead, Jones plunges back to a single repeated E, ultimately returning to the E minor harmony for the Messenger’s answer. The use of distinct harmonies for the two characters makes sense, but the shift back is less a dramatic wrench than an illogical and musically ungrammatical continuation – a dangling participle followed by an incomplete sentence. Whereas Jones’s recitatives tend towards the nineteenth-century melodramatic, Butler’s most successful recitatives would appear to be constructed on a seventeenth-century model. In particular the Messenger’s recitative, ‘Be not impatient,’ seems to be modelled directly on recitatives from the musical settings of Milton’s Comus (1634) by Henry Lawes (1596–1662).55 If Lawes was not Butler’s specific model for this recitative, the general seventeenth-century style of recitative, perhaps of Purcell, surely was. Neither Jones nor Butler wrote recitative much like Handel’s at all. The harmonic simplicity of Narcissus separates it from Handel’s work, whose scores are rich with melodic chromaticism and chromatic chords. A wonderful example of chromatic harmony that Butler does employ is the chord of the augmented sixth, which is noteworthy for containing both a chromatically lowered and a chromatically raised tone, the two pushing outward in opposite directions. In The Way of All Flesh, Butler provides a graphic portrait of the Simeonite Badcock based on the harmonic qualities of this chord: ‘Not only was he ugly, dirty, illdressed, bumptious, and in every way objectionable, but he was

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deformed and waddled when he walked,’ so that ‘the lower parts of his back [his buttocks] emphasised themselves demonstratively as though about to fly off in different directions like the two extremes in the chord of the augmented sixth’ (WOAF, 242). The augmented sixth comes up again later when Ernest is told of his aunt’s bequest. He is initially speechless, but his first words are: ‘If I were rendering this moment in music ... I should allow myself free use of the augmented sixth’ (WOAF, 387). Surprisingly, Butler does not use the augmented sixth at the equivalent moment in Narcissus. Its only appearance comes in the chorus ‘One common doom,’ after learning of the death of Narcissus’s aunt, but before hearing of the bequest. At the text ‘A harmony of endless strife, / And mode of universal growth, / Is seen alike in both,’ the augmented sixth sets the word ‘universal,’ its outward expansion emphasized in the top and bottom voices clearly depicting the ‘growth’ that is ‘universal.’ The most effective parts of the Narcissus score come when Butler and Jones independently make use of Handel’s methods without direct borrowing. Two stylistic attributes, in particular, come in for humorous treatment: the extended elongations of a single syllable over many notes (melismas) and text repetition. In the opening chorus, ‘No more upon the mountain’s brow,’ Butler has a grand old time with melismas on the word ‘tedious,’ setting the comic tone of the work; in one of his descriptions of the origin of Narcissus, he specifically calls attention to the use of this word. After deciding, following Molière, to use shepherds, Jones had suggested, ‘Yes, and let them call their flocks “tedious,”’ so that ‘we introduced “tedious” at once.’56 In the music for the first couplet, ‘No more upon the mountain’s brow / We’ll tend our tedious flocks,’ Butler begins with a straightforward syllabic setting, giving the listener a strong expectation that the two-measure phrase of the first verse will be completed with a two-measure setting of the second. Instead, on the first syllable of the word ‘tedious’ there is an unexpected extension of a full measure while the vocal line ‘tediously’ descends in even quarter notes over a five-note scale. Then, in repeated iterations of the phrase ‘our tedious flocks,’ Butler further expands the first syllable of ‘tedious,’ by setting it to a commonplace, pedantic vocal exercise, ultimately stretching the melisma to a length of seventeen notes. The composers’ delight in making comic use of Handel’s style of repetition is openly described by the authors in terms of the final chorus (by Jones): ‘How blest the prudent man, the maiden pure, / Whose

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income is both ample and secure, / Arising from consolidated Three / Per Cent Annuities, paid quarterly.’ In 1879, Butler had written to his sister: I also went last night to the Albert Hall to hear the Dettingen Te Deum (which is magnificent) ... The chorus ‘To Thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry’ was wonderful. I have counted the ‘continually’s’ and find the word repeated exactly 50 times. If you will (try and) say the word ‘continually’ ten times on each of your five fingers, you will find it gives you an idea of the fine effect produced.57

Jones comments on this passage, ‘A few years later we were writing and composing Narcissus ... We remembered Handel’s treatment of “continually,” and thought we could not do better than imitate it for our words “paid quarterly.”’58 Although Jones only manages twentythree repetitions, the accrual of compounded interest is made manifest. What makes Narcissus an operetta rather than a farce, in addition to its originally conceived libretto, is the serious turn the music sometimes takes when Handel is approached more in reverence than in fun. A striking example is the setting of the first words sung by Narcissus after learning of the bequest: ‘Peace to her ashes. In my grateful mind / Henceforth her worth shall ever live enshrined.’ The text is directly modelled on that in Handel’s Hercules (libretto by Thomas Broughton) when Iole thinks of her father’s death: ‘Peaceful rest, dear parent shade, / Light the earth be on thee laid. / In thy daughter’s pious mind / All thy virtues live enshrin’d.’ In Narcissus, the word ‘worth’ is given a double spin, as in the air ‘I never knew her worth till now / A hundred thousand pound,’ but the setting by Jones follows the seriousness of Handel’s, using a long-spun melody with especially sustained notes on ‘peace’ against a quiet accompaniment of pulsating chords that seem to throb. In this movement, Jones’s setting sincerely honours his and Butler’s musical model. Butler and Jones do not and cannot rise to the heights of Handel, nor does their composition match the quality of the operettas of Offenbach or Sullivan, but their music is nevertheless remarkably competent. Further, their demonstrated understanding of Handel’s style (Butler’s in particular) was broad and deep, and it hurt Butler to think that some people thought they were ‘laughing at [Handel] in Narcissus.’ In one of his sonnets he writes with elegance over three quatrains of Handel in Parnassus, ‘There doth great Handel live, imperious still,’ cataloguing

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how his music ‘gave eyes to ears and showed in sound / All thoughts and things in earth or heaven above.’ Then in sudden contrast to his paean to the magnificence that is Handel, he introduces his fear of what Handel would say of Narcissus in the final punchline couplet: ‘He’ll meet both Jones and me and clap or hiss us / Vicariously for having writ Narcissus’ (NB, 428). Butler probably did not need to worry. Handel was known for his sturdy self-confidence and strong sense of humour. According to anecdote, he enjoyed the parody of his opera Giustino (1737) in The Dragon of Wantley (1737) by Frederick Lampe, which similarly uses the operatic style of recitative, aria, melisma, and extensive word repetition to humorous effect. Further, the choice of a text on the stock market might have been particularly amusing to a man whose life savings were safely invested in consolidated three-percent annuities at his death.59 Handel would not have failed to understand that one can laugh at a person and admire him at the same time, and if he had had the chance to hear Narcissus, he probably would have acknowledged the homage and enjoyed the humour – or, at the very least, acknowledged the humour and enjoyed the homage.

NOTES 1 Jones, Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon,’ 2:37 (hereafter cited as Memoir); letter to his sister May dated 27 May 1886, in The Correspondence of Samuel Butler with His Sister May, ed. Howard, 160. 2 As translated by Jones in Memoir, 2:84. 3 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Jones (1912; London: Jonathan Cape, 1926), 111 (hereafter cited in text as NB). 4 Samuel Butler, Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 1 (hereafter cited in text as AS). 5 Samuel Butler, ‘Handel’s Deborah and Bach’s Passion,’ a review in The Drawing Room Gazette 2 March 1872, reprinted in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement with Other Early Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 258 (hereafter cited as Early Essays). 6 Jones, Memoir, 1:408 (letter of 1884) and 2:418 (from Life and Habit, 1878). 7 Ibid., 2:381. 8 Butleriana, ed. Bartholomew, 101–2. 9 Jones, Memoir, 2:91. 10 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, ed. James Cochrane (1903; London: Pen-

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11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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guin Books, 1986), 36 (hereafter cited in text as WOAF); this and the following example are also given by Allis, ‘Samuel Butler and Handel,’ 230. Sullivan’s adaptation is discussed in Donald Burrows, ‘Some Aspects of the Influence of Handel’s Music on the English Musician Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900),’ Händel-Jahrbuch 44 (1998): 149–71. I am indebted to Burrows’s article in the paragraph following. Burrows, ‘Handel’s Music,’ 160. Ibid., 161. ‘Sullivan’s part-autograph score remained in regular use until recently’ (ibid., 158); the score was available through the Novello hire library. Jones and Bartholomew, The Samuel Butler Collection at St. John’s College, Cambridge, 44. Samuel Butler, ‘The Performance of Jephtha at Exeter Hall,’ a review in the Drawing Room Gazette, 25 November 1871, reprinted in Early Essays, 251–3. Butler’s comments anticipate modern Handel scholarship by more than a century. Donald Burrows, writing in 1998 of Sullivan’s addition to ‘Waft her, angels,’ recapitulates Butler’s exact sentiment: ‘At this point, however, we must begin to wonder what Sullivan was doing. If Handel had wanted a vocal theme to be anticipated in the orchestral introduction, he could have written the theme into his own texture’ (Burrows, ‘Handel’s Music,’ 161). Jones, Memoir, 2:65. Review of Jephtha, Early Essays, 251. Ibid., 252. Samuel Butler, ‘Performance of Israel in Egypt at Exeter Hall,’ a review in the Drawing Room Gazette, 2 December 1871, reprinted in Early Essays, 254–6. Samuel Butler, Erewhon, ed. Peter Mudford (1872; London: Penguin Books, 1985), 68–9. Jones, Memoir, 1:413. Butler and Jones, Narcissus: A dramatic cantata in vocal score, [iv]. For a detailed account of Handel’s investments and their contexts, see Ellen T. Harris, ‘Handel the Investor,’ Music & Letters 85 (2004): 521–75. Jones, Memoir, 1:413. Mr Seedo was a popular composer of ballad operas, but little is known of him. ‘Some confounded Planet reigning’ is based on Handel’s ‘Son confusa pastorella’ from Poro (1731), and ‘Smile, smile, my Chloe, smile’ is based on ‘Si, caro,’ which had recently been heard in a revival of Rinaldo (1731). Butler refers to Fielding in a list of eighteenth-century novelists and playwrights in The Way of All Flesh, 52: ‘The violent type of father, as described

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31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

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by Fielding, Richardson, Smollett and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to find a place in literature than the original advertisement of Messrs. Fairlie & Pontifex’s “Pious country Parishioner” ...’ The Lottery would have been accessible at the British Museum (BM) in Fielding’s complete works. For example, The Works of Henry Fielding Complete in One Volume, with a memoir of the author, by Thomas Roscoe (London: Henry Washbourne, 1840) was accessioned by the BM on 7 May 1841 (shelfmark 830.k.33), and this is only one of about a dozen editions of The Lottery that would have been available. The BM also owned at least three contemporary editions of The Lottery that included the music: the first edition of 1732 (J. Watts, 1732) was accessioned 4 April 1854 (shelfmark 11775.c.66); the second edition (also J. Watts, 1732) on 4 June 1857 (shelfmark 1485.pp.7); and a later edition (J. Watts, 1748) on 8 January 1850 (shelfmark 1346.f.18). The Lottery is also one of three ballad operas preserved in a set of vocal and instrumental manuscript part books (citation from Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century [London: Oxford University Press, 1973], 116). These were originally part of the Royal Music Library, which, in 1837, was moved from Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace, where they could have been accessible to Butler; they were moved to the BM in 1911 (shelfmark RM 21.c.43–5). In the following paragraph I am indebted to the research of Roberta Montemorra Marvin. I am particularly grateful to Professor Marvin for sharing her papers with me prior to publication: ‘Handel’s Acis and Galatea: A Victorian View’ (presented at the American Handel Society Meetings, University of Iowa, 2003) and ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued: A Glimpse into Mid-Victorian Theatrical Culture,’ Cambridge Opera Journal 15 (2003): 33–66, 209–11. Marvin, ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued,’ 49. Marvin, ‘Handel’s Acis and Galatea: A Victorian View.’ Andrew Lamb, ‘Offenbach, Jacques,’ The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com. David Russell Hulme, ‘Sullivan, Sir Arthur,’ The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com; Burrows, ‘Handel’s Music,’ 148. Burrows, ‘Some Aspects,’ 148. Eric Bloom, ‘Imitation Handel,’ in Stepchildren of Music (London: G.T. Foulis, 1925), 186–8. Robert Manson Myers, ‘Samuel Butler: Handelian,’ Musical Quarterly 34 (1948): 188. Allis, ‘Samuel Butler and Handel,’ 249n85. Allis appears not to know of Bloom’s earlier work, referring to Myers’s article as ‘the only detailed dis-

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

cussion’ of Butler’s significance for Handel studies. Further, there are two significant studies of Butler and Handel that do not focus on Narcissus: Breuer, ‘Samuel Butler and George Frideric Handel,’ and Yeasted, ‘The Handelian Quality of Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.’ Jones, Memoir, 1:413–14. Ibid., 424. Butleriana, 116. Jones, Memoir, 1:439. Ibid., 2:64. Ibid., 1:428. Ibid., 2:125. Ibid., 1:416. This parallel also cited by Allis, ‘Samuel Butler and Handel,’ 254. David Russell Hulme, ‘Sullivan, Sir Arthur,’ The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com. Allis, ‘Samuel Butler and Handel,’ 238–9, provides representative quotations from the period accusing Handel of ‘wholesale plagiarism.’ Ibid., 239–40, offers a synopsis. Victor Schoelcher, The Life of Handel (London: Robert Cocks, 1857), 299. Jones and Bartholomew, The Samuel Butler Collection, 40. Butler and Jones, Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues, and Other Short Pieces for the Piano, #4: Fugue in D Minor, 7; this borrowing is also mentioned by Allis, ‘Samuel Butler and Handel,’ 247. Lawes’s music for Comus was published in the eighteenth century, so it is possible that Butler had seen it. Butleriana, 115. Butler, Correspondence with His Sister May, 78. Jones, Memoir, 1:294–5. Harris, ‘Handel the Investor,’ 550–3.

12 Why Homer Was (Not) a Woman: The Reception of The Authoress of the Odyssey mary beard

Irrelevant and Nonsensical? In November 1968 Moses Finley, one of the most influential twentiethcentury historians of antiquity, reviewed a reprinted edition of Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey in the New York Review of Books.1 First published some seventy years earlier, in 1897, The Authoress was best known for its notorious claim that the Odyssey had not been written by a blind old man, also known as ‘Homer,’ but by a young Sicilian girl who had lived around 1050 BCE and who had depicted herself in the epic as the Princess Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous of Phaeacia, the island where Odysseus found himself washed up in Book VI. Finley was decidedly unimpressed. Reviewing the book together with Theodore White’s Caesar at the Rubicon, he identified a common fault, the besetting sin of all ‘amateur historians’ (as he loftily described both Butler and White). ‘Even the best amateur historian,’ he wrote, ‘sooner or later, decides that there is nothing new under the sun ... As for Samuel Butler, he didn’t bother with explanations, he simply took it for granted that not only was the author(ess) of the Odyssey a Victorian novelist, but that the values and emotions of the characters in the poem were identical with those of his time, as he judged them.’ As a devastating illustration of Butler’s method, Finley quoted a passage of the Authoress, which called into question the behaviour of Odysseus’s wife Penelope. In Butler’s eyes, Penelope dealt with that irritating crowd of suitors who were seeking her hand and her fortune, while Odysseus was on his long journey home, in a suspiciously unconvincing way; so unconvincing that it hinted at a young female narrator gamely but unsuccessfully trying to present the outrageous

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conduct of a fellow woman in a reasonable light. ‘Sending pretty little messages to her admirers,’ Butler wrote, ‘was not exactly the way to get rid of them. Did she ever try snubbing? Nothing of the kind is placed on record. Did she ever say, “Well Antinous, whoever else I may marry, you may make your mind easy that it will not be you.” Then there was boring – did she ever try that? Did she ever read them any of her grandfather’s letters? Did she sing them her own songs, or play them music of her own composition? I have always found these courses successful when I wanted to get rid of people.’2 In his introduction David Grene, editor of the reissue, defended such treatments of the Homeric narrative as a ‘kind of spoofing and debunking,’ as well as having ‘a suggestive bearing on the meaning of this remote poem.’3 But Finley would have none of it. ‘If one is interested in the Homeric world Butler’s remarks ... are neither spoofing nor debunking nor suggestive,’ he concludes. ‘They are irrelevant and nonsensical because Penelope didn’t have either the options or the procedures available to the ladies Samuel Butler knew. If “meaning” is to be taken as pertaining either to the poet or to Greeks in the ensuing centuries, then Butler’s book contributes nothing.’ Finley had a point. Very few readers have ever been convinced by Butler’s arguments for female authorship of the epic. Most have felt that his comparisons of female behaviour in his own day and the habits and expectations of women three thousand years earlier were seriously flawed; or, in the more stylish terms of modern feminism, that they were ‘entirely based on the common essentialist prejudices that Butler shared with his contemporaries.’4 All the same, Finley had fallen into the trap of doing to Butler almost exactly what he objected to Butler doing to Homer: namely, judging him as if he were a contemporary colleague. And his trenchant professionalism overlooked some of the most significant questions that the Authoress raised, and still raises. Why bother to reprint such a maverick work on the Odyssey seventy years after its first publication? Why had it seemed worth such a prominent review? Why has a book, whose principal theory is almost universally agreed to be wrong, proved such a resilient cultural presence over the last hundred years? This essay will reflect on these issues, exploring the reception of the Authoress from its prehistory in a series of lectures and articles by Butler through the 1890s up to its 1998 translation into Italian, complete with a perceptive and admiring introduction by the Italian classicist Dario Sabbatucci.5 I shall be touching on some aspects of the literary afterlife

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of the Authoress: her influence on James Joyce’s Ulysses; her reappearance in (and as) Robert Graves’s Homer’s Daughter. But I shall focus in particular on her impact among professional classicists and in the academy more generally. What accounts for her continued presence on the professional stage, from which Finley and others have so brusquely tried to dismiss her? Why does the chimaera of the Authoress not go away? These questions have obvious implications for our understanding of Butler’s own reputation. They also prompt more general reflections on academic influence, style, and longevity. What makes a book last? The fate of the Authoress challenges the common fallacy that a work’s longterm significance correlates directly with some objective notion of its ‘correctness.’ She reveals the welcome truth that, even in such an austere discipline as professional classics, there remains an important role for the maverick, the gad-fly; that some academic prizes are reserved not for those who build new well-defended and, above all, plausible theories, but for the intellectual iconoclasts whose notable achievement it is to leave disorder rather than order in their wake.6 The Authoress’s Story Butler was, in our terms, a classicist by training.7 Schooled in Latin and Greek at Shrewsbury by the famous B.H. Kennedy, he took the Classical Tripos at St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1858 with a firstclass degree – even if not a particularly distinguished first (he was, in the Cambridge jargon of the time, ‘bracketed twelfth’ on the list).8 It was from this background, after flirting unsuccessfully with the idea of a Cambridge fellowship, that he embarked on his career first as New Zealand sheep-farmer, then as satirist, man of letters, artist, and controversialist. According to Butler himself (simultaneously the best and the worst authority for his own life), he only turned back to the Odyssey in the 1890s (‘to which I had not given so much as a thought for some five and thirty years’) after writing ‘the libretto and much of the music for a secular oratorio, Ulysses, on which my friend, Mr. H. Festing-Jones and I had been for some time engaged.’ This reacquaintance with the text of Homer proved, he claims, to have been somewhat disconcerting: ‘Fascinated ... as I at once was by its amazing interest and beauty, I had an ever-present sense of a something wrong, of a something that was eluding me, and of a riddle which I could not read. The more I reflected upon the words, so luminous and transparent, the more I felt a dark-

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ness behind them, that I must pierce before I could see the heart of the writer’ (AO, 6). Whether or not we should take à la lettre this retrospective account of Butler’s re-engagement with Homer, his work on Ulysses in the late 1880s was directly followed in the 1890s by a number of lectures, pamphlets, and articles – in both English and Italian – exploring Homeric style and language, and trying out new theories on the authorship of the Odyssey and its geographical setting.9 The main conclusions of these were drawn together in 1897 in the Authoress itself, published by Longmans. This is a more complicated and varied book than it is often taken to be; as its subtitle indicates (Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands), more was at stake than the single theory of female authorship of the Odyssey. It is also much shorter than its two hundred and fifty-odd pages would suggest, for about a third of its bulk is taken up with an uncompromisingly vernacular paraphrase of the Odyssey, book by book. As with Butler’s full translation of the poem (published in 1900, with a preview of selected passages in 1894),10 this plain style had a point: ‘I take it that a tale so absolutely without any taint of affectation as the Odyssey will speed best being unaffectedly told.’ Even so, it proved too much for many critics. ‘Papa dear, could you manage to let me have a good big waggon? I want to take all our dirty clothes to the river and wash them. You are the chief man here, so it is only proper that you should have a clean shirt when you attend meetings of the council’ was not how most late-Victorians imagined that young Princess Nausicaa would have addressed her royal father.11 Several of Butler’s concerns in the Authoress plugged directly into topical nineteenth-century debates on Homer. His basic contention, for example, that the Iliad and the Odyssey were each written by individual – but different – poets was a challenge both to those who still saw ‘Homer’ as a unitary figure and to those who followed a prominent German school of scholarship that saw both poems as essentially unauthored, gradual accumulations and accretions of traditional oral epics that were fixed in their now canonical form as late as the sixth century BCE.12 His attempts to pinpoint the landscape described in the Homeric poems and to map the journey of Odysseus were also characteristic of contemporary Homeric and archaeological scholarship. In fact, several of the late nineteenth-century geographical reconstructions of the Odyssey offered solutions that were a good deal more far-fetched than But-

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ler’s conviction (based on a careful, if sometimes overoptimistic, firsthand examination of the topography) that the majority of Odysseus’s adventures could be located around Sicily and that the poem’s author(ess) hailed from the Sicilian town of Trapani, ancient Drepanum. More extravagant theories plotted the voyage around the African coast or to the North and South poles.13 Yet, for all the wide range of topics that the book covers and for all its numerous targets in nineteenth-century Homeric studies, its distinctive claim – that for which it was always best known and has always been best remembered – is that the Odyssey was written by a woman, ‘young, headstrong and unmarried.’ This argument for female authorship is based on no external evidence; it is inferred from clues offered by the poem itself, backed up by a series of those bare-faced, ‘essentialist’ assumptions about gender, the nature of women, their interests and capabilities, that Finley and others criticized. Only a female writer could have made such crashing errors as the Odyssey-poet does on key areas of male expertise. Who but a woman could have imagined that a ship had a rudder at both ends or have felt the need to explain its function (‘in order that he might be able to steer it’) as the authoress does at Book V, 255? Young women know that a horse goes before a cart, and being told that the rudder guides the ship, are apt – and I have more than once found them do so – to believe that it goes in front of the ship. Probably the writer of the Odyssey forgot for the moment at which end the rudder should be. She thought it all over yesterday, and was not going to think it all over again to-day, so she put the rudder at both ends, intending to remove it from the one that should prove to be the wrong one; later on she forgot, or did not think it worth while to trouble about so small a detail. (AO, 10)

Surely, only a woman would have imagined that ‘dry and well seasoned timber [could] be cut from a growing tree (v. 240)’ or ‘that a lamb could live on two pulls a day at a ewe that was already milked (ix. 244, 245, and 308, 309)’ or, for that matter, that wind could ever ‘whistle’ over the waves of the sea? (AO, 9) Alongside ‘a woman’s natural mistakes’ (as a subheading in the first chapter puts it), Butler highlights what he sees as the distinctively female perspective of the poem – its characteristic woman’s touch. Sometimes it is a question of tone: ‘Calypso’s jealousy of Penelope (v.

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203, &c) is too prettily done for a man. A man would be sure to overdo it’ (AO, 145). On other occasions, it is more a matter of a woman’s priorities: The instinctive house-wifely thrift of the writer is nowhere more marked than near the beginning of Book xxii., where amid the death-throes of Antinous and Eurymachus she cannot forget the good meat and wine that were being spoiled by the upsetting of the tables at which the suitors had been sitting. (AO, 154)

Butler even detects clear signs of the age and marital status of his authoress. Surely the idea of Helen giving Telemachus a wedding dress (Book XV, 125–9) ‘was more likely to occur to a young woman than to a man.’ So too, ‘the comparison of Ulysses, struggling with Scylla and Charybdis, to a hungry magistrate (xii. 439, 440).’ This, for Butler, was not only ‘obviously humorous,’ but ‘neither a man’s nor a matron’s simile for such a thrilling situation. To me it suggests the hand of a magistrate’s daughter who had often seen her father come home tired and cross at having been detained in court’ (AO, 149–50). Perhaps the crucial diagnostic was the treatment of Penelope and the clues peeping through the narrative – despite all the attempts to conceal the fact – that Odysseus was none too keen to get home to the wife. Seven years with Calypso and he hadn’t even tried to make off with her tools (‘for she can hardly have wanted either axe or auger very often’) and fix up a raft early on, long before ‘the exigencies of the poem made it necessary to send him back to Ithaca’ (AO, 142). As Butler summed it up: An older woman might have been at less pains to conceal the fact that Penelope’s hold on Ulysses was in reality very slight, but the writer of the Odyssey is nothing if she is not young, self-willed, and unmarried. No matron would set herself down to write the Odyssey at all. She would have too much sense and too little daring. She would have gained too much – and lost too greatly in the gaining. The poem is such a tour de force as none but a high-spirited, headstrong girl who had been accustomed to have her own way would have attempted, much less carried to such a brilliantly successful conclusion. (AO, 143)

The final link came with the identification of this headstrong young woman with the character of Nausicaa in the poem itself: the poetess

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had incorporated her own self-portrait as the young daughter of King Alcinous of Phaeacia (which Butler had already concluded was ‘really’ in Sicily). To cap it all, he found in the museum at Cortona, in central Italy, an encaustic portrait (once thought to be Greek, now recognized as Renaissance) of the Muse Polymnia. Arguing that she was, in fact, his very own Nausicaa, he reproduced the image as the frontispiece of the book. ‘Let the reader,’ he wrote, ‘look at my frontispiece and say whether he would find the smallest difficulty in crediting the original of the portrait with being able to write the Odyssey?’ (AO, 207). Whether Butler was entirely serious in these claims – to what extent this was all deeply ironic, an extended joke on the scholarly community – has exercised readers from the very beginning; and, as I shall be suggesting, tricky issues of exactly how the book is to be read and what is at stake in judging it to be a parody have been important elements in the Authoress’s seductive power over the last hundred years. This is not to say, however, that we can now hope to decide exactly what Butler thought he was doing in theorizing an authoress of the Odyssey, and arguing for her in the way he did. It is not even the case that we are necessarily dealing with a book that was intended to be either an ironic joke or a deadly earnest piece of scholarship; it may fit more comfortably (as Whitmarsh has suggested) into that ‘uncertain territory between the serious and the parodic.’14 Two things only can be firmly established concerning Butler’s intentions, and they pull in different directions. First, so far as we know, Butler himself never suggested that the Authoress was anything other than completely serious; if it was an ironic game, then Butler never gave up playing it and never gave himself the (‘ever-been-had?’) satisfaction of pointing up the naivety of those who had failed to spot the joke.15 Second, by the 1890s Butler’s considerable literary reputation was principally established in the fields of satire and parody. Of course, a satirist may always write ‘seriously’ (quirky though it may have been, for example, Butler’s Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino [1881] cannot easily be taken as a spoof). But the price of successful satire – as the successful satirist must know – is that everything you subsequently write, however ‘straight,’ risks being read satirically. Or, as the reviewer of the Authoress in the Melbourne Argus put it in January 1898: ‘The inconvenience of being known as a paradoxist is that the public will never take you seriously.’16 The case for or against Butler, as provocative parodist or dogged spokesman for his own pet Homeric theory, must remain open.

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Image Not Available

12.1 Portrait of the Muse Polymnia (Nausicaa) from the frontispiece of The Authoress of the Odyssey.

The publishing history of the Authoress does not stop in 1897. It is far from clear what to make of Butler’s own record of its sales figures as 165, in a table drawn up in his Note-Books in 1899, less than two years after the book’s publication.17 He himself certainly painted it as a deep disappointment, and his table of calculations of profit and (mostly) loss from the full range of his literary endeavours was accompanied by some grumbles about his ‘declining public’ and the ‘practical boycott to which I have been subjected for so many years.’ Nevertheless, others were soon to see commercial possibilities here. In 1908, within only a few years of Butler’s death, the Authoress was thought worth a reissue (under new publishers, A.C. Fifield); a second edition was published

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by Jonathan Cape in 1922; and it was an American reprint of that, in 1967, which Finley reviewed. In Europe, the Authoress did not generally have the widespread success in translation enjoyed by Butler’s novels – apart from (and predictably enough perhaps) in Italy, and Italian. A translation, and simultaneously a work of homage to the man who had made the town one of the points of origin of Western culture, was published in Trapani itself in 1968. Thirty years later a new translation and critical edition appeared from Rome.18 Even if this is partly due to the success of Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, and to the posthumous cult of Butler more generally, it is not a bad record for an ‘irrelevant and nonsensical’ book. ‘An attitude of Hush?’19 The false premise on which all accounts of the reception of the Authoress have been based is that Butler’s book was ignored by critics (especially by those in the academic establishment) and that no professional classicist has ever thought (still less, thinks) his work on the Odyssey worth any serious consideration. Even the most acute modern readers of Butler’s theories follow this general line. According to Elinor Shaffer, for example, the book’s ‘revolutionary implications and sheer impudence led the Establishment to receive it in dignified silence, broken only by the occasional parenthetical sneer.’20 Whitmarsh, despite looking carefully at the tone of the published reviews, refers to the ‘ear-splitting silence from classicists’ and exclaims in passing: ‘Not that you can ever find a good word to be said among classicists about his Odyssey theories ...’21 Dougher alleges that ‘the only classical journal that took notice of Butler’s book is Classical Weekly, where the British scholar F.M. Cornford calls it a satire on the female sex.’22 In fact, it is simply not the case that the Authoress was ignored – at least, not in the extreme fashion that is usually suggested. It is, of course, impossible to calibrate what a ‘reasonable’ degree of critical attention amounts to (a book’s detractors and admirers, even more its author, inevitably have different views on this). Nonetheless, what now seems remarkable about the reception of the Authoress is not the ‘Hush’ that has surrounded it, but the notice it has attracted – even within (or on the boundaries of) professional classics. The wider cultural impact of Butler’s Authoress has long been recognized. It was Butler’s translation that lay behind Joyce’s creative rereading of the epic in his own Ulysses; and there are strong arguments for seeing the direct influence of the Authoress – especially in his ‘cut-

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ting down to size’ of Odysseus’s epic voyage (which then, for Joyce, became a voyage around Dublin), in the figure of Molly (‘a Penelope still sighing after her suitors’), and in the self-consciously feminizing rhetoric of the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter.23 George Bernard Shaw and Robert Graves were among those who professed themselves convinced by the idea of female authorship, and Graves took up the baton in his novel Homer’s Daughter, a fictionalizing version of the Odyssey in the voice of a Butlerian Nausicaa (here herself pursued by 112 hungry suitors). The web of cultural influence is, however, still more extensive. John Fowles, for example, is – in his own words – ‘one of those heretics who believe the Odyssey must have been written by a woman’; likewise, it seems (if rather more predictably), was H.D.24 Beyond fiction, the critic Harold Bloom referred to himself as ‘joining Samuel Butler’ in writing The Book of J, an interpretative biblical commentary, with a strongly Butlerian flavour; it argued that the primary text (‘J’) underlying Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers was in fact composed by a woman, a young princess at the court of Solomon’s son.25 No less striking is the shadowy presence of the Authoress behind a series of friezes by the Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart, depicting, among other Homeric themes, Nausicaa and her attendants; they were commissioned for the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace and were installed there in 2002.26 No one contests this strong cultural resonance of Butler’s Authoress, whatever the reasons for it (its radical meditation on the nature of authorship, and with it the whole of literary creativity? its daring reappropriation of one of the founding classics of Western culture? its challenge to ‘scholarship’ on the part of ‘literature’?). But what the vast majority of critics have chosen to ignore, or to explain away, are the no less clear traces of Butler’s impact within classics and the wider academy. The first edition of the Authoress, including some of its preview pamphlets, received almost sixty reviews in Britain and overseas.27 But not the right reviews, it is suggested; not the serious and specialist reviews that Butler would have wanted. Whitmarsh, for example, observes that the majority were in ‘newspapers ... or middlebrow journals ... As for academic journals, two reviews appeared in now-defunct German periodicals.’ In Britain it was only the Classical Review that noticed Butler’s work (his early pamphlets, not the Authoress itself) with ‘three entirely dismissive reviews.’28 All this is strictly correct, but it also misrepresents the position in several crucial respects. It was precisely those ‘middlebrow’ journals that provided one of the main arenas for intellectual debate in late Victorian England. Their usually anonymous reviews were often written by the

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more literary types among the ‘career scholars’;29 and it was through their pages that academic arguments were thrashed out in front of a mixed professional, scholarly, establishment, cultured, and sometimes, no doubt, dilettante or waggish readership. It was, after all, in one of them, the Athenaeum, that Butler had chosen to publish two early versions of his theories. Besides, by late nineteenth-century standards, the professional classical periodicals took as much notice of the Authoress as might reasonably have been expected. Despite its subsequent demise, the Wochenschrift für klassische Philologie was a major ‘establishment’ vehicle for classical reviews in Germany. And, in Britain, where else apart from the Classical Review would a professional classical review on a Homeric topic have appeared? The two other major academic periodicals dealing with ancient Greece – the Journal of Philology and the Journal of Hellenic Studies – did not at that period regularly carry reviews. It is also worth noting other clues that Butler’s theories were on the classical agenda in the last decade of the nineteenth century. His notorious lecture ‘The Humour of Homer’ may have been delivered at The Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street in 1892, but the audience certainly did not consist solely of the working class, nor solely of men. Jane Harrison, we know, was there: she was no more a part of the classical ‘establishment’ than Butler, perhaps, but closely connected with those who were and a few years later to be back in Cambridge teaching classical archaeology.30 Meanwhile, in 1898, soon after the first publication of the Authoress, the Granta – that wonderful barometer of the Cambridge undergraduate world, its preoccupations, passions, and squabbles – carried one of its trademark satiric poems, entitled ‘The Epic of Ladies.’ If not the title, then the first few stanzas made the reference clear: An axiom, so safe and sure That everyone may know it, is The simple fact, no more obscure, That Homer was a poetess The marks of female style we meet In every single line of his Apparent in those dainty feet And harmonies divine of his

There could hardly be a surer hint that Butler’s theories were in the university air – in Cambridge, if nowhere else, at the time.31 This is not to say, of course, that the theory of female authorship of

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the Odyssey was greeted with general assent by its first critics. It was certainly not – either in newspapers, magazines, or in professional periodicals.32 Some, such as the stern-faced Homerists Arthur Platt (of University College, London) and George Winter Warr (of King’s College, London), who reviewed Butler’s Homeric pamphlets in the Classical Review, had no truck with any of it; and Platt, in particular, as Whitmarsh correctly points out, effectively challenged Butler’s right to meddle ‘irresponsibly’ in such technical scholarly issues. But even these self-consciously scholarly scholars, among all the huffing and puffing, seem to have had some fun with the Authoress: Warr enjoys some predictable jokes at Butler’s expense (he has Butler outdoing Homer by ‘falling asleep’ rather than just ‘nodding’) and at one point reflects on the idea of applying Butler’s principles to the author of Hamlet and coming up with the idea of Ophelia as the author;33 and even Platt cannot resist the wry suggestion that London or New York would be equally good candidates for the Odyssey-poet’s home town on the arguments provided by Butler.34 For most of the other reviewers (by and large no more convinced than Platt or Warr of the correctness of the theory), humour and irony were a much more prominent part of the response. Occasionally this took the form of an extended parody, as in the long dead-pan review in the Daily Telegraph by W.L. Courtney (Oxford man, writer of operas, editor of John Stuart Mill and of the Daily Telegraph itself from 1899). ‘Let us ... pay our debt of gratitude to Mr Samuel Butler ... for having presented us with a new and hitherto unknown authoress of epic verse,’ he opened, before proceeding (over almost thirty column inches) to ‘welcome the doctrine, with a few unimportant reservations,’ while wondering why it was ‘that some feminine representative of the modern spirit did not think of it before Mr Butler.’ If the reader did not pick up the sarcastic tone through most of this, then it must have become clear in the end when (like Warr and many others who attempted to undermine the theory by offering entirely implausible analogies)35 he suggested that the whole hypothesis ‘might be carried a great deal further. I am quite prepared to admit, on the same terms, that Beatrice wrote Dante’s “Vita Nuova” ... and that no less a person than Queen Elizabeth herself was the real authoress of the “Faerie Queen” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”’36 Yet more often the reviewers were less certain in their judgments, much more puzzled about exactly what kind of book it was. How serious was Butler? If it was a joke, who was the joke on? Was he laughing

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at Homer or at the traditions of Homeric scholarship? And if one reviewed the Authoress as a straight work of Homeric criticism, had one become part of the joke oneself? (This, after all, as the reviewer in the Outlook pointed out, is exactly what had happened with Butler’s The Fair Haven, which had ‘entrapped several well-meaning reviewers into serious criticism of its propositions.’37) At the lecture at The Working Men’s College, Jane Harrison herself had at first been appalled by the offensive levity of the performance, though in due course came to conclude that it was ‘a forced joke’ – or so she told Butler when they later met in Athens.38 Other commentators hedged their bets or vacillated even more extremely. The critic in the Saturday Review for 4 December 1897, for example, ended his piece on a note of puzzlement: ‘We close this absurd, ingenious, candid and stimulating volume with a different feeling from that in which we took it up. We began it, believing it to be a mystification, a huge, preposterous joke; we lay it down with the conviction that Mr Butler is in earnest.’39 Others had no doubt that it was serious (‘He is quite serious in his adherence to the theory which he has started’);40 others were equally convinced that it was a flagrant parody (‘one of the most brilliant whimsicalities of a fin de siècle age’).41 And if it was all a joke? For some critics, that – combined with the sheer implausibility of the main thesis – was enough to damn the book (‘a freak, and a freak not in the best of taste’).42 But a number of commentators found considerable virtues in it, joke or not, even if the particular idea of female authorship seemed unconvincing. There were many things about ‘Homer’ to be learnt here: ‘The author does good service in showing that the writer of the Odyssey was saturated equally with the most doubted and undoubted books of the Iliad ... Indeed the book is full of clever things,’ praised the reviewer in the Athenaeum;43 even the usually crusty T.E. Page (an unbearably reactionary defender of old-fashioned classics in the face of the syllabus reforms of the late nineteenth century, and one-time editor of the Loeb Classical Library) thought the Authoress dealt a decisive blow to the excesses of German Homeric scholarship and concluded that ‘in spite of its paradoxes, it is full of wit and really suggestive criticism.’44 Similar strong divergences of view (albeit with a rather different emphasis) greeted the second edition of the Authoress in 1922, published together with a new edition of Butler’s translation of the Odyssey (and, coincidentally, in the same year as the first English edition of Joyce’s Ulysses). These divergences prompted a notable literary scrap between two leading writers of the time: Arthur Quiller-Couch (profes-

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sor of English at Cambridge, novelist, anthologist, and essayist) and John Middleton Murry (literary journalist, critic, pacifist, and husband of Katherine Mansfield). ‘Q’ reviewed the new editions for the Observer; he had a soft spot for the idea that the poem had a connection with Trapani, but claimed that Butler’s theories had been completely ignored by scholars – and for good reason. In terms reminiscent of Arthur Platt (who berated Butler for his ‘irresponsible’ attacks on Homeric scholarship), ‘Q’ put the neglect down to Butler’s own ‘touchiness and offensiveness’ and suggested that he ‘would have earned respectful treatment in his lifetime if [he] had ever learned to behave himself in talking with men as good as he.’ In reply, writing in the Nation and Athenaeum, Middleton Murry exposes ‘Q’’s proprietorial assumptions, his avid attempts to police the boundaries of academic scholarship. ‘First I wondered,’ he wrote, ‘how many men as good as Butler there were in 1892 ... Very few, I am sure, if they have to be found among the professors and scholars of the time, and not among the independent men of letters. Then I wondered whether, supposing Butler had behaved himself, anyone would have accorded respectful treatment to his main theory ... Even “Q” does not go so far as to promise that.’ But Middleton Murry was not only standing up for Butler’s right to speak against the professional academy, he was promoting Butler’s particular form of literary criticism of the Odyssey: ‘Butler has taken us closer to “The Odyssey” as a literary creation than any of the digamma conjurers who brushed him aside as an impertinence.’ For Middleton Murry, what distinguished the Authoress (whether you liked the idea of female authorship or not) was ‘a definite theory of literary creation’ and of how the creative imagination works; if it ‘is to be challenged, it must be challenged seriously, not pooh-poohed by the conservatism of scholastics and anti-feminists.’ Far from being an amateur, a gentleman scholar left behind by the increasing professionalization of classics as a discipline, Butler here stands for a radical challenge to the dominance of the academy over this canonical text.45 Many of these debates around the Authoress in newspapers and the so-called middlebrow magazines involved classicists within, or on the margins of, the academy (T.E. Page and Jane Harrison, for example). But there is still the question of the reception of Butler in classical scholarship itself and in the tradition of Homeric studies down to our own day. Is it the case that you can never ‘find a good word to be said among classicists about his Odyssey theories?’ In the sense that professional classical scholarship has almost universally rejected the idea of female

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authorship, this is the case. Almost the only major supporter of the idea in the English-speaking world has been Benjamin Farrington, radical and maverick socialist and historian of science; his book, published in 1929, Samuel Butler and the Odyssey, does little more than restate Butler’s arguments with approval. It seems a fair guess that Farrington found in Butler a model of his own single-handed battles with the classical establishment, his own – partly self-imposed – marginality.46 On the other hand, the striking fact is that Butler’s work on the Odyssey, even if seen as false or flawed, still keeps its place in the Homeric bibliography a hundred years after its first appearance. Sometimes, it is true, the Authoress offers a conveniently bonkers theory with which to enliven an introductory textbook or to teach a simple pedagogical lesson. ‘Samuel Butler once came up with the contentious (but engaging) theory that the poem was actually composed by a woman, but this idea rests on the dubious basis that only people of a particular gender or race can write meaningfully about their own set of experiences,’ as one recent beginners’ handbook reads.47 But often the references are considerably more positive, even if rather wistfully so – and never quite in agreement. Whitmarsh, in denying its classical influence, refers only to the opening of a famous essay by Jack Winkler that features a lengthy discussion of the Authoress; though strongly critical of many of Butler’s Victorian assumptions on gender, Winkler uses his work as a launch pad for a new study of the role of Penelope in Homer.48 A quick trawl through recent Homeric scholarship and other classical writing produces much more. Like Winkler, several scholars concerned with issues of gender in the Odyssey look back directly to Butler. Lilian Doherty, for example, notes that ‘Samuel Butler was the first, to my knowledge, to remark on the fact that Arete’s satisfaction with Alcinous, and not Alcinous’ with Arete is emphasized by Odysseus at 13, 59–62’;49 while for Eva Cantarella, in Pandora’s Daughters, he stands as a rather over-enthusiastic ancestor for those now taking the women of the Odyssey seriously (‘One need not go quite that far to notice the periodic reappearance in literature of the notion of an Odyssey dominated by female figures in high relief, who might be taken as indicative of the consideration in which the Homeric woman was held’).50 Even Oliver Taplin writes half-regretfully about not being able to support Butler’s theory: ‘I find Samuel Butler’s case for an authoress of the Odyssey unconvincing – unfortunately,’ before going on to float, ironically I imagine, his own Butlerian suggestion (‘If either Homeric poem were

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by a woman it would be the Iliad, with its keen awareness of the victims of war’).51 A host of other writers refer more casually to the Authoress or its trademark theory: from Jasper Griffin and Richard Rutherford to Jack Winkler again, pointedly genuflecting (‘Samuel Butler notwithstanding’) before asserting the universally acknowledged truth that Homeric bards were male.52 Most noteworthy of all perhaps is positive recommendation for Butler in the Teachers’ Handbook that accompanies the leading Greek language textbook for schools and universities in Britain: ‘Butler’s book still makes fresh and amusing reading in spite of Butler’s pet theories.’53 None of these contemporary critics is asking us to embrace the theory of female authorship of the Odyssey, but they do keep Butler hovering over our own interpretations of Homer; the Authoress still claims a powerful posthumous presence in classical scholarship and pedagogy more than a hundred years after she was first devised. So why, then, do all the attentive readers of Butler, friends and enemies alike (from ‘Q’ and Middleton Murry, through Farrington to Shaffer and Whitmarsh), confidently assert that the Authoress was ignored by classicists when it first appeared and has been resolutely off the mainstream classical agenda ever since? All kinds of reasons are possible, including the predictable error of confusing the lack of scholarly agreement with the theory with a lack of scholarly impact. But the simplest answer, I would suggest, is that they have fallen victim to the trap which Butler himself set. Very few books boast in their preface that their arguments will be (indeed, already have been) passed over in silence by their intended audience. Yet that is exactly what Butler does in the Authoress: No reply appeared to either of my letters to the Athenaeum nor to my Italian pamphlets. It is idle to suppose that the leading Iliadic and Odyssean scholars in England and the continent do not know what I have said. I have taken ample care that they should be informed concerning it. It is equally idle to suppose that not one of them should have brought forward a serious argument against me, if there were any such argument to bring. Had they brought one it must have reached me and I should have welcomed it with great pleasure ... all I care about is the knowing as much as I can about the poem; and I believe that scholars both in England and on the continent would have helped me to fuller understanding if they had seen their way to doing so. (AO, xvii–xviii)

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He takes up the refrain again, in the concluding pages: And now as I take leave of the reader, I would say that if when I began this work I was oppressed with a sense of the hopelessness of getting Homeric scholars to take it seriously and consider it, I am even more oppressed and dismayed when I turn over its pages and see how certain they are to displease many whom I would far rather conciliate than offend ... I do care and very greatly about knowing which way [these points] are decided by sensible people who have considered what I have urged in this book. (270)

This is all wonderfully manipulative rhetoric, setting the agenda for the book’s immediate reception. Butler contrives simultaneously to present silence as assent, to claim the highest of motives in the fostering of a frank exchange of views, and to wield a powerful weapon against those who would not give his book the attention it deserves: for to ignore it would be to prove Butler and his curmudgeonly predictions right. Most modern readers, too, have been the dupe of Butler here, taking his claims of being ignored quite literally, when they have every reason not to. The irony of this is especially clear when we come to compare the fate of Butler’s Authoress with that of his bête noire, Richard Jebb’s Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. This was an extremely popular student handbook and examination crib in the late nineteenth century, first published in 1887 and reaching a seventh edition in 1905; the fourth edition appeared just six weeks after one of Butler’s ‘letters’ on Homeric subjects to the Athenaeum.54 Jebb is Butler’s particular target in the preface: not only had he ignored the Athenaeum letter in his 1892 edition, but as Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge from 1889 to 1905 Jebb was a powerful symbol of the establishment academic world against which Butler set himself. It was a theme harped on, too, by Middleton Murry in 1922. While admitting that Butler had been ‘silly’ to expect Jebb to have incorporated a response to his theories only six weeks before publication, Middleton Murry nevertheless casts Jebb as the vain academic, dependent on the trappings of his Regius Chair and unwilling to let any outsider into his territory: ‘But we can guess too well what Jebb felt as he wrapped the robes of his Regius Professorship round him: “‘The Odyssey’ written by a woman! Nonsense! The man’s a lunatic!”’55 What Jebb really thought we shall never know. But the sting in the tail of the story would have gratified Middleton Murry. For, notwith-

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standing its initial success, eighty years later Jebb’s book, though not entirely forgotten, is much more rarely cited than Butler’s in contemporary writing on Homer – whether in agreement or strident disagreement. Butler’s predictions that his book would be ignored, while the likes of Jebb held the Homeric field, turn out in the long term to have been wildly wrong. It is Butler who is still on our reading lists, not Jebb.56 Why the Authoress Won’t Go Away What accounts for Butler’s continuing presence on the classical map? Obviously, there is (and has been) no single answer; a number of factors combine and compete to give the Authoress the longevity she has enjoyed. The seductive puzzle of a book that occupies that strange noman’s-land between the parodic and the serious (and the questions that continues to raise about the nature and style of ‘academic’ writing) must have some part to play. So, too, the cultural and literary influence of the book has surely contributed to its more strictly classical survival; so long as we continue to reflect on the roots of Joyce’s Ulysses, we shall be drawn back to wonder about Butler’s as well. Its cultural progeny, in other words, as well as Butler’s own literary reputation as a novelist and satirist, help to keep the book visible, to make it worth thinking about. There is also a sense in which the sheer daring of its trademark claim has given it a powerful pedagogical role in the class- and lecture-room. Thousands of teachers over the last hundred years must have used the Authoress to surprise their pupils, to engage their interest in a remote and sometimes difficult text, to jolt them out of taking the Odyssey (and their own assumptions about gender and ancient creativity) for granted. ‘Did you know there is a theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman?’ This certainly happened to me ca 1970, and that simple idea instantly opened up new vistas about what it might be possible to think about the classical world; it hinted at a vision of ancient Greece quite different from that of the grammar-grind, our usual textbooks, and the insistently male cast of characters that came with them. In this light, it is probably significant that the Authoress gets such a warm recommendation in the school-teachers’ handbook referred to above (page 332). Add to this the fact that the theory is universally agreed to be wrong. Many classicists, I suspect, would argue that a good part of the modern role of the Authoress was in marking out the territory within

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which we are to debate Homer and the Odyssey and in defining the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable criticism. Butler, in other words, is still repeatedly cited because he so conveniently symbolizes what we all now agree we do not think. Yet it is not the fate of most wrong books to play that role; they are more often simply ignored – certainly a hundred years after their first publication. I want, therefore, to end this essay by outlining two other factors that contribute to the lasting power of the Authoress, factors that have made her hard to ignore, and usefully (rather than uselessly) wrong. First, Butler’s debates about ‘Homer’ in the Authoress are still, albeit framed in different terms, our own. Even if the unitary Homer, as the author of both Iliad and Odyssey, has long since died a death, we are still exploring the implications of seeing a single framing poet behind each of these poems – or of thinking in terms of traditional oral composition over many centuries, standardized in the form we now have relatively late. We are still unsure how, or on what criteria, we could decide between those positions, or any of the many that lie in between. And underlying these issues are questions raised by Butler, and shared by us, of how we should best read and write about these distant epics. Both the Authoress and his gloriously (or offensively) vernacular prose translation of the Odyssey parade the limits of a modern engagement with these ancient texts and the society they may (or may not) represent. From his own historical perspective, Finley (himself the author of a famous historical study of The World of Homer) was absolutely correct to reject Butler’s arguments on women in the Odyssey as culpably anachronistic. But, at another level, it is precisely the terms on which we should engage with – or make sense of – Homeric characters that remain crucially under debate. Impossibly foreign? Or part of a common and comprehensible humanity? Or somewhere (but where?) in between? Butler’s critique of the motivations and behaviour of Homeric heroes and heroines through the mores and assumptions of late Victorian Britain (‘Did she sing them her own songs, or play them music of her own composition? I have always found these courses successful when I wanted to get rid of people.’) makes us face those issues head on. One of Butler’s greatest rhetorical coups, in fact, is to lure his hostile critics into engaging with the Odyssey on his chosen terms. We see this clearly in the early critiques of the Authoress, which – for all their huffing and puffing, for all their claims to detect a spoof or parody – are repeatedly drawn to argue according to the ground rules laid down by Butler

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himself. The reviewer in the Athenaeum, for example, in rejecting Butler’s identification of Nausicaa as the self-portrait of the poet, falls back on proposing as an alternative candidate one of the male bards featured in the poem, Phemius or Demodocus; and in responding to Butler’s claim that Penelope could not possibly have slept soundly through the killing of the suitors adduces ‘a friend ... [who] slept soundly through the worst thunderstorm known to a high scientific authority in the last sixty years.’57 In the end, few of Butler’s detractors remain unaffected (or uninfected) by Butler’s way of seeing the Odyssey. Second, Butler has been the (unwitting) beneficiary of changing directions within classical scholarship over the last century: the growth of gender studies and the increasing importance of feminist, or at least gender-sensitive, readings of ancient texts. He was not, of course, the first to think of the Iliad and the Odyssey in gendered terms. Richard Bentley had already famously observed, in the early eighteenth century, that Homer made ‘the Ilias ... for men, and the Odysseïs for the other sex.’58 Butler’s claim of female authorship, however, was to take such observations of the feminine tone of the Odyssey to their furthest extreme. This was noted in the first reviews in a predictably waggish fashion. ‘Mr Butler will have the ladies with him,’ quipped the New York Sun’s reviewer, echoing the suspicion of Notes and Queries that the whole theory would go down well at Girton.59 The New York Dispatch opened its critique with the idea that the ‘New Woman’ might turn out to be ‘merely a revival of a very old institution.’60 Middleton Murry’s review in 1922 offers a striking change of tone from these boyish jokes; for he, for the first time so far as I know, identifies the opposition to Butler’s theories as explicitly ‘anti-feminist.’61 Through the rest of the twentieth century, the Authoress comes to be seen in increasingly feminist terms. Whatever Samuel Butler’s own views on women and gender were, there is no reason whatsoever to imagine that his theory of female authorship was driven by anything remotely like the concerns of modern gender studies. That said, feminism within classics, in constructing its own disciplinary genealogy, has increasingly conscripted Butler – as several of the references (quoted above) to the Authoress in recent classical scholarship clearly show. In starting his analysis of Penelope’s and other female roles in the Odyssey with an account of the Authoress, Winkler was not simply offering an ironic (maybe double-edged) tribute to its author, he was attempting to place his own work, different as it was, in a historical context and genealogy. Here, as elsewhere, Butler’s theories (much like those of Jane Harrison, whose claims to be a ‘feminist’

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are also notoriously weak) are re-focused and re-presented in classical feminism’s search for a past. Of course, we would now strongly disavow his ‘essentialist’ model of gender; and indeed, Butler’s arguments are now more likely to be found useful in teaching as an object lesson in how not to project anachronistic assumptions of female and male behaviour back into the classical past. But, for all that, Butler can count, and be paraded, as an ancestor, thanks to his commitment to a version of female creativity in the otherwise masculist world of antiquity itself – and of classical scholarship even now.

NOTES

1

2

3 4 5

6

This paper would have been impossible to write without the archival (and other) assistance of Ashley Clements. I am also grateful for help, suggestions, and comments to Jim Paradis, Jim Porter, Chris Stray, and Froma Zeitlin, and to the staff of Special Collections in St John’s College Library, Cambridge. M.I. Finley, ‘Et Tu, Teddy White,’ New York Review of Books, 21 November 1968, 34–5. White was best known as a political analyst and Pulitzer prizewinning journalist, spokesman for the Kennedy presidency, creator of the myth of (Kennedy’s) Camelot, and author of a series of best-selling books (The Making of the President) on U.S. presidential elections. Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey, where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands (London: Longmans, Green, 1897), 130 (hereafter cited in text as AO); later editions (see bibliography) retain the original pagination. Another edition has appeared (ed. Tim Whitmarsh [Bristol: Phoenix Press, 2003]) since this article was completed. David Grene, Introduction, in Authoress (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), vi. Dougher, ‘An Epic for the Ladies,’ 174. L’autrice dell’Odissea, trans. Donata Aphel (Rome: edizioni dell’Altana, 1998). This has been followed by another analysis of Butler’s claims in the Sicilian context: Renato Lo Schiavo, La teoria dell’origine siciliana dell’Odissea: il cieco, la giovinetta ed il malconsiglio (Palermo: Istituto siciliano di studi politici ed economici [ISSPE], 2003). See further (in relation to the intellectual wreckage left by Jane Harrison), Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 124.

338 Mary Beard 7 I emphasize in our terms. As Tim Whitmarsh argues in ‘What Samuel Butler Saw,’ Butler’s life spans the very period of the development of a professional model of classics in England. Yet he would not have thought of himself as ‘a classicist.’ 8 That is, he was joint twelfth in the class in rank order. 9 ‘The Humour of Homer’ was first delivered as a lecture at the Working Men’s College, Great Ormond Street, London, on 30 January 1892, and later published as a pamphlet (Cambridge: Metcalfe, 1892); the lecture ‘Was the Odyssey Written by a Woman?’ was first given at the Somerville Club on 7 March 1893; among published articles and pamphlets, note L’origine siciliana dell’Odissea (Acireale: Donzuso, 1893; repr. from Rassegna della letteratura siciliana, vol. 1); Ancora sull’origine siciliana dell’Odissea (Acireale: Donzuso, 1894; repr. from Rassegna della letteratura siciliana, vol. 2); and Butler, On the Trapanese Origin of the Odyssey. 10 Samuel Butler, Sample Passages from a New Prose Translation of ‘The Odyssey’ (Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable, 1894); The Odyssey, rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original (London: Longmans, Green, 1900). 11 For Butler’s discussion of styles of translation (including his famous comparison between the ‘Wardour Street English’ of Butcher and Lang’s version and the ‘Tottenham Court Road’ style of his own), see Authoress, 7; for Nausicaa’s address to her father, Authoress, 31. For contemporary criticism (‘the humour comes, perhaps, too much to the surface’), see T.E. Page, in Bookman (December 1897): 101. Titles for this and other reviews cited below are included only if more descriptive than the formulaic “Reviews” or author/book title commonly used. 12 Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 153–86, offers the clearest account of these Homeric debates. 13 Butler’s geographic speculations and their historiographic context are well discussed by Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 187–99; see also H.-H. and A. Wolf, Der Weg des Odysseus: Tunis-Malta-Italien in den Augen Homers (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1968), 115–50. 14 Whitmarsh, ‘What Samuel Butler Saw,’ 77. 15 The closest we come to a hint that Butler might have been ‘tongue in cheek’ (and it is not very close) comes in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (21 December 1935, 879), recalling a conversation with Butler shortly before his death. The author (Robert Steele, one of the TLS’s most active correspondents) explains that he pointed out to Butler an ancient precedent for his view of female authorship: ‘I well remember his satisfaction with this

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24

25

26 27

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proof that he was not the only enemy of established reputations, and his surprise that the story had not been dug up earlier. At the same time, he left me with the impression that any general acceptance of his theory would have found him less wedded to it than he appeared to be.’ 22 January 1898, from a cutting in the Samuel Butler Collection, St John’s College, Cambridge (hereafter cited as Butler Collection). The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926), 374. L’autrice dell’Odissea, trans. G. Barrabini (Trapani: Celebes, 1968); for the 1998 edition, see above, n. 5. Farrington, Samuel Butler and the Odyssey, 43. Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 167. Whitmarsh, ‘What Samuel Butler Saw,’ 77, 82. Dougher, ‘An Epic for the Ladies,’ 179. But note that Dougher has confused Cornford’s review of Butler’s translation of the Odyssey (in Classical Review 15 [1901]: 221–2), where he does refer to the theory of female authorship as satire, with a review by S.E. Bassett of the 1922 edition of the Authoress (in Classical Weekly 18 [1924–5]: 29). Classical Weekly was not published until 1907. See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 44–50 (‘Joyce with his usual thoroughness acknowledges the mad idea by putting his Nausicaa episode into the idiom of a lady novelist,’ 49); Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye, 171, 181, 191. George Bernard Shaw’s approval is noted allusively by Butler in the Authoress (208–9), and decoded by Henry Festing Jones in his preface to the 1922 edition (xviii). Robert Graves, Homer’s Daughter (London: Cassell, 1955); John Fowles, ‘Islands,’ in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, ed. Jan Relf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 292; ‘[H.D.] was, like Joyce, under the spell of Samuel Butler’s Authoress of the Odyssey,’ R.G. Babcock, reviewing Eileen Gregory’s H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 23 March 2000, http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J, trans. David Rosenberg; interpreted by Harold Bloom (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). Bloom refers to ‘joining’ Samuel Butler in ‘The Ghost of Shakespeare. iv. Love. ii. A Salvo for Lucy Negro,’ Harper’s Magazine, April 1999, 55–7 (where he jokingly presents the case for Lucy Negro – Elizabethan England’s most celebrated whore – as the author of ‘Shakespeare’). See http://www.alexander.stoddart.com. Fifty-six reviews are excerpted as clippings in the Butler Collection; see also Breuer and Parsell, Samuel Butler: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings

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28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38

39

40 41

about Him. By some creative accounting, Whitmarsh (‘What Samuel Butler Saw,’ 76) makes the total of reviews only thirty-two. Whitmarsh, ‘What Samuel Butler Saw,’ 76. Note, for example, Butler’s suspicions that the writer of a review in the Spectator was Jane Harrison herself (see below). See Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, 54–84, 98–128; and Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 120–98. Granta, 5 March 1898, 227 (it was spotted and thought worth reprinting in the Academy a week later, 12 March 1898). For a rare piece sympathetic to the argument, see the anonymous review in Rivista politica e letteraria 1 (July 1898): 188 (though Italian responses may have been influenced by Butler’s claims for an Italian origin of the poem). George C.W. Warr, in Classical Review 6 (1892): 398–9. Arthur Platt, ‘Butler on the Odyssey,’ Classical Review 9 (February 1895): 57. One of the more imaginative was dreamt up by the anonymous reviewer in the New York Sun (5 February 1897), who suggested that ‘the modern Celtic school’ ought to be able to come up with an Irish origin for the poem in ‘the wanderings of one O’Disuse’ (from a cutting in the Butler Collection). W.L. Courtney, ‘Nausicaa, the Authoress,’ Daily Telegraph, 17 November 1897, 11. Anon., ‘A Greater than Sappho,’ Outlook 1 (19 February 1898): 86–7. Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography, 241–2, 258; Robinson, The Life and Work, 115. Butler had (wrongly) suspected Harrison of being the anonymous author of an extremely unfavourable review of the published lecture in the Spectator, 23 April 1892, 555–6; headed ‘How to Vulgarise Homer,’ it took particular exception to the tone of the piece (‘We agree as heartily with his contention, as we dislike, and, we may even say, are sickened by, his mode of demonstrating it’). Saturday Review 84 (4 December 1897): 625–6; likewise the Manchester Guardian, 23 November 1897, 4 (‘So far as one can judge from this volume, Mr Butler is in dead earnest, though some parts of his book read like excellent fooling’). Country Life, 27 November 1897, 588. Anon., ‘Latest Bookings,’ Queen 103 (4 June 1898): 984–5. Even some of the reputedly unhumourous German classicists had no doubt that there was some fun and pleasure here; as Paul Cauer (one of Germany’s leading Homerists) wrote in the Wochenschrift für klassische Philologie 32 (9 August 1899): 867: ‘Ein liebenswürdiges, anregendes Buch, das den Spott gar nicht verdient, mit dem es auch in deutschen Kritiken begossen wurde.’

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42 Anon., ‘A Freak,’ Academy, 4 December 1897, 478. Similarly damning (though in this case half-enjoying what he saw as the joke) was the anonymous critic in Notices of Books, 1897, 196–202, while the Pall Mall Gazette, 4 December 1897, 4 (Anon,. ‘Cherchez la femme’), summed it up as ‘arrogant, ingenious and futile.’ 43 [Richard Garnett], Athenaeum, 18 December 1897, 849–50. 44 T.E. Page, Bookman, December 1897, 101. 45 Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘Who Wrote the Odyssey?’ Observer, 23 April 1922, 5 (‘There was always an obtuseness in Butler, straightly derivative from his insane egoismos, which blinded him not only to the fact that chat in a Working Men’s Institute is not necessarily reverberated at once to the ends of the earth, but to the yet more important truth that if you have anything to tell, on any subject, to people who presumably knew more about it years ago than you have begun to learn, it will be your better chance to approach and talk modestly’); J.Middleton Murry, ‘Samuel Buttler and the Odyssey,’ Nation and Athenaeum, 13 May 1922, 226–7. On Butler as ‘a living anachronism’ and ‘the obsolescence of the paradigm of the gentleman as amateur scholar,’ see Whitmarsh, ‘What Samuel Butler Saw,’ 80. 46 Farrington, Samuel Butler and the Odyssey; another Homeric controversialist, L.G. Pocock, stoutly defended the Sicilian aspects of Butler’s argument in The Sicilian Origins of the Odyssey: A Study of the Topographical Evidence (Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1957). I have not seen Homère au feminin (Paris: Copernic, 1977) by the French philosopher Raymond Ruyer, nor Louis Paret, “L’Odyssée” d’Homera: La Phénicienne de l’Ile aux Singes (Paris: Augustin, 1992), but neither appears to come from the heart of French studies of Homer. Very recently, Andrew Dalby has flirted with the idea of a female Homer, in his Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). 47 Alison Sharrock and Rhiannon Ash, Fifty Key Classical Authors (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), 9. 48 John J. Winkler, ‘Penelope’s Cunning and Homer’s,’ in The Constraints of Desire (New York & London: Routledge, 1990), 129–61. Whitmarsh (‘What Samuel Butler Saw’) is perhaps more grudging than is necessary: ‘Winkler’s ironic tribute in the Constraints of Desire is about as good as it [viz. classicists’ appreciation of Butler] gets’ (82). 49 Lilian Doherty ‘Gender and Internal Audiences in the Odyssey,’ American Journal of Philology 113 (1992): 161–77 (174). 50 Eva Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, trans. Maureen B. Fant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

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51 52

53 54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61

University Press, 1987), 25–6; see also Ralph J. Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey (New York: Vintage, 1993), 300. Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 32. Jasper Griffin, Homer: The Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 107; Richard B. Rutherford, ‘From the Iliad to the Odyssey,’ in Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad, ed. Douglas L. Cairns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 117–46 (118), repr. from Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 38 (1991–3): 37–54; John J. Winkler, ‘Public and Private in Sappho’s Lyrics,’ in Helene P. Foley, Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1981), 63–89 (64). Nor is Butler absent from the Cambridge Companion to Homer, ed. Robert Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Joint Association of Classical Teachers, The Teachers’ Notes to Reading Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 154. It was published in Glasgow by J. Maclehose in 1887, and also enjoyed considerable success in the U.S., published by Ginn of Boston, MA. Middleton Murry, Nation and Athenaeum, 13 May 1922, 226. Jebb’ s Introduction was reprinted in 1969 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press) and is included in the recent reprint of his complete works (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002), vol. 2. Though his edition of the complete plays of Sophocles is still frequently referred to, his Introduction (though still, I am assured, a good guide to the ‘Homeric Question’) is more rarely brought into our own arguments. See n. 43. Unsurprisingly, Bentley was making this ‘gender’ point only in passing. Replying to a claim that Homer had written ‘for eternity, to instruct mankind,’ Bentley denied any such lofty aims. The poems, he asserted, were songs sewn together to be sung for a small fee ‘at festivals and other days of merriment’ – the Iliad for men, the Odyssey for women (Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free Thinking [London: Morphew, 1713],). Ironically, Butler himself refers to Jebb’s Homer as the source of this quotation (AO, 4). New York Sun, 5 February 1898; Notes and Queries, 4 December 1897, 458. Dispatch, 19 March 1898 (from a cutting in the Butler Collection). Middleton Murry, Nation and Athenaeum, 13 May 1922, 226.

13 Butler after Butler: The Man of Letters as Outsider james g. paradis

As the body is the manifesto of the mind, so is posterity the manifesto of the dead ... Samuel Butler, Note-Book entry, June 1890

1 In a Note-Book entry of 1899, ‘Analysis of the sales of my books,’ written toward the end of his career, Samuel Butler charted the evidence of his dwindling Victorian readership (NB 5:205).1 As the list descends through fourteen works, all self-published between 1872 and 1898, the net losses mount, and Butler’s audience diminishes to zero. ‘It will be noted,’ he observes dryly, ‘that my public appears to be a declining one. I attribute this to the long course of practical boycott to which I have been subjected for so many years – or if not boycott – of sneer, snarl, and misrepresentation. I cannot help it, nor if the truth were known, am I at any pains to try to do so’ (NB 5:205). Three years before his death, Butler’s only income from more than twenty-five years as a Victorian satirist and man of letters had come from Erewhon, his second work. Although he was well able in 1899 to dismiss his loss of nearly a thousand pounds, this sum amounted to more than three times his disposable income in many of his most productive years as a struggling writer. By 1886, when his well-to-do father, Reverend Thomas Butler, died and left him an inheritance,2 Butler had not only written A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, Erewhon, The Fair Haven, four volumes on evolution, and Alps and Sanctuaries, but he had also completed his manuscript of Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh and part of Ex Voto, not to mention two volumes of notebooks and numerous journal articles. For many of his most productive years,

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13.1 Entry from Samuel Butler’s Note-Books, 1899.

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Butler thus endured both the bitter disappointments and psychological strains of constant artistic rejection, as well as the indignity of his father’s scorn in exchange for a meagre allowance. That he persisted with so little success at recasting his writing or cultivating an audience raises questions about his self-image as a man of letters and the changing relationship between the author and reader that he was negotiating in his work. Butler’s difficulties in attracting a Victorian readership have been widely discussed by modern critics and biographers, and much has been made of the way in which contemporary Victorian critics misunderstood his work.3 Yet little consideration has been given to why he accommodated rejection or to how it influenced his strategies as a writer. In this study, I explore some of the developments in Butler’s work that contributed to his alienation from his Victorian audience and the manner in which he incorporated this alienation into a productive outsider persona that unified his work and enabled him to continue writing. In scores of entries in his voluminous Note-Books from 1874 to 1902, we find a running commentary on the problematic reception of his work and the vicissitudes of authorship and reputation in general. These same entries show him reconstructing rejection – both actual and imagined – as part of an evolving persona. Rejection, although real enough, appears also to have been one of the evolving artefacts of Butler’s own self-fashioning as the literary outsider and failed Victorian. He wrote in 1893, under the heading ‘My Own Failure’: ‘Always demurring to the justice of the word as applied to myself, I would point out that nothing else was to be expected in the Victorian age of literature’ (NB 4:217). Failure is subsumed by critique, as Butler casts his own age as his antagonist, giving voice through his outsider persona to an antiVictorian irony that would prove influential in the next generation.4 To the extent that Butler assumed the voice of the outsider, however, it masked an insider’s social experience and a sophisticated intellectualism, conversant with the distinctive literary, religious, and scientific developments in contemporary culture. He was a Victorian, through and through, the product of Shrewsbury School and St John’s College and the son of a well-to-do clergyman. His upbringing was one of relative privilege with full access to the resources of Victorian middle-class professionalism and its institutions, of which he availed himself throughout his long career. Despite a somewhat traumatic mid-career struggle for resources, he was familiar with the life of clubs, the European tour, art exhibitions, the theatre, and the concert hall; he was a

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prolific reader of periodicals and newspapers. His circle of friends in New Zealand and Fleet-Street London included barristers, artists, clerics, government officials, physicians, bankers, and architects. He was a consummate photographer. He was an admirer of Benjamin Disraeli. His outsider-ism was thus ironically constructed with an intimate familiarity with the cultural landscape of his times, a familiarity evident in all of his work, most obviously in his Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872). Indeed, this very experience as the cognizant insider, as both U.C. Knoepflmacher and Frank Turner have suggested, brought Butler to a kind of willing stalemate as he increasingly embraced the discontinuity between the traditional Christian humanism of his upbringing and emergent Victorian scientific naturalism.5 Butler found humour and paradox in this clash, an omni-directional irony, more intense for its insider’s precision,6 that he aimed at Victorian orthodoxy itself and the clerical and scientific professionalism it supported. In addition to giving rise to his self-fashioning as the outsider, Butler’s alienation from his Victorian audience seems to have inspired at least two distinctive writerly strategies. First, he generalized liberally from his own ambiguous status as an author to the contingency of all authorship and art. In seeking to transcend time, art becomes the hostage of time. The author’s relationship to the authored object is fundamentally insecure and requires maintenance. No artist or intellectual can take his reputation for granted, Butler writes in November 1884, in a parody of Luke 12:20 titled ‘Death, Money and Reputation’: ‘No man is absolutely safe. It may be said to any man; “Thou fool, this night thy money shall be required of thee.” And reputation is like money. It may be required of us at any moment’ (NB 2:99). Artistic loss and usurpation, anonymity, mistaken identity, misinterpretation, and, even, accidental fame are not only recurring themes in Butler’s work, they furnish the framework for entire literary projects that seek to restore artistic and intellectual rights to figures like Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, Jean de Wespin (Tabachetti), Bishop Samuel Butler, and the Odyssean authoress Nausicaa. These were all artists and intellectuals whose work, Butler held, had been neglected, lost, or mistakenly attributed to others. Note-Book meditations on the ambiguity of his own authorial identity and the contingency of all art are pervasive subtexts and conceptual frameworks for works like Evolution, Old and New (1880), Ex Voto (1888), and The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). In this destabilized world of the author, authorial privilege dissolves. The great-man intellectual and artist of Thomas Carlyle have become,

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as we see in Butler’s ironic portraits of Darwin, Tabachetti, Shakespeare, and the author(ess) of the Odyssey, the embodiments of mortality with all of its accidents and venalities. Butler’s ironizing of great figures, Ruth Hoberman has argued, becomes one of the models for the Edwardian and Georgian construction of Victorianism, as, for example, in Lytton Strachey’s portraits of eminent Victorians.7 The perspective of speaking as an outsider in his own times to subsequent generations not only gave a dramatic, anti-Victorian sweep to Butler’s ironic vision and led to his unusual agenda of literary reclamation projects, it also inspired the most extraordinary project of self-publishing and self-archiving contemplated by a Victorian writer. Amassing for posterity thousands of pages of Note-Books, book manuscripts, and correspondence, Butler quite literally distilled himself for posterity. This personally arranged and edited body of work, which contained his magnum opus Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh, was not the casual residuum of an author’s life’s work, but a carefully prepared archive calculated to defeat the contingencies of neglected authorship that Butler had so thoroughly explored in his published work.8 2 ‘If Swift had lived to be an evolutionist,’ Grant Allen declared in a review of Evolution, Old and New in the Examiner in 1879, ‘he would have written Mr. Butler’s new book.’9 The new volume, a miscellany of excerpts from the lives and works of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary forerunners, had, in a contrast reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books, pit what Butler saw as the shallow modern evolutionary writers against their more substantial ‘ancient’ counterparts. Charles Darwin, thus, was a footnote to Erasmus Darwin and older teleological evolutionists like Buffon and Lamarck, whom Butler viewed as the more original and intellectually sound. Treating the new work, which Butler had designated his ‘Opus Four,’ as the fourth in a series of virtuoso satires – following Erewhon, The Fair Haven, and Life and Habit – Allen saw Butler as ‘a professional satirist,’ a ‘mystifyer who does his best to leave one utterly in the dark with regard to his system of juggling’: ‘Is he a teleological theologian making fun of evolution? Is he an evolutionist making fun of teleology? Is he a man of letters making fun of science? Or is he a master of pure irony, making fun of all three and of his audience, as well?’10 The problem that Allen identified, the disjunction between an

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author’s ironic intention and an audience’s interpretive inference, is the source of an ambiguity that Butler actively cultivated in work after work through his long literary career.11 In the preface to the second edition of The Fair Haven, Butler expressed astonishment that any of the readers of Erewhon might have ‘imagined that they could detect an analogy between the English Church and the Erewhonian Musical Banks.’12 These denials began what was to be a career of asserting authorial privilege over interpretations of his work, often against textual evidence to the contrary, that his irony was not aimed at certain targets. Butler brilliantly cultivated what Hutcheon has called the ‘intentional gap,’ which placed him, as it does all ironists, in an antagonistic stance against readers like Grant Allen seeking to decipher the irony.13 For Butler, this gap opened up an immense, semantic space ruled by ambiguity, a world of whimsy, irony, and unexpected juxtaposition. Yet, the same intentional gap gave rise to an uneasiness in his Victorian audience, which wondered increasingly, as Allen did, if it might be one of the author’s targets. The uneasy instability of Butlerian irony was revealed in the shell game that Butler played over authorship in publishing The Fair Haven in 1873, a year after Erewhon. The Fair Haven is, as Northrop Frye once noted, a literary hoax,14 presented as the sincere account of a young man’s religious odyssey over the terrain of contemporary Victorian unbelief in search of a faith worthy of an age of ascendant science and rationalism. The full title reveals a complicated narrative framework: The Fair Haven. A work in defence of the miraculous element in our Lord’s ministry upon earth, both as against Rationalistic impugners and certain Orthodox defenders. By the late John Pickard Owen, edited by William Bickersteth Owen, with a memoir of the Author. William, the younger, reasonable brother, narrates with a gentle, forgiving irony the story of John, his older, passionately earnest brother. John, in his religious zeal, flirts with doubt, descends into madness, and dies of religious melancholy, leaving behind a treatise of his findings. This treatise, the centre of Butler’s volume, explores in a tone of indignant orthodoxy, a sustained and cogent argument against the consistency of the four Gospels and the divinity of Christ (FH, 63). Intended for the rank and file mid-Victorian believer, this treatise is the residue of Butler’s own grappling with and loss of religious conviction as he prepared for Holy Orders in the summer of 1858.15 One reviewer in the Spectator was reminded of the prose style of John Henry Newman, ‘of whom the author seems to us an intellectual kinsman, sharing his logical power, as well as ... grace of expression,’ but

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could not ‘help doubting whether this elaborate framework is not a mere dramatic setting to views exactly the opposite of those apparently advocated.’16 Most reviewers, however, took the work at face value and were publicly embarrassed when in the preface to his second edition five months later Butler identified himself as the author of The Fair Haven and announced that he was also the author of the still officially anonymous Erewhon.17 The satire of Erewhon and the emergence of Butler as the third author displacing the other two revealed the satirical intent of The Fair Haven, and, more disturbingly, the lengths to which Butler was willing to go in order to make his audience the butt of his satire. Here was an ironist capable of drawing blood.18 Mocking reviewers who had been taken in by the Owen brothers’ theological musings, Butler declared in his preface to the second edition: ‘I am not responsible for the interpretations of my readers.’ The Fair Haven, he proposed, could be read as ‘a defence – both as against impugners and defenders’ of the Resurrection account (FH, xxii). The experimentation with complex irony and unconventional prose forms continued in Butler’s next two works, Life and Habit (1878) and Evolution, Old and New (1879), which returned to the subject of evolution. Life and Habit, blended science and humour in a line of speculation that attributed habit acquired through repetitive, purposeful actions, with the development of the organism. Reviving the Lamarckian view of development as the transmission of acquired characteristics, Butler proposed that the organism is self-designed, an increasingly complex organic product of its own desires and will, the residuum or unconscious memory of its past selves.19 Butler employs irony throughout Life and Habit, within the descriptive framework of systematic natural history. The volume shifts freely, often startlingly, between restrained scientific discourse and a multivalenced comic discourse, in a formula Butler had once proposed to his New Zealand geologist friend, Julius von Haast, of ‘mock scientific papers [that combine] good nonsense with half sense.’20 The inability of certain breeds to produce hybrids with each other is illustrated with his own variation on a vulgar sexual jingle, substituting ‘breeds’ for ‘girls’: ‘Some breeds [i.e. girls] do, and some breeds don’t, / Some breeds will, but this breed won’t, / I tried very often to see if it would, / But it said it really couldn’t, and I don’t think it could.’21 Butler thus continually interrupts his ongoing speculative discussion with humorous digressions that lampoon the rigidities of the very scientific forms and language he is using.22

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Although the comic strains of Butler’s evolutionary speculation have a puzzling, even gratuitous quality, the same ironic impulse gives rise to his insights into evolution and its human implications. Irony, Frye has noted, is one of four foundational literary ‘myths,’ offering a unique capacity to capture the paradox and dualism of human experience;23 Butler’s irony is often constituted by his compelling perception of the incongruence of the humanistic and evolutionary vocabularies as they contend over human experience. Evolutionary thought, in yoking together the human and the biological, becomes a steady source of comic paradoxes, beginning with Erewhon, whose inhabitants live absurdly within their own eugenically constructed society. These juxtapositions are also the sources of biological insights such as Butler’s paradoxical assertion in Life and Habit that volition can somehow be stored as biological form.24 Life and Habit itself is built on an epistemological paradox: ‘that irony of nature, by which it comes about that we so often most know and are, what we least think ourselves to know and be’ (LH, 19). Perfect knowledge, in this view, is unconscious, ‘automatic’: the infinitely practised knowledge that has evolved mnemonically into custom, habit, instinct, and organic form. Imperfect knowledge is self-conscious, ‘pioneer’ knowledge, which Butler identifies with science. ‘Knowledge,’ he writes, ‘must become automatic before we are safe with it’ (LH, 25). Reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s contrast in Culture and Anarchy (1869) between Hellenic spontaneity and Hebraic passion for law, Butler’s automatic knowledge is the grace of superb biological conditioning, the higher ‘science’ of ‘good health, good looks, good temper, common sense, and energy.’ Such biologically gifted individuals, he holds, are ‘not under the law, but [are] so entirely under grace that every one who sees them likes them.’25 In contrast, people of the lower ‘science’ of progressive, self-conscious knowledge are the ‘ugly, rude, and disagreeable people’ he identifies with contemporary scientists (LH, 27). ‘The so-called man of science,’ he writes, ‘very rarely knows what he says he knows; no sooner has he misled the world for a sufficient time with a great flourish of trumpets than he is toppled over by one more plausible than himself. He is but medicine-man, augur, priest, in its latest development’ (LH, 34–5). This unflattering caricature of the contemporary man of science wars against the audience capable of comprehending the arguments of Life and Habit.26 Even his friends, Butler mused at the end of Life and Habit, could not decide whether he wrote ‘in jest or in earnest’ (LH, 249).

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3 Evolution, Old and New, published the year after Life and Habit, was in many respects Butler’s most fateful book: it closed the door on his Victorian natural history audience and opened another to his self-fashioning as the Victorian outsider addressing an audience of the future. While it had none of the substance and imaginative vigour of Erewhon or his work in draft, The Way of All Flesh, the new volume used the teleological model of evolution Butler had developed in Life and Habit as a general framework for discussing the history of evolutionary thought, especially natural selection. A miscellany of selections from works of older evolutionary writers, accompanied by Butler’s teleological commentary, its aim was to correct what Butler perceived to be Darwin’s misappropriation of credit for the authorship of evolution by showing that the Origin of Species was part of a continuing discussion of evolution. ‘Up to a certain point,’ Butler insists, ‘there is very little difference between Lamarck and Mr. Darwin ... We have [in Lamarck] a complete statement of the fact of evolution, or descent with modification – wanting nothing, but entire, and incapable of being added to except in detail, and by way of explanation of the causes which have brought the fact about.’27 Butler’s historical perspective on evolutionary thought was actually quite well received by reviewers, but the ad hominem attack on Charles Darwin and generally dismissive attitude towards contemporary science pervading Evolution, Old and New alienated his serious natural history readership.28 Viewing the neglect of older evolutionary authors in their own times and afterwards as a cultural dispossession or wilful intellectual obliteration, Butler constructed the figure of the ‘lost’ or suppressed author, the one against the many. Lamarck had endured the humiliating opposition of the vested religious and scientific interests of his own times, and Erasmus Darwin’s theories had been suppressed by religious orthodoxy, especially the institutionally sanctioned arguments of Paley’s Natural Theology. These older evolutionists, discredited by the church-sanctioned tradition of natural theology, by their own contemporary colleagues in natural history, and by the still-emerging orthodoxy of Victorian science – all intellectual and cultural authorities that Butler had satirized earlier in the decade in Erewhon – became exemplars of the outsider, with obvious parallels to Butler himself. Butler believed he had found in Buffon a model for himself, a ‘freethinker’ who had used irony to transcend the petty conventions of his

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times. ‘It is impossible,’ Butler wrote, ‘to believe that [Buffon] is not writing between his lines for the discerning, what the undiscerning were not intended to see ... So keen an observer can hardly have been blind to the signs of the times which were already close at hand ... He would help those who could see to see still further, but he would not dazzle the eyes that were yet imperfect with a light brighter than they could stand’ (EON, 70–1). Using the ‘self-adjusting’ language of irony in his Histoire naturelle to mask his evolutionism and to escape the censure of the church and the Sorbonne, Buffon had succeeded in preserving a more advanced view in his work for a future audience prepared to grasp its significance (EON, 70–1). Buffon’s is ‘the serious and legitimate irony of one who must either limit the circle of those to whom he appeals, or must know how to make the same language appeal differently to the different capacities of his readers,’ Butler wrote admiringly (EON, 80). As a free-thinker and irrepressible ironist, Buffon was reaching beyond his own cultural moment to assert to some future audience the rule of evolution. Irony would ‘keep the whole alive till the philosophical side of his writings should be understood and appreciated’ (EON, 74). This reading of Buffon offers a clue to Butler’s own changing voice, as he searched for an identity in the wake of his declining prospects as an author.29 In trying to determine Buffon’s meaning, Butler observes, ‘we can lay hold of nothing. It was not Buffon’s intention that we should.’ Indeed, the whole point of the ironist, he continues, is to cultivate ambiguity and, so, to complicate interpretation: ‘An ironical writer, concerning whom we cannot at once say whether he is in earnest or not, is an actor who is continually interrupting his performance in order to remind the spectator that he is acting. Complaint, then, against an ironical writer on the score that he puzzles us, is a complaint against irony itself; for a writer is not ironical unless he puzzles’ (EON, 96). Butler thus frames the Histoire naturelle much as he had framed The Fair Haven, in which the declared search for a modern justification for orthodox Christianity masked a sceptical attack on those very views. Buffon was an illustrious precedent, an intellectual ally worth claiming. And yet, Butler cautioned, still cultivating the intentional gap, ‘I should ... warn the reader to be on his guard against accepting my view [of Buffon’s irony] too hastily. So far as I know I stand alone in taking it’ (EON, 72). With the writing of Evolution, Old and New, Butler saw irony in a new light, not only as a versatile tool of critique and an absorbing mode of

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literary deception, but also as a means of advancing his views on the times to a more receptive future audience. Irony complicated the author’s relation to the text by resisting simple interpretations, its ambiguity conferring a quality of anonymity on an author by making it difficult ‘to lay hold of’ his views. Buffon’s use of irony to transcend petty censorship and ‘keep the whole alive’ suggested to Butler a program for his own emerging agonistic persona, enabling him to embrace his growing sense of his own literary failure. Although disappointing, failure was also liberating, for, in imagining himself as the adversary of the Victorian age, Butler gained a sense of purpose that enabled him to see in his growing body of work a new unity. He was able to form new priorities by lengthening his horizon with a posthumous writing strategy. Rather than seek an accommodation with his contemporary audience, Butler reconstructed that audience as his antagonist. Of his age, yet against his age – in some sense, against all ages and all audiences – Butler’s rebirth as the outsider furnished new motivation to continue self-publishing at a loss, broaden his attacks on the perceived cultural authorities of his times, and take up the accidents and trials of authorship as a major theme of his work. 4 By the mid-1880s, the literary fate that Butler imagined for himself and the context in which he shaped his strategy as an author was one of neglect in his own times, followed by posthumous revival and a literary life after death. The true artefact of his alienation and the diary of his emergence as the outsider is the series of commonplace books he called his ‘Note-Books’ that he maintained over twenty-five years, from 1874 until his death in 1902. This personal cosmos, with its constant contemplation of the self and rumination over the times, expanded steadily as the possibilities of his public world, the world of an author in his own time, continued to recede. As his publishing losses mounted in an unrelenting logic of rejection, Butler’s Note-Books waxed with the bitter yet witty fullness of his personal struggles and opinions. Some six volumes and nearly half a million words, the Note-Book entries were often sparked by the cool critical reception of his work, especially his antiDarwinian volumes Evolution, Old and New (1879) and Unconscious Memory (1880),30 and the clear decline of his literary prospects in the Victorian book-reviewing press.31 The appeal to posterity as a posthumous critical intelligence capable

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of reviving an author, as he himself had done with Buffon and other evolutionists, was a crucial factor sustaining Butler’s literary output through the last twenty years of his life. In a lengthy meditation titled ‘Myself and My Books’ – one of a dozen in 1883 alone addressing fame and authorship – he compared himself with his seventeenth-century namesake, the author of the biting satire Hudibras, who died in poverty and obscurity. Noting that his book losses now stood at £350 – well over a year of allowance from his father – he wrote that he prepared for failure by writing for a handful of contemporaries and for the next generation: Posterity will give a man a fair hearing, [but] his own times will not do so if he is attacking vested interests – and I have attacked two powerful sets of vested interests at once. What is the good of addressing people who will not listen? I have addressed the next generation, and have therefore said many things which want time before they become palatable. (NB 1:217)

This theme, of the author foregoing his immediate interests and appeal in order to attack the conventions of the times, furnishes the subtext of the Note-Books. A voice of self-assurance, it transforms Butler’s apparent failures into a literary strategy, subsuming the ignominy of critical defeat into an anticipation of the future. As late as 1897 he still presents himself as ‘try[ing] to live in posterity as an actor leaning over the footlights and talking to the orchestra’ – the dramatic ironist performing for an audience different from that played to by his contemporaries (NB 5:125). Butler’s notebook commentary on art and authorship, as well as volumes such as Ex Voto, The Authoress of the Odyssey, and Erewhon Revisited, typically deflate the Romantic view of the author’s (or prophet’s) special inspiration, and, so, secularize the idea of the artist. Whether in the sculptor Tabachetti’s feeble artistic ego in Ex Voto, Nausicaa’s girlish errors and headstrong scorn for men in The Authoress of the Odyssey, or Shakespeare’s sexual appetite for young men in Shakespeare’s Sonnets reconsidered, Butler’s artists lack the decorum and dignity of towering genius. In references to his own authorship, he poses as a person of no special talents writing on subjects of no particular urgency. In ‘Myself and Posterity’ (1883), for example, he is the angler, fishing for posterity by ‘dangling’ works in front of it (NB 1:240). Later in the 1880s, after publishing Luck, or Cunning? and Ex Voto, he remarks that he has ‘found it an abominable nuisance being dragged into writing’ such

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works, which were not on subjects of his own choosing so much as on matters that he has felt obligated to write about (NB 3:39–40). He refers to his works in 1893 as ‘things that were lying about as it were on the ground in very public places ... which anyone else has had ... as good a chance of picking up as I had’ (NB 4:223). This de-privileging of authorship permeates Butler’s work. The Carlylean vision of the poet, prophet, and man of letters as heroic figures, working out their destinies as forces of nature, is drolly domesticated in homely images that return us to the commonplace. Butler’s Note-Book references to the artist often reveal a frank hostility towards the reader as well, especially the critic, whom he sees as guarantor of the status quo. He associates cultural authority with the abusive parental intervention that traumatized him as a child. Contemplating his declining literary prospects in a note of March 1883 titled ‘If I break down prematurely,’ he traces his mounting depression following the disastrous failure of Unconscious Memory (1880) and the tepid response to Alps and Sanctuaries (1882) to an array of forces aligned against him. These include the severity of his upbringing, the moral oppression of his early religious indoctrination, the condemnation of his books by uncomprehending critics, the damage to his intellectual reputation of his controversy with Charles Darwin, anxiety over his mounting debt of more than £400, and (most of all) his grim and unrelenting struggle with his father (NB 1:231). In this display of authority – religious, literary, scientific, financial, and parental – Butler encounters nearly every aspect of the prevailing culture as his unyielding antagonist. Yet, even in this darkest period of his career, when his feeling of alienation was complete, Butler was revising his novel The Way of All Flesh in the patient conviction that he would ultimately have his say. In ‘Poem,’ a Note-Book entry of late 1883, which begins, ‘Oh critics, / Cultured critics who will praise me after I am dead,’ he excoriates even his hoped-for audience of the future: ‘You will think you are better than the people who, when I was / Alive swore that whatever I did was wrong, / And damned my books for me as fast as I could write them; / But ... you will be just the same / ... / Oh! how I should have hated you!’ (NB 1:259). Butler’s alienation in the early to mid-1880s was so complete at times that writing had become a paradoxical protest against even the posterity to whom he looked for his rescue from author-death. If his own attitude towards posterity was full of ambiguity, Butler himself relished exploiting this ambiguity in the role of posterity, reviving artists and authors he believed had been neglected in his own time.

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Whether in his efforts in Ex Voto (1888) to give face and fame to the shadowy terracotta sculptor Jean de Wespin, or his lengthy account of his own neglected grandfather’s pre-eminence as a public school headmaster in The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler (1896), or his claim in the Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) that a young Scherian woman had written the Odyssey, or, even, his bald parody of the Resurrection myth in Erewhon Revisited (1901), he was fascinated with the power of posterity to invent the past. Only in this context of the truth-constructing prerogatives of posterity can the startling revisionism of so many of Butler’s revivals of unknown authors and artists be fully appreciated. Full of elaborate detective work and speculation, these efforts are both anticipations of his own posthumous fate and examinations of the myth of authorship and fame itself. The obscure sculptor, Jean de Wespin, also known as Tabachetti, is one such Butlerian discovery, revived, if not partly invented, by Butler in his study, Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia (1888). One of the many artists who had created the extensive series of mostly fifteenth- and sixteenth-century votive chapels known as the Sacro Monte, above the picturesque Piedmontese town of Varallo,32 Tabachetti was a retiring virtuoso who worked in the unstable medium of terracotta. This combination of casual brilliance, faint reputation, and unstable medium excited Butler’s deepest sympathies, as he had visited these chapel-dioramas on his summer sketching holidays in the 1880s. More than thirty chapels presented, as on a series of stages, some eight hundred life-sized terracotta figures, with painted facial features and garments, some with wigs of human hair. Age had infused this decaying and often grotesque spectacle of biblical narratives, with its flagellation scenes and haloed angels, with a thoroughgoing irony of divinity in a state of carnal decomposition that would have been appreciated by Butler, who spent many months among the exhibits. Although many sculptors, fresco artists, and architects had created the Sacro Monte, including local artists like Gaudenzio Ferrari and the brothers Giovanni and Tanzio d’Enrico, Butler was most fascinated with Tabachetti, whose two chapels, Adam and Eve (No. 1) and Journey to Calvary (No. 36), he considered the finest of the Sacro Monte. The Journey to Calvary, a colossal, barbaric procession of Christ bearing the cross as he is beaten by deformed and wrathful Jews, watched over by smirking Roman soldiers, is made up of forty life-sized figures and nine horses marching across the stage. The chapel ‘is of such super-

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lative excellence as regards composition and dramatic power,’ Butler declares, ‘that it is not too much to call it the most astounding work that has ever been achieved in sculpture’ (EV, 62). Eager to expand the oeuvre of this ‘Titian of Terra Cotta,’ Butler scours the Sacro Monte for signs of Tabachetti’s masterful touch, fantasizing about discovering some forgotten cache of his art. As his narrative speculation outdistances his evidence, Butler’s search takes on the uncertain feel of a Butlerian hoax, bent on willing the artist into existence. To be sure, there is an itinerant late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century Flemish sculptor, Jean de Wespin, who for unknown reasons found his way to the Valle-Sesia to work on the Sacri Monti at Varallo and Crea. Unable to find much of de Wespin’s work, Butler weaves a tale of the self-effacing genius, ‘evidently of a laconic character, little given to self-assertion, and if he signed a work at all, did so as meagrely as he could’ (EV, 98). In the Ecce Homo Chapel (No. 31), Butler discovers what he imagines to be an ‘artist’s corner,’ featuring the life-sized terracotta figures of Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni d’Enrico, and Tabachetti. He proposes that a small ‘V’ cut in a figure’s hat and wrist stands for an ‘Italianized form of “W” or “de Wespin.”’ These faint marks, combined with the general artistic excellence of the figure, provide sufficient evidence that it is a terracotta selfportrait of Tabachetti at fifty, roughly Butler’s own age (EV, 95). Further inspections lead Butler to assign to Tabachetti what he considers the finest figure of the Sacro Monte, Il Vecchietto (The Old Man), from the Descent from the Cross Chapel (No. 39). Butler concludes – incorrectly, as he confesses in the second edition33 – that it is yet another self-portrait of the great sculptor, now ‘getting on for eighty’ (EV, 185). Resurrected from the depths of Butler’s imagination, the mysterious Tabachetti emerges from 300 years of obscurity in his own terracotta self-embodiments, now reproduced for the audience of Ex Voto in two photographs. As Butler weaves his story around the two silent forms of Tabachetti in the neglected Sacro Monte, the narrative seems representative of his own in crucial ways. ‘Strange that one who has been so much lost to sight for some 300 years,’ he muses, ‘should now come before us with such startling vividness’ (EV, 95).34 ‘Happily, there is a difference between the two portraits which tells its own story. In 1610 the memory of the five years during which he was probably in a medieval Italian madhouse is still heavy upon him; the iron has entered his soul. In 1640, the storm has long gone by, and has been followed by a serene and lovely sunset’ (EV, 96). Butler, too, had struggled against

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13.2 Terracotta figure in the Ecce Homo Chapel, Sacro Monte at Varallo. A selfportrait, attributed by Samuel Butler to Tabachetti. Photograph by Butler.

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13.3 Il Vecchietto (The Old Man). Terracotta figure in the Chapel of the Descent from the Cross, Sacro Monte at Varallo. A self-portrait, attributed by Butler to Tabachetti. Photograph by Butler.

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severe mental depression in the early 1880s, only to emerge at the beginning of 1887 – a year and a half before the publication of Ex Voto – in the serene and lovely sunset of his father’s timely legacy and his own literary rebirth as an artist for posterity. Indeed, given that the ex voto (‘from my vow’) was often a written offering, made in gratitude for the fulfilment of a prayer, and that Butler, as numerous letters to his confidant Miss Savage reveal, had long fervently hoped for his father’s demise, it is almost certain that he thought of Ex Voto as his own literary ex voto.35 The Sacro Monte becomes, among other things, a manifesto of the provisional nature of art, a contemplation of the physical decay that slowly degrades the artistic object and the obscurity and occasional fame that await many artists. Art extends the self beyond the biological limits of a life – the Ars longa, Vita brevis doctrine of the ancients – but it does so in a climate of accident and illusion. ‘If the world knows little of its greatest men, it seems to know not much more about its greatest works of art,’ Butler insists, ‘nor, if it continues to look for guidance in this matter to professional critics and society art dabblers, is it likely to improve its knowledge’ (EV, 180). Contemplating the wreck of Tabachetti’s massive yet no longer complete Assumption of the Virgin Chapel that crowns the Sacro Monte at Crea, with its hundreds of disintegrating terracotta saints and angels swarming above the altar to heaven, Butler reflects on the decay of art in general: In the kingdom of art not only are many called and few chosen, but the few that do get chosen are for the most part chosen amiss ... We flatter ourselves that among the kings and queens of art, music, and literature, or at any rate in the kingdom of the great dead, all wrongs shall be redressed, and patient merit shall take no more quips and scorns from the unworthy. As for the reputations of the great dead, they are governed in the main by the chicane that obtains among the living. (EV, 201)

Even as he writes, Butler notes, the Assumption Chapel is slated for a dubious restoration by a gentleman ‘whose facility of execution in making crucified Christs out of plaster of Paris is something almost incredible.’ They have no oven at Crea for baking terracotta, the man tells him, but plaster of Paris is faster and the effect is just as good when it is painted. As shoddy work continues to degrade the superior originals, Butler concludes that ‘great works of art have got to die like everything else’ (EV, 202–3).

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5 By the early 1880s, Butler’s project of preparing a body of self-published and unpublished work for a future readership had become the driving force of his literary life.36 He couched his metempsychosis, typically enough, in paradox, speaking of an immortality not of the soul but, rather, of the author’s literary consciousness, manifested in the bodies of others. As he wrote in ‘Life after Death’ (June 1895): I refer of course to the life we live in others by reason of work that we have left behind us. An immortal like Shakespeare knows nothing of his own immortality about which we are so keenly conscious. As he knows nothing of it when it is in its highest vitality, centuries it may be after his apparent death, so it is best and happiest if during his bodily life he should think little or nothing about it, and perhaps hardly suspect that he will live after his death at all. And yet, I do not know. I could not keep myself going at all if I did not believe that I was going to have a good average three score years and ten of immortality. (NB 5:94)

The seventy-year-long ‘immortality’ was conceived in biological, performative terms, as a hereditary perpetuation of the self through one’s writings, much as in Life and Habit the biological memory descending through the generations continually re-expressed itself. Such an immortality, with its play on Christian eschatology, drew on Butler’s own characteristic juxtaposition of the biological and Christian humanist vocabularies, whose ironical union had come to define his self-concept as a writer.37 Although dictated mainly by his declining audiences, Butler’s project of distilling and preserving himself in a body of work was also motivated by his personal bind of not wanting to risk disinheritance by further antagonizing his well-to-do father, Reverend Thomas Butler, who had been deeply offended by the publication of Erewhon and The Fair Haven.38 Butler had written in October 1883 in ‘Myself and My Difficulties’ that if he ‘saw no chance of affluence,’ he would publish more freely: ‘I could work my way better if I were cut off from any hope save from my own exertions – for example, I could publish my novel [The Way of All Flesh] which is all ready for the press, and so keep myself before the public, but as long as my father lives how can I do this?’ (NB

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2:8–9). By the time he received his inheritance after the death of his father in December 1886, he had conceived his posthumous plans partly on the cornerstone of his unpublished novel, which he now saw as his magnum opus, a work that would eventually draw attention to and dramatize his work. As his confrontation with professional authority – Homeric, Shakespearian, Christian – deepened in provocatively revisionist works like The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), Shakespeare’s Sonnets reconsidered (1899), and Erewhon Revisited (1901), Butler’s open antagonism towards the cultural authorities likely to review his work promised little in the way of a favourable contemporary reception, as he well knew.39 Butler’s unpublished archive, a vast body of notes, correspondence, manuscripts, art, and photography, was both a Victorian literary omnium-gatherum and a monument to self-fashioning, shaped for his anticipated judgment by posterity. It took Butler a decade to assemble, requiring extensive collecting, labelling, arranging, editing, annotating, duplicating, and storing by Butler himself and his full-time assistant, Alfred Emery Cathie, whom he had hired in 1887, just after his father’s death. The foundation of the archive, the Note-Books, was a collection of nearly thirty years of aphorisms, paradoxes, sayings, commentaries on the times, detailed travel and publication chronologies, self-advertisements, recriminations – all animated by the outsider sensibility that Butler had cultivated over the years. He began revising his notes in 1891 and worked sporadically on them until the end of his life. Meant for extensive quotation or outright publication, they were the ultimate Butler manual, at once a contrarian argument with his times and a source-book of the Butlerian personal myth. Henry Festing Jones, his companion of more than twenty-five years, whom he had also, with Alfred Cathie, put on retainer in 1887, made extensive use of them, publishing a popular selection in 1912 and quoting them extensively in his two-volume memoir, Samuel Butler, Author of ‘Erewhon’ (1919) – down to the reconstruction of the Butler outsider myth and the faithful repetition of Butler’s own accounts of his extensive quarrels. The correspondence, like the Note-Books, offered both a wide-ranging account of Butler’s eventful life over fifty years and a Butler offered by Butler to posterity. Prepared in the decade of the 1890s, when he was reworking his Note-Books, Butler’s correspondence amounted to some 5,000 folio pages, which he had selected, edited, arranged, and annotated, often in close coordination with the Note-Books. These letters appear also to have been readied for extensive quotation by his antici-

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pated memoirist, Jones, who, once more, handsomely obliged him. Butler had laboured down to the merest detail, culling the collection of what to him seemed its undesirable parts, including letters to W.T. Marriott discussing his loss of faith; editorial exchanges with Eliza Mary Ann Savage concerning Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh; and (understandably) letters from Lucie Dumas of Islington, his paid sexual partner of twenty years, whom he shared with Jones.40 Some correspondence, including that with his father Canon Thomas Butler, he annotated, offering detailed explanations on his own behalf. The cache of manuscripts and collectibles was also impressive, not least because the novel itself, The Way of All Flesh, lay ready to unfold its bruising indictment of Victorian middle-class sensibility. When George Bernard Shaw first read the work in 1903, the year after Butler’s death, he wrote to his friend Henry Salt: ‘Get it instantly. It is one of the great books of the world ... I do not exaggerate: it is enormous.’41 Broadly conceived as a Bildungsroman representative of the times, it was also self-distillation, as well as an attempted exorcism of the deep-seated priggishness of the times, dubbed the Victorian spiritual ‘insolvency’ by critic Morton Dauwen Zabel, who considered the novel ‘one of the milestones in the history of the English novel.’42 Extensively revised, it was marked ‘ready for the press without being further looked at’ for immediate publication upon death, which his first executor, Richard Alexander Streatfeild, quickly arranged.43 Other materials Butler prepared included a manuscript edition of the great literary correspondence of his life, the polished, witty, irreverent letters that he and Eliza Mary Ann Savage had exchanged over fifteen years between Fleet Street and Regents Park, as well as an immense collection of pamphlets and journalism that would lead to more posthumous publications, including his Essays on Life, Art, and Science (1904) and God the Known and God the Unknown (1909). His massive collection of art and photography – the photography alone amounting to more than three thousand items – was also carefully arranged, labelled, and mounted for posterity. Its extensive self-portraiture furnished Butler’s equivalent of the Tabachetti of Ex Voto, peering out from the past at his future audience. Butler’s archive was thus a wound object, something readied for a gradual, diachronic process of release, which he anticipated would begin with his demise and the publication of The Way of All Flesh, and which in turn would stimulate further interest in his work. Impressively, if somewhat fortuitously, the strategy succeeded, demonstrating what Butler had suspected for nearly twenty years – that his death

364 James G. Paradis

would lead to his revival. Prompted by the lukewarm critical response to the novel’s appearance in 1903, George Bernard Shaw declared in his 1907 preface to Major Barbara, ‘It drives one almost to despair of English literature when one sees so extraordinary a study of English life as Butler’s posthumous Way of All Flesh making so little impression.’44 The English, Shaw insisted famously, could not recognize their own geniuses unless someone pointed them out, Butler being ‘in his own department the greatest English writer of the latter half of the XIX Century.’ By ‘department,’ Shaw was without doubt referring to Butler as the most all-embracing ‘ironist’ of his age. The same year, 1907, A.C. Fifield, a small independent publisher, had been introduced to Butler’s work by Butler’s executor, Streatfeild, and he agreed, with additional encouragement from Shaw, to undertake the complete republication of Butler’s oeuvre with new introductions. ‘I read half a dozen of the books,’ Fifield wrote, ‘and felt like “Keats after reading Chapman’s Homer.” Here was the master wit, the encyclopaedic scholar-critic, the high admiral of the fleet of emotions who I had dreamed I might some day encounter.’45 With Fifield’s reissue in 1908 of The Way of All Flesh with three additional works of Butler, and his announcement that he intended to republish all of Butler’s work, critics like Holbrook Jackson began speaking of a Butler ‘Renascence.’46 Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford] described Butler’s novel as one of the most remarkable in the language, praising Fifield for his bold plan to reissue the works of this ‘rare and inestimable writer.’47 In 1907, Jones had also embarked on a series of instalments, heavily edited, from Butler’s Note-Books for New Quarterly Review, which he collected and published, to wide acclaim, with Fifield in 1912 as The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Thus, within a decade of his death, Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon, and Erewhon Revisited had been republished with two new collections of essays, several other key works, and the immensely popular and profitable Note-Books. As the Fifield project of republishing Butler’s oeuvre unfolded between 1907 and 1914 in new editions with new introductions, each new volume was reviewed in the Edwardian and Georgian press as though it were making its first appearance. It was as if a new author had, indeed, been born. The post-Victorian literary divide could be sharp and ironic, and Butler’s self-fashioning as outsider and antagonist of his own age played well among writers seeking new departures from the vast and imposing panorama of Victorian culture. G.B. Shaw, E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells,

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Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name a few, all benefited artistically from Butler’s work, most of them handsomely acknowledging the fact. Butler was a writer’s writer, in that other writers learned from his thoroughgoing ironic iconoclasm. Yet, the posthumous critical response among biographers and critics was varied and complicated.48 Ford Madox Ford, unimpressed with Henry Festing Jones’s servile yet unflattering memoir Samuel Butler, Author of ‘Erewhon’ (1919), declared Butler ‘the greatest Englishman [of] the nineteenth century.’49 In contrast, Hugh Kingsmill, a decade later in After Puritanism, found Butler and his work psychologically damaged, poisoned by narrow hatred of a Victorianism from which he could not escape, an approach that was taken to an anti-Victorian ideological extreme by Kingsmill’s close friend, Malcolm Muggeridge, who paired Butler with Karl Marx in The Earnest Atheist as an ideologue and progenitor of Joseph Stalin. Virginia Woolf perhaps best captured the sense of Butler’s importance among many writers and critics in her celebrated essay, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1924), when she declared that ‘on or about December, 1910, human character changed ... The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular. The plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it.’50 For Woolf, as for so many others, Butler’s work, whatever his limitations and excesses as an individual, revealed an astonishing willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and to pursue the Mrs Brown principle of ‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.’51 Butler, Victorian self-fashioner, polymath, and all-embracing ironist, handily achieved his ‘good average three score years and ten of immortality’ – and much more.

NOTES 1 The epigraph is from Samuel Butler, Note-Books, Copy A, Butler Collection, Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, vol. 4, June 1890, 12. Subsequent references to volumes 1–6 of Butler’s Note-Books are cited in the text as NB. References to Note-Book 1 are taken from The NoteBooks of Samuel Butler, Volume 1 (1874–1883), ed. Breuer; references to NoteBooks 2–6 are taken from the bound manuscript volumes at the Chapin Library. All citations from the manuscript volumes are from the ‘A’ copy and are given with permission from the trustees of the Chapin Library. The table that shows his dwindling readership is reproduced from The

366 James G. Paradis

2

3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (1912; London: A.C. Fifield, 1918), 368. The ‘Book of Essays’ mentioned at the end of the list could be one of several privately printed pamphlets with additional matter, such as A Lecture on the Humour of Homer ... with preface and additional matter ... (Cambridge: Metcalfe, [1892]). Letter of Samuel Butler to Henry Festing Jones, Shrewsbury, 3 January 1887, British Library Additional Manuscripts, No. 44,032, ff. 9–10. Butler received assets of roughly £24,000, some of them only as life interest, good for an income of £1,000–1,200 per year. The extraordinary record of Butler’s reception has become one of the central topics of commentary on him. See Holt, ‘Samuel Butler and His Victorian Critics,’ and ‘Critical Opinion Concerning the Work of Samuel Butler, 1835–1902.’ See also Roger Parsell, ‘Samuel Butler (1835–1902) and His Critics Since 1940.’ For Butler’s influence on Lytton Strachey’s ironic anti-Victorianism, see Ruth Hoberman, Modernizing Lives: Experiments in English Biography, 1918– 1939 ([Carbondale]: Southern Illinois Press, 1987), 12, 34–5. Butler’s influence on the Bloomsbury anti-Victorian critique is discussed in O’Connor, ‘Samuel Butler and Bloomsbury.’ Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel, 229, 232–4, 255; Turner, ‘Samuel Butler: The Man of Temper.’ See also T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (Chicago: Lyceum Books, 1982), 18–19. See Morton Dauwen Zabel, Craft and Character: Texts, Method, and Vocation in Modern Fiction (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 102. Hoberman, Modernizing Lives, 22, 33–4. Dupee, ‘Butler’s Way,’ review of The Way of All Flesh, 28. Dupee comments perceptively on Butler’s ‘ever-deepening conviction of post-mortem fame.’ [Grant Allen], review of Evolution, Old and New, by Samuel Butler, Examiner, 17 May 1879, 646–7. Grant Allen, review of Evolution, Old and New, by Samuel Butler, Academy 15 (May 1879): 426–7. For a discussion of ironic intentionality, see Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1994), 116–24. The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, vol. 3, The Fair Haven. A Work in defence of the miraculous element ... , ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew (1873; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), xviii (hereafter cited in text as FH). Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Butler’s works are to this edition. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 42–3.

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14 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 135. 15 Butler had anonymously published a version of this treatise, without the ironic framework, as the pamphlet, The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists, critically examined (London: [Williams and Norgate], 1865). 16 Anon., review of The Fair Haven, by Samuel Butler, Spectator 46 (15 November 1873): 1442. 17 Although Butler had been identified as the author of Erewhon in a literary gossip column of the Athenaeum (21 May 1872), the second edition of Erewhon in July remained anonymous. 18 See also Holt, ‘Samuel Butler and his Victorian Critics,’ 150. 19 See Willey, Darwin and Butler. 20 Butler to Julius von Haast, London, 24 February 1865, British Library Additional Manuscripts No. 44027, ff. 115–16. The two titles Butler proposed to Haast were ‘The Dynamical Theory of Grief’ and ‘The Molecular Action of Thought.’ 21 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1878; London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), 163 (hereafter cited in text as LH). 22 For a study of irony derived from juxtaposing evolutionary and humanistic terminologies, see Paradis, ‘Satire and Science in Victorian Culture.’ 23 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 223; see also Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 42. 24 For commentary on Butler’s biological insights, see Edward S. Russell, ‘Samuel Butler and the Memory Theories of Heredity.’ 25 See Kingsmill, ‘Samuel Butler,’ 93–6. Kingsmill’s psycho-biographical discussion of Butler, although moralistic, offers an insightful discussion of Butler’s use of the pagan ideal of grace to counter his puritanical upbringing. 26 See also Breuer, Note-Books, 5. 27 Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old and New; or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as compared with that of Mr. Charles Darwin (1879; London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 296–7 (hereafter cited in text as EON). 28 See, for example, [James Ward], review of Evolution, Old and New, by Samuel Butler, Athenaeum, 13 July 1876: 175. 29 See Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘Buffon and the Problem of Species,’ in Forerunners of Darwin, 1745–1859, ed. Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus Jr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 85, 99. 30 See Paradis, ‘The Butler-Darwin Controversy in the Victorian Periodical Press.’ 31 For details on the various editions, see The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Brewer 1:xi–xv. See also Holt, ‘The Note-Books of Samuel Butler.’

368 James G. Paradis 32 For Butler’s portrait of Tabachetti, see Ex Voto, 83–101 (hereafter cited in text as EV). For a study of Butler’s work as art critic in Ex Voto, see Shaffer, Erewhons of the Eye. 33 In the preface to his second edition of Ex Voto, Butler was forced by his colleague’s discovery of a deed to retract his pet theory that the Il Vecchietto was Tabachetti’s self-portrait (EV, xx-xxi). 34 Butler repeated this ‘Resurrection’ move in The Authoress of the Odyssey with his frontispiece, a portrait he claimed as the actual Nausicaa that he had found in a museum at Cortona in central Italy. 35 For example, Butler had written to Miss Savage in February 1884 that he was planning revisions to Erewhon, including the addition of ‘the trial of a middle-aged man “for not having lost his father at a suitable age.”’ See Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss E.M.A. Savage, 1871–1885, ed. Keynes and Hill, 321. 36 See also Dupee, ‘Butler’s Way,’ 28. 37 Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel, 255, refers to Butler’s ‘laughter at the two-facedness of reality’ and his acquiescence in an ‘apotheosis of paradox.’ 38 See Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography, 141–2. 39 In The Authoress of the Odyssey, for example, Butler taunted scholars likely to review his work by drawing attention to his ‘presumptuous and utterly hopeless’ defence of ‘two such seeming paradoxes as the feminine authorship and Sicilian origin of the Odyssey,’ adding: ‘Either my own work is rubbish ... or not a little of [the work of Homeric scholars] is not worth the paper on which it is written.’ See Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897; London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 3. 40 ‘I got a nice little letter from Madame last night – Give her my love, thank her.’ Samuel Butler to Henry Festing Jones, Butler correspondence, 3 September 1884, Chapin Library, Williams College. Butler’s posthumous publisher A.C. Fifield complained to Jones that Jones had omitted from his Memoir Butler’s ‘tremendously interesting and important sex life.’ See A.C. Fifield to Henry Festing Jones, London, 9 April 1918, Butler Collection, Section 8, Box 21, St John’s College, University of Cambridge. 41 Quoted in Daniel F. Howard, Introduction, Ernest Pontifex; or, the Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler (1903; London: Methuen, 1965), xv. 42 See Zabel, Craft and Character, 97–113. 43 Quoted in Howard, Introduction, Ernest Pontifex, xxiii. Streatfeild’s editing, necessary as it proved, was not intended by Butler, who considered the novel finished. 44 George Bernard Shaw, ‘First Aid to Critics,’ in John Bull’s Other Island and

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47 48 49 50 51

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Major Barbara: Also How He Lied to Her Husband (1907; London: Constable, 1924), 161–2. A.C. Fifield, ‘Butler and his Publishers,’ Now & Then, no. 9 (July 1922): 22–3. Holbrook Jackson, ‘A Remarkable Personality: The Renascence of Samuel Butler,’ Sunday Sun, 24 May 1908, 2. The additional works published by Fifield were Erewhon, Erewhon Revisited, and Essays on Life, Art, and Science. Ford Madox [Ford], ‘A Book of the Day,’ review of The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler, Daily News, 15 May 1908, 4. See Holt, ‘Critical Opinion,’ and Parsell, ‘Samuel Butler and His Critics.’ Ford, ‘Biography and Criticism,’ review of Samuel Butler, Author of ‘Erewhon’ (1835–1902): A Memoir, by Henry Festing Jones, 198. Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’ 194. Ibid., 212.

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Chronology

1835

Samuel Butler is born on 4 December at Langar, near Nottingham, eldest son of Reverend Thomas Butler and Fanny Worsley Butler; grandson of Bishop Samuel Butler, classical scholar and former headmaster of Shrewsbury School. 1843–4 His first continental tour, at age 7, with his family to Italy, wintering in Rome and Naples. 1848–54 Attends Shrewsbury School, under headmaster Benjamin Hall Kennedy. 1854–8 Attends St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Bracketed twelfth in the Classical Tripos. Helps found and writes for the Eagle, a student literary journal. 1858–9 In preparation for Holy Orders, reads theology, works as lay assistant in St James’s parish, Piccadilly, London. Unable on principle to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles, refuses ordination. Emigrates, with financial backing from his father, to Canterbury Settlement, New Zealand. 1860–4 Assembles and manages the successful 80,000 acre Mesopotamia Sheep Station on the upper Rangitata River in Canterbury Province. Active in Christchurch Club, writes for the Press newspaper, becomes intimate of superintendent of the province, William Moorhouse. Befriends and headquarters Provincial Geologist Julius von Haast and reads Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Discovers (with John Baker) the Whitcombe Pass across the Southern New Zealand Alps.

372 Chronology

1863 1864

1865

1867

1872 1873

1874 1874–5

1877 1878 1879

A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, prepared from letters home and articles in the Eagle, edited by Rev. Thomas Butler. Sells Mesopotamia, nearly doubling his initial investment, and returns to London with his close friend and sometime editor of the Press, Charles Paine Pauli. Settles at 15 Clifford’s Inn, near the Inns of Court on Fleet Street, where he remains throughout his life. Begins study as artist and paints Family Prayers, his most widely known oil painting, in the primitive style. The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as given by the Four Evangelists, critically examined. Anonymous pamphlet. ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ in the Christchurch Press and ‘The Mechanical Creation’ in George Jacob Holyoake’s journal of free thought, the Reasoner. Two reveries on evolution. Corresponds with Charles Darwin. Painting studies continue at Heatherley’s School of Art in Newman Street. Exhibits at the Royal Academy in 1869, 1871, 1874, and 1876. Meets fellow art student Eliza Mary Ann Savage at Heatherley’s. Begins extensive correspondence with her in 1871. Erewhon, or Over the Range, published anonymously. Visits Charles Darwin at Down. The Fair Haven, published under the pseudonym ‘William Bickersteth Owen.’ Mother dies in Mentone, Southern France. Begins work on Pontifex novel. Recalls interest-bearing investments from New Zealand to speculate in banker Henry Hoare’s companies. Mr Heatherley’s Holiday, his most polished painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy. Speculative investments with Hoare fail. Makes three trips to Canada in unsuccessful effort to salvage the Canada Tanning Factory. Loses financial independence and becomes dependent on father’s allowance. Begins writing his aphoristic Note-Books, a lifelong undertaking. Art career wanes. Life and Habit. Completes draft of the Pontifex novel. Evolution, Old and New; or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus

Chronology

1880 1882 1884

1885

1886

1887

1888

1888–9

1892 1892–4

373

Darwin, and Lamarck, as compared with that of Mr. Charles Darwin. A Clergyman’s Doubts (letter series under various pseudonyms) and God the Known and God the Unknown (an article series) published in the Examiner. Unconscious Memory. Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino. Illustrated mainly with etchings of his own drawings. Selections from Previous Works, with Remarks on Mr. G.H. Romanes’ ‘Mental Evolution in Animals’; and A Psalm of Montreal. Completes final revisions of Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh. Death of Eliza Mary Ann Savage, his literary confidante, close friend, and correspondent. Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues, and Other Short Pieces for the Piano, in collaboration with Henry Festing Jones. Stands, unsuccessfully, for Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge. Death of Rev. Thomas Butler, his father, and inheritance of substantial financial legacy. Luck, or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? Takes Alfred Cathie into service as clerk and domestic aide. Engages Henry Festing Jones as paid musical collaborator and companion. Revives interests in photography, purchasing new cameras. Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia. Ilustrated with his own photographs. Narcissus: A Dramatic Cantata. In imitation of Handel, with Henry Festing Jones. Occasional essays, including ‘Quis Desiderio ...?’, ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism’ (in three essays), and ‘Ramblings in Cheapside’ in the Universal Review, later collected as Essays on Life, Art, and Science (1904). Death of Lucie Dumas, ‘Madame.’ Numerous articles in English and Italian on emerging theories of the Odyssey, including the pamphlets A Lecture on The Humour of Homer (1892) and Ancora sull’origine siciliana dell’Odissea (1893) that place Scheria near Trapani in Western Sicily.

374 Chronology

1894

1895 1896 1897

1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1909 1912

Meets Hans Faesch (1893), young Swiss man and business apprentice in London. Ex voto: studio artistico sulle opere d’arte del S. Monte di Varallo e di Crea. Translation by C. Angelo Rizzetti with Butler’s assistance. Visits Greece and Troy. The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler. The Authoress of the Odyssey. Death of Charles Paine Pauli, friend, literary adviser, barrister, and financial dependent. The Iliad rendered into English prose. Shakespeare’s Sonnets reconsidered, and in part rearranged. The Odyssey rendered into English prose. Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later. Erewhon, or Over the Range. New and revised edition. Last visit to Sicily, collapses in Palermo, brought back to London by Alfred Cathie. Dies, 18 June, in London hospice. The Way of All Flesh. Essays on Life, Art, and Science. Ulysses: A Dramatic Oratorio, with Henry Festing Jones. God the Known and God the Unknown. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, edited by Henry Festing Jones.

Select Bibliography

1. Writings by Samuel Butler Collected Works The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler. Edited by Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew. 20 vols. London: Jonathan Cape, 1923–6. Separate Works [listed chronologically by date of first appearance] ‘Darwin on the Origin of Species: A Dialogue.’ Press [Christchurch, New Zealand], 20 December 1862. ‘Darwin among the Machines.’ Press [Christchurch, New Zealand], 13 June 1863. A First Year in Canterbury Settlement. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863. Reprinted as A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, with Other Early Essays, edited and with an introduction by R.A. Streatfeild, London: A.C. Fifield, 1914. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 1, 1923. Auckland and Hamilton: Blackwood & Janet Paul, 1965; edited by A.C. Brassington and P.B. Maling. The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists, critically examined. London: [Samuel Butler] [Williams & Norgate], 1865. Gerrards Cross: Smythe; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980; edited and introduced by Robert Johnstone, with appendix by W.B. Primrose. Erewhon, or Over the Range. London: Trübner, 1872; published anonymously; first acknowledged authorship with fifth printing, 1873. Leipzig: Johann Ambr. Barth, 1879; German translation, Ergindwon: Oder Jenseits der Berge. New and revised edition, London: Grant Richards, 1901. New and revised edition, London: A.C. Fifield, 1910. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue

376 Select Bibliography française, 1920; French translation by Valéry Larbaud, Erewhon: ou, De l’autre côté des montagnes. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 2, 1923. London: J.M. Dent, 1932, with Erewhon Revisited; edited by Ernest Rhys, introduction by Desmond MacCarthy. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1934, introduction by Aldous Huxley. New York: Random House, 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970; edited by Peter Mudford. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981; edited by Hans-Peter Breuer and Daniel F. Howard. The Fair Haven. A work in defence of the miraculous element in our Lord’s ministry upon earth, both as against Rationalistic impugners and certain Orthodox defenders. By the late John Pickard Owen, edited by William Bickersteth Owen, with a memoir of the Author. London: Trübner, 1873; first edition published anonymously. Second edition, London: Trübner, 1873; this and subsequent editions with attributed authorship. New edition, with an introduction by R.A. Streatfeild, London: A.C. Fifield, 1913. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 3, 1923. New York: Garland, 1977; reprint of 1873 edition. Life and Habit. London: Trübner, 1878 [1877]. Revised edition, with author’s addenda and a preface by R.A. Streatfeild, London: A.C. Fifield, 1910. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue française, 1922; French translation by Valéry Larbaud, La vie et l’habitude. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 4, 1923. London: Wildwood House, 1981; reprint of 1910 edition. ‘A Clergyman’s Doubts.’ Examiner, 15 & 22 February; 1, 8, 15, 22 & 29 March; 5 & 19 April; 10 & 17 May, 14 & 18 June 1879. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 18, 1925. ‘God the Known and God the Unknown.’ Examiner, 24 & 31 May; 14, 21 & 28 June; 12, 19, 26 July 1879. Published in pamphlet form, with prefatory note by R.A. Streatfeild, London: A.C. Fifield, 1909. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 18, 1925. Evolution, Old and New; or, The Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as compared with that of Mr. Charles Darwin. London: Hardwicke and Bogue, 1879. Reprinted with appendix and index, London: David Bogue, 1882. New edition, with author’s revisions, appendix, index, and an introduction by R.A. Streatfeild, London: A.C. Fifield, 1911. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 5, 1924. Unconscious Memory: A comparison between the theory of Dr. Ewald Hering, Professor of Physiology at the University of Prague, and the ‘Philosophy of the Unconscious’ of Dr. Edward von Hartmann, with translations from these authors, and preliminary chapters bearing on ‘Life and Habit,’ ‘Evolution, Old and New,’ and Mr. Charles Darwin’s edition of Dr. Krause’s ‘Erasmus Darwin.’ London: David Bogue, 1880. New edition with a note by R.A. Streatfeild and introduction by

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377

Marcus Hartog, London: A.C. Fifield, 1910. New edition with an introduction and postscript by Marcus Hartog, London: A.C. Fifield, 1920. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 6, 1924. Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino. London: David Bogue, 1881. New and enlarged edition with author’s revisions and index, and an introduction by R.A. Streatfeild, London: A.C. Fifield, 1913. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 7, 1924. Gloucester: Sutton, 1986. Selections from Previous Works, with remarks on Mr G.J. Romanes’ ‘Mental Evolution in Animals,’ and a Psalm of Montreal. London: Trübner, 1884; Longmans, Green, 1890. Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues, and Other Short Pieces for the Piano. London and New York: Novello, Ewer, & Co., 1885. Holbein’s ‘Dance.’ London: Trübner, 1886. Reprinted in Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 19, 1925. Luck, or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? An attempt to throw additional light upon the late Mr. Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. London: Trübner, 1887 [1886]. New edition, with author’s corrections, additions to index, and a new introduction by Henry Festing Jones, London: A.C. Fifield, 1920. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 8, 1924. Ex Voto: An account of the Sacro Monte, or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia, with some notice of Tabachetti’s remaining work at the Sanctuary of Crea. London: Trübner, 1888. Revised, enlarged, and annotated edition, London: Trübner, 1889. Novara: Tipo-Litografia dei Fratelli Miglio, 1894; Italian translation by Angelo Rizzetti, Ex voto: studio artistico sulle opere d’arte del S. Monte di Varallo e di Crea. New edition, London: A.C. Fifield, 1915. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 9, 1924. Narcissus: A dramatic cantata in vocal score. London: Weekes & Co., 1888. [With Henry Festing Jones.] ‘The Deadlock in Darwinism.’ Universal Review, April, May, & June 1890. Reprinted in Essays on Life, Art, and Science, 1904; and Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 19, 1925. A Lecture on the Humour of Homer, delivered at the Working Men’s College, Great Ormond Street, London, January 30th, 1892. Re-printed, with preface and additional matter, from The Eagle. Cambridge: Metcalfe, [1892]. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 19, 1925. On the Trapanese Origin of the Odyssey. Cambridge: Metcalfe, 1893. Acireale: Tipografia Donzuso, 1894; Italian translation, Ancora sull’origine siciliana dell’Odissea. The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler, Headmaster of Shrewsbury School, 1798–

378 Select Bibliography 1836, and afterwards Bishop of Lichfield, in so far as they illustrate the scholastic, religious and social Life of England, 1790–1840. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1896. Shrewsbury Edition, vols 10–11, 1924. The Authoress of the Odyssey, where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands. London: Longmans, Green, 1897, 1900. London: A.C. Fifield, 1908, 1913. New edition, corrected and reset, with a preface by Henry Festing Jones, London: Jonathan Cape, 1922. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 12, 1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967; introduction by David Grene. Trapani: Celebes, 1968; Italian translation by G. Barrabini, L’autrice dell’Odissea. Rome: edizioni dell’Altana, 1998; Italian translation by Donata Aphel, L’autrice dell’Odissea. Bristol: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2003; introduction by Tim Whitmarsh. The Iliad of Homer rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original. London: Longmans, Green, 1898. New impression, corrected, London: A.C. Fifield, 1914. New edition, corrected, with a preface by Henry Festing Jones, London: Jonathan Cape, 1921. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 13, 1924. New York: Washington Square Press, 1969; revised and introduced by Malcolm M. Willcock, with supplementary materials prepared by Walter J. Miller. Ann Arbor: Borders Classics, 2004 (with The Odyssey). Shakespeare’s Sonnets reconsidered, and in part rearranged with introductory chapters, notes, and a reprint of the original 1609 edition. London: Longmans, Green, 1899. London: A.C. Fifield, 1910. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 14, 1925. New edition, with a note by Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew, London: Jonathan Cape, 1927. New York: AMS Press, 1971; reprint of 1899 edition. The Odyssey, rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original. London: Longmans, Green, 1900. New edition, corrected and reset, with a preface by Henry Festing Jones, London: Jonathan Cape, 1921. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 15, 1925. New York: Washington Square Press, 1969; revised and introduced by Malcolm M. Willcock, with supplementary materials prepared by Walter J. Miller. Ann Arbor: Borders Classics, 2004 (with The Iliad). Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, both by the original discoverer of the country and by his son. London: Grant Richards, 1901. London: A.C. Fifield, 1908; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1910. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue française, 1924; French translation by Valéry Larbaud, Nouveaux voyages en Erewhon; accomplis, vingt ans après la découverte du pays, par le premier explorateur et par son fils. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 16, 1925. New York: Modern Library, 1927; with Erewhon, introduction by Lewis Mumford. London: J.M. Dent, 1932; with Erewhon, edited by Ernest Rhys, introduction by Desmond MacCarthy. London: J.M. Dent, 1975; with Erewhon, introduction by Desmond MacCarthy.

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The Way of All Flesh. London: Grant Richards, 1903; published posthumously, as edited by R.A. Streatfeild. London: A.C. Fifield, 1908. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue française, 1921; French translation by Valéry Larbaud, Ainsi va toute chair. Shrewsbury edition, vol. 17, 1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936, 1944; introduction by George Bernard Shaw. New York: Heritage Press, 1936; introduction by Theodore Dreiser. New York: Modern Library, 1950; introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, 1986: edited by James Cochrane, with introduction by Richard Hoggart. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970; edited with an introduction by Peter Mudford. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004; reprint of 1903 edition. Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh, edited with an introduction and notes by Daniel F. Howard, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964; London: Methuen, 1964, 1965; follows the original manuscript as corrected and prepared for the press by Butler. Pan Classic, 1976; introduction and notes by Roger Robinson, based on the original text restored by Daniel F. Howard, 1964. London: J.M. Dent, 1993; edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Raby, following the original manuscript as corrected and prepared for the press by Butler. Essays on Life, Art, and Science. Edited with an introduction by R.A. Streatfeild, London: Grant Richards, 1904. London: A.C. Fifield, 1908. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 19, 1925. New York: Chelsea House, 1983. Ulysses: A dramatic oratorio in vocal score with accompaniment for the pianoforte. London: Weekes & Co., 1904. [With Henry Festing Jones.] The Humour of Homer, and Other Essays. Introduction by R.A. Streatfeild and biographical sketch of the author by Henry Festing Jones, London: A.C. Fifield, 1913. New edition, corrected and reset, with preface by Henry Festing Jones, London: Jonathan Cape, 1922. Shrewsbury Edition, vol. 19, 1925. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1967. Note-Books The Manuscript Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Copy A: 8 vols, 1874–1902, Chapin Library, Williamstown, MA: Butler Collection. Copy B: 6 vols, 1874– 1902, The British Library, St Pancras, London: Manuscript Collections. Copy C: 6 vols, 1874–1902, St John’s College Library, St John’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Edited with a preface and biographical statement by Henry Festing Jones. London: A.C. Fifield, 1912, 1918. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917. Shrewsbury edition, vol. 20 [1926]. London: Hogarth Press, 1985; reissue of the 1912 edition, with an introduction by P.N. Furbank.

380 Select Bibliography Butleriana. Edited by A.T. Bartholomew. Bloomsbury [London, England]: Nonesuch Press; New York: Random House, 1932. [Folcroft, PA.]: Folcroft Library Editions, 1978; reprint of 1932 edition. Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Edited by A.T. Bartholomew. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934. Carnets. French translation by Valéry Larbaud (1912 edition). Paris: Gallimard, 1936. Note-Books: Selections. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, Volume 1 (1874–1883). Edited by Hans-Peter Breuer. Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1984. Letters Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss E.M.A. Savage, 1871–1885. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. Samuele Butler e la Valle Sesia. Varallo Sesia, 1940. The Family Letters of Samuel Butler, 1841–1886. Edited by Arnold Silver. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962. The Correspondence of Samuel Butler with His Sister May. Edited by Daniel F. Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. 2. Writings about Samuel Butler Biographical and Critical Studies Allis, Michael. ‘Samuel Butler and Handel: A Study in Obsession.’ Händel-Jahrbuch 44 (1998): 225–71. Angelo, Giovanni. ‘A Note on Samuel Butler in Sicily.’ English Miscellany [Rome] 22 (1971): 263–7. Azzalin, Roberto, ed. Cartoline dal Sacro Monte di Varallo: un meraviglioso viaggio in compagnia di un brioso turista vittoriano; il dottor Samuel Butler. Azzate (Varese): Macchione, 1998. Bateson, W. ‘Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights.’ In Darwin and Modern Science: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of Charles Darwin and of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of The Origin of the Species, edited by A.C. Seward, 85–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910. Bekker, Willem Gerard. An Historical and Critical Review of Samuel Butler’s

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Literary Works. Rotterdam: Gedrucht bij Nijgh and Van Ditmar; London: The Times Book Club; New York: Russell & Russell, 1925. Bellorini, Mariagrazia. ‘L’Italia di Samuel Butler.’ Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 1 (1991): 137–54. Bignami, Marialuisa. ‘Samuel Butler’s Antipodes.’ In Vite di Utopia, edited by Vita Fortunati and Paola Spinozzi, 157–66. Ravenna: Longo, 2001. Bissell, Claude T. ‘The Butlerian Inheritance of G.B. Shaw.’ Dalhousie Review 41 (1962): 159–73. – ‘Samuel Butler and Evolution.’ In Evolution, Its Science and Doctrine: Symposium Presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1959, edited by Thomas M.W. Cameron, 189–98. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960. – ‘A Study of The Way of All Flesh.’ In Nineteenth-Century Studies, collected and edited by Herbert Davis, William C. De Vane, and R.C. Bald, 277–303. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940. Blackmur, R.P. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation, 226–33. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935. Blom, Eric. ‘Imitation Handel.’ In Stepchildren of Music, 183–91. London: G.T. Foulis, 1925. Bolitho, Hector, and John Mulgan. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In The Emigrants: Early Travellers to the Antipodes, 171–84. London: Selwyn & Blount, 1939. Booth, Alison. ‘The Author of The Authoress of the Odyssey: Samuel Butler as a Paterian Critic.’ SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 25, no. 4 (autumn 1985): 865–83. Brassington, A.C. The Predestined Choice: Samuel Butler in Canterbury. Christchurch, New Zealand: Pegasus Press, 1972. Breuer, Hans-Peter. ‘A Reconsideration of Samuel Butler’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered.’ Dalhousie Review 57, no. 3 (1977): 507–24. – ‘Samuel Butler (1835–1902).’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 57, ‘Victorian Prose Writers after 1867,’ edited by William B. Thesing, 35–50. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987. – ‘Samuel Butler and George Frideric Handel.’ Dalhousie Review 55, no. 3 (1975): 467–90. – ‘Samuel Butler’s “The Book of the Machines” and the Argument from Design.’ Modern Philology 72, no. 4 (May 1975): 365–83. – ‘Samuel Butler’s “Notebooks”: The Outlook of a Victorian Black Sheep.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 22, no. 1 (1979): 17–37. – ‘The Source of Morality in Butler’s Erewhon.’ Victorian Studies 16 (1973): 317– 28. Cannan, Gilbert. Samuel Butler: A Critical Study. London: Martin Secker, 1915.

382 Select Bibliography Cannon-Brookes, Peter. ‘Varallo Revisited: Samuel Butler and the Sacro Monte.’ Apollo (August 1974): 108–16. Carey, Glenn O. ‘Samuel Butler’s Theory of Evolution: A Summary.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 7 (1964): 230–33. Carswell, Catherine. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In The English Novelists: A Survey of the Novel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists, edited by Derek Verschoyle, 197–212. New York: Harcourt, Brace; London: Chatto & Windus, 1936. Clutton-Brock, A. ‘The Life of Samuel Butler.’ In Essays on Books, 142–56. London: Methuen, 1920. – ‘The Note-Books of Samuel Butler.’ In Essays on Books, 129–41. London: Methuen, 1920. Cockshut, A.O.J. ‘Samuel Butler: The Search for Paradox.’ In The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought, 1840–1890, 10–11, 99–114, 129, 182, 184. New York: New York University Press, 1964. Cohen, Philip. ‘Stamped on His Works: The Decline of Samuel Butler’s Literary Reputation.’ Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 18, no. 1 (1985): 64–81. Cole, G.D.H. Samuel Butler. Denver: A. Swallow, 1948. – Samuel Butler and The Way of All Flesh. London: Home & Van Thal, 1947. Coleman, Brian. ‘Samuel Butler, Darwin and Darwinism.’ Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 7, no. 1 (1974): 93–105. Connell, Allison. ‘Forgotten Masterpieces of Literary Translation: Valéry Larbaud’s “Butlers.”’ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 1 (spring 1974): 167–90. Copland, R.A. ‘Butler’s Metaphorical Man.’ Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 42 (November 1974): 163–74. Cowie, Donald. ‘Samuel Butler in New Zealand.’ London Mercury 35 (March 1937): 480–8. Crane, John Kenny. ‘The Pontifex Genealogy: Evolution and Determinism.’ College Literature 6, no. 2 (1979): 85–102. Currie, A.W. ‘Samuel Butler’s Canadian Investment.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 32 (January 1963): 109–25. Darwin, Charles. Autobiography, 167–219. Edited by Nora Barlow. London: Collins, 1958. Davis, Herbert. ‘Samuel Butler, 1835–1902.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 5 (October 1935): 21–36. Dawson, Carl. ‘Strange Metamorphoses: Samuel Butler’s “Unconscious Memory” and The Way of All Flesh.’ In Prophets of Past Time, 70–97. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

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DeLaura, David J. ‘Echoes of Butler, Browning, Conrad, and Pater in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot.’ English Language Notes 3 (March 1966): 211–21. Dentith, Simon. ‘Imagination and Inversion in Nineteenth-Century Utopian Writing.’ In Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, edited by David Seed, 137–52. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Dougher, Sarah. ‘An Epic for the Ladies: Contextualizing Samuel Butler’s Theory of Odyssey Authorship.’ Arethusa 34, no. 2 (2001): 173–84. Dupee, F.W. ‘Butler’s Way.’ New York Review of Books, 24 August 1967, 26–31. Durio, Alberto. Samuel Butler e la Val Sesia. Varallo Sesia: Tipografia Testa, 1986; first published in 1958. Dyson, A.E. ‘The Honest Sceptic: Samuel Butler.’ In The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony, 112–37. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965. Farrington, B. Samuel Butler and the Odyssey. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. Federico, Annette R. ‘Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh: Rewriting the Family.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 38, no. 4 (1995): 466–82. Fifield, A.C. ‘Butler and His Publishers.’ Now & Then 9 (July 1922): 20–8. Fleishman, Avrom. ‘Personal Myth: The Victorian Autobiographers.’ In Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, edited by George P. Landow, 215–34. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979. Fletcher, Jefferson B. ‘Samuel Butler (1835–1902).’ In English Literature during the Last Half-Century, edited by J.W. Cunliffe, 59–81. New York: Macmillan, 1919. Ford, Ford Madox. ‘Biography and Criticism.’ Review of Samuel Butler, Author of ‘Erewhon’ (1835–1902): A Memoir, by Henry Festing Jones. In Ford Madox Ford, Critical Essays, edited by Max Saunders and Richard Stang, 197–202. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 2002; reprint of 1919 review. Forsdyke, Donald R. ‘Heredity as Transmission of Information: Butlerian “Intelligent Design.”’ Centaurus 48 (2006): 133–48. Forster, E.M. ‘The Legacy of Samuel Butler.’ Listener, 12 June 1952, 955–6. Fort, Joseph B. Samuel Butler (1835–1902). Vol. 1, Étude d’un caractère et d’une intelligence. Vol. 2, L’Écrivain. Paris: Didier; Bordeaux: Bière, 1935. – ‘Samuel Butler 1935; le bilan d’un anniversaire.’ Langues modernes (June 1936): 352–60. Frye, Northrop. ‘Some Reflections on Life and Habit.’ F.E.L. Priestley Lecture Series, 2nd Lecture, 17 February 1988. Lethbridge, Alberta: University of Lethbridge Press, 1988. Reprinted in part in Northrop Frye, Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988, edited by Robert D. Denham, 141–54. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

384 Select Bibliography – ‘Varieties of Literary Utopias.’ In Utopias and Utopian Thought, edited by Frank E. Manuel, 25–49. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Furbank, P.N. Samuel Butler, 1835–1902. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. Ganz, Margaret. Humor, Irony, and the Realm of Madness: Psychological Studies in Dickens, Butler, and Others. New York: AMS Press, 1990. – ‘Samuel Butler: Ironic Abdication and the Way to the Unconscious.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 28, no. 4 (1985): 366–94. Garnett, Martha Roscoe [Mrs. R.S.]. Samuel Butler and His Family Relations. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1926. Garrett, J.C. Hope or Disillusion: Three Versions of Utopia; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Butler, George Orwell. Christchurch, New Zealand: Canterbury University Press, 1984. Giddey, Ernest. ‘Zigzags d’artiste: Samuel Butler.’ In Hors des chemins battus: le passage en Suisse de quelques voyageurs anglais peu conventionnels, 53–70. Le Mont-sur-Lausanne: Editions Ouverture, 1998. Giovanni, Angelo. ‘Samuel Butler in Sicily.’ Review of English Literature 3 (January 1962): 47–52. Gnappi, Carla Maria. ‘A Victorian Ulysses: Samuel Butler.’ In Viaggi in Utopia, edited by Raffaella Baccolini, 265–82. Ravenna: Longo, 1996. Gosse, Edmund. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In Aspects and Impressions, 55–76. London: Cassell, 1922. Gounelas, Ruth. ‘Samuel Butler, Homeopathy, and the Unity of Opposing Principles.’ AUMLA – Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 53 (May 1980): 25–41. – ‘Samuel Butler’s Cambridge Background, and Erewhon.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 24, no. 1 (1981): 17–39. Graff, Ann-Barbara. ‘“Administrative Nihilism”: Evolution, Ethics and Victorian Utopian Satire.’ Utopian Studies 12, no. 2 (2001): 33–52. Graves, Robert. Homer’s Daughter. London: Cassell, 1955. Greenacre, Phyllis. The Quest for the Father: A Study of the Darwin-Butler Controversy, as a Contribution to the Understanding of the Creative Individual. New York: International Universities Press, 1963. Grene, David. ‘The Strangest Work of Classical Scholarship: Samuel Butler and The Authoress of the Odyssey.’ Midway 8 (June 1967): 69–79. Guest, David. ‘Acquired Characters: Cultural versus Biological Determinism in The Way of All Flesh.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 34, no. 3 (1991): 283–92. Haack, Susan. “The Ideal of Intellectual Integrity, in Life and Literature.” New Literary History 36 (summer 2005): 359–73.

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Hammond, Wayne. ‘Misadventures of a Landlord.’ Samuel Butler Newsletter 5 (December 1984): 11–17. Henderson, Philip. Samuel Butler, the Incarnate Bachelor. London: Cohen and West; Toronto: Burns and MacEachern, 1953. Hicks, Granville. ‘Samuel Butler, Cautious Rebel.’ In Figures of Transition: A Study of British Literature at the End of the Nineteenth Century, 145–76. New York: Macmillan, 1939. Hill, Brian. ‘Samuel Butler in Canada.’ Dalhousie Review 16 (April 1936): 54–7. Holt, Lee E. ‘Critical Opinion Concerning the Work of Samuel Butler, 1835– 1902.’ Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1940. – ‘E.M. Forster and Samuel Butler.’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 61 (September 1946): 804–19. – ‘The Note-Books of Samuel Butler.’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 60 (September 1945): 1165–79. – Samuel Butler. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964. Revised edition, 1989. – ‘Samuel Butler and His Victorian Critics.’ English Literary History 8 (June 1941): 146–59. – ‘Samuel Butler’s Rise to Fame.’ Publications of the Modern Language Association 57 (September 1942): 867–78. – ‘Samuel Butler Up to Date.’ English Fiction in Transition, 1880–1920 3, no. 1 (1960): 17–21. Howard, Daniel F. ‘Erewhon as a Victorian Document.’ Samuel Butler Newsletter 1 (spring 1978): 1–12. Jedrejewski, Jan. ‘Samuel Butler’s Treatment of Christianity in Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 31, no. 4 (1988): 415–36. Jeffers, Thomas L. Samuel Butler Revalued. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. Joad, C.E.M. Samuel Butler (1835–1902). London: L. Parsons, 1924. Jones, Henry Festing. Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler: A Step towards Reconciliation. London: A.C. Fifield, 1911. – Diary of a Journey through North Italy to Sicily in the spring of 1903 undertaken for the purpose of leaving the MSS. of three books by Samuel Butler at Varallo-Sesia, Aci-Reale and Trapani. Cambridge: Printed for private circulation by Metcalfe, 1904. – Samuel Butler: A Sketch. London: Jonathan Cape, 1921. – Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon’ (1835–1902): A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1919. Jones, Jenny Robin. ‘Handel by the Rangitata: Samuel Butler (1835–1902).’ In

386 Select Bibliography Writers in Residence: A Journey with Pioneer New Zealand Writers, 146–61. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2004. Jones, Joseph J. The Cradle of Erewhon: Samuel Butler in New Zealand. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959. Kellogg, Vernon Lyman. ‘Samuel Butler and Biological Memory.’ Science 35 (17 May 1912): 769–71. Kenner, Hugh. ‘Homer’s Sticks and Stones.’ James Joyce Quarterly 6 (1969): 285–9. Kettle, Arnold. ‘Samuel Butler: The Way of All Flesh.’ In An Introduction to the English Novel, vol. 2, Henry James to the Present Day, 35–48. London: Hutchinson, 1951–3. Kingsmill, Hugh. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In After Puritanism, 1850–1900, 57–110. London: Duckworth, 1929. Knoepflmacher, U.C. ‘“Ishmael” or Anti-Hero? The Division of Self in The Way of All Flesh.’ English Fiction in Transition, 1880–1920 4, no. 3 (February 1961): 28–35. – Laughter & Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. – Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. – ‘Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: A Postscript.’ In British Victorian Literature: Recent Revaluations, edited by Shiv K. Kumar, 206–7, 209–11, 213. New York: New York University Press, 1969. – ‘The Rival Ladies: Mrs. Ward’s “Lady Connie” and Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”’ Victorian Studies 4 (December 1960): 141–58. Lange, Petronella Jacoba de. Samuel Butler, Critic and Philosopher. Zutphen, Netherlands: W.J. Thieme, 1925. Lappin, Henry A. ‘Un-Victorian Victorian.’ Bookman 51 (March 1920): 33–7. Larbaud, Valéry. ‘Les carnets de Samuel Butler.’ Nouvelle Revue française 43 (1936): 83–98. – ‘Samuel Butler.’ Revue de France 1 (October 1923): 449–64. LeMire, E.D. ‘Irony in Erewhon.’ Humanities Association Newsletter [Kingston, Ontario] 16 (fall 1965): 27–36. Leyburn, Ellen Douglass. ‘Satiric Journeys II: Erewhon.’ In Satiric Allegory: Mirror of Man, 92–106. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Lo Schiavo, Renato. La teoria dell’origine siciliana dell’Odissea: il cieco, la giovinetta ed il malconsiglio. Palermo: Istituto siciliano di studi politici ed economici [ISSPE], 2003. MacCarthy, Desmond. ‘Author of Erewhon.’ Quarterly Review 220 (January 1914): 152–73.

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– ‘Samuel Butler.’ In Criticism, 1–16. London: Putnam, 1932. – ‘Samuel Butler: An Impression.’ In Remnants, 62–8. London: Constable, 1918. MacDonald, W.L. ‘Samuel Butler and Evolution.’ North American Review (December-February 1926–7): 223, 626–37. Macrorie, Ken. ‘The Way of all Communicators: Samuel Butler on Painting and Writing.’ ETC: A Review of General Semantics 15 (summer 1958): 267–71. Maling, Peter Bromley. Samuel Butler at Mesopotamia, together with Butler’s ‘Forest Creek’ manuscript and his letters to Tripp and Acland. Wellington: New Zealand Historic Places Trust, 1960. Maxwell, William. ‘Your Affectionate Son.’ New Yorker, 13 October 1962, 225–31. More, Paul Elmer. ‘Samuel Butler of Erewhon.’ In A New England Group and Others: Shelburne Essays, Eleventh Series, 169–99. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921. Morton, Peter. ‘Butler on Heredity.’ In The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900, 156–94. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984. Muggeridge, Malcolm. The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1936; New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937. Murry, John Middleton. ‘The Life of Samuel Butler.’ In Aspects of Literature, 113–20. London: Collins, 1921. Myers, Robert Manson. ‘Samuel Butler: Handelian.’ Musical Quarterly 34 (April 1948): 177–98. Noddings, Nel. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In Fifty Major Thinkers on Education: From Confucius to Dewey, edited by Joy A. Palmer, 138–43. London & New York: Routledge, 2001. Norrman, Ralf. Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus. London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986. – Wholeness Restored: Love of Symmetry as a Shaping Force in the Writings of Henry James, Kurt Vonnegut, Samuel Butler, and Raymond Chandler. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. O’Connor, William Van. ‘Samuel Butler and Bloomsbury.’ In From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse, edited by Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann Jr, 257–73. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958. Oldroyd, D.R. Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution, 36, 315, 324–7. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1980. O’Neill, H.C. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In The Great Victorians, edited by H.J. Massingham and Hugh Massingham, 97–107. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1932. Otis, Laura. Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries, esp. 19–25. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

388 Select Bibliography Paradis, James G. ‘The Butler-Darwin Biographical Controversy in the Victorian Periodical Press.’ In Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, 307–29. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. – ‘Butler, Samuel.’ In Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists, edited by Bernard Lightman, 4 vols, 1:358–61. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. – ‘Satire and Science in Victorian Culture.’ In Victorian Science in Context, edited by Bernard Lightman, 143–75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Parsell, Roger. In the Wild with Samuel Butler, or, A Man of Three Centuries. [Townsville, Australia]: Department of English, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1981. – ‘Samuel Butler (1835–1902) and His Critics since 1940.’ Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Denver, 1972. Pauly, Philip J. ‘Samuel Butler and His Darwinian Critics.’ Victorian Studies 25, no. 2 (winter 1982): 161–80. Pocock, L.G. ‘Samuel Butler and the Authoress of the Odyssey.’ Landfall, 5 March 1951, 31–6. – ‘Samuel Butler and the Site of Scheria.’ Greece and Rome 4 (October 1957): 125–30. Pritchett, V.S. ‘The Way of All Flesh: One of the Time Bombs of Literature.’ New Statesman and Nation 24 (12 December 1942): 392. Reprinted as ‘A Victorian Son,’ in The Living Novel, by V.S. Pritchett, 109–15. London: Chatto & Windus, 1946. Prosio, Pier Massimo. ‘Samuel Butler a Casale.’ Studi piemontesi 23 (November 1994): 355–63. Prum, M. ‘Hommes et machines chez Samuel Butler.’ Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 31 (April 1990): 111–18. Raby, Peter. Samuel Butler: A Biography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991; London: Hogarth Press, 1991. Rattray, Robert F. ‘The Philosophy of Samuel Butler.’ Mind 23 (July 1914): 371–85. – Samuel Butler: A Chronicle and an Introduction. London: Duckworth, 1935. Robinson, Roger. ‘“Halle-bloody-lujah”: Samuel Butler’s Complete Notebooks.’ In Of Pavlova, Poetry and Paradigms: Essays in Honour of Harry Orsman, edited by Laurie Bauer and Christine Franzen, 78–90. Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 1993. – ‘Samuel Butler: Exploration and Imagination.’ In Provincial Perspectives: Essays in Honour of W.J. Gardner, edited by Len Richardson and W.D.

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McIntyre, 61–73. Christchurch, New Zealand: University of Canterbury, 1980. Russell, Edward S. ‘Samuel Butler and the Memory Theories of Heredity.’ In Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology, 335–44. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; reprint of 1916 edition. Shaffer, Elinor. Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer and Art Critic. London: Reaktion Books, 1988. – ‘Samuel Butler’s Fantastic Maps: Erewhon, the “New-Jerusalem,” and the Periplus of Odysseus.’ Word & Image 4 (April–June 1988): 510–22. Sharma, G.N. ‘Samuel Butler and Edmund Burke: A Comparative Study in British Conservatism.’ Dalhousie Review 53 (spring 1973): 5–29. Sharma, Pavan. “New Beginnings and Vexed Ideals: F.E. Maning’s Old New Zealand, John Logan Campbell’s Poenamo, and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.” New Literatures Review 41 (April 2004): 19–36. Shaw, George Bernard. ‘Butler When I Was a Nobody.’ Saturday Review of Literature 33 (29 April 1950): 9–10. – ‘First Aid to Critics.’ In John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara: Also How He Lied to Her Husband, 161–2. 1907; London: Constable, 1924. – ‘Old Bachelor Sam Butler.’ Observer, 26 March 1950. Reprinted in Shavian 7 (October 1963): 8–10. Silvani, Giovanna. ‘Le montagne incantate di Samuel Butler.’ In Viaggi in utopia e altre luoghi, edited by Maria Enrica D’Agostini, 143–58. Milan: Guerini e associati, 1989. Simpson, George Gaylord. ‘Lamarck, Darwin and Butler: Three Approaches to Evolution.’ American Scholar 30 (spring 1961): 238–49. Stallybrass, Peter. ‘The World Turned Upside-Down: Inversion, Gender and the State.’ In The Matter of Difference: Materialist-Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Valerie Wayne, 201–20. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Stanford, Donald E. ‘Robert Bridges and Samuel Butler on Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Exchange of Letters.’ Philological Quarterly 50 (April 1971): 281–91; Shakespeare Quarterly 22, no. 4 (fall 1971): 329–35. Stark, Susanne. ‘Overcoming Butlerian Obstacles: May Sinclair and the Problem of Biological Determinism.’ Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21, no. 3 (1992): 265–83. Stillman, Clara G. Samuel Butler, a Mid-Victorian Modern. London: Martin Secker; New York: Viking Press, 1932. Stuart, Ross. ‘Samuel Butler and Charles Paine Pauli: A Friendship Reconsidered.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 28, no. 2 (1985): 145–61. Sussman, Herbert L. ‘Evolution and the Machine: Samuel Butler.’ In Victorians

390 Select Bibliography and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology, 135–61. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Teofili, Raffaella. ‘Fiction and Deception: Patterns of Cultural Perpetuation in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.’ Rivista di studi vittoriani, no. 14 (2002): 89–103. Tobin, Patricia Drechsel. ‘Ernest Pontifex; or, The Way of All Flesh: Self-Begetting, Space, and Forgetfulness.’ In Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative, 46–53. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Turner, Frank Miller. ‘Samuel Butler: The Man of Temper.’ In Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England, 164–200. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Vita-Finzi, Claudio. ‘Samuel Butler and Italy.’ Italian Studies 18 (January 1963): 78–100. von Haast, H.F. The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast, Explorer, Geologist, Museum Builder. Wellington, New Zealand: n.p., 1948. [Ward, James.] Review of Evolution, Old and New, by Samuel Butler. In Examiner, 17 May 1879, 646–7. Whitmarsh, Tim. ‘What Samuel Butler Saw: Classics, Authorship and Cultural Authority in Late Victorian England.’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 48 (2002): 66–86. Willcocks, M.P. ‘Samuel Butler: Of the Way of All Flesh.’ English Review 39 (1924): 524–40. Willey, Basil. Darwin and Butler: Two Versions of Evolution. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960. Wilson, Edmund. ‘The Satire of Samuel Butler.’ In The Triple Thinkers: Ten Essays on Literature, 210–19. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. Woolf, Leonard. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In Essays on Literature, History, Politics, Etc., 44–56. London: Hogarth Press, 1927. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.’ Reprinted in The Virginia Woolf Reader, edited by Mitchell Leaska, 192–202. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Early version of essay published as ‘Character in Fiction,’ in the Criterion, 1922–1939, edited by T.S. Eliot, 2 (October 1923–July 1924): 409–30. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. Yeasted, Rita. ‘The Handelian Quality of Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.’ Modern Language Studies 9, no. 2 (1979): 23–32. Yeats, John Butler. ‘Recollections of Samuel Butler.’ In Essays, Irish and American, 9–21. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1918. Zabel, Morton Dauwen. ‘Samuel Butler: The Victorian Insolvency.’ In Craft and Character: Texts, Methods, and Vocation in Modern Fiction, 97–113. London:

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Viking Press, 1957. Reprinted in The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism, compiled by Ian P. Watt, 446–61. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Zemka, Sue. ‘Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism.’ ELH 69, no. 2 (2002): 439–72. Bibliographies and Catalogues Bethke, Frederick John. Three Victorian Travel Writers : An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism on Mrs. Frances Milton Trollope, Samuel Butler, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1977. Breuer, Hans-Peter, and Roger Parsell, comp. & ed. Samuel Butler: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him. New York: Garland, 1990. Chapin Library. Catalogue of the Collection of Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) in the Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. Portland, ME: Southworth-Anthoensen Press, 1945. Davies, David W. ‘The Samuel Butler Collection of the Honnold Library.’ Claremont Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1960): 59–62. Hammond, Wayne G. ‘Samuel Butler: A Checklist of Works and Criticism.’ Samuel Butler Newsletter 3, no. 1 (June 1979): 13–24; 3, no. 2 (December 1980): 51–67; 4, no. 1 (June 1981): 6–20. Harkness, Stanley Bates. The Career of Samuel Butler (1835–1902): A Bibliography. London: Bodley Head, 1955. Hoppé, A.J. A Bibliography of the Writings of Samuel Butler (Author of ‘Erewhon’) and of Writings about Him. With some letters from Samuel Butler to the Rev. F.G. Fleay, now first published. London: Office of ‘The Bookman’s Journal’; New York: Bowker, 1925. Howard, Daniel F. ‘Samuel Butler.’ In Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research, edited by George H. Ford, 288–307. New York: Modern Language Association, 1978. Jones, Henry Festing, and A.T. Bartholomew. The Samuel Butler Collection at St. John’s College, Cambridge: A Catalogue and a Commentary. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1921. Samuel Butler, 1835–1902: A Collection. London: Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, 1988. Shaffer, Elinor. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh: Photographs, Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings by Samuel Butler (1835–1902); A Catalogue of Touring Exhibition Held at: Bolton Museum and Art Gallery 16 December 1989–24 February 1990; The Royal Museum and Art Gallery, Canterbury 3 March–31 March

392 Select Bibliography 1990; St. John’s College, Cambridge 17 April-23 April 1990; D.L.I. Museum & Arts Centre, Durham 26 May-24 June 1990; University Art Gallery, Nottingham 2 October-6 November 1990. Bolton: Bolton Museum & Art Gallery, 1989. – The Way of All Flesh: Samuel Butler (1835–1902); A Centenary Exhibition at St. John’s College, 26 May–30 June 2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, n.d. Sotheby & Co. Catalogue of the Very Important Manuscripts and Books by and about Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon: for the most part formerly the property of the late Henry Festing Jones, Butler’s friend, biographer and, in succession to R.A. Streatfeild, his literary executor: the property of A.T. Bartholomew, Esq., co-editor of the Shrewsbury edition of Samuel Butler’s complete works, and present literary executor of Samuel Butler and of Henry Festing Jones, which will be sold by auction ... 1st day of December, 1930, at one o’clock precisely. London: J. Davy & Sons, 1930. Wilson, Carroll A., comp. Catalogue of the Collection of Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) in the Chapin Library, Williams College. Portland, ME: SouthworthAnthoensen Press, 1945.

Contributors

David Amigoni is Professor of English and Director of the Research Institute for the Humanities at Keele University. A specialist in Victorian prose, particularly biography and autobiography, and in the relationship between biological science and literary culture, his books include Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (1993), The English Novel and Prose Narrative (2000), and Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and the Culture Concept in NineteenthCentury Writing (2007). He is editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture. Mary Beard is Professor of Classics, Cambridge University, and Fellow of Newnham College, as well as Classics Editor for the Times Literary Supplement. Her books include Religions of Rome (1998, with John North and Simon Price), The Invention of Jane Harrison (2000), Classical Art from Greece to Rome (2001, with John Henderson), The Parthenon (2002), and The Roman Triumph (2007). Dame Gillian Beer, freelance writer, is former King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University, and President of Clare Hall at Cambridge. Her books include Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983, 2nd ed. 2000), George Eliot (1986), Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996), and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996). Elizabeth Edwards, Professor in the Cultural History of Photography and Senior Research Fellow, University of the Arts London, specializes in the ethnography of photography, visual anthropology, and collections history. Her books include Anthropology and Photography, 1860–

394 Contributors

1920 (1992); Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (2001), and Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (2004, co-edited with Janice Hart). Ellen T. Harris, Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a historian of music, specializing in baroque opera, particularly the music of Handel and Purcell, and in baroque vocal performance practice. Her books include Handel and the Pastoral Tradition (1980), Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1987), The Librettos of Handel’s Operas (13 vols, 1989), and Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (2001). Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University and the editor of Isis. He specializes in the cultural history of nineteenthcentury British science. His books include The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (1987), Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth Century Religious Belief (1990, coedited with Richard Helmstadter), Victorian Science in Context (1997), and Figuring it Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (2006, coedited with Ann Shteir). James G. Paradis is Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing and Humanistic Studies and Professor of Science and Technical Communication, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Head of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. His books include T.H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (1978), Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives (1984, coedited with Thomas Postlewait), and Evolution and Ethics (1989, coedited with George C. Williams). Ruth Parkin-Gounelas is Professor of English Literature and Culture at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. Her books include Fictions of the Female Self (1991), Literature and Psychoanalysis: Intertextual Readings (2001), and (coedited with Sean Homer and Yannis Stavrakakis) Objects: Material, Psychic, Aesthetic (2007). Roger Robinson, Professor of English, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, specializes in late nineteenth-century English literature, with additional scholarly interests in contemporary New Zealand

Contributors

395

and Pacific poetry and prose. His books include Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998), Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings (2003), and Running in Literature (2003). Elinor Shaffer, Fellow of the British Academy, is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She specializes in Romantic literature, literature and the visual arts, and literature and science. Her books include ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (1975); Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer and Art Critic (1988); and The Third Culture: Literature and Science (1998). She is series editor of The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe. Sally Shuttleworth, Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford, is a specialist in Victorian studies, with a keen interest in emergent views of psychology and the relationship between literature and science. Her books include George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (1984), Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996), and Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (1998, coedited with Jenny Bourne Taylor). Herbert Sussman teaches at the New School and is Professor of English, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Victorians and the Machine (1968), Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1979), and Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (1995). Clarice Zdanski, artist, freelance writer, translator, formerly Professor in Art and Art History and currently Artist in Residence at Franklin College, Lugano, Switzerland, specializes in Italian Renaissance art history and criticism. Her publications include Giulio Campagnola umanista: Una reinterpretazione alla luce di nuovi documenti (1987), along with several translations, travel guides, and exhibit catalogues.

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Credits

I gratefully acknowledge the Masters and Fellows of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, for permission to use Figure 1, Butler at age 54; Figure 5.1 (b), Self-portrait, Butler, 1878; Figure 6.1, The Butler Family; Figure 7.2, Rose, the model; Figure 10.1 (a) and (b), Worshippers outside the church at Madesimo; Figure 10.3, Marketplace at Novara; Figure 10.4, The Chapel of The Marriage at Cana; Figure 10.5 (a) and (b), The Stoning of St Stephen; Figure 10.6 (a) and (b), Tabachetti’s Crucifixion Chapel; Figure 10.7, Women looking in at the Sposalizio Chapel; Figure 10.8, Girl adjusting stocking; Figure 10.9, An old priest reading; Figure 10.10, Public spaces: (a) Piazza St Carlo, (b) Two priests on a steamer. I thank the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand, for permission to use Figure 1.1, Samuel Butler, Sketch of his homestead, Mesopotamia. I thank the Tate Britain, London, for permission to use Figure 3.1, Butler’s Royal Academy exhibition painting, Mr Heatherley’s Holiday; and Figure 7.1, August Blue by Henry Scott Tuke. I thank the American Museum of Natural History, Special Collections, for permission to use Figure 5.1 (a), Darwin, last photograph, by his son Leonard. I am grateful to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for permission to use Figure 10.2, Magazine seller, Ludgate Circus, photograph by Paul Martin, 1900.

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Index

A page number in italics indicates the presence of an illustration. Academy, 340n31 Accademia del Disegno (Florence), 226 Accademia di San Luca (Rome), 226 acoustics, 47 adaptation, 108; of children, 151; in Darwinian theory, 121, 124, 151, 167n21; technology as, 102–3, 197– 8 Aeschylus, 29 Airy, George Biddell, 129 Albert Hall (London), 312 Alberti, Leon Battista, 239 Alford, Henry, 67, 70, 75–9, 82 Allegri, Antonio. See Correggio Allen, Grant, 118, 128, 132; Charles Darwin, 130, 211; review of Evolution, Old and New, 142n43, 200, 347–8 Allis, Michael, 302, 315n39 Alter, Stephen, 94 alternation, theory of, 208 ambiguity (in SB’s writing), 16, 346, 347–50, 352, 354 Amigoni, David, 11, 15, 91–110 Amis, Martin: Time’s Arrow, 164

Anglican Church. See Church of England animals and plants: cognitive powers of, 92–3; language of, 94–5, 150–1; link with machines, 127; memory or consciousness of, 45, 47, 199 Annan, Noel, 197 Anthropological Institute (London), 258 anthropology: cultural differentiation, 251; and cultural past, 285n63; direct observation and naturalism, 254–5; photography used in, 254–5, 258; salvage ethnography, 251–2, 272–8 anti-academic views (of SB), 226–7, 231, 235, 238, 243, 330 archaeological imagination, 251–2, 272–8 archives and catalogues, 105–6; British Museum catalogue, 106, 112n35; record photography, 272– 5; SB’s unpublished archive, 347, 362–4 Argyll, Duke of, 128 Armstrong, Nancy, 256

400 Index Arnauld, Antoine, 62 Arne, Thomas: Alfred, 308; ‘Rule, Britannia,’ 308 Arnold, Matthew: Culture and Anarchy, 82, 350 Arnold, Thomas, 70 art and artists: links with science, 226, 231; Old Masters exhibitions, 224; provisional nature of, 357; SB’s artistic work, 10, 223, 363; SB’s studies and training in, 224, 230–1, 260; secularization of, 354. See also Butler, Samuel, works: art art education, 223, 226, 239–40, 245 art history: academism and professionalization, 226–7, 231, 235, 243; avant garde, 240; idea of decline, 238–9; Italian primitives, 224; local art, 241–5; neglected artists, 234–5; SB’s writing on, 13, 223, 230, 234, 237–8, 240–5; style and period, 242–3; theoretical and canonical basis for, 226–7, 237; use of photography, 241 Arts and Crafts Movement (England), 240, 244 associationism, theory of, 191, 196, 197, 198–9, 202 Athenaeum, The, 303, 367n17; reviews of SB’s writing, 201, 211, 329, 336; SB’s Homeric articles in, 327, 332, 333; Spencer’s letter to, 135, 207 Atkinson, Mrs Beavington, 304 Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake, 39 Austen, Jane, 5 authority, 70; cultural, 3, 5, 13, 123, 355, 362; parental, 355; religious,

64, 83; scientific, 14, 117–18, 131–6, 351 authorship and authorial or literary identity, 105–10; ambiguity or instability of, 346–7; control of reader’s interpretation, 348; ‘departments’ of writing, 91, 109– 10; literary power, 92, 100; and literary production, 99–100; literary skills, 132; neglected authors of the past, 92–3, 346–7, 351–2, 354–6. See also identity Babcock, R.G., 339n24 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 289, 293, 306–7; Invention in F major, 308; ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring,’ 309; St Matthew Passion, 289 bachelorhood and bachelor culture, 170–91; domesticity of, 171–3, 174, 190–1; and the gay subculture, 171, 183, 184; respectability of, 170–1; and same-sex desire, 170–6; SB’s avocation of, 173–4. See also homoeroticism and homosexuality bachelor narrators, 84n10 Baedeker, Karl, 244, 245; Handbook for Travellers, 229, 232, 236, 239 Bain, Alexander, 196, 197, 200, 202, 216n30; The Senses and the Intellect, 197, 198 ballad operas, 296 Bandinelli, Baccio, 226 Barnby, Joseph, 290, 291 Baroque styles, 80, 236 Barthes, Roland, 244, 272 Barzun, Jacques, 6 Bassett, S.E., 339n22 Bastian, H. Charlton, 116

Index Bateson, Gregory: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 285–6n77 Bateson, William, 6 Bayle, Pierre, 61, 65; Dictionnaire historique et critique, 62 Beaconsfield, Lord. See Disraeli, Benjamin Beard, Mary, 15, 317–37 Beer, Gillian, 7, 9, 45–56, 94, 98–9, 167n21; Darwin’s Plots, 98 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 289, 293, 307 Bellini, Giovanni, 224, 289 Bellini, Vincenzo: La sonnambula, 299 Benjamin, Walter, 271, 277 Benn, J. Miriam, 156, 167n26 Bennett, Arnold, 5 Bentley, Richard, 336, 342n58 Berettini, Pietro (Pietro da Cortona), 236 Bergognone, Ambrogio, 243 Bergson, Henri, 210; Matter and Memory, 210 Berlin, 66, 200, 203 Bible: New Testament, 65–70; Alford’s Greek Testament, 77; OT prophesies fulfilled in, 63; parody of Luke, 346; portrayed in Sacri Monte, 227, 262–3, 356–7; St Paul, 168n32, 289. See also Christianity Bible: Old Testament: account of Creation, 64–5; biological inheritance themes in, 153–4, 164; Bloom’s primary text (‘J’), 326; prophesies in New Testament, 63; tenth plague of Egypt, 153–4 biblical criticism, 58–83; authenticity of biblical texts, 61; centrality of Resurrection, 60; editorial persona, 63; English writers, 75–7; German

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writers, 62–3, 65–9, 73, 76–9; historical criterion for, 64–5; ironic modes of writing, 10, 62–5, 82; literalism vs figural interpretation, 63; and the Romantic movement, 65, 67, 73, 74, 79, 82 Bildungsroman, 65–6, 143; Way of All Flesh as, 11–12, 148, 163–4, 186–91, 363 biological grace, 161–2 birth: as an end, 146–7; rebirth in break with family, 160; as suicide, 169n43 Bissell, Claude, 138–9n4 Bizet, Georges: Carmen, 299 Bloch, Marc: The Historian’s Craft, 61 Bloom, Eric, 302, 315n39 Bloom, Harold, 15, 339n25; The Anxiety of Influence, 212; The Book of J, 326 Bloomsbury circle, 5, 191. See also individual authors Boas, Franz, 275 Book of Canterbury Rhymes, The, 31 Bordiga, Gaudenzio, 241–2 Boring, Edwin G., 205 Bovill, Mrs (amateur singer), 304 Bowler, Peter J., 114, 276 Breuer, Hans-Peter, 7, 114, 119 Breuer, Josef, 216n36 Brightwen, Eliza, 119, 123 British Journal of Photography, 252, 259, 274 British Museum, 106, 142n43, 296; SB in catalogue of, 106, 112n35 Brome, Richard: The Antipodes, 36 Broome, Napier, 5 Broughton, Thomas, 312 Browne, Philip Van Dyck, 223 Brücke, Ernst, 200

402 Index Buckland, Frank, 129 Buckley, Arabella, 118, 119, 123, 131, 132, 141n43 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 131, 354; as a discoverer of evolution, 113, 120–1, 347; Histoire naturelle, 64–5, 352; SB’s ironic reading of, 64–5, 351–2; teleological basis of theory, 120–1 Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress, 299 Burckhardt, Jakob, 232, 241, 243, 244, 247n26 burlesques, operatic, 299–300 Burrows, Donald, 314n17 Burton, Cosmo: ‘The Whole Duty of a Photographer,’ 274, 277 Butler, Fanny Worsley (mother of Samuel Butler), 60–1, 71, 168n32, 290 Butler, Joseph (Bishop): The Analogy of Religion, 92, 97, 107, 111n13 Butler, May (sister of Samuel Butler), 122, 252, 281nn5–6, 313n1 Butler, Samuel (SB): as an evolutionist, 10–12, 347–50; as contrarian, 5, 6, 16, 362; as a controversialist, 10, 212, 319; death of, 41, 363–4; as a free thinker, 125, 140n30; polymathy of, 7, 91, 279, 365; portraits of, 4, 115; as radical vs conservative, 161, 213; relationships with women, 173, 176–7, 189; relationship with father, 60–1, 167n28, 355, 360, 361–2, 363; revisionism, 11, 15– 16, 356, 362; same-sex relationships, 172–3; with Faesch, 172; with Jones, 170, 171–4, 178–9, 180, 183–4; with Pauli, 170, 172, 174, 186, 187–8, 190; as a scientist, 116,

117–18, 133–6, 148; Victorian roots and background, 70, 345–6. See also specific topics (education, literary career, critical reception, etc.) Butler, Samuel: Note-Books, 13, 56n1, 362–3, 364 comments: on authorship and posterity, 16, 165n8, 343, 345, 346, 353–4, 355, 362; on bachelorhood and same sex desire, 176, 178, 179; on Darwin, 113, 165n9; on music, 301, 304–5, 306–7, 309; on psychological subjects, 210–11 ‘Analysis of the sales of my books,’ 324, 343, 344 ‘Death, Money and Reputation, 346 ‘If I break down prematurely,’ 355 ‘Life after Death,’ 361 ‘My Own Failure,’ 345 ‘Myself and My Books,’ 354 ‘Myself and My Difficulties,’ 361 ‘Myself and Posterity,’ 354 ‘My Visits to Charles Darwin at Down,’ 165n9 ‘Scraps Cut Out from Luck or Cunning,’ 212 ‘Unity of Nature,’ 145 Butler, Samuel, works: art: ‘Interior of Old Church at Giornico,’ 232, 233; map for Alps and Sanctuaries, 228; Mr Heatherley’s Holiday, 10, 81; ‘Sacro Monte at Locarno,’ 225; selfportrait, 115; sketch of Mesopotamia Station (New Zealand), 21, 22. See also art and artists Butler, Samuel, works: music Fugue in D minor, 309 Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues, and Other Short Pieces for the Piano, 14

Index Narcissus, 14, 287–313; borrowed material in, 306–9; as a comedy, 302–4, 311–13; critiques of, 302; Handelian style of, 14, 302–3, 309–13; Jones’s role in, 290, 295, 302–3; models for, 296, 299–303, 304–6; pages from score, 288, 297–8; parallels with Way of All Flesh, 296, 299; plot and characters, 295–6, 297, 299; SB’s note on changes to, 291–2; text of, 295, 304–6 Ulysses, 15, 287, 307, 319, 320, 333. See also music (SB’s work in) Butler, Samuel, works: photography, 363; ‘The Chapel of the Marriage at Cana,’ 259, 261; ‘Girl adjusting her stocking,’ 270, 271; ‘Marketplace at Novara,’ 260; ‘Old priest reading in the Church of the Addolorata,’ 272, 273; ‘Piazza St Carlo at Varallo,’ 278; ‘Rose, the model,’ 181–3, 182; ‘The Stoning of St Stephen, St Eusebio Chapel,’ 262, 264, 265; Tabachetti’s Crucifixion Chapel at the Sacro Monte, 262–3, 266; Terracotta figure in the Ecce Homo Chapel, Varallo, 358; ‘Two priests on a steamer on Lake Como,’ 279; Il Vecchietto, in the Chapel of the Descent from the Cross, Varallo, 359; ‘Worshippers outside the church at Madesimo,’ 256, 257. See also photography: SB’s work in Butler, Samuel, works: translations, 15, 338n11; Hartman, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 206; Hering, ‘On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter,’ 12, 202, 203–4; Hering, ‘On the Connection be-

403

tween Body and Mind,’ 204–5; The Iliad, 15, 37; The Odyssey, 15, 335 Butler, Samuel, works: writings Alps and Sanctuaries, 3, 13, 37, 223– 40, 245, 323, 343; anti-academicism in, 223, 226–7, 235, 238, 243; as art history, 230, 237–8, 245; ‘Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art,’ 223, 227, 234–5, 238–9, 243; critical reception, 355; drawings in, 225, 228, 233, 255; links with New Zealand, 30, 248n35; spatial narrative in, 255– 6; as a travel diary, 223, 229–30, 237; visionary dream sequence, 230, 235–7 The Authoress of the Odyssey, 14, 15, 37, 317–37, 356; anti-academicism in, 62, 68, 362, 368n39; archaeological imagination in, 272; authorial identity themes, 346, 354; authorship arguments in, 317–18, 320, 321–3, 328, 334– 5; background of, 319–20; citations of, 331–2; compared with Jebb’s Homer, 333–4; critical reception of, 317–18, 319, 325, 326–34; cultural influence of, 319, 325–6, 334; and gender studies, 331–2, 336–7; longevity and continuing relevance of, 318, 334–7; Nausicaa ‘portrait’ in, 323, 324, 368n34; parody of, 328; pedagogical role of, 332, 334; as satirical vs serious, 323, 328–9, 334, 338n15; SB’s predictions for, 331, 332–3, 335–6; second edition, 324–5, 329–30; translations of, 318, 325; views of women in, 317–18, 321–2, 335

404 Index ‘Darwin among the Machines,’ 33–4, 35, 39, 59, 102 ‘Darwin on Species’ (February 1863), 9 ‘Darwin on the Origin of Species,’ 9, 31, 32–3, 101–2, 165n9 ‘The Deadlock on Darwinism,’ 15, 91, 100, 136; comments on Darwin, 91–2, 121, 124–5, 134; issues of identity, 97, 101, 104–5; truth and photography, 270–1 Erewhon, 8, 34–40; birth-death discussions, 149, 152; ‘The Book of the Machines,’ 33, 55–6, 102, 140n30, 166n14, 269, 276–7; Thomas Butler’s reaction to, 361; compared with Erewhon Revisited, 40–1; compared with Gulliver’s Travels, 35; contrapuntal writing, 31, 38–9; critical reception of, 5, 10, 60; Drysdale’s influence on, 156; ethnographic observation, 255, 256; European order vs rugged colonial landscape, 21; evolutionary theory in, 9, 11, 47, 102, 118; genealogy of, 107; homoerotic themes in, 180–1; ironic reversal, 23, 35–7; literary background of, 34–5; musical descriptions in, 294; New Zealand influences in, 8–9, 21, 23, 35–7, 59, 180–1, 236, 255; publication of, 11, 40, 60, 168n37, 349, 364, 367n17, 369n46; revisions of, 15, 60, 367n17; sales of, 343, 344; as a satiric fantasy, 38– 9; and SB’s authorial identity, 107; and Victorian cultural landscape, 346 Erewhon Revisited, 13, 15, 16, 40–2,

74; authorial identity themes in, 354; authority confrontations, 70, 362; Thomas Butler’s reaction to, 361; compared with Erewhon, 40– 1; father-son relationship, 40–1; narration in, 40–2, 52; publications of, 364, 369n46; Resurrection parody, 9, 61, 74–5, 356; science vs religion in, 59; vision of the future in, 51–6 Ernest Pontifex (see Way of All Flesh below) Essays on Life, Art, and Science, 92, 363, 369n46 ‘Essay upon the Art of Feeling,’ 210–11 The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 8, 9, 34–5, 59–60, 67– 9, 76, 111n10, 367n15; attack on Alford in, 75 Evolution, Old and New, 3, 11, 37, 92, 144, 351–3; anti-Darwinian theory in, 13, 61, 120, 121, 124, 129, 351–3; and authorial ambiguity in, 346; Buffon’s views in, 64–5; citation of Lewes in, 199; citation of Mirvart in, 135; citation of Paley in, 123–4; critical reception of, 98, 116, 131, 142n43, 200, 347– 8, 353; natural theology in, 122; as popular science, 117; publication of, 61; and SB’s controversy with Darwin, 141–2n43; SB’s scientific authority in, 14, 133, 136, 351; teleological model in, 351 Ex Voto, 13–14, 15, 227, 240–5, 354– 5, 356–60; and authorial ambiguity, 346, 354; critical reception of, 252, 280n3; photographs for, 241, 252, 281n5, 357

Index The Fair Haven, 8, 9, 13, 70–83, 116, 343, 361; as an ironic conversion story, 60, 66, 70–1, 352; attack on Alford in, 75–6; biographical element in, 166n16; compared to Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, 352; critical reception of, 10, 60, 65, 73–4, 329, 348–9; Darwin on, 73– 4, 111n10, 148; editorial persona, 63, 68, 166n16; as a literary hoax, 348–9; publication of, 348–9; rationalist views in, 72–3, 166n16; Resurrection theme in, 60–1, 68, 72, 348 A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, 8–9, 24–5, 26–31; and Thomas Butler (SB’s father), 43n4, 102; compared with ‘Forest Creek manuscript,’ 26–7; contrapuntal mode of writing in, 30–1; ironic contrast of old and new worlds, 27–8, 29, 37–8 ‘Forest Creek manuscript,’ 25–7, 43n4 ‘God the Known and God the Unknown,’ 11, 37, 122, 363 ‘The Humour of Homer,’ 101, 327, 338n9 The Humour of Homer, and Other Essays, 37, 92 The Iliad of Homer rendered into English Prose, 15, 37 ‘In Memoriam H.R.F.,’ 183–5 Life and Habit, 3, 9, 11, 12, 37, 92, 130, 231, 349–50, 361; binaries or dichotomies in, 196; Carpenter cited in, 198; critical reception of, 199; Darwin cited in, 98, 104, 134; dedication to Pauli, 169n38; discussion of Lamarck and Darwin,

405

104; as evolutionary epic, 118; evolutionary theory in, 98, 116, 118–19, 178, 197–8, 200, 351; Huxley’s view of, 136; identity beyond birth and death, 146–7; inherited memory, 145–7, 154–5, 157, 158–9, 271; Lamarck cited in, 104; lateral organization of life, 49; mind vs matter, 196; Mivart cited in, 135; oneness of parent and child, 145–6, 154–5, 157, 158–9; organic memory, 156; origins of, 144; paradox and contradiction in, 146–7, 164; past vs future in, 46; as popular science, 117–18; publication of, 46, 61; relation to SB’s fiction, 148; revision of, 200; science and scientific authority, 13, 16, 117–18, 130–1, 135–6, 169n38; scientific vs comic discourse, 349–50; technology as adaptation, 102–3, 197–8; theory of grace, 169n38; unconscious memory, 165n3, 167n35, 269–70, 271 The Life and Letters of Dr Samuel Butler, 15, 70, 356 Luck, or Cunning?, 37, 92, 120–2, 209–12; acoustics language in, 47; anti-Darwinian critique, 116, 120, 121–2, 138n2, 211; anti-Darwinian critique in, 92; attack on Huxley, 131; background, 354–5; critical reception of, 211; Darwin deferred to, 134; as popular science, 117, 120; publication of, 61, 268; purpose vs natural selection, 104; revision of, 200, 211; ‘Scraps Cut Out from Luck or Cunning,’ 212; Spencer cited, 135

406 Index ‘Lucubratio Ebria,’ 33, 34, 102, 103– 5, 105 ‘A Medieval Girl School,’ 96 ‘Notes on Duncan’s “Conscious Matter,”’ 217n54, 218n59 The Odyssey, rendered into English Prose, 15 ‘On English Composition and Other Matters,’ 23 ‘On the Genesis of Feeling,’ 218n58 ‘Our Emigrant,’ 43n4 ‘Our Tour,’ 23 ‘Quis Desiderio ...?,’ 100, 101, 105– 8 ‘Ramblings in Cheapside,’ 275 Shakespeare’s Sonnets reconsidered, 15, 185–6, 354, 362 sonnets, 309, 312–13 ‘The Mechanical Creation,’ 35 ‘Thought and Language,’ 91, 92–4, 100, 151 Unconscious Memory, 37, 144, 203–4, 355; attack on Darwin, 13, 61, 92, 116, 353; attack on Huxley, 131; attack on scientists, 131; critical reception of, 133, 166n12, 353; Hartmann cited in, 206; Hering cited in, 156, 203; Life and Habit described in, 165n3, 167n35; as popular science, 117; publication of, 61, 355; teleological model in, 120, 128 ‘Was the Odyssey Written by a Woman?,’ 338n9 The Way of All Flesh, 11–12, 143–64; as an experimental text, 163–4; autobiographical elements and models for characters, 75, 76–82, 145, 187, 290, 296, 299; as a Bildungsroman, 11–12, 148, 163–4,

186–91, 363; biological, psychological, and cultural determinism in, 152–3; birth-death discussions in, 149–50; evolutionary themes in, 58, 118, 144–5, 187; father-son relationships, 148, 149–64, 189–90; Ford on, 17n3; as a homoerotic manifesto, 186–91; manuscript and writing of, 143–4, 343, 347, 363; memory and time constructions, 48–9, 145–6, 164, 187; musical references, 296, 299, 300, 302, 310–11; and Narcissus, 296, 299; narrative forms in, 48–9, 52, 61, 148–9; New Zealand influence in, 42; Old Testament themes, 153–4, 164; paradox and playfulness, 163–4; publication, 60, 61, 364; Shaw on, 166n17, 191–2n4, 363, 364; title of, 37, 187; as tragedy vs comedy, 164; twentieth-century readership, 145, 355; as a Victorian text, 70, 164; Woolf on, 192n11 Butler, Samuel (17th century poet), 92, 107; Hudibras, 93, 107, 354 Butler, Samuel (Bishop; grandfather of SB), 15, 70, 107, 346; Life and Letters of, 70, 356 Butler, Thomas (Canon) (father of SB): death of, 12–13, 299, 343; and First Year, 24, 43n4, 102; SB’s relationship with, 60–1, 355, 360, 361– 2, 363 Buttmann, Philipp, 78 Caimi, Fra’ Bartolomeo, 227, 250n63 Cambridge University: classical studies at, 319, 327, 333; cult of

Index male athleticism at, 172, 180; Darwin at, 197; empirical sciences at, 197; Forster at, 191; Granta, 327; Payley at, 197; SB at St John’s College, 8, 23, 120, 197, 319, 345; SB library at St John’s College, 107, 291, 296; Trinity College, 85n31, 201; vs Oxford University, 172, 197; Ward at, 201 Camera Club, 252, 281n6 Cantarella, Eva: Pandora’s Daughters, 331 Canterbury Association, 24 Canterbury Pilgrims, 24 Canterbury Settlement (New Zealand), 9, 23–5, 31–2, 101–2 Cape, Jonathan (publisher), 325 Carey’s art studio, 10 Carlyle, Thomas, 346; Sartor Resartus, 60, 66, 149, 166n19 Carpenter, William B., 135, 198, 200, 209, 216n37; Principles of Mental Physiology, 198 Cathie, Alfred Emery, 4, 14, 171, 173, 362 Cauer, Paul, 340n41 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 64 Chambers, Robert: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 76–7, 86n46, 100, 118, 129 chapels and churches: ‘Adam and Eve’ (Varallo), 356; Addolorata (Monte Erice), 272, 273; ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ (Crea), 360; ‘Descent from the Cross’ (Varallo), 357, 359; ‘Ecce Homo’ (Varallo), 357, 358; ‘Journey to Calvary’ (Varallo), 356–7; ‘Life of the Virgin’ (Oropa), 263; at Madesimo (Italy),

407

256, 257; ‘The Marriage at Cana’ (Crea), 259, 261; St Eusebio (Crea), 262, 264, 265; San Carlo (Switzerland), 230; San Michele (Monte Pirichiano), 237; San Nicolao (Giornico), 232, 233; Santa Maria (Calanca), 234–5; Santa Maria dei Maracoli (Saronno), 236–7; Sposalizio (Crea), 267 Chapman, George, 364 Cherry, or the Frog Bride, 29 children: adaptive powers of, 151; breaking of parental ties, 160; father-son (parent-child) relationships, 40–1, 116n17, 144, 148, 149– 64, 166n17, 189–90; and the hierarchical structure of the church, 152; oneness of parent and child, 145–6, 155, 157, 158–9 Christchurch (New Zealand), 8, 24–5, 29, 37 Christchurch Press, 8, 31, 32–4, 59, 101, 165n9 Christian humanism, 5, 8, 346, 361 Christianity: and God (SB’s conception of), 47, 51, 121–2; oscillation between doubt and belief, 66; Resurrection, 59–83; Gospel accounts of, 61, 67–9, 72, 76–7, 82, 110n10, 348; hallucination theory, 69–70, 73, 74; Jesus, 65, 66, 69–70; parallels in Erewhon Revisited, 52, 70; rationalist views of, 68–70, 72–4; SB’s sense of betrayal concerning, 95; Resurrection as central doctrine of, 60; vs Darwinism, 32–3. See also Bible: New Testament Church of England: and Canterbury Settlement, 24; and Colenso, 78, 85n34; and Essays and Reviews,

408 Index 84n11; hierarchical structure of, 152; and natural theology, 128; satirization of in Erewhon, 38; SB’s background in, 8; and Thirlwall, 85 Classical Review, 326, 327, 328, 339n22 Classical Weekly, 325, 339n22 Clerke, Agnes, 123 Clifford, W.K., 131, 208, 218–19n62 Clifford’s Inn (London), 170, 172, 180, 183, 190, 191 Clodd, Edward, 128–9, 132–3, 136 Colenso, John William (Bishop), 58, 67, 70, 77–8, 85n34 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 59, 67, 73, 79, 84n17 Collins (photographic firm), 253, 281n10, 283n28 Collins, Anthony, 62, 63, 64, 70; Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, 63 Collins, Wilkie, 105 colonial experience and perspective (of SB), 8–9, 21–3 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 5, 365 concomitance, theory of, 205, 208 consciousness, 199; of all life forms, 147; immortality of literary consciousness, 53–4, 361; of the inorganic world, 166n14; of nonhuman life forms, 47 Constantiensis, Georgius Wilhelmus: Battle of Lepanto, 234 Cook, Thomas, 229 Cornford, F.M., 325, 339n22 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 236 Cortona (Italy), 323, 368n34 Cortona, Pietra da (Pietro Berettini), 236 Courtney, W.L., 328

Crary, Jonathan, 276 Crea (Italy), 357, 360; ‘Assumption of the Virgin,’ 360; ‘The Marriage at Cana’ chapel, 259, 261; St Eusebio chapel, 262, 264, 265; Sposalizio Chapel, 267 critical reception (of SB’s writings): impact of his science writing on, 116; modern readership of, 145, 355; posthumous critiques, 5, 210; psychological criticism, 6–7; research and critiques on, 5–7; Victorian readership, 5–6, 16, 324, 343, 345–6, 356. See also specific titles cultural survival, 272–5; survival of the past in the present, 275–6 Daily Telegraph, 328 Dalby, Andrew, 341n46 Dallas, W.S., 99 Damasio, Antonio, 209 Dante Alighieri, 275, 287 da Rossa, Dedomenici. See Dedomenici da Rossa Darwin, Charles, 115; approach to writing, 104; at Cambridge, 197; death of, 100, 113; on Erasmus Darwin, 98–9; on Fair Haven, 73–4, 111n10, 148; as a father figure for SB, 146; literary identity of, 105; literary power of, 92; SB compared with, 49; SB compares Lamarck with, 35; SB’s contacts with, 98–9; SB’s deferrals to, 134; as a science popularizer, 113; and science professionalization, 137; science writers’ deferral to, 133; scientific abilities of, 138n2; scientific community’s support for, 92, 99, 100, 116, 132; at Shrewsbury School, 70.

Index See also evolution and evolutionary theory – SB’s controversy with, 13, 50–1, 82, 97, 99–105, 107, 113–38, 201, 351–3; impact of, 132–3, 137–8; origin of, 98–9 – theory of evolution, 121, 130, 201; reluctance to publish, 101; SB’s attacks on, 13, 61, 120, 121, 124, 129, 351; SB’s reading and initial responses to, 8, 31, 59, 98; SB’s rewriting of, 105; SB’s sense of betrayal concerning, 95; theological use of scientific terminology, 82 – writings: Animals and Plants under Domestication, 154; Descent of Man, 156, 169n34; The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 198; On the Origin of Species: historical sketch in, 130; impact of, 64, 94, 196; publication of, 59, 94; SB’s critique of, 103–5, 351; SB’s initial responses to, 9, 96, 101–2, 114, 116, 146, 165n9; preface for Krause’s Erasmus Darwin, 98–9; The Voyage of the Beagle, 49 Darwin, Emma, 105 Darwin, Erasmus, 92, 141n43, 351; Krause’s essay on, 98–9, 141n43; SB’s interpretation and citation of, 113, 120–2, 125, 128, 131, 135, 347 Darwin, Francis, 98, 104, 107 Darwin, Leonard, 115 Darwinism and the Darwinians: as a repressive orthodoxy, 129, 130–1; and salvage ethnology, 251; SB attacks on, 130–2; vs Christianity, 32–3; Ward’s view on, 201 da Vinci, Leonardo. See Leonardo da Vinci

409

death: and adaptive powers of children, 151; and birth, 146–50, 152; and memory, 53–4 Dedomenici da Rossa, 237–8 de la Mare, Walter, 6 Delane, John, 5 d’Enrico, Giovanni, 356, 357 d’Enrico, Tanzio, 356 Descartes, René, 216n32 detective camera. See photography dichotomies, SB’s use of, 196, 212–13 Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield, 148, 153, 161; Pictures from Italy, 230 Dispatch (New York), 336 Disraeli, Benjamin (Lord Beaconsfield), 169n38, 346 Doherty, Lilian, 331 Double Dutchman, The (burlesque), 299 Dougher, Sarah, 325, 339n22 Drawing Room Gazette, 289 Dreiser, Theodore, 5 Drysdale, George, 167n26, 167n28, 168n31; The Elements of Social Science, 156–7 Du Bois-Reymond, Emil, 200 Dumas, Lucie, 173, 189, 363 Duncan, W. Stewart, 12, 210–11, 218n59; Conscious Matter, 208, 217– 18n54 Dupee, Frederick Wilcox, 366n8 Durio, Alberto: Samuel Butler e la Val Sesia, 242 Eagle, The, 23, 43n4 education (of SB), 23, 153; art training, 223, 226, 239–40, 245; music training, 290; plans for and decision against ordination, 60, 61, 70– 1, 120, 223; at Shrewsbury School,

410 Index 23, 70, 120, 172, 223, 319, 345; at St John’s College, Cambridge, 23, 122, 196–7, 197, 319, 345; study of mathematics, 197 Edwardian age, 347, 364 Edwards, Elizabeth, 14, 251–80 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 62, 65, 66, 73, 85n26 Eliot, George, 5, 85n28, 148; Daniel Deronda, 143, 165n1; Middlemarch, 82; The Mill on the Floss, 143, 145, 148, 164 Ellis, Havelock: Sexual Inversion, 177, 178 Emerson, P.H., 258, 283n30 Essays and Reviews, 58, 61, 84n11, 161 ethnographic issues, 254–68; direct observation and spatial narrative, 254–6; salvage ethnography, 251–2, 272–8 Euclid, 197 eugenics, 161, 169n39, 285n66 evolution and evolutionary theory: adaptational view of, 108; and authorial identity, 100–1; as Darwin’s original work, 129; ‘departments’ of, 92, 109–10; extension to cultural artefacts, 108; and the ‘family romance,’ 144; and free will, 148; and homoerotic desires, 177–8; and individual identity, 97; and language theory, 94; and natural theology, 97, 123–5; nineteenthcentury authorship and literary production, 100; and OT themes of biological inheritance, 153–4, 164; precursors to Darwin, 95–6; primordial cell, 146; and racial identity, 108; relationship with fiction, 144–5; role in SB’s fiction, 118; role

of memory in, 9; SB’s body of work on, 343; SB’s early embrace of, 9; SB’s extension of Darwin’s theories, 96–7; and technology, 102–3; teleological models of, 119–21, 137–8, 269, 276, 351; variation under domestication, 103; vs Catholic theology, 62. See also Darwin, Charles; natural selection theory evolutionary epic, 86n46, 118–19, 132 evolutionary psychology, 12, 143–64, 195–219 Examiner, The, 11, 347 Exeter Hall (London), 291 Faesch, Hans, 172, 174, 179, 183–5, 190 Fardon, Richard, 286n77 Farrington, Benjamin, 332; Samuel Butler and the Odyssey, 331 father-son relationships, 40–1, 116n17, 144, 148, 149–64, 166n17, 189–90 Fechner, Gustav, 200, 204–5, 206, 207, 216n32; Elements of Psychophysics, 202, 205 Ferrari, Gaudenzio. See Gaudenzio Ferrari Festing Jones, Henry. See Jones, Henry Festing Fielding, Henry, 314–15n29; The Lottery, 296, 315n30 Fifield, A.C. (publisher), 91–2, 324, 364, 368n40, 369n46 Finley, Moses, 317–19, 325; The World of Homer, 335 Fiske, John, 118 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 5, 365 Flemish style, 241, 357

Index Florence: Accademia del Disegno, 226; Uffizi Gallery, 229 Ford, Ford Madox, 5, 6–7, 17n3, 364, 365 Forster, E.M., 364; Maurice, 191 Foucault, Michel, 173, 192n6, 193n27 Fowles, John, 326; ‘Islands,’ 339n24 Freedberg, Sydney J., 227 free will, 46–7, 48, 51 Frei, Hans, 63 Freud, Sigmund, and Freudian psychology, 204, 218n58; ‘family romance,’ 144; father-son relationships, 155, 162; human communal memory, 50; translation of Levine’s The Unconscious, 216n36; work on neuroanatomy, 200, 207; writings: ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ 203; Civilisation and Its Discontents, 50; Project for a Scientific Psychology, 200; Totem and Taboo, 50; ‘The Wolfman,’ 50 Frost, John: Lives of Eminent Christians, 106, 108 Frye, Northrop, 5–6, 348, 350 Fuller-Maitland, Mrs J.A., 52 Furbank, P.N., 210 future: irony addressed to readers of, 353; link with memory, 48–9, 51; past as embedded in, 46, 48–9, 275; past invented by posterity, 356; in SB’s fiction, 51–6. See also posterity (SB’s view of) Galton, Francis, 274; Hereditary Genius, 169n39, 285n66; ‘Hereditary Improvement,’ 169n39 Garnett, Richard, 106–7 Gatty, Margaret, 118, 119, 123, 129 Gaudenzio Ferrari, 236, 240, 242, 356

411

Gay, John, 300 Genoa, 28 Georgian age, 347, 364 Germany and German scholars: biblical criticism, 62–3, 65–9, 73, 76–9; German Enlightenment, 62–3, 64, 65–8; German idealism, 197; German school of psychophysics, 199– 204; Homeric scholarship, 320, 327, 340n41; psychological research in, 200–6; psychophysics research, 199–204; SB’s study and translations of, 202–3 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 250n63 Gibbon, Edward: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 62 Giberne, Agnes, 118 Gilbert, W.S., 14, 301 Gillespie, Neal C., 141n31 Giotto di Bondone, 237 Gnappi, Carla, 236 God (SB’s conception of), 47, 51, 121– 2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Wilhelm Meister, 66 Gospels. See Bible: New Testament Gosse, Edmund: Father and Son, 163 Gosse, Philip, 6 Gotch, Tom, 174 Gothic style, 232, 235, 237, 238, 243 Göttingen (Germany), 203, 216n30 grace, biological, 161–2, 169n38 Granta (periodical), 327, 340n31 Graves, Robert, 5, 15, 365; Homer’s Daughter, 319, 326, 339n24 Gray, Michael, 284n56 Greece and Greek culture, 176, 327; homoerotic aspects, 180, 183, 186, 190; sculpture, 80, 226; Teacher’s Handbook, 332; in Victorian classics

412 Index curriculum, 37, 197, 319; women in, 318, 321–2. See also Homeric studies and scholarship Gregory, Eileen: H.D. and Hellenism, 339n24 Grene, David, 318 Griffin, Jasper, 332 Gurney, Harry, 290 Haast, Julius von, 349, 367n20 Haddon, A.C., 275, 282n27 Haeckel, Ernst, 155, 167n24 Haggard, Rider, 37 Hall, Edward, 290 Handel, George Frideric: as an English composer, 301; compared with Shakespeare, 287, 289; Handelian style of SB’s Narcissus, 14, 302–3, 309–13; Morell’s librettos for, 302, 303, 304–6; references to in SB’s writings, 294, 300; SB’s interest in and critiques of, 30, 174, 287, 290–5, 314n17 – compositions: Acis and Galatea, 300, 308; Alexander Balus, 304; Alexander’s Feast, 293; Belshazzar, 309; Dettingen Te Deum, 312; Giustino, 313; Harpsichord Suite (HWV 494), 293–4; Hercules, 312; Israel in Egypt, 293–4; Jephtha, 291, 292–4, 304, 305; Joshua, 303, 305–6, 308; Judas Maccabaeus, 293, 304; Messiah, 294–5, 302, 303, 308; Occasional Oratorio, 308; Poro, Re dell’Indie, 314n28; Rinaldo, 314n28; Samson, 290, 293; Saul, 293; Scipio (opera), 290; Semele, 308; Susanna, 293; Theodora, 230, 290, 293 Hardy, Thomas, 158 Hare, Julius, 85n31

Harris, Ellen T., 14, 287–313 Harrison, Jane, 327, 329, 330, 337, 340n29, 340n38 Hartley, David, 196, 197, 202, 203 Hartmann, Eduard von: Philosophy of the Unconscious, 206, 216n30 Heatherley’s Art School (London), 10, 170, 174, 181, 224, 231 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 66, 73, 79 Helmholtz, Hermann, 200, 202, 283n30; On the Sensations of Tone, 216n33 Henderson, Philip, 173, 192n4 Henslow, George, 128 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 202 heredity: and the family, 49; links with photography, 268, 270, 275; as memory, 45–6 Hering, Ewald, 12, 158, 202–5, 207, 216nn35–6; ‘On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter,’ 12, 156, 203–4; ‘On the Connection between Body and Mind,’ 204–5; SB’s citations of, 121, 135, 203–4 Hoberman, Ruth, 347 Hoeldtke, Robert, 196 Hoggart, Richard, 144 Holt, Lee, 6, 7, 114, 130 Homer, 68, 269, 272, 287, 289, 317–37; The Iliad, 15, 37, 320, 329, 332, 335, 336; The Odyssey, 319–20, 336, 364; SB’s authorship arguments, 317– 18, 320, 321–3, 328, 334–5; SB’s translation, 15, 335 Homeric studies and scholarship, 320–1, 325–37; German school of, 320, 327, 340n41; in ‘middlebrow’ periodicals, 330–1. See also The

Index Authoress of the Odyssey under Butler, Samuel, works: writings; Greece and Greek culture homoeroticism and homosexuality, 12, 170–91; and ancient Greek culture, 180, 183, 186, 190; biological basis for, 176, 177–8, 183; criminalization of, 181, 184–5; and evolutionary theory, 177–8; male athleticism, health, and beauty, 172, 174, 175, 179–80, 183; photograph of Rose (model), 181–3; reverse discourse on, 171, 191, 192n6; role of heterosexual relationships in, 173, 188–9; role of love in, 178–9; SB’s identification with, 184–5; SB’s relationship with Tuke, 174, 192n11; sexual inversion, 179; thematics of, 176–86. See also bachelorhood and bachelor culture homosexual panic, 183 Hoyt, David, 255, 274, 282n20 Hueffer, Ford Madox. See Ford, Ford Madox Hughes, Willie, 185 Hume, David, 197; Dialogues on Natural Religion, 62 humour: in Narcissus, 302–4, 311–13; scientific vs comic discourse, 349– 50 Hutcheon, Linda, 348 Huxley, Aldous, 5 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 12, 199; Agnosticism: A Rejoinder, 74; concomitance theory, 205, 208; Encyclopaedia Britannica article on evolution, 131; on Life and Habit, 136; ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata,’ 199; and professionalization of science, 134,

413

137; SB’s attack on, 127, 129, 131, 199, 218n62; and SB’s controversy with Darwin, 142n43; as a scientific naturalist, 11, 122; on scientific vs religious concerns, 58–9, 62, 76 identity: beyond birth and death, 146–8; and evolutionary theory, 97; and memory, 49–50, 144; racial, 108. See also authorship and authorial or literary identity identity hypothesis, 205 Impressionists, 240 inherited memory. See memory Inns of Court (London), 171 instinct, 159, 197–8, 201 irony and satire: addressed to future readers, 353; and ambiguity, 16, 346, 347–50, 352–3; antipodean contrast, 23, 35, 42; author’s intention vs reader’s interpretation, 347–8; in Biblical criticism, 10, 62– 3; editorial persona in, 63; European order vs colonial landscape, 21–3; intentional gap, 348; ironic reversal, 35–7, 38, 39, 40, 41; literary models of, 10; parody vs rationality, 33–4, 323; readers’ interpretations of, 348; SB on active reading of, 33; SB’s contrapuntal agility with, 23, 30, 37–8; scientific vs comic discourse, 349–50; in scientific writing, 64–5; as a secularizing tool, 9–10; spelling reversals, 35, 37; variant sources and perspectives, 28 Irvine, William, 138n4 Italian culture and art: as an alternative to England, 13, 15; decline of, 238–9

414 Index Italy, 226, 227, 228, 229, 241, 242; Alps, 180, 227, 248n35; Cortona, 323, 368n34; Lake Como, 278; Lanzo, 238; Madesimo, 256, 257; Mantua, 236; Novara, 260; Oropa, 235, 263; Piedmont, 243, 356; Saronno, 237; SB’s travels in, 180, 224, 226; Turin, 237; Val Sesia, 227, 241 Jackson, Holbrook, 364 James, Henry, 171, 192n7 James, William, 10, 207, 209–10, 211, 218n61; ‘Are We Automata?,’ 218n62; ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?,’ 210; Principles of Psychology, 195, 209, 217n49; ‘What is an Emotion?,’ 209 Jameson, Anna: Diary of an Ennuyée, 230 Jansenism, 62 Jebb, Richard, 333–4, 342n56; Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey, 333, 342n58 Jesuits, 62 Jesus. See Christianity Jews and Judaism, 183 Joad, C.E.M., 210 Jones, Edward James, 178 Jones, Henry Festing, 60, 72, 74, 156; edition of SB’s Note-Books, 364; and Lucie Dumas, 173, 189, 363; memoir of SB (Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon), 5, 6–7, 72, 74, 95–6, 365, 368n40; and SB’s musical works, 14–15, 288, 290, 295–6, 299–306, 309–13, 319–20; SB’s personal relationship with, 170, 171–4, 178–9, 180, 183–4 Josephus, 69 Journal of Hellenic Studies, 327

Journal of Philology, 327 Joyce, James, 15, 33, 145; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 145, 166n17; Ulysses, 17n3, 319, 325–6, 329, 334 Kant, Immanuel, 94, 202 Keats, John: ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’ 364 Kennedy, Benjamin Hall, 70, 319 Kettle, Arnold, 7 Kingsmill, Hugh: After Puritanism, 365, 367n25 Kirby, Mary, 118 Klein, Melanie, 213 Knoepflmacher, U.C., 7, 346, 368n37 knowledge: as memory, 45–6; unconscious, 137, 161, 164, 350 Kohlstedt, Sally, 138n1 Kracauer, Siegfried, 271 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 177 Krause, Ernst: Erasmus Darwin, 98–9, 141n43 Krauss, Rosalind E., 286n85 Kugler, Franz: Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei, 242 Lachmann, Karl, 78 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, and Lamarckian evolution, 346; and archaeological imagination, 251–2; compared to SB, 46; and discovery of evolution, 113, 120–1, 347; links with Darwinian theory, 121, 134–5; SB’s extension to technology, 102– 3, 109; SB’s interpretation and citation of, 113, 119, 125, 128, 131, 146, 346–7, 351; SB’s neo-Lamarckian position, 10, 46, 117, 121, 134–5, 251–2, 268, 272, 274

Index Lampe, Frederick: The Dragon of Wantley, 313 language: of animals, 94–5, 150–1; effectual, 93–4; writing as form of, 94–5 Lanzi, Luigi: La storia pittorica dell’Italia, 226 Latin, 26, 29, 235; Victorian classics curriculum, 23, 37, 197, 319 Lavizzari, Luigi, 236 Lawes, Henry, 310, 316n55 Lawrence, D.H., 5, 365 Layard, Austen Henry, 242 Lecocq, Charles: La fille de Madam Angot, 289 LeDoux, Joseph, 209 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 216n32 Leonardo da Vinci, 226, 234, 238, 243, 289, 357 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 62, 68, 69, 74 Levine, Israel: The Unconscious, 216n36 Lewes, George Henry, 155, 196, 197, 198; The Physical Basis of Mind, 199 Lightman, Bernard, 11, 15, 113–38 literary career (of SB), 343; archive of notes and correspondence, 347, 362–4; daily schedule, 171; financial difficulties, 296, 299, 343, 344, 354; formative years in New Zealand, 8–9, 21–43, 59–60, 101, 172, 179–80, 223–4, 248n35, 319; income from writing, 12, 324, 344; influence on modern writers, 5–6, 145, 365; overview, 8–17; posthumous publications, 363–4; as a science popularizer, 113–38. See also posterity (SB’s view of) Literary Foundlings, 31

415

Little Carmen (burlesque), 299 Locke, John, 197, 202, 216n32 Lockyer, Joseph Norman (Sir), 129 Lombard style, 232, 237, 243 Longman’s (publisher), 320 Loudon, Jane, 118 Lovelock, James, 50 Lucian, 33 Lyke-Wake Dirge, 28, 29 Lyttelton (New Zealand), 24, 34 Lyttelton, Lord, 24 Lyttelton Times, 31 Mabillon, Jean: De re diplomatica, 61 machines. See technology Madesimo (Italy), 256 Magdalene, Mary, 68, 69 Malinowski, Bronislaw: Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 282–3n27 Malthus, Thomas, 101 Manchester Guardian, 340n39 mannerism, 243 Mansfield, Katherine, 330 Marcus, Steven, 173 marriage, 173, 174, 188–9 Marriott, William Thackeray, 84n8, 363 Martin, Paul, 256, 258–60, 274, 277, 283n28; ‘Magazine seller, Ludgate Circus,’ 258, 259 Marvin, Roberta Montemorra, 315n31 Marx, Karl, 17n13, 365 materialism, 196 Maudsley, Henry: Body and Mind, 169n41 McQuire, Scott, 277 Melbourne Argus, 323 Melville, Herman: ‘The Paradise of Bachelors,’ 171

416 Index Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, 64 memory, 45–56; communal, 50; and death, 53–4; as heredity, 45–6, 49– 50, 119, 144–5; and homoerotic desires, 176, 177–8; instinct as, 197–8; W. James on, 209; knowledge as, 45; links with photography, 251–2, 268–72; link with the future, 48–9, 51; and nutrition, 216n37; organic, 119, 139n17, 146, 155–6, 157, 158; and personal identity, 49–50; and the professionalization of science, 137; role in evolution, 9; role of unconsciousness in, 46–7, 50–1, 119; and time, 48 – inherited memory, 201–2; and associationism, 198; and the concept of childhood, 159–60; and the primordial cell, 146, 149; and random inclusivity, 269; and sexual inversion, 179; vs hereditary instinct, 159 Mendelejeff [Mendeleyev], Dmitri Ivanovich, 210 Mendelssohn, Felix, 290, 293, 300; Elijah, 293 Meredith, George, 160, 168n37; The Egoist, 168n37 Mesopotamia Station (New Zealand), 21, 22 Michelangelo, 224, 226, 230, 238, 242, 243, 250n63, 289 Mill, John Stuart, 59, 196, 199, 216n30, 328; An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 197; A System of Logic, 197 Milton, John: Comus, 310 Mind, 200–1, 204, 209, 218n62 mind vs matter, 196 Mivart, St George, 62, 112n26, 116,

119, 128, 135; On the Genesis of Species, 269; Lessons from Nature, 135 modernism, 145, 149, 254 Molière, 311; Le bourgeois gentilhomme, 295 monism, 204, 205, 206; vs dualism, 205–6 Moore, Aubrey, 128 Moore, James R., 138n1 More, Thomas, 33, 35; Utopia, 31 Morell, Thomas, 302, 303, 304–6 Morris, William, 240 Morton, Peter, 7, 114 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 300; Don Giovanni, 301, 302, 307; The Magic Flute, 307, 308 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 172; The Earnest Atheist, 17n13, 192n7, 365 Müller, Friedrich Max, 92, 94, 202 Murray, John, III, 229, 237, 239, 244 Murry, John Middleton, 6, 330, 332, 333–4, 336 music (SB’s work in): borrowing, 306–7, 306–9; chromaticism, 310– 11; Jones’s role in, 14–15, 288, 290, 295–6, 299–306, 309–13, 319–20; references in Erewhon, 294; references in Way of All Flesh, 296, 299, 300, 302, 310–11; revisions and arrangements, 293–4; text-painting, 294–5; text repetition, 311–12; visionary dream in Alps, 230. See also Butler, Samuel, works: music Myers, Robert Manson, 302, 315n39 narration and narrative structures: in Authoress, 68; bachelor narrators, 84n10; in Erewhon Revisited, 52; inward interpretive perspective,

Index 65; spatialized narratives, 255–6; in Way of All Flesh, 48–9, 52, 61, 148–9 National Photographic Record Association, 272–4 Nation and Athenaeum, The, 330 natural selection theory, 95, 98, 101, 351; adaptive powers of children, 151; Darwin’s analogical reasoning on, 126–7; Darwin’s ‘exquisite adaptations,’ 151, 167n21; Huxley’s view on, 131; random selectivity, 269; role of instinct, 201; SB’s critique of, 117, 119, 129–30, 200; vs desire, 12, 178; vs natural theology, 122; vs teleological model, 119–21. See also evolution and evolutionary theory natural theology, 9, 11, 116, 122–8, 123–5, 351; of Joseph Butler, 97; SB’s secularized revision of, 125–6, 132, 137–8 Nausicaa, 319–20, 322–3, 324, 326, 346 Negri, Dionigi, 241 Negro, Lucy, 339n25 New Jerusalem, 227, 241, 356 Newman, John Henry, 348 New Quarterly Review, 364 Newton, Isaac, 76, 196, 205 New York Review of Books, 317 New York Sun (newspaper), 336, 340n35 New Zealand: and antipodean reversal, 23; Avon River, 24, 37; Canterbury Settlement, 9, 23–5, 31–2, 101– 2; Christchurch, 8, 24–5, 29, 37; influence on SB’s life outlook, 8–9, 21–43, 101, 172, 179–80, 223–4, 248n35, 319; influences in Erewhon, 8–9, 21, 23, 35–7, 59, 180–1, 236, 255; intellectual and cultural life in,

417

25, 31–2; ironic contrast with England, 23–5, 37–8; as male utopia, 180; Maori culture, 24, 25, 35, 37; Mesopotamia Station, 21, 22; Mitre hotel, 29, 37; Mount Cook, 27; Rangitata River and Gorge, 21, 26, 40; SB’s descriptions of, 9, 21, 23–5, 25–7, 102; Southern Alps, 24, 248n35; Waimakariri River, 28 Norrman, Ralf, 212 North London Photographic Society, 253 Notes and Queries, 336 Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 254 Notices of Books, 341n42 Novara (Italy), 260 Observer (periodical), 330 Offenbach, Jacques, 14, 300–1, 302, 303, 312; La belle Hélène, 300; Orphée aux enfers, 300 operetta, 300, 312 organic memory, 119, 139n17, 146, 155–6, 157, 158 Oropa (Italy), 235, 263 Ortega y Gasset, José, 64 Otis, Laura, 119, 139n17, 156, 216n35 Outlook, The, 329 outsider persona: of older evolutionists, 351–2; of SB, 16, 116, 324, 331, 332–3, 345–7, 355; vs cognizant insider, 345–6 Oxberry, William: Acis and Galatea Burlesqued, 300 Oxford Movement, 73 Oxford University, 25, 172, 197, 328; Christ Church, 24 Page, David, 118 Page, T.E., 329, 330

418 Index Paget, A.J., 223 Paley, William, 51, 116, 125–7, 140– 1nn30–31; Natural Theology, 122–8, 351 Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper), 341n42 Paradis, James G., 3–18, 93, 138n1, 248n35, 343–65 Paret, Louis, 341n46 Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth, 12, 195– 214 Pascal, René: Les Lettres provinciales, 62 Pater, Walter, 171, 178, 191, 241; The Renaissance, 188, 193n17 Pauli, Charles Paine, 170, 172, 174, 186, 187–8, 190; Life and Habit dedicated to, 169n38 Paulson, Ronald, 64 Pauly, Philip J., 114, 130, 201 Peirce, C.S., 282n16 periodic law, 210 photography, 251–80; as an instantaneous medium, 253–4, 256, 270, 276–7; in anthropology, 254–5, 258; in art history, 241; development of, 252; documentary, 258; ethnographic issues, 254–68; and eyebrain relationship, 276–7; handheld or ‘detective’ cameras, 253–4, 256, 258, 274, 281nn10–11, 283n28; indexicality, 254, 262, 268, 282n16; links with heredity, 268, 270, 275; links with memory, 251–2, 268–72; links with science, 258; as a metaphor for truth, 270–1; naturalistic vs interventionist styles, 258; negative intensification, 284n56; permanent processes for, 274; random inclusiveness and ‘ignorance’ of, 268–70, 276–7; record projects, 272–

5, 285n62; snapshot aesthetic, 260, 262 photography: SB’s work in, 251–80, 363; compared with Martin, 256, 258–60; direct observation, 254–5; early work, 252, 268; for Ex Voto, 241, 252, 281n5, 357; frame and composition, 259–60, 262–3; points of view, 262–3; spatialized narratives, 255–6; vs written descriptions, 263, 267–8. See also Butler, Samuel, works: photography physiological psychology, 155–6 Pisano, Niccolo, 237 plants. See animals and plants Platt, Arthur, 328, 330 Pocock, L.G., 341n46 Poole, Deborah, 267 Pope, Alexander: Dunciad, 64 Portman, M.V., 258 portraits (of SB), 4, 115 posterity (SB’s view of), 16, 347, 353– 6; immortality of literary consciousness, 53–4, 361; as a literary strategy, 345, 354; and selfarchiving, 347, 362–4. See also future; literary career (of SB) postmodernism, 145 Poynter, Edward, 183 Pre-Raphaelites and Pre-Raphaelite art, 13, 80, 224, 240, 243, 244, 275 presentationism, 202 Proctor, Richard, 123, 129 prostitution, 173 psychology: branches of, 211; development as a science, 197; new vs older traditions of, 216n32 psychology, evolutionary, 12, 143–64, 195–219 psychophysics: German school of,

Index 199–204; psychophysical parallelism, 217n40 Purcell, Henry, 301, 310; Timon of Athens, 307 Queen, 284n40 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 329–30 Quilter, Harry, 15 Raby, Peter, 7, 114, 249n57 Rahn, Johann Rudolf, 232, 235, 245; Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in der Schweiz, 232 Raphael (Raffaello da Urbino), 223, 224, 226, 230, 237, 238, 243, 289 Reasoner, The, 35 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 62, 68– 70, 74, 76, 79; Wolfenbüttel Fragmente, 68 Rembrandt van Rijn, 272 Renaissance period and styles, 185–6, 236, 237, 241, 242–3 Renan, Ernest: Vie de Jésus, 67 Resurrection. See Christianity Réville, Albert, 73 Ribot, Théodule-Armand, 146; Heredity, 166n12, 199 Richards, Grant, 92 Richards, Robert J., 215n24 Richardson, Samuel, 315n29 Robinson, Henry Peach, 258, 283n30 Robinson, Roger, 8–9, 21–43 Rockstro, William Smith, 290 Roman Catholic Church, 58, 59, 62, 71, 73; Jesuits, 62 Romanes, George John, 133, 146, 166n12, 198 Romanesque style, 232 Romano, Giulio, 236 Rome: Accademia di San Luca, 226

419

Rorty, Richard, 18n22 Rose (model), 181–3, 182 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 224 Royal Academy, 10, 81, 224 Ruskin, John, 224, 227, 235, 238–9, 241, 244, 247n15; The Stones of Venice, 237, 243; The Two Paths, 237 Russell, Edward S., 210 Rutherford, Richard, 332 Ruyer, Raymond, 341n46 Sabbatucci, Dario, 318 Sacri Monte, 240–5, 259–68, 356–60; at Crea, 259, 261, 262, 264, 267, 357, 360; at Locarno, 225; at Varallo, 252, 255–6, 356–60 St Gotthard Pass (Switzerland), 229– 30, 231 St Hilaire, Geoffroy, 65 St John’s College. See Cambridge University Salt, Henry, 363 salvage ethnography, 251–2, 272–8 San Carlo (chapel, Switzerland), 230 satire. See irony and satire Saturday Review, 131, 329 Savage, Eliza Mary Ann: on Fair Haven, 73; on Helmholtz, 202; influence on SB’s writing, 34, 65; on Narcissus, 304; SB’s correspondence with, 231, 303, 304, 360, 363, 368n35; SB’s sonnets about, 176–7 Schlegel, Friedrich, 65–6, 82 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 66–7, 85n31; Lectures on the Life of Jesus, 66; On Luke, 67 Schoelcher, Victor: The Life of Handel, 308 Schumann, Clara, 290 science: and art, 226, 231; evolution

420 Index of, 136–8; and fiction, 118; as imperfect knowledge, 350; ironic modes of writing in, 64–5; and photography, 258; popularization of, 113–38; professionalization of, 129, 131–2, 134; professional or practicing scientists, 131, 132, 136– 7, 150, 215n8, 218n62; symbols in, 93; vs grace, 169n38; vs religious concerns, 58–9, 82–3, 95–6, 116, 120–1, 123; women in, 142n46 scientific authority, 14, 117–18, 131–6, 351 scientific naturalism, 116, 122, 128– 33, 138, 346 Scotto, Stefano, 243 sculpture, 80, 81 Secord, James, 100–1, 105, 118 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 174, 192n7 Seedo, Mr (composer), 296, 314n27 sensation, 196–9 sexology, 177 Shaffer, Elinor, 7, 9–10, 16, 58–83, 243; on Authoress, 325; on SB as a photographer, 252–3, 255, 262, 268, 283n28; on SB’s visionary dream, 230, 236 Shakespeare, William, 287, 289, 347, 354; Hamlet, 328; Much Ado About Nothing, 186; sonnets, 13, 185–6 Shaw, George Bernard, 5, 6, 91, 109; on Authoress, 326, 339n24; Major Barbara, 364; SB’s influence on, 15, 364–5; on Way of All Flesh, 166n17, 191–2n4, 363, 364 Sheets-Pyenson, Susan, 135 Sheffield, Suzanne Le-May, 138n1 Sheridan, Richard, 315n29 Shrewsbury School: Samuel Butler (SB’s grandfather) as headmaster

of, 70, 107; SB’s education at, 23, 70, 120, 172, 223, 319, 345 Shuttleworth, Sally, 11–12, 143–64 Sicily, 15; Church of the Addolorata (Mont Erice), 272, 273; Trapani, 15, 321, 325, 330 Sidgwick, Henry, 197 Simon, Richard, 61 Simpson, George Gaylord, 114, 139n4 Smollett, Tobias, 315n29 Sonnambulo, Il; or Lively Little Alessio, 299 Sorbonne, 62, 64, 352 Spalding, Douglas A., 219n62 Spectator, The, 340n29, 340n38, 348 Spencer, Herbert, 12, 118, 197, 209, 216n30, 216n32; developmental theory, 135, 207; First Principles, 93, 207; physiological psychology, 155–6; Principles of Biology, 207; Principles of Ethics, 207; Principles of Psychology, 146, 195, 207, 217n49, 219n64; Principles of Sociology, 207; SB’s citation of, 135, 202, 207, 210– 11 Spencer, W. Baldwin, 275 Spinoza, Baruch: Tractatus theologicopoliticus, 61, 62 Springer, Anton, 239, 245 Stalin, Joseph, 365 Steele, Robert, 338n15 Stephen, Leslie, 197 Sterling, John, 77 Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy, 64, 143 Stevenson, Robert Louis: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 171 Stillman, Clara, 7, 214n1 Stoddart, Alexander, 326 Stone, Benjamin, 272

Index Stott, William, 249n49 Strachey, Lytton, 365; Eminent Victorians, 82, 347 Strauss, David Friedrich, 69, 70, 73–5, 84n11; Der alte und der neue Glaube, 73; Das Leben Jesu /The Life of Jesus, 62–3, 65, 66, 67, 73, 79, 85n28 Streatfeild, Richard Alexander, 43n5, 91, 92, 363, 364, 368n43 Suarez, Francisco, 62 Sullivan, Arthur, 14, 301, 303, 306, 312, 314n17; edition of Handel’s Jephtha, 290–1, 314n17; The Mikado, 301–2; Trial by Jury, 301 Sully, James, 202, 216n30 surrealism, 286n85 Sussman, Herbert, 7, 12, 16, 170–91 Sutcliffe, F. Meadow, 283n28 Swales, Martin, 65 Swift, Jonathan, 10, 33, 35, 39, 63; The Battle of the Books, 347; Gulliver’s Travels, 17n3, 31, 35, 63; A Modest Proposal, 63; A Tale of a Tub, 63 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 174 Switzerland, 226, 227, 228, 229; Airolo, 231; Alps, 230, 241; Bellinzona, 234; Biasca, 237; Calanca, 234–5; Calpiogna, 294; Canton Ticino, 13, 227, 231–2, 241, 244; Giornico, 232, 233; Lago Maggiore, 231, 275; Lake Ritom, 230, 236; Locarno, 225, 235; Mairengo, 232; Mendrisio, 231; Mesocco, 234, 237; Piora, 230, 236, 237; St Gotthard Pass, 229–30, 231; San Carlo chapel, 230; Val Leventina, 231, 232, 236; Wetterhorn, 294 symbols and symbolic practice: control of, 103–5; covenanted, 95, 96; written, 92, 93, 94, 103

421

Symonds, John Addington, 241 Tabachetti (Jean de Wespin), 240, 241, 356–60, 363; SB interpretations of, 275, 346–7, 354; terracotta figures, 262–3, 266, 358, 359; Il Vecchietto (attrib. to), 267, 275, 357, 359, 368n33 Taplin, Oliver, 331 technology: adaptation as, 102–3, 197–8; as an evolutionary process, 55–6, 109, 126–8, 197–8, 269; machines as external organs, 276 teleological model (in SB’s writing), 119–20, 137–8, 269, 276, 351 Temple, Frederick, 128 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), 25, 28, 184, 304 Testori, Giovanni, 241–2 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 35 Thirlwall, Connop, 67, 85n31 Thurn, Everard im, 258 Times (London), 5, 40, 242 Times Literary Supplement, 338n15 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 237, 243, 289 Toland, John: Christianity Not Mysterious, 63 Trapani (Sicily), 15, 321, 325, 330 travel writing, 13; travel diaries, 223, 229–30; travel vs tourism, 229 Trollope, Frances: A Visit to Italy, 230 Trovatore, Il, or Larks with a Libretto (burlesque), 299 Tuke, Henry Scott, 174; August Blue (1894), 174, 175 Turner, Frank M., 114, 135, 215n18, 346 Tylor, E.B., 108, 272, 276 Tyndall, John, 11, 59, 92, 131, 205,

422 Index 208; ‘Virchow and Evolution,’ 110n3 unconsciousness and the unconscious: role in memory, 46–7, 50–1, 119; unconscious knowledge, 137, 161, 164, 350 Universal Review, The, 15 University College (London), 216n30, 328 Val Sesia (Italy), 227, 241 Varallo (Italy): Sacro Monte at, 227, 241–3, 249n57, 252, 255, 262–3, 263, 267, 356–60 Vasari, Giorgio, 226, 227, 237, 243; Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 226 Vecchietto, Il, 267, 275, 357, 359, 368n33 Verdi, Giuseppe: Il trovatore, 299 Victorianism and the Victorian age: bachelor culture in, 170–6; classic comedies, 319; classics curriculum, 23, 37, 68, 197, 319; Edwardian and Georgian constructions of, 347; gay culture during, 171, 183, 184; Handel’s music in, 287, 290; imbalance of power within, 151–2; Italy as a cultural contrast to, 13; marriage, 173, 188–9; ‘middlebrow’ journals, 326–7, 330–1; museum culture, 231; natural theology tradition, 116, 122; photography in, 252–4; religious education in, 70–1; SB as a commentator on, 10–11, 346; SB’s alienation from, 345; SB as an insider, 70, 345–6; SB’s challenges to, 37–8; SB’s readership in, 5–6, 16, 324, 343, 345–6, 356; SB’s satire on

conventions of, 93, 348; scientific community in, 62; travel writing, 13, 223, 229–30; women in, 142n46, 173, 317–18, 321–2, 335 Voltaire, 62, 65 Wagner, Richard: The Flying Dutchman, 299 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 67, 92, 116, 120, 124, 128 Ward, James, 12, 195, 198, 205, 206, 217n40; ‘An Attempt to Interpret Fechner’s Law,’ 204; on consciousness, 201–2, 218n58; ‘Psychology’ (in Encyclopedia Britannica), 202, 209; review of Luck, or Cunning?, 211 Ward, Mrs Humphry: Robert Elsmere, 60, 67 Warr, George Winter, 328 Weber, Max, 202 Wells, H.G., 5, 364 Wesley, Samuel: ‘Lead me Lord,’ 306, 308 Wespin, Jean de. See Tabachetti Whistler, James McNeill, 240, 249n49 White, Joseph Blanco, 74 White, Theodore, 317, 337n1; Caesar at the Rubicon, 317 Whitman, Walt, 180, 181, 184 Whitmarsh, Tim, 323, 328, 332, 338n7; on reviews of Authoress, 325, 326, 340n27; on Winkler, 331, 341n48 Whyte, Lancelot, 206 Wilde, Oscar, 164, 171, 172, 184–6, 188, 240; The Importance of Being Ernest, 149; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 189, 191; ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.,’ 185

Index Willey, Basil, 58, 73, 79 Winckelmann, Johann: Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 226 Winkler, John J. (Jack), 331, 332, 336, 341n48 Wochenschrift für klassische Philologie, 327, 340n41 women: prostitution, 161, 173, 178, 188–9 Wood, John George: Nature’s Teachings, 123 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 56, 145, 365; ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ 193n25, 365; Orlando, 185; To the Lighthouse, 56, 166n17

423

Wordsworth, William, 105 Working Men’s College (Great Ormond Street, London), 100, 101, 117, 167n20, 327, 329, 338n9, 341n45 Worsley, Philip, 84n8 Wundt, Wilhelm, 202, 203, 209, 216n32, 217n40; Physiologische Psychologie, 202 Zabel, Morton Dauwen, 7, 363 Zdanski, Clarice, 13–14, 223–45 Zemka, Sue, 43n8 Ziolkowsky, Theodore: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus, 67