Samuel Butler
From Philosopedia
Butler, Samuel (4 December 1835 - 18 June 1902)
Born into a long line of clerics, Butler was expected also to become a cleric. But following graduation from Cambridge, he discovered that whether or not one was baptized made no apparent difference, and this led to his questioning faith and his giving up any intent of becoming an Anglican clergyman. Because his family was unhappy about this, he moved to New Zealand. In 1864, however, he returned to England and for the rest of his life lived in rooms in Clifford's Inn, near Fleet Street in London.
Butler satirized English social and economic injustices in Erewhon (1872, “Nowhere” spelled backwards, a mock utopian novel).
“Christ was crucified once,” he has written, “and for a few hours. Think of the thousands he has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.”
“Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously,” he wrote in hs Note-Books (1912).
His Way of All Flesh (1902) described the importance of shedding the religion in which one unthinkingly has been brought up. The novel included,
- ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
That was a paraphrase of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s lament upon the death of his beloved friend, Arthur Hallam, “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.”
In a spoof of Alexander Pope’s remark that “An honest man’s the noblest work of God,” Butler wrote, “An honest God’s the noblest work of man.”
Butler’s interest in homoerotic male friendships is found not only in the religious characters of Ernest Pontifex, Towneley, Pryor, and Overtson in The Way of All Flesh but also in his own close friends. In 1861 Butler met Charles Paine Pauli in New Zealand and supported him financially for the next thirty years. Upon Pauli’s death, Butler was shocked to learn that Pauli had been supported by two other men, had amassed a fortune, and had omitted any mention of Butler in his will.
Another friend, the Swiss Hans Faesch, died young and Butler wrote an emotional poem about him as well as wore a lock of Faesch’s hair in a pendant.
His Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered (1899) argued that the playwright had a young male lover who betrayed him much as Pauli had betrayed Butler.
Although Butler’s work was popular, he pleased few in philosophy because he was anti-Christian but also bitterly anti-Darwinian. Butler did not believe in a personal God, yet he maintained that there was mind and purpose in the universe. George Bernard Shaw was his one disciple, but the progress of evolutionary science since their time has made their criticisms “hopelessly outdated,” Joseph McCabe has observed.
After a prolonged illness, Butler died while being attended by his devoted manservant, Alfred Catie, and his companion-biographer, Henry Festing Jones.
{BDF; CE; GL; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
