by Simon Heffer
Mill was alert to the potential damage that could be done to a man in public life who strayed from the social orthodoxy of belief in God. Somewhat disingenuously, he told another correspondent in November 1868 that ‘if anyone again tells you that I am an atheist, I would advise you to ask him, how he knows and in what page of my numerous writings he finds anything to bear out the assertion.’95 When defeated at Westminster in the election that same week he made a point of writing to Bradlaugh saying that although his support of him might have cost a few votes, it was not why he lost. ‘In any case, it was the right thing to do and I do not regret it.’96
On the Liberal wing of politics, such feelings about God were becoming common. In his 1874 tract On Compromise, John Morley – then thirty-six, and a leading intellectual of his generation – wrote that ‘religion, whatever destinies may be in store for it, is at least for the present hardly any longer an organic power. It is not that supreme, penetrating, controlling, decisive part of a man’s life which it has been and will be again.’97 The assault on religion had, he felt, been accomplished ‘as if by unseen hands’: though the reasons for the retreat of the Sea of Faith were clear for all with eyes to see them. ‘Those who dwell in the tower of ancient faiths look about them in constant apprehension, misgiving, and wonder, with the hurried uneasy mien of people living amid earthquakes.’ Morley blamed the rigidities of the Church for failing to allow it to move with the intellectual spirit of the times. ‘While the spirit of man expands in search after new light, and feels energetically for new truth, the spirit of the Church is eternally entombed within the four corners of acts of parliament.’ He said this led to a system ‘that begins by making mental indolence a virtue and intellectual narrowness a part of sanctity, ends by putting a premium on something too like hypocrisy.’ The result was a Church that was ‘a political army of obstruction to new ideas’.98
Morley had been at Oxford when ‘the star of Newman had set, and the sun of Mill had risen in its stead’. His views were more typical by the 1870s. Samuel Butler made a career out of advancing them. But they were increasingly present among more established thinkers. On 2 May 1875 Ruskin noted that Carlyle was ‘in an abusive humour; a sorrowful one.’99 They discussed religion. Carlyle said ‘on the whole the right command seems to be the voice of eternal nature.’ He attacked Cardinal Manning as ‘the most entirely complete representative of humbug we have in the world – “Yon beggarly bag of wind”. I saying that I felt greatly minded sometimes to join the Catholics . . . C said “he would desire in such case rather to have me assassinated”.’ For good measure Carlyle then described the Talmud ‘as far as he could learn, an odious rotten dunghill, with jewels scattered in it.’ As for ‘modern Protestantism’, he said that ‘you don’t feel called on to accelerate by one moment the doom of it, which is legible enough to all men with eyes. They are universally recognizable as people of no sincerity of mind – a puddle of sentimentalities and hypocrisies of all kinds.’100
VII
No writer in the second half of the nineteenth century articulates social radicalism better than Samuel Butler; or illustrates better the reaction against early Victorian values. As with Mill in the generation before him – and Bentham in the generation before Mill – he advanced secularisation in the contemporary mind, stripping away religious bigotries, prejudices and superstitions seen as a brake on progress. However, whereas the utilitarians used rationalism to combat God, Butler used a mixture of bitter satire and hostility. His deconstruction and demolition of the Victorian religious mindset was effective, but not entirely rational: which was largely true of other aspects of Butler’s life and character. He was deeply cynical, including about himself: ‘When I was a boy at school at Shrewsbury,’ he recorded in his Note-Books, ‘old Mrs Brown used to keep a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper. They most of them looked pretty right till you handled them. We are all spoiled tarts.’101
His tone can be blamed upon his father. Butler was born in the rectory at Langar in Nottinghamshire in 1835 under the almost crushing weight of parental expectation. His father was a clergyman in the mould of Archdeacon Froude, and his reward was to become one of the great monsters of Victorian fiction when depicted as the Reverend Mr Pontifex in Butler’s semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh. Butler, who in his private expressions as in many of his public ones was unacquainted with understatement, recorded that ‘MY MOST IMPLACABLE ENEMY from childhood onward has certainly been my father.’102 He also observed of family that ‘more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other – I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily.’103
His grandfather, also Samuel Butler, was headmaster of Shrewsbury and then, in 1836, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Butler went to Shrewsbury, in the family tradition, and then similarly to St John’s College, Cambridge. Writing to tell his father, in 1853, that he had won a scholarship at John’s (one of just five awarded to freshmen), Butler said ‘I shall not make any bones about the oaths’ that he had to swear in those days of the religious tests.104 His friend and first biographer, Henry Festing Jones, noted that, when he was at John’s, ‘Butler had been taught to accept the Christian miracles as self-evident propositions and to believe in a personal anthropomorphic God. He had, at this time, never met any one who entertained a doubt on the matter.’105
His single-mindedness was clear as an undergraduate. In notes he made on 31 March 1855 he wrote that ‘There are only 10 good men in John’s; I am one; reader, calculate your chance of salvation.’106 He quoted the observation of another Johnian, Bishop Selwyn, made a few months earlier in a series of addresses to the university, that ‘the University church is a place too much neglected by the young men up here’ and added: ‘How far better would it be if each man’s own heart was a little University Church, the pericardium a little University churchyard, wherein are buried the lust of the flesh, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world; the veins and arteries, little clergymen and bishops ministering therein, and the blood a stream of soberness, temperance and chastity perpetually flowing into it.’ A ‘Puseyite playing upon an organ’ in the College ‘playeth his own soul to damnation’. Simeonites he dismissed as ‘an acknowledged humbug’.
He graduated twelfth in the first class of the Classical tripos, sufficiently high to be considered for a fellowship. He was expected to enter the Church: but it was quickly apparent that his doubts – to use the popular euphemism – would make that unfeasible. He worked for a few months in the slums of the parish of St James’s Piccadilly, where he realised that seeking to improve the very poor by spiritual means was a waste of time: they needed money. One of his biographers has summed up Butler’s problem with Christianity as being that ‘he could not accept a religion that based itself upon the fundamental wickedness of humanity, whose practice was centred on the injunction “Thou shalt not”, and whose doctrine pointed to the eternal divide of heaven and hell.’107 Men such as Canon Froude and Canon Butler certainly took this view of doctrine; it was Butler’s misfortune to have been brought up by one of them. ‘Is there any religion,’ he asked, ‘whose followers can be pointed to as distinctly more amiable and trustworthy than those of any other? . . . I find the nicest and best people generally profess no religion at all, but are ready to like the best men of all religions.’
To his father’s dismay he abandoned the idea of holy orders. Other ideas for his future vexed his parents. He had to be talked out of growing cotton in Liberia, but finally settled on being an artist even though ‘for two or three years I could make no money by it’ – as he said he wouldn’t, either, by going into the law, a possibility his father held out to him.108 By the late summer of 1859 the Reverend Mr Butler had had enough. ‘If you choose to act in utter contradiction of our judgment and wishes and that before
having acquired the slightest knowledge of your powers which I see you overrate in other points you can of course act as you like. But I think it’s right to tell you that not one sixpence will you receive from me after your Michaelmas payment till you come to your senses.’109 He refused to fund him to go abroad: still angry at his son’s refusal to pursue ordination, he yelled: ‘God give you a seeing eye some day’.
Butler told his mother that ‘if I am the pigheaded fool you think me the best school for me is adversity.’110 He told his father he would make his own living. He started to insist that he be allowed to become an artist. He had some talent for this, but his father was outraged. Father and son had a negotiation about Samuel’s emigrating. Once all other avenues – diplomacy and the Army were also suggested – were exhausted, Canon Butler agreed to let his son go and learn sheep-farming in New Zealand: and to advance him the capital to do so. It was a business transaction: and Samuel kept his word, making a profit after applying himself to learn the mechanics of agriculture. His father advanced him £4,000, a fortune, and Butler sailed from Gravesend in September 1859. He sat on deck as his ship headed down the Thames. When he went to bed that evening he failed, for the first time in his life, to say his prayers, an event so tumultuous that he recorded it in his notebook. In retrospect, it was more surprising that the ritual had lasted that long. On arrival in New Zealand, he learned that a ship on which he had originally intended to sail had sunk with the loss of all on board.
He found some virgin land that would make excellent pasture, and this was the basis of the commercial success of his venture. This was not his only enterprise. He also explored the country, and in proper Victorian fashion sought to improve the cultural climate of the colony by organising art exhibitions. Perhaps more significantly, he lost what remained of his faith: he told a friend in 1862 that ‘he no longer considered himself a Christian’.111 He studied the Gospels and was exercised by their inconsistencies. Since he could find no evidence that Christ died on the cross, he decided there had been no Resurrection.
He returned to England in 1864, his success having created an investment that would pay him £800 a year, liberating him from his father. However, some injudicious business decisions in the 1870s made him dependent again, until his father’s death in 1886 left him with an inheritance. He was also liberated from his father’s doctrines, and made no secret of his own apostasy. This led to a rebuke from his aunt, Anna Russell, who suspected he had been trying to wean her son away from Christianity: she complained about ‘the influence you are exerting on other[s], younger, and less skilled in argument than yourself – leading them. It may be, to make the same shipwreck of faith and hope that you have made.’112 This only provoked Butler to write to her at length about his conception of God, causing more shock and dismay. So settled were his family in their beliefs that to find him so resolute against them – more resolute than they knew, given the anonymity of Butler’s writings on the subject at that time – prevented them from grasping his radical course.
He set himself up in London and sought to make a career as a painter, enrolling as a student at several art schools successively over a period of seven years. He was heavily under the influence of Ruskin, having read The Seven Lamps at John’s. He then read his writings on painting. At this time he painted his best-known and perhaps best picture, Family Prayers, a representation of the grim domestic life at Langar that in its suffocating sense of order and closed-mindedness displays his feelings about his family and his upbringing better than words could. At Heatherley’s art school in Newman Street he befriended a fellow student, Eliza Savage, who became a muse to him, and urged him to write fiction. Charles Darwin, no less, had congratulated Butler in 1865 on his ‘rare powers of writing’.113 Butler was a man of strong, almost comically polarised, likes and dislikes, and one of the latter was the novel. However, Miss Savage persisted; and when Butler failed to achieve his ambition to become a student at the Royal Academy, he had a change of heart.
He wrote his anonymous novel Erewhon, about a utopia based on his experience of New Zealand, and a society in which religion is rejected but in which the Church appears, to be satirised, as a bank. The cult of Ydgrun, a goddess of pragmatism and common sense, has replaced old deities. The truly successful worship her; she is based on Thomas Morton’s character Mrs Grundy, a byword for an arbiter of respectability and good sense in society. Butler also undermines parenthood, attacking the notion that parents inevitably know best. Erewhon was a critical success when published in 1872. When it was reported that Butler was the author, and word reached Langar, its godlessness shocked his family. His father took his advice not to read it, but word about it caused great unhappiness: so much so that his sister Harriet wrote and ordered him to write a letter of regret, which he did – but later destroyed. His father was forced to admit, in a letter of 12 June 1872, that ‘I know that there is a great deal of scepticism in the world’; but he added: ‘That unbelief is the badge of the wise and excellent of the earth or of great array of them I totally deny.’114 To this Butler has added: ‘Who ever said it was?’ His father professed to be distressed at his son losing the faith that he held so strongly: but the wound went even more deeply. He asked Butler not to visit Langar ‘at present’ while he and his wife took in the fact that they had a heretic for a son.
Butler had an unconventional approach to novel-writing as he did to everything else, and derided the views of literary society. He wrote to Miss Savage in March 1873: ‘I have finished Middlemarch. It is very bad indeed.’115 Nearly two years later, he told her: ‘I have been reading a translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea, and the priggishness is the finest of its kind I can call to mind. Is it all a practical joke?’116 She said she had read it in her teens and found it ‘tiresome . . . I shall not read Wilhelm Meister again.’117
In June 1873 Lord Pembroke sent Gladstone, his godfather, a copy of Butler’s next work, The Fair Haven, describing the author as ‘a modern freethinker of the most thoroughgoing sort, and all the defence of religion and dogma and the refutation of doubt are written in a spirit of carefully concealed irony’.118 He continued: ‘It is a satire of almost repulsive bitterness. Yet its real nature is so cleverly disguised that more than one church paper has treated it to a solemn and favourable review.’ He described Butler as being of a school of freethinker ‘whose glory and pride is their recklessness of consequences . . . I hope you will forgive me [for sending him the book]. I feel horribly guilty.’ Gladstone was duped, but soon corrected himself. ‘Dear George, since I wrote to you on Sunday I have learned that the “The Fair Haven” is the work of a writer who does not believe in Christianity. It took me in.’119 A few days later he added: ‘It is rather deplorable that he should bear the name of Butler, but I hope he may grow to be more worthy of it.’120
In 1865 Butler had written articles on the Resurrection, which he had sent to Darwin, who had regarded them as ‘written with much force, vigour, and clearness’.121 These developed via a pamphlet entitled, with Butlerian irony, The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, into The Fair Haven. Miss Savage had been consulted on the manuscript and pronounced it ‘wonderful’.122 When the book was published anonymously in 1873 he sent Darwin a copy. ‘It has interested me greatly and is extremely curious . . . it will be a curious problem whether the orthodox will have so good a scent as to detect your heresy.’123 He told him that ‘Leslie Stephen, a regular reviewer, who was lunching here, knew you were the author’ and added: ‘I have been surprised at the strength of the case which you make for Jesus not having died on the cross.’
The book purports to be a justification of Christian faith, published posthumously with a memoir of the author by his equally fictional brother. Butler felt he had given an intellectual view of the Resurrection in his earlier pamphlet: but he knew such matters had an emotion
al side, and in this book sought to display that too. When we are told the author died of a brain disease after years of mental indisposition, we should take the hint. The book does indeed purport to be a defence of Christianity: but it is a defence launched by so third-rate a mind that it destroys the very thing it allegedly sought to protect. By taking in various reviewers Butler proved his main point, that the intellectual quality and percipience of many churchmen was deplorably low, and their determination to be convinced in the face of evidence against them was deeply depressing. As the ‘author’, John Pickard Owen, says, ‘Never was there a time when such an exposition [of the foundations of belief] was wanted so much as now. The specious plausibilities of pseudo-science have led hundreds of thousands into error; the misapplication of geology has ensnared a host of victims, and a still greater misapplication of natural history seems likely to devour those whom the perversion of geology has spared.’124
Owen goes on, in a bravura display of the very temper Butler was so determined to expose and ridicule: ‘Not that I have a word to say against true science: true science can never be an enemy of the Bible, which is the text-book of the science of the salvation of human souls as written by the great Creator and Redeemer of the soul itself, but the Enemy of Mankind is never idle, and no sooner does God vouchsafe to us any clearer illumination of His purposes and manner of working than the Evil One sets himself to consider how he can turn the blessing into a curse; and by the all-wise dispensation of Providence he is allowed so much triumph as that he shall sift the wise from the foolish, the faithful from the traitors.’
