High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Butler’s notes were made in the late 1880s, for they include a reference to the grudging (and in Butler’s view, plainly inadequate) clarification in the second edition of Erasmus Darwin, published in 1887 and edited by Francis Darwin. The wound would not heal. Darwin told Huxley that ‘the affair has annoyed and pained me to a silly extent; but it would be disagreeable to anyone to be publicly called in fact a liar. He seems to hint that I interpolated sentences in Krause’s MS, but he could hardly have really thought so. Until quite recently he expressed great friendship for me, and said he had learnt all he knew about evolution from my books, and I have no idea what has made him so bitter against me.’147 Bitterness seems to have been in Butler’s DNA, and was not diluted by poor Darwin apologising, as he did in a letter to Butler, for having caused such offence.

  Festing Jones contended that ‘one of the objects of this book was to show that the idea of descent with modification did not originate with Charles Darwin; and another was to restore mind to the universe, for Butler thought that the tendency of Charles Darwin’s writings was to give too much prominence to accident at the expense of design in the theory of evolution.’148 Butler, wounded by the lack of serious response to Life and Habit, was now even more upset, and lashing out. Unconscious Memory was the final nail in his coffin as a serious thinker about science. His last book on the subject, Luck or Cunning?, was an extended act of score-settling. It appeared in 1886. Darwin was dead, but his adherents remained to be abused and reviled, and to hold Butler in contempt. Butler went to his grave believing he had made a distinguished contribution to the theory of evolution.149 However, in a remark that gives us the measure of the man, he also said that ‘I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.’150

  Perhaps Butler concentrated on scientific matters because he doubted his worth in the debate on Christianity. Sending an acquaintance ‘one of the many unsold copies’ of The Fair Haven in 1877, he said it was ‘what is called the 1st edition, i.e. without the preface, because it is better without it, the preface being written without due thought and in fact a mistake’. He wrote his assaults on Darwin while developing other aspects of a considerable artistic talent: having done with painting, he took up photography, and worked on translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey and on travel writing. However, his crowning achievement was another work he wrote at Miss Savage’s instigation, but could not bring himself to publish in his father’s lifetime and then, after Canon Butler died in 1886, his own: The Way of All Flesh.

  Butler wrote it from 1873 until 1884, contemporarily with his writing on evolution. At the start he spent his days painting, and wrote in the evenings, instead of practising the piano. He knew the offence the novel would cause his family. A discarded title-page, found in his papers after his death, bears the motto: ‘Quand on fait des ommelettes [sic] il faut croquer des oeufs’.151 Miss Savage, who read it as Butler wrote it, told him early on, in August 1873, that ‘I read the novel two more times – once to find fault and once for complete enjoyment. As far as it goes it is perfect (at least it is to my mind) and if you go on as you have begun (and I daresay you will) it will be a beautiful book.’152 In July 1878 he was still sending her the latest instalments of ‘Ernest Pontifex’. He told her: ‘It is so much less readable than I yet see my way to making it – and it is full of little contradictions.’153 She loved it and longed for further instalments.

  He revised the manuscript continually, though after Miss Savage’s death in 1885 hardly touched it again, so important was her critical eye to him: she is immortalised in the book as Ernest’s kindly and beautiful aunt, Alethea. As it turned out this great, revolutionary, destructive, modern Victorian novel was not published until 1903, the year after Butler died. He had been right about the outrage it would provoke, not least because the Reverend Theobald Pontifex, the father of the hero of the book, is within a few pages dripping with cant and hypocrisy; and his wife, Christina, is not far behind. Ernest, their son, is said in the narrative to have been born in 1835, as was Butler; and Ernest is the son of a clergyman of the same age as Butler’s father.

  Theobald is a self-regarding, self-pitying sociopath, sadist, bully, hypocrite and prig. His wife is a vacuous, trivial, oppressed fantasist, compliant towards and conniving in the many beastlinesses of her vile husband. When Christina dies, Butler writes of Theobald that ‘he buried his face in his handkerchief to conceal his want of emotion.’154 Butler’s two sisters were horrified. It is no wonder, but it hardly speaks well of them. As well as there being something of Archdeacon Froude in Theobald, there is something of a poor man’s Dr Arnold in Ernest’s headmaster Dr Skinner (although Butler went to Shrewsbury, he clearly understood the type).

  As well as undermining the concept of family life, the book also attacks the foundation for it, religion. ‘If you begin with the Bible’, the odious Pryer tells Ernest, ‘you are three parts gone on the road to infidelity, and will go the other part before you know where you are. The Bible is not without its value to us the clergy, but for the laity it is a stumbling block which cannot be taken out of their way too soon or too completely . . . a more unreliable book was never put upon paper.’155 That, though, is only one of the related hypocrisies it attacks. ‘In his eagerness to regenerate the Church of England (and through this the universe) by the means which Pryer had suggested to him, it occurred to him to try to familiarise himself with the habits and thoughts of the poor by going and living among them. I think he got this notion from Kingsley’s Alton Locke, which, High Churchman though he for the nonce was, he had devoured as he had devoured Stanley’s Life of Arnold, Dickens’s novels, and whatever other literary garbage of the day was most likely to do him harm.’156 The higher classes are, in their way, far more disgusting than the lower, whom they so effortlessly patronise. When Ernest is sent to prison, his louche friend Towneley squares the press not to write anything. ‘He was successful as regards all the higher-class papers. There was only one journal, and that of the lowest class, which was incorruptible.’157

  When Ernest suddenly realises, in prison, that Christianity has ‘humbugged’ him – how Butler felt during his work in the slums in 1858 – it is because he knows that ‘the greater part of the ills which had afflicted him were due, indirectly, in chief measure to the influence of Christian teaching’. He wishes to save others from ‘years of waste and misery as he had had to pass himself. If there was no truth in the miraculous accounts of Christ’s Death and resurrection, the whole of the religion founded upon the historic truth of those events tumbled to the ground. “Why,” he exclaimed, with all the arrogance of youth, “they put a gipsy or fortune teller into prison for getting money out of silly people who think they have supernatural power; why should they not put a clergyman in prison for pretending that he can absolve sins, or turn bread and wine into the flesh and blood of One who died two thousand years ago?”’158

  Festing Jones described his friend’s autobiographical novel as ‘like the Book of Job and the Odyssey, that of the good man passing through trials and coming out triumphant in the end.’159 This does not take into account what must be jettisoned and destroyed before attaining that triumph. The review in The Times was typical. Referring to Ernest’s childhood, the reviewer noted: ‘We cannot believe it; we are convinced he exaggerates . . . all this part of the book is painful to the last degree, and fills an ordinarily kind-hearted reader with maddening wrath. Exaggerated or not, we treat children very differently; and the Rev Theobald and his wife would hear of the SPCC.’160 The reviewer went on to castigate Butler for his ‘bitter irony’, and for expounding a philosophy that was ‘wholly negative’. Butler had told Fleay in 1873, when the work was in its early stages, that it was ‘getting positively awful as to satire, every time I rewrite the first 3 chapters they come out more bitter and more bitter: yet I imagine – though I hardly dare
say so – that the bitterness is not likely to hurt anyone who does not richly deserve it – and these won’t be hurt by it.’161

  He did, however, admit that connoisseurs of humour would not be disappointed. The review ended with the pay-off: ‘We admire Mr Butler almost more in this book than in anything else he did; but we liked him better when he was using his intellect and knowledge to prove that the Odyssey was written by a woman.’ It was probably more of a compliment than that paid by the reviewer in the Sunday Sun, who described the work as ‘not a great novel, but it is unquestionably a deeply interesting book’ with a ‘rather foolish title’.

  Butler was on the provisional wing of nineteenth-century secularisers. For all his pretensions, he had no weight of scientific knowledge or discovery to place behind the movement. He was, however, equipped with the courage and the originality of mind to challenge received social and theological wisdom, and he saw humbug with a clarity possessed by hardly any of his peers. He was emblematic of the Victorian determination to construct a new world view, on foundations they themselves had made.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE POLITICAL MIND: HIGH PRINCIPLE AND LOW AMBITION

  I

  POLITICIANS IN THE mid-nineteenth century were just as vulnerable to the tide of social and intellectual change as writers or thinkers were. An extreme example of this new attitude came later in the century when Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist who had been elected an MP, refused to take the Christian oath and therefore could not take his seat. However, Protestant orthodoxy had already retreated at the time of Catholic emancipation in 1829, and Christianity generally soon found itself challenged in the political sphere by the demand to allow Jews to sit in Parliament. As with Catholic emancipation, this entailed a huge challenge to deep-rooted convictions and prejudices.

  The long-running debate on Jewish disabilities from the 1830s to the 1850s showed the political milieu of the time at its best and worst. The best was that minds were now open enough to discuss this question; the worst was that a profound strain of anti-Semitism lingered in British political life, partly racialist in nature, partly based on a religious bigotry that still saw the Jews as requiring to be punished for their part in killing Christ. The ability to participate in politics also defined membership of society, and three increasingly important groups found themselves still excluded, their status as outsiders posing an increasing threat to the stability of civil society. They were the working classes, women, and Jews. Catholics had been enabled to sit in Parliament in 1829 by the Emancipation Act. Jews remained barred, but the relief given to Catholics inspired a new wave of lobbying to secure Jewish rights as well. A bill was presented in the year after the emancipation, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, elected for the first time that year, made his name by supporting it, and attacking the injustice of Jewish exclusion. The bill was defeated in the Commons, but was annually reintroduced. By 1833 the reformed Commons passed it, only to have it defeated by the Lords. The Tory party was opposed, as was King William, on the grounds that Jews were held to have a higher allegiance outside Britain. Huge petitions were presented to Parliament demanding Jews be accorded these rights, but to no avail.

  The Jewish lobby turned its attention to securing admission to positions in local government. Such a bill was finally passed in July 1845. Part of the reason for its success was the determination of certain Jews to become High Sheriffs and Aldermen, and those aiming for the admission of Jews to Parliament realised they would need candidates prepared to sit there. The most notable Jew in political life at this time was Disraeli, who had converted to Christianity at the age of twelve. Now one who had not converted put himself forward: Lionel de Rothschild, from the banking family, who stood for the City of London in 1847, and was elected. There had been nothing to prevent his standing: but he could not take his seat. A bill to enable him, and other Jewish MPs, to do so was introduced into the Commons shortly after his election, to allow the will of his constituents to prevail. Opinion had started to soften on the question. F. D. Maurice told Charles Kingsley in November 1847 that ‘the feeling that the Jews are aliens used to be decisive with me, till I perceived that it ought only to be decisive as to my own conduct, and is no foundation for a law to deprive the aliens of their ordinary privilege.’1

  The Lords rejected the bill in the summer of 1848, albeit by the relatively small margin of 163 to 128. Rothschild could not take his seat. However, in 1851 the banker David Salomons, who had led the fight for Jews to be allowed to hold municipal offices, was elected for Greenwich, and insisted on taking his seat in the Commons. He asked to swear the oath on the Old Testament, which the Speaker permitted: however, he omitted the phrase in the Oath of Abjuration ‘on the true faith of a Christian’. The Speaker asked him to withdraw, but he went to sit on the government side of the House. He was again asked to withdraw, and did, but his friends in the Commons warned he would be seeking legal redress: which panicked the senior minister present, Charles Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who sought to delay further discussion until the following week, to allow legal opinion to be consulted. There were demands for a new writ to be issued for a by-election in Greenwich, since Salomons was disqualified from taking his seat. This move was headed off, but the House reconvened the following Monday to discuss what to do.

  At the start of the discussion about his position Salomons not only came into the chamber but, to great uproar, sat on the ministerial bench. A motion was immediately proposed that he could take his seat; an amendment was immediately proposed that he should not. The uproar continued. One member stood up and challenged the legality of the Oath of Abjuration, which Salomons had refused to take. The Speaker quoted the precedent of Rothschild’s being denied permission to take his seat. An Irish MP, Thomas Anstey, argued that the Oath of Abjuration had been aimed at descendants of James II, not at the Jews; and argued further that the oath had ceased to be legal since the death of George III – it had ‘expired’ since the demise of the last Stuart pretender. The purpose of the oath was not to affirm the Christian faith, but to affirm that Queen Victoria was the lawful sovereign. Salomons had done that: but in the view of the Attorney-General, Sir Alexander Cockburn, an oath was an oath, and if it was not taken in its prescribed form, it was not taken at all. Cockburn did not quibble over the Old Testament: it was the absence of the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ that caused him problems. However, another member pointed out that the former Attorney, Sir Frederic Thesiger, had said that even an oath including those words would be illegal if not sworn on the New Testament.

  The Prime Minister, Russell, said the Commons had to set an example to the people, who generally obeyed the law, and expected their leaders to do so as well. However, even this bromide was unsuccessful, since MPs then disputed whether it would be illegal for Salomons, who had taken an oath to uphold the Queen as sovereign, to take his seat. Just as Quakers had since 1696 been allowed to sit in the Commons simply by affirmation, so should Jews be: this point was also made by John Bright, a Quaker MP.

  Richard Bethell, who would become Solicitor-General, argued that:

  by the very Act of this House, in permitting the hon Members to take the oath on the Old Testament, they had expressed their opinion that they had authority to alter the form—that they were bound to administer the oath in the form that was binding on the hon Member’s conscience; and yet; after making that concession, they mocked the hon Member—they mocked the law—they violated the principle of the law by telling him that though they conceded the principle so far—though they gave him the Old Testament on which to be sworn, and by that very Act rendered it incumbent on themselves to obliterate the words, ‘on the true faith of a Christian,’ yet they refused to obliterate them. He said again they mocked the law, and they mocked common sense by insisting on such a course.2

  Once the House had conceded the point that a man could swear on the Old Testament, they were, Bethell claimed, ‘under a moral obligation to follow that up by omitting the w
ords “on the true faith of a Christian”.’

  It was agreed that the withdrawal of Salomons should be put to the vote. After several speakers, one of whom had said that Salomons, who was in the House, would ‘weaken his own case’ if he did not say something about how he intended to proceed, Salomons rose. There were several cries of ‘Withdraw!’, but many more indicated they wished him to be heard, and the Speaker did not prevent him. He said that:

  having been returned to this House by a large constituency, and believing that I labour under no disability whatever, and that I am in a position to fulfil all the requirements of the law, I thought I should not be doing justice to my own position as an Englishman and a gentleman did I not adopt the course which I thought right and proper of maintaining my right to appear on this floor—without thereby meaning any disrespect to you, Sir. I thought I was bound to take this course in defence of my own rights and privileges, and of the rights and privileges of the constituents who have sent me here. In saying this, Sir, I shall state to you that whatever the decision of this House may be, I shall willingly abide by it, provided that just sufficient force be used to make me feel that I am acting under coercion.3

  He pointed to the ‘doubtful’ state of the law, and warned the House that the very confusion was reason enough not to override the rights of his constituents.

  The House voted by 231 to 81 to have Salomons withdraw. As he had indicated he would, he waited until the Serjeant-at-Arms placed his hand on his shoulder, and then went quietly. The next day Russell moved a motion expressly forbidding Salomons to vote or sit in the House until he took the Oath of Abjuration. He conceded that Quakers could affirm, but the law allowed them to do that: no such law specified that Jews could, and Russell conceded that ‘I complain of the state of the law. I think it a very great hardship upon the Jews.’4