The Humour of Homer and Other Essays. Samuel Butler
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Doctor, the horse, is introduced into Erewhon Revisited; the shepherd in Chapter XXVI tells John Higgs that Doctor “would pick fords better than that gentleman could, I know, and if the gentleman fell off him he would just stay stock still.”
Butler carried on his run for about four and a half years, and the open-air life agreed with him; he ascribed to this the good health he afterwards enjoyed. The following, taken from a notebook he kept in the colony and destroyed, gives a glimpse of one side of his life there; he preserved the note because it recalled New Zealand so vividly.
April, 1861. It is Sunday. We rose later than usual. There are five of us sleeping in the hut. I sleep in a bunk on one side of the fire; Mr. Haast, {22} a German who is making a geological survey of the province, sleeps upon the opposite one; my bullock-driver and hut-keeper have two bunks at the far end of the hut, along the wall, while my shepherd lies in the loft among the tea and sugar and flour. It was a fine morning, and we turned out about seven o’clock.
The usual mutton and bread for breakfast with a pudding made of flour and water baked in the camp oven after a joint of meat—Yorkshire pudding, but without eggs. While we were at breakfast a robin perched on the table and sat there a good while pecking at the sugar. We went on breakfasting with little heed to the robin, and the robin went on pecking with little heed to us. After breakfast Pey, my bullock-driver, went to fetch the horses up from a spot about two miles down the river, where they often run; we wanted to go pig-hunting.
I go into the garden and gather a few peascods for seed till the horses should come up. Then Cook, the shepherd, says that a fire has sprung up on the other side of the river. Who could have lit it? Probably someone who had intended coming to my place on the preceding evening and has missed his way, for there is no track of any sort between here and Phillips’s. In a quarter of an hour he lit another fire lower down, and by that time, the horses having come up, Haast and myself—remembering how Dr. Sinclair had just been drowned so near the same spot—think it safer to ride over to him and put him across the river. The river was very low and so clear that we could see every stone. On getting to the river-bed we lit a fire and did the same on leaving it; our tracks would guide anyone over the intervening ground.
Besides his occupation with the sheep, he found time to play the piano, to read and to write. In the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge, are two copies of the Greek Testament, very fully annotated by him at the University and in the colony. He also read the Origin of Species, which, as everyone knows, was published in 1859. He became “one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophic dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the Origin of Species” (Unconscious Memory, close of Chapter I). This dialogue, unsigned, was printed in the Press, Canterbury, New Zealand, on 20th December, 1862. A copy of the paper was sent to Charles Darwin, who forwarded it to a, presumably, English editor with a letter, now in the Canterbury Museum, New Zealand, speaking of the dialogue as “remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and accurate an account of Mr. D’s theory.” It is possible that Butler himself sent the newspaper containing his dialogue to Mr. Darwin; if so he did not disclose his name, for Darwin says in his letter that he does not know who the author was. Butler was closely connected with the Press, which was founded by James Edward FitzGerald, the first Superintendent of the Province, in May, 1861; he frequently contributed to its pages, and once, during FitzGerald’s absence, had charge of it for a short time, though he was never its actual editor. The Press reprinted the dialogue and the correspondence which followed its original appearance on 8th June, 1912.
On 13th June, 1863, the Press printed a letter by Butler signed “Cellarius” and headed “Darwin among the Machines,” reprinted in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912). The letter begins:
“Sir: There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances”; and goes on to say that, as the vegetable kingdom was developed from the mineral, and as the animal kingdom supervened upon the vegetable, “so now, in the last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian types of the race.” He then speaks of the minute members which compose the beautiful and intelligent little animal which we call the watch, and of how it has gradually been evolved from the clumsy brass clocks of the thirteenth century. Then comes the question: Who will be man’s successor? To which the answer is: We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate. In 1863 Butler’s family published in his name A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, which, as the preface states, was compiled from his letters home, his journal and extracts from two papers contributed to the Eagle. These two papers had appeared in the Eagle as three articles entitled “Our Emigrant” and signed “Cellarius.” The proof sheets of the book went out to New Zealand for correction and were sent back in the Colombo, which was as unfortunate as the Burmah, for she was wrecked. The proofs, however, were fished up, though so nearly washed out as to be almost undecipherable. Butler would have been just as well pleased if they had remained at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, for he never liked the book and always spoke of it as being full of youthful priggishness; but I think he was a little hard upon it. Years afterwards, in one of his later books, after quoting two passages from Mr. Grant Allen and pointing out why he considered the second to be a recantation of the first, he wrote: “When Mr. Allen does make stepping-stones of his dead selves he jumps upon them to some tune.” And he was perhaps a little inclined to treat his own dead self too much in the same spirit.
Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864 and returned via Callao to England. He travelled with three friends whose acquaintance he had made in the colony; one was Charles Paine Pauli, to whom he dedicated Life and Habit. He arrived in August, 1864, in London, where he took chambers consisting of a sitting-room, a bedroom, a painting-room and a pantry, at 15 Clifford’s Inn, second floor (north). The net financial result of the sheep-farming and the selling out was that he practically doubled his capital, that is to say he had about £8000. This he left in New Zealand, invested on mortgage at 10 per cent, the then current rate in the colony; it produced more than enough for him to live upon in the very simple way that suited him best, and life in the Inns of Court resembles life at Cambridge in that it reduces the cares of housekeeping to a minimum; it suited him so well that he never changed his rooms, remaining there thirty-eight years till his death.
He was now his own master and able at last to turn to painting. He studied at the art school in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, which had formerly been managed by Henry Sass, but, in Butler’s time, was being carried on by Francis Stephen Gary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis Gary, who had been a school-fellow of Dr. Butler at Rugby and is well known as the translator of Dante and the friend of Charles Lamb. Among his fellow-students was Mr. H. R. Robertson, who told me that the young artists got hold of the legend, which is in some of the books about Lamb, that when Francis Stephen Gary was a boy and there was a talk at his father’s house as to what profession he should take up, Lamb, who was present, said:
“I should make him an apo-po-pothe-Cary.”
They used to repeat this story freely among themselves, being, no doubt, amused by the Lamb-like pun, but also enjoying the malicious pleasure of hinting that it might have been as well for their art education if the advice of the gentle humorist had been followed. Anyone who wants to know what kind of an artist F. S. Cary was can see his picture of Charles and Mary Lamb in the National Portrait Gallery. In 1865 Butler sent from London to New Zealand an article entitled “Lucubratio Ebria,” which was published in the Press of 29th July, 1865. It treated machines from a point of view different from that adopted in “Darwin among the Machines,” and was one of the steps that led to Erewhon and ultimately to Life and Habit. The article is reproduced in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912).
Butler also studied art at South Kensington, but by 1867 he had begun to go to Heatherley’s School of Art in Newman Street, where he continued going for many years. He made a number of friends at Heatherley’s,