Samuel Butler: A Sketch | Page 9

the Post Office Directory, and between 1868 and
1876 exhibited at the Royal Academy about a dozen pictures, of which
the most important was "Mr. Heatherley's Holiday," hung on the line in
1874. He left it by his will to his college friend Jason Smith, whose
representatives, after his death, in 1910, gave it to the nation, and it is
now in the National Gallery of British Art. Mr. Heatherley never went
away for a holiday; he once had to go out of town on business and did
not return till the next day; one of the students asked him how he had
got on, saying no doubt he had enjoyed the change and that he must
have found it refreshing to sleep for once out of London.
"No," said Heatherley, "I did not like it. Country air has no body."
The consequence was that, whenever there was a holiday and the
school was shut, Heatherley employed the time in mending the skeleton;
Butler's picture represents him so engaged in a corner of the studio. In
this way he got his model for nothing. Sometimes he hung up a
looking-glass near one of his windows and painted his own portrait.
Many of these he painted out, but after his death we found a little store
of them in his rooms, some of the early ones very curious. Of the best
of them one is now at Canterbury, New Zealand, one at St. John's
College, Cambridge, and one at the Schools, Shrewsbury.
This is Butler's own account of himself, taken from a letter to Sir Julius
von Haast; although written in 1865 it is true of his mode of life for
many years:
I have been taking lessons in painting ever since I arrived. I was always
very fond of it and mean to stick to it; it suits me and I am not without

hopes that I shall do well at it. I live almost the life of a recluse, seeing
very few people and going nowhere that I can help--I mean in the way
of parties and so forth; if my friends had their way they would fritter
away my time without any remorse; but I made a regular stand against
it from the beginning and so, having my time pretty much in my own
hands, work hard; I find, as I am sure you must find, that it is next to
impossible to combine what is commonly called society and work.
But the time saved from society was not all devoted to painting. He
modified his letter to the 'Press' about "Darwin among the Machines"
and, so modified, it appeared in 1865 as "The Mechanical Creation" in
the 'Reasoner', a paper then published in London by Mr. G. J. Holyoake.
And his mind returned to the considerations which had determined him
to decline to be ordained. In 1865 he printed anonymously a pamphlet
which he had begun in New Zealand, the result of his study of the
Greek Testament, entitled 'The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ as given by the Four Evangelists critically examined'. After
weighing this evidence and comparing one account with another, he
came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ did not die upon the cross. It is
improbable that a man officially executed should escape death, but the
alternative, that a man actually dead should return to life, seemed to
Butler more improbable still and unsupported by such evidence as he
found in the gospels. From this evidence he concluded that Christ
swooned and recovered consciousness after his body had passed into
the keeping of Joseph of Arimathaea. He did not suppose fraud on the
part of the first preachers of Christianity; they sincerely believed that
Christ died and rose again. Joseph and Nicodemus probably knew the
truth but kept silence. The idea of what might follow from belief in one
single supposed miracle was never hereafter absent from Butler's mind.
In 1869, having been working too hard, he went abroad for a long
change. On his way back, at the Albergo La Luna, in Venice, he met an
elderly Russian lady in whose company he spent most of his time there.
She was no doubt impressed by his versatility and charmed, as
everyone always was, by his conversation and original views on the
many subjects that interested him. We may be sure he told her all about
himself and what he had done and was intending to do. At the end of
his stay, when he was taking leave of her, she said:
"Et maintenant, Monsieur, vous allez creer," meaning, as he understood

her, that he had been looking long enough at the work of others and
should now do something of his own.
This sank into him and pained him. He was nearly