Samuel Butler: a sketch | Page 6

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 8,000
pounds. 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 Cary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis
Cary, 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 Cary 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, and among them Miss Eliza Mary Anne Savage. There
also he first met Charles Gogin, who, in 1896, painted the portrait of
Butler which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. He described
himself as an artist in 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.