Samuel Butler: a sketch | Page 9

have been to
give away the irony and satire. And he had another reason for not
disclosing his name; he remembered that as soon as curiosity about the
authorship of Erewhon was satisfied, the weekly sales fell from fifty
down to only two or three. But, as he always talked openly of whatever
was in his mind, he soon let out the secret of the authorship of The Fair
Haven, and it became advisable to put his name to a second edition.
One result of his submitting the MS. of Erewhon to Miss Savage was
that she thought he ought to write a novel, and urged him to do so. I
have no doubt that he wrote the memoir of John Pickard Owen with the
idea of quieting Miss Savage and also as an experiment to ascertain
whether he was likely to succeed with a novel. The result seems to have
satisfied him, for, not long after The Fair Haven, he began The Way of
All Flesh, sending the MS. to Miss Savage, as he did everything he
wrote, for her approval and putting her into the book as Ernest's Aunt
Alethea. He continued writing it in the intervals of other work until her
death in February, 1885, after which he did not touch it. It was
published in 1903 by Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, his literary executor.
Soon after The Fair Haven Butler began to be aware that his letter in
the Press, "Darwin among the Machines," was descending with further
modifications and developing in his mind into a theory about evolution
which took shape as Life and Habit; but the writing of this very
remarkable and suggestive book was delayed and the painting
interrupted by absence from England on business in Canada. He had
been persuaded by a college friend, a member of one of the great
banking families, to call in his colonial mortgages and to put the money
into several new companies. He was going to make thirty or forty per
cent, instead of only ten. One of these companies was a Canadian
undertaking, of which he became a director; it was necessary for
someone to go to headquarters and investigate its affairs; he went, and
was much occupied by the business for two or three years. By the
beginning of 1876 he had returned finally to London, but most of his
money was lost and his financial position for the next ten years caused
him very serious anxiety. His personal expenditure was already so low
that it was hardly possible to reduce it, and he set to work at his

profession more industriously than ever, hoping to paint something that
he could sell, his spare time being occupied with Life and Habit, which
was the subject that really interested him more deeply than any other.
Following his letter in the Press, wherein he had seen machines as in
process of becoming animate, he went on to regard them as living
organs and limbs which we had made outside ourselves. What would
follow if we reversed this and regarded our limbs and organs as
machines which we had manufactured as parts of our bodies? In the
first place, how did we come to make them without knowing anything
about it? But then, how comes anybody to do anything unconsciously?
The answer usually would be: By habit. But can a man be said to do a
thing by habit when he has never done it before? His ancestors have
done it, but not he. Can the habit have been acquired by them for his
benefit? Not unless he and his ancestors are the same person. Perhaps,
then, they are the same person.
In February, 1876, partly to clear his mind and partly to tell someone,
he wrote down his thoughts in a letter to his namesake, Thomas
William Gale Butler, a fellow art-student who was then in New
Zealand; so much of the letter as concerns the growth of his theory is
given in The Note- Books of Samuel Butler (1912).
In September, 1877, when Life and Habit was on the eve of publication,
Mr. Francis Darwin came to lunch with him in Clifford's Inn and, in
course of conversation, told him that Professor Ray Lankester had
written something in Nature about a lecture by Dr. Ewald Hering of
Prague, delivered so long ago as 1870, "On Memory as a Universal
Function of Organized Matter." This rather alarmed Butler, but he
deferred looking up the reference until after December, 1877, when his
book was out, and then, to his relief, he found that Hering's theory was
very similar to his own, so that, instead of having something sprung
upon him which would have caused him to want to alter his book, he
was supported. He at once wrote