BUTLER, SAMUEL (1835-1902), English author, son of the Rev. Thomas Butler, and grandson of Samuel Butler, Bishop of Lichfield (q.v.), was born at Langar, Notts., on Dec. 4, He was educated at Shrewsbury School and at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he narrowly missed a classical fellowship. He wished to be a painter, and refused, on grounds of religious doubt, to enter the Church, for which he had been intended. After some differences with his father on this head, he emigrated in to New Zealand, and established a sheep-run on the Rangitata, with capital advanced by his father. He had already been con nected at St. John's with an undergraduate paper, The Eagle, and in New Zealand he contributed various articles to the press, including a dialogue, Darwin and the Origin of Species (1862), and a sketch, Darwin among the Machines (1863), which was the germ of his best-known work, Erewhon. His first book, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), describing his New Zealand experiences, was edited and published by his father from his letters during his absence from England. In 1864, having doubled his capital, he sold his sheep-run, and returned to England, taking rooms in Clifford's Inn, where he lived for the rest of his life. At this time he possessed a competence; but this was subse quently lost in speculative ventures, and from 1874 to 1886 his circumstances were embarrassed. In 1886, however, his father's death ended his monetary troubles. On his return to England he had begun to study painting seriously, and from 1868 to 1876 he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. One of his pictures, "Mr. Heatherley's Holiday," is now in the National Gallery of British Art. At Heatherley's school of painting in Newman Street he met Eliza Mary Anne Savage, who became his closest friend. He corresponded regularly with her until her death in 1885. It appears that she was in love with him; but she was lame_ in poor health, and not beautiful. Butler never married. In his later years his closest friend was Henry Festing Jones, who wrote his life, and collaborated with him in the illustrating of his Italian books and in his musical compositions. These include Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues, and other Short Pieces for the Piano (1885), Narcissus: a Cantata in the Handelian form (i888), and Ulysses: an Oratorio 0904). Butler was throughout his life passionately devoted to Handel, whom he ranked very much above all other composers.
Butler lives, not by his musical compositions or his pictures, but by his books. His first important work was Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), a story of a visit to an imaginary country shut off from the world. The account of Erewhonian manners enables Butler to proclaim his own philosophy of life in satirizing the manners of his age. Erewhon, which had a popular success denied, in Butler's lifetime, to all his later books, was followed by The Fair Haven (1873), a satirical defence of "the miraculous element in Our Lord's ministry here on earth," purporting to be written by one, John Pickard Owen, of whom a satirical biography is prefixed. The Fair Haven, based on a pamphlet on The Evidence for the Resurrection, which Butler had printed privately in 1865, appeared without his name, and was taken seriously by some reviewers. In a second edition, issued in the same year, Butler disclosed his authorship and intention. Meanwhile, he had been following up his early interest in the doctrine of evolution. In 1872 he twice stayed with Charles Darwin, with whom, and with his son, Francis, he was on terms of friendship. But his study of evolution led him to a sharp dissent from Darwin's views, and to the upholding of a doctrine which he traced back in part to Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, whose contributions to the theory of evolution seemed to him to have been overlaid by the praise accorded to Charles Darwin's theory of Natural Selec tion. In 1877 he published the first of his books on this subject, Life and Habit, in which he developed the doctrine that heredity, and therefore evolution, depended not on the natural selection of chance variations or "sports," but on an "unconscious memory," transmitted as habit from generation to generation, and tending constantly to grow with the life of the race. Life and Habit was followed by Evolution Old and New Unconscious Memory (188o), and Luck or Cunning? (1886), in which Butler's biolog ical theories were further developed. These writings, by means of which he held that he had achieved "the re-introduction of teleology into organic life," received no serious notice from his contemporaries, though they have been far more favourably con sidered by later scientists [cf. Prof. Bateson, in the Darwin cen tenary volume, Darwin and Modern Science (1909)]. Natural selection, as interpreted by Darwin, seemed to Butler to remove all idea of purpose from the universe, and to depend on the occurrence of variations, or "sports," whose appearance it left totally unexplained. Against this view, he maintained that varia tion was due, not to "luck," but to the striving (or "cunning") of the individual in adapting itself to its environment, and handed on by the inheritance of "unconscious memory" or "habit." Having completed his contribution to the theory of evolution, Butler found himself attracted to a problem of a very different order—the Homeric question. He developed the belief that the Iliad and the Odyssey were by different writers—the Iliad by a native of the Troad, veiling his sympathy for the Trojans against the Greeks, and the Odyssey by a woman, a native of Trapani in Sicily. These views were first put forward in periodical writings and in two pamphlets, The Humour of Homer (1892) and On the Trapanese Origin of the Odyssey (1893) . His views about the Odyssey were further developed in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), and he also translated both the Iliad (1898) and the Odyssey (1900) into colloquial prose. His remaining works include his charming Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881) and Ex V oto: an Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia (1888), memorials of his frequent holidays in Italy, first visited by him as an under graduate, and subsequently re-visited on all possible occasions. He also wrote The Life and Letters of Samuel Butler (1890), a voluminous study of his grandfather's life and work, a book on Shakespeare's Sonnets (1899), and Erewhon Revisited (19o1), an amusing sequel to Erewhon.
Butler's one novel, The Way of All Flesh (19o3), not published until after his death, though it was written between 1873 and i885, is by far his most important work. It is largely autobio graphical, and the characters are mostly taken, with changes, from real life. Theobald and Christina Pontifex are based on Butler's parents, Alethea on Miss Savage, and Dr. Skinner on Dr. Kennedy, Butler's head master at Shrewsbury, while Butler him self appears twice, as both Overton and Ernest Pontifex. The Way of All Flesh is the quintessence of its author's commonsense philosophy. It wages war on all extremes (surtout point de zele was a favourite maxim of Butler's), on all shams and pretences— above all those of which the pretenders are unconscious—on all attempts to take either life or death too seriously. It is full of a faintly bitter irony, which the author turns on occasion against himself as well as his victims. It is caricature; but no book gives a better satiric picture of family life and manners in mid-Victorian England. With Butler's books on evolution, it has notably in fluenced Bernard Shaw, especially in his writings on parents and children.
Butler wrote a good, plain, vigorous English, almost devoid of ornament. "A man," he wrote at the age of 22, "should be clear of his meaning before he endeavours to give it any kind of utterance, and, having made up his mind what to say, the less thought he takes how to say it, more than briefly, pointedly, and plainly, the better." His Notebooks, from which a selection was published in 1912, are full of good and characteristic things said briefly, pointedly and plainly. There will be found also his famous Psalm of Montreal, first published in the Spectator in 1878.
See Samuel Butler: Records and Memorials (privately printed, 1903), H. F. Jones, Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler (i9ii), H. F. Jones The Life of Samuel Butler (1919), and, for a critical study, C. E. M. Joad, Samuel Butler (1924). (G. D. H. C.)