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A Positive Benefit. "Do not expend much powder and shot on Mr. Butler," Charles Darwin advised one of his supporters, "for he is really not worthy of it. His work is merely ephemeral." But Butler, who hated Darwin's evolutionary theory of "natural selection" as much as he hated the Established Church, expressed his own views early in his career by denouncing, in four large volumes, the idea that man "survived or perished according to a process of 'natural selection' into which neither God's will nor man's nor any being's appeared to enter at all." We survive, Butler argued (and Shaw after him) because "there is in each of us a certain limited power of adaptation, which makes it possible for us to face without disaster, or even with positive benefit, unexpected situations." Only if the unexpected, like an overdose of vaccine, demands too much of our strength and will, do we succumb.
Butler did everything he could to insure himself against such a succumbing. In his bachelor apartment in London, he hoarded his independence like a miser. From behind this barricade he attacked every idea that he disliked, kept all distractions at arm's length. He had a French mistress, Mme. Lucie Dumas, for 20 years, during 15 of which he was too careful even to tell her what his name was.
Butler believed that he was by nature a painter, spent years turning out mediocre canvases and damning art critics who had never heard of the "great" artist (a 16th Century Fleming named Jean de Wespin, alias Giovanni Tabachetti). He composed minuets, gavottes and fugues in the manner of Germany's Handel. He translated the Iliad and the-Odyssey into a breezy English that made the dons wince ("Calypso trembled with rage when she heard this. 'You gods,' she exclaimed, 'ought to be ashamed of yourselves' "), then added insult to injury by claiming that the "Homer" of the Odyssey was the pseudonym of an unknown Sicilian woman.
Devil's Disciple. Butler invaded science and theology with the same contumacious temerity. He denied both the Crucifixion and Resurrection; nonetheless, he believed in "God"—a Butler-made vital spirit of whom he Shavianly said: "God is not so white as he is painted, and he gets on better with the Devil than people think." Like Carl Jung, he believed in a collective unconscious—an inborn "memory" of human habit and behavior handed down through the generations. The art of living, he held, was to keep a tricky but common-sensical balance between this vital inheritance and the equally vital capacity for adaptation.
Butler wrote 27 books. Only two are at -all well known today. One is Erewhon ("Nowhere" roughly spelled backwards), a brilliant fantasy about a world in which sickness is treated as a crime and crime as a sickness (as is coming to be the case today) and civilization rests upon two banks, one (financial) which men invest in but deprecate, the other (religious) which the)L praise to high Heaven but seldom invest in. The second survivor, Butler's only, real novel, The Way of All Flesh, is a unique period-study of Victorian home life.