century Englishmen, wretched in the processes of industrial revolution, and taking it out of each other in consequence. The English have a pig-headed capacity of endurance for which they are not as a rule given sufficient credit. They will make a mess of things and then just hang on stubbornly until life re-asserts itself and the mess becomes a joke. To Samuel Butler that kind of joke was the all-important thing in life, and therefore he had no use for success or prosperity, which led nowhere. The joke was the divine thing, the intimation of immortality, and therefore he could not endure people like his father or Charles Darwin or Miss Savage, who took life and themselves seriously. Of the three Miss Savage was the most really serious and therefore his relationship with her was maintained for the most part through correspondence. He was afraid of her just as he was afraid of his father and Charles Darwin, with an intellectual rather than a personal fear.
These three obsessions made up his real life, which he decorated rather than enriched with friendships. Let us consider them in their order. Butler, senior, was one of your Hell-fire Christians, so enamoured of Hell that they turn this life into a foretaste of it: no room for the divine joke there. Hence Butler's horror of his father and his fanatical struggle with him. Fear of Hell-fire, however, had kept the English fairly decent—and for the ordinary purposes of life Butler asked no more. Then came the publication of The Origin of Species, and the young Samuel saw that his father was dished. The menace of Hell-fire had lost its validity, because the theory of evolution demonstrated that there was no such place. Hurrah! then, for Darwin and Huxley who would at last make room in civilized life for the divine joke. Butler in New Zealand felt that he could return to civilization, and did so, only to find to his disgust that there was less room for the divine joke than ever because to the solemnity of the Bishops had been added that of the scientists. Worse than that, Darwin by letting loose such phrases as the survival of the fittest and insisting upon the mindlessness of evolution, had authorized the ruthlessness of the industrial revolution as it gathered momentum for its work of world-wide devastation. A materialistic philosophy had been evolved which for sheer humbug knocked Anglican and Hell-fire Christianity into a cocked hat. The tyranny of machines which Butler had thought of in New Zealand as a whimsy was in England rapidly becoming the most appalling reality. He saw the danger to his beloved joke and did what he
