The Fair Haven

The demand for a new edition of The Fair Haven gives me an opportunity of saying a few words about the genesis of what, though not one of the most popular of Samuel Butler’s books, is certainly one of the most characteristic.  Few of his works, indeed, show more strikingly his brilliant powers as a controversialist and his implacable determination to get at the truth of whatever engaged his attention.

To find the germ of The Fair Haven we should probably have to go back to the year 1858, when Butler, after taking his degree at Cambridge, was preparing himself for holy orders by acting as a kind of lay curate in a London parish.  Butler never took things for granted, and he felt it to be his duty to examine independently a good many points of Christian dogma which most candidates for ordination accept as matters of course.  The result of his investigations was that he eventually declined to take orders at all.  One of the stones upon which he then stumbled was the efficacy of infant baptism, and I have no doubt that another was the miraculous element of Christianity, which, it will be remembered, was the cause of grievous searchings of heart to Ernest Pontifex in Butler’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh.  While Butler was in New Zealand (1859-64) he had leisure for prosecuting his Biblical studies, the result of which he published in 1865, after his return to England, in an anonymous pamphlet entitled “The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists critically examined.”  This pamphlet passed unnoticed; probably only a few copies were printed and it is now extremely rare.  After the publication of Erewhon in 1872, Butler returned once more to theology, and made his anonymous pamphlet the basis of the far more elaborate Fair Haven, which was originally published as the posthumous work of a certain John Pickard Owen, preceded by a memoir of the deceased author by his supposed brother, William Bickersteth Owen.  It is possible that the memoir was the fruit of a suggestion made by Miss Savage, an able and witty woman with whom Butler corresponded at the time.  Miss Savage was so much impressed by the narrative power displayed in Erewhon that she urged Butler to write a novel, and we shall probably not be far wrong in regarding the biography of John Pickard Owen as Butler’s trial trip in the art of fiction—­a prelude to The Way of All Flesh, which he began in 1873.

It has often been supposed that the elaborate paraphernalia of mystification which Butler used in The Fair Haven was deliberately designed in order to hoax the public.  I do not believe that this was the case.  Butler, I feel convinced, provided an ironical framework for his arguments merely that he might render them more effective than they had been when plainly stated in the pamphlet of 1865.  He fully expected his readers to comprehend his irony, and he anticipated that some at any rate of them would keenly resent it.  Writing to Miss Savage in March, 1873 (shortly before the publication of the book), he said:  “I should hope that attacks on The Fair Haven will give me an opportunity of excusing myself, and if so I shall endeavour that the excuse may be worse than the fault it is intended to excuse.”  A few days later he referred to the difficulties that he had encountered in getting the book accepted by a publisher:  ” —–­ were frightened and even considered the scheme of the book unjustifiable. —–­ urged me, as politely as he could, not to do it, and evidently thinks I shall get myself into disgrace even among freethinkers.  It’s all nonsense.  I dare say I shall get into a row—at least I hope I shall.”  Evidently there is here no anticipation of The Fair Haven being misunderstood.  Misunderstood, however, it was, not only by reviewers, some of whom greeted it solemnly as a defence of orthodoxy, but by divines of high standing, such as the late Canon Ainger, who sent it to a friend whom he wished to convert.  This was more than Butler could resist, and he hastened to issue a second edition bearing his name and accompanied by a preface in which the deceived elect were held up to ridicule.

Butler used to maintain that The Fair Haven did his reputation no harm.  Writing in 1901, he said: 

“The Fair Haven got me into no social disgrace that I have ever been able to discover.  I might attack Christianity as much as I chose and nobody cared one straw; but when I attacked Darwin it was a different matter.  For many years Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious Memory made a shipwreck of my literary prospects.  I am only now beginning to emerge from the literary and social injury which those two perfectly righteous books inflicted on me.  I dare say they abound with small faults of taste, but I rejoice in having written both of them.”

Very likely Butler was right as to the social side of the question, but I am convinced that The Fair Haven did him grave harm in the literary world.  Reviewers fought shy of him for the rest of his life.  They had been taken in once, and they took very good care that they should not be taken in again.  The word went forth that Butler was not to be taken seriously, whatever he wrote, and the results of the decree were apparent in the conspiracy of silence that greeted not only his books on evolution, but his Homeric works, his writings on art, and his edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Now that he has passed beyond controversies and mystifications, and now that his other works are appreciated at their true value, it is not too much to hope that tardy justice will be accorded also to The Fair Haven.  It is true that the subject is no longer the burning question that it was forty years ago.  In the early seventies theological polemics were fashionable.  Books like Seeley’s Ecce Homo and Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma were eagerly devoured by readers of all classes.  Nowadays we take but a languid interest in the problems that disturbed our grandfathers, and most of us have settled down into what Disraeli described as the religion of all sensible men, which no sensible man ever talks about.  There is, however, in The Fair Haven a good deal more than theological controversy, and our Laodicean age will appreciate Butler’s humour and irony if it cares little for his polemics.  The Fair Haven scandalised a good many people when it first appeared, but I am not afraid of its scandalising anybody now.  I should be sorry, nevertheless, if it gave any reader a false impression of Butler’s Christianity, and I think I cannot do better than conclude with a passage from one of his essays which represents his attitude to religion perhaps more faithfully than anything in The Fair Haven:  “What, after all, is the essence of Christianity?  What is the kernel of the nut?  Surely common sense and cheerfulness, with unflinching opposition to the charlatanisms and Pharisaisms of a man’s own times.  The essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma, nor yet in abnormally holy life, but in faith in an unseen world, in doing one’s duty, in speaking the truth, in finding the true life rather in others than in oneself, and in the certain hope that he who loses his life on these behalfs finds more than he has lost.  What can Agnosticism do against such Christianity as this?  I should be shocked if anything I had ever written or shall ever write should seem to make light of these things.”

R. A. STREATFEILD. 
August, 1913.