Samuel Butler

The Fair Haven Samuel Butler

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.