Now the world is confronted with a situation in which the neglected philosopher of Clifford's Inn has attained an importance he never dreamt of and perhaps would not have approved. "Above all things," he said, "let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing in _me_." This useful motto was printed on the menu of the first Erewhon dinner; but a great number of his disciples have disregarded the admonition. I was once the witness of one undergraduate trying to proselytise another and telling him that it was a worthy ambition to desire to be like Christ. "I don't want to be like anyone else," replied the second undergraduate, "but if I did, I shouldn't choose Christ, I should choose Samuel Butler." This is at once an extreme instance and one strictly guarded against Butler's own disapproval: for the kernel of the remark would meet with his applause. But it illustrates the direction in which many of his admirers have more frenetically rushed. It is an ironic fate for so ironic a philosopher that his teaching should have become a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground for so many solemn and ridiculous persons.
What, after all, is his total achievement? He himself summed up what he considered to be his life-work in a statement which is not dated but which must have been written in 1899 or later. It begins with (1) The emphasising the analogies between crime and disease [_Erewhon_], and ends with (17) The elucidation of Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ [_Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered_.] "The foregoing," he continues, "is the list of my mares'-nests, and it is, I presume, this list which made Mr. Arthur Platt call me the Galileo of Mares'-nests in his diatribe on my _Odyssey_ theory in the _Classical Review_." The two to which he probably attached most importance, to judge from the bitterness of his remarks on their reception, were his intervention into the great evolution dispute and his great discovery that the _Odyssey_ was written by a female inhabitant of Trapani in Sicily. With regard to the second he continually complained that no classical scholar had ever replied to his arguments. It was once remarked in answer to this, that if a classical scholar published a book arguing that no player of Rugby football ought to be allowed to pass the ball to another without obtaining a signed receipt for it, the great community of Rugby footballers, intent on other matters, would probably ignore his suggestion. Butler's claim may perhaps be left there. Yet he did apparently take it seriously, in spite of his failure to deal with the singular fact that no scrap of confirmation of his theory has survived from the writings or the traditions of antiquity. His "mares'-nests," he said, "were simply sovereigns which he found lying in public places and which people would not notice and be at the trouble of picking up." They were mostly, however, one cannot help suspecting, recommended to him less because they seemed to be sovereigns than because other people would not pick them up. They were, in fact, the notions of a crank, who, having acquired a distrust of the rest of the world, took pains to differ from it as much as he could.