The title - The Way of the Flesh - is a religious allusion that is explicated in the verse: “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.”—ROM. viii. 28. The title and the complimentary verse apprises the reader regarding the religious perspective of the text. Literally, “the ways of all flesh” are not laudable for they incarnate decadence.
The substance of partiality in art displays in Butler’s text. Samuel Butler’s father edified Samuel Butler on how to construe art: “you must not judge by the work, but by the work in connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi, think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition? Would a single one of those frescoes we went to see when we were at Padua have the remotest chance of being hung, if it were sent in for exhibition now? Why, the Academy people would be so outraged that they would not even write to poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his fresco away. Phew!” continued he, waxing warm.” Samuel Butler’s father’s comments undeniably applause Mr. Pontifex’s determination in art. The pronouncement deduces that Mr. Pontifex’s works should be gauged in the context of Pontifex’s settings instead of equalling them to the masterpieces of famed artists such as ‘Cromwell and Giotto’ for their statuses are substantially deviating.
Samuel Butler is a prodigy of paralleling and contrasting personas; he equates Mr. George Pontifex to his mother impeccably: “To the best of my belief George Pontifex got the greater part of his nature from this obstinate old lady, his mother—a mother who though she loved no one else in the world except her husband (and him only after a fashion) was most tenderly attached to the unexpected child of her old age; nevertheless she showed it little. The boy grew up into a sturdy bright-eyed little fellow, with plenty of intelligence, and perhaps a trifle too great readiness at book learning. Being kindly treated at home, he was as fond of his father and mother as it was in his nature to be of anyone, but he was fond of no one else.” Samuel Butler’s report of Mr. George Pontifex surmises that his guise is inherited. Besides, his association with his parentages may have sponsored the persona that he displays during his adulthood.
A ‘Youth versus Old age’ binary crumbles when Butler expounds, “To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season—delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Fontenelle at the age of ninety, being asked what was the happiest time of his life, said he did not know that he had ever been much happier than he then was, but that perhaps his best years had been those when he was between fifty-five and seventy-five, and Dr Johnson placed the pleasures of old age far higher than those of youth.” Butler suggests that youthfulness is not unambiguously more pleasurable than old age. Youthfulness is glorified, yet it may fail to return uncompromising harmony. Comparatively, old age, which is looked upon as disconsolate, may offer gigantic ecstasy for an individual. Although old age is a catalyst for bereavement, it does not downrightly exterminate one’s utility from existence.
Additionally, the ‘Vice versus Virtue’ binary degenerates automatically: “People divide off vice and virtue as though they were two things, neither of which had with it anything of the other. This is not so. There is no useful virtue which has not some alloy of vice, and hardly any vice, if any, which carries not with it a little dash of virtue; virtue and vice are like life and death, or mind and matter—things which cannot exist without being qualified by their opposite.” Butler presumes that vices and virtues are not twofold inverses because they are frequently interwoven. The deconstruction epitomizes the propensity to qualify actualities through annulment which is principally defective.
