Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Butler

Truth here isn’t framed as a civic good or a personal virtue; it’s contraband. Butler’s line turns knowledge into a “pearl” and the public into “carnal swine,” a deliberately abrasive pairing that does two things at once: it elevates truth as sacred (“precious and divine”) while insulting the audience as bodies-first creatures who can’t metabolize it. The sting is the point. Calling someone a swine isn’t persuasion, it’s triage: the poet is deciding who deserves access to what he knows.

The phrasing borrows the moral architecture of the Bible (the warning not to cast pearls before swine), but Butler’s version is more worldly and more irritated. “Carnal” doesn’t just mean sinful; it means driven by appetite, status, sensation - the marketplace instincts that turn uncomfortable facts into entertainment, outrage, or trash. That’s the subtext: truth doesn’t fail because it’s unclear; it fails because people are incentivized to misunderstand it.

Context matters. Butler wrote in a Victorian culture loudly committed to piety and progress, yet prickly about Darwin, hypocrisy, and the social machinery that kept respectable lies in circulation. His broader work often needles institutions that claim moral authority while policing dissent. This couplet is less a hymn to truth than a warning about its audience: truth is not rejected in a vacuum; it’s rejected by communities trained to prefer consoling fictions. In that light, the line reads like an artist’s defensive posture - not elitism for sport, but a grim recognition that some revelations cost more than most people are willing to pay.