War & Peace Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line lands like a needle slipped under Victorian piety: art pretends to be a temple, but it’s built with the same bricks as an army. The phrase “sinews” does double work. It’s anatomical, suggesting the hidden connective tissue that makes movement possible, and it’s classical, echoing the old maxim that money is the “sinews of war.” By grafting art and literature onto that militaristic proverb, Butler refuses the comforting fantasy that culture floats above economics. If war needs funding to recruit, supply, and sustain itself, so does “genius”: time to write, paper to print, patrons, publishers, distribution, publicity, leisure.

The subtext is less “artists are greedy” than “a society’s aesthetic output is shaped by who can afford to make it and who can afford to circulate it.” Money isn’t just support; it’s selection. It decides which voices get amplified, which experiments get to fail, which reputations can be manufactured and maintained. Butler is also puncturing the moral halo around “pure” literature. In a market culture, even sincerity is entangled with sales, and even rebellion can be financed, packaged, and made legible to buyers.

Context matters: Butler wrote in an era when publishing was industrializing and the professional author was replacing the gentleman amateur. Copyright, serialization, mass readership, and the patronage-to-market shift turned literature into a career with overhead. Calling money the “sinews” doesn’t romanticize the bargain; it anatomizes it. Culture moves when it’s paid to move.