by a subtle, indirect reflection. Our race placed beside the "coming" one merely looks small, inferior, incomplete, yet all it needs is growth. But if the barrier could be leveled between our country and the one Over the Range, the two would confront each other and see their own images, not as in a glass darkly but as in a brilliant yet tricky and distorting mirror. Our actual beliefs and practices, shorn of the verbal illusions we have spun around them, and pushed to their logical conclusions, would become the naked reductio ad absurdum we view in the Erewhonian philosophy of illness, crime, science, religion, life, and death.[1]
In Erewhon Revisited we see a mental sequence even more interesting than the dramatic sequel. Erewhon was followed the very next year by The Fair Haven. The former supplies the stage setting, the latter the central idea, whose combination makes the Revisit a seemingly artless but really astounding tour de force, an uncanny offspring of logic and fancy.
Given the original situation and the climax that closes the Erewhonian adventure, given considerable study and meditation on the strange, enshrouded origin of the religion which possessed the author's part of the world, given a speculative dream as to what might have happened in his fabricated autobiography after the event, given the Butlerian mind, patient to track and quick to spring, and the result is as inevitable as a theorem. One scent, and the proficient hound is off, literally hot on the trail, nor does he halt till Hanky and Panky, the credulous(Whether the of means directed against or produced by, the verdict is undoubtedly valid.)
- ↑ Cannan says of Erewhon, "Few good books have so many faults, and yet it remains the one enduring satire of the nineteenth century." Samuel Butler, 32.
