Erewhon

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 337, 7 December 1945, Page 8

Erewhon

AMUEL BUTLER sits now in some strange nook of the next world, awaiting with what patience he can muster the advent of Bernard Shaw, probably the only other human being ‘in all space and time-except perhaps Diogenes the

Cynic-with irresponsibility of genius to match his own, But Butler, for all the determinedly mundane. and unromantic quality of his writings, had a gift of poetic imagination all his own. This was somehow the dominant note of the BBC’s "Have You Read?" feature dealing with his "Erewhon"; the journey up the unknown pass, the fallen idols booming in the wind and darkness, and the new land disclosed from the hillside at dawn. Swift wrote nothing better than this in its marriage of poetry and satire, It is interesting to speculate on the extent to which Butler’s sojournings above. the Rangitata may have influenced his writings; and how it was that he chose a land which later writers know above all for its lack of human records and ancient monuments, on which to project his fantasy of fallen idols and the city of the mind’s other side. How characteristic of that land, by the way, to let the hut whose building by his own hands he somewhere describes, ‘and which could

have been something of a literary monument, decay to a heap of nails and borerdust. Not that Butler would have minded. "When a thing is old, useless and broken," he said, "we throw it away; but if it is sufficiently old, sufficiently useless, and sufficiently broken, we put it in a museum." I cherish also the comment of his Notebooks on Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words: "Jones said it was a mercy they had no words."