He would be as
difficult reading to-day as Swift in his "Tale of a Tub."
Like most of the great satirists of the world, Butler's saeva
indignatio was aroused by the daily conflicts between reason and
stupidity, between candor and disingenuousness, with all their
mutations of hypocrisy, guile, deceit, and sham. In "Erewhon" it
was human unreason, as a clever youth sees it, that he was
attacking. We remember vividly the beautiful Erewhonians, who knew
disease to be sin, but believed vice to be only disease. We
remember the "straighteners" who gave moral medicine to the
ethically unwell, the musical banks, the hypothetical language,
the machines that threatened to master men, as in the war of 1914-
1918 and in the industrial system of to-day they have mastered men
and made them their slaves. There was a youthful vigor in
"Erewhon," a joyous negligence as to where the blow should fall, a
sense of not being responsible for the world the author flicked
with his lash, which saved the book from the condemnation that
would have been its fate had the Victorians taken it seriously. It
was an uneven book, beginning with vivid narrative in the best
tradition of Defoe, losing itself finally in difficult argument,
and cut short in mid-career.
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