EREWHON REVISITED
TWENTY YEARS LATER
Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by his Son
I forget when, but not very long after I had published “Erewhon” in
1872, it occurred to me to ask myself what course events in Erewhon
would probably take after Mr. Higgs, as I suppose I may now call him,
had made his escape in the balloon with Arowhena. Given a people in
the conditions supposed to exist in Erewhon, and given the apparently
miraculous ascent of a remarkable stranger into the heavens with an
earthly bride--what would be the effect on the people generally?
There was no use in trying to solve this problem before, say, twenty
years should have given time for Erewhonian developments to assume
something like permanent shape, and in 1892 I was too busy with books
now published to be able to attend to Erewhon. It was not till the
early winter of 1900, i.e. as nearly as may be thirty years after the
date of Higgs’s escape, that I found time to deal with the question
above stated, and to answer it, according to my lights, in the book
which I now lay before the public.
I have concluded, I believe rightly, that the events described in
Chapter XXIV. of “Erewhon” would give rise to such a cataclysmic change
in the old Erewhonian opinions as would result in the development
of a new religion. Now the development of all new religions follows
much the same general course. In all cases the times are more or
less out of joint--older faiths are losing their hold upon the
masses. At such times, let a personality appear, strong in itself,
and made to seem still stronger by association with some supposed
transcendent miracle, and it will be easy to raise a Lo here! that will
attract many followers. If there be a single great, and apparently
well-authenticated, miracle, others will accrete round it; then, in
all religions that have so originated, there will follow temples,
priests, rites, sincere believers, and unscrupulous exploiters of
public credulity. To chronicle the events that followed Higgs’s balloon
ascent without shewing that they were much as they have been under like
conditions in other places, would be to hold the mirror up to something
very wide of nature.
Analogy, however, between courses of events is one thing--historic
parallelisms abound; analogy between the main actors in events is a
very different one, and one, moreover, of which few examples can be
found. The development of the new ideas in Erewhon is a familiar one,
but there is no more likeness between Higgs and the founder of any
other religion, than there is between Jesus Christ and Mahomet. He is a
typical middle- class Englishman, deeply tainted with priggishness in
his earlier years, but in great part freed from it by the sweet uses of
adversity.
If I may be allowed for a moment to speak about myself, I would say
that I have never ceased to profess myself a member of the more
advanced wing of the English Broad Church. What those who belong to
this wing believe, I believe. What they reject, I reject. No two
people think absolutely alike on any subject, but when I converse with
advanced Broad Churchmen I find myself in substantial harmony with
them. I believe--and should be very sorry if I did not believe--that,
mutatis mutandis, such men will find the advice given on pp. 277-281
and 287-291 of this book much what, under the supposed circumstances,
they would themselves give.
Lastly, I should express my great obligations to Mr. R. A. Streatfeild
of the British Museum, who, in the absence from England of my friend
Mr. H. Festing Jones, has kindly supervised the corrections of my book
as it passed through the press.
SAMUEL BUTLER. May 1, 1901.
CHAPTER I: UPS AND DOWNS OF FORTUNE--MY FATHER STARTS FOR EREWHON
Before telling the story of my father’s second visit to the remarkable
country which he discovered now some thirty years since, I should
perhaps say a few words about his career between the publication of his
book in 1872, and his death in the early summer of 1891. I shall thus
touch briefly on the causes that occasioned his failure to maintain
that hold on the public which he had apparently secured at first.
His book, as the reader may perhaps know, was published anonymously,
and my poor father used to ascribe the acclamation with which it was
received, to the fact that no one knew who it might not have been
written by. _Omne ignotum pro magnifico_, and during its month of
anonymity the book was a frequent topic of appreciative comment in good
literary circles. Almost coincidently with the discovery that he was a
mere nobody, people began to feel that their admiration had been too
hastily bestowed, and before long opinion turned all the more seriously
against him for this very reason. The subscription, to which the Lord
Mayor had at first given his cordial support, was curtly announced as
closed before it had been opened a week; it had met with so little
success that I will not specify the amount eventually handed over, not
without protest, to my father; small, however, as it was, he narrowly
escaped being prosecuted for trying to obtain money under false
pretences.
The Geographical Society, which had for a few days received him
with open arms, was among the first to turn upon him--not, so far
as I can ascertain, on account of the mystery in which he had
enshrouded the exact whereabouts of Erewhon, nor yet by reason of
its being persistently alleged that he was subject to frequent
attacks of alcoholic poisoning--but through his own want of tact,
and a highly-strung nervous state, which led him to attach too much
importance to his own discoveries, and not enough to those of other
people. This, at least, was my father’s version of the matter, as I
heard it from his own lips in the later years of his life.
“I was still very young,” he said to me, “and my mind was more or less
unhinged by the strangeness and peril of my adventures.” Be this as it
may, I fear there is no doubt that he was injudicious; and an ounce of
judgement is worth a pound of discovery.
Hence, in a surprisingly short time, he found himself dropped even by
those who had taken him up most warmly, and had done most to find him
that employment as a writer of religious tracts on which his livelihood
was then dependent. The discredit, however, into which my father
fell, had the effect of deterring any considerable number of people
from trying to rediscover Erewhon, and thus caused it to remain as
unknown to geographers in general as though it had never been found.
A few shepherds and cadets at up-country stations had, indeed, tried
to follow in my father’s footsteps, during the time when his book was
still being taken seriously; but they had most of them returned, unable
to face the difficulties that had opposed them. Some few, however,
had not returned, and though search was made for them, their bodies
had not been found. When he reached Erewhon on his second visit, my
father learned that others had attempted to visit the country more
recently--probably quite independently of his own book; and before he
had himself been in it many hours he gathered what the fate of these
poor fellows doubtless was.
Another reason that made it more easy for Erewhon to remain unknown,
was the fact that the more mountainous districts, though repeatedly
prospected for gold, had been pronounced non-auriferous, and as there
was no sheep or cattle country, save a few river-bed flats above the
upper gorges of any of the rivers, and no game to tempt the sportsman,
there was nothing to induce people to penetrate into the fastnesses
of the great snowy range. No more, therefore, being heard of Erewhon,
my father’s book came to be regarded as a mere work of fiction, and
I have heard quite recently of its having been seen on a second-hand
bookstall, marked “6d. very readable.”
Though there was no truth in the stories about my father’s being
subject to attacks of alcoholic poisoning, yet, during the first few
years after his return to England, his occasional fits of ungovernable
excitement gave some colour to the opinion that much of what he said
he had seen and done might be only subjectively true. I refer more
particularly to his interview with Chowbok in the wool-shed, and
his highly coloured description of the statues on the top of the
pass leading into Erewhon. These were soon set down as forgeries of
delirium, and it was maliciously urged, that though in his book he had
only admitted having taken “two or three bottles of brandy” with him,
he had probably taken at least a dozen; and that if on the night before
he reached the statues he had “only four ounces of brandy” left, he
must have been drinking heavily for the preceding fortnight or three
weeks. Those who read the following pages will, I think, reject all
idea that my father was in a state of delirium, not without surprise
that any one should have ever entertained it.
It was Chowbok who, if he did not originate these calumnies, did much
to disseminate and gain credence for them. He remained in England for
some years, and never tired of doing what he could to disparage my
father. The cunning creature had ingratiated himself with our leading
religious societies, especially with the more evangelical among them.
Whatever doubt there might be about his sincerity, there was none about
his colour, and a coloured convert in those days was more than Exeter
Hall could resist. Chowbok saw that there was no room for him and for
my father, and declared my poor father’s story to be almost wholly
false. It was true, he said, that he and my father had explored the
head-waters of the river described in his book, but he denied that my
father had gone on without him, and he named the river as one distant
by many thousands of miles from the one it really was. He said that
after about a fortnight he had returned in company with my father, who
by that time had become incapacitated for further travel. At this point
he would shrug his shoulders, look mysterious, and thus say “alcoholic
poisoning” even more effectively than if he had uttered the words
themselves. For a man’s tongue lies often in his shoulders.
Readers of my father’s book will remember that Chowbok had given a very
different version when he had returned to his employer’s station; but
Time and Distance afford cover under which falsehood can often do truth
to death securely.
I never understood why my father did not bring my mother forward to
confirm his story. He may have done so while I was too young to know
anything about it. But when people have made up their minds, they are
impatient of further evidence; my mother, moreover, was of a very
retiring disposition. The Italians say:-
“Chi lontano va ammogliare Sarà ingannato, o vorrà ingannare.”
“If a man goes far afield for a wife, he will be deceived--or means
deceiving.” The proverb is as true for women as for men, and my mother
was never quite happy in her new surroundings. Wilfully deceived she
assuredly was not, but she could not accustom herself to English modes
of thought; indeed she never even nearly mastered our language; my
father always talked with her in Erewhonian, and so did I, for as a
child she had taught me to do so, and I was as fluent with her language
as with my father’s. In this respect she often told me I could pass
myself off anywhere in Erewhon as a native; I shared also her personal
appearance, for though not wholly unlike my father, I had taken more
closely after my mother. In mind, if I may venture to say so, I believe
I was more like my father.
I may as well here inform the reader that I was born at the end of
September 1871, and was christened John, after my grandfather. From
what I have said above he will readily believe that my earliest
experiences were somewhat squalid. Memories of childhood rush vividly
upon me when I pass through a low London alley, and catch the faint
sickly smell that pervades it--half paraffin, half black-currants,
but wholly something very different. I have a fancy that we lived in
Blackmoor Street, off Drury Lane. My father, when first I knew of
his doing anything at all, supported my mother and myself by drawing
pictures with coloured chalks upon the pavement; I used sometimes to
watch him, and marvel at the skill with which he represented fogs,
floods, and fires. These three “f’s,” he would say, were his three best
friends, for they were easy to do and brought in halfpence freely. The
return of the dove to the ark was his favourite subject. Such a little
ark, on such a hazy morning, and such a little pigeon--the rest of
the picture being cheap sky, and still cheaper sea; nothing, I have
often heard him say, was more popular than this with his clients. He
held it to be his masterpiece, but would add with some naïveté that
he considered himself a public benefactor for carrying it out in such
perishable fashion. “At any rate,” he would say, “no one can bequeath
one of my many replicas to the nation.”
I never learned how much my father earned by his profession, but it
must have been something considerable, for we always had enough to eat
and drink; I imagine that he did better than many a struggling artist
with more ambitious aims. He was strictly temperate during all the time
that I knew anything about him, but he was not a teetotaler; I never
saw any of the fits of nervous excitement which in his earlier years
had done so much to wreck him. In the evenings, and on days when the
state of the pavement did not permit him to work, he took great pains
with my education, which he could very well do, for as a boy he had
been in the sixth form of one of our foremost public schools. I found
him a patient, kindly instructor, while to my mother he was a model
husband. Whatever others may have said about him, I can never think of
him without very affectionate respect.
Things went on quietly enough, as above indicated, till I was about
fourteen, when by a freak of fortune my father became suddenly
affluent. A brother of his father’s had emigrated to Australia in 1851,
and had amassed great wealth. We knew of his existence, but there had
been no intercourse between him and my father, and we did not even know
that he was rich and unmarried. He died intestate towards the end of
1885, and my father was the only relative he had, except, of course,
myself, for both my father’s sisters had died young, and without
leaving children.
The solicitor through whom the news reached us was, happily, a man
of the highest integrity, and also very sensible and kind. He was a
Mr. Alfred Emery Cathie, of 15 Clifford’s Inn, E.C., and my father
placed himself unreservedly in his hands. I was at once sent to a
first-rate school, and such pains had my father taken with me that I
was placed in a higher form than might have been expected considering
my age. The way in which he had taught me had prevented my feeling any
dislike for study; I therefore stuck fairly well to my books, while
not neglecting the games which are so important a part of healthy
education. Everything went well with me, both as regards masters and
school-fellows; nevertheless, I was declared to be of a highly nervous
and imaginative temperament, and the school doctor more than once urged
our headmaster not to push me forward too rapidly--for which I have
ever since held myself his debtor.
Early in 1890, I being then home from Oxford (where I had been entered
in the preceding year), my mother died; not so much from active
illness, as from what was in reality a kind of _maladie du pays_.
All along she had felt herself an exile, and though she had borne up
wonderfully during my father’s long struggle with adversity, she began
to break as soon as prosperity had removed the necessity for exertion
on her own part.
My father could never divest himself of the feeling that he had wrecked
her life by inducing her to share her lot with his own; to say that he
was stricken with remorse on losing her is not enough; he had been so
stricken almost from the first year of his marriage; on her death he
was haunted by the wrong he accused himself--as it seems to me very
unjustly--of having done her, for it was neither his fault nor hers--it
was Atè.
His unrest soon assumed the form of a burning desire to revisit the
country in which he and my mother had been happier together than
perhaps they ever again were. I had often heard him betray a hankering
after a return to Erewhon, disguised so that no one should recognise
him; but as long as my mother lived he would not leave her. When death
had taken her from him, he so evidently stood in need of a complete
change of scene, that even those friends who had most strongly
dissuaded him from what they deemed a madcap enterprise, thought it
better to leave him to himself. It would have mattered little how much
they tried to dissuade him, for before long his passionate longing for
the journey became so overmastering that nothing short of restraint in
prison or a madhouse could have stayed his going; but we were not easy
about him. “He had better go,” said Mr. Cathie to me, when I was at
home for the Easter vacation, “and get it over. He is not well, but he
is still in the prime of life; doubtless he will come back with renewed
health and will settle down to a quiet home life again.”
This, however, was not said till it had become plain that in a few days
my father would be on his way. He had made a new will, and left an
ample power of attorney with Mr. Cathie--or, as we always called him,
Alfred--who was to supply me with whatever money I wanted; he had put
all other matters in order in case anything should happen to prevent
his ever returning, and he set out on October 1, 1890, more composed
and cheerful than I had seen him for some time past.
I had not realised how serious the danger to my father would be if he
were recognised while he was in Erewhon, for I am ashamed to say that
I had not yet read his book. I had heard over and over again of his
flight with my mother in the balloon, and had long since read his few
opening chapters, but I had found, as a boy naturally would, that the
succeeding pages were a little dull, and soon put the book aside. My
father, indeed, repeatedly urged me not to read it, for he said there
was much in it--more especially in the earlier chapters, which I had
alone found interesting--that he would gladly cancel if he could. “But
there!” he had said with a laugh, “what does it matter?”
He had hardly left, before I read his book from end to end, and, on
having done so, not only appreciated the risks that he would have to
run, but was struck with the wide difference between his character
as he had himself portrayed it, and the estimate I had formed of
it from personal knowledge. When, on his return, he detailed to me
his adventures, the account he gave of what he had said and done
corresponded with my own ideas concerning him; but I doubt not the
reader will see that the twenty years between his first and second
visit had modified him even more than so long an interval might be
expected to do.
I heard from him repeatedly during the first two months of his absence,
and was surprised to find that he had stayed for a week or ten days at
more than one place of call on his outward journey. On November 26 he
wrote from the port whence he was to start for Erewhon, seemingly in
good health and spirits; and on December 27, 1891, he telegraphed for a
hundred pounds to be wired out to him at this same port. This puzzled
both Mr. Cathie and myself, for the interval between November 26 and
December 27 seemed too short to admit of his having paid his visit to
Erewhon and returned; as, moreover, he had added the words, “Coming
home,” we rather hoped that he had abandoned his intention of going
there.
We were also surprised at his wanting so much money, for he had taken a
hundred pounds in gold, which from some fancy, he had stowed in a small
silver jewel-box that he had given my mother not long before she died.
He had also taken a hundred pounds worth of gold nuggets, which he had
intended to sell in Erewhon so as to provide himself with money when he
got there.
I should explain that these nuggets would be worth in Erewhon fully ten
times as much as they would in Europe, owing to the great scarcity of
gold in that country. The Erewhonian coinage is entirely silver--which
is abundant, and worth much what it is in England--or copper, which is
also plentiful; but what we should call five pounds’ worth of silver
money would not buy more than one of our half-sovereigns in gold.
He had put his nuggets into ten brown holland bags, and he had had
secret pockets made for the old Erewhonian dress which he had worn when
he escaped, so that he need never have more than one bag of nuggets
accessible at a time. He was not likely, therefore, to have been
robbed. His passage to the port above referred to had been paid before
he started, and it seemed impossible that a man of his very inexpensive
habits should have spent two hundred pounds in a single month--for the
nuggets would be immediately convertible in an English colony. There
was nothing, however, to be done but to cable out the money and wait my
father’s arrival.
Returning for a moment to my father’s old Erewhonian dress, I should
say that he had preserved it simply as a memento and without any idea
that he should again want it. It was not the court dress that had been
provided for him on the occasion of his visit to the king and queen,
but the everyday clothing that he had been ordered to wear when he was
put in prison, though his English coat, waistcoat, and trousers had
been allowed to remain in his own possession. These, I had seen from
his book, had been presented by him to the queen (with the exception of
two buttons, which he had given to Yram as a keepsake), and had been
preserved by her displayed upon a wooden dummy. The dress in which he
escaped had been soiled during the hours that he and my mother had been
in the sea, and had also suffered from neglect during the years of
his poverty; but he wished to pass himself off as a common peasant or
working-man, so he preferred to have it set in order as might best be
done, rather than copied.
So cautious was he in the matter of dress that he took with him the
boots he had worn on leaving Erewhon, lest the foreign make of his
English boots should arouse suspicion. They were nearly new, and when
he had had them softened and well greased, he found he could still wear
them quite comfortably.
But to return. He reached home late at night one day at the beginning
of February, and a glance was enough to show that he was an altered
man. “What is the matter?” said I, shocked at his appearance. “Did you
go to Erewhon, and were you ill-treated there?”
“I went to Erewhon,” he said, “and I was not ill-treated there, but I
have been so shaken that I fear I shall quite lose my reason. Do not
ask me more now. I will tell you about it all to-morrow. Let me have
something to eat, and go to bed.”
When we met at breakfast next morning, he greeted me with all his usual
warmth of affection, but he was still taciturn. “I will begin to tell
you about it,” he said, “after breakfast. Where is your dear mother?
How was it that I have . . . ”
Then of a sudden his memory returned, and he burst into tears.
I now saw, to my horror, that his mind was gone. When he recovered, he
said: “It has all come back again, but at times now I am a blank, and
every week am more and more so. I daresay I shall be sensible now for
several hours. We will go into the study after breakfast, and I will
talk to you as long as I can do so.”
Let the reader spare me, and let me spare the reader any description of
what we both of us felt.
When we were in the study, my father said, “My dearest boy, get pen and
paper and take notes of what I tell you. It will be all disjointed; one
day I shall remember this, and another that, but there will not be many
more days on which I shall remember anything at all. I cannot write a
coherent page. You, when I am gone, can piece what I tell you together,
and tell it as I should have told it if I had been still sound. But
do not publish it yet; it might do harm to those dear good people.
Take the notes now, and arrange them the sooner the better, for you
may want to ask me questions, and I shall not be here much longer. Let
publishing wait till you are confident that publication can do no harm;
and above all, say nothing to betray the whereabouts of Erewhon, beyond
admitting (which I fear I have already done) that it is in the Southern
hemisphere.”
These instructions I have religiously obeyed. For the first days after
his return, my father had few attacks of loss of memory, and I was in
hopes that his former health of mind would return when he found himself
in his old surroundings. During these days he poured forth the story
of his adventures so fast, that if I had not had a fancy for acquiring
shorthand, I should not have been able to keep pace with him. I
repeatedly urged him not to overtax his strength, but he was oppressed
by the fear that if he did not speak at once, he might never be able to
tell me all he had to say; I had, therefore, to submit, though seeing
plainly enough that he was only hastening the complete paralysis which
he so greatly feared.
Sometimes his narrative would be coherent for pages together, and he
could answer any questions without hesitation; at others, he was now
here and now there, and if I tried to keep him to the order of events
he would say that he had forgotten intermediate incidents, but that
they would probably come back to him, and I should perhaps be able to
put them in their proper places.
After about ten days he seemed satisfied that I had got all the facts,
and that with the help of the pamphlets which he had brought with him
I should be able to make out a connected story. “Remember,” he said,
“that I thought I was quite well so long as I was in Erewhon, and do
not let me appear as anything else.”
When he had fully delivered himself, he seemed easier in his mind, but
before a month had passed he became completely paralysed, and though
he lingered till the beginning of June, he was seldom more than dimly
conscious of what was going on around him.
His death robbed me of one who had been a very kind and upright elder
brother rather than a father; and so strongly have I felt his influence
still present, living and working, as I believe for better within me,
that I did not hesitate to copy the epitaph which he saw in the Musical
Bank at Fairmead, {1} and to have it inscribed on the very simple
monument which he desired should alone mark his grave.
* * * * *
The foregoing was written in the summer of 1891; what I now add should
be dated December 3, 1900. If, in the course of my work, I have
misrepresented my father, as I fear I may have sometimes done, I would
ask my readers to remember that no man can tell another’s story without
some involuntary misrepresentation both of facts and characters. They
will, of course, see that “Erewhon Revisited” is written by one who has
far less literary skill than the author of “Erewhon;” but again I would
ask indulgence on the score of youth, and the fact that this is my
first book. It was written nearly ten years ago, _i.e_. in the months
from March to August 1891, but for reasons already given it could not
then be made public. I have now received permission, and therefore
publish the following chapters, exactly, or very nearly exactly, as
they were left when I had finished editing my father’s diaries, and the
notes I took down from his own mouth--with the exception, of course, of
these last few lines, hurriedly written as I am on the point of leaving
England, of the additions I made in 1892, on returning from my own
three hours’ stay in Erewhon, and of the Postscript.