THE NEW GULLIVER.

Iis obvious that we have amongst us a satirist of very remark- able able literary power, as well as of a very cynical turn of mind. Since the days of Swift nothing has been written abler in its peculiar way, and certainly nothing more thoroughly bitter and contemptuous in its drift, than the little book called " Erewhon ; or, Over the Range,"—the reader will see that Erewhon is a very simple disguise of Nowhere,'—just published by Mr. Triibner. While Swift, however, in his voyage to the coun try of the Houynhyms and voyage to Laputa, directed his satire chiefly against the vices of man and the degradation of human manners and intellect,—for in his admiration for the equine form of the Houynhyms, as compared with that of the Yahoos, he only expressed a coarse physical dis- gust for the human form in its degraded condition,—the author of " Erewhon," on the other hand, directs all the force of his satire not against the practical life of men as they are, but against the morality and the religion of men and the higher workings of their intellect. His satire is at bottom a philosophical attack veiled in fable, on the prevalent notions of human responsi- bility, on the personal forms of human faith, and on the capacity for intellectual perversions. His object,—if, as we feel no doubt, the book has an object beyond the fanciful exhibition of a topsy-turvy sort of moral and intellectual world,—is to make men blush not for what they do, but for what they think and feel, and not for what they think and feel in their lowest, but in their highest moods. We conjecture that the author is a universal

sceptic, who intends to illustrate strongly the absurdity (as be holds it) of treating men as at all more responsible for their moral than for their physical health ; further, the absurdity of believing that any real being gives the law to our thoughts of what is fitting ; and finally, the absurdity of speculating too much even as to the possible developments of what is already in existence. The author of " Erewhon " differs widely from Swift in directing all his satire against what would usually be called the highest morality, faith, and philosophy of the day. What he seems to want to impress on his readers is the hollowness of all the higher creeds, whether as to ethics, religion, or philosophy,—the wisdom of quietly taking your notions of what is best from the society around you, without inventing fictions as to any power of the under- standing to penetrate beneath or beyond them. In one page the author confesses that the " high Ydgrunites,"—i.e., the higher worshippers of Ydgrun (Mrs. Grundy), who always defer to her without ample reason for resistance, but then override her with due self-reliance, appeared to him to have got " about as far as it is in the right nature of men to go,"---a judgment which he only modi- fies by saying that they ought to speak out more clearly what they really think. Of course this, too, may be veiled satire ; but if it is, the book is without definite drift,—which no one who reads it carefully will easily believe.

One of the most skilful parts of the book is the account of the adventures of the colonist of the fable in his discovery of the land

of Erewhon, of the interview with the Indian Chowbok, in which the latter acts to him the terrors of the great mountain chain he desires to cross between the pasture lands on the coast and the unexplored interior, imitating the hideous faces of the stone

giants whom the hero of the tale subsequently finds at the top of the pass, and the unearthly sounds which the wind makes in blowing through them ;—of the three weeks' ex- ploring with Chowbok, by which he reaches the foot of the pass, and his desertion by the terrified Chowbok before he attempts it; of his own dangers in the journey, and of his ultimate success. All this is told with a graphic minuteness that lends a good deal of external interest to the satire, but that we cannot stay to recount. When at length the adventurer descends into the land of Erewhon, his first remarkable experience is the approbation expressed of his physical health, after minute examination of his heart, lungs, and other organs, the praise of his light hair and complexion, and the exceeding disapprobation with which his watch is received, as though it were a kind of crime in him to be in possession of such an instrument. The hero speculates that the people, who present most of the features of European life with a difference, may perhaps be the Ten lost tribes, and one of the many bitter sarcasms directed at the Bible is introduced in reference to this suggestion :—

" To restore the lost Ten Tribes of Israel to a knowledge of the only truth : here would be indeed an immortal crown of glory ! My heart beat fast and furious as I entertained the thought. What a position would it not ensure me in the next world ; or perhaps even in this ! What folly it would be to throw such a chance away! I should rank next to the Apostles, if not as high as they—certainly above the minor prophets, and possibly above any Old-Testament writer except Moses and Isaiah."

Soon he remarks that the people are very compassionate to him when he is out of temper, or when they think him so, and one of his visitors tells him quite kindly that though she knows how impossible it is to prevent being sulky at times, he " ought to see some one, if it became more serious,"—just as we say that if cold takes further hold on a man, he ought " to see some one." On the other hand, when he tells the daughter of his jailer that he has taken cold, she fires up and asks him what he means by it, and how he dare make such a statement, especially when he remembers that he is in prison,—from all which he gradually elicits the view of the country to be that illness is a crime to be seriously punished by the law,—while what we call sins or vices are misfortunes to be pitied and sympathized with, and removed only with the full consent of the patient, by the moral sagacity of the family " straightener " (or moral physician), whose prescriptions are followed as sedu- lously in Erewhon as those of our physicians of the body in Europe :—

" There are subdivisions of illnesses into crimes and misdemeanours as with offences amongst ourselves—a man being punished very heavily for serious illness, while failure of eyes or hearing in one over sixty-five who has had good health hitherto is dealt with by fine only, or 1121- Iprisonment in default of payment. But if a man forges a cheque, or sets his house on fire, or robs with violence from the person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our own country, he is either taken to a hospital, and most carefully tended at the public expense, or if he is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to all his friends that he is indisposed, just as we do when we are ill, and they come and visit him with great solicitude, and inquire with interest how it all came about, what symptoms first showed themselves, and so fort13,—questions which he will answer with perfect unreserve ; for bad conduct, though con- sidered no leas deplorable than illness with ourselves, and as unquestion- ably indicating something seriously wrong with the individual who misbehaves, is nevertheless held to be the result of either pre-natal or post-natal misfortune. I should add that under certain circumstances poverty is considered criminal."

Consequently, when people meet each other in the morning, they do not ask after health, which would be gross ill-breeding, but after temper or character, hoping their friends are "good " ; that they no longer feel greedy, or malicious, or snappish, but are recovered from these little indispositions. The hero's host is taken with premonitory symptoms of embezzlement, having twice or three times laid hands on money not his own, till at last he cheats a confiding widow out of the whole of her for- tune,--whereupon, seeing he had neglected himself too long, " he drove home at once ; broke the news to his wife and daughters, and sent off for one of the most celebrated straighteners of the kingdom to a consultation with the family practitioner," and " expressed his fears that his morals were permanently impaired." This vein of satire,—its force depending, of course on the many cases in which we make the opposite blunder, and treat as criminal, habits and dispositions which are, strictly speaking, moral maladies caught by contagion from evil parentage and evil cir- cumstances,—is worked out very skilfully ;—young ladies, for instance, who are really weak in health pleading dipsomania to con- ceal their weakness of health, just as in England similar young ladies sometimes plead hysterical or nervous weakness to conceal the dipsomania from which they are really suffering.

The other ideas of the day satirized in " Erewhon " are hardly as closely connected with this leading notion,—that we are really quite as responsible (or irresponsible) for our health of body as for our health of soul,—as they ought to be. A people who held that vice was mere illness and that disease was crime, would hardly be the people to worship the personifications of Hope, Justice, &c., as they are here made to do. They would rather have worshipped the personifications of Strength, Beauty, Activity, &c.,—which to them would be the moral qualities, and not mere gifts of fortune. However, the inner structure of satires of this kind must not be scanned too minutely. The attack of the author on these divine personifications is fierce and but too evidently intended to go to the very roots of Theism. Not that the author argues the question. It is the very danger of this sort of satire that it throws ridicule on a faith without the slightest show of argument, except a faint argument from analogy, against it :—

"They personify hope, fear, love, and so forth, giving them temples- and priests and carving likenesses of them in stone, which they verily believe to be faithful representations of living beings who are only not human in being more than human. If any one denies the objective existence of these divinities, and says that there is really no such being as a beautiful woman called Justice, with her eyes blinded and a pair of scales positively living and moving in a remote and a3thereal region, but that justice is only the personified expression of certain modes of human thought and action,—on this they become disturbed and call the objector every kind of ill name, saying that he denies the existence of justice in denying her personality, and that he is a wanton disturber of men's religious convictions. They detest nothing so much as any attempt to lead them to higher spiritual conceptions of the deities whom they pro- fess to worship. Arowhena and I had a pitched battle on this point, and should have had many more, but for my prudence in allowing her to get the better of me. I am sure that in her heart she was suspicions of her own position, for she returned more than once to the subject. ' Can you not see,' I had exclaimed, ' that the fact of Justice being admirable will not be in the least affected by the absence of a belief in her being also a living agent ? Can you really think that men will be one whit less hopeful, because they no longer believe that hope is an actual person ?' She shook her head, and said that with men's belief in the personality all incentive to the reverence of the thing itself, as justice or hope, would cease; men from that hour would never be either just or hopeful again."

Arowhena might surely have replied that as a matter of fact a just head of a family has a marvellous influence on the respect for justice in the minds of the children, and the disappearance of that just head of the family,—or of the trust in him, if he be invisible, — is necessarily a great loss to the characters of the children ; but this side of the question it did not suit our author to suggest. The attack on our Churches, under the thin veil of " Musical Banks,"— places where the superstitious and chiefly feminine population of Ere- whon go to hear music and receive a kind of sacred currency not much used in the business of real life, but supposed to be all the more profitable on that account to the users,—will strike home much more to the minds of those who believe in the objects of Chris- tian worship, than of those who believe, as the author evidently does, in the utter emptiness and folly of that worship. One of the most telling and bitter touches of irony in the book is the author's attack on the feminine, wistful half-belief and half- unbelief iu religious rites,—in daily services, and the like. He puts it in the form of an observation on the manner of the ladies when going every morning to their musical banks ' to get some of the mysterious currency supposed to be especially profit- able to them in a spiritual sense. He says that whenever he asked them where they were going, they answered with a certain air of re- serve ; but that there was always something wistful about the manner, "something of regret, something as though they would wish to take me with them, but did not like to ask me, and yet as though I were hardly to ask to be taken." These are the comments on the service after it was over :—

" At last I ventured to remark that the bank was not so busy to-day as it probably often was. On this Mrs. Nosnibor said that it was indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious of all institutions. To this I could say nothing; but I have ever been of opinion that the greater part of mankind do, on the whole, know where they get that which does them good. Mrs. Nosnibor went on to say that I must not imagine that there was any want of confidence in the bank because I had seen so few people there ; the heart of the country was thoroughly devoted to these establishments, and any sign of their being in danger would bring in support from the most unexpected quarters. It was only because people knew them to be so very safe, that in some case (as she lamented to say in Mr. Nosnibor's) they felt that their support was unnecessary."

Does the author really believe " that the greater part of man- kind do, on the whole, know where they get that which does them good "? We doubt it. He only says so when it tells on the sceptical side. If he takes the emptiness of the churches as evidence on the one side of the case, he should take their fullness as evidence on the other, which he certainly shows no disposition to do. However, the assertion of one of the musical-bank managers that all would be right now that "they had put fresh stained-glass into all the banks of the country, and repaired the buildings, and enlarged the organs, and taken to talking nicely to the people in the streets, and to remembering the ages of their children, and giving them things when they were ill," is a happy enough caricature of the dim hopefulness of our High-Church clergy. The poorest thing in " Erewhon " is the account of the Colleges of Unreason,—the equivalents for our Universities,—with regard to which almost everything said is stale and conven- tional.

One of the cleverest elements in the satire is the account of "The Book of the Machines,"—an elaborate argument by one of the learned men of Erewhon, to show that machinery was im- proving so much more rapidly than man, that in the course of a few centuries machinery would probably develop complete self- sustaining power, and reduce man to a quite secondary posi- tion in the universe, " machinery " being supported by " man- nery," rather than man by machinery. The argument that machinery could not acquire a reproductive system is thus happily rebutted

What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduc- tion? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines ? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their fertilisation were not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does any one say that the red clover has no repro- ductive system because the humble-bee (and the hunible-bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one would venture upon such an obviously absurd assertion. The humble-bee is a part

of the reproductive system of the clover then why not we part of that of the machines?"

The argument had taken so much effect in Erewhon that after a great revolutionary agitation, it was decided to destroy all machines invented for the previous 271 years and never permit the intro- duction of any new machine, and this was the reason why the hero's watch brought him into so much danger when he entered Erewhon. The drift of this part of the satire,—skilful beyond measure as it is,—is hardly so clear as that of the rest of the book ; but its general intention evidently is to discredit the confi- dence placed in long trains of intellectual reasoning, to suggest the danger that great scholastic institutions may lead a nation into the most absurd and ruinous conservatism, and to illus- trate the writer's strong conviction that half the moral creeds of nations are mere arbitrary inheritances from the past, originating in the dominance of some powerful but prejudiced mind. " The Book of the Machines " is a sort of intellectual Bible of falsehood, which the writer wants to exhibit as exercising pre- cisely the same kind of dominating authority as our own spiritual Bible,—whose creed he clearly holds to be quite as false and more dangerous than that of his own imaginary "Book of the Machines." " Erewhon " is intended to suggest that man's physical and moral being are equally subject to absolutely necessary laws, that responsibility and God are alike fictions, that the power of moral and intellectual tradition and authority is overwhelming, and that the true conduct-creed—it is a perversion of language to call it moral,—would enjoin general conformity to a public opinion formed with reference to general interests, but constantly modified by the courage requisite to prevent it from petrifying or standing still. It is certainly quite true that if any one will accept the implied satiric teaching of the book, he will find himself morally and intellectually " nowhere,"—i.e., in Erewhon,—when he has done.