ow it too intimately if you want to
form an opinion about it and its author."

It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more than
the book--the work of man; the painter more than the picture; the
composer more than the music. "If a writer, a painter, or a musician
makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which I myself hold
to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting in so far as it
reveals the personality of the artist." Handel was, of course, "the
greatest of all musicians." Among the painters he chiefly loved Giovanni
Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and
De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare, Homer, and the Authoress of the
_Odyssey_; and in architecture the man, whoever he was, who designed the
Temple of Neptune at Paestum. Life being short, he did not see why he
should waste any of it in the company of inferior people when he had
these. And he treated those he met in daily life in the same spirit: it
was what he found them to be that attracted or repelled him; what others
thought about them was of little or no consequence.

And now, at the end of his life, his thoughts reverted to the two
subjects which had occupied him more than thirty years previously--namely,
_Erewhon_ and the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed
miracle had been slumbering during all those years and at last rose again
in the form of a sequel to _Erewhon_. In _Erewhon Revisited_ Mr. Higgs
returns to find that the Erewhonians now believe in him as a god in
consequence of the supposed miracle of his going up in a balloon to
induce his heavenly father to send the rain. Mr. Higgs and the reader
know that there was no miracle in the case, but Butler wanted to show
that whether it was a miracle or not did not signify provided that the
people believed it be one. And so Mr. Higgs is present in the temple
which is being dedicated to him and his worship.

The existence of his son George was an afterthought and gave occasion for
the second leading idea of the book--the story of a father trying to win
the love of a hitherto unknown son by risking his life in order to show
himself worthy of it--and succeeding.

Butler's health had already begun to fail, and when he started for Sicily
on Good Friday, 1902, it was for the last time: he knew he was unfit to
travel, but was determined to go,