say, "may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the
commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you
can consult, and it is impossible to know 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