A History of English Prose Fiction Part 9

[Footnote 125: _Idem_, ii, 349.]

[Footnote 126: _Tatler_, No. 159, Sat.u.r.day, April 15, 1710.]

[Footnote 127: Steele, _Tatler_, No. 5.]

[Footnote 128: Walpole to Montague, March 20, 1737.]

[Footnote 129: Wilson's "Memoirs of Defoe," vol. i, p. 265.]

[Footnote 130: Wilson's "Memoirs of Defoe," vol. i, p. 206.]

[Footnote 131: Steele, _Tatler_, No. 12 May 7, 1709.]

[Footnote 132: Walpole to Mann, Nov. 26, 1711.]

[Footnote 133: Letter to Mrs. Ann Granville, Dec. 5, 1739.]

[Footnote 134: Letter to Mrs. Ann Granville, Jan. 17, 1731-32.]

[Footnote 135: Letter to Mrs. Ann Granville, Nov. 18, 1729.]

[Footnote 136: Letter to Mrs. Ann Granville, Christmas-day, 1729.]

[Footnote 137: Green, "Short History of the English People," p. 717.]

[Footnote 138: Lord Hervey's "Memoirs of George II," vol. ii, p. 139.]

[Footnote 139: Strutt's "Sports and Pastimes," p. 259; Lecky, "History of England in the 18th Century," vol. i, chap. iv.]

[Footnote 140: Lecky, "History of England in the 18th Century," vol. i, p. 522.]

[Footnote 141: Walpole to Sir H. Mann, March 23, 1752.]

[Footnote 142: The _Spectator_, "Sir Roger at the Playhouse."]

[Footnote 143: Horace Walpole, "Short Notes of My Life."]

[Footnote 144: Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, Aug. 2, 1750.]

[Footnote 145: See the "Newgate Calendar."]

[Footnote 146: See the "Newgate Calendar" and Pike's "History of Crime," vol. 2, chap. x.]

[Footnote 147: Walpole to Mann, bet. July 14 and 29, 1742.]

[Footnote 148: "Amelia," book i, chap. 2.]

[Footnote 149: Walpole to Mann, bet. July 14 and 29, 1742.]

[Footnote 150: "State Trials;" vol. xvii, p. 298. _Proceedings against John Higgins, Esq., Warden of the Fleet, Thomas Bainbridge, Esq., Warden of the Fleet, Richard Corbett, one of the Tipstaffs of the Fleet, and William Acton, Keeper of the Marshalsea Prison: 3 George II, A.D. 1729.

Report of the Com. of the House of Commons_.]

II.

Lord Hervey's bitter lines introduce us to Jonathan Swift. Nature, together with the character of his time, made the great Dean a misanthropist. Physical infirmity, disappointed hopes, and a long series of humiliations destroyed the happiness which should have belonged to his rare union of n.o.ble gifts,--his tall, commanding figure, his awe-inspiring countenance, his acute wit, and magnificent intellect. Naturally proud and sensitive to an abnormal degree, he was obliged to suffer the most galling slights. From his earliest years he hated dependence, and yet, until middle life he was forced to be a dependent. His education was furnished by the charity of relatives, between whom and himself there was no affection. His college degree was conferred in a manner which made it a disgrace rather than an honor.

The long years which he pa.s.sed in the household of Sir William Temple, subject to the humors and caprices of his master, embittered his temper at the time of life when it should have been most buoyant and hopeful.

Thus began the melancholy and misanthropy which marred his whole life, darkening his triumphs, turning such love as he had to give into a curse to those who received it, producing an eccentricity which often gave him the appearance of a madman, and finally bringing him to a terrible end--to die, as he himself foretold, like a blasted elm, first at the top. He kept his birthday as a day of mourning. He solemnly regretted his escape when nearly killed by an accident. He habitually parted from a friend with the wish that they might never meet again.

Caesar's description of Ca.s.sius is wonderfully applicable to Swift:[151]

----He reads much; He is a great observer, and he looks Quite through the deeds of men ---- Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort As if he mocked himself, and scorn'd his spirit That could be amused to smile at any thing.

The character of Swift presents great apparent contradictions. Although full of good-will and appreciation for individuals, although exercising out of a small income the most discriminating and open handed generosity, there has never lived a man more bitter in his misanthropy, more fierce in his denunciation of mankind. Although capable of great and disinterested affection, he was unable to make his affection a source of happiness to himself or to others. Although he always chose for companions.h.i.+p the most refined and cultivated women, the wisest and most honored men, his mind dwelt by preference on the most terrible examples of human depravity, and he gave permanent form, in his literary productions, to ideas from which a healthy mind must always turn with horror and disgust. His misanthropy was founded partly on observation of the evil and corruption which he saw about him, and partly on the suspicions and exaggerations of his own imagination. He gave up writing a history of England, because, in his own words, he found the characters of history such a pack of rascals that he would have no more to say to them. He made a "List of Friends," which he cla.s.sified as Grateful, Ungrateful, Indifferent, and Doubtful. Of these friends, forty-four in number, only seventeen were marked with the _g_ which signified that their friends.h.i.+p was trusted. We cannot disa.s.sociate Swift from his own time, nor can we attribute simply to a melancholy life or to mental aberration the revolting conceptions which his works contain. The coa.r.s.eness and corruption which marked the private and public life of Swift's day had their share in the production of such poems as The "Lady's Dressing-Room," and such degrading views of human nature as are expressed in the "Voyage to the Houyhnhnms."

It is a significant sign of the times that Hogarth, the greatest English painter, and Swift, the greatest English writer, should have employed their talents in caricature and in satire. In the wonderful allegory of the "Tale of a Tub," in which the corruptions and failings of the English, Roman, and Presbyterian churches were ridiculed in the persons of Jack, Peter, and Martin, Swift displayed at an early age his exuberant wit and surpa.s.sing satirical power. The "Tale of a Tub" was succeeded by the "Battle of the Books," an imaginary conflict between volumes in a library, which exposed the absurdity of the controversy over the relative merits of the ancients and the moderns. But Swift's satire became most fierce and brilliant when it was turned from rival creeds and rival literatures, and directed toward mankind itself.

The "Travels of Lemuel Gulliver" were dropped, said the publisher, at his house, in the dark, from a hackney-coach. In regard to this work, the Dean followed his custom of sending out his writings to the world to make their way on their own merits, without the a.s.sistance of his name. But the authors.h.i.+p of the book could not long remain unknown before the storm of applause and curiosity which it immediately excited. It was a production, said Johnson,[152] "so new and strange that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and amazement. It was received with such avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made; it was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. Criticism was for a while lost in wonder; no rules of judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity." Whether read for the satire or the story, the adventures of Gulliver proved equally fascinating. They "offered personal and political satire to the readers in high life, low and coa.r.s.e incidents to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age and disappointed ambition."[153]

The early part of the eighteenth century offered rich material to the satirist, and Swift brought to his work unparalleled fierceness and power. He attacked the corruption of the politician and the minister, the vanity and vice of the courtier, the folly and extravagance of the fas.h.i.+onable world, and gathering venom in his course, made his satire universal and painted the pettiness and deformity of the human race.

But among the follies and vices of mankind, vanity was the fault most offensive to Swift, and that which he lashed with his most bitter invective. To ridicule human pride, and to expose its inconsistency with the imperfection of man, is the ruling object of his great satirical romance. On Gulliver's return to England from the land of the Houyhnhnms, where, under the degraded form of Yahoos, he had studied mankind as they appeared when influenced by all human vices and brutal instincts unveiled by hypocrisy or civilization, he describes his horror at observing the existence of vanity among his countrymen who resembled Yahoos so closely;--

My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those vices and follies only which nature has ent.i.tled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a wh.o.r.emonger, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things: but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I ever be able to comprehend how such an animal, and such a vice, could tally together.

In the "Voyage to Lilliput" the follies and vanities of individuals and of parties are ridiculed by the representation of their practice among diminutive beings. Sir Robert Walpole suffered in the person of Flimnap the Lilliputian Premier, Tories and Whigs in the High-Heels and Low-Heels, Catholics and Protestants in the Big-endians and Small-endians. In the "Voyage to Brobdingnag," where Gulliver finds himself a pigmy among giants, the general object of the satire is the same, but its application becomes more bitter and universal.

Characteristics of the human race hardly perceptible in their ordinary proportions, attain a disgusting and monstrous prominence when seen in the huge persons of the Brobdingnagians. The king of this gigantic people is represented as a beneficent monarch, who directs all his energies toward the peace, prosperity, and material advancement of his subjects; who seeks with a cold, calculating mind, undisturbed by pa.s.sion or prejudice, the greatest good of the greatest number. To this monarch Gulliver gave a description of his native country: "I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favorable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow; for I have always borne that laudable partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarna.s.seusis, with so much justice, recommends to a historian; I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light." But the impression produced upon the King of Brobdingnag by Gulliver's relation expressed the widespread sense of evil which existed in Swift's day, which tinctured literature with misanthropy, and made Rousseau at a later time argue the superiority of the savage man over his civilized, but corrupt and hypocritical brother.

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting: "It was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, ma.s.sacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, l.u.s.t, malice, and ambition could produce."

His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then, taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: "My little friend, Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an inst.i.tution, which in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are enn.o.bled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers for their conduct or valor; judges for their integrity; senators for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. * * * I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth!"

In the voyage to Laputa the satire is directed against the vanity of human wisdom, and the folly of abandoning useful occupations for the empty schemes of visionaries. The philosophers of Laputa had allowed their land to run to waste, and their people to fall into poverty in their attempts to "soften marble for pillows and pin-cus.h.i.+ons," to "petrify the hoofs of a living horse to prevent them from foundering,"

to "sow land with chaff," and to "extract sunbeams from cuc.u.mbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers." The satire cannot be considered too broad when we consider the folly and credulity which, at the time of the South Sea mania, led many persons into sinking their whole fortunes in such enterprises as the company "To Fish up Wrecks on the Irish Coast," to "Make Salt-Water Fresh," to "Extract Silver from Lead," and to "Import Jacka.s.ses from Spain."

It is impossible within the limits of this volume to comment with any completeness on the application of Gulliver's Travels. The satire gathered strength and bitterness in its progress, until the limits of horror were reached in the voyage to the Houyhnhnms. This portion of the work cannot be considered to apply universally. Man does not here perceive a truthful reflection of himself. The Houyhnhnms, beings endowed with reason, but undisturbed and untempted by the pa.s.sions or struggles of earthly existence, are not brutes, and are not to be compared with men. The Yahoos, in their total depravity, are not human; they represent, and that with a terrible truthfulness, the condition into which men may fall when their animal instincts and baser pa.s.sions are allowed to subvert their reason and their n.o.ble qualities. The more a man suffers his better nature to yield to his lower, the more he resembles the detestable Yahoo. In this sense alone, the satire applies generally to mankind; but it applies with peculiar point to some characteristics of Swift's time. In reading the following pa.s.sage, it is impossible not to be reminded of the treatment of Sir Robert Walpole by his former flatterers and sycophants when his power seemed at an end:

Some curious _Houyhnhnms_ observe that in most herds there was a sort of ruling _Yahoo_, * * * who was always more deformed in body and mischievous in disposition than any of the rest; that this leader had usually a favorite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master's feet * * * and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of a.s.s's flesh. This favorite is hated by the whole herd, and, therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the _Yahoos_ in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and * * * (defile) him from head to foot.

But Swift, in his denunciation of men under the form of the Yahoos, disclosed the narrowness of his own misanthropy. When Gulliver has returned from his last voyage, with a mind which had dwelt on the beastliness and vice of the human race as it existed in the land of the Houyhnhnms, his warped judgment is unable to discern in his countrymen any attributes but those which they seem to share with the Yahoos:--

My wife and family received me with great surprise and joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust, and contempt; and the more, by reflecting on the near alliance I had to them. * * * As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour. At the time I am writing, it is five years since my last return to England: during the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable, much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. To this hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup; neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the hand.

Thus Swift himself, from the vividness with which he realized, and the intensity with which he hated, the vices and failings of humanity, was unable to duly appreciate the good, which, in some measure, always accompanies the evil.

It was the habit of the great Dean to utter the witticisms which caused the continual delight or terror of all who approached him with the most stern composure. Such was the manner of the "Travels." The solemn and circ.u.mstantial narrative style, imitated from the old English explorers added verisimilitude to the incidents and point to the sarcasm.

Trifles, personal to the traveller and of no consequence to the course of the story, gave an appearance of truth to the whole work. Thus Gulliver keeps the reader informed of the most minute details interesting to himself. "I took part of a small house in the Old Jewry; and being advised to alter my condition, I married Mrs. Mary Burton, second daughter to Mr. Edmund Burton, hosier, in Newgate Street, with whom I received four hundred pounds for a portion." In the same way he informs us carefully that the date of his sailing on the first voyage was May 4, 1699, from Bristol, and the storm which destroyed the s.h.i.+p arose when in the lat.i.tude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south. In a work of fiction only such events are expected as have a direct bearing upon the development of the plot, and when immaterial details are introduced, the reader is likely to be impressed with their truth. In this way the personality of Gulliver is kept up, and he remains, through whatever strange scenes he pa.s.ses, the same honest, blunt English sailor.

Yet more remarkable is the skill of the author in maintaining the probability of the allegory. When living among the Lilliputians, Gulliver insensibly adopts their ideas of size. He admires as much as they the prowess of the horseman who clears his shoe at a single leap.

When the committee of the Lilliputian king examine Gulliver's pockets, they describe his handkerchief as a "great piece of coa.r.s.e cloth, large enough to be a foot-cloth to your majesty's chief room of state"; his purse is "a net, almost large enough for a fisherman," containing "several ma.s.sy pieces of yellow metal, which, if they be real gold, must be of immense value." The same almost mathematical accuracy of proportion is kept up in the visit to Brobdingnag, and on Gulliver's return to his native country he experiences as much trouble in reaccustoming his mind to the ordinary standard as he had met with in adopting that of pigmies or giants. There was a country clergyman living in Ireland, who declared there were some things in Gulliver's Travels he could not quite believe. His difficulty probably occurred in the "Voyage to the Houyhnhnms." In the latter part of the work Swift allowed the fiction to yield to the exigencies of the satire. So long as we can imagine the existence of giants and pigmies, it is easy to realize all the circ.u.mstances connected with Gulliver's existence among them, but it is impossible to feel the same sense of reality in regard to horses who live in houses they could not build, and who eat oats they could not harvest.[154]