The Common Pursuit (11 page)

The adult may re-read the first two parts, as he may Robinson Crusoe, with great interest, but his interest, apart from being more critically conscious, will not be of a different order from the child's. He will, of course, be aware of an ingenuity of political satire in Lilliput, but the political satire is, unless for historians, not very much alive to-day. And even the more general satire characteristic of the second book will not strike him as very subtle. His main satisfaction, a great deal enhanced, no doubt, by the ironic seasoning, will be that which Swift, the student of the Mariners Magazine and of travellers' relations, aimed to supply in the bare precision and the matter-of-fact realness of his narrative.

But what in Swift is most important, die disturbing characteristic of his genius, is a peculiar emotional intensity; that which, in Gulliver, confronts us in the Struldbrugs and the Yahoos. It is what we find ourselves contemplating when elsewhere we examine his irony. To lay the stress upon an emotional intensity should be matter of commonplace: actually, in routine usage, the accepted word for Swift is * intellectual'. We are told, for instance, that his is pre-eminently * intellectual satire' (though we are not told what satire is). For diis formula the best reason some commentators can allege is the elaboration of analogies—their 'exact and elaborate propriety' 1 —in Gulliver. But a muddled perception can hardly be expected to give a clear account of itself; the stress on Swift's 'intellect' (Mr Herbert Read alludes to his 'mighty intelligence') 2 registers, it would appear, a confused sense, not only of the mental exercise involved in his irony, but of the habitually critical attitude he maintains towards the world, and of the negative emotions he specializes in.

From 'critical' to 'negative' in this last sentence is, it will be observed, a shift of stress. There are writings of Swift where * critical' is the more obvious word (and where 'intellectual' may seem correspondingly apt)—notably, die pamphlets or pamphleteering essays in which the irony is instrumental, directed and limited to a given end. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity and the Modest Proposal, for instance, are discussible in the terms in which satire is commonly discussed: as die criticism of vice, folly, or other aberration, by some kind of reference to positive standards. But even here, even in the Argument, where 1 Churton Collins. * English Prose Style.

Swift's ironic intensity undeniably directs itself to the defence of something that he is intensely concerned to defend, the effect is essentially negative. The positive itself appears only negatively—a kind of skeletal presence, rigid enough, but without life or body; a necessary pre-condition, as it were, of directed negation. The intensity is purely destructive.

The point may be enforced by the obvious contrast with Gibbon—except that between Swift's irony and Gibbon's the contrast is so complete that any one point is difficult to isolate. Gibbon's irony, in the fifteenth chapter, may be aimed against, instead of for, Christianity, but contrasted with Swift's it is an assertion of faith. The decorously insistent pattern of Gibbonian prose insinuates a solidarity with the reader (the implied solidarity in Swift is itself ironical—a means to betrayal), establishes an understanding and habituates to certain assumptions. The reader, it is implied, is an eighteenth-century gendeman ('rational', 'candid', 'polite', 'elegant', 'humane'); eighteen hundred years ago he would have been a pagan gendeman, living by these same standards (those of absolute civilization); by these standards (present everywhere in the stylized prose and adroitly emphasized at key points in such phrases as 'the polite Augustus', 'the elegant mythology of the Greeks') the Jews and early Christians are seen to have been ignorant fanatics, uncouth and probably dirty. Gibbon as a historian of Christianity had, we know, limitations; but the positive standards by reference to which his irony works represent something impressively realized in eighteenth-century civilization; impressively 'there' too in the grandiose, assured and ordered elegance of his history. (When, on the other hand, Lytton Strachey, with a Gibbonian period or phrase or word, a 'remarkable', 'oddly', or 'curious', assures us that he feels an amused superiority to these Victorian puppets, he succeeds only in conveying his personal conviction that he feels amused and superior.)

Gibbon's irony, then, habituates and reassures, ministering to a kind of judicial certitude or complacency. Swift's is essentially a matter of surprise and negation; its function is to defeat habit, to intimidate and to demoralize. What he assumes in the Argument is not so much a common acceptance of Christianity as that the reader will be ashamed to have to recognize how fundamentally

unchristian bis actual assumptions, motives, and attitudes are. And in general the implication is that it would shame people if they were made to recognize themselves unequivocally. If one had to justify this irony according to the conventional notion of satire, then its satiric efficacy would be to make comfortable non-recognition, the unconsciousness of habit, impossible.

A method of surprise does not admit of description in an easy formula. Surprise is a perpetually varied accompaniment of the grave, dispassionate, matter-of-fact tone in which Swift delivers his intensities. The dissociation of emotional intensity from its usual accompaniments inhibits the automatic defence-reaction:

He is a Presbyterian in politics, and an atheist in religion; but he chooses at present to whore with a Papist.

What bailiff would venture to arrest Mr Steele, now he has the honour to be your representative ? and what bailiff ever scrupled it before ?

Or inhibits, let us say, the normal response; since ' defence * suggests that it is the * victim* whose surprise we should be contemplating, whereas it is our own, whether Swift's butt is Wharton or the atheist or mankind in general. 'But satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any, since every individual makes bold to understand it of others, and very wisely removes his particular part of the burden upon the shoulders of the World, which are broad enough and able to bear it*, * There is, of course, no contradiction here; a complete statement would be complex. But, actually, the discussion of satire in terms of offence and casti-gation, victim and castigator, is unprofitable, though the idea of these has to be taken into account. What we are concerned with (die reminder is especially opportune) is an arrangement of words on the page and their effects—the emotions, attitudes and ideas that they organize.

Our reaction, as Swift says, is not that of the butt or victim; nevertheless, it necessarily entails some measure of sympathetic self-projection. We more often, probably, feel the effect of the words as an intensity in the castigator than as an effect upon a victim: the dissociation of animus from the usual signs defines for

1 A Tak of a Tub: the Preface.

our contemplation a peculiarly intense contempt or disgust. When, as sometimes we have to do, we talk in terms of effect on the victim, then 'surprise* becomes an obviously apt word; he is to be betrayed, again and again, into an incipient acquiescence :

Sixthly. This would be a great Inducement to Marriage, which all wise Nations have either encouraged by Rewards, or enforced by Laws and Penalties. It would increase the Care and Tenderness of Mothers towards their Children, when they were sure of a Settlement for Life, to the poor Babes, provided in some Sort by the Publick, to their annual Profit instead of Expence; we should soon see an honest Emulation among the married Women, which of them could bring the fattest Child to the Market. Men would become as fond of their Wives, during the Time of their Pregnancy, as they are now of their Mares in Foal, their Cows in Calf, or Sows when they are ready to farrow, nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a Practice) for fear of a Miscarriage.

The implication is: 'This, as you so obligingly demonstrate, is the only kind of argument that appeals to you; here are your actual faith and morals. How, on consideration, do you like the smell of them?'

But when in reading the Modest Proposal we are most engaged, it is an effect directly upon ourselves that we are most disturbingly aware of. The dispassionate, matter-ot-fact tone induces a feeling and a motion of assent, while the burden, at the same time, compels the feelings appropriate to rejection, and in the contrast—the tension—a remarkably disturbing energy is generated. A sense of an extraordinary energy is the general effect of Swift's irony. The intensive means just indicated are reinforced extensively in the continuous and unpredictable movement of the attack, which turns this way and that, comes now from one quarter and now from another, inexhaustibly surprising—making again an odd contrast with the sustained and level gravity of the tone. If Swift does for a moment appear to settle down to a formula it is only in order to betray; to induce a trust in the solid ground before opening the pitfall.

*His Tale of a Tub has little resemblance to his other pieces. It exhibits a vehemence and rapidity of mind, a copiousness of images, a vivacity of diction, such as he afterwards never possessed, or never exerted. It is of a mode so distinct and peculiar, that it

must be considered by itself; what is true of that, is not true of anything else he has written'. What Johnson is really testifying to here is the degree in which the Tale of a Tub is characteristic and presents the qualities of Swift's genius in concentrated form. 'That he has in his works no metaphors, as has been said, is not true,' says Johnson a sentence or two later,' but his few metaphors seem to be received rather by necessity than choice'. This last judgment may at any rate serve to enforce Johnson's earlier observation that in the Tale of a Tub Swift's powers function with unusual freedom. For the 'copiousness of images' that Johnson constates is, as the phrase indicates, not a matter of choice but of essential genius. And, as a matter of fact, in this 'copiousness of images' the characteristics that we noted in discussing Swift's pamphleteering irony have their supreme expression.

It is as if die gift applied in Gulliver to a very limiting task— directed and confined by a scheme uniting a certain consistency in analogical elaboration with verisimilitude—were here enjoying free play. For the bent expressing itself in this 'copiousness' is clearly fundamental. It shows itself in the spontaneous metaphorical energy of Swift's prose—in the image, action or blow that, leaping out of the prosaic manner, continually surprises and disconcerts the reader: 'such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up'. It appears with as convincing a spontaneity in the sardonic vivacity of comic vision that characterizes the narrative, the presentment of action and actor. If, then, the continual elaborate play of analogy is a matter of cultivated habit, it is a matter also of cultivated natural bent, a congenial development* It is a development that would seem to bear a relation to die Metaphysical fashion in verse (Swift was born in 1667). The spirit of it is that of a fierce and insolent game, but a game to which Swift devotes himself with a creative intensity.

And whereas the mind of man, when he gives the spur and bridle to his thoughts, does never stop, but naturally sallies out into both extremes of high and low, of good and evil, his first flight of fancy commonly transports him to ideas of what is most perfect, finished, and exalted, till, having soared out of his own reach and sight, not well perceiving how near the frontiers of height and depdi border upon each other, with the same course and wing he falls down plump into the

lowest bottom of things, like one who travels the east into the west, or like a straight line drawn by its own length into a circle. Whether a tincture of malice in our natures makes us fond of furnishing every bright idea with its reverse, or whether reason, reflecting upon the sum of things, can, like the sun, serve only to enlighten one half of the globe, leaving the other half by necessity under shade and darkness, or whether fancy, flying up to the imagination of what is highest and best, becomes over-short, and spent, and weary, and suddenly falls, like a dead bird of paradise, to the ground. . . .

One may (without difficulty) resist the temptation to make the point by saying that this is poetry; one is still tempted to say that the use to which so exuberant an energy is put is a poet's. 'Exuberant' seems, no doubt, a paradoxical word to apply to an energy used as Swift uses his; but the case is essentially one for paradoxical descriptions.

In lus use of negative materials—negative emotions and attitudes —there is something that it is difficult not to call creative, though the aim always is destructive. Not all the materials, of course, are negative; the 'bird of paradise' in the passage above is alive as well as dead. Effects of this kind, often much more intense, are characteristic of the Tale of a Tub, where surprise and contrast operate in modes that there is some point in calling poetic. 'The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together'—and in the juxtaposition intensity is generated.

* Paracelsus brought a squadron of stink-pot-flingers from the snowy mountains of Rhaetia'—this (which comes actually from the Battle of the Books) does not represent what I have in mind; it is at once too simple and too little charged with animus. Swift's intensities are intensities of rejection and negation; his poetic juxtapositions are, characteristically, destructive in intention, and when they most seem creative of energy are most successful in spoiling, reducing, and destroying. Sustained 'copiousness', continually varying, and concentrating surprise in sudden local foci, cannot be represented in short extracts; it must suffice here to say that this kind of thing may be found at a glance on almost any page:

Meantime it is my earnest request that so useful an undertaking may be entered upon (if their Majesties please) with all convenient speed, because I have a strong inclination before I leave the world to taste a

blessing which we mysterious writers can seldom reach till we have got into our graves, whether it is that fame, being a fruit grafted on the body, can hardly grow and much less ripen till the stock is in the earth, or whether she be a bird of prey, and is lured among the rest to pursue after the scent of a carcass, or whether she conceives her trumpet sounds best and farthest when she stands on a tomb, by the advantage of a rising ground and the echo of a hollow vault.

It is, of course, possible to adduce Swift's authority for finding that his negations carry with them a complementary positive—an implicit assertion. But (pace Charles Whiblcy) the only tiling in the nature of a positive that most readers will find convincingly present is self-assertion— superbia. Swift's way of demonstrating his superiority is to destroy, but he takes a positive delight in his power. And that the reader's sense of the ncgativcness of die Tale of a Tub is really qualified comes out when we refer to the Yahoos and the Struldbrugs for a test. The ironic detachment is of such a kind as to reassure us that this savage exhibition is mainly a game, played because it is die insolent pleasure of die author: 'demonstration of superiority' is as good a formula as any for its prevailing spirit. Nevertheless, about a superiority that asserts itself in this way there is something disturbingly odd, and again and again in the Tale of a Tub we come on intensities that shift the stress decisively and remind us how different from Voltaire Swift is, even in his most complacent detachment.