Such cross-ruffing is the heart of farce and of the ordinary literature of roguery. But as Wild picks the pockets of his accomplices, double-crosses the card-sharping Count, swindles and is swindled in turn, each act shows a further aspect of his character and is a new chapter in the anatomy of Greatness. It has been said that Fielding’s common sense and his low opinion that human beings were moved chiefly by self-interest, restricted his imagination. This may be so, though the greater restriction was to his sensibility. In the light of our present painful knowledge of Great Men of action we are not likely to think the portrait of Wild unimaginative simply because Fielding takes an unpoetical view. There is the episode of the jewels. The Count who, with Wild, has swindled Heart-free over the casket of jewels, has double-crossed his partner by substituting paste for the stolen treasure. Worse still, Tishy whom Wild intends to seduce by the gift of the casket, has worked in a pawnbroker’s and knows paste when she sees it. Wild is left to another soliloquy, to the sadness of Berchtesgaden or neo-Imperial Rome. “They” are always sad:
How vain is human Greatness! … How unhappy is the state of Priggism! How impossible for Human Prudence to foresee and guard against each circumvention! … In this a Prig is more unhappy than any other: a cautious man may in a crowd, preserve his own Pockets by keeping his hands in them; but while he employs his Hands in another’s pockets, how shall he be able to defend his own? Where is his Greatness? I answer in his Mind; ’Tis the inward Glory, the secret Consciousness of doing great and wonderful Actions, which can alone support the truly Great Man, whether he be a Conqueror, a Tyrant, a Minister or a Prig. These must bear him up against the private Curse and public Imprecation, and while he is hated and detested by all Mankind, must make him inwardly satisfied with himself. For what but some such inward satisfaction as this could inspire Men possessed of Wealth, of Power, of every human Blessing, which Pride, Luxury, or Avarice could desire, to forsake their Homes, abandon Ease and Repose, and, at the Expense of Riches, Pleasures, at the Price of Labour and Hardship, and at the Hazard of all that Fortune hath liberally given them could send them at the Head of a Multitude of Prigs called an Army, to molest their Neighbours, to introduce Rape, Rapine, Bloodshed and every kind of Misery on their own Species? What but some such glorious Appetite of Mind….
Intoxicating stuff. The eighteenth century’s attack on absolutism, its cry of Liberty, its plea for the rational, the measured, and even the conventional culminated—in what? Napoleon. And then democracy. It is painful to listen to the flying Prigs, to democracy’s Jonathan Wild. Was the moral view of human nature mistaken? Is the Absolute People as destructive as the Absolute King? Is the evil not in the individual, but in society? We rally to the eighteenth-century cry of “Liberty”; it is infectious, hotter indeed than it sounds today. We reflect that those good, settled, educated, middle-class men of the time of Queen Anne, owed their emancipation to a Tyrant who burned half Ireland, killed his King and went in private hysterical dread of the devil. Under that smooth prose, under that perfect deploying of abstractions, the men of the eighteenth century seem always to be hiding a number of frightening things that are neither smooth nor perfect. There is the madness of Swift, there is the torment of Wesley. Or was Fielding imagining the paradise of the anarchists where our natural goodness enables us to dispense with leaders? Sitting under the wings of the flying Prigs, we observe the common, indeed the commonplace, non-combatant man, behaving with a greatness which appears to require no leader but merely the prompting of sober and decent instincts.
Of course if the Great are wicked, the good are fools. Look at the Heartfrees! What a couple! But here again if you have made your head ache over Fielding’s impossible theme, it is cured at once by the felicities to which the Heartfrees drive Fielding’s invention. The letters which Heartfree gets from his impecunious or disingenuous debtors are a perfect collection; and Mrs. Heartfree’s sea adventures in which there is hardly a moment between Holland and Africa when she is not on the point of losing her honour, are not so much padding but give a touch of spirit to her shopkeeping virtues and also serve the purpose of satirising the literature of travel. It is hard on Mrs. Heartfree; perhaps Fielding was insensitive. Without that insensibility we should have missed the adventure with the monster who was “as large as Windsor Castle”, an episode which reminds us that the spirit of the 9 o’clock news was already born in the seventeen-hundreds:
I take it to be the strangest Instance of that Intrepidity, so justly remarked in our Seamen, which can be found on Record. In a Wood then, one of our Mucketeers coming up to the Beast, as he lay on the Ground and with his Mouth wide open, marched directly down his Throat.
He had gone down to shoot the Monster in the heart. And we should have missed another entrancing sight. Mrs. Heartfree perceived a fire in the desert and thought at first she was approaching human habitation.
… but on nearer Approach, we perceived a very Beautiful Bird just expiring in the Flames. This was none other than the celebrated Phœnix.
The sailors threw it back into the Fire so that it “might follow its own Method of propagating its Species”.
Yes, the Heartfrees would have a lot to talk about afterwards. There is a charm in the artlessness of Mrs. Heartfree, if Heartfree is a bit of a stodge; one can understand why she introduced just a shade of suspense in the account of how she always managed to save her virtue at the last minute.
The Dean
The world would be poor without the antics of clergymen. The Dean, for example, wished he was a horse. A very Irish wish which a solid Englishwoman very properly came down on; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was one of the few hostile critics of Gulliver:
Great eloquence have (the authors) employed to prove themselves beasts and show such a veneration for horses, that, since the Essex Quaker nobody has appeared so passionately devoted to that species; and to say truth they talk of a stable with so much warmth and affection I cannot help suspecting some very powerful motive at the bottom of it.
It was odd that a man as clean as the Dean should find solace among the mangers; and there is a stable tip for psychoanalysts here. The function which he loathed in Celia and could never stop mentioning, had become unnoticeable at last. Shades of the Freudian Cloacina imprison the growing boy, but are guiltlessly charmed away when, pail and shovel in hand, we make our first, easy, hopeful acquaintance with the fragrant Houhynhms.
Dr. Johnson was also hostile. Gulliver was written “in defiance of truth and regularity”. Yet the Dean and the Doctor had much in common. They were both sensible men in a century devoted to the flightiness of Reason. What annoyed the Doctor was what enchanted the public; the madness of Gulliver. Very irregular. We see now that the Augustan prose was a madman’s mask and that the age of Reason was also the age of witchcraft, hauntings, corruption and the first Gothic folly. History has confirmed Dr. Johnson’s judgment first by numbing the satire—for who can be bothered to look up the digs at Walpole, Newton and the rest?—and by giving the book a totally different immortality. It is not an accident that Gulliver has become a child’s book; only a child could be so destructive, so irresponsible and so cruel. Only a child has the animal’s eye; only a child, or the mad clergyman, can manage that unhuman process of disassociation which is the beginning of all satire from Aristophanes onwards; only children (or the mad) have that monstrous and infantile egotism which assumes everything is meaningless and that, like children, we run the world on unenlightened self-interest like a wagon-load of monkeys. What a relief it is that the Dean’s style is as lucid and plain as common water: it runs like water off a duck’s back. If Gulliver had been written in the coloured prose of the Bible, bulging with the prophetic attitudinisings of the Jews, the book might have caused a revolution—there is some very revolutionary stuff in Lilliput—but a moderate church Tory like the Dean had no intention of doing that. There must have been satisfaction in reminding a Queen in the rational century that under her petticoat she was a Yahoo and savage s
atisfaction in knowing she liked the idea. In this she was a sensible woman; she had, like the rest of us, been charmed back to the minute and monstrous remembrances of childhood, she had been captivated by the plain, good and homely figure of Gulliver himself. She picked out the topical bits and when the Dean waded into his generalities about human nature, her eyes no doubt wandered off that almost too easy page and examined her finger-nails.
But there was a part of Gulliver which nobody liked or which most people thought inferior. Laputa missed the mark. Why? It was topical enough. The skit on science was a good shot at the young Royal Society and the wave of projects which obsessed the times. The highbrow is always fair game. Visually and satirically Laputa is the most delightful of the episodes. The magic island floats crystalline in the air, rising and falling to the whim of its ruler, and its absent-minded philosophers are only tickled into awareness by a fly-whisk. Laputa is the rationalist’s daydream. Here is the unearthly paradise, an hydraulic and attainable heaven. True, the philosophers were fools and the scientists, with their attempts to get sunshine out of cucumbers, cloth from spiders, food from dirt and panic from astronomy, were ridiculous. The knowledge machine was grotesque. But what was the matter with the men of Newton’s time that they could not appreciate Laputa? The age of Reason enjoyed the infantile, the animal and irrational in Gulliver; it rejected the satire on knowledge.
The only answer can be that the Augustans had not had enough of science, to know it was worth satirising. The Dean was before his time; and the world would have to wait a hundred and fifty years for Bouvard and Pécuchet to continue the unpopular game—the origins of Bouvard and Gulliver are, incidentally, identical and both Flaubert and Swift spent ten years on and off writing the books—and among ourselves, we have only Aldous Huxley’s crib of Laputa, Brave New World. Yet Laputa is the only part of Gulliver which has not been eclipsed by subsequent writing. Voltaire, Wells, Verne—to take names at random—have all taken the freshness off Swift’s idea; and what the Utopians have left out has been surpassed by science itself. The sinister functionalism of the termites, the pedestrian mysticism of the bee, the ribald melodramas of the aquarium and the Grand Guignol of the insect house, have all defeated human life and literature as material for the political satirist. These things have put the date on Lilliput, but Laputa is untouched. It stands among us, miraculously contemporary.
It is the sur-realist island. At least Laputa is to Lilliput what Alice in Wonderland is to sur-realism. The sportively clinical and sinister, succeed to the human and extraordinary. One cannot love Laputa as one loves Lilliput, but one recognises Laputa. It is the clinic we have come to live in. It is the world of irresponsible intellect and irresponsible science which prepared the way for the present war. We enter at once into our inhumanity, into that glittering laboratory which is really a butcher’s shop. What science does not dissect, it blows to pieces. The Dean, safe at the beginning of the period, did not foresee this—though he does note that, to crush rebellion, the King was in the habit of letting the island down bodily from the sky on the rebellious inhabitants.
We are also in the world of the cubist painters. The rhomboid joints, the triangular legs of mutton come out of Wyndham Lewis—has he illustrated Laputa?—those mathematicians take us to our Bertrand Russells. Among the astronomers, with their weakness for judicial astrology, does one not detect the philosophical speculations of Jeans and Eddington? Pure thought, moreover, led to a laxity of morals, for husbands devoted to the higher intellectual life were inclined either to be short-sighted or absent-minded, and the wives in Laputa found it necessary and simple to descend to coarser but more attentive lovers on the mainland below. In search perhaps of Gerald Heard’s new mutation, the speculative despised sex or forgot about it; or having read their Ends and Means, thought of giving sex up. Yes, Laputa, the island of the non-attached, is topical.
Like all satirists, the Dean was, nevertheless, in a vulnerable position. By temperament and in style he is one of the earliest scientific writers in modern literature. He delights, with a genuine anticipation of scientific method, in those measurements of hoofs, heads and fingers, the calculated quantities of food, the inevitable observation on his bladder. One might be reading Malinowski or Dr. Zuckermann. Yet when one puts the book down it is to realise that there is one more country in the story which is the counterblast to Laputa, Lilliput and the whole list. This is Gulliver himself. The world is mad, grotesque, a misanthropic Irishman’s self-destructive fantasy; but Gulliver is not. Gulliver is sane. He is good, homely, friendly and decent. How he keeps himself to himself in his extraordinary adventures! No love affairs; Mrs. Gulliver and family are waiting at home. Unlike the philosophers, he is not a cuckold. One is sure he isn’t.
“I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities,” the Dean wrote to Pope; “and all my love is towards individuals; for instance I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Councillor Such a One and Judge Such a One; principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth.”
A religious mind, even one as moderate in its religion as Swift’s, must, in the end, be indifferent to material welfare, progress and hopes. Gulliver is simply John, Peter or Thomas, the ordinary sensible man and he stands alone against the mad laboratories of the floating island. Gulliver could not know that people would one day make a knowledge machine or invent sunshine substitutes (but not out of cucumbers), but he does know that it is folly to let the world be run by these people. They will turn it (as the visit to Lagado showed, or, shall we say, to a blitzed town) into a wilderness. The world, the mad Dean says in the figure of Gulliver, must be run by John, Peter, Thomas, the sensible man.
The End of the Gael
The return of Synge from Paris to Ireland is a dramatic moment in Anglo-Irish literature. In significance that journey is equalled only by the one made in the other direction by Joyce when he broke with Dublin for ever and went angrily to the Continent. The thing which fired Synge seemed to Joyce to be tarnished by the vulgarity of Edwardian Dublin. Unhappily the dates do not quite fit, but nevertheless one has a picture of those two figures, most self-contained and priest-like in their attitude to literature, passing each other without signals of recognition on their opposite journeys across the Irish Sea. Each is going to what the other has left: Joyce is on his way to become something like the Irish pedant and aesthete abroad, moving to that diletantism which always seems to catch the Irishman in exile, turning him into a kind of cold Tara brooch in the shirt-front of Western European culture; and Synge is on the way back to rub off some of the polish and to refertilise an imagination which culture had sterilised. Such migrations, exile and return, are a master rhythm in Irish life. And yet, when one thinks about these journeys in connection with the work of Synge and Joyce, their destinations are not effectively so different after all. Both writers are sedulous linguists and lovers of a phrase who sport like dolphins in the riotous oceans of an English language which has something of the fabulous air of a foreign tongue for them. In the beginning was the word—if that is not the subject of their work, it is the exciting principle. There would even be no difficulty in citing parallel passages. I have no copy of Ulysses or Finnegan to hand at the moment, but sentences from The Playboy like Christy’s
“Ah, you’ll have a gallous jaunt, I’m saying, coaching out through limbo with my father’s ghost”,
or,
“And I must go back into my torment is it, or run off like a vagabond straying through the unions with the dust of August making mudstains in the gullet of my throat; or the winds of March blowing on me till I’d take an oath I felt them making whistles of my ribs within”,
are three parts on the way to Anna Livia. And this passion for the bamboozling and baroque of rhetoric leaves both Synge and Joyce with a common emotion: an exhausted feeling of the evanescence of outward things, which is philosophical in Synge and, in Joyce, the very description of human consciousness. The
sense of a drunken interpenetration of myth or legend (or should we call it imagination and the inner life) with outer reality is common to them. Where modern Europeans analysed, Synge and Joyce, heirs of an earlier culture, substituted metaphor and image. Again and again, in almost any page you turn to in Joyce and Synge, the tragedy or comedy of life is felt to be the tragedy or comedy of memory and the imagination. It is their imagination which transforms Christy, Pegeen, Deirdre, and Nora in The Shadow of the Glen; but when, “the fine talk they have on them” is done, they are aware that time is writing on like a ledger clerk, that the beautiful girls will become old hags like the Widow Quin or Mrs. Bloom grunting among her memories on the chamber-pot. Time dissolves the lonely legendary mind of man, killing the spells of the heart, draining the eloquence of the body—that seems to be not only the subject of Synge’s Deirdre and all his plays, but the fundamental subject of Anglo-Irish literature.
Reading Synge again one feels all the old excitement of his genius. Nothing has faded. He reads as well as an Elizabethan. In his short creative period all Synge’s qualities were brought to a high pitch of intensity and richness and his work stands inviolable in a world apart. It is unaffected by the passing of the fashion for peasant drama, for behind the peasant addict with his ear to the chink in the wall is the intellect of the European tradition, something of Jonson’s grain and gusto. Synge was a master who came to his material at what is perhaps the ripest moment for an artist—the brink of decadence. The Gaelic world was sinking like a ship; and there was an enlightened desperation in the way the Anglo-Irish caught at that last moment, before their own extinction too. That, anyway, is how it looks now. The preoccupation with the solitude of man, with illusion and with the evanescence of life in Synge and Joyce is one of the signs that the old age of a culture has come, and Synge gives to the death of the Gaelic world the nobility and richness of a ritual. It is not, as in the Aran journal, a ritual of sparse sad words, but the festive blaze of life.
In My Good Books Page 14