The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  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 somethin
g 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.

  I propose to examine in illustration a passage from the Digression Concerning the Original, the Use, and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth (i.e. Section IX). It will have, in die nature of the case, to be a long one, but since it exemplifies at the same time all Swift's essential characteristics, its length will perhaps be tolerated. I shall break up the passage for convenience of comment, but, except for the omission of nine or ten lines in dxe second instalment, quotation will be continuous:

  For the brain in its natural position and state of serenity disposcth its owner to pass his life in the common forms, without any thought ot subduing multitudes to his own power, his reasons, or his visions, and the more he shapes his understanding by the pattern of human learning, the less he is inclined to form parties after his particular notions, because

  that instructs him in his private infirmities, as well as in the stubborn ignorance of the people. But when a man's fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding as well as common sense is kicked out of doors, the first proselyte he makes is himself; and when that is once compassed, the difficulty is not so great in bringing over others, a strong delusion always operating from without as vigorously as from within. For cant and vision are to the ear and the eye the same that tickling is to the touch. Those entertainments and pleasures we most value in life are such as dupe and play the wag with the senses. For if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or to the senses, we shall find all its pro* perties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.

  Swift's ant-like energy—the business-like air, obsessed intent-ness and unpredictable movement—have already had an effect. We are not, at the end of this instalment, as sure that we know just what his irony is doing as we were at the opening. Satiric criticism of sectarian 'enthusiasm' by reference to the 'common forms'— the Augustan standards—is something that, in Swift, we can take as very seriously meant. But in the incessant patter of the argument we have (helped by such things as, at the end, the suggestion of animus in that oddly concrete 'herd') a sense that direction and tone are changing. Nevertheless, the change of tone for which the next passage is most remarkable comes as a disconcerting surprise:

  And first, with relation to the mind or understanding, it is manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth, and the reason is just at our elbow; because imagination can build nobler scenes and produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or Nature will be at the expense to furnish.... Again, if we take this definition of happiness and examine it with reference to the senses, it will be acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How sad and insipid do all objects accost us that are not conveyed in the vehicle of delusion! How shrunk is everything as it appears in the glass of Nature, so that if it were not for the assistance of artificial mediums, false lights, refracted angles, varnish, and tinsel, there would be a mighty level in the felicity and enjoyments of mortal men. If this were seriously considered by the world, as I have a certain reason to suspect it hardly will, men would no longer reckon among their high points of wisdom the art of exposing weak sides and publish-

  ing infirmities—an employment, in my opinion, neither better nor worse than that of unmasking, which, I think, has never been allowed fair usage, either in the world or die playhouse.

  The suggestion of changing direction does not, in the first part of this passage, bring with it anything unsettling : from ridicule of * enthusiasm' to ridicule of human capacity for self-deception is an easy transition. The reader, as a matter of fact, begins to settle down to the habit, the steady drift of this irony, and is completely unprepared for the sudden change of tone and reversal of attitude in the two sentences beginning 'How sad and insipid do all objects', etc. Exactly what the change means or is, it is difficult to be certain (and that is of the essence of the effect). But the tone has certainly a personal intensity and die ironic detachment seems suddenly to disappear. It is as if one found Swift in the place—at the point of view—where one expected to find his butt. But die ambiguously mocking sentence with which die paragraph ends reinforces the uncertainty.

  The next paragraph keeps the reader for some time in uneasy doubt. The irony has clearly shifted its plane, but in which direction is the attack going to develop ? Which, to be safe, must one dissociate oneself from, 'credulity* or * curiosity'.

  In the proportion that credulity is a more peaceful possession of the mind than curiosity, so far preferable is that wisdom which converses about the surface to that pretended philosophy which enters into the depths of tilings and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing. The two senses to which all objects first address themselves are the sight and die touch; these never examine further than the colour, the shape, die size, and whatever odier qualities dwell or are drawn by art upon the outward of bodies; and then comes reason officiously, with took for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate that they are not of the same consistence quite through. Now I take all this to be the last degree of perverting Nature, one of whose eternal laws is to put her best furniture f
orward. And therefore, in order to save the charges of all such expensive anatomy for the time to come, I do here think fit to inform the reader that in such conclusions as these reason is certainly in the right; and that in most corporeal beings which have fallen under my cognisance the outside hath been infinitely preferable to the in, wnereof I have been furdier convinced from some

  late experiments. Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.

  The peculiar intensity of that last sentence is, in its own way, so decisive that it has for the reader the effect of resolving uncertainty in general. The disturbing force of the sentence is a notable instance of a kind already touched on: repulsion is intensified by the momentary co-presence, induced by the tone, of incipient and incompatible feelings (or motions) of acceptance. And that Swift feels the strongest animus against 'curiosity' is now beyond all doubt. The natural corollary would seem to be that * credulity', standing ironically for the * common forms'—the sane, socially sustained, common-sense illusions—is the positive that the reader must associate himself with, and rest on for safety. The next half-page steadily and (to all appearances) unequivocally confirms this assumption: