THE POISONED RAT
While France has been moving toward its revolution, England has been
moving away from hers, and we now return to the foggy island to watch
the course of events through this eighteenth century. The crown has
submitted, and parliament has the last word in public affairs. A
parliament of the land-owning gentry, elected by corruption, we shall
see it in the course of two centuries being gradually changed into a
parliament of merchants and ship-owners, of steel and coal and diamond
and gold magnates, of brewers and publishers of capitalist propaganda.
It was the task of eighteenth century England to create the bourgeois
soul. Machinery and standardized production, which were to make over the
world, had not yet appeared, but when they came, they found their
psychology and culture all prepared for them by this “nation of
shop-keepers.” It is a world of money, all other powers deposed, all
other standards a shell without life inside; honor, favor, virtue are
represented by money. Religion has become an affair of “livings” and of
“benefices.” Politics has become an affair of party rancor, a squabble
over the spoils of office. The difference between the two parties is
that one is in and the other is out; the purpose of the outs being to
prove rascality against the ins, and thus get a chance to do what the
ins are doing.
In this bourgeois world the artist may be feeble of mind, not knowing
the reality of his time, believing sincerely in its shams. Or he may be
a cynic, jeering at his time, but taking what he can get. Or he may be a
rebel, speaking the truth--in which case he will starve in a garret, or
go insane, or be thrown into prison, or driven into exile.
The first to greet this new century with his writings was a man who went
insane. One of the great masters of English prose, his fate in life was
to be brought up as a “poor relation,” and to eat the bitter bread of
dependence. He became a kind of educated servant to the wealthy, and
finally got a small job in the church. Ill most of his life, proud,
imperious, burning up with thwarted genius, Jonathan Swift was made into
a master ironist.
His first great book was “The Tale of a Tub,” in which he ridiculed the
squabbles of the various church parties. Having thus shocked the church,
he applied to be a dean, but did not get the job, because somebody else
paid a thousand pound bribe to the official having the appointment.
Swift was told that he could have another deanery at the same price, but
he did not have the sum handy.
The “ins” of those days were called Tories, and the “outs” were called
Whigs; they fought furiously, and literary rats, hiding in garrets and
cellars, wrote pamphlets of personal abuse, which were published
anonymously and circulated in the face of jail penalties. Like the
laureate Dryden, our would-be dean did this vile writing; he did it for
the Whigs, and when he got no preferment there, he joined the Tories,
and was made dean of the cathedral in Dublin. There he wrote his “Modest
Proposal” for eating the children of Ireland, one of the most terrific
pieces of irony in all literature. “Look,” says the ‘gloomy dean,’ “we
are letting a population starve to death, and, what a waste of national
resources, what a violation of our fundamental principles of business
economy. Let us feed these Irish babies, and when they are nice and fat,
serve them on our tables; they will be happy during their brief span of
life, and we shall no longer have to import food from foreign parts.”
Then came “Gulliver’s Travels,” which took its place along with
“Pilgrim’s Progress” as required reading for children and adults. It is
an even more perfect allegory; you can read it as a story pure and
simple, without any idea of an ulterior meaning. The author helps you by
the perfect gravity with which he describes every detail of these
singular adventures. First we visit the land in which the people are
only six inches tall, and so we laugh at the pettiness of human affairs.
Then we visit the land where they are correspondingly big, and we learn
how brutal and gross and stupid we really are. So on, until we come to
the land of noble and beautiful horses, in which human beings are lewd
and filthy apes. So we learn the worst possible about a world which
appointed a man of genius to be dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, when
he wanted to be dean of St. Paul’s in London. So we are ready to go
insane, and to die, as the dean himself phrased it, “like a poisoned rat
in a hole.”