by F. R. Leavis
Yesterday I ordered the carcass of a beau to be stripped in my presence, when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected faults under one suit of clothes. Then I laid open his brain, his heart, and his spleen, but I plainly perceived at every operation that the farther we proceeded, we found the defects increase upon us in number and bulk; from all of which I justly formed this conclusion to myself, that whatever philosopher or projector can find out an art to sodder and patch up the flaws and imperfections of Nature, will deserve much better of mankind and teach us a much more useful science than that, so much in present esteem, of widening and exposing them (like him who held anatomy to be the ultimate end of physic). And he whose fortunes and dispositions have placed him in a convenient station to enjoy the fruits of this noble art, he that can with Epicurus content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superficies of things, such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.
Assumption has become habit, and has been so nourished that few readers note anydiing equivocal to trouble them in that last sentence: the concrete force of * creams off', 'sour', 'dregs' and 'lap up' seems unmistakably to identify Swift with an intense animus against 'philosophy and reason' (understood implicitly to stand for 'curiosity' the anatomist). The reader's place, of course, is with Swift.
The trap is sprung in the last sentence of the paragraph:
This is the sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of being well-deceived, the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.
What is left ? The next paragraph begins significantly: 'But to return to madness'. This irony may be critical, but 'critical' turns out, in no very long run, to be indistinguishable from*negative'. The positives disappear. Even when, as in the Houyhjrihnms, they seem to be more substantially present, they disappear under our 'curiosity*. The Houyhnhnms, of course, stand for Reason, Truth and Nature, the Augustan positives, and it was in deadly earnest that Swift appealed to these; but how little at best they were anything solidly realized, comparison with Pope brings out. Swift did his best for the Houyhnhnms, and they may have all the reason, but the Yahoos have all the life. Gulliver's master 'thought Nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal', but nature and reason as Gulliver exhibits them arc curiously negative, and die reasonable animals appear to have nothing in them to guide. 'They have no fondness for their colts or foals, but the care they take in educating them proceeds entirely from the dictates of reason'. This freedom from irrational feelings and impulses simplifies other matters too : 'their language doth not abound in variety of words, because their wants and passions are fewer than among us'. And so conversation, in this model society, is simplified : 'nothing passed but what was useful, expressed in the fewest and most significant words.. / 'Courtship, love, presents, jointures, settlements, have no place in their thoughts, or terms whereby to express them in their language. The young couple meet and are joined, merely because it is die determination of their parents and friends: it is what they see done every day, and they look upon it as one of the necessary actions of a reasonable being'. The injunction of 'temperance, industry, exercise, and cleanliness ... the lessons enjoined to die young ones of bodi sexes seems unnecessary; except possibly for exercise, the usefulness of which would not, perhaps, be immediately apparent to the reasonable young.
The clean skin of the Houyhnhnms, in short, is stretched over a void; instincts, emotions and life, which complicate the problem
of cleanliness and decency, are left for the Yahoos with the dirt and the indecorum. Reason, Truth and Nature serve instead; the Houyhnhnms (who scorn metaphysics) find them adequate. Swift too scorned metaphysics, and never found anything better to contend for than a skin, a surface, an outward show. An outward show is, explicitly, all he contends for in the quite unironical Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the difference between the re aHty of religion and the show is, for the author of the Tale of a Tub, hardly substantial. Of Jack we are told, *nor could all the world persuade him, as the common phrase is, to eat his victuals like a Christian*. It is characteristic of Swift that he should put in these terms, showing a complete incapacity even to guess what religious feeling might be, a genuine conviction that Jack should be made to kneel when receiving the Sacrament.
Of the intensity of this conviction there can be no doubt. The Church of England was the established * common form', and, moreover, was Swift's church: his insane egotism reinforced the savagery with which he fought to maintain this cover over the void, this decent surface. But what the savagery of the passage from the Digression shows mainly is Swift's sense of insecurity and of the undisguisable flimsiness of any surface that offered.
The case, of course, is more complex. In the passage examined the 'surface' becomes, at the most savage moment, a human skin. Swift's negative horror, at its most disturbing, becomes one with his disgust-obsession: he cannot bear to be reminded that under the skin there is blood, mess and entrails; and the skin itself, as we know from Gulliver, must not be seen from too close. Hypertrophy of the sense of uncleanness, of the instinct of repulsion, is not uncommon; nor is its association with what accompanies it in Swift. What is uncommon is Swift's genius and the paradoxical vitality with which this self-defeat of life—life turned against itself—is manifested. In the Tale of a Tub the defeat is also a triumph; the genius delights in its mastery, in its power to destroy, and negation is felt as self-assertion. It is only when time has confirmed Swift in disappointment and brought him to more intimate contemplation of physical decay that we get the Yahoos and the Struldbrugs.
Here, well on this side of pathology, literary criticism stops. To attempt encroachments would be absurd, and, even if one were
qualified, unprofitable. No doubt psychopathology and median have an interesting commentary to offer, but their help is nc necessary. Swift's genius belongs to literature, and its appreciatio to literary criticism.
We have, then, in his writings probably the most remarkabl expression of negative feelings and attitudes that literature ca offer—the spectacle of creative powers (the paradoxical descrij tion seems right) exhibited consistently in negation and rejectioi His verse demands an essay to itself, but fits in readily with whs has been said. 'In poetry', he reports of the Houyhnhruns, 'the must be allowed to excel all other mortals; wherein the justness c their similes and the minuteness as well as exactness of their d« scriptions are, indeed, inimitable. Their verses abound very muc in both of these.. / The actuality of presentment for which Swi: is notable, in prose as well as verse, seems always to owe its cor vincing 'justness* to, at his least actively malicious, a coldly ir tense scrutiny, a potentially hostile attention. 'To his domesticks says Johnson, 'he was naturally rough; and a man of rigoroi temper, with that vigilance of minute attention which his worl discover, must have been a master that few could bear'. Instrui tions to Servants and the Polite Conversation enforce obviously tt critical bearing and felicity of Johnson's remark.
A great writer—yes; that account still imposes itself as fitting though his greatness is no matter of moral grandeur or huma centrality; our sense of it is merely a sense of great force. And th force, as we feel it, is conditioned by frustration and constriction the channels of life have been blocked and perverted. That w should be so often invitdd to regard him as a moralist and a idealist would seem to be mainly a witness to the power of vanit] and the part that vanity can play in literary appreciation: saei indignatio is an indulgence that solicits us all, and the use of litei ature by readers and critics for the projection of nobly sufferin selves is familiar. No doubt, too, it is pleasant to believe that ur usual capacity for egotistic animus means unusual distinction c intellect; but, as we have seen, there is no reason to lay stress o intellect in Swift. His work does indeed exhibit an extraordinai play of mind; but it is not great intellectual force that is exhibite in his indifference to the problems raised—in, for instance, tt Voyage to the Ho
uyhnhnms —by his use of the concept, or the wor
'Nature*. It is not merely that he had an Augustan contempt for metaphysics; he shared the shallowest complacencies of Augustan common sense: his irony might destroy these, but there is no conscious criticism.
He was, in various ways, curiously unaware—the reverse of clairvoyant. He is distinguished by the intensity of his feelings, not by insight into them, and he certainly does not impress us as a mind in possession of its experience.
We shall not find Swift remarkable for intelligence if we think ofBlake.
'THE DUNCIAD'
YES, one concedes grudgingly, overcoming the inevitable re* vulsion, as one turns the pages of this new edition (The 'Twickenham'), in which the poem trickles thinly through a desert of apparatus, to disappear time and again from sight—yes, there has to be a Dunciad annotated, garnished and be-prosed in this way. A very large proportion of the apparatus, after all, comes down from the eighteenth century with die poem, and the whole, though to read it all through will be worth no one's while, is enlightening documentation of the age that produced Pope and of which Pope made poetry. Yet, as the editor in his Introduction insists—'It has never sufficiently been recognized that in the Dunciad one of the greatest artists in English poetry found the perfect material for his art', he did make poetry, and it is the poetry that matters; so that one has to follow up one's concession with the remark that, though this new monument of scholarship will have to go into all the libraries for reference, it is not the edition in which the Dunciad should be read. The material is one thing, the poetry another. In fact, the sufficient recognition won't come except in company with the recognition that notes are not necessary: the poetry doesn't depend upon them in any essential respect.
'The art', says Professor Sutherland, * which Pope lavished upon this poem has too often been obscured by an unnecessary concern for his victims'. Yes; and more generally, by an unnecessary concern with his victims—a concern of a kind that notes, especially obtrusive ones, inevitably encourage. The 'fading of its personalities', remarked by Professor Sutherland as something that appreciation of the Dunciad suffers from, is really an advantage, and one we ought not to refuse. For eighteenth-century readers it must have been hard not to start away continually from the poetry to thinking about the particular historical victim and the grounds of Pope's animus against him; for modern readers it should be much easier to appreciate the poetry as poetry—to realize that Pope has created something the essential interest of
which, lies within itself, in what it is. Yet where satire is concerned there appear to be peculiar difficulties in the way of recognizing the nature of art and of the approach to it, as Professor Sutherland bears inadvertent witness in the last sentence of his Introduction:
the criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been far too much concerned with the moral issues raised by Pope's satire, and too little interested in its purely aesthetic values.
'Aesthetic* is a term the literary critic would do well to deny himself. Opposed to 'moral', as it is in this sentence, it certainly doesn't generate light. Moral values enter inevitably into the appreciation of the Dunciad, if it is judged to be a considerable work; the problem is to bring them in with due relevance, and the bringing of them in is the appreciation of Pope's art. How are malice, resentment, spite, contempt, and the other negative attitudes and feelings that we can't doubt to have played a large part in the genesis of his poetry, turned in that poetry into something that affects us as being so very different ?
We don't feel die personalities as personal. More than that, we don't, for the most part, even in places where animus is very apparent, feel the total effect to be negative, expressing a hostile and destructive will. The force of this judgment comes out when we look by way of comparison at Swift. The final impression that Swift, in any representative place, leaves us with is one of having been exposed to an intense, unremitting and endlessly resourceful play of contempt, disgust, hatred and the will to spoil and destroy. The contrast brings home to us the sense in which Pope, in practising his art of verse, is engaged, whatever his materials, in positive creation. It is Swift's prose I am thinking of in the first place, but the contrast is no less striking and significant when made between verse and verse. In verse, in fact, Swift is more barely and aridly negative (the air is 'thoroughly small and dry'), and more summarily destructive, than in prose; he never achieves anything approaching the complexity characteristic of the Digression Concerning the Use of Madness in a Commonwealth. In the following we have the richest, in the way of organization, that his verse yields:
When Celia in her glory shews,
If Strephon would but stop his nose,
(Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her ointments, daubs, and paints, and creams,
Her washes, slops, and every clout,
With which he makes so foul a rout;)
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravish'd sight to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.
Effects like that of the closing couplets are not common in Swift's verse, but the sourly nagging meanness, the sawing meagreness, of the movement in general is representative. No one, of course, would carry out a solemn comparison of Swift and Pope as poets. My point is simply, by the contrast with Swift, who is not positively an Augustan—though he is nothing else positive —to bring out what is meant by saying that Pope, in practising his art of verse, is being an Augustan of a most positive kind. Against any of Swift's verse (if you want decasyllabics take the close of A City Shower) set this:
This labour past, by Bridewell all descend,
(As morning-pray'r and flagellation end)
To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
The King of Dykes! than whom, no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood.
It is not enough to talk in the usual way (I have just seen a Sunday review that quotes the passage, which I had already marked) about the beauty of that last couplet. That beauty is inseparable from the whole habit of the versification. And in saying this one recognizes that Versification' here involves more than the term is generally felt to convey. When Pope is preoccupied with the metrical structure, the weight, and die pattern of his couplets, he is bringing to bear on his 'materials' habits of thought and feeling, and habits of ordering thought and feeling. The habits are those of a great and ardent representative of Augustan civilization. The result is that even when he is closest to Swift he remains very un-Swiftian in effect: what we note at once as the charac-
terisric movement (no simple metrical matter, of course) makes a radical difference:
Like the vile straw that's blown about the streets The needy Poet sticks to all he meets, Coach'd, carted, trod upon, now loose, now fast, In the Dog's tail his progress ends at last.
The part of Augustan civilization in Pope's creative triumph is peculiarly apparent in the Fourth Book of the Dunciad. The preeminence of this book doesn't seem to be at all generally recognized. There is no sign, for instance, that the present editor recognizes it any more than Leslie Stephen did, writing his 'English Men of Letters' Pope before 1880. There can, then, be no harm in reiterating that the Fourth Book stands, not only (so much later in date as it is) apart from the other books, but much above them: it is a self-sufficient poem. The opening has an obvious relevance to my immediate argument:
Yet, yet a moment one dim Ray of Light Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night! Of darkness visible so much be lent, As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent. Ye Pow'rs! whose Mysteries restor'd I sing, To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing, Suspend a while your Force inertly strong, Then take at once the Poet and the Song.
This astonishing poetry ought to be famous and current for the unique thing it is. Consider how trumphandy it enlists Milton into an Augustan sublime
. Faced with this passage as a detached fragment, and forgetting (if that can be granted as credible) where one had read it, what would one make of it ? It could have been written, one would have to conclude, only by Pope, but one would hardly guess that it belonged to a satire. Yet within ten lines the poem breaks out into a most lively play of imaginative wit, overtly satirical, and the transition is irresistibly sure:
Now flam'd the Dog-star's unpropitious ray, Smote ev'ry Brain, and wither d ev'ry Bay; Sick was the Sun, the Owl forsook his bow'r, The moon-struck Prophet felt the madding hour:
Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light, Of dull and venal a new World to mold, And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold.
She mounts the Throne: her head a Cloud conceal'd, In broad Effulgence all below reveaTd, ('Tis thus aspiring Dullness ever shines) Soft on her lap her Laureat son reclines.
Beneath her foot-stool, Science groans in Chains, And Wit dreads Exile, Penalties and Pains. There foam'd rebellious Logic, gagg'd and bound, There, stript, fair Rhet'ric languished on the ground; His blunted Arms by Sophistry are born, And shameless Billingsgate her Robes adorn. Morality, by her false Guardians drawn, Chicane in Furs, and Casuistry in Lawn, Gasps as they straiten at each end the cord, And dies, when Dullness gives her Page the word. Mad Mathesis alone was unconfin'd, Too mad for mere material chains to bind, Now to pure Space lifts her extatic stare, Now running round the Circle, finds it square.
The key to Pope's command of the sublime, and to his mastery of transition, presents itself in the couplet:
Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light. . ..
Order* for Pope is no mere word, but a rich concept imaginatively realized: ideal Augustan civilization. It is his greatness as a poet that he can relate the polite Augustan social culture always present in Augustan idiom and movement with something more profound than a code of manners: a code adequate to being thought of as the basis and structure of a great civilization. We have him doing it in this book of the Dunciad. * Order* (associated with 'Light') imparts its grandeur to the opening, and it is the comprehensive positive from which the satire works (in ways I discuss in Revaluation, c. III). It is everywhere implicitly there, or within easy recall, and it explains the mastery of transition that goes with Pope's astonishing variety. As the antithesis of triumph-
