Jonathan Swift

Swift

Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay favoured octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the intricately textured humour of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published 1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course, as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading, and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern” consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court, and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to part the reader from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge him to rethink from first principles his notions of man. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.

Shaftesbury and others

More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic, benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.

His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29), which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous functioning. He thus favoured an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.

He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.

In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigour with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious, socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual life centred in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.