animosity to most of mankind. "Sure the earth has not produced such monsters as Mercurialis, and his companion, and the Prelate," was Lewis's splenetic verdict on Bolingbroke and Harcourt and Atterbury. And Arbuthnot, in his letter to Swift on the Queen's death, turns the rage and bewilderment of the beaten faction to philosophy: "I have an opportunity calmly and philosophically to consider that treasure of vileness and baseness, that I always believed to be in the heart of man." All this, he declares, "really diverts me, and in a manner improves my theory." Yet it is an odd sort of diversion: "God knows,” he adds, "I write this with tears in my eyes." It would be interesting to follow this improvement of their theory through the works of the various men affected. Arbuthnot, for example, though he expressed himself at the moment in what are perhaps the bitterest words of any of the group, soon regained the fine equanimity of his spirit. Barely a year after the date of the letter just mentioned, he is writing to Swift, now in Ireland, in a vein as significant of his central calm as of the high esteem in which his absent friend was held: Therefore I say again, come, and you will be far from finding such dismal scenes as you describe. Your own letter will furnish you with topics to conquer your melancholy. For in such a mutability, what is it that must not in time cast up? . . . As to your friends, though the world is changed to them, they are not changed to you; and you will be caressed as much as ever, and by some that bore you no good will formerly. Do you think there is no pleasure in hearing the Hanover club declaim upon the clemency and gentleness of the late reign, and a thousand stranger things? As for the Constitution, it is in no more danger than a strong man that has got a little surfeit by drunkenness. All will be well, and people recover their sober senses every day. So the general débâcle had no power over the disposition of the honest doctor; but in the case of the two great writers of the group, Pope and Swift, if it did not change their attitude towards life, it at least deepened their views, adding a something which raises, or lowers, their conviction into a kind of philosophy. With Pope this conviction came with the enlarged opportunity of associating with Bolingbroke, one of the leaders of the deistic optimism which was running parallel with the cynical movement and was in the end to supplant it. Now the coexistence of these two tendencies, the one drawing on the essential selfishness and baseness of human nature, the other treating evil as a mere accident in the make-up of the world and leading on to the school of sympathetic sentimentalists, was in itself a curious anomaly; it became something more than an anomaly when it showed itself in a single writer. This fundamental inconsistency is not absent in Bolingbroke, though it is manifest there not so much in his avowed philosophy as in the discrepancy between his books and his character. But in Pope, under Bolingbroke's influence, it becomes flagrant and inexcusable. In the same years, almost in the same breath, he was composing the Dunciad and other satires, in which the lash is applied to human nature about las vigorously as genius could wield it, and in his Essay was giving epigrammatic form to Bolingbroke's creed of universal goodness. The thought of the little poet "thus calling his enemies (that is, all the world save a half-dozen exempts) every scandalous name in his rich vocabulary, while at the same time he was concocting his deistic salve for the conscience of mankind, is not nice. It troubles me in my admiration of Pope-for I am bound to admire his genius, and somehow I cannot help loving the man too this troubles me, I say, more than all the atrocious intrigues of his vanity. One plea against the charge of insincerity is, no doubt, possible. The peculiarity of Pope, and to a certain extent of other satirists of the age, is that their spleen was vented at individual men, rather than at human nature in itself. Woe to the particular wretch who in any way came athwart the doughty captain of Twickenham! The luckMess miscreant was pilloried in the Dunciad, perhaps, or in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, with a label over his head so clever and so diabolically like the truth that it could never be forgotten. indicates Cherbearia litter. 3 The only comfort for the sufferer was the assurance that his infamy should at least be immortal; and, indeed, more than once we find Swift protesting with Pope against this immortality he was bestowing on his enemies. Now, this very preoccupation with individuals left the door open, in a way, for adopting Bolingbroke's deistic attitude of benevolence when it came to dealing with human nature in general. But the inconsistency, though it might be less startling to the superficial observer, was none the less gross. If the good are the rare exceptions, and the great mass of individual men merit only contempt and insult, by what right, when we come to generalize, shall we adopt a philosophy which applies a kind of universal whitewash to the evil of the world? Whatever may be said of Swift, there is no such fundamental inconsistency, not to call it insincerity, in his writings; and so far as he contradicts himself at all, it is in the opposite direction which he cles = to Pope. He, too, has dealt heavy blows to his enemies on occasion, notably to such wicked Whigs as Wharton, but in what may be called his literary pose he consciously and consistently reserves his satire for human nature itself, rarely even alluding to particular men. So, in a letter after the completion of his Gulliver's Travels and of Pope's Odyssey, he draws by inference a comparison between his own method and Pope's, and cutradiction summons his friend to battle with the same sort of weapons: But since you will now be so much better employed, when you think of the world give it one lash the more at my request. I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians I will not speak of my own trade-soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale [the definition much mouthed by Bolingbroke and the deists generally], and to show it would be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy, though not in Timon's manner, the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion. On this ground the Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, to me the greatest of his poems and very great in its way, rises into a kind of pathetic sublimity. The whole thing is a sermon on a favourite text of the cynic, "Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose, qui nous ne déplait pas": As Rochefoucault his maxims drew |