“What did they do with them in the French revolution?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“Les aristocrats à la lanterne!” says her husband.
“I’ve forgotten all my French,” says Mrs. Ogi, “and so will most of your readers. But I’ll tell you this—the professor sounds exactly like you, except that he’s on the other side!”
CHAPTER XLVI
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.”