"Where Cruel Rage"

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Title:     "Where Cruel Rage"
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

"Fret not thyself," sang the cheerful Psalmist--"fret not thyself because of evildoers." For they shall soon be cut down like the grass; they shall be rooted out; their sword shall go through their own heart; their arms shall be broken; they shall consume as the fat of lambs, and as the smoke they shall consume away; though they flourish like a green bay-tree, they shall be gone, and though we seek them, their place shall nowhere be found.

A soothing consolation lies in the thought. Why should we fluster ourselves, why wax so hot, when time thus brings its inevitable revenges? Composed in mind, let us pursue our own unruffled course, with calm assurance that justice will at length prevail. Let us comply with the dictates of sweetness and light, in reasonable expectation that iniquity will melt away of itself, like a snail before the fire. If we have confidence that vengeance is the Lord's and He will repay, where but in that faith shall we find an outlet for our indignation at once so secure, so consolatory, and so cheap?

It was the pious answer made by Dr. Delany to Swift at the time when, torn by cruel rage, Swift was entering upon the struggle against Ireland's misery. Swift appealed to him one day "whether the corruptions and villainies of men in power did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?" But Delany answered, "That in truth they did not." "Why--why, how can you help it? How can you avoid it?" asked the indignant heart. And the judicious answer came: "Because I am commanded to the contrary; 'Fret not thyself because of the ungodly.'" Under the qualities revealed in Swift and Delany by that characteristic scene, is also revealed a deeply-marked distinction between two orders of mankind, and the two speakers stand as their types. Dr. Delany we all know. He may be met in any agreeable society--himself agreeable and tolerant, unwilling to judge lest he be judged, solicitous to please, careful not to lose esteem, always welcome among his numerous acquaintances, sweetly reasonable, and devoutly confident that the tale of hideous wrong will right itself without his stir. No figure is more essential for social intercourse, or moves round the cultivated or political circle of his life with more serene success.

To the great comfort of cultivated and political circles, the type of Swift is not so frequent or so comprehensible. What place have those who fret not themselves because of evildoers--what place in their tolerant society have they for uncouth personalities, terrible with indignation? It is true that Swift was himself accounted a valued friend among the best wits and writers of his time. Bolingbroke wrote to him: "I loved you almost twenty years ago; I thought of you as well as I do now, better was beyond the power of conception." Pope, also after twenty years of intimate friendship, could write of him: "My sincere love of that valuable, indeed incomparable, man will accompany him through life, and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives." Arbuthnot could write to him:

"DEAR FRIEND,--The last sentence of your letter plunged
a dagger in my heart. Never repeat those sad, but tender,
words, that you will try to forget me. For my part, I
can never forget you--at least till I discover, which
is impossible, another friend whose conversation could
procure me the pleasure I have found in yours."

The friends of Swift--the men who could write like this--men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay--were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night, how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes "azure as the heavens," which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them? Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that "spirit of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil spirit to torment him"? Of his private generosity, and his consideration for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether passionate, witty, or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A woman of peculiar charm and noble character was his livelong friend from girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more. Another woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the "Verses on his own Death," how far removed from the envy, hatred, and malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses beginning:

"In Pope I cannot read a line,
But with a sigh I wish it mine;
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six,
It gives me such a jealous fit,
I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.'
I grieve to be outdone by Gay
In my own humorous biting way;
Arbuthnot is no more my friend
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce;
Refined it first, and showed its use."

And so on down to the lines:

"If with such talents Heaven has blest 'em,
Have I not reason to detest 'em?"

To damn with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure; but to praise with jealous damnation reveals a delicate generosity that few would look for in the hater of his kind. Nor let us forget that Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase "Sweetness and light."

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked, and they could not redeem the writer's savagery in popular opinion, being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and exhausted his spirit. Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation sprang. Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened a gate to new unhappiness. The sorrows of others were more to him than to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain. On the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, "I hate life," he cried, "when I think it exposed to such accidents: and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing." It was not any spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy with suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed. Writing whilst he was still a youth, in _The Tale of a Tub_, he composed a terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical bareness of style seem foretold: "Last week," he says, "I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse." "Only a woman's hair," was found written on the packet in which the memorial of Stella was preserved, and I do not know in what elegy there breathes a prouder or more poignant sorrow.

When he wrote the _Drapier Letters_, Ireland lay before him like a woman flayed. Of the misery of Ireland it was said (I think by Sheridan):

"It fevered his blood, it broke his rest, it drove him at
times half frantic with furious indignation, it sunk him
at times in abysses of sullen despondency, it awoke in
him emotions which in ordinary men are seldom excited
save by personal injuries."

This cruel rage over the wrongs of a people whom he did not love, and whom he repeatedly disowned, drove him to the savage denunciations in which he said of England's nominee: "It is no dishonour to submit to the lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat?" It drove him also to the great principle, still too slowly struggling into recognition in this country, that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." It inspired his _Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures_, in which the advice to "burn everything that came from England except the coals and the people," might serve as the motto of the Sinn Fein movement. And it inspired also that other "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a burden to their Parents and Country, and making them beneficial to the Public. Fatten them up for the Dublin market; they will be delicious roast, baked, or boiled."

As wave after wave of indignation passed over him, his wrath at oppression extended to all mankind. In _Gulliver's Travels_ it is the human race that lies before him, how much altered for the worse by being flayed! But it is not pity he feels for the victim now. In man he only sees the littleness, the grossness, the stupidity, or the brutal degradation of Yahoos. Unlike other satirists--unlike Juvenal or Pope or the author of _Penguin Island_, who comes nearest to his manner--he pours his contempt, not upon certain types of folly or examples of vice, but upon the race of man as a whole. "I heartily hate," he wrote to Pope soon after _Gulliver_ was published, "I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." The philanthropist will often idealise man in the abstract and hate his neighbour at the back door, but that was not Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh--a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by various lusts.

"Noli aemulari," sang the cheerful Psalmist; "Fret not thyself because of evildoers." How easy for most of us it is to follow that comfortable counsel! How little strain it puts upon our popularity or our courage! And how amusing it is to watch the course of human affairs with tolerant acquiescence! Yes, but, says Swift, "amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think," and may we not say that acquiescence is the cowardice of those who dare not feel? There will always be some, at least, in the world whom savage indignation, like Swift's, will continually torment. It will eat their flesh and exhaust their spirits. They would gladly be rid of it, for, indeed, it stifles their existence, depriving them alike of pleasure, friends, and the objects of ambition--isolating them in the end as Swift was isolated. If only the causes of their indignation might cease, how gladly they would welcome the interludes of quiet! But hardly is one surmounted than another overtops them like a wave, nor have the stern victims of indignation the smallest hope of deliverance from their suffering, until they lie, as Swift has now lain for so many years, where cruel rage can tear the heart no more--"Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit."

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: "Where Cruel Rage"

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