Page images
PDF
EPUB

THE NATURE OF ALLEGORY AS USED BY SWIFT

The purpose of this essay is to analyze, somewhat more closely than has been done hitherto, the nature of the allegory which Swift developed in the service of satire. Much has been written about Swift, and I am well aware that the facts and many of the critical dicta which appear below are by no means novel; but I believe that in linking together such material I can show that the great satirist handled allegory with a subtlety of technique which has not been credited to him. There may be some novelty in claiming that a great part of his power lies in the consistent use of symbolism to deride and degrade the objects of his satire; but I wish further to determine how both the consistency and resourcefulness of his methods are conditioned by the psychology of symbolism. In the course of my analysis, I hope to demonstrate that, although the Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels have rightly been studied for their "sources," the allegory in those works has a positive distinction. In other words I shall try to clarify one of the issues, perhaps not the smallest, on which the critics of Swift are wont to debate his title to originality.

In order to make that issue clear, let me offer some comments on the nature, or at least the practice, of satiric allegory as contrasted with the practice of allegory which is not satiric.

I. THE SATIRIC SYMBOL

When the seraph Hope with her anchor is suggested to our mind's eye, her primary duty is to give us, by her concrete appearance and action, a sharper concept of "hope" the abstract idea. In other words, an allegory of Hope in literature is usually meant to lead us on by the visualization of the symbol to a vision of the nature of hope. Except in so far as this is eventually accomplished, the allegory is lame. No doubt the seraph should be described with attractions of

1 In addition to the comments found in the standard biographies of Swift by Scott, Forster, Stephen, Craik and Collins, the following source-studies are important: Th. Borkowsky; "Quellen zu Swifts Gulliver" (Anglia, vol. xv; 1892); A. C. L. Brown, "Gulliver's Travels and an Irish Folk-Tale" (Modern Language Notes, xix; Febr. 1904); A. Guthkelch, "Swift's Tale of a Tub" (Modern Language Review, viii and ix; July and Oct. 1913, Jan. 1914); J. H.Hanford, "Plutarch and Dean Swift," (Modern Language Notes, xxv; June 1910); Hermann Hoffman, Swift's Tale of a Tub (dissertation, Leipzi,g 1911); E. Hönncher, "Quellen zu Dean Jonathan Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels' " (Anglia, x; 1888); Max Poll, "The Sources of Gulliver's Travels" (University of Cincinnati Bulletins, Ser. 2, vol. 3, no. 24); Paul Thierkopf, "Swift's Gulliver und seine französische vorgänger" (monograph, Magdeburg, 1899). I acknowledge indebtedness to all the foregoing, and also to H. E. Greene's "The Allegory as employed by Spenser, Bunyan, and Swift" (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, iv; 1888-9); but I have not been able to utilize their conclusions for my purpose.

her own; but the reader must not be permitted to linger so long over the superficial aspects of angels and anchors that he becomes preoccupied with winged females and marine hardware; he must, on the contrary, regard the quasi-human being with her attribute as a mere interpreter of something other than herself. Generally, of course, she leads him upward: the vision which she provides is poignant, spiritual, and ennobling. In the long run, therefore, the symbol in this kind of allegory is often tinged with the nature of the thing symbolized; and, when that nature is an exalted one, the symbol is carried up above its own natural level to a plane of spiritual meaning. The Grail, for example, becomes no mere specimen of goldsmith's work, but Heaven's consummate cup, owing little to earth's wheel.

But when Bunyan's Hopeful chats by the wayside, he is less likely to glorify our notion of hope, or be glorified by it, than to make it seem simple, vivid, and human, something which perhaps comes nearer to our hearts than do those vague "shining ones" whom Christian later encounters. Of course the staunch but somewhat homely optimist is less purely an allegorical figure than the heavenly visitant; but he and others like him appear continually in allegories, where they help to condense and vitalize abstract ideas by presenting virtues and emotions in actual human operations, not in transcendental constancy. Such a figure may even vary from the nature he is supposed to represent, as Christian varies from Christianity; but he does not, necessarily, forfeit his significance by such a variance; indeed, he may make the meaning brighter. Through him the allegory is not lost, but is conducted less on the two somewhat discrepant planes of this world and the world outside the senses, than on the single intelligible plane of common daily soil: virtue is still virtue, but it is also a mortal characteristic made one with mortal character. Hence, though we need not fail to translate the allegory, we are not much affected by any discrepancy in intrinsic value between the type-figure and the quality which he typifies. Hopeful, in a way, shares in the sincere but unidealizing respect which we feel for the optimism of our neighbor across the street.2

The two varieties of allegory discussed above might be denominated, relatively to each other, visionary and realistic. They differ

2

The distinction between "type" and "symbol" on which the preceding paragraphs touch is similar to that which I have heard from Professor W. A. Neilson, and which is embodied in a work by one of Mr. Neilson's pupils, W. R. Mackenzie's English Moralities from the Point of View of Allegory, Boston 1914); see pp. ix-x, 5-7, 258. Like Dr. Mackenzie, I am grateful to Professor Neilson for much guidance in the study of allegory; but I do not wish to commit either of these gentlemen to my attempts at distinguishing the satiric species.

[ocr errors][ocr errors]

radically from satiric allegory in purpose: vision is meant to exalt, realism to portray, but satire endeavors to degrade and deride. As the purpose differs, so do the symbols differ in the impression they make upon our consciousness: the satiric symbols do not lead up to the higher spiritual plane or greater intrinsic value of the things which they symbolize; they do not delineate or brighten or cheerfully humanize those things; but they bring down to their own level things which are of greater real or reputed value and dignity. Hence these symbols, being instruments of depreciation, must be so managed as to seem themselves on a low level: if the seraph Hope is to help to satirize hope, she must be bedraggled and tawdry, her anchor must be old iron; if Hopeful is to make hopefulness despicable, he must be a mean creature. When Piers Plowman wants us to contemn drunkenness, he does not give us a figure of Dionysian beauty with Hedda Gabler's "vine-leaves in his hair," but a sodden lout staggering like "a gleeman's dog"; when Bunyan wants to show us the illusions of a false hope, he gives us the figure of Atheist, whose laughter crackles ever the more vainly as he steps forward into perdition. Moreover, such figures should not only be managed so as to emphasize a casual meanness and ugliness, but selected, so far as possible, from whatever is inherently mean and ugly, if satiric allegory is to achieve thoroughly its essential duty of derogation. Hence it behooves the satirist to be careful in his choice; he may find, if he wishes to deride the idea of hope, that an anchor is not peculiarly an object of scorn; he may be troubled, if he wishes to deride intemperance and atheism, by the fact that all men, even the drunkard and the scoffer, are more or less in the image of God; whereas satire wants symbols which will do by their own weight half the business of dragging down. Often, therefore, the satirist abandons the classes of symbols from which I have been drawing examples, and turns to a class in which each member is, according to our habitual estimate, on a very much lower plane than the plane of those ideas or traits which they are to symbolize. For example: if humanity, as well as the traits of humanity, is to be disgraced, there is a great value in presenting human nature through the debasing screen of the beast-fable, to suggest as Henrysoun phrased it

"How mony men in operacioun

Ar lyke to beistis in condicioun."

Very convenient is that device by which a satirist like Swift may suggest a frog to represent a politician; for what reader may not be

led to infer that the conscience of a Whig, like the skin of the frog, is changeable, slippery, and unclean?3

The foregoing discussion leads me to believe that between visionary allegory and satiric there exists one important difference in practice: in the latter the artist more often wishes to prejudice or preoccupy his reader's mind with the qualities of the symbol before the reader passes to the concept of the thing symbolized; whereas in visionary allegory the reader's imagination must quickly be shifted from symbol to symbolized and in realistic allegory, as I have tried to show above, the type and the thing typified are closely united in impression. So far as visionary allegory is concerned, the difference in practice between it and the satiric depends on the fact that in vision there is no suggestion of a moral equivalence between the anchor and hope; but satire does suggest a moral equivalence of the frog and the Whig. I am not arguing that the visionary symbol lacks intrinsic impressiveness and beauty, but simply that such beauty is inadequate and nondefinitive: the Lord's Supper is the most impressive of ceremonies, but it is ritual as well as ceremony;the participant must know "exolutions and gustation of God": like the Graal, the cup of the Passover is merely employed to lead the worshipper up from its own level to the plane of divine suffering and redemptive love. In lower matters of vision, too, the symbol is inadequate: even a transcendental nature-worshipper is not satisfied to pore forever over the physical grace of the primrose by the river's brim; the rose, perfect attribute though it be of Venus in its color, curves, fragrance, frailty, and general voluptuous opulence, is not all that is needed to bring to a focus our conception of the strife-provoking Cytherean. But in satire the symbol is really intended to be, in a sense which is not paradoxical, inadequate and yet definitive: in The Hind and The Panther the fabulist wishes his readers to believe that the Anabaptist is more bestial than is truly the case; we are at liberty to focus our attention on the boar's snout and the boar's bristles by which Dryden presents the Anabaptist, and the complex moral character of the man is satirized through the simple physical appearance and action of the beast. Indeed, it is worth noting that this policy of satire accords well with the very nature of symbolism; for surely the most common function of any symbol is to present the complex through the simple, the infinite through the finite, or the abstract through the concrete; the difference in satire is that adroit use may be made of the fact that the 3 Cf. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (ed. F. E. Ball), i, 58.

symbol, by its very nature, is generally on a lower plane of intrinsic universal value than the thing symbolized, and for purposes of satire we are invited to let our imaginations riot on that lower plane. The boar does not mount the Baptist pulpit, but the preacher wallows with the boar; the frog does not enter Parliament, but the politician croaks with parliamentary eloquence in the pond.

.

If this be true, we may observe further that, from the point of view of technique, satire has a certain command of allegory which some high poetry may lack. It is natural for the imagination to halt, quite as often from inertia as from perplexity, in the contemplation of symbols before the interpretation of them: "consequently there is the danger of considering the illustration so closely as to forget the thing illustrated." A primrose may give thoughts too deep for tears, but on the other hand many of us are very prone to think of it as a simple primrose; and visionary allegory too often affects us with the simple meaning rather than with the vision: did not Dante lament the blindness of his readers who saw only the literal significance in the Divine Comedy? The law which accounts for this mortifying lack of penetration has been explained psychologically as the law of mental pause— "l'arrêt mental."

"Le symbole n'est qu' un signe; sa seule fonction est de représenter quelqu' élément psychique, une image, une idée, une emotion; mais si telles sont sa nature et sa fonction considérées en elles mêmes, le symbole finit souvent au contraire par remplacer entièrement la chose qu'il devrait représenter; il absorbe la realité, et acquiert une importance exagérée, l' importance de la chose représentée."5

Yet I hesitate to believe that such a substitution is often complete, or that it is desirable in atiric allegory for the symbol to attain the importance, much less the dignity, of the thing represented. The point is rather that the reader's mental pause is only a temporary halt, just long enough to let the symbol so preoccupy his consciousness that the true nature of the thing symbolized, when finally discernible, is very slow to regain any ascendancy over the imagination. We think of the frog and then almost immediately of the politician; but the politician forthwith is very froglike to our senses; and even thus he is most effectively satirized.

Let us turn to Swift, and see how in theory and practice he illustrates this doctrine of the satiric symbol.

4 Cf. Greene, "The Allegory as employed by Spenser. . .," (op. cit.), p. 154.

5

Guglielmo Ferrero, Les Lois Psychologiques de symbolisme (Paris 1895), p. 93.

« PreviousContinue »