Misanthropy Page 9

  Certain wild animals, male and female, spread throughout the country, dark, livid and burned by the sun, are bound to the earth they are always digging and turning up and down with an invincible obstinacy; they have something resembling an articulate voice, and when they stand up they display a human face, and in effect are men. At night they retire to their burrows, where they live on black bread, water and roots. (CT, p. 300)

  Similarly, Saint-Simon’s good works in no way mitigated his hauteur or esprit de caste. It was the disempowerment of the aristocracy that had doomed French society from Mazarin on, and that alone.79 Saint-Simon hated most of the court, but anyone outside the nobility was merely a specimen of the lie du peuple, the dregs of the populace, and probably a crook or a scoundrel. Below a certain (elevated) point in the social hierarchy his Mémoires never deign to descend.

  In effect, for the misanthropically inclined, France was populated with distinct life-forms. The misanthropes could not begin properly to acknowledge the existence of the people or take account of their circumstances. In this they remained thoroughly a part of Ancien Régime culture as a whole. There is good reason for Marie Antoinette being remembered for having suggested that those without bread should eat cake. La Bruyère and Saint-Simon were operating in a very narrow space. Indeed, though it would have been a conspicuously brave person who ridiculed Saint-Simon, he was very much caught up in exactly the kind of inconsistency that Molière mocked in Alceste, denouncing the world while failing to renounce it. It begins to look as though misanthropic discourse did not so much take issue with Ancien Régime culture as radicalize its assumptions, turning the aversion it felt for the French people upon its own representatives and the court.

  Indeed, more disquietingly still, in some degree, misanthropy conformed to, even was, State policy. Richelieu was very influenced by contemporary Augustinianism, founding the new state itself on an Augustinian premise: men were incapable of knowing what was best for them. He would therefore serve as an authority on the subject. To some extent, too, the misanthropy of the courtier was a question of just getting out while the going was good, cutting one’s losses, having one’s cake and eating it too. There were many prudent characters who, like the wit and poet Isaac de Benserade, protégé of Richelieu and friend and confidant of the Sun King, finally cultivated a ‘disgust with the court and the world’ when virtually satiated with their pleasures. (De Benserade went off to translate the Psalms).80 In this respect, misanthropy could sometimes just be worldly wisdom. Even the accomplished schemer and factionist Madame de Maintenon, whose ascent through the court to the side of the Sun King was apparently so inexorable, claimed to hate humanity: ‘I am filled with sadness and horror at the very sight of Versailles’, she declared. ‘That is what is called the World; that is where all passions are at work: love of money, envy, ambition, dissipation. How happy are those who have put the World behind them!’81 That ‘the World’ and ‘Versailles’ are equivalents, here, is in one respect beside the point. For Madame de Maintenon, no other world was worth attention.

  The Ancien Régime was a society given over to dire oppression, inequality and injustice. Above all, perhaps, it was a society that granted no one save the king the right to live according to one’s lights. True, the freedoms at stake were not those that tend to preoccupy today’s democracies. Homosexuality was accepted, commonplace, indulged, even paraded at Louis XIV’s court. Surprising as it may seem today, this made not a whit of difference to the general level of political virtue. The best people at court were women: subtle, intellectual, literary women like de Sévigné and de Lafayette, or saintly types like Louise de la Vallière. But odious and unscrupulous women like Maintenon and Madame de Montespan were also among the most powerful figures at the Sun King’s side. It was in a different sense to the postmodern one that, for the American as well as the French Revolution, the Ancien Régime would serve as the paradigm of liberty foreclosed, of a world gone wrong.

  Its misanthropic discourses are comprehensible, then, not as a recognition of what humankind in itself is and can only be, but as a reflection of what it, the Régime, had made of humans, accepted, connived in, fashioned as human being, a life that for most was often little better than that of beasts. In a sense, the misanthropists in this culture saw straight, but what they saw straight was a historical culture, as other misanthropists have repeatedly despaired – ‘O tempora! O mores!’ – of other historical cultures. We might wonder, too, whether, at some level, the culture did not owe its misanthropy to an obscure sense of shame or self-disgust, a secret knowledge of its own degradation. That the misanthropic tradition did not long survive the Revolution suggests, by a seemingly incontrovertible logic, that, as the modern democratic spirit becomes a reality, as the people assert their claims, as the multitude declares itself to be unignorable and makes itself so, so misanthropy is bound to look increasingly like a historical phenomenon, past its sell-by date. There would seem to be a contradiction in terms between popular democracy and misanthropy. How can the people affirm itself, assert itself as arbiter and authority, and at the same time write itself off? As we shall at length see, however, the form of that question is altogether too simple. It may even be quite the wrong question to ask.

  2

  MISANTHROPISTS AND THE BODY

  There are certain perhaps rather obvious objections to misanthropy, of which three stand out at this point. One of these seems to me to be much more convincing than the other two. First, misanthropy is essentially self-preening. The misanthropist is contemptuous, arrogant, aloof. He or she keeps an exorbitant ego inflated by peering down disdainfully at his or her fellows. This is in some degree Molière’s critique of Alceste. But if, certainly, we will encounter misanthropists who are not exactly immune to this charge, they will probably be in the minority. As we shall repeatedly see, misanthropy is actually quite frequently born of care, disquiet, an intense (some might say, hypersensitive) response to the seeming ineradicability of human misery, radical injustice, the flagrant and irremediable evils of the world. Such misanthropists may evidently be preening themselves on a superior quality of sensibility or soul. But Swift and Tobias Smollett, who will feature in this chapter, stand as examples to the contrary, and there are plenty of others. The misanthropist also has a specific sense of proportion, in that, for him or her, abiding evils tend to have priority over any supposed counterweight or antidote to or mitigation of them. Equally, while the misanthropist may be almost overenthusiastic for reform or good works, he or she also seems persuaded of their futility and inefficacy in the larger scheme of things, and obstinate in a refusal to entertain any (more or less pious) consolations. The misanthropist tends towards a moral absolutism that has less to do with simplification, the resort to crude, oppositional categories, than with the assumption that the intractable self-interest is always in fact on the other side, that of the ‘reasonable view’. Far from being snooty Olympians, misanthropists often appear to have lived in, at best, psychic discomfort, at worst, moral grief or dreadful torment.

  Furthermore, if misanthropists are sometimes unpalatably harsh and serious-minded, they also quite often have not only very amusing but distinctly ironical minds (as in the cases of Smollett and Swift). Grimly, stoically, they face up to their own implication in what they attack. But above all, imagine the tones of a gruff, pragmatic critic of misanthropy, harping on the vanity and egotism of the misanthropist, and then read the following:

  While in the camp almost all my comrades thought, as I did, that if ever God allowed us to leave the camp alive, we would not live in towns, or even in villages, but somewhere in the depth of the forest. We would find work as foresters, rangers, or, failing that, as herdsmen, and stay as far away as we could from people, politics, and all the snares and delusions of the world.1

  This is V. V. Pospelov, survivor of the Gulag Archipelago. He and the common-sense critic do not belong to the same world. The Russian would no doubt have thought the critic quite as remote from reali
ty as armchair misanthropists are for the critic who scorns them. Pospelov speaks with the authority of extreme experience. Of course, there is no immediate reason why we should privilege extreme experience over other kinds – as experience. But the more important question here is what kinds of experience might matter for thought. What can be said in favour of a human world in which it was possible for Pospelov to say what he says? It is not unimportant that Pospelov asserts that his views were those of almost everyone who shared his tribulations. How would it conceivably be possible to show them all that they were wrong?

  The second objection is less commonsensical than humanistic: what about the great human achievements, in the sciences, the arts and humanities, literature, philosophy? What of Wilberforce, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Mandela? We shouldn’t limit the evidence to big names: what of the countless instances of humble, ordinary, unassuming inventiveness and goodness? The trouble with this argument is one whose terms we will come across at intervals, but repeatedly. History furnishes no evidence of any prevalence, let alone triumph of the good, other than very fleetingly. The good, it would seem, is an exception, and, like other exceptions, merely goes to prove the rule. As we have already seen, misanthropy and exceptionalism (to introduce the philosophical term, though it is not only philosophical) are by no means incompatible. Given the fundamental incoherence and incompleteness of the misanthropic case, this is surely logical enough: the misanthropic position will necessarily include a space for the exception. From time to time, some figure or instance lifts him-, her- or itself out of the general ruck. But the very fact that we recognize how very remarkable he, she or it is only reinforces one’s sense of the general quality of the ruck itself.

  The most powerful of the three arguments against misanthropy mentioned above is rooted in something both more subtle and simpler than the other two, but weightier, though even this argument is not wholly immune to question. However compelling the arguments for renouncing humanity might seem on, say, intellectual, moral or political grounds, placed in one particular context, they are merely trifling. They are reasons for misanthropy – but only reasons.2 They do not survive delight, the seductiveness if not the thrill of human beauty: the sparkle in the eye of a beautiful woman, the glow on the flesh of a beautiful man, a child’s tenderness, the pathos of the old that Rembrandt captured. The true misanthropist must surely at the very least have difficulties with organic life, the (sometimes mesmeric) physical charm of people, their vivid appeal to the senses, to the affections, most obviously parental and sexual ones. In other words, the misanthropist has trouble with the body, and in this is likely to seem an aberration or a pathological case. Persius’s and Juvenal’s satire sometimes reeks of physical revulsion. Pascal actually censured his sister Gilberte for caressing her children. Everything ‘which drives us to become attached to creatures is bad’, he states. ‘I have never been able to form such attachments’.3 Note the implication: his alienation from human feeling came first, the bleak edifice of his thought second. Or take Saint-Simon: he seems given over to a disgust-obsession. He returns compulsively to descriptions of Versailles as full of filthy, shitting beasts, devoting great tracts of the Mémoires to commodes, enemas and purgatives and dwelling appalled (for example) on Richelieu’s way of defecating (he would ‘walk around for three hours and then, wherever he happened to be, unburden himself so copiously that the bowl could scarcely hold it all’).4 Piss and shit were much in evidence at Versailles – indeed, on open display. But to extrapolate from such details to a vision of Paris as ‘the sewer which gathered in all the spawn of all Europe’s sensuality’,5 however justified it might be morally, is to take side against the senses from the start, as though the sewer is where they belong. Here as much as anywhere else we encounter the Saint-Simon who was drawn to Jansenist asceticism.

  However, the misanthropic tradition that perhaps most clearly poses the question of misanthropy and the body is English and Anglo-Irish and eighteenth-century, if for reasons beyond my scope here. In Not in Timon’s Manner: Feeling, Misanthropy and Satire in Eighteenth-Century England, Thomas Preston has described this tradition, and I shall take one or two of my bearings from his work. But he does not raise the issue of attitudes to the body, still less how far they might compromise the power of the tradition. I will focus on three key instances in Preston’s book, the order in which they appear being decided not by chronology but by the development of my argument: Johnson, Smollett and Swift.

  *

  Samuel Johnson cast himself as an observer of the world, remarking that whoever surveys it ‘must see many things that give him pain’.6 This could end in a ‘horror at life in general’.7 Preston immediately directs us to The Rambler no. 175, and its initial quotation, from Bias of Priene, makes the reason self-evident: ‘οί πλέονες κακοί, the majority are wicked’.8 Johnson says that it is impossible to ignore this:

  The depravity of mankind is so easily discoverable, that nothing but the desert or the cell can exclude it from notice. The knowledge of crimes intrudes uncalled and undesired. They whom their abstraction from common occurrences hinders from seeing iniquity, will quickly have their attention awakened by feeling it. Even he who ventures not into the world, may learn its corruption in his closet. For what are treatises of morality, but persuasives to the practice of duties, for which no arguments would be necessary, but that we are continually tempted to violate or neglect them? What are all the records of history, but narratives of successive villanies, of treasons and usurpations, massacres and wars? (R 175, vol. v, p. 160)

  Where the truth of original sin is concerned, he declared, ‘the inquiry is not necessary; for whatever is the cause of human corruption, men are evidently and confessedly so corrupt, that all the laws of heaven and earth are insufficient to restrain them from their crimes’ (LJ, p. 1160).

  Johnson’s certainty about this was cast-iron, and it fixed him in some fairly merciless attitudes. His politics were by no means as unvaryingly, stuffily conservative as some take them to be. He was ferociously anti-slavery, for example, appalled by the (discriminatory, anti-Catholic) Penal laws in Ireland, and enraged by British warmongering over the Falkland Islands. But such responses did not stem from a liberal disposition. Johnson had far too dark a mind to tend in the liberal direction. Men are fit to govern neither themselves nor each other, he states, and liberty is a juvenile passion, a ‘love’ appropriate only for ‘boys’ (LJ, p. 1017). He regarded the liberalisms as mere cant, a ‘whining pretension to goodness’,9 an affectation of a virtue unmerited because sentimental and self-deceiving. It is the saints and sufferers who are likely to see things right: thus, for example, with Floretta in The Fountains, finally crushed by human folly. Johnson’s play Irene sacrifices its doughtily independent-minded heroine to a tyrannical social order founded on a universal docility that, in Demetrius’s phrase, ensures a ‘gen’ral fraud from day to day’.10 In The Vision of Theodore: The Hermit of Teneriffe, Theodore himself, though once ‘a groveller on earth’ who ‘purchased the assistance of men by the toleration of their follies’, subsequently chooses solitude, and then has a vision of the true nature of the ‘Mountain of Existence’.11

  Hardly the Johnson, it would seem, who famously declared that ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’ (LJ, p. 859). However, Johnson specifically said only that this would be the case with ‘any man, at all intellectual’ (my italics) – in other words, London was the best place for intellectual life; equally, for intellectuals to observe life – and, at any rate, the remark says nothing about any supposed value to the human life in question. Indeed, Johnson’s (admittedly much earlier) Juvenalian satire ‘London: A Poem’ might make one suspect the seeming enthusiast for London of ironic craft. There Johnson, not a fan of the Scots, nonetheless asks who could conceivably leave ‘unbrib’d, Hibernia’s land/Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?’ In the city that holds and represents all life, where ‘all are slaves to gold,/Where looks a
re merchandise and smiles are sold’ and ‘malice, rapine, accident conspire/And now a rabble rages, now a fire’, you should ‘prepare for death, if here at night you roam,/And sign your will before you sup from hoam’. Even at home, however, you will hardly be safe, since ‘the midnight murd’rer’ may always burst ‘the faithless bar’. At all events, within London’s ‘curst walls, devote to vice and gain’, ‘rebellious virtue’ is ‘quite o’erthrown’.12

  It is possible to make Johnson sound a little like Pascal. (The resemblance in general is greater than one might suspect). According to Mrs Thrale, he ‘never could endure’ his father’s caresses.13 Boswell tells us that not only did he never want a child. He also thought he could not have had ‘much fondness’ for one (LJ, p. 737). However, it would be quite mistaken to develop the parallel very far. Certainly, Johnson conceived of himself as a solitary – life was essentially an affair of solitude. Samuel Beckett later remarked that ‘there can hardly have been many so completely at sea in his solitude as he was or more horrifiedly aware of it’.14 But he was also an immensely gregarious and convivial man, and had a huge acquaintance drawn from all ranks in society, which he clearly genuinely enjoyed – indeed, needed. As the biographies make clear, he not only treated his many friends very warmly, but was seriously generous and charitable. At the very least, then, it would seem that he shared Swift’s recognition that the misanthropic attitude could not be wholehearted. No doubt, in Johnson’s case, this was partly a question of impulse. But Rambler no. 79, for example, also makes a theoretical case for benevolence, and does so with particular clarity: a categorical mistrust of others is itself ‘an enemy of virtue’, since it corrupts, and probably stems in any case from the mistruster’s knowledge of his or her own character. It is therefore ‘happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust’ (R 79, vol. iv, pp. 53, 55). Johnson’s writings make it abundantly clear that he did not stop believing in goodness and its limited efficacy. He can make the limits sound drastic: if our sole hope of achieving ‘the conquest of the world and of ourselves’, he asserts, ‘lies in the cultivation of piety and reason along with virtue as our reigning ideas’ (R 203, vol. v, p. 319), finally, only God can underwrite that hope. But this hardly makes of Johnson a La Rochefoucauld or a Saint-Simon.