Critical Woodcuts/Mandeville on the Seamy Side of Virtue
THE seamy side of virtue is its origin. Bernard Mandeville, author of "The Fable of the Bees," 1714, was interested in origins. He was a great anatomist of society who transferred to the study of human nature the physician's habit of tracing symptoms to the vital organs. He said: "One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves is that most writers are always teaching men what they should be and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they are." By a merciless probing to the source of social phenomena in the self-preservative and reproductive impulses of natural man, and in the cluster of elementary passions which branch immediately from those two impulses, he attempted to disclose the necessary final basis of morals and politics. In the process he deepened the channels of thought and imparted to his intelligent admirers a relish for coming to grips with reality.
But Mandeville was not merely a social anatomist. He was also a born man of letters with an exuberant personality, which he liked to express. He was no sour misanthrope but, as I take it, a rather hearty, burly fellow who enjoyed the excitement of ideas and the collision of minds. Yet with all his truculent aggressiveness he was a crafty, insidious ironist with a most irritating wit and a capacity for interesting in him a multitude of readers who were sure that they were "on the side of the angels" and that he was not—a multitude of readers who were far from clear what he was about, yet were entirely certain that he was very unconventional, very indecorous, very shocking, and very dangerous. And so Mandeville, who had no Boswell, has come down to us on the tongue of rumor, in an odor of unsanctity, and in a dust of controversy which delays recognition of the originality and penetrating vigor of his mind. The flavor of such a man, however, one gets the better if one comes to him through a little of the dust that he stirred up.
After he had offended the clergy and the masters of schools, as he did grievously—by telling more truth than either class thinks expedient or proper, and in sundry other ways—a number of terrible things were circulated about him. It was said, for example, that he had referred to that mirror of Queen Anne virtue, Joseph Addison, a man who had called his stepson to his deathbed "to see a man die like a Christian"—he had referred to Joseph Addison as "a parson in a tye-wig," which was certainly no proper way to speak of Addison. It was said, and it was openly avowed by Mandeville, that his system of ideas was diametrically opposed to that of the late Lord Shaftesbury; and every one knew that Shaftesbury had devoted his life to proving that man is inclined naturally towards the Good and the Beautiful. It was said that Mandeville was a foreigner, and this was true: by birth and education he was Dutch—out of Rotterdam, the Erasmus school and the University of Leyden.
Mandeville himself had offered to burn his book if anything could be found in it contrary to public morals, and it was said—it was published in the papers—that a well-dressed gentleman, presumably the author, had been seen carrying "The Fable of the Bees" to the public bonfire. It was said that he had been hired by the distillers to write in behalf of spirituous liquors, and it was given out as his opinion that children of dram-drinking women were never afflicted with rickets. It was said that he lived in obscure lodgings and had little practise as a physician—both serious tokens of moral turpitude in the eyes of the poor in spirit.
Our young countryman, Ben Franklin, on his Wanderjahr in London in 1724, became intimate with a surgeon by the name of Lyons, who took him around to a pale ale house, The Horns, in Cheapside, and introduced him to Dr. Mandeville, who had a club there. Franklin in his autobiography reported that Mandeville was the "soul" of the club and "a most facetious, entertaining companion." But we know that Franklin himself, in those days, was no better than he should have been.
One sees how the legend of the vulgar tavern wit got afoot.
As a matter of fact, at the outset of his literary career, Mandeville himself was at small pains to be taken seriously. His "Fable," as he first launched it on the town in 1705, under the title of "The Grumbling Hive," was not, as it is now, a magnum opus, a life-work—comparable with Montaigne's "Essays," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Hobbes' "Leviathan," Locke on "Human Understanding" or Shaftesbury's "Charactersticks."
He threw out at first but the germ or nucleus about which his meditations were to agglomerate for the next generation. The germ is but a poem of some four hundred doggerel lines, such as splenetic, misanthropic Swift was writing, such as iconoclastic Samuel Butler in "Hudibras" had written to tickle the anti-Puritan fancy of the last age. The pacifists and preachers and little Englanders and the societies for the reformation of morals were actively engaged in their perennial, millennial business, and Mandeville tossed among them a satirical skit, playing inoffensively with the idea that when ambition and enterprise are replaced by frugality, meekness, temperance, and long-suffering, society will cease to "bloom" and expand as it does when its animating ideals are stirring and aggressive.
For nine years Mandeville studied men and meditated on the contrast between what we might call "Christian idealism" and the actual way of the world. He came to the conclusion that all mankind talks about one objective: the kingdom of heaven, and bends the major part of its efforts toward reaching another objective: the power and the glory of this earth. He inquired why people worked at such cross-purposes, and I don't think he quite adequately solved that problem.
But he inquired thoroughly into the reason why the great majority of mankind actually find their pleasure in the pursuit of power and glory. He traced our civilization as it is back to its roots in the savage animal nature—into lust and fear and pride and vanity. His contemporary, Swift, coming on those same roots, became morbid and nasty over them, and was finally driven mad by the discovery. But Mandeville had the phlegm of a physician, and the special sort of robust clean-mindedness of which physicians are capable. He could cut open a patient and grope among his viscera or converse with his excrements, and yet think none Mandeville on the Seamy Side of Virtue the worse of him when, a month later, he shook hands with him and passed the time of day.
I conceive that Mandeville thought it would be well for the intelligent adult portion of mankind to acquire a less squeamish habit about facing, recognizing and naming facts of human nature and facts of the social organism. Accordingly he brought out a new edition of his poems in 1714, entitled this time "The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits," to which he added, ostensibly as a commentary, a substantial body of prose in the form of moral essays. After the lapse of nine years more, he published, in 1723, a second edition, supplemented by defensive dialogues, containing many new speculations, and an extremely provocative "Essay on Charity and Charity Schools," together with a "Search Into the Nature of Society."
If Mandeville desired to bugle forth all the forces of opposition he managed his "publicity" well. Apparently he was attacking everything in sight—especially everything sacred, such as polite society, the army, and charity schools. He displayed a sub-title—Private Vices, Publick Benefits—which attracted and fascinated the mob like the picture of a naked woman—or an advertisement of the Ten Commandments over a moving-picture palace. When the police ran up to see what was going on, he made disparaging remarks about London aldermen and the Lord Mayor—really stinging and insufferable remarks, coming from a foreigner, to the disadvantage of the Lord Mayor as compared with Dutch burgomasters. He explained that his show was not intended for the yokelry but only for the choice few who could think, or at least read and write, that is, what we should call the Intellectuals. "Apagete vulgus!" he exclaimed. which was an extremely disrespectful and perhaps almost blasphemous way of saying: "Please rope off the crowd." He might well have added: "Este procul feminae," which, being interpreted, means: "Why don't the ladies go into the drawing-room?" For I suppose no one has ever heard of a woman who was acquainted with Mandeville's book.
Mandeville is for men—he does not flatter. There is, to be sure, something of illicit and "unprofessional" sensationalism in that sub-title; and there is much of sensationalism and economic fallacy in the mode of his argument for luxury and extravagance as the pathway to national greatness. But Mandeville's fallacies and his exaggerations have been sufficiently emphasized. Once past his outworks, you find yourself in the hands of a serious and masterly analyst of motive, bent on getting at the savage root of the matter.
Take, for illustration, his treatment of pride. As Christianity speaks of it, pride is to be abased, and as medieval theology regards it, pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Perhaps it is, says Mandeville, in those who are preparing themselves for life in another world, but, as this world goes, pride is one of the indispensable pillars of civilized society. It is, as the ancients regarded it, one of the virtues of the magnanimous man. So far, Mandeville may seem to flatter pride and the pagan at the expense of the Christian virtues, in an effort to bring about, like Nietzsche, a "transvaluation of values." But if you subject yourself to the discipline of Mandeville you will ultimately find yourself left without a rag of pride clinging to you. He cuts beneath all the virtues, Christian and pagan alike, until he has dissected out of civil and polite society that nude, mean, nasty and brutish being in whose passionMandeville on the Seamy Side of Virtue ate selfishness the "cynical" moralists from Hobbes to Samuel Butler and Mr. Veblen have found the effective source of polite and civil society.
The fact of the matter is that Mandeville had by psychological analysis firmly established in his own mind the conception of man and society as products of a complex evolution. He hadn't a doubt that man was an animal of base ancestry and savage relatives. That this conception has haunted mankind from the earliest times is often suggested to us by the poets, who, when they leave off flattering the ladies and depict human nature as it is, show us lions on the throne, foxes at court and wolves, bulls, bears, monkeys and rabbits in the streets. With Mandeville, however, this conception is not poetically but scientifically and philosophically entertained. He works out his corollaries. He applies his ideas to the development of languages. He pries into the physiology of the emotions. He discards all absolute values, and works out a doctrine of pure relativity. Before Malthus and Darwin he meditates on the enormous potential reproductivity of nature, as exemplified in the shad roe; he concludes that the shad, if unchecked, would clog up the seven seas; he perceives that powers which thwart reproduction—pestilence and war—are as necessary to the "balance of nature" as reproduction: he states clearly the necessity of the struggle for existence. Without in the least intending to be a "forward-looking" man he prepares the way for the philosophical radicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose most important distinction is in the part which they assign to conscious purpose in altering the terms of the struggle for existence.
I doubt whether Mandeville suffered much from the attacks which the ministers made upon him, or even from the heavy guns of Bishop Berkeley and William Law. They started from assumptions about human nature and human origins which he had dismissed as completely as most biologists to-day dismiss the assumptions of Mr. Bryan. He was a very modern type of man: philosophical bishops amused him. But Mr. Kaye, in his admirably learned edition of the "Fable."[1] has made a large collection of tributes from later writers, which show the wide and deep furrow that Mandeville drew in the thought of two centuries. Most of them are by solid men.
Samuel Johnson said: "I read Mandeville forty, or, I believe, fifty years ago . . . he opened my views into real life very much." Crabb Robinson called the "Fable" "the wickedest, cleverest book in the English language." Lord Macaulay said: "If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions it is . . . extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on the subject as is to be found in 'The Fable of the Bees.'" William Hazlitt said: "I like Mandeville better [than La Rochefoucauld]. He goes more into his subject." Robert Browning, in "Parleyings" saluted Mandeville as the sage in whom truth triumphs through the harmonious combination of good with evil.
Now, if you look into the ordinary textbook by which English literature is introduced to students in the United States, the probability is that you will not find Bernard Mandeville so much as mentioned, though the author of "Marco Polo's Travels" usually finds a place. In a history of eighteenth century literature, such as that of Edmund Gosse, he is dismissed as a vulgar, if sometimes amusing, fellow, a devil's disciple. Writers like Professor Saintsbury and Dean Inge find him vulgar and foul and unpolished, though Professor Saintsbury, on reconsideration, admits that he is a master of the vernacular. In the great Cambridge History of English Literature he gets a paragraph from Professor Sorley as a reviver of the Hobbesian selfishness theory against the facile optimism of Shaftesbury. The two English writers who have most sought to do him justice are Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr. Leslie Stephen. The latter, as author of the article in the "Dictionary of National Biography," extensive references in his "English Thought in the Eighteenth Century" and extensive treatment in his essays, is perhaps chiefly responsible for his present English reputation. Leslie Stephen saw clearly that Mandeville was a remarkable man with important intellectual connections, but he was irritated by Mandeville's "detestable grin," and he felt bound to apologize for Mandeville's giving up to the coffee-houses "a penetration meant for loftier purposes."
I have gradually been preparing the way for two announcements. The first is: Mandeville is worth knowing—a man to lay siege to and conquer. The second is: If you wish to know Mandeville you may now, without hesitation, be recommended to disregard everything else, and begin with Mr. Kaye's two magnificent volumes. I speak with emphasis and feeling. In twenty years' observation of the products of higher English study in America I have met with no more exhilarating and satisfying work than this, which originated in the Yale school for eighteenth century letters.
Mr. Kaye gives us an admirable scholarly text of the "Fable," preceded by a life of Mandeville, a history of the text, an analysis of Mandeville's thought and studies of his background, and of his influence. The brilliant preliminary discussion is supplemented by extraordinarily rich and illuminating notes and various appendices by the aid of which one sees the naturalistic thought of Europe converging upon Mandeville from the time of the Renaissance, and, from him, coursing on to our own time. The point of view is easily accessible, but the vistas are immense, and Mandeville is steadily at the center of all of them, flooded with light. It is a triumph of technique and of the intelligent, purposeful pursuit of ideas.
- ↑ The Fable of the Bees, New York, 1924, two vols.