Английская литература (представители) — страница 2

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Peter (St.)-and what they do with their inheritance (the Christian religion). The story is farcical and at times wildly funny, but people of his day could perhaps be forgiven if they found blasphemy in it. It certainly shocked Queen Anne so much that she would not allow Swift to be made a bishop, and this contributed to Swift's inner frustration and bitterness. Gulliver's Travels hides much of its satire so cleverly that children still read it as a fairy story. It starts off by making fun of mankind (and especially England and English politics) in a quite gentle way: Gulliver sees in Lilliput a shrunken human race, and its concerns-so important to Lilliput-become shrunken accord­ingly. But in the second part, in the land of the giants, where tiny Gulliver sees human deformities

magnified to a feverous pitch, we have some­thing of this mad horror of the human body which obsesses Swift. (According to Dr. Johnson, Swift washed himself excessively-'with Oriental scrupulosity'-but his terror of dirt and shame at the body's functions never disappeared.) In the fourth part of the book, where the Houyhnhnms-horses with rational souls and the highest moral instincts-are contrasted with the filthy, depraved Yahoos, who are really human beings, Swift's hatred of man reaches its climax. Nothing is more power­ful or horrible than the moment when Gulliver reaches home and cannot bear the touch of his wife-her smell is the smell of a Yahoo and makes him want to vomit. Swift is a very great literary artist, and perhaps only in the present cen­tury is his full

stature being revealed. He is skilful in verse, as well as in prose, and his influence continues: James Joyce-in his The Holy Office-has written Swiftian verse; Aldous Huxley (in Ape and Essence} and George Orwell (in Animal Farm) have produced satires which are really an act of homage to Swift's genius. Yet Gulliver's Travels stands supreme: a fairy story for children, a serious work for men, it has never lost either its allure or its topicality. The first part of the century is also notable for a number of philoso­phical and religious works which reflect the new 'rational' spirit. The Deists (powerful in France as well as in England) try to strip Christianity of its mysteries and to establish an almost Islamic conception of God- a God in whom the Persons of the Christian

Trinity shall have no part -and to maintain that this conception is the product of reason, not of faith. On the other hand, there were Christian writers like William Law (1686-1761) and Isaac Watts (1674-1748) who, the first in prose, the second in simple pious verse, tried successfully to stress the importance of pure faith, even of mysticism, in religion. The religious revival which was to be initiated by John Wesley (1703-91) owes a good deal to this spirit, which kept itself alive despite the temptations of 'rationalism'. Joseph Butler (1692-1752) used reason, not to advance the doctrine of Deism, but to affirm the truths of established Christianity. His Analogy of Religion is a powerfully argued book. The most important philosopher of the early part of the century is Bishop

Berkeley (1685-175 3), whose con­clusions may be stated briefly: he did not believe that matter had any real existence apart from mind. A tree exists because we see it, and if we are not there to see it, God is always there. Things ultimately exist in the mind of God, not of themselves. He was answered later by David Hume (1711-76), the Scots philosopher, who could not accept the notion of a divine system enclosing everything. He could see little system in the uni­verse: he begins and ends with human nature, which links together a series of impressions, gained by the senses, by means of 'association'. We make systems according to our needs, but there is no system which really exists in an absolute sense. There is no ultimate truth, and even God is an idea that man has developed

for his own needs. This is a closely argued kind of sceptical philosophy, very different from Berkeley's some­what mystical acceptance of reality's being the content of the ' Mind of God'. The novel develops, after the death of Defoe, with Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), a professional printer who took to novel-writing when he was fifty. Richardson liked to help young women with the composition of their love-letters, and was asked by a publisher to •write a volume of model letters for use on various occasions. He was inspired to write a novel in the form of a series of letters, a novel which should implant a moral lesson in the minds of its readers (he thought of these readers primarily as women). This novel was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which describes the assaults made on