A Purge for Self-Conceit *
By BONAMY DOBREE
MANDEVILLE belongs to the honourable and glorious race of sceptics, of cynics if you prefer the word, a useful race but unpopular, as all must be who administer nasty, even if salutary, doses. Man, in his noble attempt to make himself as different as possible from the beast, too easily endows himself with divine attributes, and this is not at all good for him. But he is not always conscious of his illness, and when the doctor comes with his disagreeable physic, he regards the worthy gentleman as a poisoner, which explains why the word " cynic " is a term of abuse. Men do not like to be told, as they were by La Rochefoucauld, Ce qu'on nomme liberalite n'est is plus souvent que la vanite de donner: they did not love Mandeville the better for pointing out, " Thus thousands give money to beggars from the same motive as they pay their corncutters, to walk easy."
The Hudibrastie squib which Mandeville produced in 1705, under the title of The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest, by 1729 swelled into a bulky treatise, occupying, in F. B. Kaye's recent edition, two very fat volumes ; and in addition to this there were various publica- tions expressing or developing his thought, the last of which was the " Letter to Dion," of 1732, answering the rather shallow attack on him made by Berkeley in his " Alciphron " dialogues. In answer to Mandeville's bees, society had let loose a swarm of hornets, not only such giants as Shaftesbury and Berkeley, but smaller ones as well. The Grand Jury of Middlesex presented the " Fable " as a public nuisance : it was " a diabolical attempt against religion," intended to " debauch the nation " : another writer looked upon the work as " so shocking, so frightful, so flagrant an enormity " that he feared the Divine Vengeance would be invoked upon the whole nation. Yet this, " the cleverest, wickedest book in the language," as Crabb Robinson called it, was described by Dr. Johnson as the work of a thinking man ; while Jowett, who hated it, thought it was not " a bad thing to read the book with patience and ask how much it is true of ourselves."
Mandeville's position is that of a man intensely interested in human motives, and who did not shrink to look into his own : " he never ceased from examining into himself." Though he called himself a Christian, people could not believe that he was one, on account of the obvious glee he took in parson-baiting. His butt was the pretension to virtue of all men in nature, and he explains, " I say all men in Nature, because devout Christians, who alone are to be excepted here, being regenerated, and preternaturally assisted by the Divine Grace, cannot be said to be in Nature." That is not an attack on Christianity : what Mandeville meant was that the ideals of Christianity are so impossibly high, that no man can be said to follow them. Men did, indeed, exhibit moral virtues, but they were mistaken as to their motives. " The more we search into human nature, the more we shall be convinced that the moral virtues are the Political offspring which flattery begot upon pride." But then Mandeville's definition of virtue was the " rigoristic " one : only the acts we derive no sort of pleasure from are virtuous : all others have in them an alloy of " passion " through which we gratify some desire in ourselves. Thus Pity is a vice, though one which Mandeville indulged in himself, as his moving picture of the slaughter of an ox reveals. His work, really, is an ironic assumption of the rigoristie position, from which it was not too difficult to show that though some actions might be for the good of all, they were nevertheless vicious actions : " Private vices,
The Fable of the Bees. By Bernard Mandeville. Edited by Douglas Garman. (Wishart. 6s.) Publick Benefits."
Ile obviously enjoyed developing his
paradox.
Mr. Garman ranks him among the Deists, but a system - of any kind was repugnant to Mandeville : you could not arrive at any explanation of human beings by a high-flown metaphysic, all you could do was to study human beings. This accounts for his antagonism to Shaftesbury, whom once at least he amusingly parodies. The quarrel itself was as paradoxical as anything Mandeville hit on, since, to quote Mr. Kaye, " Mandeville is on the surface a rationalist, and an ascetic, but is basally as relativist, an anti-rationalist, and a utilitarian ; whereas Shaftesbury is superficially a relativist and spokesman for impulse, but is really an abso- lutist and a rationalist." Not that Mandeville denied impulse, but what he did emphatically state was that Shaftesbury mistook the nature of the impulse ; all man's desires were selfish, even if they might appear self-sacrificing.
It was, of course, and no doubt still is, easy to misunder- stand Mandeville : be too much employed that dangerous figure irony. Mandeville did not believe that virtue was a mere figment, or that you could not tell bad from evil, nor that vice is uniformly a benefit to the State :
"So Vice is beneficial found [Only] When it's by Justico lopt and bound : " and, being a man of common sense, he showed quite clearly where the line was to be drawn. Himself a sober decent man, a crony of Lord Macclesfield's, a companion whom Benjamin Franklin found full of genial high spirits, he can trace a long and honourable descent through several philo- sophers, and is really the precursor of Benthamite utilitarian- ism. More astonishingly, Rousseau owes something to him, and in the sphere of economics he is the father of Adam Smith and the progenitor of the laissez-faire theory. As a forerunner he is perhaps most unexpected in the realm of psychology, though this befits a man fond of looking into himself, who was moreover a specialist in nervous diseases. In many ways he anticipates Freud, in the " compensation " theory, in the notion that the more universal the prohibition of an act, the stronger is the desire to perform it, and it can be said that he sketched out the idea of the ambivalence of the emotions. Yes, there is no doubt that, whatever this amusing, shocking, stimulating book may be, it is the work of a thinking man.
Mr. Garman, in spiritedly wishing to popularize Mandeville, has produced the bulk of the fable in one cheap volume. He only prints one of the six dialogues, but that may be enough to tempt his readers to extract Mr. Kaye's Clarendon Press edition from the libraries, by doing which they will also have the benefit of Mr. Kaye's brilliant Introduction and learned notes. Mr. Garman's Introduction is the more suitable for a popular edition, though it is difficult to follow him when he insists upon the revolutionary nature of Mande- ville's political views. The " Essay of Charity and Charity Schools," which he does not reproduce, would hardly bear out his contention. Making every allowance for irony, it would seem that the good doctor accepted the form of society : and if society was irritated with him, it was not because he wished to upset it, but because he revealed too clearly the basis upon which it stood. Mandeville, not being a reformer, did not mind that. But, at bottom, society's fury against the fabulist was not on any rational ground it was quite simply that he bruised their self-esteem. It is for that reason that we ought to read bim now, especially in these days when so much literature is devoted to what Mr. Wyndham Lewis calls " beauty-doctoring." It is quite possible that we may find reading it to be a moral discipline.
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