Bertrand Russell : Disgust and Its Antidote

Bertrand Russell

Fact and Fiction

DISGUST AND ITS ANTIDOTE

It is, I imagine, common in youth to feel in quick succession a number of different attitudes towards life and the world, and to feel each in turn as strongly as if it had no competitors. I loved the imagined beauty that I found in Shelley; I rejoiced in the ardent revolutionaries portrayed by Turgenev; and I was excited by the bold voyages of adventure that made the subject-matter of Ibsen’s plays. All these in their various ways satisfied optimistic moods; but I had other moods for which quite different literature found expression, moods of despair, disgust, hatred, and contempt. I never gave wholehearted assent to these moods, but I was glad when I found in literature anything that seemed to sanction them.

I read in adolescence a great deal of Carlyle. I thought his positive doctrines foolish, but his virulent denunciations delighted me. I enjoyed it when he described the population of England as ‘twenty-seven millions, mostly fools’. I was delighted by his remark: ‘Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot!’ But I came to feel that his attitude to life and mankind was peevish rather than tragic. It was not in his writings but in King Lear that I found the fullest satisfaction for black moods.

EARLY PREFERENCE FOR ‘KING LEAR’

At that time I preferred King Lear to all the rest of Shakespeare, even to Hamlet, and it was because of its vast cosmic despair that I liked it. ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools.’ This seemed to me at moments to express ultimate wisdom. I liked, also: ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.’ There was a kind of bitter satisfaction in imagining that the tortures human beings endure give pleasure to the gods and are therefore not wholly purposeless. I revelled in Lear’s comment when he and Kent and the Fool meet Edgar, naked, in the storm: ‘Ha! here’s three on’s are sophisticated; thou are the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come; unbutton here.’

I exulted in the heroic magnificence of Lear’s defiance of the storm:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once

That make ingrateful man!

Lear’s speeches in the scenes on the heath make the romanticism of the romantics seem thin and paltry by comparison. There is, however, a more fundamental difference: the romantics believed it all, whereas Shakespeare put it in the mouth of a man going mad.

THEN FOR ‘GULLIVER’S TRAVELS’

On a lower plane of tragedy I enjoyed King Lear’s subversive sentiments, such as ‘Through tattered clothes small vices do appear, Robes and furred gowns hide all’. I liked, too, his comment on bureaucracy: ‘Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?’ ‘Ay, Sir.’ ‘And the creature run from the cur? There thou might’st behold the great image of authority; a dog’s obey’d in office.’ In the same scene King Lear makes a pleasant remark about the perspicacity of statesmen: ‘Get thee glass eyes; And, like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.’

But in King Lear, even in the blackest and most despairing passages, there is a redeeming sublimity. One feels in reading that, though life may be bad and the world full of unmerited suffering, yet there is in man a capacity of greatness and occasional splendour which makes ultimate and complete despair impossible. It was not in Shakespeare but in Swift that I found the expression of the ultimate and complete despair.

It was largely by accident that I came to read Swift. The room that was my schoolroom had been my grandfather’s library. The shelves were filled with great tomes, but I was solemnly warned not to read them. This had the effect which ought to have been anticipated but was not. Among the tomes that I took down from the shelves was an unexpurgated Swift. I read first The Tale of a Tub, which delighted me because it treated theological controversies with a flippancy of which nowadays not even the most arrant free-thinker would dare to be guilty. I then went on to Gulliver’s Travels, a book which has had the curious fate of being regarded as one for the amusement of children, although it is the most biting and devastating and completely black of all the satires ever penned by embittered men.

The account of Laputa is an early example of science fiction; not, by any means, the first, since it had been anticipated, for example, by Francis Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac. But it is, I think, the first to represent a scientific community in the manner familiarized for our generation by Huxley’s Brave New World. Other writers, until nearly our own day, had thought of science optimistically as a liberator. Swift was, I believe, the first to think of it as affording a means of ruthless tyranny. I imbibed this point of view at the age of fifteen, and it left my imagination well prepared for the shock of nuclear bombs. I realized then, and have remembered ever since, that science in itself is ethically neutral. It confers power, but for evil just as much as for good. It is to feeling not to knowledge that we must appeal if science is to be beneficent. Laputa showed me the possibility of scientific horrors and made me realize that, however scientific, they remain horrors. Abominations are abominations even if the utmost skill is required to contrive them.

But it was, above all, the Yahoos that impressed me. I read with growing horror the skilful pages in which the reader is gradually enticed into the belief that the Yahoos are just ordinary human beings, ending with the appalling climax in which on Gulliver’s return home he shrinks from his wife in horror because he sees her as a Yahoo. In the land of the Houyhnhnms, where horses are rational and lord it over the rest of the animal kingdom as men do with us, there are hordes of wild and horrid creatures, human in form and called Yahoos, who are regarded by the Houyhnhnms much as we regard hyenas. Gulliver at first is viewed with suspicion by the wise horses, but in the end they admit that he has some glimmerings of reason and virtue, and they consent to listen to his account of the world from which he has come.

The Houyhnhnms have, of course, all those merits which Swift believes that he would like men to possess, while the Yahoos have in a supreme degree all the demerits which his spleen inclines him to find among human beings. It does not occur to the reader at first to think of the Yahoos, in spite of their human shape, as like the people that he knows. It is only Swift’s diabolical skill that insinuates this horrid idea into his disgusted mind. This terrible indictment had a profound effect upon me, and it was only with an effort that I shook off its paralysing influence.

AND SO TO THE ANTIDOTE

I found the antidote to Swift in a place which may, perhaps, seem surprising: I found it in Milton’s prose. I did not fail to appreciate his verse—indeed, at that time I learnt a great deal of it by heart — but in his verse it was not the philosophy that pleased me: it was more purely poetic merits such as those of diction and metre. The philosophy left me unmoved: Paradise Lost did not diminish my taste for eating apples. But in his prose at its best I found not only splendid writing from the purely literary point of view but also doctrines that were wide and free and ennobling. I had known the sonnet beginning, ‘Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold’. But I had not known until I read his prose works that in his capacity of Foreign Secretary he sent paraphrases of this sonnet to many of the governments of Europe. Never since that time has the Foreign Office spoken in such accents.

But, above all, I admired the Areopagitica. I treasured such sentences as: ‘As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.’ This was an inspiring sentiment for an intending writer who devoutly hoped that his books would be ‘good books’. And more especially encouraging to a budding philosopher was the statement: ‘Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.’ This might almost be taken as the sacred text for free speech and free discussion. ‘Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making’, says in few words what is essential for the condemnation of censorship. Alas, I did not know in those days that to cure Milton of opposing censorship they made him a censor. This is the almost invariable logic of revolutions: while in the making they praise liberty; but when successful they establish tyranny.

But it was not only the justice of Milton’s opinions that I valued: it was also, and more especially, the pomp and majesty of his finest passages. Though they are very well known I cannot refrain from quoting two sentences which inspired me then and which I still cannot read without intense emotion: ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beams.’ In spite of growing blindness Milton was happy while he could so feel about England. For the time his hopes ended in disappointment, but something shining and noble descended from them to later generations.

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