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Yahoos
The poet Alexander Pope would later describe the era of George II as a new Augustan age, a time that rivaled classical Greece and Rome in its power and grandeur. “Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires, / Why should not we be wiser than our sires?” Pope wrote. “In every public virtue we excel; / We build, we paint, we sing, we dance as well.” What read like a celebration, however, was in fact a biting faux tribute to a monarch and a society Pope felt were better at trumpeting their achievements than fixing the country’s many problems.
Handel had been part of Pope’s circle in his first years in London, a collective that also included John Gay and John Arbuthnot, Queen Anne’s physician. The writers among them briefly joined together as the Scriblerus Club, a joke of a name for a group of men who, in plays, poems, pamphlets, and satires, would emerge as the most prescient chroniclers of the ache, grime, and broken beauty of their times. Handel’s audiences could not have helped but sense the same concerns playing out onstage. When Handel populated his operas with complicated plots of war, betrayal, loss, and revenge, he was working squarely within the premises and plotlines he had studied in Italy. But his listeners would have seen plenty of parallels closer to home. Their era’s signature trait was not so much confidence about what the Augustan age had built as lingering anxiety about how frequently it all seemed to get knocked down.
“My Mother dear, did bring forth twins at once,” the philosopher Thomas Hobbes had written several decades earlier, in the middle of the seventeenth century, “both me and fear.” Hobbes had seen normal politics and society dissolve in the English Civil War and had escaped to Paris to wait out the chaos. The age of human history before states existed, he believed, must have looked something like the present: angry, war-ridden, and cutthroat, as Hobbes described it in his Leviathan, in 1651, where there was “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
A generation later, John Locke accepted that people seemed shockingly content to suffer inside a “shatterd and giddy nation,” as he once put it in a letter, where “warrs have producd noething but warrs and the sword cut out worke for the sword.” Locke’s father had been a cavalryman in the parliamentary forces during the civil war, and Locke himself had fled to the Netherlands to escape suspicions about his own loyalty to the king. The primitive, stateless, and government-free past that he imagined was more benign than Hobbes’s version, but as he wrote in his Second Treatise of Government, in 1689, there was simply no going back to a time before countries, armies, and taxes, “a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers.” His route out of the troublesome present was to ground government in natural rights and the protection of property.
For many philosophers of the era, the remedy to fear was to start with a sober expectation that bad times weren’t permanent—that is, to cultivate hope: “an Appetite with an opinion of attaining,” as Hobbes had defined it, or “an expectation indulged with pleasure,” as Samuel Johnson would describe it in his dictionary in the 1750s. Thinkers differed on whether hope was a passion, a virtue, or a product of calculating reason. Philosophers such as David Hume wrapped discussions of hope into broader speculation about the nature of motivation, or what made human beings strive for some ends but not for others. Yet the common view was that being hopeful was essential to everything from civilized governance to individual survival. Readers who opened Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary, the century’s most widely consulted guide to words and concepts, published in 1721, found “hope” described as an “affection of the mind that keeps it steadfast, and from being born away or hurried into despair by the violence of present evils, by a well-grounded expectation of being extricated out of them in time.” That was why, Bailey said, hope had long been represented in painting and sculpture as an anchor. It was the thing that secured people and societies against the buffeting winds of fate.
The problem, though, was how to get hope if one didn’t already have it—that is, if the rational reasons for being hopeful in the first place proved thin. Given the everyday experience of tragedy and loss, how exactly were people supposed to confront awfulness without becoming prisoners to despair? Christian theologians had long pointed to the promise offered by revealed religion—divine salvation through Jesus Christ—but that assurance would only come to fruition eventually, in a new life after this one. Human experience offered no shortage of reasons for thinking that the opposite was true, both here and in the hereafter. Suffering and damnation seemed entirely reasonable predictions of what was in store in this life as well as in the next. Belief in the reality of hell and the devil, doubts about one’s own state of rescue or rejection, warnings delivered from pulpits each Sunday about the likelihood of eternal pain—all seemed to mirror current events and confirm a deep reality of brokenness and unpredictability. If hope was at base a desire to attain something that seemed likely but not certain, as Hobbes had it, what was one to do with circumstances where, on rational reflection, the odds of a decent outcome were minuscule?
For most of the eighteenth century, there was no word for the idea that problems necessarily had solutions at all, whether in one’s own life or in society at large. The term “optimism” appeared in English for the first time only in 1759, and it was originally something of an insult. To be optimistic didn’t mean to have a sunny outlook or positive disposition. It referred instead to a specific method for wishing away one’s troubles rather than facing them: by holding fast to the conviction that this universe, despite the trials and tears, is the optimal one, the best that can be imagined.
Optimism of this sort came from the work of one of the era’s most capacious and daring thinkers, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. A native of Saxony like Handel, Leibniz had developed new techniques for understanding systems in continuous change, the essence of calculus. He anticipated a machine whose function was not to make things but rather to process information, the basis for later computer science. Just as Handel was arriving in London, Leibniz joined the debate on how to reconcile “the goodness of God, the liberty of man, and the origin of evil,” as he put it in the subtitle of his Essays of Theodicy, published in 1710.
Even sympathetic readers had to admit that Leibniz’s train of thought required some heroic switchbacks. God was all knowing, a fact that any Christian like himself would accept, and thus had the capacity to imagine an infinite number of worlds. God was also all loving, however, and wished only the best for his creation. Therefore, the world that God actually did call into being—the one we experience—must be the one most suited to our happiness, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary.
Had circumstances worked out differently, Leibniz might have ended up as Britain’s court philosopher, much in the way that Handel became its court composer. He, too, had been attached to the house of Hanover, as a friend and confidant of the dowager electress Sophia’s. But Sophia’s death robbed him of a key patron, even as it elevated Handel. Long-running disputes with English scholars—not least with Isaac Newton, over credit for inventing calculus—put Leibniz at odds with Georg Ludwig’s newly acquired kingdom. When the family departed for London, they left Leibniz behind. He died in Hanover not long afterward. Later in the century, his ideas would form the target of the greatest satire of the age, Voltaire’s Candide; or, Optimism, whose Dr. Pangloss deals with tragedy after tragedy—syphilis, an earthquake, the Inquisition—by reminding himself that in the end everything is for the best.
For all the ridicule it elicited, however, Leibniz’s unsatisfying answer did help clarify the issues at stake. A contemporary of Leibniz’s, Pierre Bayle, spent nearly fifty years coming at the problems of fear and hope through a microscopic examination of history and human folly. His influential Historical and Critical Dictionary, translated into English in 1709, was the first major attempt at what would later be called an encyclopedia, and in it Bayle set out to answer the big questions plainly. “Man is wicked and unhappy,” he wrote in one of his opinionated footnotes. “Every one knows it by what he feels in himself, and by the intercourse he is obliged to have with his neighbours…. History, properly speaking, is nothing but a collection of the crimes and misfortunes of mankind.”
Bayle was a Huguenot, or French Protestant, and had immigrated to the Netherlands when it became impossible to live in Catholic France. Surviving the trials of life, Bayle suggested, required placing one’s thought in boxes. Ultimate things—God, morality, truth—had their own logic, which one could piece together by studying the Christian scriptures. By contrast everyday physical processes—the things amenable to observable cause and effect—could be accounted for without regard to grand theories of divinity or justice. The formula for happiness was to train one’s brain to recognize the difference between the former and the latter, between the vastness of the created universe and the here-and-now tribulations of simply being alive.
A few decades later, Alexander Pope took a similar line. His philosophical discourse in verse, An Essay on Man, from the early 1730s, would be memorized by generations of schoolchildren and adults for its insistence on the underlying harmony in what could seem like mayhem. Even the most terrible occurrences looked different when placed in their proper pigeonholes, he claimed. Some later readers interpreted Pope as a fatalist—“Whatever is, is right,” went one line of the poem—but what he was really after was a pared-down theory of hopefulness:
Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore!
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Pope had particular experience with seeking consolation where he could find it. A childhood tubercular infection had left him with a severely curved spine that would eventually collapse his rib cage and choke off his lungs. He remained under five feet tall and in near-constant pain throughout what he once called “this long disease, my life.”
Other thinkers expanded on Pope’s idea of hoping humbly—that is, getting through life by constraining one’s line of vision. Since true happiness would forever be unattainable, David Hume advised, the best course was to maintain a temperate, moderate attitude, aiming at “a mediocrity, a kind of insensibility, in every thing.” Still other writers speculated that there might even be something appealing in awfulness, if properly understood. A distinct concept, the sublime, came into fashion to describe experiences that were at once elevating and laced with fear. A sublime moment was one that was neither beautiful nor truly dangerous but endowed with elements of both. Peering over a cliff face, for example, might inspire dreadful awe, just as one of Handel’s arias, sung by a castrato, could feel heartrending as well as uplifting. You could recognize the sublime, Edmund Burke wrote, when you confronted nature, art, or music that was “in any sort terrible, or is conversant with terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.” There was something profound at work, his argument went, in the way humans actually experienced something they would otherwise regard as painful.
Some of the core political philosophers of the era—Hobbes, Locke, Bayle—wrote from a position of displacement as refugiés, a term newly invented for religious and political minorities who had fled home in order to survive. Already by the 1690s, the word had been anglicized as “refugees.” The hidden truth of what would later count as foundational Western philosophy is that much of it was the work of people who, in another era, would have been relegated to an immigrant detention facility. One of the effects of their theorizing about the state of nature was to emphasize how very unnatural the present condition felt. The world was in evident decline. Countries rose and fell, a fact that Edward Gibbon would later confirm in monumental detail in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which appeared in 1776. With the painful present always disappearing into history, finding solutions required the creativity and courage of patching a ship already at sea.
In a time of war, political division, and conspiracy, along with everyday cares such as disease and natural disasters, the whole point of studying the inner workings of law, politics, and morality, even the effects of art and music, was remedial—a way of fixing a world out of joint. Thinking systematically was a technique not just for representing reality but for repairing it, an activity not so different from painting an idyllic landscape or making ordered sounds out of cacophony. No one put that technique to greater purpose than someone in Handel’s circle whose personal litany of suffering—vertigo, depression, debilitating tinnitus—seemed built for a worried age.
People who knew Jonathan Swift also tended to know Handel, and the two men were sometimes described as versions of the same personality: witty to excess, sarcastic, talented at making ordinary things seem strange and new, and able “to throw persons and things into very ridiculous attitudes.” Swift had been born into a comfortable family in Dublin around 1667 (the precise date, as for many people at the time, was uncertain) but fled to England after the Glorious Revolution to escape James II’s violent crusade to regain the throne. He was eventually ordained in the Church of Ireland, the established Protestant church in his old homeland, and his hope was to secure a comfortable living as a well-placed cleric. But his satirical writings, which were already gaining a public readership, proved to be an obstacle.
A Tale of a Tub, published anonymously in 1704, was a complicated parable about politics and religion, with Catholics, Anglicans, and Dissenters (Protestants such as Puritans and Quakers who had broken with the Church of England) rendered as nitpicking exegetes. More people read the book than understood it, but anyone had only to turn over the flyleaf to see that Swift was taking on large, even dangerous, themes. The frontispiece engraving was a send-up of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the opening paragraph started with a denunciation of all self-important projects for reforming politics and the church. Bookshops were so full of new “schemes of religion and government,” Swift wrote, taking aim at just about every Grub Street pamphleteer who had come before him, that most could not help but be like a barrel tossed into the ocean, “hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to rotation.”
Swift’s supporters finally persuaded Anne, not long before her death, to appoint him to a deanship, a senior religious position in charge of a cathedral. The one the queen chose, however, was not in England but back in Dublin. From this new position, Swift settled into the tasks of managing a gray pile of a building, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, sited on the remains of a swampy meadow. As dean he oversaw a good choir and a devoted set of parishioners in the Liberties, a neighborhood of weavers and market traders. He was joined by a longtime companion, Hester Johnson, whom he called Stella, one of the few people who could match him for wit and wordplay. As he once told a friend, he expected to “die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”
In fact, Swift was already on his way to becoming the most incisive social critic of his time. People attended church services just to hear what outrages he might deliver from the pulpit in his high, nasally voice. There were few subjects he failed to cover in published essays, polemics, and sermons, the first collected edition of which, in 1735, already filled four volumes, with much left out. On subjects ranging from the travails of Ireland to the policies of the Whig government, he perfected the deadpan exaggeration and the trolling takedown, parroting the style and argumentation of political speeches and religious commentary. When he had exhausted his store of subtlety and wit, he was not beyond resorting to passages about defecation and other bodily functions as never-fail tools of derision.
Swift’s views earned him broad popularity along with the “fierce Indignation” of those he targeted, a phrase that he wrote into an epitaph for his own future memorial in St. Patrick’s. Like many writers of the time, he published either anonymously or under one of several pseudonyms, even when the authorship was readily known. He was nearly sixty years old when he invented a pen name that would forever be associated with high parody and, mistakenly, literature for children. What he really offered was the very thing contemporary philosophers had been getting at all along: a method for staring full on at the anxiety of living.
Lemuel Gulliver was the author of a work superior to “the common Scribbles of Politics and Party,” claimed the publisher Richard Sympson in the preface to Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, which appeared just as Handel’s Royal Academy of Music was enjoying continued success at the King’s Theatre, in 1726. Both names—Gulliver and Sympson—were inventions, a double mask for Swift himself. His conceit was that a Grub Street printing house had issued the text that now lay before the reader: a true recounting of several voyages to unknown lands by Gulliver, an obscure ship’s surgeon.
After a devastating storm and shipwreck, Gulliver first washes ashore in Lilliput, where he finds himself a prisoner of tiny beings who bind him with stakes and pelt him with arrows. On his next journey, to Brobdingnag, he encounters natives as tall as church steeples, with a language that is as loud as a tumbling watermill. On his third voyage, to Laputa, Glubbdubdrib, and other faraway lands, Gulliver encounters the great Academy of Lagado, where sages have devised a machine for sorting all the words in their language into intelligible sentences, thereby economizing on the composition of philosophical tracts.
Swift’s only experience with travel had been on the packet boat, or short-run sailing ship, across the Irish Sea. His approach to travel writing, though, was simply to open the volumes in his own library. Interspersed with ethnographic asides about the outlandish customs of the people he supposedly met, Gulliver’s tales mimicked the travelers’ tales that had remained a consistent moneymaker for booksellers, fueled by more than two centuries of European exploration and overseas conquest. His breathless sea voyages and overland adventures also contained a fair amount of detail of particular interest to Swift himself, a non-traveler contemplating the vast abroad: how to find a toilet.
Yet that, in a way, was the point. The Travels was not so much about the lure of leaving as the tenacity of home. It was an inventory of the mental baggage that Europeans carried with them, however far they happened to roam, as well as a cutting critique of their own sense of the normal, placed in the mouths of outlandish foreigners. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver is asked to give a description of his homeland to the Brobdingnagian king, which he proudly provides. But to his disappointment, the king’s reaction is to pronounce it all “only a heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce”—exactly the judgment that writers such as Hobbes and Bayle had made about their own societies.
By the time Swift got to Gulliver’s fourth and final voyage, however, he had come around to something slightly different. This last adventure was a sober culmination of the ideas that Swift had been working toward via the nonsensical hijinks of Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. The new trip “opened my Eyes and enlarged my Understanding,” Gulliver says, and placed “the Actions and Passions of Man in a very different Light.” After again taking to sea and then being off-loaded by a mutinous crew, Gulliver washes up in a land of oat fields and grassy meadows. The country is controlled by the Houyhnhnms, a community of beautiful beings who happen to look like the horses of Gulliver’s own world (the name was probably Swift’s play on “whinny”) but with a capacity for reason and virtue that leaves him in awe.
Gulliver is enchanted by nearly everything in Houyhnhnm society. He changes his gait to approximate the noble, confident stride of creatures that have four legs at their disposal. He learns the language under the tutelage of a gentle equine master. He tries his best to explain Britain to his Houyhnhnm listeners but quickly realizes that, to them, he is speaking drivel. It is hard for them to believe a place really exists where people take up arms over “whether Flesh be Bread” or “the Juice of a certain Berry be Blood or Wine,” and where one of the most honorable professions, soldiering, means being “hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.”
Before long, Gulliver realizes that Houyhnhnm society, too, has its flaws. The Houyhnhnms share their homeland with hairy, unclean creatures called Yahoos, who vaguely resemble humans. The Houyhnhnms employ Yahoos for menial tasks, but as Gulliver comes to understand, they also secretly fear them. Certain Houyhnhnm leaders worry that Gulliver’s middling position—the fact that he resembles Yahoos but has some degree of intelligence—might lead him to organize a revolt by the brutish underclass. Pressed by his mentor to flee for his own safety, Gulliver reluctantly consents to find a way of returning to England, banished from a place he admires and alienated from beings he has come to love.
In his previous voyages, Gulliver had given thanks to God for delivering him from his bizarre trials. But now he comes home chastened and wistful. His entire understanding of himself and his world has been turned upside down. When finally he is reunited with his family, he can barely stand them. Their smell reminds him of the stench of Yahoos. He has difficulty shaking the habit of walking like a Houyhnhnm, which elicits laughs from friends and neighbors. Gulliver’s whole change of heart came about, Swift suggested, not through religious faith or philosophical speculation. The route was both more straightforward and more painful: the simple experience of living through misfortune and coming to view oneself differently as a result.
Having a sense of falling short was not the way Gulliver expected to return to England. His first encounter with foreigners, after all, had been with tiny creatures speaking gibberish and launching harmless arrows against him. Where he ended up was as a hairless Yahoo, ill at ease in his surroundings, disgusted by his wife and children, a stranger to everything he once held dear. “When I thought of my Family, my Friends, my Countrymen, or Human Race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in Shape and Disposition,” whose modicum of reason was mainly used to magnify their vices. In this predicament, the worst sin of all, Swift said through Gulliver, was not run-of-the-mill faults like blasphemy, avarice, or dishonesty; pickpockets, fools, and lawyers all had their backstories and maybe even their uses. The only truly shameful thing was to take pride in one’s worst qualities. And that was something only Yahoos and humans seemed to manage.
The Travels, read and reread for centuries, would make Swift immortal, but much of its core message would, in time, be lost. Victorian publishers tamed the text, scrubbing out the filthier bits—Lilliputians carting away Gulliver’s feces in wheelbarrows, for example, or Brobdingnagian maidens using him for their sexual pleasure—while also weakening its central thesis. Generations of readers would encounter what came to be called Gulliver’s Travels not as a response to its own troubled times but as a benign fantasy and an entertainment for children at bedtime—and, of course, the original source of the word “yahoo.”
Yet at its heart was a very adult bit of advice. Knowing your own dark habits was practice for navigating the calamities likely to come your way. Real enlightenment, Swift suggested, came through acknowledging the brokenness of oneself and one’s world—not as a route to despair, but as a first step toward correcting the things you had just identified as lacking. Gulliver had even devised a method for making that happen. Toward the end of his narrative, once safely back home, he reported that he had come upon a way of handling the demoralizing fact that he embodied everything he saw as most repulsive in the Yahoos. It was “to behold my Figure often in a glass.”
Swift had plenty of quiet moments to do the same. With slim chances of ever being called back to England, he settled into his role as administrator of St. Patrick’s in Dublin. His duties included the important job of managing the choristers, which he seems to have detested. Swift could tolerate ballads and popular song—he was an exact contemporary of the blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan, the last of the great Irish bards—but when it came to choirs, organs, and orchestras, his patience quickly wore thin. “Grave D[ean] of St. P.—how comes it to pass,” he wrote to himself in a ditty, “That you who know music no more than an ass…/ With trumpets and fiddles and organs singing / Will sure the Pretender and popery bring in.”
“I would not give a farthing for all the music in the universe,” he once told a parishioner. It was an art form that he found frequently cheap, overwrought, and boring. If you wanted to write an original birthday song, for example, gather up your inanities and make your way to “Mynheer,” or Mein Herr, as Swift called him in a satirical poem in 1729.
Supposing now your song is done,
To Mynheer Handel next you run,
Who artfully will pare and prune
Your words to some Italian tune.
What neither man could have known at the time, however, was that their lives would eventually come together in a wholly unexpected way—Swift at the end of his life, and Handel at what would turn out to be a second beginning.