SOURCE: Monro, Hector. “The Two Mandevilles” and “The Real Mandeville?” In The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville, pp. 1-24; 249-67. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

[In the following essays, Monro discusses two very contradictory but equally plausible interpretations of Mandeville and finds such ambiguity consistent with the philosophical view evident throughout his work that the world is ultimately indefinable and unknowable.]

THE TWO MANDEVILLES

Mandeville is not an obscure writer, but it has nevertheless been found possible to interpret him in two diametrically opposed ways. On one view, he is a pious Christian, an ascetic, and an unusually austere moralist, who finds corruption even in apparently laudable or at least innocent activities. On the other, he is at best an easy-going man of the world, at worst a profligate, a cynic, a scoffer at all virtue and religion, and even (in the words of William Law, the author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life) a man who ‘comes a missioner from the kingdom of darkness to do us harm’.¹

In Mandeville's day, and even perhaps in ours, the second view is the commoner. The Grand Jury of the County of Middlesex, noting that the Almighty had, understandably, visited France with the plague but spared England, was afraid that the circulation of The Fable of the Bees might cause a change in the divine policy.²

John Wesley thought Mandeville even wickeder, at least in his writings, than Machiavelli or Voltaire, and as wicked as Mr. Sandeman.³ Mandeville would have found it easy to explain why Wesley thought the opinions of a rival preacher more wicked than those of an unbeliever. In fairness, however, it should be said that the Sandemanians were commonly believed to be anti-nominas. But the coupling of Mandeville with Sandeman as well as Voltaire does leave some slight doubt as to which of the two Mandevilles roused Wesley's horror.

There is no such doubt about Fielding. Miss Matthews, in Amelia, says that Mandeville had taught her to regard the words ‘virtue’ and ‘religion’ as ‘only cloaks under which hypocrisy may be the better enabled to cheat the world’. She is shaken a little when told that Mandeville also denied the existence of ‘the best passion which the mind can possess’, love: a charge also made against Mandeville by Fielding, speaking in his own person, in one of the introductory chapters in Tom Jones.⁴

Adam Smith has a chapter in the Theory of Moral Sentiments called ‘Of Licentious Systems’ [of Moral Philosophy]. The entire chapter is devoted to Mandeville. In the first edition, it is true, La Rochefoucauld is included as well, but Smith deleted this passage in the later editions at the request of the Duke's grandson. Only the plural remains in the chapter heading as a vestigial reminder, a kind of literary coccyx.⁵

With no titled descendants to intercede for him, Mandeville continued to be abused. Gibbon said that ‘Morality as well as Religion must joyn’ in applauding William Law for ‘drawing his pen against the licentious doctrine’ of The Fable of the Bees.⁶ An anonymous writer in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1846 remarked that ‘nobody would be the better for reading Mandeville’ and that he tended ‘to lower the standard of virtue, and to set life on a narrow expediency footing’.⁷ Sir James Mackintosh, writing on the ‘Progress of Ethical Philosophy’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, dismissed him with the phrase: ‘not to mention Mandeville, the buffoon and sophister of the alehouse’.⁸ Even Leslie Stephen said that Mandeville ‘represents scepticism in its coarsest and most unlovely stage’.⁹ And it would be very easy to go on quoting similar remarks: a book published in 1959 calls him ‘Mandeville, a tavern character whose malice sharpened his wit’.¹⁰

The main exponent of the other view is probably Mandeville himself: a somewhat suspicious fact that is not inconsistent with, and might even tend to confirm, Law's opinion that he was an emissary of the Devil. But Mandeville is not alone in his presentation of himself. Francis Hutcheson conjectured: ‘He has probably been struck with some old Fanatick Sermon upon self-denial in his youth, and can never get it out of his head since.’¹¹ Selby-Bigge thought his asceticism genuine, and his themes, when properly understood, ‘the perpetual topics of the pulpit’.¹² Robert Browning put Mandeville firmly on the side of the angels, and called upon him to help refute the scepticism of Carlyle.¹³ Browning, it is true, did not see Mandeville as a stern moralist, but as a kind of Pippa who sunnily insisted on seeing the Good that came unnoticed out of Evil. This was hardly Mandeville's own picture of himself; he would no doubt have preferred the writer in the Monthly Mirror for 1803, who said that he ‘supports one of the tenets of our religion, the natural corruption of human nature, unless assisted by divine grace’.¹⁴

For the first of the two Mandevilles, the pious one, is a man who looks round him at a professedly Christian society, and is scandalized at what he sees. In his reply to Mandeville, Hutcheson is at pains to point out that Christianity ‘no where condemns the Rich or Powerful for being so, or for desiring high Stations’.¹⁵ True though this may be, it is the kind of remark that makes twentieth-century Christians squirm a little. Neither now nor in Mandeville's time would a visitor from another planet, observing the people among whom he found himself, suspect that they were committed to loving their enemies, turning the other cheek, renouncing the things of this world.

When Ministers of Christ assure their Hearers, that to indulge them selves in all earthly Pleasures and Sensualities, that are not clashing with the Laws of the Country, or the Fashion of the Age they live in, will be no bar to their future Happiness, if they enjoy them with Moderation; that nothing ought to be deem'd Luxury, that is suitable to a Person's Rank or Quality, and which he can purchase without hurting his Estate, or injuring his Neighbour; that no Buildings or Gardens can be so profusely sumptuous, no Furniture so curious or magnificent, no Inventions for Ease so extravagant, no Cookery so operose, no Diet so delicious, no Entertainments or Way of Living so expensive as to be Sinful in the Sight of God, if a Man can afford them, and they are the same as others of the same Birth or Quality either do or would make use of, if they could: That a Man may study and be sollicitous about Modes and Fashions, assist at courts, hunt after Worldly Honour, and partake of all the Diversions of the beau monde, and at the same time be a very good Christian; when Ministers of Christ I say, assure their Hearers of this, they certainly teach what they have no Warrant for from his Doctrine. For it is in Effect the same as to assert that the strictest Attachment to the World is not inconsistent with a Man's Promise of renouncing the Pomp and Vanity of it.¹⁶

This is Mandeville's first charge: worldliness, self-indulgence, complacency. England (Europe, for that matter) is only nominally Christian. Its real God is Mammon. Materialistic, money-grubbing, pleasure-seeking: the indictment is familiar, and has been repeated thousands of times, both before and since. The theme of The Fable of the Bees is that society is built entirely upon these worldly foundations: a genuine attempt by its members to lead a life of Christian devotion would bring it crashing down at once. The bees in Mandeville's fable, it will be remembered, were hypocritical or self-deceiving enough

Always to rail at what they loved.

That is to say, they complained of dishonesty and self-seeking in others, while practising them themselves:

One, that had got a Princely score,
By cheating Master, King and Poor,
Dar'd cry aloud, The Land must sink
For all its Fraud; And whom d'ye think
The Sermonizing Rascal chid?
A Glover that sold Lamb for Kid.

Jove, indignant at this duplicity, and noticing that

… all the Rogues cry'd brazenly,
Good Gods, Had we but Honesty!

decides to teach them a lesson by granting them their prayer. The bees become honest and virtuous: with startling results. Lawyers, turnkeys, milliners, footmen, courtiers lose their livelihoods:

All Places manag'd first by Three
Who watched each other's Knavery,
And often for a Fellow-feeling
Promoted one another's stealing,
Are happily supply'd by One,
By which some thousands more are gone.

With luxurious living and conspicuous consumption abandoned, trade and commerce languish:

The Price of Land and Houses falls
Mirac'lous Palaces, whose Walls
Like those of Thebes, were rais'd by Play,
Are to be let …
…
The building Trade is quite destroy'd,
Artificers are not employ'd;
No Limner for his Art is fam'd,
Stone-cutters, Carvers are not nam'd.
Those that remain'd, grown temp'rate, strive
Not how to spend, but how to live,
And when they paid their Tavern Score,
Resolv'd to enter it no more:
No Vintner's Jilt in all the Hive
Could wear now Cloth of Gold, and thrive.
…
          The haughty Chloe, to live Great,
Had made her Husband rob the State:
But now she sells her Furniture,
Which th' Indies had been ransack'd for;
Contracts th' expensive Bill of Fare,
And wears her strong Suit a whole Year:
The slight and fickle Age is past,
And Clothes, as well as Fashions, last.

Finally, the once large and prosperous community, the ‘Spacious Hive well stockt with Bees’, thronged with

Millions endeavouring to supply
Each other's Lust and Vanity

dwindles to a handful of hardy simple-lifers:

Hard'ned with Toils and Exercise,
They counted Ease itself a Vice;
Which so improv'd their Temperance
That, to avoid Extravagance,
They flew into a hollow Tree,
Blest with Content and Honesty.

So far, then, it is mainly luxury, self-indulgence, and self-deception that Mandeville is denouncing: the delusion (to update the clichés a little) that the affluent society, obsessed with material values, could also be a community of Christians. The real values of the fashionable world are described in the Preface to Part 2 of the Fable.

Virtue … is a very fashionable word, and some of the most luxurious are extremely fond of the amiable sound; tho' they mean nothing by it, but a great Veneration for whatever is courtly or sublime, and an equal Aversion to every thing, that is vulgar or unbecoming. They seem to imagine that it chiefly consists in a strict Compliance to the Rules of Politeness, and all the Laws of Honour, that have any regard to the Respect that is due to themselves. It is the Existence of this Virtue, that is often maintain'd with so much Pomp of Words, and for the Eternity of which so many Champions are ready to take up Arms. Whilst the Votaries of it deny themselves no Pleasure, they can enjoy either fashionably or in Secret; and instead of sacrificing the Heart to the Love of real Virtue, can only condescend to abandon the outward Deformity of Vice, for the Satisfaction they receive from appearing to be well-bred. It is counted ridiculous for Men to commit Violence upon themselves, or to maintain, that Virtue requires Self-denial; all Court-philosophers are agreed, that nothing can be lovely or desirable that is mortifying or uneasy. A civil Behaviour among the Fair in Publick and a Deportment, inoffensive both in Words and Actions, is all the Chastity, the polite World requires in Men. What Liberties soever a Man gives himself in private, his Reputation shall never suffer whilst he conceals his Amours from all those that are not unmannerly inquisitive, and takes care that nothing criminal can ever be proved upon him. Si non castè saltem cautè, is a Precept that sufficiently shews, what every Body expects; and tho' Incontinence is own'd to be a Sin, yet never to have been guilty of it is a Character, which most single men under thirty would not be fond of, even amongst modest Women.¹⁷

There were other ways, too, in which men's actual beliefs differed from their professions. The real ideal of the English gentleman was not the Christian saint, but the Man of Honour.

For ever since the Notion of Honour has been receiv'd among Christians, there have always been, in the same Number of People, Twenty Men of real Honour to one of real Virtue. The Reason is obvious. The Persuasions to Virtue make no Allowances, nor have any Allurements that are clashing with the Principle of it; whereas the Men of Pleasure, the Passionate and the Malicious, may all in their Turns meet with Opportunities of indulging their darling Appetites without trespassing against the Principle of Honour. A virtuous Man thinks himself obliged to obey the Laws of his Country; but a Man of Honour acts from a Principle which he is bound to think Superior to all Laws … A virtuous Man expects no Acknowledgments from others; and if they won't believe him to be virtuous, his Business is not to force them to it; but a Man of Honour has the Liberty openly to proclaim himself to be such, and to call to an Account Every body who dares to doubt of it; Nay, such is the inestimable Value he sets upon himself, that he often endeavours to punish with Death the most insignificant Trespass that's committed against him, the least Word, Look, or Motion, if he can find but any far-fetch'd Reason to suspect a Design in it to undervalue him, and of this No body is allowed to be a Judge but himself.¹⁸

There was of course a better side to the ideal of Honour, as Mandeville admitted. In one of the ‘Remarks’ added to the Fable he tells us that the Man of Honour ‘is oblig'd always to be faithful to his Trust, to prefer the publick interest to his own, not to tell lies nor defraud or wrong any Body, and from others to suffer no Affront, which is a Term of Art for every Action designedly done to undervalue him’. He adds, however, that whereas all of these rules were faithfully observed by ‘the Men of ancient Honour, of which I reckon Don Quixote to have been the last upon Record’, their modern counterparts paid little attention to any but the last of them. ‘In great Families’, Mandeville tells us, Honour ‘is like the Gout, generally counted Hereditary, and all Lord's Children are born with it … there is nothing that encourages the Growth of it more than a Sword, and upon the first wearing of one, some People have felt considerable Shoots of it in four and twenty Hours.’¹⁹

The real point, however, is that the ideal of Honour is inconsistent with Christianity. To see this one only needs to consider duelling or war.

The only thing of weight that can be said against modern Honour is, that it is directly opposite to Religion. The one bids you bear Injuries with Patience, the other tells you if you don't resent them, you are not fit to live. Religion commands you to leave all Revenge to God, Honour bids you trust your Revenge to nobody but your self, even where the Law would do it for you; Religion plainly forbids Murther, Honour openly justifies it: Religion bids you not shed Blood upon any account whatever: Honour bids you fight for the least Trifle: Religion is built on Humility, and Honour upon Pride …²⁰

Mandeville denounces duelling in several places: in both parts of the Fable as well as in the Origin of Honour. That book, like Part 2 of the Fable, takes the form of dialogues in which Mandeville's spokesman and defender, Cleomenes, expounds Mandeville's ideas to a sceptical friend, Horatio. Horatio is ‘a Man of strict Honour’, who has himself fought a duel. In the Origin of Honour, Cleomenes' comments on duelling are given in a style worthy of Wesley or Sandeman themselves. A ‘sincere follower of the Apostles, a downright Christian’, he says, would first give all the obvious arguments against duelling.

But if all these could not divert the Dueller from his Purpose, he would attack his stubborn Heart in its inmost Recesses, and forget Nothing of what I told you on the Subject in our Second and Third Conversation. He would recommend to him the Fable of the Bees, and, like that, he'd direct and lay open to him the Principle of Honour, and shew him, how diametrically opposite the Worship of that Idol was to the Christian Religion: the First consisting in openly cherishing and feeding that very Frailty in our Nature, which the latter strictly commands us with all our Might to conquer and destroy. Having convinced him of the substantial Difference and Contrariety of the Two Principles, he would display to him, on the one Hand, the Vanity of Earthly Glory, and the Folly of Coveting the Applause of a Sinful World; and, on the other, the Certainty of a Future State and the Transcendency of everlasting Happiness over every Thing that is perishable. From such Remonstrances as these the good, pious Man would take an Opportunity of exhorting him to a Christian Self-denial, and the Practice of real Virtue, and he would earnestly endeavour to make him sensible of the Peace of Conscience and solid Comforts that are to be found in Meekness and Humility, Patience and an entire Resignation to the Will of God.

HOR.:
How long, pray, do you intend to go on with this Cant?
CLEO.:
If I am to personate a Christian Divine, who is a sincere Believer, you must give me Leave to speak his Language.
HOR.:
But if a Man had really such an Affair upon his Hands, and he knew the Person, he had to do with, to be a resolute Man that understood the Sword, do you think he would have Patience or be at leisure to hearken to all this puritanical Stuff, which you have been heaping together? Do you think (for that is the Point) it would have any Influence over his Actions?
CLEO.:
If he believ'd the Gospel, and consequently future Rewards and Punishments, and he likewise acted consistently with what he believ'd, it would put an entire Stop to all and it would certainly hinder him from sending or accepting of Challenges, or ever engaging in anything relating to a Duel.
HOR.:
Pray now, among all the Gentlemen of your Acquaintance, and such as you your Self should care to converse with, how many are there, do you think, on whom the Thoughts of Religion would have that Effect?
CLEO.:
A great many, I hope.
HOR.:
You can hardly forbear laughing, I see, when you say it; and I am sure, you your Self would have no Value for a Man whom you should see tamely put up a gross Affront: Nay I have seen and heard Parsons and Bishops themselves laugh at, and speak with Contempt of pretended Gentlemen, that had suffer'd of themselves to be ill treated without resenting it.(21)

Duelling is a test case which brings out clearly the contrast between Christian morality and the prevailing mores. Mandeville was not, of course, the only one to point this out. Richard Steele, for example, attacked duelling obliquely in The Christian Hero (1701), more forthrightly in The Lying Lover (1703), and quite explicitly in the Tatler²² (which certainly influenced Mandeville, the contributor to the Female Tatler) and other periodicals. But Captain Steele, as he then was, wrote The Christian Hero as a soldier commending the Christian way of life to his fellow soldiers: it was left to Mandeville to suggest that war itself was also incompatible with Christianity. The bees in the Fable, after they had been afflicted with virtue,

… have no Forces kept Abroad;
Laugh at th' Esteem of Foreigners,
And empty Glory got by Wars;
They fight but for their Country's sake,
When Right or Liberty's at Stake.(23)

In the Origin of Honour, however, Cleomenes (and so presumably Mandeville) goes further still: he is emphatic that ‘there is Nothing contain'd in the Gospel, that can have the least Tendency to promote or justify War or Discord, Foreign or Domestick, Publick or Private; nor is there any the least Expression to be found in it, from which it is possible to excite or set People on to quarrel with, do Hurt to, or any Ways offend one another, on any Account whatever.’²⁴

For all the lip-service paid to religion, the army chaplains, and the official prayers, the soldier cannot be permitted to be a genuine Christian.

If he has but Courage, and knows how to please his Officers, he may get drunk Two or Three Times a Week, have a fresh Whore every Day, and swear an Oath at every Word he speaks, little or no Notice shall be taken of him to his Dishonour; and if he be good humour'd, and forbears stealing among his Comrades, he'll be counted a very honest Fellow. But if, what Christ and his Apostles would have justify'd him in and exhorted him to do, he takes a Slap in the Face, or any other gross Affront before Company without resenting it, tho' from his intimate Friend, it cannot be endured; and tho' he was the soberest and the most chaste, the most discreet, tractable and best temper'd Man in the World, his Business is done … and the Officers are forc'd to turn him out of the Regiment.²⁵

Yet the full title of the Origin of Honour is An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. It is generally believed, Horatio points out and Cleomenes concedes, that Christians make the best soldiers. This is possible, however, only through the perversion and distortion of Christianity. Morality, and ‘even the Gospel’, may be preached to soldiers

at seasonable Times when they are in Winter Quarters, or in an idle Summer when there is no Enemy near, and the Troops perhaps are encamped in a Country, where no Hostilities should be committed. But when they are to enter upon Action, to besiege a large Town, or ravage a rich Country, it would be very impertinent to talk to them of Christian Virtues; doing as they would be done by; loving their Enemies, and extending their Charity to all Mankind … Then the Mask is flung off; not a Word of the Gospel, or of Meekness or Humility, and all Thoughts of Christianity are laid aside entirely.²⁶

What is useful in war, then, is not genuine Christianity, but simply the belief that God is on one's side. Men are ready enough to believe this, especially if the outward acts of devotion are performed: frequent prayers, long and pathetic sermons, the singing of psalms, keeping the Sabbath. Mandeville demonstrates how the religious beliefs of the soldiers may be made serviceable by giving us the sermon of ‘a crafty Divine’:

Provisions had been scarce for some Time; the Enemy was just a Hand; and Abundance of the Men seem'd to have little Mind to fight when a Preacher, much esteem'd among the Soldiers, took the following Method: First, he set faithfully before them their Sins and Wickedness, the many Warnings they had received to repent, and God's long Forbearance, as well as great Mercy, in not having totally destroy'd them long ago. He represented their Wants, and Scarcity of Provision, as a certain Token of the Divine Wrath, and shew'd them plainly, that labouring already under the Weight of his Displeasure, they had no Reason to think, that God would connive longer at their manifold Neglects and Transgressions. Having convinc'd them, that Heaven was angry with them, he enumerated many Calamities, which, he said, would befal them; and several of them being such, as they had actually to fear, he was hearken'd to as a Prophet. He then told them, that what they could suffer in this World, was of no great Moment, if they could but escape Eternal Punishment; but that of this (as they had lived) he saw not the least Probability, they should. Having shewn an extraordinary concern for their deplorable Condition, and seeing many of them touch'd with Remorse, and overwhelm'd with Sorrow, he changed his Note on a Sudden, and with an Air of Certainty told them, that there was still one Way left, and but that one, to retrieve all, and avert the Miseries they were threaten'd with; which, in short, was to Fight well, and beat their Enemies; and that they had nothing else for it. Having thus disclosed his Mind to them, with all the Appearances of Sincerity, he assumed a chearful Countenance, shew'd them the many Advantages, that would attend the Victory; assured them of it, if they would but exert themselves; named the Times and Places in which they had behaved well, not without Exaggeration, and work'd upon their Pride so powerfully, that they took Courage, fought like Lions, and got the Day.²⁷

The distortion of Christianity to serve the worldly ambitions of priests and politicians is a favourite theme of Mandeville's. He devotes a whole book to it: his Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness. The thesis here is really the same as in the Fable; Christian virtue is quite incompatible with worldly prosperity and greatness. It follows that if the Christian Church had become great and prosperous (as it undoubtedly had) it could only be by abandoning Christian virtue.

That the Church should have attained so much power and greatness was, Mandeville remarks, a very considerable achievement, considering the intractable material its priests had to work with:

The Pagans, whose religion was built upon poetry and fiction, had a wretched theology, that might be turn'd to any purpose, and the priests in their contrivances had no morals to cope with. In Mahometism there is more morality, and the notions of the Deity are better … but then the whole religion seems contriv'd to engage the sensual and voluptuous: in the alcoran it self many things are ludicrous and silly, and not a few that are soothing human passion. But in the Christian religion all is grave and solid; every part of it worthy of the most serious contemplation of a man, that can and dares think freely and thoroughly. The idea it furnishes us with of the Godhead is sublime, and as incomprehensible as it should be: in the doctrine of Christ there are no worldly allurements to draw the vicious, and all his followers are ty'd down to the strictest morality: the whole aim of the gospel is divine, nothing in it can possibly be construed so as to encourage priestcraft, or be serviceable to sooth any human passion, without doing the utmost violence to truth and good sense; and yet behold, what has been made of it!²⁸

So far Mandeville appears as a familiar figure: the prophet denouncing the wickedness of the times and the backsliding of his contemporaries. They worship false gods while blandly pretending to themselves that they are still good Christians; they pervert the most sacred things to serve worldly ends; the very clergy are bulwarks of hypocrisy and worldliness. They mistake the outward trappings of religion for true devotion and they cry peace where there is no peace, and there is no health in them.

But he goes still further. It is not merely that men are weak and sinful, and find it hard to live by what they know to be right. The truth is that the nature of man makes virtue impossible for him. Man is motivated by his passions, by self-love and by pride, the desire to think well of himself and have others think well of him. But no action is virtuous unless there is self-denial. No human actions, then, except those rare ones inspired by divine grace, are virtuous. What men mistake for virtue is something quite different: pride or self-righteousness or fear of public opinion. This is quite central to Mandeville's thought. It provides him with a theme on which he plays many variations. He is fairly light-hearted about it in The Virgin Unmask'd:

LUCINDA:
… All is not gold that glisters; many things are done daily for which People are extoll'd to the Skies that at the same time, tho' the Actions are Good, would be blamed as highly, if the Principle from which they acted, and the Motive that first edg'd them on, were thoroughly known. When People are too Lazy, or fearful to undertake any thing, they are praised for being Contented; and the Effects of Avarice are often called Temperance and Sobriety. I know two Married People that seem to be very Loving, and never displeased with one another, and indeed they Live so well, that they are thought a very happy couple: But you would hardly guess at the Reason of all this.
ANTONIA:
Without doubt they are both very Good Humour'd.
LUC.:
Just the Reverse, for their present Unison is owing to no other cause, than their both being Devils alike.
AN.:
How can that be?
LUC.:
When they came first together, they Fell out, and Fought every Day like Dogs and Cats, and did one another abundance of Mischief. But as every one feels his own Hurt best, so both perceiving the ill conveniences they got by every quarrel, being equally Match'd, they became so terrible one to another, that at last they lived Peaceably, in Dread only of provoking one another's Anger.(29)

Mandeville's convert and spokesman, Cleomenes, is much more serious about it:

Cleomenes seemed charitable, and was a Man of strict Morals, yet he would often complain that he was not possess'd of one Christian Virtue, and found fault with his own Actions, that had all the Appearances of Goodness; because he was conscious, he said, that they were perform'd from a wrong Principle. The Effects of his Education, and his Aversion to Infamy, had always been strong enough to keep him from Turpitude; but this he Ascribed to his Vanity, which he complain'd was in such full Possession of his Heart, that he knew no Gratification of any Appetite from which he was able to exclude it … He was sure, that the Satisfaction which arose from worldly Enjoyments, was something distinct from Gratitude, and foreign to Religion; and he felt plainly that, as it proceeded from within, so it center'd in himself. The very Relish of Life, he said, was accompanied with an Elevation of Mind, that seem'd to be inseparable from his Being. Whatever Principle was the Cause of this, he was convinced within himself, that the Sacrifice of the Heart, which the Gospel requires, consisted in the utter Extirpation of that Principle; confessing at the same time, that this Satisfaction he found in himself, this Elevation of Mind, caused his chief Pleasure; and that in all the Comforts of Life, it made the greatest Part of the Enjoyment.³⁰

Men are not naturally good: on the contrary, they cannot be virtuous without conquering their natural impulses. And, however we may delude ourselves, this is something we very rarely do:

HORATIO:
But are there no Persons in the World that are good by Choice?
CLEOMENES:
Yes, but then they are directed in that Choice by Reason and Experience, but not by Nature, I mean, not by untaught Nature: But there is an ambiguity in the Word Good which I would avoid; let us stick to that of Virtuous, and then I affirm that no Action is such, which does not point at some Conquest or other, some Victory great or small over untaught Nature; otherwise the Epithet is improper.
HOR.:
But if by the help of a careful Education this Victory is obtain'd, when we are young, may we not be virtuous afterwards voluntarily and with Pleasure?
CLEO.:
Yes, if it really was obtain'd: But how shall we be sure of this, and what Reason have we to believe it ever was? When it is evident, that from our Infancy, instead of endeavouring to conquer our Appetites, we have always been Taught, and have taken pains ourselves to conceal them; and we are conscious within, that whatever Alterations have been made in our Manners and Circumstances, the Passions themselves always remain'd?(31)

The worldliness, the hypocrisy, the backsliding are not, then, accidental: they are the necessary consequences of man's nature. Virtue, it would seem, is impossible. At least, it is impossible to corrupt and unregenerate man: ‘when I say Men, I mean neither Jews nor Christians; but meer Man, in the State of Nature and ignorance of the true Deity.’³² ‘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.’³³ But good Christians, Mandeville adds, ‘have always been very scarce and there are no Numbers of them any where, that one can readily go to’.³⁴

There seems, then, to be a good deal to support Mandeville's claim that The Fable of the Bees ‘is a Book of severe and exalted Morality’.³⁵ Mandeville himself appears as a quite uncompromising ascetic, disgusted by the materialism, the selfishness, the lust, and the vanity of mankind, detecting the wickedness in the hearts of even the respectable and apparently upright, horrified at the worldliness and hypocrisy of institutionalized religion, and preaching spiritual regeneration as the only possible remedy.

One might expect such a man to be unpopular, especially for what he said about the churches and about the corruption on which every powerful and prosperous state was built. One might even expect him to be accused of cynicism, of scoffing at some of the finer things in life, of traducing good and pious men. That is what the boosters usually say about the knockers; and Mandeville was undoubtedly a knocker. But why should he be accused of godliness, of materialism, of licentiousness, of moral nihilism? Why should he be linked, not only with Sandeman, but with Hobbes, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Tindal, and the Devil?

The explanation is put very neatly by Richard Whately, Mandeville, he suggests, is merely putting forward a hypothetical argument. If virtue consisted in self-denial, as was taken for granted by all the moralists and theologians, and if national wealth and greatness were desirable, as was taken for granted by everybody, then the public happiness depended on the vices of individuals. National virtue and national wealth must be irreconcilable. ‘Of two incompatible objects we must be content to take one, or the other. Which of the two is to be preferred he nowhere decides in his first volume: in his second, he solemnly declares his opinion that wealth ought to be renounced, as incompatible with virtue.’³⁶

The argument, that is to say, cuts both ways. One might draw the conclusion that the world ought to be renounced. But one might also decide that virtue should be. Or at least that the virtue of the theologians, which consisted in self-denial, was not really virtue at all. Why not adopt the utilitarian criterion, and count as virtuous any action that contributed to the welfare of society in the long run? In that case the ‘vices’ on which the national prosperity depended were really not vices, but virtues. Perhaps that was what Mandeville was really getting at? When one then remembered that in The Fable of the Bees not only luxuriousness and worldly enjoyment were shown to contribute to the nation's prosperity, but also the activities of cheats and highwaymen, this became a very shocking conclusion indeed.

Was there anything to suggest that this was Mandeville's real meaning, in spite of his denials? There was a great deal.

To begin with, there was Mandeville's personality. His early opponents accused him of dissolute habits. There is however very little reason to believe them; Mandeville somehow managed to sustain a medical practice as well as writing a good many books, which could hardly have left him much time for debauchery. Leslie Stephen says: ‘Mandeville is said to have been in the habit of frequenting coffee-houses and amusing his patrons by ribald conversation. The book smells of its author's haunts. He is a cynical and prurient writer, who shrinks from no jest, however scurrilous, and from no paradox, however grotesque …’³⁷ But Mandeville is no coarser than Swift, who was after all a Dean, Stephen's contemporaries might have thought Bunyan coarse, if they had read all of him.³⁸ There is a different way, however, in which the quality of Mandeville's prose tells against the view that he was a pious ascetic. His tone is too detached, too amused. When, in Free Thoughts on Religion, he recounts the enormities committed by churchmen in the name of Christianity, it is much in the tone of Voltaire, or Gibbon, or Anatole France:

In the time of Theodosius junior, they [Christians] enjoy'd a full liberty of conscience in Persia, when Abdas, a zealous bishop, had the courage to pull down one of the temples where the Persians worship'd the fire. The Magi made their complaints to the King, who sent for Abdas, and demanded no other satisfaction than the rebuilding of the temple: Abdas refus'd it with scorn, tho' that prince had declar'd to him that in case of disobedience he would cause all the christian churches to be pull'd down; which he did, and began a terrible persecution, in which the valiant Abdas fell the first martyr.

The brave remainder of the faithful, that could escape the fury of the Persian priests, were not so dejected at their loss, but that, animated with the hopes of a noble revenge, they implored the assistance of the emperor, which kindling a long war between Romans and Persians, occasion'd a second deluge of blood in vindication of the gospel.³⁹

Or again:

Nothing is more diverting than to read the various and noble struggles the popes have had with the princes of christendom, till Gregory the seventh, with the utmost intrepidity, and equal hazard and difficulties, establish'd his superiority over their temporalities: that able and stately prelate, who, in the midst of winter made an emperor barefoot wait unattended in a hall, fasting from morning till night, for three days together, before he would admit him to his presence; and was the first, who undertook to deprive his lord and master of the imperial dignity.⁴⁰

Then there is the actual subject-matter of some of his books. One would after all be surprised to learn that Savonarola, say, had written a tract called A Modest Defence of Public Stews (subtitle: an Essay upon Whoring) in which he argued strongly for the establishment of state-owned brothels, and worked out all the practical details, including charges. One would be only a little less surprised if he published an attack on free schools for the poor, on the ground that education would make the poor discontented with their lot and lead to a scarcity of servants and a rise in the wages masters would have to pay. One can hardly regard the author of these works as excessively unworldly.

None of this is, of course, conclusive. Obviously Mandeville did not correspond to popular stereotypes of an austere moralist; he was certainly a wit who sometimes found men's follies amusing. It may still be true that he also found them horrifying and was sincere in denouncing them. As for the Modest Defence and the Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools, a firm belief in human corruption and the final inefficacy of any remedy short of spiritual regeneration with miraculous assistance need not rule out an interest in palliatives. Charity schools, Mandeville argued, only made social conditions worse; public brothels, as a means of regulating and controlling sexual irregularity, might make them at least a little better. Nevertheless, it is not very easy to see Mandeville as the kind of pious Christian he declares himself to be.

More significant than any of this is the equivocal note which creeps into Mandeville's most earnest preachments, and even into his very denials of the charges against him. I have already quoted one exchange between Horatio and Cleomenes:

HOR.:
How long, pray, do you intend to go on with this Cant?
CLEO.:
If I am to personate a Christian Divine, who is a sincere Believer, you must give me leave to speak his Language.

If Cleomenes is really Mandeville's spokesman here, we may well conclude that he, too, is merely personating a Christian. But of course Mandeville could point out in reply that Cleomenes, though a convert to the ideas of The Fable of the Bees, is also represented as a member of the beau monde, along with Horatio. In a discussion between gentlemen the phrases of the pulpit would be a little out of place, and it was after all only the phraseology, and not the actual arguments, that Cleomenes was disclaiming.

There are, however, other passages less easy to explain away. ‘If I have shown the way to worldly Greatness’, Mandeville says in his own defence, ‘I have always without Hesitation preferr'd the Road that leads to Virtue.’ He then goes on to tell us how to travel along that road:

Would you banish Fraud and Luxury, prevent Profaneness and Irreligion, and make the generality of the People Charitable, Good and Virtuous, break down the Printing Presses, melt the Founds, and burn all the Books in the Island, except those at the Universities, where they remain unmolested, and suffer no Volume in private Hands but a Bible: Knock down Foreign Trade, prohibit all Commerce with Strangers, and permit no Ships to go to Sea, that ever will return, beyond Fisher-Boats. Restore to the Clergy, the King and the Barons their Ancient Privileges, Prerogatives, and Possessions: Build New Churches, and convert all the coin you can come at into Sacred Utensils: Erect Monasteries and Alms-houses in abundance, and let no Parish be without a Charity-School. Enact Sumptuary Laws, and let your Youth be inured to Hardship: Inspire them with all the nice and most refined Notions of Honour and Shame, of Friendship and of Heroism, and introduce among them a great Variety of imaginary Rewards: Then let the Clergy preach Abstinence and Self-denial to others, and take what Liberty they please for themselves; let them bear the greatest Sway in the management of State-Affairs, and no Man be made Lord-Treasurer but a Bishop.

By such pious Endeavours, and wholesome Regulations, the Scene would be soon alter'd; the greatest part of the Covetous, the Discontented, the Restless and Ambitious Villains would leave the Land, vast Swarms of Cheating Knaves would abandon the City, and be dispers'd throughout the Country: Artificers would learn to hold the Plough, Merchants turn Farmers, and the sinful over-grown Jerusalem, without Famine, War, Pestilence or Compulsion, be emptied in the most easy manner and ever after cease to be dreadful to her Sovereigns …

And so on, ending with a quite indubitable sneer: ‘… an harmless, innocent and well-meaning People, that would never dispute the Doctrine of Passive Obedience, nor any other Orthodox Principles, but be submissive to Superiors and Unanimous in religious Worship’.⁴¹

Mandeville cites this passage, or at least the sentence preceding it, about preferring the road that leads to virtue, in both the Vindication attached to later editions of the Fable and A Letter to Dion, in which he replies to Berkeley's attack on him. Yet it hardly reassures the reader who suspects him of scoffing at both virtue and religion. It is true that one recent defender of Mandeville finds in this passage ‘proof of his ferocious seriousness’. Mandeville, he suggests, is

mocking his own hopes for salvation as well as ours. The program horrifies him as much as it was calculated to horrify the newly liberated middle-class readers or us, their liberal heirs … We may hope for reformation within individual men … but if some miracle were to effect a wholesale conversion to virtue, could we bear it? It would be as hard for Mandeville as anyone; the peculiar honesty of his method requires that he be as vulnerable as his readers … The point is that whole-hearted Christianity is rare, to say the least, and Mandeville would not claim it for himself any more than he will allow it to most other men.⁴²

This is hardly convincing. No doubt Mandeville did regard some Christian virtues as desirable, but too hard for unregenerate men; but no reader of his Free Thoughts on Religion can suppose that he felt that about the participation of the clergy in politics, or the doctrine of passive obedience, to say nothing of charity schools. The Utopia described in the passage we are considering seems to be a curious mixture of what, in Mandeville's view, the clergy say they want but really do not, and what they really want but say they do not. Mandeville is not only saying that real virtue would be incompatible with national power and prosperity; he is also saying that what the clergy call virtue is a sham, and a cloak for their avarice and their thirst for power.

Mandeville may well have believed both propositions. Neither is inconsistent with a genuine concern for morality and religion. But here the two are so confused that the reader can hardly escape the conclusion that it is only the sham and not the real virtue that cannot coexist with national greatness.

This impression may well be confirmed by the Preface to Part I of the Fable, in which Mandeville says that his object is

to expose the Unreasonableness and Folly of those, that desirous of being an opulent and flourishing People, and wonderfully greedy after all the Benefits they receive as such, are yet always murmuring at and exclaiming against those Vices and Inconveniences, that from the Beginning of the World to this present Day, have been inseparable from all Kingdoms and States that ever were fam'd for Strength, Riches and Politeness, at the same time.⁴³

It is true that Mandeville merely says here that it is inconsistent to expect a state to be opulent and virtuous at the same time. As he puts it in the Fable itself:

Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive
To make a Great an Honest Hive.

This leaves it an open question whether greatness or honesty should be abandoned. But the emphasis is on the folly of complaining about the necessary accompaniments of opulence, not on the folly of pursuing opulence in the first place. Of course this may be meant ironically; but there is at least ground for suspicion that Mandeville is really saying: ‘Why make all this fuss about vice? We could not get on without it, and, besides, those who make most fuss about it are really only trying to hoodwink us so that they can gain control of the state and set up a theocracy like Cromwell's.’

William Minto, indeed, in an Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Mandeville, suggested that The Fable of the Bees, or at least its nucleus, the poem called The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn'd Honest, was originally published as an election pamphlet.

It appeared during the heat of the bitterly contested elections of 1705, when the question before the country was whether Marlborough's war with France should be continued. The cry of the high Tory advocates of peace was that the war was carried on purely in the interests of the general and the men in office; charges of bribery, peculation, hypocrisy, every form of fraud and dishonesty were freely cast about among the electors.⁴⁴

In Free Thoughts on Religion Mandeville tells us: ‘I despise the very thoughts of a party-man and desire to touch no man's sore, but in order to heal it.’⁴⁵ But that book itself contains a fairly orthodox statement of whig political theory: he was certainly no friend to the Tories. Minto does not, however, suggest that the intention of The Grumbling Hive was to defend Marlborough by defending vice; he sees the poem as merely ‘a political jeu d'esprit, full of the impartial mockery that might be expected of a humorous foreigner’. This need not prevent the Fable from being also ‘a Book of severe and exalted Morality’; but it is at least consistent with, and perhaps tends to suggest, a quite different interpretation.

Once Mandeville was taken seriously as a defender of vice, it was easy to see his attacks on the ideal of Honour, and on duelling and war, as simply deriding the values which good citizens held dear. Horatio complains to Cleomenes that Mandeville ‘ridicules War and Martial Courage, as well as Honour and everything else’.⁴⁶ Alternatively, Mandeville could be taken to be defending duelling, at least by those who read only Part 1 of the Fable. He says there that the practice of duelling

polishes and brightens Society in general. Nothing civilizes a Man equally as his Fear … the dread of being called to an Account keeps abundance in awe, and there are thousands of mannerly and well-accomplish'd Gentlemen in Europe, who would have been insolent and insupportable Coxcombs without it; besides if it was out of Fashion to ask Satisfaction for Injuries which the Law cannot take hold of, there would be twenty times the Mischief done there is now, or else you must have twenty times the Constables and other Officers to keep the Peace … It is strange that a Nation should grudge to see perhaps half a dozen Men sacrific'd in a Twelvemonth to obtain so valuable a Blessing, as the Politeness of Manners, the Pleasure of Conversation, and the Happiness of Company in general, that is often so willing to expose, and sometimes lose as many thousands in a few Hours, without knowing whether it will do any good or not.⁴⁷

In Part 2, Cleomenes has to tell Horatio that this passage is meant ironically.⁴⁸ He was certainly not the only reader to take it seriously. His contemporary George Bluet did, for one. Mandeville's genuine dislike of duelling does, I think, shine through the discussion in the Origin of Honour, but even here it might be pointed out that his chief argument is that duelling is opposed to Christian principles. It could be alleged that he was saying, sotto voce, so much the worse for those principles. It was, after all, claimed that in The Fable of the Bees Mandeville was really saying: if Christianity and national prosperity are incompatible, so much the worse for Christianity. It is true that in the Free Thoughts on Religion Mandeville attacked the clergy on the ground that their principles were incompatible with Christianity, and here no one doubted that it really was the clergy he was attacking. But, it might be argued, what he really objected to was their hypocrisy, not their worldliness, though it was the worldliness that he ostensibly attacked.

But it was Mandeville's views on human corruption that drew most of the fire. For what he is saying here is that it is simply not in human nature to behave in the ways commonly called virtuous. Virtue, then, is neither desirable (if national prosperity and happiness are) nor even possible. Men are bound to act from self-interest, however much they delude themselves that they have other motives. The conclusion seems irresistible: why not, then, abandon all this fuss about virtue, accept man as he is, and make the best of what we have got?

Mandeville, Leslie Stephen tells us,

will not be beguiled from looking at the seamy side of things. Man, as theologians tell us, is corrupt, nay, it would be difficult for them to exaggerate his corruption; but the heaven which they throw in by way of consolation is tacitly understood to be a mere delusion, and the supernatural guidance in which they bid us trust, an ingenious device for enforcing their own authority. Tell your fine stories, he says in effect, to school girls or to devotees; don't try to pass them off upon me, who have seen men and cities, and not taken my notions from books or sermons. There is a part of our nature that is always flattered by the bold assertion that our idols are made of dirt; and Mandeville was a sagacious sycophant of those baser instincts.⁴⁹

Mandeville's doctrine was, he adds a little later: ‘Virtue is an empty pretence … To feather our own nests as warmly as may be is our only policy in this pitiless storm. Lust and pride are realities; to gratify them is to secure the only genuine enjoyment.’⁵⁰

There is, then, a plausible case to be made for either interpretation of Mandeville. … Which is the right one? Which of the two Mandevilles really existed? Perhaps the best way of arriving at an answer to that question will be to forget it for a while, and look more closely at some other aspects of Mandeville's work. We may even discover more Mandevilles than two.

.....

THE REAL MANDEVILLE?

What conclusions, if any, can we now reach about the question … : which of the representations of Mandeville is the true one?

So far we have considered only the evidence of his own writings. There is not much to be added from external evidence, which is scanty, unreliable, and sometimes conflicting. Records show that he was baptized at Rotterdam on 20 November 1670, and that he matriculated at the University of Leyden in October 1685.⁵¹ He presented a dissertation in 1689 on the consciousness of animals, taking the Cartesian view (which he afterwards abandoned) that they were automata, and another one in 1691 on the chylification of the blood, after which he took the degree of Doctor of Medicine. He seems to have gone to England shortly afterwards. He married there in 1699. We know from his medical treatise that, in specializing in nervous disorders, he was following in the footsteps of his father, who had practised medicine in Amsterdam and Rotterdam for more than thirty-eight years.⁵² He died in London on 21 January 1733. The Gentleman's Magazine has the briefest of entries in its list of deaths for January:⁵³

21st. Dr. Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees and other pieces.

The traces of feminism shown by Mandeville in The Virgin Unmask'd and elsewhere did not extend to his will: of five hundred pounds he had in South Sea Annuities, he left one hundred to his wife and the remainder, together with the rest of his estate, to his son Michael; to his daughter Penelope he left ‘twenty shillings for a Ring’.⁵⁴

In his article on Mandeville in the Dictionary of National Biography Leslie Stephen says that the only personal details of Mandeville's life that have been preserved are to be found in brief references in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Sir John Hawkins's Life of Samuel Johnson, and Jeremiah Whitaker Newman's Lounger's Commonplace Book. Of these Hawkins's account is the most circumstantial, even though most of it is contained in a footnote (to a remark about the effect on ‘the moral conduct of the young and unthinking’ of such writers as ‘Collins, Mandeville, Morgan and Tindal; the first pair deists, and the latter infidels’). Mandeville, he tells us, ‘lived in obscure lodgings in London and was never able to acquire much practice’; he made a living by writing ‘sundry papers in the London Journal and other such publications, to favour the custom of drinking spirituous liquors, to which employment of the pen it is supposed he was hired by the distillers’; he was ‘coarse and overbearing in his manners where he durst be so; yet a great flatterer of some vulgar Dutch merchants who allowed him a pension’. He adds that ‘this last information comes from a clerk of a city attorney, through whose hands the money passed.’⁵⁵

Such of this as can be checked would seem to be false: Kaye went through the files of the London Journal and other contemporary journals without finding the articles commissioned by the distillers.⁵⁶ Mandeville's known writings, he points out, contain vivid warnings of the evil effects of excessive drinking, notably ‘Remark G’ of the Fable. Since Kaye's researches, Paul Bunyan Anderson, who discovered Mandeville's contributions to the Female Tatler, has unearthed a pamphlet called A Dissertation upon Drunkenness, which he also attributes to Mandeville, mainly because of its close verbal resemblance to ‘Remark G’.⁵⁷ The title-page includes the words: ‘Also an Account of the Pride, Insolence and Exorbitance of Brewers, Vintners, Victuallers, Coffee-House-Keepers, and Distillers, with the various Arts and Methods by which they allure and excite People to drink and debauch themselves.’⁵⁸ It now seems established that Anderson's attribution was mistaken, and that the author of the pamphlet was not Mandeville, but someone who plagiarized freely from the Fable. But the mere fact that the attribution could be made, with some plausibility, tells heavily against Hawkins's story.

In his medical treatise, Mandeville extols the medicinal qualities of wine, while deploring the fact that people render themselves immune to its curative effects by drinking it when they have no need of them. He also introduces a rhetorical eulogy of it:

… it is not only in the power of this Vegetable to make the Slave fancy himself to be free, the Poor to be Rich, the Old Young, and the Miserable Happy; but it likewise actually mends visible Imperfections; renders the Infirm Strong, the Decrepit Nimble, and the Stammerer Eloquent; and what neither Circe's nor Medea's Art could ever perform; turns Vices into Virtues, and by the Charm of it, the Coward, the Covetous, the Proud, and the Morose become Valliant, Generous, Affable, and good Humour'd.⁵⁹

But, apart from the obvious irony of this, it is made quite clear that it is not meant seriously: ‘I am no Critick’, Philopirio adds immediately afterwards, ‘but well assured that, Poetical Flights apart, the innumerable mischiefs which Wine, as it is managed, creates to Mankind, far exceed whatever Horace, or any body else can say in commendation of it.’⁶⁰

This part of Hawkins's story, then, seems unlikely to be true. As for the Dutch merchants, Kaye makes the plausible conjecture that they were John and Cornelius Backer, mentioned in Mandeville's will as holding the South Sea Annuities for him, and that they were not his patrons but merely his business agents.

Kaye also thinks it unlikely that Mandeville lived in poverty. He must have made money out of the Fable, which was enormously successful, even if it was a success of scandal. He is known to have been an intimate friend of Lord Macclesfield, the Lord Chancellor, as Hawkins himself notes, among others. (It was at Macclesfield's house that Mandeville met Addison and later made the famous remark that he was ‘a parson in a tie-wig’.)⁶¹ Benjamin Franklin who, unlike Hawkins or Newman, actually met Mandeville, draws a picture rather different from Hawkins's. Working as a printer in London, Franklin set up the second edition of Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated, and was moved to write an answer to it, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, and on Pleasure and Pain.

My pamphlet by some means falling into the hands of one Lyons, a surgeon, author of a book entitled The Infallibility of Human Judgment, it occasioned an acquaintance between us. He took great notice of me called on me often to converse on those subjects, carried me to the Horns, a pale-alehouse in—Lane, Cheapside, and introduced me to Dr. Mandeville, author of the Fable of the Bees, who had a club there, of which he was the soul, being a most facetious, entertaining companion.⁶²

But this must have been in 1725 or 1726, during the nineteen months Franklin spent in London. The undated letter to Sir Hans Sloane, cited by Kaye as evidence of Mandeville's success in his profession, could not have been written, as Kaye himself points out, before 1716, when Sloane was made a baronet. Mandeville's will, which shows him to be in relative affluence, is dated 1729. It is quite possible, therefore, that Mandeville did have to struggle to make a living in his earlier years in London, and he may very well have spent as much time on journalism as on medicine. At least this would seem to be true for the five months between November 1709 and March 1710, during which he wrote thirty-two issues of the Female Tatler. If Anderson is right, the other thirty-three issues were written by Mrs. Susanna Centlivre, the playwright. Probably she and Mandeville had taken over the paper between them, which would mean editing and perhaps publishing as well as writing.

The medical treatise in 1711 was at least partly a bid for patients. Mandeville's preface suggests that he is a little on the defensive about this. It may possibly have been used against him by Bluet, who says that Mandeville's ‘Vindication’ of the Fable ‘is writ in the true Spirit of a Quack Bill’.⁶³ Given the controversial manners of the times, however, a doctor with Mandeville's opinions would have been called a quack in any case. It is also possible that the publication of the Treatise had something to do with the feud between Mandeville and Dr. John Radcliffe, whose bequest to Oxford is put forward in the Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools as a prime example of vanity masquerading as philanthropy: ‘what must we judge of his Motive, the Principle he acted from, when after his Death we find that he has left a Trifle among his Relations who stood in need of it, and an immense Treasure to an University that did not want it?’⁶⁴ Richard Fiddes, who was related to Radcliffe, devotes several pages of his preface on Mandeville to answering this attack. While admitting that the charge about leaving a trifle to his relations is ‘not altogether groundless’, he denies that Radcliffe's motives were unworthy ones. In reply to another comment of Mandeville's, that Radcliffe was known ‘to look down with contempt on the most deserving of his Profession, and never confer with any other Physician but what will pay Homage to his Superior Genius, creep to his Humour, and never approach him but with all the slavish Obsequiousness a Court-Flatterer can treat a Prince with’⁶⁵ Fiddes says: ‘If the Doctor did really look down with Contempt upon any Persons, it was upon those, and those only, who had Recourse to vile and ignoble Methods, towards opening a Way to Practice. And this might be, and I have Reason to believe was, the true Cause why he, sometimes, refused to confer with others of the same Faculty.’⁶⁶

This may not have been a direct hit at Mandeville, but it may be significant that Mandeville seems to have changed his mind about Radcliffe some time between 1709 and 1714, when Radcliffe died, or at least before 1723, when the Essay on Charity first appeared. In the Female Tatler for 21-3 November 1709, ‘Lucinda’ criticizes Steele's Tatler for publishing scandal about real people under ‘ingenious Nicknames’ easily seen through, and refers unmistakably to a piece in which Radcliffe (called Aesculapius) had been ridiculed over a love-affair with a much younger woman. She imagines the delight of Steele's readers: ‘Pray, Madam, did you see the Doctor in the Tatler; did you mind the Gold Buttons, was not that very Witty? I declare I am glad to see him exposed, because he wou'd not come to my Sister Patty, tho' my Father sent twice, and never yet gave him less than three Guineas for a Fee.’⁶⁷ In 1709 Mandeville is virtuously protesting against such attacks on ‘a Physician famous for the Splendour of his Practice’: in 1723 he is himself attacking the same physician much more severely. It is possible that all he objected to in the first place was the trivial ground of the attack: ‘In Writing Scandal’, he says, ‘I wou'd draw the Picture of those upon whom it is design'd, not from Things that are indifferent, and have neither good nor harm in them, but from the Folly and Vices of which they are really guilty.’ But he also criticizes the practice of referring to real people who can be readily identified; and in any case the Tatler, though mainly making fun of Radcliffe as an ageing lover, also anticipates Mandeville in mentioning his avarice: ‘Love has taken place of avarice, or rather is become an avarice of another kind, which still urges him to pursue what he does not want.’⁶⁸ One thing that happened between 1709 and 1714 was the publication of Mandeville's Treatise: in view of Fiddes's remark, it is at least possible that it was the repercussions from that event that made him less tender of Radcliffe's reputation.

If Mandeville did have difficulty in establishing himself in practice, probably this situation did not last. Whether or not the Treatise brought him patients, it is likely that the Fable, with the celebrity that followed it, did. If the Fable brought him money as well as fame, he may have deliberately kept his practice small, to give himself time for his writing, and for evenings of witty talk at Lord Lansdowne's or the Horns.

Most of this is, of course, conjecture. As Kaye points out, ‘there is no authoritative first-hand evidence whatever as to Mandeville's character and habits except what he himself has told us and the brief remark of one single contemporary.’⁶⁹ We come back, then, to the ground already surveyed; and to the question at the beginning of this chapter.

It is obvious, I think, that neither of the views outlined in the first chapter is wholly accurate. Mandeville was neither a Savonarola nor Law's missioner come from the kingdom of darkness to do us harm: the Fable is not an evangelical tract, but neither is it, as Chambers' Encyclopedia was still proclaiming in 1891, ‘a pot-house fulminant’.⁷⁰ Any brief characterization of Mandeville is inadequate. To take one example: there is some plausibility in Wilde's suggestion that he was the mouthpiece of the diehards of the Restoration who were made uneasy by the softening of manners and the higher moral tone of the new age; but it does not survive examination. Consider Wilde's illustrations of the new moral temper: ‘Attempts were made to improve and educate the poor, and charity schools were founded. Laws were enacted against gaming and cock-spitting and the more brutal amusements of all kinds were discouraged.’⁷¹ Mandeville, as we know, opposed charity schools, and was contemptuous of the Societies for Promoting a Reformation of Manners, but he also condemned cruelty to animals. I have been unable to find the law against cock-spitting which Wilde refers to, unless he has in mind 4 & 5 William and Mary, c. 23 (1692), which forbids the burning of heath-lands to trap grouse or heath-cock. This, like other Acts for preserving game, was intended to benefit landowners rather than their prey. Another possibility is that he means cock-throwing (the practice of tying a cock to a stake and throwing stones or sharp sticks at it) though I have found no evidence that that was prohibited at this time. But whatever cock-spitting may have been, we may safely assume that the man who wrote so movingly of the death of an ox would have been opposed to it. Mandeville's attack on the cult of Honour hardly fits Wilde's thesis; and, in general, his satire is directed quite as often against rakes of the old as against moralists of the new school.

Again, it is tempting to say that Mandeville's essential characteristic is his hatred of cant and hypocrisy: his refusal to be blinded by comforting conventional fictions, and his insistence on showing men as they really are. ‘You, Sir’, he tells Berkeley, ‘think it for the Good of Society that human Nature should be extoll'd as much as possible: I think, the real Meanness and Deformity of it to be more instructive.’⁷² And, indeed, there is a suggestion in Alciphron that Berkeley himself regards Mandeville as a reckless and uncompromising utterer of inconvenient truths. Alciphron says in the first dialogue: ‘Convenience is one thing, and truth is another. A genuine philosopher, therefore, will overlook all advantages, and consider only truth itself as such.’⁷³ Euphranor in reply seems to be suggesting that, when it comes to the general happiness of mankind, expediency is more important than truth: ‘Might it not therefore be inferred, that those men are foolish who go about to unhinge such principles as have a necessary connexion with the general good of mankind?’⁷⁴ The same argument is used against Lysicles in the second dialogue:

EUPHRANOR:
Virtue then, in your account, is a trick of statesmen?
LYSICLES:
It is.
EUPHRANOR:
Why then do your sagacious sect betray and divulge that trick or secret of State, which wise men have judged necessary for the good government of the world?
Lysicles hesitating, Crito made answer, that he presumed it was because their sect, being wiser than all other wise men, disdained to see the world governed by wrong maxims, and would set all things on a right bottom.(75)

Probably, there is no single characteristic of Mandeville's as prominent as his hatred of hypocrisy and self-deception; yet the moment we try to set him up as the champion of candour and frankness above all, doubts begin to rush in. Why, in that case, is it so hard to take his professions of religious belief seriously? Does he not himself think it necessary to pander to the stubborn belief in an invisible cause, which is a congenital human weakness, hardly less strong than the instinctive tendency to overvalue oneself? Would an apostle of candour be quite as fond of irony as Mandeville? Would he use literary devices like the alleged answer to the Modest Defence, purporting to come from the Societies for Promoting a Reformation of Manners? Would he share Lucinda's weakness for treating an argument like a pot of tea, and straining the last drop out of it?

Moreover, it must be admitted that, as a controversialist, Mandeville does not always show an uncompromising devotion to strict honesty. He protests, quite rightly, against Berkeley's unfairness to Shaftesbury in ignoring ‘the many admirable Things he has said against Priestcraft, and on the side of Liberty and Human Happiness’. Few of Berkeley's readers, he adds, ‘among those that have read, and are not lash'd in the Characteristicks … will think that My Lord Shaftsbury deserves one Tenth Part of the Indignity and Contempt, which you treat Cratylus with’.⁷⁶ Yet elsewhere Mandeville himself makes capital out of the charges levelled against Shaftesbury by those who had been lashed. ‘The Characteristicks’, he makes Cleomenes say, ‘have made a Jest of all reveal'd Religion, especially the Christian.’⁷⁷ He at least hints that Shaftesbury was remiss because ‘he did not follow Arms when his Country was involved in War’:⁷⁸ a charge one hardly expects from the author of the Enquiry into Honour, or the other works in which Mandeville tells us what he thinks of warfare. Similarly, any reader of Free Thoughts on Religion, with its plea for religious tolerance, would expect Mandeville to welcome Shaftesbury's humane policy for the treatment of heretics. They should be laughed at, he said, but not persecuted. Ridicule was a test of truth: a solemn opinion that could be punctured by a little raillery could have no substance in it. Ridicule was also a more effective way of discrediting cranks and enthusiasts than making martyrs of them.

The Jews were naturally a very cloudy People, and wou'd endure little Raillery in any thing; much less in what belong'd to any Religious Doctrines or Opinions. Religion was look'd upon with a sullen Eye; and Hanging was the only Remedy they cou'd prescribe for any thing which look'd like setting up a new Revelation. The sovereign Argument was, Crucify, Crucify. But with all their malice, and Inveteracy to our Saviour, and his Apostles after him, had they but taken the Fancy to act such Puppet-Shows in his Contempt, as at this hour the Papists are acting in his Honour; I am apt to think they might possibly have done our Religion more harm, than by all their other ways of Severity.⁷⁹

This remark naturally scandalized the orthodox; but was it quite sincere of Mandeville to echo them?

CLEO.:
… Lord Shaftsbury takes Joke and Banter to be the best and surest Touchstone to prove the Worth of Things: It is his Opinion, that no Ridicule can be fasten'd upon what is really great and good; his Lordship has made use of that Test to try the Scriptures and the Christian Religion by, and expos'd them because it seems they could not stand it.
HOR.:
He has exposed Superstition and the miserable Notions the Vulgar were taught to have of God; but no man ever had more Sublime Ideas of the Supreme Being and the Universe than himself.
CLEO.:
You are convinc'd that what I charge him with is true.(80)

So no doubt it is; and Cleomenes' remarks (if quoted, say in The Rationalist Annual for 1974) might even be taken as commending Shaftesbury. But not in 1729, and in the context of a discussion in which Shaftesbury's views are fairly thoroughly demolished. Mandeville is undoubtedly making a point against Shaftesbury that he knows will tell against him with his readers. And he is probably making it tongue in cheek.

It is true that Horatio makes an able defence of Shaftesbury. This might be taken as proof of Mandeville's fair-mindedness, and his care not to do what he blamed Berkeley for, and make the characters in his dialogues mere men of straw. But Horatio's defence reminds us of another possible piece of deviousness on Mandeville's part. Cleomenes, we are told in the preface, is Mandeville's mouthpiece; yet whenever he and Horatio discuss religion, it seems (at any rate to a careful, perceptive, and sympathetic editor like Kaye) that Mandeville agrees, not with the orthodoxy of Cleomenes, but with Horatio's criticisms of it. This almost certainly applies to this exchange in the Origin of Honour:

HOR.:
It is better to have no Religion, than to worship the Devil.
CLEO.:
In what Respect is it better?
HOR.:
It is not so great an Affront to the Deity not to believe his Existence, as it is to believe him to be the most Cruel and the most Malicious Being that can be imagin'd.
CLEO.:
That is a subtle Argument, seldom made Use of but by Unbelievers.(81)

It was an argument made use of by Shaftesbury, as Mandeville's readers would probably know. It is also not very far removed from what Cleomenes himself says in Part 2 of the Fable: ‘I could as soon believe, that he could cease to exist, as that he should be the Author of any real Evil.’⁸²

It is hard to escape the impression that Mandeville is decrying Shaftesbury for holding opinions that he secretly shared. If there is any doubt of this, it is because of the difficulty of pinning Mandeville down; and that is enough in itself to cast doubt on the representation of Mandeville as a fearless upholder of truth and sincerity at all costs.

Shall we, then, go to the opposite extreme with Minto and (in a rather less charitable version) Wilde, and say that Mandeville is primarily a wit, who cares little for consistency as long as he can propound an ingenious paradox or score off an opponent? Mandeville has too many favourite opinions, sustained over too many books, for that to be wholly true. But it is part of the truth. Why, after all, did Mandeville make such a parade of not being a deist or an atheist? Understandable caution, in a man whose books attracted the attention of grand juries? But it did him little good: almost everyone took his godlessness for granted. Caution may have had something to do with it; but less, I think, than his pleasure at turning the believers' arguments against themselves, at gravely reminding contumacious clergymen that they are committed to ‘meekness, patience, humility, peace and charity to all men’,⁸³ their worldly parishioners that slander and back-biting are not ‘less heinous in the sight of God than murder or adultery’,⁸⁴ and both of them that, in a matter on which St. Paul himself could only appeal to the impenetrable mysteriousness of God's ways, ‘the subtlest logician or most learned theologist … can have no more claim or colour to be dogmatical … than the simplest shepherd, or the most illiterate plowman.’⁸⁵ Mandeville is quite genuinely deploring sectarian bitterness and worldly spitefulness, and he does want to make a point about predestination; but he is also having fun. His is not the simple-minded earnestness of a man with a message. It would not quite be true to say that he prefers the booby-trap to either the rapier or the bludgeon; but it is characteristic that, when he wants Cleomenes to attack Shaftesbury, he begins by making him pretend to have been converted to Shaftesbury's views. He enjoys an ingenious argument or an apt parallel (the parable of small beer, the analogy of the dirt in the streets of London, or the castrati, the likening of society to a bowl of punch) for its own sake. Sometimes I think he lets virtuosity take over, as when (with doubtful taste, but an undoubted gift for parody) he imagines the pious exhortations of the poor wretch being hanged at Tyburn by his improved method, and renders them in the most nauseating of evangelical styles.

Yet, if Mandeville is not earnest, he is usually serious: he does have something he wants to say. If one had to characterize him briefly, one might do worse than take as a text a sentence from Free Thoughts on Religion: ‘My aim is to make men penetrate into their own consciences and by searching without flattery into the true motives of their actions, learn to know themselves.’⁸⁶ So put, this sounds, and is intended to sound, like the earnest preacher again, the enemy of hypocrisy; but it might also do for the psychologist. Mandeville may have been disingenuous at times; but disingenuousness and self-deception are not the same thing. He does take ‘Know thyself’ seriously; and he sees (and makes Cleomenes point out, with side references to weeding gardens and exterminating moles)⁸⁷ that moralizing about the passions can get in the way of understanding them. The botanist is just as interested in weeds as in the prize-winners at the garden show; and Mandeville is not so much exhorting men to repent as to understand themselves. Hutcheson's sneer: ‘so dearly does he love making a very Dispensatory of Passions’⁸⁸ does fasten on to one truth about Mandeville. This love of his was not unrequited: his analysis of the code of Honour, or of the motives underlying politeness and good breeding, his pursuit of ‘self-liking’ in all its manifold disguises, his speculations on the origin of language, his insistence on the evolutionary principle in explaining human behaviour, all represent genuine achievements. Yet this is clearly not the whole truth about Mandeville either. The satirist, the novelist, and the moralist all intrude upon the dispassionate psychologist. Even after he has substituted the neutral word ‘self-liking’ for the tendentious ‘pride’ (which is in any case, he comes to realize, only one manifestation of self-liking), his thesis is still about human weakness and frailty. When he preaches the sermon of ‘a crafty divine’ rallying the troops before battle or gives us a character sketch of Oliver Cromwell, he is not just grappling with the problem of why men risk their lives in war, or how they maintain themselves in power: he is also writing as an anti-clerical and as a debunker.

So far, then, it seems that Mandeville cannot be characterized in a sentence or two, and that he will not fit neatly into any single pigeon-hole. He was a highly complex and sometimes inconsistent man. Like most of us.

Perhaps one should stop there and accept that, once we have looked at the satirist, the wit, the social reformer, the medical man, the theologian, the psychologist, and the moralist, and perhaps one or two others not dealt with here, such as the economist or the politician, there is nothing useful to be said further about Mandeville the whole man. Yet perhaps there is, after all, something that is fairly central to all of these: a vision of the universe and of man's place in it. It is mainly, if not entirely, a comic vision: one might perhaps call it tragicomic.

Visions are notoriously difficult to capture. Let us approach this one obliquely, by considering another vision of the universe which both resembles it and contrasts with it. In his much anthologized and uncharacteristically dithyrambic essay, ‘A Free Man's Worship’, Bertrand Russell asks how we are to come to terms with the universe revealed to us by modern science, in which ‘Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving’ and ‘his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms’. ‘Only within the scaffolding of these truths’, he tells us, ‘only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.’⁸⁹

We are inclined to think of this as a purely twentieth-century problem; but of course it is not. Something like it presented itself to Spinoza, who proceeded to reinterpret the traditional theological formulas so as to accommodate the view that man was a small and insignificant part of nature, and nature essentially indifferent to man. God, he suggested, was just another name for Nature, mind and matter were reverse sides of the same medal, and the Love of God the frame of mind of one who admires the neat way in which every part fits into the whole (the spider's web and the fly's delicate wing, to take Shaftesbury's example) and the laws of nature work themselves out with austere perfection, regardless of the hopes and fears of self-centred individuals who cannot see past their own noses, especially when they are dropping off with frost-bite. It is the frame of mind in which a biologist might take pleasure in observing the inexorable progress of his own disease and noting how well it exemplified the laws of physiology and biochemistry, themselves exemplifications of those more general physical laws, which, by realizing all their manifold possibilities, produce a varied but unified whole, that perfection which is the sum of all being, and also its ground and sustaining cause.

Russell's solution is different. Instead of consoling himself with the reflection that this pitiless universe has its own austere beauty, man can remind himself that this beauty, like all beauty, is after all a creation of the mind of man. ‘Brief and powerless is Man's life, on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.’ Freedom is to be found, not in the consciousness of necessity, or in prostrating oneself before it, but in man's ability to fashion his own ideals even though they are doomed to frustration: ‘to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.’⁹⁰ It is a solution that also seems to have commended itself to the existentialists.

But not to Mandeville. He too is impressed by the cruelty and indifference of nature, and by the extent to which man is the sport of forces outside his control, even when, like his own passions and appetites, they are inside him. He is sure that there is no solution to the problem of evil; in that respect Shaftesbury's optimistic deism is no better than orthodox Christianity. He is just as sure as Russell that man does not live in a cosy little world in which somehow good will be the final goal of ill: no one misinterpreted him more egregiously than Browning. Man is of very little importance in the scheme of things: if the sun's sole purpose was to warm the earth, it would not need to be so large. It must have been made ‘to enlighten and cherish other Bodies besides this Planet of ours’.⁹¹ And even on this planet Providence has ‘no greater regard to our species than it has to Flies, and the Spawn of Fish’.⁹² But Mandeville does not take up Russell's stance of heroic though hopeless defiance. In some ways he is nearer to Spinoza's scientific quietism: though ‘quietist’ would be an odd word to apply to Mandeville. But consider this snatch of dialogue:

CLEO.:
… All Actions in Nature, abstractly consider'd, are equally indifferent; and whatever it may be to individual Creatures, to die is not a greater Evil to this Earth, or the whole Universe, than it is to be born.
HOR.:
That is to make the First Cause of Things not an Intelligent Being.
CLEO.:
Why so? Can you not conceive an Intelligent, and even a most Wise Being, that is not only exempt from, but likewise incapable of entertaining any Malice or Cruelty?(93)

Cleomenes' retort may be only a debating point: perhaps this is one of the places in which Horatio is meant to get the better of the argument, and Cleomenes to be merely evasive. I think that this is true to the extent that Mandeville meant (though he could not let Cleomenes say) that the First Cause was incapable of malice or cruelty only in the sense that it was also incapable of compassion, or fatherly love, or the other attributes of a personal god. But it is probably not just as a debating point that Mandeville makes Cleomenes deploy the argument from design:

From the little we know of the Sun and Stars, their Magnitudes, Distances, and Motion; and what we are more nearly acquainted with, the gross, visible Parts in the Structure of Animals, and their Oeconomy it is demonstrable that they are the Effects of an intelligent Cause, and the Contrivance of a Being infinite in Wisdom as well as Power.⁹⁴

Mandeville may have been a deist rather than an atheist. Most proponents of the argument from design do not take it seriously enough: they triumphantly produce the conclusion, that the universe is controlled by an intelligent being, and do not go on to ask what attributes such a being, who designed such a universe, must have. It is clear to Mandeville that the First Cause is certainly not benevolent; but he readily concedes its extraordinary ingenuity. Death is an ingenious contrivance for preventing the world from being overpopulated; and how neat the arrangement by which one animal keeps alive by eating another!

CLEO.:
… For the Continuance of every Species, among such an infinite Variety of Creatures, as this Globe yields; it was highly necessary, that the Provision for their Destruction should not be less ample, than that, which was made for the Generation of them; and therefore the Sollicitude of Nature in procuring Death, and the Consumption of Animals, is visibly superiour to the Care she takes to feed and preserve them.
HOR.:
Prove that pray.
CLEO.:
Millions of her Creatures are starv'd every Year and doom'd to perish for want of Sustenance; but whenever any dye, there is always plenty of Mouths to devour them. But then again, she gives all she has: Nothing is so fine or elaborate, as that she grudges it for Food; nor is any thing more extensive or impartial than her Bounty: She thinks nothing too good for the meanest of her Broods, and all Creatures are equally welcome to every thing they can find to eat. How curious is the Workmanship in the Structure of a common Fly; how inimitable are the Celerity of his Wings, and the Quickness of all his Motions in hot Weather! Should a Pythagorean, that was likewise a good Master in Mechanicks, by the help of a Microscope, pry into every minute part of this changeable Creature, and duly consider the Elegancy of its Machinery, would he not think it a great pity, that thousands of Millions of animated Beings, so nicely wrought and admirably finish'd, should every Day be devour'd by little Birds and Spiders, of which we stand in so little need?(95)

This is Shaftesbury's ‘Animal-Order or Oeconomy’, the Great One of Nature, more sardonically observed; but Mandeville does not deny the skilfulness and the intricacy of the contrivance. Nature's solicitude in procuring death has been responsible for other master-strokes of ingenuity: disease, for example, and war (including ‘general Massacres, private Murders, Poyson, Sword, and all hostile Force’):⁹⁶ in order to perfect this device it was necessary to endow man with a large stock of innate aggressiveness.

For man is a part of nature: as much a puppet in her hands as the spider or the fly. And this rules out a response like Russell's. It is no use trying to console oneself with thoughts of man's indomitable spirit and his lofty ideals. Man is nature's tame lapdog like everything else, and his ideals are themselves illusions by which he is tricked into serving nature's purpose: all the swagger about national honour and martial glory, for example, is just a way of getting him to keep the population down.

The system works, of course, by means of the passions and appetites of animals: hunger, for example. And clearly man is no exception. Intent on gratifying his passions, he is constantly contributing to results he does not intend: his lust perpetuates his species, his greed keeps other animals from getting too numerous, his anger and malice perform the same service for his own kind. His fear and his weakness gradually lead him, when enough of his fellows have been eaten by wolves or lions, to stumble into society; his aggressiveness, his urge for dominance, and his unreliability make it necessary for the social bonds to be tightened, and a morality devised; his taste for luxury and display lead to the development of civilization. All this he does without knowing clearly what he is doing, or seeing where he is going: often enough he only does it because he is nursing fictions which tickle his vanity.

That is the universe, and man's place in it, as Mandeville sees it. It is not a spectacle to call forth Russell's defiant glorification of man, or Spinoza's pietistic reverence, or Shaftesbury's beaming optimism. It is on the whole a comic spectacle. It is particularly diverting to notice how everything has the opposite effect to what you might expect: how men's weakness and fear make them eventually the lords of creation, how arrogance and vanity make men invent modesty and politeness and apparent self-effacement, how the poverty and ignorance of the labouring poor create a rich, sophisticated, and luxurious civilization; how fear can make men risk their lives, and vanity lead them to mortify the flesh, and self-seeking make them contribute more to the well-being of other men than ever benevolence would: how, in short, good springs up and pullulates from evil as naturally as chickens do from eggs.⁹⁷

In such a universe, what is to be done? Nothing very much, except to lean back and enjoy it, with a wry kind of enjoyment: noting that respectable businessmen behave very much like criminals, and that the professional devotees of humility and charity have a formidable record of rapacity, contentiousness, and readiness to persecute. One may, perhaps, try to stop some of the more obvious silliness, like whipping prostitutes to make them virtuous, when society offers them no alternative means of making a living, or allowing criminals to go to their death in an atmosphere of boozy adulation. And one may make a protest against men's cutting each other's throats in a frenzy of brotherly love. But one need not expect to achieve much:

If you ask me, why I have done all this, cui bono? and what Good these Notions will produce? truly, besides the Reader's Diversion, I believe none at all … Mankind having for so many Ages remain'd still the same, notwithstanding the many instructive and elaborate Writings, by which their Amendment has been endeavour'd, I am not so vain as to hope for better Success from so inconsiderable a Trifle.⁹⁸

One should, of course, try to remain clear-sighted oneself, surrounded though one is by a fog of almost universal self-deception and hypocrisy. But one should not delude oneself that one can blow away the fog or be too earnest in denouncing it: better to write for the diversion of one's readers, and oneself. One might as well, then, pretend to go along with some of the delusions, and have some fun on the way, by pointing out the less comfortable conclusions that might be drawn from them, but seldom are. Besides, human knowledge really is very limited: we know practically nothing even about our own bodies, let alone about First and Last Things. With a little ingenuity, it is possible to make a plausible case for all sorts of unlikely hypotheses. And there really is something to be said for that last resort of the theologian when pushed into a corner (like St. Paul): man can hardly expect to understand fully a universe of which he is a small and insignificant part. No doubt the proper conclusion from that is that one should suspend judgement on ultimate metaphysical questions, not that one should feel free to dogmatize about them, and accept the most unlikely hypotheses without question, on the doubtful evidence of ‘revelation’. But it might be amusing to ignore that from time to time and demonstrate to the theologians that theirs is a game that two can play.

Is that ‘the real Mandeville’? I think that it at least represents one of his moods, and a fairly constant one; and that it may help to explain how he can be at once tough-minded and tolerant, visionary and cynical, a denouncer of deception who constantly dissimulates. In his writings, as in the bowl of punch to which he compared society, apparently incompatible ingredients combine to make a stimulating and palatable mixture. Even if it was too potent for many of his contemporaries (though they drank it avidly) the time may now have come to recommend it to connoisseurs.

Notes

1. W. Law, Remarks upon a late Book entitled The Fable of The Bees, 1724, ed. F. D. Maurice, Cambridge, 1845, p. 67.

2. B. Mandeville, A Vindication of the Book, from the Aspersions Contain'd in a Presentment of the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and an Abusive Letter to Lord C. In The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 1924, vol. 1, p. 384.

3. J. Wesley, Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Nehemiah Curnock, London, Epworth Press, 8 vols., 1909-16. Entry for 14 April 1756, vol. 4, p. 157.

4. Amelia, Book 3, Chapter 5; Tom Jones, Book 6, Chapter 1.

5. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, Part VII, Section II, Chapter 4. For the La Rochefoucauld story, see ‘Short Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’ in Wealth of Nations, London, Nelson, 1864, pp. vii-viii.

6. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, 1789, Chapter 1.

7. Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 25 (June 1846), 484, in one of a series of articles called ‘Extracts from the Portfolio of a Man of the World’.

8. Quoted by J. M. Robertson in his essay ‘The Fable of the Bees’, in Essays toward a Critical Method, London, 1889, p. 227. James Mill defended Mandeville in his Fragment on Mackintosh, 1835.

9. L. Stephen, ‘Mandeville's Fable of the Bees’, in Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking, London, 1907, p. 315.

10. Louis I. Bredworld, ‘The gloom of the Tory Satirists’, in J. Clifford, ed., Eighteenth-Century English Literature, New York, Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 16.

11. F. Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter and Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees, in Collected Works, Georg Olms, Hildesheim, 1971, vol. 7, p. 407.

12. L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. British Moralists, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1897, vol. 1, pp. xvi and xv.

13. R. Browning, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, 1887.

14. Quoted in Kaye's edition of The Fable of the Bees, vol. 2, p. 438.

15. F. Hutcheson, op. cit., p. 148.

16. B. Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, 1732, pp. 104-5 (Second Dialogue).

17. Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, vol. 2, pp. 12-13 (Preface).

18. B. Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, 1732, pp. 43-4 (First Dialogue).

19. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, p. 199 (Remark R).

20. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, pp. 221-2 (Remark R).

21. Origin of Honour, pp. 77-9 (Second Dialogue).

22. See e.g. nos. 25, 29, and 31 of the Tatler.

23. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, p. 32.

24. Origin of Honour, pp. 156-7 (Third Dialogue).

25. Ibid., pp. 150-1 (Third Dialogue).

26. Ibid., pp. 160-1 (Third Dialogue).

27. Origin of Honour, pp. 215-17 (Fourth Dialogue).

28. B. Mandeville, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness, 2nd ed., 1729, pp. 149-50 (Chapter 6).

29. B. Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask'd: or Female Dialogues betwixt an elderly Maiden Lady and her Niece, on several Diverting Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs, Morals, etc., of the Times, 1709, p. 73 (Fourth Dialogue).

30. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 2, pp. 18-19 (Preface to Part 2).

31. Ibid., p. 109 (Third Dialogue).

32. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 40 (Introduction to An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue).

33. Ibid., p. 166 (Remark O).

34. Origin of Honour, p. 56 (Second Dialogue).

35. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, p. 404 (A Vindication of the Book from the Aspersions, etc.).

36. R. Whately, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, 2nd ed., 1832 (Reprints of Economic Classics, New York, Augustus M. Kelley, 1966, p. 44).

37. L. Stephen, ‘Mandeville's Fable of the Bees’, in Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking, London, 1907, p. 279.

38. For example, his comparison of the evangelist to the father of a family ridding his children's hair of lice. See W. Y. Tindal, John Bunyan. Mechanick Preacher, New York, Russell & Russell, 1964.

39. Free Thoughts on Religion, pp. 143-4.

40. Ibid., pp. 145-6.

41. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, pp. 231-2 (Remark T).

42. Thomas R. Edwards, Jr., ‘Mandeville's Moral Prose’, ELH 31 (1964), 208.

43. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, p. 7 (Preface).

44. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., Edinburgh, A. & C. Black, 1875-87, vol. 15 (1883), p. 472.

45. Free Thoughts on Religion, p. 169 (Chapter 7).

46. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 2, p. 103 (Third Dialogue).

47. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 219-20 (Remark R).

48. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 101 (Third Dialogue).

49. L. Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking, 1907, pp. 281-2.

50. Ibid., p. 314.

51. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, pp. xvii-xx. Most of the facts mentioned in this paragraph come from Kaye.

52. Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, 1711, pp. xii and 40.

53. Gentleman's Magazine, 3 (1733), 46.

54. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, facing p. xx (reproduction of Mandeville's will).

55. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1787, p. 263.

56. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, p. xxiii, n. 3.

57. P. B. Anderson, ‘Bernard Mandeville on Gin’, PMLA 54 (1939), 775-84.

58. Ibid., p. 777.

59. Treatise on the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, 1711, p. 272.

60. Ibid., p. 273.

61. S. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets. Works, 1823, vol. 7, p. 114; Hawkins, op. cit., p. 264.

62. B. Franklin, Autobiography. Works. ed. J. Bigelow, New York, Putnam's, 1904, vol. 1, p. 92.

63. [G. Bluet], Enquiry whether … Virtue tends to … Wealth or Poverty …, 1725, p. 97.

64. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, p. 263 (Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools).

65. Ibid., p. 263.

66. R. Fiddes, General Treatise of Morality, 1724, p. cxii.

67. Female Tatler, no. 60, 21-3 Nov. 1709.

68. Tatler, no. 44, 21 July 1709.

69. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, pp. xxvii-xxviii.

70. Chambers' Encyclopedia, 1888-92, vol. 7, p. 16, under Mandeville, Bernard de.

71. N. Wilde, ‘Mandeville's Place in English Thought’, Mind, 11 (1898), 224.

72. A Letter to Dion, 1732, p. 48.

73. G. Berkeley, Alciphron. Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, vol. 3, p. 60.

74. G. Berkeley, Alciphron. Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, vol. 3, p. 62.

75. Ibid., p. 80.

76. A Letter to Dion, 1732, p. 48.

77. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 2, p. 47 (First Dialogue).

78. Ibid., p. 332 (Search into the Nature of Society).

79. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2nd ed., 1714, vol. 1, pp. 29-30 (A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm).

80. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 2, p. 53 (First Dialogue).

81. Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, 1732, p. 154.

82. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 2, p. 252.

83. Free Thoughts on Religion, 2nd ed., 1729, p. 16.

84. Ibid., p. 13.

85. Ibid., p. 124.

86. Free Thoughts on Religion, 2nd ed., 1729, p. 11.

87. Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, 1732, pp. 4-5.

88. F. Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter and Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees. Works, G. Olms, Hildesheim, 1971, vol. 7, Opera Minora, p. 166.

89. B. Russell, ‘A Free Man's Worship’, in Mysticism and Logic, New York, Norton, 1929, pp. 47-8.

90. B. Russell, ‘A Free Man's Worship’, in Mysticism and Logic, p. 57.

91. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 2, p. 244 (Fifth Dialogue).

92. Ibid., p. 251 (Fifth Dialogue).

93. Ibid., p. 252 (Fifth Dialogue).

94. Ibid., p. 311 (Sixth Dialogue).

95. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 2, pp. 249-50 (Fifth Dialogue).

96. Ibid., p. 254 (Fifth Dialogue).

97. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 91 (Remark G).

98. Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. 1, p. 8 (Preface).