iii
If the appearances in the poem of Peterborough, Whiston, Clarges,
and Douglas indicate that Arbuthnot could be the author of "The
Rabbit-Man-Midwife," other facts about the poem—facts about its
publication and about its satiric theme, strategy and style—are all
consistent with his habits.
"His imagination was almost inexhaustible," remarked Lord
Chesterfield, "and whatever subject he treated, or was consulted upon, he
immediately overflowed with all it could possibly produce. It was at
anybody's service, for as soon as he was exonerated he did not care what
became of it; insomuch, that his sons, when young, have frequently made
kites of his scattered papers of hints, which would have furnished good
matter for folios."[42] The story of his
sons and their kites, whatever its literal truth, epitomizes what is known
about Arbuthnot's writing and publishing habits. Arbuthnot, Chesterfield
went on to say, was not "in the least jealous of his fame as an author." He
seems to have been so unconcerned whether or not he was credited with his
own works that he let them pass for those of others and even foisted their
authorship on friends as a kind of practical joke ("Dr.
Arbuthnot is a strange creature," said Pope; "he goes out of
town, and
leaves his Bastards at other folks doors").[43] He often allowed his pieces to
circulate
in manuscript, not pressing them toward publication, and when they did
come out in print, they were usually unrevised and published
anonymously.[44] "The
Rabbit-Man-Midwife" shares all these characteristics: passed in manuscript
(as evidenced by the Douglas copy), not published until four years after it
was written, and then unrevised and anonymously.
Stylistically, too, "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" is similar to
Arbuthnot's work. Typically, his satires are occasional, and structurally
they are shaped by the event itself or by the free play of wit over the
particular historical circumstances that have occasioned the satire.
Arbuthnot's lack of structural control—or his lack of interest in
asserting
such control over his material—has been remarked on by almost all
of his
critics, who characterize the movement of his satires as digressive,
desultory, and casual.[45] Even in
The History of John Bull, where one would expect a
structural
coherence and unity because of its historical frame, its narrative line, and
its allegorical method, Arbuthnot's idiosyncratic digressiveness has sent
some scholars to the looser models of Menippean satire in an attempt to
find a source of his style.[46] At his
best, Arbuthnot is superficially similar to Swift: both work in a rapid,
centrifugal movement, encompassing more and more targets; but, unlike
Swift's satire, Arbuthnot's tends not to have that centripetal
countermovement which creates a vertiginous sense of dove-tailing, giving
the reader the impression that amidst the rapid proliferation of targets, they
are all the same target, sharing common psychological aberrations or
identical moral failings. Arbuthnot's targets seem just to proliferate. His
mind, as one of his critics has observed, was "keenly alive to the next
thing, but not to the unity of all things,"[47] and typically his satires are
structured
serially, drifting from satiric butt to satiric butt, one related to the other by
little beyond the fact
that they all exemplify a highly generalized "foolishness." Such, too, is the
movement of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife." As the alternative title to the
poem, "Bunny's Dad," shows, there is no center or focus here. The poem
is really a series of four discrete satiric portraits, one simply yielding to the
next, building to no discernible structure or unity, each developing its own
point or joke.
Finally, "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" reflects preoccupations that are
central to Arbuthnot's works. Arbuthnot's overriding drive in almost all his
non-satiric writing was to eschew the eccentric, the idiosyncratic, and the
esoteric and search for simple, commonsensical principles of order or
explanation. "The Reader must not be surpriz'd to find the most common
and ordinary Facts taken notice of," he said, defending his methods; "many
important Consequences may be drawn from the Observation of the most
common Things."[48] In this pursuit
of the quotidian explanation, Arbuthnot's impulse was to regularize the
anomalous, to prefer the usual to the extraordinary, or to perceive the
orderly in the aberrant, the explicable in the apparently wonderful and
miraculous. In his first published work, Of the Laws of
Chance,
he showed how the seemingly incalculable vagaries of chance could be
reduced to mathematical reasoning and subjected to orderly rules;
in An Examination of Dr. Woodward's Account of the
Deluge,
he mocked system-making that relied on the evidence of the wonderful and
miraculous, creating explanations "contrary to the Laws of Nature, and .
. . the Philosophy of Second Causes"[49]; in "An Argument for Divine
Providence,
taken from the constant regularity observed in the Births of both Sexes," he
demonstrated that an apparent statistical anomaly in birth rates was actually
proof of an over-arching regularity in nature; in An Essay on the
Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, he argued for the importance
of mathematics on the grounds that it revealed the "simple and natural"
laws that direct all physical phenomena, "applicable even to such things as
seem to be governed by no rule."[50]
"There are two things common to all Mankind," Arbuthnot observed,
"Air and Aliment,"[51] and it is utterly
characteristic of him that the only two medical works he wrote were
An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies
and
An Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments. And it is
utterly
characteristic, too, that in these two works he rejected all esoteric
explanations, finding the reasons for health and disease not in "occult or
extraordinary" causes, but in the "Common Properties" of things we eat
"daily by Pounds" or breathe "inwardly every Moment."[52] One can see gestures of this
profound
habit of mind even in his last work, Tables of Ancient Coins,
Weights
and Measures, where he attempted to systematize the chaos of
Greek,
Roman, Hebrew and other Near Eastern weights and measures by reducing
them to an English standard of equivalents.
One reason for studying mathematics, Arbuthnot argued, was that it
"frees [the mind] from prejudice, credulity, and superstition . . . by giving
us a clear and extensive knowledge of the system of the world."[53] Given his
commitment to the idea of nature as an orderly process governed by simple
laws, it is not surprising that in his satires he repeatedly attacked prejudice,
credulity, and superstition and how they turned the mind away from the
observation of the regularity of nature to a fascination with its putative
miracles and anomalies. Credulity and superstition, according to Arbuthnot,
were rooted in the mind's "incapacity to be moved or delighted with
anything that is vulgar or common,"
[54] and thus one of his favorite targets
was
the witless admiration of wonders, prodigies, and monsters. In works which
he wrote with his fellow Scriblerians, those who seek wonders are marked
for special ridicule: Whiston, of course, who builds elaborate cosmogonies
from the single anomaly of a comet; Fossile, in
Three Hours After
Marriage, who proves himself a credulous fool in his enthusiasm for
curiosities and monsters; Cornelius and Martin Scriblerus, both of whom
are "in daily pursuit of the Curiosities of Nature," fascinated with its
"grand Phænomena"—that is to say, with its oddities like
earthquakes
and monstrous births, not with its simple regularity.
[55] In satires which Arbuthnot wrote
himself,
he also ridiculed the love of wonders, which he saw as springing from
irrationality and ending in hysteria and social disruption. In
The Art
of Political Lying, he listed appeals to "the prodigious" as one of
the
best ways to manipulate a gullible public into heightened passion and
political factionalism.
[56] In
The
History of John Bull, he made the same point in the allegorical
figure
of "Discordia," who retails stories of "Blazing-Stars, Flying Dragons, and
abundance of such Stuff," spreading "Tales and Stories from one to
another, till she had set the whole Neighbourhood together by the
Ears."
[57] He consistently portrayed
Whiston
as beginning in mindless wonder at an oddity of nature and ending in a
socially disruptive millenarian frenzy.
Arbuthnot satirized the attraction of the prodigious once more, this
time by turning to a human monster, Lindamira-Indamora, in the Double
Mistress episode of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.
Arbuthnot had a major, perhaps the principal role in writing this episode;
there exists a manuscript fragment in his hand, with corrections of
Pope.[58] And certainly the episode
plays out the themes that mark Arbuthnot's attitudes toward the prodigious:
its appeal to irrationality (here, Martin's confusion of intellectual curiosity
and sexual desire) and the resulting over-emotionalism and social discord
(the battle among Martin, Mr. Randal, and the Black Prince and the legal,
medical, and theological squabbles that follow).
Given Arbuthnot's temperament and his habitual sentiments, "The
Rabbit-Man-Midwife" easily could have come from his pen. The fact that
an illiterate country woman had duped so many educated Londoners for so
long with her tale of monstrous births obviously would appeal to a man
confident of the regularity of nature and so alive to the absurdity of the
wonderful and prodigious. Too, the near-hysteria of the reactions of the
characters in "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife"—Clarges's anger,
Whiston's
millenarianism, Douglas's abandonment of his professional skepticism for
unthinking enthusiasm—mirrors Arbuthnot's attitudes about the
emotional
effect of monsters, miracles,
and anomalies. And, perhaps most importantly, the author of "The
Rabbit-Man-Midwife" has gravitated to those instances of the greatest social
discord in the Mary Toft incident, when people were "set . . . together by
the Ears," as Arbuthnot described the result of a credulous belief in
prodigies: Whiston's apocalyptic predictions, the struggle between Clarges
and Manningham and Douglas over how to proceed with exposing the
fraud, and the day of 4 December when Douglas gave the impression that
he sanctioned the monstrous births, thus setting off a chaotic and
acrimonious debate.
Did Arbuthnot, then, write "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife"? The evidence
is not conclusive. But Douglas attributed the poem to him, and he was in
an excellent position to know if Arbuthnot had written it. The probable
reference to Douglas in the first stanza and, to a lesser degree, the
references to Clarges and Whiston in the fourth and fifth stanzas, suggest
that the writer of the poem knew first-hand what happened in the bagnio or
was privy to the stories that were making the rounds among the medical
men. Arbuthnot visited the bagnio, and what he did not witness for himself
he could have learned from his medical colleagues. The attack on Whiston's
millenarianism and what appears to be the good-humored tweaking of
Peterborough—both in terms that were common among the
Scriblerians—also point to Arbuthnot. The facts about the publication
of
"The Rabbit-Man-Midwife," its loose, serial style, and its satiric themes are
all markedly similar to Arbuthnot's works. And the exquisite
sense of the ludicrous in the poem is something that could have come from
the pen of Arbuthnot—something, in fact, like what had come from
his
pen in the Double Mistress episode of the Memoirs of Martinus
Scriblerus, where, too, a monster provokes learned and professional
men into exposing their own foolishness. Until more evidence is brought
forward, I think that we must take Douglas's attribution seriously and
consider Arbuthnot's authorship of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" a strong
possibility.
