TH

CHAPTER V

JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)

HE gloomy figure of JONATHAN SWIFT, in contrast with bright, joyous men like Steele and Addison, resembles a shadow by the side of two luminous forms. Swift has been compared with Rabelais and Voltaire; but, take up Rabelais in an hour of sorrow, and a few pages, perhaps even the first words, will make one laugh; even Voltaire, the spiteful mocker, does not leave behind him the sharp sting of ill-humour which we nearly always feel after reading Swift. We can never picture Rabelais except as a jovial Silenus, with face ruddy with wine; and Frederick the Great was as enchanted with the amiability of the ugly Voltaire as a lover with his mistress; on the other hand, we cannot recall Swift as anything but bilious and jaundiced. Rabelais and Voltaire understand the art of laughing; Swift does not laugh, he grins.

Swift's life was full of deprivations and disappointments; only because his gnawing ambition made him look upon every position he occupied as a humiliation. His troubles began at the University; at Trinity College, Dublin (his native place), it was only by special grace (speciali gratia) that he was allowed his degree, since he obstinately refused to learn the scholastic nonsense which was then called Logic. He then spent eleven years as reader and amanuensis of Sir William Temple, the statesman,―he who felt himself called to be a statesman and considered himself far the intellectual superior of his employer ! For years he had to put up with a poor living at Laracor, in Ireland, and when, at forty-six years of age, he finally became (1713) Dean of St. Patrick's, he was too soured to be content. His ambition held out to him the hopes of an episcopal see which would have opened the doors of the House of Lords to him. As he was unable to play the part of a great politician in Parliament, he played that of a small one in his fugitive pieces and his newspaper, The Examiner, the Conservative opponent of the Addisonian Whig journals.

Swift was serious in his hatred of the world and mankind. He

began with himself; he regularly fasted and mourned on his birthday, and when his friends took leave of him, he said, "I hope you will never see me again." The Latin inscription (written by himself) over his grave in St. Patrick's Cathedral runs as follows:

:

Hic depositum est corpus JONATHAN SWIFT S.T.P., hujus ecclesiae Cathedralis decani, ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit. Abi, viator, et imitare, si poteris, strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicem.

On his journey through life Swift was the object of much affeetion; two women loved him deeply, both of whom died, for him, and owing to him, in the prime of life, after feeling all the tortures of love for a man such as Swift. Their poetical names Stella and Vanessa are still remembered by every Englishman. In ordinary life Stella was Esther Johnson, Vanessa Esther Vanhomrigh. Was he serious in his relations with them? Who shall say?

His letters to Stella are the most delightful productions of his pen, often full of boyish merriment, overflowing with yearning affection; only he could not marry his beloved, and, when he was finally obliged to yield to her entreaties, he compelled her to keep their marriage a secret! These two women, whose devotion to him was unbounded, sank into the grave before him, and Swift died alone, mentally deranged. He had long had a foreboding of his terrible end; on seeing a tree that had been struck by lightning, he is said to have exclaimed to a friend, "I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top."

Swift reminds us of the unhappy boy in Hans Andersen's Little Kay, whose eye was pierced with a piece of glass from the devil's looking-glass, which made him see everything in a satanically distorted form. The consciousness of his own weaknesses impelled him to revenge himself upon his fellow-men; yet he rarely troubled himself about trifles or individuals; in his keenest satires, he always aimed at great and general abuses.

His verses, which fill two volumes, are not poetry-indeed, were not meant to be; they are cleverly rhymed prose, not more prosaic than Pope's compositions, but far wittier; in fact, they are the wittiest doggerel of that period. Swift can never be quite serious; even the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, the story of his love for Esther Vanhomrigh, is written for the most part in a tone of burlesque. The metre itself, the four-footed iambic jingle, used by Butler in Hudibras, is the favourite metre of English comic verse; Swift rarely used any other.

His ablest, although not his most famous work, is A Tale of a Tub (1704), a clever, merciless satire upon religions. Not upon religion, with

respect to which Swift held the same views as his friend Bolingbroke ; that is, he regarded it as essentially a police sergeant for the maintenance of public order. For the existing religious societies he had the toleration of indifference. What aroused his satire was, the eagerness of each of the Christian confessions of faith to represent itself as the only true one, the only embodiment of the teaching of Christ. The subject of his "Tale" is as follows: A father (God) bequeaths to each of his three twin sons, Peter (Catholicism), Martin (Lutherism) and Jack (Calvinism) a coat, with instructions to make no alteration in it. Following the advice of Peter, who claims to be the eldest, the brothers adopt every caprice of fashion, sophistically interpreting their father's will to suit their desires, until the simple coats become pieces of patchwork, very triumphs of sartorial ingenuity. The brothers quarrel, Peter sets himself up as lord over Martin and Jack, until the latter, revolting against his presumption, proceed to improve their coats in such a manner that the one stops half-way, while the other cuts up nearly the whole coat. This account of the story gives no idea of the wealth of spiteful ridicule with which it is told. In style the Tale of a Tub is a masterpiece; Samuel Johnson, who could not endure Swift, bluntly denied that he was the author! When he wrote this Satire, Swift was Vicar of Laracor; but this did not hinder him from scoffing at all the dogmas and usages of the Christian churches, most savagely at those of Catholicism. He himself was a very high churchman. A few of his remarks will illustrate his views upon religion generally :—

To say a man is bound to believe, is neither truth nor sense. You may force men, by interest or punishment, to say or swear they believe, and to act as if they believed; you can go no farther.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

We may add a few of Swift's thoughts on various subjects

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.

Men are grateful in the same degree as they are resentful.

To be angry is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves.

The eye of a critic is often, like a microscope, made so very fine and nice, that it discovers the atoms, grains, and minutest particles, without ever comprehending the whole.

We have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

When a true genius appeareth in the world, you may know him by this infallible sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

The greatest inventions were produced in the times of ignorance; as the use of the compass, gunpowder, printing-and by the dullest nation, as the Germans.

Several "digressions" are inserted in the Tale of a Tub, all very witty, almost in Rabelais' manner, but more virulent. The best of them is the essay Concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth.

Appended to the "Tale" is a short piece, The Battle of the Books, a farcical discussion of the controversy as to the superiority of ancient or modern literature, which at that time was raging both in England and France. Swift's attitude towards this question was one of the same bantering indifference as towards the respective merits of the three Christian religions. It was not generally Swift's way to be enthusiastic about anything; it was enough that the subject afforded a welcome peg to hang his satire and wrath upon; for instance, in The Battle of the Books, and the famous political pamphlets, the Drapier's Letters (1723), directed against the suppression and exploitation of Ireland by the English, and specially called forth by Wood's patent for supplying Ireland with a copper coinage, which was alleged to be inferior in weight and value. Swift knew as well as the English Government that all small coin is below value, and that this need not be injurious to a settled currency, but this was not the main point with him; he wanted to avenge himself on the hated Whig ministry for giving him no higher ecclesiastical dignity than a deanery. The Drapier's Letters also supported the indefensible system of complete severance of trade between Ireland and England, in order to protect the unhappy country from extortion by the latter. These letters made Swift the most popular man in Ireland, and he who had been greeted with stones on entering upon office was received everywhere with ringing of bells.

In his paper The Examiner, he also attacked his political enemies with might and main, but these essays are not so witty and incisive as his pamphlets. Once in his life he appears to have been in earnest in his desire to assist the terrible necessities of Ireland. But how does he set about it? He sits down and writes a short essay, A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public. And what is this philanthropic proposal? After a lengthy, mild introduction, Swift recommends as the last, the only resource, the following: At the end of their first year of life, when they are fat and appetising, the children are to be used as dainties. for the tables of the rich, as substitutes for the price of sucking pigs. It almost makes one sick to read it, but Swift lingers over the details of the dressing, over the statistical calculations of the increasing benefit to parents and the country in such a manner that we feel inclined to fling the book away, if we did not remember what burning

hatred for the wicked butchery of Ireland by the English blazes forth from these pages. It is no longer human; it is the saeva indignatio, which, according to the inscription on his tomb, has torn his heart. Walter Scott called this essay "one of the most extraordinary pieces of humour in our language." It is more: it is the highest pitch of the terrible, to which satire has ever ventured in any language.

Swift's best-known work is his immortal Gulliver's Travels (1720-6), in four parts: A journey to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the unpronounceable Houyhnhnms. Since Defoe's time, descriptions of travel and adventure were the class of books most read. In 1719 Robinson Crusoe was received with unheard-of approval; to it, and perhaps to Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage à la lune Swift was indebted for the suggestion of his book of travels, which was to assure him immortality. For, if he deserves immortality, it is clear that it is not on account of his political pamphlets; Swift will live as long as the idea and name of Lilliput, and should those who are grown up forget him, the world of children will always read with delight Gulliver's adventures in the countries of dwarfs and giants. The most remarkable thing about this book is that, while regarded as a biting satire on mankind, especially contemporary politicians, it is at the same time one of the most splendid children's books for the age which does not yet know that there are such things as satire and hatred of mankind. That same book, which has delighted every child almost as much as Robinson Crusoe and Grimm's Tales, was declared by the Duchess of Marlborough, Swift's mortal enemy, to be the most successful satire ever written on court and political life generally.

The purpose of Gulliver's Travels was to show that all human acts were really trifles: how then must we men appear to the eye of a higher power? Just like the Lilliputians to Gulliver, or Gulliver to a Brobdingnagian!

For the mature reader the enjoyment of Gulliver's Travels is not altogether unalloyed: he tastes the bitterness of Swift in spite of the humour and classical repose of the style.

Swift not only drafted his own epitaph, but also anticipated his death and its effect upon English society. The poem is one of his wittiest, Verses on the death of Dr. Swift, written fourteen years before his death, suggested by La Rochefoucauld's words: "We always find something that is not displeasing to us in the misfortunes of our friends." The description of the sensation which the news of his death makes among his friends and the fashionable society of London is strikingly true, in so far as it corresponds generally to the impression caused by the announcement of a death. What will his dearest friends, Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, and St. John (Bolingbroke) say?