BOOKS.
DEAN SWIFT.* Da. BIRKBECK HILL'S edition of the letters addressed by Swift to Knightley Chetwode is welcome, despite certain faults of proportion and arrangement. By an accident these admirable specimens of Swift's style have hitherto remained unpublished, and though, of course, they yield in interest to the masterly Journal to Stella, they should long since have attained the dignity of print, and they would have attained this dignity had Forster's Life ever been finished. For they are composed with all their author's ease and vigour ; their phrase is as energetic as their wit is quick ; while one at least is hitten in with the Dean's characteristic irony. "A very ex- traordinary letter," Chetwode calls it, "and designed, I sup- pose, to mortifie me." The supposition is exquisite, and proves that Swift was but half understood even by his intimates.
The editor has done his work with less tact than we have a right to expect. He has sunk the text in commentary, and since there is no distinguishing type, the notes appear as impor- tant as the letters. Again, Dr. Hill has unhappilyapproached his author in the spirit of a schoolmaster. Not onlydoes he tell us far too much about Swift, but he permits himself frequent, unneces- sary digressions. What, for instance, has the derivation of "navvy" to do with the Dean of St. Patrick's ? And who, dyed with the slightest tincture of letters, is not familiar with the form " marish "1 But Dr. Hill is guilty of a still worse sin He proves in several places a lack of sympathy with his author. Like so many of his colleagues, he eyes Swift with suspicion, and misunderstands his character and his satire. Having quoted the well-known passage from The Modest Proposal wherein "a very knowing American" is made to declare that "a young, healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food," he proceeds to argue that Swift was profoundly ignorant or contemptuous of our American Colonies. Others have quoted the same work with as fine a justice to prove that Swift was a cannibal, and a sense of humour might save the most reckless commentator from the literal interpretation of a savage satire.
Again, Dr. Hill asserts that "a vein of baseness" runs through Swift, and he shows this vein "in nothing more than in his dejection at the death of Queen Anne and in his esti- mate of her character." Dr. Hill does not think of that lady "without a certain feeling of good-natured contempt." Swift admired her, and mourned her when she died. It is possible that Dr. Hill's estimate is right and that Swift's was wrong. But Swift's admiration was sincere, and dictated by nothing else than a genuine feeling. From a dead woman he could expect neither promotion nor reward, and his regret for Anne ceased only with his life. Yet he is called "base" because he does not share the world's "good-natured contempt" for a Queen who had shown him kindness. Had he not mourned her, he would doubtless have been " ungrateful." Truly it seems as though any stick were good enough for the back of Jonathan Swift.
It has been his fate to be misunderstood always and every- where. The French, whose Voltaire should have taught them better, are no more appreciative than his own countrymen. Paul Saint-Victor, who was at the pains to write an essay upon him, declared that he lost his meaning when he passed the Straits of Dover. Because he dared to write of monsters, he has constantly been denounced for a monster himself. Not only were the sins of Gulliver imputed to him, but the Tale of a Tub inspired manifold charges of blasphemy, which he most bitterly resented. Nor has his private life ever been secure from prying criticism, and the countless legends of Stella and Vanessa are unprofitable as they are impertinent. Whence comes it, then, that he and his writings have aroused an almost universal wrath I It comes, we believe, from his
• Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift. Edited by G. Birkbeek Hln, D.C.L., LL.D. London : T. Fisher IInwin. [128.]
use of irony, the most dangerous weapon wherewith a man of genius ever armed himself.
For irony is the boomerang of literature. It inevitably returns upon the man who wields it, and harms him more bitterly than it afflicts his adversary. In the first place, it appears to the average intellect a mark of superiority. For why, asks the average intellect, cannot a writer make a plain statement in plain terms ? Secondly, where no obvious signal is set up, the simple reader knows not whether to laugh or to cry, and no man will ever forgive an author whom he misin- terprets. And from first to last Swift was ironic ; irony was in his blood ; and was as necessary to him as was satire to Rabelais. Only, while Rabelais laughed in rotund, good- humoured contempt, Swift smiled a hard, dry smile. "Swift's wit was the wit of sense," said Hazlitt, with a clear thought underlying the jingle, "Rabelais' the wit of nonsense.' For Swift was not content with raising a smile. He never put pen to paper save in scorn of stupidity, or with a fixed desire to reform abuses. And so his serious purpose has been misunder- stood, and his back saddled with all the sins and all the absurdities which he castigated in others. His very perfection has helped to rob him of the world's sympathy. If only now and again he had lapsed from the topmost height of irony, he might have been rewarded by a nod of recognition. But in his contempt he is Olympian. He gave no quarter, as he expected none. He laid bare human folly, and he has aiffered for his courageous indiscretion. "The soul of Rabelais, habitans in sicco," Coleridge's witty phrase, is less luminous than it seems. For Rabelais never let go his geniality, and Swift is nearly always cruel ; but he took care that his cruelty was justified.
He was, besides, a writer of unparalleled excellence, who invented a strong and brilliant prose of his own,—a prose which is inimitable, and which defies analysis. It is not sonorous, save in pages ; it is frequently inaccurate, as any pedant may see for himself. His vocabulary is neither curious nor elaborate ; he separated himself entirely from his Elizabethan ancestors, though, on the other hand, he was remote from the somewhat thin elegance of Addison and Steele. It is his great merit to have given a new force to the common forms of speech, to have set his words in so precise an order that the stress always falls where the sense demands it. Moreover, his style is inevitably clear, direct, and appro- priate ; his phrase never carries a superfluous word ; the meaning is expressed in the briefest terms ; and since the material is always wit, the expression cannot but be witty too. And then his compass is not less remarkable than his mastery. He was equally skilled in controversy and narrative. He can develop a situation with the skill of Defoe, while as a pamphleteer he remains without a rival. If he choose he can amble with the easiest of gaits ; he can change his forensic robe for a loose dressing-gown. The same hand which penned the Drapier's Letters wrote also the Journal to Stella; the same brain which devised the Letter to a Young Clergyman sketched also the opening pages of the immortal Gul- liver. His Polite Conversation is a perfect exposition of the commonplace ; by a tour de force he has put his personages in the most dramatic attitude, and not one of them may boast the thinnest shred of character, though one eminent critic has declared a lifelong attachment to the person of Miss. Any one of these separate achievements is sufficient for immortality, and if their sum enable Swift to defy death, they have not won for him an amiable apprecia- tion. It is an ironic fate—a fate which he might have chosen for himself—and it is not wonderful that he formed no school and tempted the courage of few imitators. Irony, being a matter of temperament, defies the most "sedulous ape," and Swift's style, which is personal in its essence rather than on the surface, is more easily admired than copied. But there is ne doubt that he influenced the pamphleteers who came after him The clear thought, the incisive phrase of Junius owe much tc the great example of Swift. For Junius, too, made words cut and burn and sting ; he, too, forced a bitter truth into satire. And yet they are but a handful who have dared to match themselves with the author of The Modest Proposal : as during his life he was superior to his fellows, so he has been solitary after death. But for those who will rid themselves of a time-worn prejudice Swift will ever seem, not only a great writer of English, but the world's supreme master of sustained irony.
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