Poems of Jonathan Swift (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

Dr. Johnson, in his "Life of Swift," after citing with approval Delany's

character of him, as he describes him to Lord Orrery, proceeds to say:

"In the poetical works there is not much upon which the critic can

exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and

have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and

gaiety. They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The

diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. There

seldom occurs a hard laboured expression or a redundant epithet; all his

verses exemplify his own definition of a good style--they consist of

'proper words in proper places.'"

Of his earliest poems it is needless to say more than that if nothing

better had been written by him than those Pindaric Pieces, after the

manner of Cowley--then so much in vogue--the remark of Dryden, "Cousin

Swift, you will never be a Poet," would have been fully justified. But

conventional praise and compliments were foreign to his nature, for his

strongest characteristic was his intense sincerity. He says of himself

that about that time he had writ and burnt and writ again upon all manner

of subjects more than perhaps any man in England; and it is certainly

remarkable that in so doing his true genius was not sooner developed, for

it was not till he became chaplain in Lord Berkeley's household that his

satirical humour was first displayed--at least in verse--in "Mrs. Frances

Harris' Petition."--His great prose satires, "The Tale of a Tub," and

"Gulliver's Travels," though planned, were reserved to a later time.--In

other forms of poetry he soon afterwards greatly excelled, and the title

of poet cannot be refused to the author of "Baucis and Philemon"; the

verses on "The Death of Dr. Swift"; the "Rhapsody on Poetry"; "Cadenus

and Vanessa"; "The Legion Club"; and most of the poems addressed to

Stella, all of which pieces exhibit harmony, invention, and imagination.

Swift has been unduly censured for the coarseness of his language upon

Certain topics; but very little of this appears in his earlier poems, and

what there is, was in accordance with the taste of the period, which

never hesitated to call a spade a spade, due in part to the reaction from

the Puritanism of the preceding age, and in part to the outspeaking

frankness which disdained hypocrisy. It is shown in Dryden, Pope, Prior,

of the last of whom Johnson said that no lady objected to have his poems

in her library; still more in the dramatists of that time, whom Charles

Lamb has so humorously defended, and in the plays of Mrs. Aphra Behn,

who, as Pope says, "fairly puts all characters to bed." But whatever

coarseness there may be in some of Swift's poems, such as "The Lady's

Dressing Room," and a few other pieces, there is nothing licentious,

nothing which excites to lewdness; on the contrary, such pieces create

simply a feeling of repulsion. No one, after reading the "Beautiful young

Nymph going to bed," or "Strephon and Chloe," would desire any personal

acquaintance with the ladies, but there is a moral in these pieces, and

the latter poem concludes with excellent matrimonial advice. The

coarseness of some of his later writings must be ascribed to his

misanthropical hatred of the "animal called man," as expressed in his

famous letter to Pope of September 1725, aggravated as it was by his

exile from the friends he loved to a land he hated, and by the reception

he met with there, about which he speaks very freely in his notes to the

"Verses on his own Death."

On the morning of Swift's installation as Dean, the following scurrilous

lines by Smedley, Dean of Clogher, were affixed to the doors of St.

Patrick's Cathedral:

To-day this Temple gets a Dean

  Of parts and fame uncommon,

Us'd both to pray and to prophane,

  To serve both God and mammon.

When Wharton reign'd a Whig he was;

  When Pembroke--that's dispute, Sir;

In Oxford's time, what Oxford pleased,

  Non-con, or Jack, or Neuter.

This place he got by wit and rhime,

  And many ways most odd,

And might a Bishop be in time,

  Did he believe in God.

Look down, St. Patrick, look, we pray,

  On thine own church and steeple;

Convert thy Dean on this great day,

  Or else God help the people.

And now, whene'er his Deanship dies,

  Upon his stone be graven,

A man of God here buried lies,

  Who never thought of heaven.

It was by these lines that Smedley earned for himself a niche in "The

Dunciad." For Swift's retaliation, see the poems relating to Smedley at

the end of the first volume, and in volume ii, at p. 124, note.

This bitterness of spirit reached its height in "Gulliver's Travels,"

surely the severest of all satires upon humanity, and writ, as he tells

us, not to divert, but to vex the world; and ultimately, in the fierce

attack upon the Irish Parliament in the poem entitled "The Legion Club,"

dictated by his hatred of tyranny and oppression, and his consequent

passion for exhibiting human nature in its most degraded aspect.

But, notwithstanding his misanthropical feelings towards mankind in

general, and his "scorn of fools by fools mistook for pride," there never

existed a warmer or sincerer friend to those whom he loved--witness the

regard in which he was held by Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot,

and Congreve, and his readiness to assist those who needed his help,

without thought of party or politics. Although, in some of his poems,

Swift rather severely exposed the follies and frailties of the fair sex,

as in "The Furniture of a Woman's Mind," and "The Journal of a Modern

Lady," he loved the companionship of beautiful and accomplished women,

amongst whom he could count some of his dearest and truest friends; but

  He loved to be bitter at

  A lady illiterate;

and therefore delighted in giving them literary instruction, most notably

in the cases of Stella and Vanessa, whose relations with him arose

entirely from the tuition in letters which they received from him. Again,

when on a visit at Sir Arthur Acheson's, he insisted upon making Lady

Acheson read such books as he thought fit to advise, and in the doggerel

verses entitled "My Lady's Lamentation," she is supposed to resent his

"very imperious" manner of instruction:

No book for delight

Must come in my sight;

But instead of new plays,

Dull Bacon's Essays,

And pore every day on

That nasty Pantheon.

As a contrast to his imperiousness, there is an affectionate simplicity

in the fancy names he used to bestow upon his female friends. Sir William

Temple's wife, Dorothea, became Dorinda; Esther Johnson, Stella; Hester

Vanhomrigh, Vanessa; Lady Winchelsea, Ardelia; while to Lady Acheson he

gave the nicknames of Skinnybonia, Snipe, and Lean. But all was taken by

them in good part; for his rather dictatorial ways were softened by the

fascinating geniality and humour which he knew so well how to employ when

he used to "deafen them with puns and rhyme."

Into the vexed question of the relations between Swift and Stella I do

not purpose to enter further than to record my conviction that she was

never more to him than "the dearest friend that ever man had." The

suggestion of a concealed marriage is so inconsistent with their whole

conduct to each other from first to last, that if there had been such a

marriage, instead of Swift having been, as he was, a man of _intense

sincerity_, he must be held to have been a most consummate hypocrite.

In my opinion, Churton Collins settled this question in his essays on

Swift, first published in the "Quarterly Review," 1881 and 1882. Swift's

relation with Vanessa is the saddest episode in his life. The story is

amply told in his poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and in the letters which

passed between them: how the pupil became infatuated with her tutor; how

the tutor endeavoured to dispel her passion, but in vain, by reason; and

how, at last, she died from love for the man who was unable to give love

in return. That Swift ought, as soon as Hester disclosed her passion for

him, at once to have broken off the intimacy, must be conceded; but how

many men possessed of his kindness of heart would have had the courage to

have acted otherwise than he did? Swift seems, in fact, to have been

constitutionally incapable of the _passion_ of love, for he says,

himself, that he had never met the woman he wished to marry. His annual

tributes to Stella on her birthdays express the strongest regard and

esteem, but he "ne'er admitted love a...