Have we said too much in declaring that of all the men who illustrated that period of our literary history which lies between the Revolution of 1688 and the beginning or middle of the reign of George II. Swift alone (Pope excepted, and he only on certain definite and peculiar grounds) fulfils to any tolerable extent those conditions which would entitle him to the epithet of “great,” already refused to his age as a whole? We do not think so. Swift was a great genius; nay, if by greatness we understand general mass and energy rather than any preconceived peculiarity of quality, he was the greatest genius of his age. Neither Addison, nor Steele, nor Pope, nor Defoe, possessed, in anything like the same degree, that which Goethe and Niebuhr, seeking a name for a certain attribute found often present, as they thought, in the higher and more forcible order of historic characters, agreed to call the demonic element. Indeed very few men in our literature, from first to last, have had so much of this element in them—perhaps the sign and source of all real greatness—as Swift. In him it was so obvious as to attract notice at once. “There is something in your looks,” wrote Vanessa to him, “so awful that it strikes me dumb;” and again, “Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe I tremble with fear;” and again, “What marks are there of a deity that you are not known by?” True, these are the words of a woman infatuated with love; but there is evidence that, wherever Swift went, and in whatever society he was, there was this magnetic power in his presence. Pope felt it; Addison felt it; they all felt it. We question if, among all our literary celebrities, from first to last, there has been one more distinguished for being personally formidable to all who came near him.
And yet, in calling Swift a great genius, we clearly do not mean to rank him in the same order of greatness with such men among his predecessors as Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Milton, or such men among his successors as Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. We even retain instinctively the right of not according to him a certain kind of admiration which we bestow on such men of his own generation as Pope, Steele, and Addison. How is this? What is the drawback about Swift’s genius which prevents us from referring him to that highest order of literary greatness to which we do refer others who in respect of hard general capacity were apparently not superior to him, and on the borders of which we also place some who in that respect were certainly his inferiors? To make the question more special, why do we call Milton great in quite a different sense from that in which we consent to confer the same epithet on Swift?
Altogether, it will be said, Milton was a greater man than Swift; his intellect was higher, richer, deeper, grander, his views of things were more profound, grave, stately, and exalted. This is a true enough statement of the case; and one likes that comprehensive use of the word intellect which it implies, wrapping up, as it were, all that is in and about a man in this one word, so as to dispense with the distinctions between imaginative and non-imaginative, spiritual and unspiritual natures, and make every possible question about a man a mere question in the end as to the size or degree of his intellect. But such a mode of speaking is too violent and recondite for common purposes. According to the common use of the word intellect, it might be maintained (we do not say it would) that Swift’s intellect, his strength of mental grasp, was equal to Milton’s, and yet that, by reason of the fact that his intellectual style was different, or that he did not grasp things precisely in the Miltonic way, a distinction might be drawn unfavourable to his genius as compared with that of Milton. According to such a view, we must seek for that in Swift’s genius upon which it depends that, while we accord to it all the admiration we bestow on strength, our sympathies with height or sublimity are left unmoved. Nor have we far to seek. When Goethe and Niebuhr generalized in the phrase “the demonic element” that mystic something which they seemed to detect in men of unusual potency among their fellows, they used the word “demonic,” not in its English sense, as signifying what appertains specially to the demons or powers of darkness, but in its Greek sense, as equally implying the unseen agencies of light and good. The demonic element in a man, therefore, may in one case be the demonic of the etherial and celestial, in another the demonic of the Tartarean and infernal. There is a demonic of the supernatural—angels, and seraphs, and white-winged airy messengers, swaying men’s phantasies from above; and there is a demonic of the infra-natural—fiends and shapes of horror tugging at men’s thoughts from beneath. The demonic in Swift was of the latter kind. It is false, it would be an entire mistake as to his genius, to say that he regarded, or was inspired by, only the worldly and the secular—that men, women, and their relations in the little world of visible life, were all that his intellect cared to recognise. He also, like our Miltons and our Shakespeares, and all our men who have been anything more than prudential and pleasant writers, had his being anchored in things and imaginations beyond the visible verge. But, while it was given to them to hold rather by things and imaginations belonging to the region of the celestial, to hear angelic music and the rustling of seraphic wings, it was his unhappier lot to be related rather to the darker and subterranean mysteries. One might say of Swift that he had far less of belief in a God than of belief in a Devil. He is like a man walking on the earth and among the busy haunts of his fellow-mortals, observing them and their ways, and taking his part in the bustle, all the while, however, conscious of the tuggings downward of secret chains reaching into the world of the demons. Hence his ferocity, his misanthropy, his sæva indignatio, all of them true forms of energy, imparting unusual potency to a life, but forms of energy bred of communion with what outlies nature on the lower or infernal side.
Swift, doubtless, had this melancholic tendency in him constitutionally from the beginning. From the first we see him an unruly, rebellious, gloomy, revengeful, unforgiving spirit, loyal to no authority, and gnashing under every restraint. With nothing small or weak in his nature, too proud to be dishonest, bold and fearless in his opinions, capable of strong attachments and of hatred as strong, it was to be predicted that, if the swarthy Irish youth, whom Sir William Temple received into his house when his college had all but expelled him for contumacy, should ever be eminent in the world, it would be for fierce and controversial, and not for beautiful or harmonious, activity. It is clear, however, on a survey of Swift’s career, that the gloom and melancholy which characterized it were not altogether congenital, but, in part at least, grew out of some special circumstance, or set of circumstances, having a precise date and locality among the facts of his life. In other words, there was some secret in Swift’s life, some root of bitterness or remorse, diffusing a black poison throughout his whole existence. That communion with the invisible almost exclusively on the infernal side—that consciousness of chains wound round his own moving frame at the one end, and at the other held by demons in the depths of their populous pit, while no cords of love were felt sustaining him from the countervailing heaven—had its origin, in part at least, in some one recollection or cause of dread. It was some one demon down in that pit that held the chains; the others but assisted him. Thackeray’s perception seems to us exact when he says of Swift that “he goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil;” or again, changing the form of the figure, that “like Abudah, in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night will come, and the inevitable hag with it.” What was this Fury, this hag that duly came in the night, making the mornings horrible by the terrors of recollection, the evenings horrible by those of anticipation, and leaving but a calm hour at full mid-day? There was a secret in Swift’s life: what was it? His biographers as yet have failed to agree on this dark topic. Thackeray’s hypothesis, that the cause of Swift’s despair was chiefly his consciousness of disbelief in the creed to which he had sworn his professional faith, does not seem to us sufficient. In Swift’s days, and even with his frank nature, we think that difficulty could have been got over. There was nothing, at least, so unique in the case as to justify the supposition that this was what Archbishop King referred to in that memorable saying to Dr. Delany, “You have just met the most miserable man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question.” Had Swift made a confession of scepticism to the Archbishop, we do not think the prelate would have been taken so very much by surprise. Nor can we think, with some, that Swift’s vertigo (now pronounced to have been increasing congestion of the brain), and his life-long certainty that it would end in idiocy or madness, are the true explanation of this interview and of the mystery which it shrouds. There was cause enough for melancholy here, but not exactly the cause that meets the case. Another hypothesis there is of a physical kind, which Scott and others hint at, and which finds great acceptance with the medical philosophers. Swift, it is said, was of “a cold temperament,” &c., &c. But why a confession on the part of Swift that he was not a marriageable man, even had he added that he desired, above all things in the world, to be a person of that sort, should have so moved the heart of an Archbishop as to make him shed tears, one cannot conceive. Besides, although this hypothesis might explain much of the Stella and Vanessa imbroglio, it would not explain all; nor do we see on what foundation it could rest. Scott’s assertion that all through Swift’s writings there is no evidence of his having felt the tender passion is simply untrue. On the whole, the hypothesis which has been started of a too near consanguinity between Swift and Stella, either known from the first to one or both, or discovered too late, would most nearly suit the conditions of the case. And yet, as far as we have seen, this hypothesis also rests on air, with no one fact to support it. Could we suppose that Swift, like another Eugene Aram, went through the world with a murder on his mind, it might be taken as a solution of the mystery; but, as we cannot do this, we must be content with supposing that either some one of the foregoing hypotheses, or some combination of them, is to be accepted, or that the matter is altogether inscrutable.
Such by constitution as we have described him—with an intellect strong as iron, much acquired knowledge, an ambition all but insatiable, and a decided desire to be wealthy—Swift, almost as a matter of course, flung himself impetuously into that Whig and Tory controversy which was the question paramount in his time. In that he laboured as only a man of his powers could, bringing to the side of the controversy on which he chanced to be (and we believe when he was on a side it was honestly because he found a certain preponderance of right in it) a hard and ruthless vigour which served it immensely. But from the first, or at all events after the disappointments of a political career had been experienced by him, his nature would not work merely in the narrow warfare of Whiggism and Toryism, but overflowed in general bitterness of reflection on all the customs and ways of humanity. The following passage in Gulliver’s Voyage to Brobdingnag, describing how the politics of Europe appeared to the King of Brobdingnag, shows us Swift himself in his larger mood of thought.
“This prince took a pleasure in conversing with me, inquiring into the manners, religion, laws, government, and learning of Europe; wherein I gave him the best account I was able. His apprehension was so clear, and his judgment so exact, that he made very wise reflections and observations upon all I said. But I confess that, after I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved country, of our trade, and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in religion and parties in the state, the prejudices of his education prevailed so far that he could not forbear taking me up in his right hand, and, stroking me gently with the other, after a hearty fit of laughing asking me whether I was a Whig or Tory. Then, turning to his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff nearly as tall as the mainmast of the ‘Royal Sovereign,’ he observed how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I; ‘And yet,’ says he, ‘I dare engage these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray.’ And thus he continued on, while my colour came and went several times with indignation to hear our noble country, the mistress of arts and arms, the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe, the seat of virtue, piety, honour, truth, the pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously treated.”
Swift’s writings, accordingly, divide themselves, in the main, into two classes,—pamphlets, tracts, lampoons, and the like, bearing directly on persons and topics of the day, and written with the ordinary purpose of a partisan; and satires of a more general aim, directed, in the spirit of a cynic philosopher, against humanity on the whole, or against particular human classes, arrangements, and modes of thinking. In some of his writings the politician and the general satirist are seen together. The Drapier’s Letters and most of the poetical lampoons exhibit Swift in his direct character as a party-writer; in the Tale of a Tub we have the ostensible purpose of a partisan masking a reserve of general scepticism; in the Battle of the Books we have a satire partly personal to individuals, partly with a reference to a prevailing tone of opinion; in the Voyage to Laputa we have a satire on a great class of men; and in the Voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and still more in the story of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, we have human nature itself analysed and laid bare.
Swift took no care of his writings, never acknowledged some of them, never collected them, and suffered them to find their way about the world as chance, demand, and the piracy of publishers, directed. As all know, it is in his character as a humourist, an inventor of the preposterous as a medium for the reflective, and above all as a master of irony, that he takes his place as one of the chiefs of English literature. There can be no doubt that, as regards the literary form which he affected most, he took hints from Rabelais as the greatest original in the realm of the absurd. Sometimes, as in his description of the Strulbrugs in the Voyage to Laputa, he approaches the ghastly power of that writer; but on the whole there is more of stern English realism in him, and less of sheer riot and wildness. Sometimes, however, Swift throws off the disguise of the humourist, and speaks seriously and in his own name. On such occasions we find ourselves in the presence of a man of strong, sagacious, and thoroughly English mind, content, as is the habit of most Englishmen, with vigorous proximate sense, expressed in plain and rather coarse idiom. For the speculative he shows in these cases neither liking nor aptitude: he takes obvious reasons and arguments as they come to hand, and uses them in a robust, downright, Saxon manner. In one respect he stands out conspicuously even among plain Saxon writers—his total freedom from cant. Johnson’s advice to Boswell, “above all things to clear his mind of cant,” was perhaps never better illustrated than in the case of Dean Swift. Indeed, it might be given as a summary definition of Swift’s character that he had cleared his mind of cant without having succeeded in filling the void with song. It was Swift’s intense hatred of cant—cant in religion, cant in morality, cant in literature—that occasioned many of those peculiarities which shock people in his writings. His principle being to view things as they are, with no regard to the accumulated cant of orators and poets, he naturally prosecuted his investigations into those classes of facts which orators and poets have omitted as unsuitable for their purposes. If they had viewed men as Angels, he would view them as Yahoos. If they had placed the springs of action among the fine phrases and the sublimities, he would trace them down into their secret connections with the bestial and the obscene. Hence, as much as for any of those physiological reasons which some of his biographers assign for it, his undisguised delight in filth. And hence, also, probably—since among the forms of cant he included the traditional manner of speaking of women in their relations to men—his studious contempt, whether in writing for men or for women, of all the accustomed decencies. It was not only the more obvious forms of cant, however, that Swift had in aversion. Even to that minor form of cant which consists in the “trite” he gave no quarter. Whatever was habitually said by the majority of people seemed to him, for that very reason, not worthy of being said at all, much less put into print. A considerable portion of his writings, as, for example, his Tritical Essay on the Faculties of the Mind, and his Art of Polite Conversation—in the one of which he strings together a series of the most threadbare maxims and quotations to be found in books, offering the compilation as a gravely original disquisition, while in the other he imitates the insipidity of ordinary table-talk in society—may be regarded as showing a systematic determination on his part to turn the trite into ridicule. Hence, in his own writings, though he refrains from the profound, he never falls into the commonplace. Apart from Swift’s other views, there are to be found scattered through his writings not a few distinct propositions of an innovative character respecting our social arrangements. We have seen his doctrine as to the education of women; and we may mention, as another instance of the same kind, his denunciation of the system of standing armies as incompatible with freedom. Curiously enough, also, it was Swift’s belief that, Yahoos though we are, the world is always in the right.