Essays in Rebellion

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

To the great comfort of cultivated and political circles, the type of Swift is not so frequent or so comprehensible. What place have those who fret not themselves because of evildoers—what place in their tolerant society have they for uncouth personalities, terrible with indignation? It is true that Swift was himself accounted a valued friend among the best wits and writers of his time. Bolingbroke wrote to him: "I loved you almost twenty years ago; I thought of you as well as I do now, better was beyond the power of conception." Pope, also after twenty years of intimate friendship, could write of him: "My sincere love of that valuable, indeed incomparable, man will accompany him through life, and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives." Arbuthnot could write to him:

"DEAR FRIEND,—The last sentence of your letter plunged
a dagger in my heart. Never repeat those sad, but tender,
words, that you will try to forget me. For my part, I can never
forget you—at least till I discover, which is impossible, another
friend whose conversation could procure me the pleasure I
have found in yours."

The friends of Swift—the men who could write like this—men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay—were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night, how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes "azure as the heavens," which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them? Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that "spirit of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil spirit to torment him"? Of his private generosity, and his consideration for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether passionate, witty, or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A woman of peculiar charm and noble character was his livelong friend from girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more. Another woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the "Verses on his own Death," how far removed from the envy, hatred, and malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses beginning:

"In Pope I cannot read a line,
But with a sigh I wish it mine;
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six,
It gives me such a jealous fit,
I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.'
I grieve to be outdone by Gay
In my own humorous biting way;
Arbuthnot is no more my friend
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce;
Refined it first, and showed its use."

And so on down to the lines:

"If with such talents Heaven has blest 'em,
Have I not reason to detest 'em?"

To damn with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure; but to praise with jealous damnation reveals a delicate generosity that few would look for in the hater of his kind. Nor let us forget that Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase "Sweetness and light."

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked, and they could not redeem the writer's savagery in popular opinion, being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and exhausted his spirit. Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation sprang. Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened a gate to new unhappiness. The sorrows of others were more to him than to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain. On the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, "I hate life," he cried, "when I think it exposed to such accidents: and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing." It was not any spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy with suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed. Writing whilst he was still a youth, in The Tale of a Tub, he composed a terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical bareness of style seem foretold: "Last week," he says, "I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse." "Only a woman's hair," was found written on the packet in which the memorial of Stella was preserved, and I do not know in what elegy there breathes a prouder or more poignant sorrow.

When he wrote the Drapier Letters, Ireland lay before him like a woman flayed. Of the misery of Ireland it was said (I think by Sheridan):