Wit luxuriates, incisive, in little compact verses, vigorously coined, of extreme conciseness, facility, precision; but compared to La Fontaine, it is wine turned into vinegar. Even when he comes to the charming Vanessa, his vein is still the same: to praise her childhood, he puts her name first on the list, as a little model girl, just like a schoolmaster:
"And all their conduct would be tried
By her, as an unerring guide:
Offending daughters oft would hear
Vanessa's praise rung in their ear:
Miss Betty, when she does a fault,
Lets fall her knife, or spills the salt,
Will thus be by her mother chid:
'Tis what Vanessa never did!'"[699]
A strange way of admiring Vanessa, and of proving his admiration for her. He calls her a nymph, and treats her like a schoolgirl! Cadenus "now could praise, esteem, approve, but understood not what was love!" Nothing could be truer, and Stella felt it, like others. The verses' which he writes every year on her birthday, are a pedagogue's censures and praises; if he gives her any good marks, it is with restrictions. Once he inflicts on her a little sermon on want of patience; again, by way of compliment, he concocts this delicate warning:
"Stella, this day is thirty-four
(We shan't dispute a year or more).
However, Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy size and years are doubled
Since first I saw thee at sixteen,
The brightest virgin on the green;
So little is thy form declin'd,
Made up so largely in thy mind."
And he insists with exquisite taste:
"O, would it please the gods to split
Thy beauty, size, and years, and wit!
No age could furnish out a pair
Of nymphs so graceful, wise, and fair."[700]
Decidedly this man is an artisan, strong of arm, terrible at his work and in a fray, but narrow of soul, treating a woman as if she were a log of wood. Rhyme and rhythm are only businesslike tools, which have served him to press and launch his thought; he has put nothing but prose into them: poetry was too fine to be grasped by those coarse hands.
But in prosaic subjects, what truth and force! How this masculine nakedness crushes the affected elegance and artificial poetry of Addison and Pope! There are no epithets; he leaves his thought as he conceived it, valuing it for and by itself, needing neither ornaments, nor preparation, nor extension; above the tricks of the profession, scholastic conventionalisms, the vanity of the rhymester, the difficulties of the art; master of his subject and of himself. This simplicity and naturalness astonish us in verse. Here, as elsewhere, his originality is entire, and his genius creative; he surpasses his classical and timid age; he tyrannizes over form, breaks it, dare utter anything, spares himself no strong word. Acknowledge the greatness of this invention and audacity; he alone is a superior being, who finds everything and copies nothing. What a biting comicality in the "Grand Question Debated "! He has to represent the entrance of a captain into a castle, his airs, his insolence, his folly, and the admiration caused by these qualities! The lady serves him first; the servants stare at him:
"The parsons for envy are ready to burst;
The servants amazed are scarce ever able
To keep off their eyes, as they wait at the table;
And Molly and I have thrust in our nose
To peep at the captain in all his fine clo'es.
Dear madam, be sure he's a fine spoken man,
Do but hear on the clergy how glib his tongue ran:
'And madam,' says he, 'if such dinners you give,
You'll ne'er want for parsons as long as you live.
I ne'er knew a parson without a good nose:
But the devil's as welcome wherever he goes;
G—d—n me! they bid us reform and repent,
But, z—s! by their looks they never keep Lent:
Mister curate, for all your grave looks, I'm afraid
You cast a sheep's eye on her ladyship's maid:
I wish she would lend you her pretty white hand
In mending your cassock, and smoothing your band'
(For the dean was so shabby, and look'd like a ninny,
That the captain suppos'd he was curate to Jinny).
Whenever you see a cassock and gown,
A hundred to one but it covers a clown.
Observe how a parson comes into a room,
G—d—n me, he hobbles as bad as my groom;
A scholard, when just from his college broke loose,
Can hardly tell how to cry bo to a goose;
Your Noveds and Bluturks and Omurs,[701] and stuff,
By G—, they don't signify this pinch of snuff;
To give a young gentleman right education,
The army's the only good school in the nation."[702]
This has been seen, and herein lies the beauty of Swift's verses: they are personal; they are not developed themes, but impressions felt and observations collected. Read "The Journal of a Modern Lady, The Furniture of a Woman's Mind," and other pieces by the dozen: they are dialogues transcribed or opinions put on paper after quitting a drawing-room. "The Progress of Marriage" represents a dean of fifty-two married to a young worldly coquette; do we not see in this title alone all the fears of the bachelor of St. Patrick's? What diary is more familiar and more pungent than his verses on his own death?