The Function of the Poet, and Other Essays

by James Russell Lowell

Cadenus felt within him rise
Shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise.

[Footnote 1: Most of the authorities conclude that Swift never married
Stella. A.M.]

Shame there might have been, but surely no guilt on any theory except that of an implicit engagement with Stella. That there was something of the kind, more or less definite, and that it was of some ten years' standing when the affair with Vanessa came to a crisis, we have no doubt. When Tisdall offered her marriage in 1704, and Swift wrote to him "that if my fortunes and humor served me to think of that state, I should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice," she accepted the implied terms and rejected her suitor, though otherwise not unacceptable to her. She would wait. It is true that Swift had not absolutely committed himself, but she had committed him by dismissing Tisdall. Without assuming some such tacit understanding, his letters to her are unintelligible. He repeatedly alludes to his absence from her as only tolerable because it was for her sake no less than his own, and the details of his petty economies would be merely vulgar except to her for whom their motive gave them a sweetness of humorous pathos. The evidence of the marriage seems to be as conclusive as that of a secret can well be. Dr. Delany, who ought to have been able to judge of its probability, and who had no conceivable motive of misstatement, was assured of it by one whose authority was Stella herself. Mr. Monck-Berkeley had it from the widow of Bishop Berkeley, and she from her husband, who had it from Dr. Ashe, by whom they were married. These are at least unimpeachable witnesses. The date of the marriage is more doubtful, but Sheridan is probably not far wrong when he puts it in 1716. It was simply a reparation, and no union was implied in it. Delany intimates that Vanessa, like the young Chevalier, vulgarized her romance in drink. More than this, however, was needful to palliate even in Swift the brutal allusion to her importunacy in "Gulliver," unless, as is but too possible, the passage in question be an outbreak of ferocious spleen against her victorious rival. Its coarseness need not make this seem impossible, for that was by no means a queasy age, and Swift continued on intimate terms with Lady Betty Germaine after the publication of the nasty verses on her father. The communication of the secret to Bishop Berkeley (who was one of Vanessa's executors) may have been the condition of the suppressing Swift's correspondence with her, and would have exasperated him to ferocity.

II

We cannot properly understand Swift's cynicism and bring it into any relation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiability without taking his whole life into account. Few give themselves the trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet. With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the Cowleian Pindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint of Parisian rather than Theban origin. If the master was but a fresh example of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of the flying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not even the secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earth while with perfect good faith he went through all the motions of soaring? Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment, though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent. He who could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything something else than it was, he would see things as they were—or as, in his sullen disgust, they seemed to be—and call them all by their right names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a Hottentot—nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble compromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and not ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with the brutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed and aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with himself. He despised mankind because he found something despicable in Jonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion to their likeness with himself. He had more or less consciously sacrificed self-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man's accidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, as no other "man of his level" in Ireland was, to being happy with the woman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and the independence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude after all. "Money," he was fond of saying, "is freedom," but he never learned that self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect. With a hearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yet bring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier of three royal strumpets. How should he be happy who had defined happiness to be "the perpetual possession of being well deceived," and who could never be deceived himself? It may well be doubted whether what he himself calls "that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries that in the inside they are good for nothing," be of so penetrative an insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather that to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had the microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his shallow friend Gay that life was a jest. To his nobler temper it was always profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, we suspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears. The lesson is worth remembering that his apples of Sodom, like those of lesser men, were plucked from boughs of his own grafting.

But there are palliations for him, even if the world were not too ready to forgive a man everything if he will only be a genius. Sir Robert Walpole used to say "that it was fortunate so few men could be prime ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking wickedness of mankind." Swift, from his peculiar relation to two successive ministries, was in a position to know all that they knew, and perhaps, as a recognized place-broker, even more than they knew, of the selfish servility of men. He had seen the men who figure so imposingly in the stage-processions of history too nearly. He knew the real Jacks and Toms as they were over a pot of ale after the scenic illusion was done with. He saw the destinies of a kingdom controlled by men far less able than himself; the highest of arts, that of politics, degraded to a trade in places, and the noblest opportunity, that of office, abused for purposes of private gain. His disenchantment began early, probably in his intimacy with Sir William Temple, in whom (though he says that all that was good and great died with him) he must have seen the weak side of solemn priggery and the pretension that made a mystery of statecraft. In his twenty-second year he writes:

Off fly the vizards and discover all:
How plain I see through the deceit!
How shallow and how gross the cheat!
* * * * *
On what poor engines move
The thoughts of monarchs and designs of states!
What petty motives rule their fates!

I to such blockheads set my wit!
I damn such fools! go, go, you're bit!

Mr. Forster's own style (simpler now than when he was under the immediate influence of Dickens, if more slipshod than when repressed by Landor) is not in essentials better or worse than usual. It is not always clear nor always idiomatic. On page 120 he tells us that "Scott did not care to enquire if it was likely that stories of the kind referred to should have contributed to form a character, or if it were not likelier still that they had grown and settled round a character already famous as well as formed." Not to speak of the confusion of moods and tenses, the phrase "to form a character" has been so long appropriated to another meaning than that which it has here, that the sense of the passage vacillates unpleasantly. He tells us that Swift was "under engagement to Will Frankland to christen the baby his wife is near bringing to bed." Parthenogenesis is a simple matter to this. And why Will Frankland, Joe Beaumont, and the like? We cannot claim so much intimacy with them as Swift, and the eighteenth century might be allowed to stand a little on its dignity. If Mr. Forster had been quoting the journal to Stella, there would be nothing to say except that Swift took liberties with his friends in writing to her which he would not have ventured on before strangers. In the same odd jargon, which the English journals are fond of calling American, Mr. Forster says that "Tom [Leigh] was not popular with Swift." Mr. Forster is not only no model for contemporary English, but (what is more serious) sometimes mistakes the meaning of words in Swift's day, as when he explains that "strongly engaged" meant "interceded with or pressed." It meant much more than that, as could easily be shown from the writings of Swift himself.

All the earlier biographers of Swift Mr. Forster brushes contemptuously aside, though we do not find much that is important in his own biography which industry may not hit upon somewhere or other in the confused narrative of Sheridan, for whom and for his sources of information he shows a somewhat unjust contempt. He goes so far as sometimes to discredit anecdotes so thoroughly characteristic of Swift that he cannot resist copying them himself. He labors at needless length the question of Swift's standing in college, and seems to prove that it was not contemptible, though there can be no doubt that the contrary opinion was founded on Swift's own assertion, often repeated. We say he seems to prove it, for we are by no means satisfied which of the two Swifts on the college list, of which a facsimile is given, is the future Dean. Mr. Forster assumes that the names are ranked in the order of seniority, but they are more likely to have been arranged alphabetically, in which case Jonathan would have preceded Thomas, and at best there is little to choose between three mediocriters and one male, one bene, and one negligenter. The document, whatever we may think of its importance, has been brought to light by Mr. Forster. Of his other materials hitherto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving that Swift's Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707. This shows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whig to Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his former associates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency if not of desertion to the enemy. Whatever the motives of his change, it would have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty, and in spite of Mr. Forster's assertion that Addison continued to love and trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was any cordiality in their intercourse after 1710. No one familiar with Swift's manner of thinking will deem his political course of much import in judging of his moral character. At the bottom of his heart he had an impartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aims of both were more or less consciously selfish. Even if sincere, the matters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment as that which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput. With him the question was simply one between men who galled his pride and men who flattered it. Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceable inferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footing of friendship. To him they were all, more or less indifferently, rounds in the ladder by which he hoped to climb. He always claimed to have been a consistent Old Whig—that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchman who accepted the Revolution of 1688. This, to be sure, was not quite true, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on a Cavalier grandfather, and whose first known verses were addressed to the non-juring primate Sancroft after his deprivation, to become first a Tory and then a conniver at the restoration of the Stuarts as the best device for preventing a foreign succession and an endless chance of civil war. A man of Swift's way of thinking would hardly have balked at the scruple of creed, for he would not have deemed it possible that the Pretender should have valued a kingdom at any lower rate than his great-grandfather had done before him.