I
[Footnote 1: [A review of _The Life of Jonathan Swift_, by John Forster.]]
The cathedral of St. Patrick's, dreary enough in itself seems to grow
damper and chillier as one's footsteps disturb the silence between the
grave of its famous Dean and that of Stella, in death as in life near
yet divided from him, as if to make their memories more inseparable and
prolong the insoluble problem of their relation to each other. Nor was
there wanting, when we made our pilgrimage thither, a touch of grim
humor in the thought that our tipsy guide (Clerk of the Works he had
dubbed himself for the nonce), as he monotonously recited his
contradictory anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane," varied by times with
an irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinary
biographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled our
cicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse into
rhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind of
conjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servant
Patrick, but in that sad presence his grotesqueness was as shocking as
the clown in one of Shakespeare's tragedies to Châteaubriand. A shilling
sent him back to the neighboring pot-house whence a half-dozen ragged
volunteers had summoned him, and we were left to our musings. One
dominating thought shouldered aside all others--namely, how strange a
stroke of irony it was, how more subtle even than any of the master's
own, that our most poignant association with the least sentimental of
men should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to that
of Abélard and Héloïse should invest the memory of him who had done more
than all others together to strip life and human nature of their last
instinctive decency of illusion. His life, or such accounts as we had of
it, had been full of antitheses as startling as if some malign enchanter
had embodied one of Macaulay's characters as a conundrum to bewilder the
historian himself. A generous miser; a sceptical believer; a devout
scoffer; a tender-hearted misanthrope; a churchman faithful to his order
yet loathing to wear its uniform; an Irishman hating the Irish, as Heine
did the Jews,[1] because he was one of them, yet defending them with the
scornful fierceness of one who hated their oppressors more; a man honest
and of statesmanlike mind, who lent himself to the basest services of
party politics for purely selfish ends; a poet whose predominant faculty
was that of disidealizing; a master of vernacular style, in whose works
an Irish editor finds hundreds of faults of English to correct;
strangest of all, a middle-aged clergyman of brutal coarseness, who
could inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with a
fruitless passion that broke her heart, the other with a love that
survived hope and faith to suck away the very sources of that life
whereof it was the only pride and consolation. No wonder that a new life
of so problematic a personage as this should be awaited with eagerness,
the more that it was to be illustrated with much hitherto unpublished
material and was to be written by the practised hand of Mr. Forster.
Inconsistency of conduct, of professed opinion, whether of things or
men, we can understand; but an inconsistent character is something
without example, and which nature abhors as she does false logic.
Opportunity may develop, hindrance may dwarf, the prevailing set of
temptation may give a bent to character, but the germ planted at birth
can never be wholly disnatured by circumstance any more than soil or
exposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it is
cumulative, whether for good or ill; the general tenor of the life is a
logical sequence from it, and a man can always explain himself to
himself, if not to others, as a coherent whole, because he always knows,
or thinks he knows, the value of _x_ in the personal equation. Were it
otherwise, that sense of conscious identity which alone makes life a
serious thing and immortality a rational hope, would be impossible. It
is with the means of finding out this unknown quantity--in other words,
of penetrating to the man's motives or his understanding of them--that
the biographer undertakes to supply us, and unless he succeed in this,
his rummaging of old papers but raises a new cloud of dust to darken our
insight.
[Footnote 1: Lowell was mistaken. Heine never lost his love for the
Jews. He regretted his apostasy and always regarded himself as a Jew,
and not a Christian. His own genius was Hebraic, and not, as Matthew
Arnold thought, Hellenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowell
had great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitchell once told
me that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even wished that he
had a Hebraic nose. Several documents attest to Lowell's ideas on the
subject. He even claimed that his middle name "Russell" showed that he
had Jewish blood. A.M.]
If Mr. Forster's mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality of
genius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for his
task. The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which is
beset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer. A finer sense might recoil
before investigations whose importance is not at first so clear as their
promise of unsavoriness. So far as Mr. Forster has gone, we think he has
succeeded in the highest duty of a biographer: that of making his
subject interesting and humanly sympathetic to the reader--a feat surely
of some difficulty with a professed cynic like Swift. He lets him in the
main tell his own story--a method not always trustworthy, to be sure,
but safer in the case of one who, whatever else he may have been, was
almost brutally sincere when he could be so with safety or advantage.
Still, it should always be borne in mind that he _could_ lie with an air
of honest candor fit to deceive the very elect. The author of the
"Battle of the Books" (written in 1697) tells us in the preface to the
Third Part of Temple's "Miscellanea" (1701) that he "cannot well inform
the reader upon what occasion" the essay upon Ancient and Modern
Learning "was writ, having been at that time in another kingdom"; and
the professed confidant of a ministry, whom the Stuart Papers have
proved to have been in correspondence with the Pretender, puts on an air
of innocence (in his "Enquiry into the Behavior of the Queen's last
Ministry") and undertakes to convince us that nothing could be more
absurd than to accuse them of Jacobitism. It may be, as Orrery asserted,
that Swift was "employed, not trusted," but this is hardly to be
reconciled with Lewis's warning him on the Queen's death to burn his
papers, or his own jest to Harley about the one being beheaded and the
other hanged. The fact is that, while in certain contingencies Swift was
as unscrupulous a liar as Voltaire, he was naturally open and truthful,
and showed himself to be so whenever his passions or his interest would
let him. That Mr. Forster should make a hero of the man whose life he
has undertaken to write is both natural and proper; for without sympathy
there can be no right understanding, and a hearty admiration is alone
capable of that generosity in the interpretation of conduct to which all
men have a right, and which he needs most who most widely transcends the
ordinary standards or most resolutely breaks with traditionary rules.
That so virile a character as Swift should have been attractive to women
is not wonderful, but we think Mr. Forster has gone far towards proving
that he was capable of winning the deep and lasting affection of men
also. Perhaps it may not always be safe to trust implicitly the fine
phrases of his correspondents; for there can be no doubt that Swift
inspired fear as well as love. Revengefulness is the great and hateful
blot on his character; his brooding temper turned slights into injuries,
gave substance to mere suspicion, and once in the morbid mood he was
utterly reckless of the means of vengeance. His most playful scratch had
poison in it. His eye was equally terrible for the weak point of friend
and foe. But giving this all the value it may deserve, the weight of the
evidence is in favor of his amiability. The testimony of a man so
sweet-natured and fair-minded as Dr. Delany ought to be conclusive, and
we do not wonder that Mr. Forster should lay great stress upon it. The
depreciatory conclusions of Dr. Johnson are doubtless entitled to
consideration; but his evidence is all from hearsay, and there were
properties in Swift that aroused in him so hearty a moral repulsion as
to disenable him for an unprejudiced opinion. Admirable as the
rough-and-ready conclusions of his robust understanding often are, he
was better fitted to reckon the quantity of a man's mind than the
quality of it--the real test of its value; and there is something almost
comically pathetic in the good faith with which he applies his
beer-measure to juices that could fairly plead their privilege to be
gauged by the wine standard. Mr. Forster's partiality qualifies him for
a fairer judgment of Swift than any which Johnson was capable of
forming, or, indeed, would have given himself the trouble to form.
But this partiality in a biographer, though to be allowed and even
commended as a quickener of insight, should not be strong enough to warp
his mind from its judicial level. While we think that Mr. Forster is
mainly right in his estimate of Swift's character, and altogether so in
insisting on trying him by documentary rather than hearsay evidence, it
is equally true that he is sometimes betrayed into overestimates, and
into positive statement, where favorable inference would have been
wiser. Now and then his exaggeration is merely amusing, as where he
tells us that Swift, "as early as in his first two years after quitting
Dublin, was _accomplished in French_," the only authority for such a
statement being a letter of recommendation from Temple saying that he
"had _some French_." Such compulsory testimonials are not on their _voir
dire_ any more than epitaphs. So, in speaking of Betty Jones, with whom
in 1689 Swift had a flirtation that alarmed his mother, Mr. Forster
assumes that she "was an educated girl" on the sole ground, so far as
appears, of "her mother and Swift's being cousins." Swift, to be sure,
thirty years later, on receiving some letters from his old sweetheart,
"suspects them to be counterfeit" because "she spells like a
kitchen-maid," and this, perhaps, may be Mr. Forster's authority. But,
as the letters _were_ genuine, the inference should have been the other
way. The "letters to Eliza," by the way, which Swift in 1699 directs
Winder, his successor at Kilroot, to burn, were doubtless those
addressed to Betty Jones. Mr. Forster does not notice this; but that
Swift should have preserved them, or copies of them, is of some
consequence, as tending to show that they were mere exercises in
composition, thus confirming what he says in the remarkable letter to
Kendall, written in 1692, when he was already off with the old love and
on with a new.
These instances of the temptation which most easily besets Mr. Forster
are trifles, but the same leaning betrays him sometimes into graver
mistakes of overestimate. He calls Swift the best letter-writer in the
language, though Gray, Walpole, Cowper, and Lamb be in some essential
qualities his superiors. He praises his political writing so
extravagantly that we should think he had not read the "Examiner," were
it not for the thoroughness of his work in other respects. All that
Swift wrote in this kind was partisan, excellently fitted to its
immediate purpose, as we might expect from his imperturbable good sense,
but by its very nature ephemeral. There is none of that reach of
historical imagination, none of that grasp of the clue of fatal
continuity and progression, none of that eye for country which divines
the future highways of events, that makes the occasional pamphlets of
Burke, with all their sobs of passionate sentiment, permanent
acquisitions of political thinking. Mr. Forster finds in Swift's
"Examiners" all the characteristic qualities of his mind and style,
though we believe that a dispassionate reader would rather conclude that
the author, as we have little doubt was the fact, was trying all along
to conceal his personality under a disguise of decorous commonplace. In
the same uncritical way Mr. Forster tells us that "the ancients could
show no such humor and satire as the 'Tale of a Tub' and the 'Battle of
the Books.'" In spite of this, we shall continue to think Aristophanes
and even Lucian clever writers, considering the rudeness of the times in
which they lived. The "Tale of a Tub" has several passages of
rough-and-tumble satire as good as any of their kind, and some hints of
deeper suggestion, but the fable is clumsy and the execution unequal and
disjointed. In conception the "Battle" is cleverer, and it contains
perhaps the most perfect apologue in the language, but the best strokes
of satire in it are personal (that of Dryden's helmet, for instance),
and we enjoy them with an uneasy feeling that we are accessaries in
something like foul play. Indeed, it may be said of Swift's humor
generally that it leaves us uncomfortable, and that it too often
impregnates the memory with a savor of mortal corruption proof against
all disinfectants. Pure humor cannot flow from so turbid a source as
_soeva indignatio_, and if man be so filthy and disgusting a creature as
Swift represents him to be, if he be truly "by nature, reason, learning,
blind," satire is thrown away upon him for reform and cruel as
castigation.
Mr. Forster not only rejects the story of Stella's marriage with Swift
as lacking substantial evidence, but thinks that the limits of their
intercourse were early fixed and never overpassed. According to him,
their relation was to be, from the first, one "of affection, not
desire." We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only woman
Swift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, that
he probably did marry her,[1] but only when all hope of the old
open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault,
if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa,
and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no
explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief
folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened
his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with
remorseful self-contempt. Nothing could be more galling to a proud man
than the feeling that he had been betrayed by his vanity. It is commonly
assumed that pride is incompatible with its weaker congener. But pride,
after all, is nothing more than a stiffened and congealed vanity, and
melts back to its original ductility when exposed to the milder
temperature of female partiality. Swift could not deny himself the
flattery of Vanessa's passion, and not to forbid was to encourage. He
could not bring himself to administer in time the only effectual remedy,
by telling her that he was pledged to another woman. When at last he did
tell her it was too late; and he learned, like so many before and since,
that the most dangerous of all fires to play with is that of love. This
was the extent of his crime, and it would have been none if there had
been no such previous impediment. This alone gives any meaning to what
he says when Vanessa declared her love:
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.