In contemplating the lives and works of the preceding poets in this
third volume of 'Specimens,' we have been impressed with a sense, if not
of their absolute, yet of their comparative mediocrity. Beside such
neglected giants as Henry More, Joseph Beaumont, and Andrew Marvell, the
Pomfrets, Sedleys, Blackmores, and Savages sink into insignificance. But
when we come to the name of Swift, we feel ourselves again approaching
an Alpine region. The air of a stern mountain-summit breathes chill
around our temples, and we feel that if we have no amiability to melt,
we have altitude at least to measure, and strange profound secrets of
nature, like the ravines of lofty hills, to explore. The men of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be compared to Lebanon, or
Snowdown, or Benlomond towering grandly over fertile valleys, on which
they smile--Swift to the tremendous Romsdale Horn in Norway, shedding
abroad, from a brow of four thousand feet high, what seems a scowl of
settled indignation, as if resolved not to rejoice even over the wide-
stretching deserts which, and nothing but which, it everlastingly
beholds. Mountains all of them, but what a difference between such a
mountain as Shakspeare, and such a mountain as Swift!
Instead of going minutely over a path so long since trodden to mire as
the life of Swift, let us expend a page or two in seeking to form some
estimate of his character and genius. It is refreshing to come upon a
new thing in the world, even though it be a strange or even a bad thing;
and certainly, in any age and country, such a being as Swift must have
appeared an anomaly, not for his transcendent goodness, not for his
utter badness, but because the elements of good and evil were mixed in
him into a medley so astounding, and in proportions respectively so
large, yet unequal, that the analysis of the two seemed to many
competent only to the Great Chymist, Death, and that a sense of the
disproportion seems to have moved the man himself to inextinguishable
laughter,--a laughter which, radiating out of his own singular heart as
a centre, swept over the circumference of all beings within his reach,
and returned crying, 'Give, give,' as if he were demanding a universal
sphere for the exercise of the savage scorn which dwelt within him, and
as if he laughed not more 'consumedly' at others than he did at himself.
Ere speaking of Swift as a man, let us say something about his genius.
That, like his character, was intensely peculiar. It was a compound of
infinite ingenuity, with very little poetical imagination--of gigantic
strength, with a propensity to incessant trifling--of passionate
purpose, with the clearest and coldest expression, as though a furnace
were fuelled with snow. A Brobdignagian by size, he was for ever toying
with Lilliputian slings and small craft. One of the most violent of
party men, and often fierce as a demoniac in temper, his favourite motto
was _Vive la bagatelle_. The creator of entire new worlds, we doubt if
his works contain more than two or three lines of genuine poetry. He may
be compared to one of the locusts of the Apocalypse, in that he had a
tail like unto a scorpion, and a sting in his tail; but his 'face is not
as the face of man, his hair is not as the hair of women, and on his
head there is no crown like gold.' All Swift's creations are more or
less disgusting. Not one of them is beautiful. His Lilliputians are
amazingly life-like, but compare them to Shakspeare's fairies, such
as Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mustardseed; his Brobdignagians are
excrescences like enormous warts; and his Yahoos might have been spawned
in the nightmare of a drunken butcher. The same coarseness characterises
his poems and his 'Tale of a Tub.' He might well, however, in his old
age, exclaim, in reference to the latter, 'Good God! what a genius I
had when I wrote that book!' It is the wildest, wittiest, wickedest,
wealthiest book of its size in the English language. Thoughts and
figures swarm in every corner of its pages, till you think of a
disturbed nest of angry ants, for all the figures and thoughts are black
and bitter. One would imagine the book to have issued from a mind that
had been gathering gall as well as sense in an antenatal state of being.
Swift, in all his writings--sermons, political tracts, poems, and
fictions--is essentially a satirist. He consisted originally of three
principal parts,--sense, an intense feeling of the ludicrous, and
selfish passion; and these were sure, in certain circumstances, to
ferment into a spirit of satire, 'strong as death, and cruel as the
grave.' Born with not very much natural benevolence, with little purely
poetic feeling, with furious passions and unbounded ambition, he was
entirely dependent for his peace of mind upon success. Had he become, as
by his talents he was entitled to be, the prime minister of his day, he
would have figured as a greater tyrant in the cabinet than even Chatham.
But as he was prevented from being the first statesman, he became the
first satirist of his time. From vain efforts to grasp supremacy for
himself and his party, he retired growling to his Dublin den; and there,
as Haman thought scorn to lay his hand on Mordecai, but extended his
murderous purpose to all the people of the Jews,--and as Nero wished
that Rome had one neck, that he might destroy it at a blow,--so Swift
was stung by his personal disappointment to hurl out scorn at man and
suspicion at his Maker. It was not, it must be noticed, the evil which
was in man which excited his hatred and contempt; it was man himself. He
was not merely, as many are, disgusted with the selfish and malignant
elements which are mingled in man's nature and character, and disposed
to trace them to any cause save a Divine will, but he believed man to
be, as a whole, the work and child of the devil; and he told the
imaginary creator and creature to their face, what he thought the
truth,--'The devil is an ass.' His was the very madness of Manichaeism.
That heresy held that the devil was one of two aboriginal creative
powers, but Swift seemed to believe at times that he was the only God.
From a Yahoo man, it was difficult to avoid the inference of a demon
deity. It is very laughable to find writers in _Blackwood_ and elsewhere
striving to prove Swift a Christian, as if, whatever were his
professions, and however sincere he might be often in these, the whole
tendency of his writings, his perpetual and unlimited abuse of man's
body and soul, his denial of every human virtue, the filth he pours upon
every phase of human nature, and the doctrine he insinuates--that man
has fallen indeed, but fallen, not from the angel, but from the animal,
or, rather, is just a bungled brute,--were not enough to shew that
either his notions were grossly erroneous and perverted, or that he
himself deserved, like another Nebuchadnezzar, to be driven from men,
and to have a beast's heart given unto him. Sometimes he reminds us of
an impure angel, who has surprised man naked and asleep, looked at him
with microscopic eyes, ignored all his peculiar marks of fallen dignity
and incipient godhood, and in heartless rhymes reported accordingly.
Swift belonged to the same school as Pope, although the feminine element
which was in the latter modified and mellowed his feelings. Pope was a
more successful and a happier man than Swift. He was much smaller, too,
in soul as well as in body, and his gall-organ was proportionably less.
Pope's feeling to humanity was a tiny malice; Swift's became, at length,
a black malignity. Pope always reminds us of an injured and pouting hero
of Lilliput, 'doing well to be angry' under the gourd of a pocket-flap,
or squealing out his griefs from the centre of an empty snuff-box; Swift
is a man, nay, monster of misanthropy. In minute and microscopic vision
of human infirmities, Pope excels even Swift; but then you always
conceive Swift leaning down a giant, though gnarled, stature to behold
them, while Pope is on their level, and has only to look straight before
him. Pope's wrath is always measured; Swift's, as in the 'Legion-Club'
is a whirlwind of 'black fire and horror,' in the breath of which no
flesh can live, and against which genius and virtue themselves furnish
no shield.