English literature. We do not talk in that manner now. We feel that when
we get among the authors of the times of Queen Anne and the first George
we are among very pleasant and very clever men, but by no means among
giants. In coming down to this period from those going before it, we have
an immediate sensation of having left the region of "greatness" behind us.
We still find plenty of good writing, characterized by certain qualities
of trimness, artificial grace, and the like, to a degree not before
attained; here and there also, we discern something like real power and
strength, breaking through the prevailing element; but, on the whole,
there is an absence of what, except by a compromise of language, could be
called "great." It is the same whether we regard largeness of imaginative
faculty, loftiness of moral spirit, or vigour of speculative capacity, as
principally concerned in imparting the character of "greatness" to
literature. What of genius in the ideal survived the seventeenth century
in England contented itself with nice little imaginations of scenes and
circumstances connected with the artificial life of the time; the moral
quality most in repute was kindliness or courtesy; and speculation did not
go beyond that point where thought retains the form either of ordinary
good sense, or of keen momentary wit. No sooner, in fact, do we pass the
time of Milton than we feel that we have done with the sublimities. A kind
of lumbering largeness does remain in the intellectual gait of Dryden and
his contemporaries, as if the age still wore the armour of the old
literary forms, though not at home in it; but in Pope's days even the
affectation of the "great" had ceased. Not slowly to build up a grand poem
of continuous ideal action, not quietly and at leisure to weave forth
tissues of fantastic imagery, not perseveringly and laboriously to
prosecute one track of speculation and bring it to a close, not earnestly
and courageously to throw one's whole soul into a work of moral agitation
and reform, was now what was regarded as natural in literature. On the
contrary, he was a wit, or a literary man, who, living in the midst of the
social bustle, or on the skirts of it, could throw forth in the easiest
manner little essays, squibs, and _jeux d'esprit_, pertinent to the rapid
occasions of the hour, and never tasking the mind too long or too much.
This was the time when that great distinction between Whiggism and
Toryism which for a century-and-a-half has existed in Great Britain as a
kind of permanent social condition, affecting the intellectual activity of
all natives from the moment of their birth, first began to be practically
operative. It has, on the whole, been a wretched thing for the mind of
England to have had this necessity of being either a Whig or a Tory put so
prominently before it. Perhaps, in all times, some similar necessity of
taking one side or the other in some current form of controversy has
afflicted the leading minds, and tormented the more genial among them; but
we question if ever in this country in previous times there was a form of
controversy, so little to be identified, in real reason, with the one only
true controversy between good and evil, and so capable, therefore, of
breeding confusion and mischief, when so identified in practice, as this
poor controversy of Whig and Tory which came in with the Revolution. To be
called upon to be either a Puritan or a Cavalier--there was some
possibility of complying with _that_ call and still leading a tolerably
free and large intellectual life; though possibly it was one, cause of the
rich mental development of the Elizabethan era that the men of that time
were exempt from any personal obligation of attending even to this
distinction. But to be called upon to be either a Whig or a Tory--why, how
on earth can one retain any of the larger humanities about him if society
is to hold him by the neck between two chairs such as these, pointing
alternately to the one and to the other, and incessantly asking him on
which of the two he means to sit? Into a mind trained to regard
adhesiveness to one or other of these chairs as the first rule of duty or
of prudence what thoughts of any high interest can find their way? Or, if
any such do find their way, how are they to be adjusted to so mean a rule?
Now-a-days, our higher spirits solve the difficulty by kicking both chairs
down, and plainly telling society that they will not bind themselves to
sit on either, or even on both put together. Hence partly it is that, in
recent times, we have had renewed specimens of the "great" or "sublime" in
literature--the poetry, for example, of a Byron, a Wordsworth, or a
Tennyson. But in the interval between 1688 and 1727 there was not one wit
alive whom society let off from the necessity of being, and declaring
himself to be, either a Whig or a Tory. Constitutionally, and by
circumstances, Pope was the man who could have most easily obtained the
exemption; but even Pope professed himself a Tory. Addison and Steele were
Whigs. In short, every literary man was bound, by the strongest of all
motives, to keep in view, as a permanent fact qualifying his literary
undertakings, the distinction between Whiggism and Toryism, and to give to
at least a considerable part of his writings the character of pamphlets or
essays in the service of his party. To minister by the pen to the
occasions of Whiggism and Toryism was, therefore, the main business of the
wits both in prose and verse. Out of those occasions of ministration there
of course arose personal quarrels, and these furnished fresh opportunities
to the men of letters. Critics of previous writings could be satirized and
lampooned, and thus the circle of subjects was widened. Moreover, there
was abundant matter, capable of being treated consistently with either
Whiggism or Toryism, in the social foibles and peculiarities of the day,
as we see in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. Nor could a genial mind
like that of Steele, a man of taste and fine thought like Addison, and an
intellect so keen, exquisite, and sensitive as that of Pope, fail to
variegate and surround all the duller and harder literature thus called
into being with more lasting touches of the humorous, the fanciful, the
sweet, the impassioned, the meditative, and the ideal. Thus from one was
obtained the character of a _Sir Roger de Coverley_, from another a
_Vision of Mirza_, and from the third a _Windsor Forest_, an _Epistle of
Heloise_, and much else that delights us still. After all, however, it
remains true that the period of English literature now in question,
whatever admirable characteristics it may possess, exhibits a remarkable
deficiency of what, with recollections of former periods to guide us in
our use of epithets, we should call great or sublime.
With the single exception of Pope, and that exception made from deference
to the peculiar position of Pope as the poet or metrical artist of his
day, the greatest name in the history of English literature during the
early part of last century is that of Swift. In certain fine and deep
qualities, Addison and Steele, and perhaps Farquhar, excelled him, just as
in the succeeding generation Goldsmith had a finer vein of genius than was
to be found in Johnson with all his massiveness; but in natural brawn and
strength, in original energy, force, and imperiousness of brain, he
excelled them all. It was about the year 1702, when he was already
thirty-five years of age, that this strangest specimen of an Irishman, or
of an Englishman born in Ireland, first attracted attention in London
literary circles. The scene of his first appearance was Button's
coffee-house: the witnesses were Addison, Ambrose Philips, and other wits
belonging to Addison's little senate, who used to assemble there.
"They had for several successive days observed a strange clergyman
come into the coffee-house, who seemed utterly unacquainted with any
of those who frequented it, and whose custom it was to lay his hat
down on a table, and walk backward and forward at a good pace for
half an hour or an hour, without speaking to any mortal, or seeming
in the least to attend to anything that was going forward there. He
then used to take up his hat, pay his money at the bar, and walk away
without opening his lips. After having observed this singular
behaviour for some time, they concluded him to be out of his senses;
and the name that he went by among them was that of 'the mad parson.'
This made them more than usually attentive to his motions; and one
evening, as Mr. Addison and the rest were observing him, they saw him
cast his eyes several times on a gentleman in boots, who seemed to be
just come out of the country, and at last advance towards him as
intending to address him. They were all eager to hear what this dumb
mad parson had to say, and immediately quitted their seats to get
near him. Swift went up to the country gentleman, and in a very
abrupt manner, without any previous salute, asked him, 'Pray, sir, do
you remember any good weather in the world?' The country gentleman,
after staring a little at the singularity of his manner, and the
oddity of the question, answered 'Yes, sir, I thank God I remember a
great deal of good weather in my time.' 'That is more,' said Swift,
'than I can say; I never remember any weather that was not too hot or
too cold, too wet or too dry; but, however God Almighty contrives it,
at the end of the year 'tis all very well.' Upon saying this, he took
up his hat, and without uttering a syllable more, or taking the least
notice of anyone, walked out of the coffee-house; leaving all those
who had been spectators of this odd scene staring after him, and
still more confirmed in the opinion of his being mad."--_Dr.
Sheridan's Life of Swift, quoted in Scott's Life._
If the company present had had sufficient means of information, they would
have found that the mad parson with the harsh, swarthy features, and eyes
"azure as the heavens," whose oddities thus amused them, was Jonathan
Swift, then clergyman of Laracor, a rural parish in the diocese of Meath
in Ireland. They would have found that he was an Irishman by birth, though
of pure English descent; that he could trace a relationship to Dryden;
that, having been born after his father's death, he had been educated, at
the expense of his relatives, at Trinity College, Dublin; that, leaving
Ireland in his twenty-second year, with but a sorry character from the
College authorities, he had been received as a humble dependent into the
family of Sir William Temple, at Sheen and Moorpark, near London, that
courtly Whig and ex-ambassador being distantly connected with his mother's
family; that here, while acting as Sir William's secretary, amanuensis,
librarian, and what not, he had begun to write verses and other trifles,
some of which he had shown to Dryden, who had told him in reply that they
were sad stuff, and that he would never be a poet; that still, being of a
restless, ambitious temper, he had not given up hopes of obtaining
introduction into public employment in England through Sir William
Temple's influence; that, at length, at the age of twenty-eight,
despairing of anything better, he had quarrelled with Sir William,
returned to Ireland, taken priest's orders, and settled in a living; and
that again, disgusted with Ireland and his prospects in that country, he
had come back to Moorpark, and resided there till 1699, when Sir
William's death had obliged him finally to return to Ireland, and accept
first a chaplaincy to Lord Justice Berkeley, and then his present living
in the diocese of Meath. If curious about the personal habits of this
restless Irish parson, they might have found that he had already won the
reputation of an eccentric in his own parish and district: performing his
parochial duties when at home with scrupulous care, yet by his language
and manners often shocking all ideas of clerical decorum and begetting a
doubt as to his sincerity in the religion he professed; boisterous,
fierce, overbearing, and insulting to all about him, yet often doing acts
of real kindness; exact and economical in his management of his income to
the verge of actual parsimony, yet sometimes spending money freely, and
never without pensioners living on his bounty. They would have found that
he was habitually irritable, and that he was subject to a recurring
giddiness of the head, or vertigo, which he had brought on, as he thought
himself, by a surfeit of fruit while he was staying with Sir William
Temple at Sheen. And, what might have been the best bit of gossip of all,
they would have found that, though unmarried, and entertaining a most
unaccountable and violent aversion to the very idea of marriage, he had
taken over to reside with him, or close to his neighbourhood, in Ireland,
a certain young and beautiful girl, named Hester Johnson, with whom he had
formed an acquaintance in Sir William Temple's house, where she had been
brought up, and where, though she passed as a daughter of Sir William's
steward, she was believed to be, in reality, a natural daughter of Sir
William himself. They would have found that his relations to this girl,
whom he had himself educated from her childhood at Sheen and Moorpark,
were of a very singular and puzzling kind; that on the one hand she was
devotedly attached to him, and on the other he cherished a passionate
affection for her, wrote and spoke of her as his "Stella," and liked
always to have her near him; yet that a marriage between them seemed not
to be thought of by either; and that, in order to have her near him
without giving rise to scandal, he had taken the precaution to bring over
an elderly maiden lady, called Mrs. Dingley, to reside with her as a
companion, and was most careful to be in her society only when this Mrs.
Dingley was present.
There was mystery and romance enough, therefore, about the wild,
black-browed Irish parson, who attracted the regards of the wits in
Button's coffee-house. What had brought him there? That was partly a
mystery too; but the mystery would have been pretty well solved if it had
been known that, uncouth-looking clerical lout as he was, he was an author
like the rest of them, having just written a political pamphlet which was
making or was to make a good deal of noise in the world, and having at
that moment in his pocket at least one other piece which he was about to
publish. The political pamphlet was an _Essay on the Civil Discords in
Athens and Rome_, having an obvious bearing on certain dissensions then
threatening to break up the Whig party in Great Britain. It was received
as a vigorous piece of writing on the ministerial side, and was ascribed
by some to Lord Somers, and by others to Burnet. Swift had come over to
claim it, and to see what it and his former connexion with Temple could do
for him among the leading Whigs. For the truth was, an ambition equal to
his consciousness of power gnawed at the heart of this furious and gifted
man, whom a perverse fate had flung away into an obscure vicarage on the
wrong side of the channel. His books, his garden, his canal with its
willows at Laracor; his dearly-beloved Roger Coxe, and the other perplexed
and admiring parishioners of Laracor over whom he domineered; his clerical
colleagues in the neighbourhood; and even the society of Stella, the
wittiest and best of her sex, whom he loved better than any other creature
on earth: all these were insufficient to occupy the craving void in his
mind. He hated Ireland, and regarded his lot there as one of banishment;
he longed to be in London, and struggling in the centre of whatever was
going on. About the date of his appointment to the living of Laracor he
had lost the rich deanery of Derry, which Lord Berkeley had meant to give
him, in consequence of a notion on the part of the bishop of the diocese
that he was a restless, ingenious young man, who, instead of residing,
would be "eternally flying backwards and forwards to London." The bishop's
perception of his character was just. At or about the very time when the
wits at Button's saw him stalking up and down in the coffee-house, the
priest of Laracor was introducing himself to Somers, Halifax, Sunderland,
and others, and stating the terms on which he would support the Whigs with
his pen. Even then, it seems, he took high ground, and let it be known
that he was no mere hireling. The following, written at a much later
period, is his own explanation of the nature and limits of his Whiggism at
the time when he first offered the Whigs his services:--
"It was then (1701-2) I began to trouble myself with the differences
between the principles of Whig and Tory; having formerly employed
myself in other, and, I think, much better speculations. I talked
often upon this subject with Lord Somers; told him that, having been
long conversant with the Greek and Latin authors, and therefore a
lover of liberty, I found myself much inclined to be what they call a
Whig in politics; and that, besides, I thought it impossible, upon
any other principles, to defend or submit to the Revolution; but, as
to religion, I confessed myself to be a High-Churchman, and that I
could not conceive how anyone who wore the habit of a clergyman could
be otherwise; that I had observed very well with what insolence and
haughtiness some lords of the High-Church party treated not only
their own chaplains, but all other clergymen whatsoever, and thought
this was sufficiently recompensed by their professions of zeal to the
Church: that I had likewise observed how the Whig lords took a direct
contrary measure, treated the persons of particular clergymen with
particular courtesy, but showed much contempt and ill-will for the
order in general: that I knew it was necessary for their party to
make their bottom as wide as they could, by taking all denominations
of Protestants to be members of their body: that I would not enter
into the mutual reproaches made by the violent men on either side;
but that the connivance or encouragement given by the Whigs to those
writers of pamphlets who reflected upon the whole body of the clergy,
without any exception, would unite the Church to one man to oppose
them; and that I doubted his lordship's friends did not consider the
consequences of this."
Even with these limitations the assistance of so energetic a man as the
parson of Laracor was doubtless welcome to the Whigs. His former connexion
with the stately old Revolution Whig, Sir William Temple, may have
prepared the way for him, as it had already been the means of making him
known in some aristocratic families. But there was evidence in his
personal bearing and his writings that he was not a man to be neglected.
And, if there had been any doubt on the subject on his first presentation
of himself to ministers, the publication of his _Battle of the Books_ and
his _Tale of a Tub_ in 1703 and 1704 would have set it overwhelmingly at
rest. The author of these works (and, though they were anonymous, they
were at once referred to Swift) could not but be acknowledged as the first
prose satirist, and one of the most formidable writers, of the age. On his
subsequent visits to Button's, therefore (and they were frequent enough;
for, as the Bishop of Derry had foreseen, he was often an absentee from
his parish), the mad Irish parson was no longer a stranger to the company.
Addison, Steele, Tickell, Philips, and the other Whig wits came to know
him well, and to feel his weight among them in their daily convivial
meetings. "To Dr. Jonathan Swift, the most agreeable companion, the truest
friend, and the greatest genius of the age" was the inscription written by
Addison on a copy of his Travels presented to Swift; and it shows what
opinion Addison and those about him had formed of the author of the _Tale
of a Tub_.