him in the same order of greatness with such men among his predecessors as
Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Milton, or such men among his successors as
Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. We even retain instinctively the right
of not according to him a certain kind of admiration which we bestow on
such men of his own generation as Pope, Steele, and Addison. How is this?
What is the drawback about Swift's genius which prevents us from
referring him to that highest order of literary greatness to which we do
refer others who in respect of hard general capacity were apparently not
superior to him, and on the borders of which we also place some who in
that respect were certainly his inferiors? To make the question more
special, why do we call Milton great in quite a different sense from that
in which we consent to confer the same epithet on Swift?
Altogether, it will be said, Milton was a greater man than Swift; his
intellect was higher, richer, deeper, grander, his views of things were
more profound, grave, stately, and exalted. This is a true enough
statement of the case; and one likes that comprehensive use of the word
intellect which it implies, wrapping up, as it were, all that is in and
about a man in this one word, so as to dispense with the distinctions
between imaginative and non-imaginative, spiritual and unspiritual
natures, and make every possible question about a man a mere question in
the end as to the size or degree of his intellect. But such a mode of
speaking is too violent and recondite for common purposes. According to
the common use of the word intellect, it might be maintained (we do not
say it would) that Swift's intellect, his strength of mental grasp, was
equal to Milton's, and yet that, by reason of the fact that his
intellectual style was different, or that he did not grasp things
precisely in the Miltonic way, a distinction might be drawn unfavourable
to his genius as compared with that of Milton. According to such a view,
we must seek for that in Swift's genius upon which it depends that, while
we accord to it all the admiration we bestow on strength, our sympathies
with height or sublimity are left unmoved. Nor have we far to seek. When
Goethe and Niebuhr generalized in the phrase "the demonic element" that
mystic something which they seemed to detect in men of unusual potency
among their fellows, they used the word "demonic," not in its English
sense, as signifying what appertains specially to the demons or powers of
darkness, but in its Greek sense, as equally implying the unseen agencies
of light and good. The demonic element in a man, therefore, may in one
case be the demonic of the etherial and celestial, in another the
demonic of the Tartarean and infernal. There is a demonic of the
_super_natural--angels, and seraphs, and white-winged airy messengers,
swaying men's phantasies from above; and there is a demonic of the
_infra_-natural--fiends and shapes of horror tugging at men's thoughts
from beneath. The demonic in Swift was of the latter kind. It is false, it
would be an entire mistake as to his genius, to say that he regarded, or
was inspired by, only the worldly and the secular--that men, women, and
their relations in the little world of visible life, were all that his
intellect cared to recognise. He also, like our Miltons and our
Shakespeares, and all our men who have been anything more than prudential
and pleasant writers, had his being anchored in things and imaginations
beyond the visible verge. But, while it was given to them to hold rather
by things and imaginations belonging to the region of the celestial, to
hear angelic music and the rustling of seraphic wings, it was his
unhappier lot to be related rather to the darker and subterranean
mysteries. One might say of Swift that he had far less of belief in a God
than of belief in a Devil. He is like a man walking on the earth and among
the busy haunts of his fellow-mortals, observing them and their ways, and
taking his part in the bustle, all the while, however, conscious of the
tuggings downward of secret chains reaching into the world of the demons.
Hence his ferocity, his misanthropy, his _saeva indignatio_, all of them
true forms of energy, imparting unusual potency to a life, but forms of
energy bred of communion with what outlies nature on the lower or infernal
side.
Swift, doubtless, had this melancholic tendency in him constitutionally
from the beginning. From the first we see him an unruly, rebellious,
gloomy, revengeful, unforgiving spirit, loyal to no authority, and
gnashing under every restraint. With nothing small or weak in his nature,
too proud to be dishonest, bold and fearless in his opinions, capable of
strong attachments and of hatred as strong, it was to be predicted that,
if the swarthy Irish youth, whom Sir William Temple received into his
house when his college had all but expelled him for contumacy, should ever
be eminent in the world, it would be for fierce and controversial, and not
for beautiful or harmonious, activity. It is clear, however, on a survey
of Swift's career, that the gloom and melancholy which characterized it
were not altogether congenital, but, in part at least, grew out of some
special circumstance, or set of circumstances, having a precise date and
locality among the facts of his life. In other words, there was some
secret in Swift's life, some root of bitterness or remorse, diffusing a
black poison throughout his whole existence. That communion with the
invisible almost exclusively on the infernal side--that consciousness of
chains wound round his own moving frame at the one end, and at the other
held by demons in the depths of their populous pit, while no cords of love
were felt sustaining him from the countervailing heaven--had its origin,
in part at least, in some one recollection or cause of dread. It was some
one demon down in that pit that held the chains; the others but assisted
him. Thackeray's perception seems to us exact when he says of Swift that
"he goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil;" or
again, changing the form of the figure, that "like Abudah, in the Arabian
story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night
will come, and the inevitable hag with it." What was this Fury, this hag
that duly came in the night, making the mornings horrible by the terrors
of recollection, the evenings horrible by those of anticipation, and
leaving but a calm hour at full mid-day? There was a secret in Swift's
life: what was it? His biographers as yet have failed to agree on this
dark topic. Thackeray's hypothesis, that the cause of Swift's despair was
chiefly his consciousness of disbelief in the creed to which he had sworn
his professional faith, does not seem to us sufficient. In Swift's days,
and even with his frank nature, we think that difficulty could have been
got over. There was nothing, at least, so unique in the case as to justify
the supposition that this was what Archbishop King referred to in that
memorable saying to Dr. Delany, "You have just met the most miserable man
on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a
question." Had Swift made a confession of scepticism to the Archbishop, we
do not think the prelate would have been taken so very much by surprise.
Nor can we think, with some, that Swift's vertigo (now pronounced to have
been increasing congestion of the brain), and his life-long certainty that
it would end in idiocy or madness, are the true explanation of this
interview and of the mystery which it shrouds. There was cause enough for
melancholy here, but not exactly the cause that meets the case. Another
hypothesis there is of a physical kind, which Scott and others hint at,
and which finds great acceptance with the medical philosophers. Swift, it
is said, was of "a cold temperament," &c., &c. But why a confession on the
part of Swift that he was not a marriageable man, even had he added that
he desired, above all things in the world, to be a person of that sort,
should have so moved the heart of an Archbishop as to make him shed tears,
one cannot conceive. Besides, although this hypothesis might explain much
of the Stella and Vanessa imbroglio, it would not explain all; nor do we
see on what foundation it could rest. Scott's assertion that all through
Swift's writings there is no evidence of his having felt the tender
passion is simply untrue. On the whole, the hypothesis which has been
started of a too near consanguinity between Swift and Stella, either known
from the first to one or both, or discovered too late, would most nearly
suit the conditions of the case. And yet, as far as we have seen, this
hypothesis also rests on air, with no one fact to support it. Could we
suppose that Swift, like another Eugene Aram, went through the world with
a murder on his mind, it might be taken as a solution of the mystery; but,
as we cannot do this, we must be content with supposing that either some
one of the foregoing hypotheses, or some combination of them, is to be
accepted, or that the matter is altogether inscrutable.
Such by constitution as we have described him--with an intellect strong as
iron, much acquired knowledge, an ambition all but insatiable, and a
decided desire to be wealthy--Swift, almost as a matter of course, flung
himself impetuously into that Whig and Tory controversy which was the
question paramount in his time. In that he laboured as only a man of his
powers could, bringing to the side of the controversy on which he chanced
to be (and we believe when he was on a side it was honestly because he
found a certain preponderance of right in it) a hard and ruthless vigour
which served it immensely. But from the first, or at all events after the
disappointments of a political career had been experienced by him, his
nature would not work merely in the narrow warfare of Whiggism and
Toryism, but overflowed in general bitterness of reflection on all the
customs and ways of humanity. The following passage in _Gulliver's Voyage
to Brobdingnag_, describing how the politics of Europe appeared to the
King of Brobdingnag, shows us Swift himself in his larger mood of thought.
"This prince took a pleasure in conversing with me, inquiring into
the manners, religion, laws, government, and learning of Europe;
wherein I gave him the best account I was able. His apprehension was
so clear, and his judgment so exact, that he made very wise
reflections and observations upon all I said. But I confess that,
after I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved
country, of our trade, and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in
religion and parties in the state, the prejudices of his education
prevailed so far that he could not forbear taking me up in his right
hand, and, stroking me gently with the other, after a hearty fit of
laughing asking me whether _I_ was a Whig or Tory. Then, turning to
his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff nearly
as tall as the mainmast of the 'Royal Sovereign,' he observed how
contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by
such diminutive insects as I; 'And yet,' says he, 'I dare engage
these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour; they
contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities;
they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they
dispute, they cheat, they betray.' And thus he continued on, while my
colour came and went several times with indignation to hear our noble
country, the mistress of arts and arms, the scourge of France, the
arbitress of Europe, the seat of virtue, piety, honour, truth, the
pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously treated."
Swift's writings, accordingly, divide themselves, in the main, into two
classes,--pamphlets, tracts, lampoons, and the like, bearing directly on
persons and topics of the day, and written with the ordinary purpose of a
partisan; and satires of a more general aim, directed, in the spirit of a
cynic philosopher, against humanity on the whole, or against particular
human classes, arrangements, and modes of thinking. In some of his
writings the politician and the general satirist are seen together. The
_Drapier's Letters_ and most of the poetical lampoons exhibit Swift in his
direct character as a party-writer; in the _Tale of a Tub_ we have the
ostensible purpose of a partisan masking a reserve of general scepticism;
in the _Battle of the Books_ we have a satire partly personal to
individuals, partly with a reference to a prevailing tone of opinion; in
the _Voyage to Laputa_ we have a satire on a great class of men; and in
the _Voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag_, and still more in the story of
the _Houyhnhnms_ and _Yahoos_, we have human nature itself analysed and
laid bare.
Swift took no care of his writings, never acknowledged some of them, never
collected them, and suffered them to find their way about the world as
chance, demand, and the piracy of publishers, directed. As all know, it is
in his character as a humourist, an inventor of the preposterous as a
medium for the reflective, and above all as a master of irony, that he
takes his place as one of the chiefs of English literature. There can be
no doubt that, as regards the literary form which he affected most, he
took hints from Rabelais as the greatest original in the realm of the
absurd. Sometimes, as in his description of the Strulbrugs in the _Voyage
to Laputa_, he approaches the ghastly power of that writer; but on the
whole there is more of stern English realism in him, and less of sheer
riot and wildness. Sometimes, however, Swift throws off the disguise of
the humourist, and speaks seriously and in his own name. On such occasions
we find ourselves in the presence of a man of strong, sagacious, and
thoroughly English mind, content, as is the habit of most Englishmen, with
vigorous proximate sense, expressed in plain and rather coarse idiom. For
the speculative he shows in these cases neither liking nor aptitude: he
takes obvious reasons and arguments as they come to hand, and uses them in
a robust, downright, Saxon manner. In one respect he stands out
conspicuously even among plain Saxon writers--his total freedom from cant.
Johnson's advice to Boswell, "above all things to clear his mind of cant,"
was perhaps never better illustrated than in the case of Dean Swift.
Indeed, it might be given as a summary definition of Swift's character
that he had cleared his mind of cant without having succeeded in filling
the void with song. It was Swift's intense hatred of cant--cant in
religion, cant in morality, cant in literature--that occasioned many of
those peculiarities which shock people in his writings. His principle
being to view things as they are, with no regard to the accumulated cant
of orators and poets, he naturally prosecuted his investigations into
those classes of facts which orators and poets have omitted as unsuitable
for their purposes. If they had viewed men as Angels, he would view them
as Yahoos. If they had placed the springs of action among the fine
phrases and the sublimities, he would trace them down into their secret
connections with the bestial and the obscene. Hence, as much as for any of
those physiological reasons which some of his biographers assign for it,
his undisguised delight in filth. And hence, also, probably--since among
the forms of cant he included the traditional manner of speaking of women
in their relations to men--his studious contempt, whether in writing for
men or for women, of all the accustomed decencies. It was not only the
more obvious forms of cant, however, that Swift had in aversion. Even to
that minor form of cant which consists in the "trite" he gave no quarter.
Whatever was habitually said by the majority of people seemed to him, for
that very reason, not worthy of being said at all, much less put into
print. A considerable portion of his writings, as, for example, his
_Tritical Essay on the Faculties of the Mind_, and his _Art of Polite
Conversation_--in the one of which he strings together a series of the
most threadbare maxims and quotations to be found in books, offering the
compilation as a gravely original disquisition, while in the other he
imitates the insipidity of ordinary table-talk in society--may be regarded
as showing a systematic determination on his part to turn the trite into
ridicule. Hence, in his own writings, though he refrains from the
profound, he never falls into the commonplace. Apart from Swift's other
views, there are to be found scattered through his writings not a few
distinct propositions of an innovative character respecting our social
arrangements. We have seen his doctrine as to the education of women; and
we may mention, as another instance of the same kind, his denunciation of
the system of standing armies as incompatible with freedom. Curiously
enough, also, it was Swift's belief that, Yahoos though we are, the world
is always in the right.
HOW LITERATURE MAY ILLUSTRATE HISTORY.
HOW LITERATURE MAY ILLUSTRATE HISTORY.[8]
Some of the ways in which Literature may illustrate History are obvious
enough. In the poems, the songs, the dramas, the novels, the satires, the
speeches, even the speculative treatises, of any time or nation, there is
imbedded a wealth of direct particulars respecting persons and events,
additional to the information that has been transmitted in the formal
records of that time or nation, or in its express histories of itself. "It
has often come to my ears that it is a saying too frequently in your mouth
that you have lived long enough for yourself:" so did Cicero, if the
speech in which the passage occurs is really his, address Caesar face to
face, in the height of his power, and not long before his assassination,
remonstrating with him on his melancholy, and his carelessness of a life
so precious to Rome and to the world. If the words are any way authentic,
what a flash they are into the mind of the great Roman in his last years,
when, _blase_ with wars and victories, and all the sensations that the
largest life on earth could afford, he walked about the streets of Rome,
consenting to live on so long as there might be need, but, so far as he
himself was concerned, heedless when the end might come, the conspirators
in a ring round him, the short scuffle, the first sharp stab of the
murderous knife!
Let this pass as one instance of a valuable illustration of Biography and
History derived from casual reading. Literature teems with such: no one
can tell what particles of direct historical and biographical information
lie yet undiscovered and unappropriated in miscellaneous books. But there
is an extension of the use for the historian of the general literature of
the time with which he may be concerned. Not only does Literature teem
with yet unappropriated anecdotes respecting the persons and events of
most prominent interest in the consecutive history of the world; but quite
apart from this, the books, and especially the popular books, of any time,
are the richest possible storehouses of the kind of information the
historian wants. Whatever may be the main thread of his narrative, he has
to re-imagine more or less vividly what is called the general life of the
time, its manners, customs, humours, ways of thinking, the working of its
institutions, all the peculiarities of that patch of the never-ending,
ever-changing rush and bustle of human affairs, to-day above the ground,
and to-morrow under. Well, here in the books of the time he has his
materials and aids. They were formed in the conditions of the time; the
time played itself into them; they are saturated with its spirit; and
costumes, customs, modes of eating and drinking, town-life, country life,
the traveller on horseback to his inn, the shoutings of mobs in riot, what
grieved them, what they hated, what they laughed at, all are there. No
matter of what kind the book is, or what was its author's aim; it is, in
spite of itself, a bequest out of the very body and being of that time,
reminding us thereof by its structure through and through, and by a crust
of innumerable allusions. It has been remarked by Hallam, and by others,
how particularly useful in this way for the historian, as furnishing him
with social details of past times, are popular books more especially of
the humorous order--comic dramas and farces, poems of occasion, and novels
and works of prose-fiction generally. How the plays of Aristophanes admit
us to the public life of Athens! How, as we read the Satires and Epistles
of Horace, we see old Rome, like another huge London, only with taller
houses, and the masons mending the houses, and the poet himself, like a
modern official in Somerset House, trudging along to his office, jostled
by the crowds, and having to get out of the way of the ladders and the
falling rubbish, thinking all the while of his appointment with Maecenas!
Or, if it is the reign of George II. in Britain that we are studying,
where shall we find better illustration of much of the life, and
especially the London life, of that coarse, wig-wearing age, than in the
novels of Fielding and Smollett?
* * * * *
These, and perhaps other ways in which Literature may illustrate History,
are tolerably obvious, and need no farther exposition. There is, however,
a higher and somewhat more subtle service which Literature may perform
towards illustrating History and modifying our ideas of the Past.
What the historian chiefly and finally wants to get at, through all his
researches, and by all his methods of research, is the _mind_ of the time
that interests him, its mode of thinking and feeling. Through all the
trappings, all the colours, all the costumes, all those circumstances of
the picturesque which delight us in our recollections of the past, this is
what we seek, or ought to seek. The trappings and picturesque
circumstances are but our optical helps in our quest of this; they are the
thickets of metaphor through which we push the quest, interpreting as we
go. The metaphors resolve themselves; and at last it is as if we had
reached that vital and essential something--a clear transparency, we seem
to fancy it, and yet a kind of throbbing transparency, a transparency
with pulses and powers--which we call the mind or spirit of the time. As
in the case of the individual, so in that of a time or a people, we seem
to have got at the end of our language when we use this word, mind or
spirit. We know what we mean, and it is the last thing that we can mean;
but, just on that account, it eludes description or definition. At best we
can go to and fro among a few convenient synonyms and images. Soul, mind,
spirit, these old and simple words are the strongest, the profoundest, the
surest; age cannot antiquate them, nor science undo them; they last with
the rocks, and still go beyond. But, having in view rather the operation
than the cause, we find a use also in such alternative phrases as "mode of
thinking," "mode of feeling and thinking," "habit of thought," "moral and
intellectual character or constitution," and the like. Or, again, if we
will have an image of that which from its nature is unimaginable, then, in
our efforts to be as pure and abstract as possible, we find ourselves
driven, as I have said, into a fancy of mind as a kind of clear aerial
transparency, unbounded or of indefinite bounds, and yet not a dead
transparency, but a transparency full of pulses, powers, motions, and
whirls, capable in a moment of clouding itself, ceasing to be a
transparency, and becoming some strange solid phantasmagory, as of a
landscape smiling in sunshine or a sky dark with a storm. Yet again there
is another and more mechanical conception of mind which may be of
occasional use. The thinking power, the thinking principle, the substance
which feels and thinks, are phrases for mind from of old: what if we were
to agree, for a momentary advantage, to call mind rudely the thinking
apparatus? What the advantage may be will presently appear.
Mind, mode of thinking, mode of thinking and feeling, moral and
intellectual constitution, that mystic transparency full of pulses and
motions, this thinking apparatus,--whichever phrase or image we adopt,
there are certain appertaining considerations which we have to take along
with us.