Dean Swift

“ That great, bustling, slashing, literary giant, Dean Swift, says to Mistress Hester Johnson, “Do you read the Spectators? I never do; they never come in my way. They say abundance of them are very pretty.” “Very pretty!” a vast many satiric shots have been fired off to [293] that tune. And yet Swift and Addison had been as friendly as two men so utterly unlike could be. ”

“ Birrell, the great English essayist, remarks that, "Of writing books about Dean Swift there is no end." The reason is plain: of no other prominent writer who has lived during the past two hundred years do we know so much. His life lies open to us in many books. Boswell did not write his biography, but Johnson did. Then followed whole schools of little fishes, some of whom wrote like whales. But among the works of genuine worth and merit, with Swift for a subject, we have Sir Walter Scott's nineteen volumes, and lives by Craik, Mitford, Forster, Collins and Leslie Stephen. ”

“ Dean Swift hated the world, and only loved particular persons; yet pride rivalled them. A foolish wish of rising superior to the common wants and desires of the human species made him singular, but not respectable. ”

“ His complexion had the same muddy tinge which distinguished Dean Swift's, and his hair lay in ragged masses of jet black about his square brows, unrestrained by bow or ribbon. His features were coarse and heavy in repose, but when thought illumined his humorous eye there was a sudden gush of mind into his countenance which dilated every fibre with the glow of sacred fire. As a companion he was unrivalled both as wit and raconteur, which may account for my lord's sudden whim of civility to the low-born advocate ”

“ Addison would listen with a smile to the Dean as he lolled over the table in his huge periwig, and roared out in his great rich voice all the sins of all the people, always beginning and ending with Sir Robert Walpole, whom he hated most malignantly. Once, a pause coming in the Dean’s talk, Mr. Addison, calmly taking out his snuffbox, and helping himself to a pinch, remarked that he had always thought Dean Swift’s chiefest weakness, until he had been assured to the contrary, was his love for people of quality. We each held our breath. ”

“ With regard to Dean Swift's poetical character, the reader will take the following sketch of it in the words of Lord Orrery. 'The poetical performances of Swift (says he) ought to be considered as occasional poems, written either to pleasure [3] , or to vex some particular persons. We must not suppose them designed for posterity; if he had cultivated his genius that way, he must certainly have excelled, especially in satire. We see fine sketches in several of his pieces; but he seems more desirous to inform and strengthen his mind, than to indulge the luxuriancy of his imagination. ”

“ Dean Swift was indeed a misanthrope by theory, however he may have made exception to private life. His hero, Gulliver, discovers race after race of beings who typify the genera in his classification of mankind. Extremely diverting are Gulliver's adventures among the tiny Lilliputians; only less so are his more perilous encounters with the giants of Brobdingnag.... By a singular dispensation of Providence, we usually read the Travels while we are children; we are delighted with the marvellous story, we are not at all injured by the poison. Poor Swift! ”

“ Indeed, I do not think the poems of Swift are much read nowadays; surely none but a strong man and a witty one could have written them; but they do not allure us. Everybody, however, remembers with interest the little people that Lemuel Gulliver saw, and will always associate them with the name of Swift. But if the stormy Dean had known that his Gulliver book would be mostly relished by young folks, only for its story, and that its tremendous satire—which he intended should cut and draw blood—would have only rarest appreciation, how he would have raved and sworn! ”

“ When nothing's left that's worth defence,
We build a magazine."
With the exception of Gulliver's Travels, very little that Dean Swift wrote is now read by anyone but students.
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS INTRODUCTION Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726 and without any allusion to the real author, though many knew that the work must have come from the pen of Dean Swift. Though the dean was habitually secretive in what he did, he had some reason for not wishing to say in public that he had written so bitter a satire on the government and on mankind. ”

“ The celebrated Dean Swift came to Chelsea in the year 1711, and took up his residence facing Dr. Atterbury’s house in Church Street.
Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick, in Dublin, an illustrious poet, and political and satirical writer, was born in Dublin in 1667, and died in 1745. Of a life so various and so full of business as Swift’s, we know not what part we could select consistent with the limits of this work that would not excite rather than gratify curiosity. ”

“ Patrick's, Dublin.—It is remarkable (and yet it has not been noticed, I believe, by his biographers) that Dean Swift was suspended from his degree of B.A. in Trinity College, Dublin, for exciting disturbances within the college, and insulting the junior dean. He and another were sentenced by the Board to ask pardon publicly of the junior dean, on their knees, as having offended more atrociously than the rest. These facts afford the true solution of Swift's animosity towards the University of Dublin, and account for his determination to take the degree of M.A. at Oxford ”

“ Theophilus Swift, who, though an Irishman, practised at the English bar, gave rise to one of the most curious libel cases that ever occurred in Ireland, and which involved a point of very great interest and importance.
Theophilus had two sons. In point of figure, temper, disposition, and propensities, no two brothers in the whole kingdom were so dissimilar. Dean Swift, the elder, was tall, thin, and gentlemanly, but withal an unqualified reformer and revolutionist: the second, Edmond, was broad, squat, rough, and as fanatical an ultra-royalist as the king’s dominions afforded. ”

“ His merit as a preacher was so eminent that it was early rewarded with a mitre. Swift went to congratulate him on the occasion, when he observed that as his lordship was a native of Ireland, and had now a seat in the House of Peers, he hoped he would employ his eloquence in the service of his distressed country. The prelate told him the bishopric was but a very small one, and he could not hope for a better if he disobliged the court. "Very well," said Swift; "then it is to be hoped when you have a better you will become an honest man." "Ay, that I will, Mr. Dean." ”

“ But though badly shaken, it was yet far from coming down.
"Do not the corruptions and villainies of men," said Swift to his friend Delaney, "eat your flesh and exhaust your spirits?" They certainly gnawed at the heart of the courageous Dean, but at the same time, they excited rather than exhausted his spirits. In 1720 he resumed his pen, as a political writer, in his famous proposal "for the universal use of Irish manufactures." Waters, the printer of this piece, was indicted for a seditious libel, before Chief-Justice Whitshed, the immortal "coram nobis" of the Dean's political ballads. ”

“ Johnson's life in the Lives of the Poets refers his readers to Hawkesworth, and is both perfunctory and prejudiced. An Inquiry into the Life of Dean Swift, prefixed to the Literary Relics of G. Monck Berkeley [q. v.] , is only important for the marriage story. An Essay on the earlier part of Swift's life, 1808, by Dr. Barrett, collects some facts from the Trinity College records, and prints some rubbish attributed to Swift. The life by Scott in 1814, though otherwise agreeable and judicious, is not very critical. ”

“ It happened that captain Hamilton paid one of these visits when Swift was there. Sir Arthur, upon hearing of his friend's arrival, ran out to receive him at the door followed by Swift. The captain, who did not see the dean, as it was in the dusk of the evening, in his blunt way, upon entering the house, exclaimed, that he was very sorry he was so unfortunate to choose that time for his visit — Why so? — Because I hear dean Swift is with you. He is a great scholar, a wit; a plain country 'squire will have but a bad time of it in his company, and I don't like to be laughed at. ”

“ It is the reciprocity of these appearances that each party should think the other has contracted that is so difficult to realise. Here is a paradox beyond even the imagination of Dean Swift. Gulliver regarded the Lilliputians as a race of dwarfs; and the Lilliputians regarded Gulliver as a giant. That is natural, If the Lilliputians had appeared dwarfs to Gulliver, and Gulliver had appeared a dwarf to the Lilliputians—but no! that is too absurd for fiction, and is an idea only to be found in the sober pages of science. ”

“ I have stood on a platform while the whole train was shunting; and as the dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys. I think we are human only in virtue of open windows. Without fresh air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the Queen’s English, to become such another as Dean Swift ”

“ Yet, according to this authority, her society was courted by several families in the neighbourhood, who visited her, notwithstanding her seldom returning that attention; and he added, that her manners interested every one who knew her,—but she avoided company, and was always melancholy save when Dean Swift was there, and then she seemed happy. The garden was to an uncommon degree crowded with laurels. The old man said, that when Miss Vanhomrigh expected the Dean, she always planted with her own hand a laurel or two against his arrival. ”

“ An Irish Bishop.
It could not have been more than two or three years after this sight of the Venetian Coach that Dean Swift introduced to his friend Miss {4} Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) a young protégé of his, whom he had known at Dublin, and who had made a great reputation there among thinkers, by an ingenious Theory of Vision, and by his eloquent advocacy of an Idealism, which he believed would cut away all standing ground for the materialism that threatened Christian Faith. ”

“ But the Queen’s death destroyed all; with George I. the Whigs came in again; the late Tory ministers were dispersed and disgraced, and Swift shared their fall. “Dean Swift,” says Arbuthnot, “keeps up his noble spirit; and, though like a man knocked down, you may behold him still with a stern countenance, and aiming a blow at his adversaries.” He returned, with rage and grief in his heart, to Ireland, a disgraced man, and in danger of arrest on account of his connexion with the late ministers. Even in Dublin he was insulted as he walked in the streets. ”

“ A simple journalist, of obscure origin, without rank or station, with nothing but a beggarly Irish living to fall back upon, yet endowed with heaven-born genius and the pride of an insulted god. He treated art like man: with the same sovereign pride scribbling his articles in haste, scorning the wretched necessity for reading them over, putting his name to nothing he wrote; letting every piece make its way on its own merits, recommended by none. Swift had the soul of a dictator and the heart of a woman. ”

“ He was one of the most amiable and intelligent of a most amiable and intelligent class of men—the physicians."
DEAN SWIFT AT BUTTON'S.
It was just after Queen Anne's accession that Swift made acquaintance with the leaders of the wits at Button's. Ambrose Philips refers to him as the strange clergyman whom the frequenters of the Coffee-house had observed for some days. He knew no one, no one knew him. He would lay his hat down on a table, and walk up and down at a brisk pace for half an hour 74 without speaking to any one, or seeming to pay attention to anything that was going forward. ”

“ The pleasure Dean Swift's Works have already afforded will be a sufficient apology for communicating to the reader, though somewhat out of season, these additional volumes; who will be less displeased, that they have been so long suppressed, than thankful that they are now at last published. We have no occasion to apologize for the pieces themselves; for, as they have all the internal marks of genuineness, so, by their farther opening the author's private correspondence, they display the goodness of his heart, no less than the never-ceasing sallies of his wit. ”

“ Well, Swift at last goes back to Ireland—all his larger designs having miscarried—a saddened and disappointed man; full of growlings and impatience; taking with him from that wreck of London life and political forgatherings, only the poor flotsam of an Irish deanery.
He has some few friends to welcome him there: Miss Hester and Mrs. Dingley among the rest. How gladly would Stella have put all her woman’s art and her womanly affection to the work of cheering and making glad the embittered and disappointed Dean: but no; he has no notion of being handicapped by marriage ”

“ It is fortunate that we do know the names of at least two of those lucky gentlemen who stayed with Mathew, and that one of them happens to be a great man, a man who might be called a ‘hard case’ so far as guests are concerned, a man with a capacity for being displeased that had not its equal in Europe, whose enjoyment may reasonably be taken as the very acid test of Mathew’s scheme—no other than Dean Swift. Yes, we are told that the great Dean himself rode down to Tipperary and spent some time at Thomastown. ”