The Function of the Poet and Other Essays Part 9

Ligeia! Ligeia!

My beautiful one, Whose harshest idea Will to melody run, _Say, is it thy will_, _On the breezes to toss_, _Or, capriciously still_, _Like the lone albatross_, _Inc.u.mbent on night_, _As she on the air_, _To keep watch with delight_ _On the harmony there_?

John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too long capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similar pa.s.sages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.

Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to call _genius_. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power. Let talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such magnetism.

Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting. Talent sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton, and if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses shall but seem n.o.bler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may make friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away by their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of its sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive the ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man of mere talent ever flung his inkstand at the devil.

When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he has produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it at all is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence for the trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and the greenest laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses and Aristotles of our newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order to render a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness of attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parna.s.sus is, according to these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of the country, a circ.u.mstance which must make it an uncomfortable residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude be, as immemorial tradition a.s.serts, a necessary part of their idiosyncrasy.

Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous yet minute a.n.a.lysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a correct outline, while the second groups, fills up, and colors. Both of these Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his prose works, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the first in his later ones. In judging of the merit of an author, and a.s.signing him his niche among our household G.o.ds, we have a right to regard him from our own point of view, and to measure him by our own standard. But, in estimating the amount of power displayed in his works, we must be governed by his own design, and, placing them by the side of his own ideal, find how much is wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions of the objects of art. He esteems that object to be the creation of Beauty, and perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that we disagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we shall take his own standard as our guide. The temple of the G.o.d of song is equally accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it for all who bring offerings, or seek an oracle.

In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable into the weird confines of superst.i.tion and unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a b.u.t.ton unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded, a.n.a.lysis. It is this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at once reaches forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bring about certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate parts tend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to his own mind. To him _x_ is a known quant.i.ty all along. In any picture that he paints, he understands the chemical properties of all his colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with _Mysticism_. The Mystic dwells _in_ the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other hand, is a spectator _ab extra_. He a.n.a.lyzes, he dissects, he watches

----with an eye serene, The very pulse of the machine,

for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and piston-rods, all working to produce a certain end.

This a.n.a.lyzing tendency of his mind balances the poetical, and, by giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of horror, also, he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by a dusky hint some terrible _doubt_ which is the secret of all horror. He leaves to imagination the task of finis.h.i.+ng the picture, a task to which only she is competent.

For much imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles' image stood his spear Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind.

Beside the merit of conception, Mr. Poe's writings have also that of form. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly cla.s.sical. It would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales, "The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been enough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master of a cla.s.sic style. In this tale occurs, perhaps, the most beautiful of his poems.

The great masters of imagination have seldom resorted to the vague and the unreal as sources of effect. They have not used dread and horror alone, but only in combination with other qualities, as means of subjugating the fancies of their readers. The loftiest muse has ever a household and fireside charm about her. Mr. Poe's secret lies mainly in the skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mystery and terror. In this his success is so great and striking as to deserve the name of art, not artifice. We cannot call his materials the n.o.blest or purest, but we must concede to him the highest merit of construction.

As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient. Unerring in his a.n.a.lysis of dictions, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art. His criticisms are, however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic.

They have the exactness, and at the same time, the coldness of mathematical demonstrations. Yet they stand in strikingly refres.h.i.+ng contrast with the vague generalisms and sharp personalities of the day.

If deficient in warmth, they are also without the heat of partizans.h.i.+p.

They are especially valuable as ill.u.s.trating the great truth, too generally overlooked, that a.n.a.lytic power is a subordinate quality of the critic.

On the whole, it may be considered certain that Mr. Poe has attained an individual eminence in our literature, which he will keep. He has given proof of power and originality. He has done that which could only be done once with success or safety, and the imitation or repet.i.tion of which would produce weariness.

THACKERAY

ROUNDABOUT PAPERS

The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death of Thackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still our social and literary capital. Not even the loss of Irving called forth so universal and strong an expression of sorrow. And yet it had been the fas.h.i.+on to call Thackeray a cynic. We must take leave to doubt whether Diogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been so tenderly regretted. We think there was something more in all this than mere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius. There was a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,--a true man.

Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist, and could not have been one if he would. Your true cynic is a sceptic also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself, but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest quality always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees, and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is and man as he might be, between the real sn.o.b and the ideal image of his Creator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm; the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from the harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of all manner of _shams_, an equally intense love for every kind of manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that _ingenium perfervidum_ of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-Mall Jeremiah after all.

It is curious to see how often Nature, original and profuse as she is, repeats herself; how often, instead of sending one complete mind like Shakespeare, she sends two who are the complements of each other,--Fielding and Richardson, Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and George Sand, and now again Thackeray and d.i.c.kens. We are not fond of comparative criticism, we mean of that kind which brings forward the merit of one man as if it depreciated the different merit of another, nor of supercilious criticism, which measures every talent by some ideal standard of possible excellence, and, if it fall short, can find nothing to admire. A thing is either good in itself or good for nothing. Yet there is such a thing as a contrast of differences between two eminent intellects by which we may perhaps arrive at a clearer perception of what is characteristic in each. It is almost impossible, indeed, to avoid some sort of parallel _a la_ Plutarch between Thackeray and d.i.c.kens. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they may be equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a few striking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints character, and d.i.c.kens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages are all men, those of d.i.c.kens personified oddities. The one is an artist, the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.

Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the ill.u.s.trations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for d.i.c.kens invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is perfect, that of d.i.c.kens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.

Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, d.i.c.kens from the reporter's box in the police-court. d.i.c.kens is certainly one of the greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.

Thackeray's style is beyond praise,--so easy, so limpid, showing everywhere by un.o.btrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture, it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was natural to him,--his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond," for example) being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respects the most finished example we have of what is called a man of the world.

In the pardonable eulogies which were uttered in the fresh grief at his loss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked above Fielding,--a position which no one would have been so eager in disclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on their pedestals. Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written in English since Shakespeare. Of a broader and deeper nature, of a larger brain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter is Society. The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common was Richard Steele, as these "Roundabout Papers" show plainly enough. He admired Fielding, but he loved Steele.

TWO GREAT AUTHORS

SWIFT[1]

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 Chateaubriand. A s.h.i.+lling 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 a.s.sociation with the least sentimental of men should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to that of Abelard and Helose 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 ant.i.theses 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 coa.r.s.eness, who could inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with a fruitless pa.s.sion 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 circ.u.mstance any more than soil or exposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it is c.u.mulative, 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 ident.i.ty 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 quant.i.ty--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, h.e.l.lenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowell had great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitch.e.l.l once told me that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even wished that he had a Hebraic nose. Several doc.u.ments 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 st.u.r.dy 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 a.s.serted, 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 pa.s.sions 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 ent.i.tled 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 quant.i.ty 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 doc.u.mentary 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 a.s.sumes 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 pa.s.sionate 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 dispa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sages 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 overpa.s.sed. 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sion, 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 a.s.suming 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sage in question be an outbreak of ferocious spleen against her victorious rival. Its coa.r.s.eness 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.

II

We cannot properly understand Swift's cynicism and bring it into any relation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiability without taking his whole life into account. Few give themselves the trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet.

With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the Cowleian Pindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint of Parisian rather than Theban origin. If the master was but a fresh example of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of the flying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not even the secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earth while with perfect good faith he went through all the motions of soaring? Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment, though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent. He who could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything something else than it was, he would see things as they were--or as, in his sullen disgust, they seemed to be--and call them all by their right names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a Hottentot--nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble compromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and not ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its ident.i.ty with the brutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed and aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with himself. He despised mankind because he found something despicable in Jonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion to their likeness with himself. He had more or less consciously sacrificed self-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man's accidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, as no other "man of his level" in Ireland was, to being happy with the woman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and the independence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude after all. "Money," he was fond of saying, "is freedom," but he never learned that self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect. With a hearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yet bring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier of three royal strumpets. How should he be happy who had defined happiness to be "the perpetual possession of being well deceived," and who could never be deceived himself? It may well be doubted whether what he himself calls "that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries that in the inside they are good for nothing," be of so penetrative an insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather that to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had the microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his shallow friend Gay that life was a jest. To his n.o.bler temper it was always profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, we suspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears. The lesson is worth remembering that _his_ apples of Sodom, like those of lesser men, were plucked from boughs of his own grafting.

But there are palliations for him, even if the world were not too ready to forgive a man everything if he will only be a genius. Sir Robert Walpole used to say "that it was fortunate so few men could be prime ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking wickedness of mankind." Swift, from his peculiar relation to two successive ministries, was in a position to know all that they knew, and perhaps, as a recognized place-broker, even more than they knew, of the selfish servility of men. He had seen the men who figure so imposingly in the stage-processions of history too nearly. He knew the real Jacks and Toms as they were over a pot of ale after the scenic illusion was done with. He saw the destinies of a kingdom controlled by men far less able than himself; the highest of arts, that of politics, degraded to a trade in places, and the n.o.blest opportunity, that of office, abused for purposes of private gain. His disenchantment began early, probably in his intimacy with Sir William Temple, in whom (though he says that all that was good and great died with him) he must have seen the weak side of solemn priggery and the pretension that made a mystery of statecraft.

In his twenty-second year he writes: