BOOKS
Torrents of Thoughts
WHAT are we to make of Swift? There can be little excuse for not making something of him when we consider how many things he actually was: ecclesiastic, journalist, politician (Whig as well as Tory), patriot (Irish as well as English), friend of Pope, and in the running, at any rate, for psychopath—all this before we can get down to his qualities as. 'a great English writer.' There are thus rather more than the usual number of heaps into which we can deal the pack of our knowledge about him, while the enormous documentation of both his private and his public life has seen to it that there are more cards in that pack than is common; too many, perhaps, for one man to hold con- veniently in his hand. This factor tends to exaggerate the general proclivity of scholars and critics towards reducing to a single aspect the literary figure that has claimed their notice. and the latest discussion of Swift* makes him out to be primarily a politician.
There is not the slightest doubt—a perusal of Professor Quintana's book leaves no room for any—that Swift really was a politician. On page 3 we come to Swift's attempt, backed up with a letter from Sir William Temple, to get hold of a secretaryship, or perhaps a consolation prize in the form of a fellowship at Trinity College, through the interest of Orange Billy's Secretary of State in Ireland. On page 7 Swift learns with understandable disgust that the Godolphin Ministry is preparing to back the repeal of the Test Act, with the evident aim of conciliating the extreme Whigs and the Dissenters. On page 13 the Earl of Oxford is convincing Swift that the Tory Party, by virtue of its determination to get cracking on the question of the First Fruits, is the true Church party. And so we go on, carried breathlessly from the political context and applications of Swift's Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions in Athens and Rome; with the Consequences they had upon both those States (1701), to the social doctrine inherent in A Proposal for Giving Badges to the Beggars in All the Parishes of Dublin (1737).
Upon recovery from this experience, however, the reader will realise that there is more in the book than a dashing account of Swift's ecclesiastical and political career and the reflections of that career in the myriad pamphlets and occa- sional pieces. Professor Quintana is straightforward, detailed and instructive on the actual political content of the more important works, such as A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels. One might perhaps take exception to the rather over- lengthy (for this size of book) discussion of exactly when and how the various parts of Gulliver came to be written, but the political parallels adduced for many of the main events and motives of the work, especially its earlier sections, are con- vincing and helpful as far as they go. To wonder just how far they do go brings into question Professor Quintana's whole method, and the answer here depends, in turn, on what use one expects to make of his book. It will no doubt be very useful to the student of the subject. the specialist, the man who wants a handy résumé of the part played by political history in Swift's work, plus, perhaps, a few novel suggestions and inferences in this field. But this is not the kind of use to which the subtitle, An Introduction, seems to be laying claim.
This claim, which is extended at various points in Professor Quintana's preface, would be difficult to substantiate. The clarity and level-headedness of the book are admirable enough, and its approach has at any rate the merit of being a counter-irritant to all the talk about impotence and scato- logical obsession and dementia and Meniere's syndrome, not to mention Presto's relations with MD. The chief weakness, I think, is the absence of any apparent interest in critical matters, any very ardent attempt to treat Swift's work as litera- ture. What we get are terms like 'moral realism,' rhetorical power' and 'comic artistry' being thrown about as if every- body knew what they meant and what they could be applied to; individual works tend to get reduced to political and social comment on the one hand and 'craftsmanship' or 'workman- I know about them I am more than ever convinced that. outside Gulliver's Travels, parts of the Directions to Servants, and perhaps the manual of Genteel and Ingenious Conversa- tion, Swift's prose works consist of a series of exhibition-bouts between a steamroller and a bushel of nuts laid end to end. The similarity of this method to that used in The Dunciad is only superficial; Pope, to begin with, was able simply to do more different things with his material. Swift's range was indeed very. narrow, and it was only in fiction (or near-fiction) and a few of the shorter poems—both of them forms that may do something to curb diffuseness—that this range could seem adequate.
The foregoing is not designed to compel every writer on Swift to take that kind of line—though it might be a good idea. It is merely an appeal against letting what he actually wrote, and the varying literary value of what he wrote, become dimmed and blurred into sameness by a fog of adventitious fact. Mr. Robert Graves once said something to the effect that what he meant by poetry was poetry, not Byron's collars and Shelley's girl-friends and Keats's first editions, and so on. By the same token, I feel, we should do all we can to forget Swift's preferment, Ancients vs. Moderns, the Barrier Treaty and Wood's lia'pence, or at least keep them incarcerated in footnotes.
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