BOOKS•

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SWIFT.*

THE task of editing The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift was entrusted originally to the late Mr. C. Litton Falkiner, a scholar in whom the love of his subject would seem to have been part of a family tradition, since his father, Sir Frederick Falkiner, was also a distinguished authority upon many questions relating to Swift's life and works. On Mr. Falkiner's death, Mr. F. Elrington Ball consented to carry on his work. Of his predecessor's special qualifications Mr. Ball writes : "Ease and grace of diction were united, in his case, with a lawyer's skill in the examination of evidence and a temperament essentially judicial; and knowledge of the sources for the elucidation of Irish history, on which he was recognised at the time of his death as a first authority, was combined with wide reading in general literature and a close study of the political history of England." We should say that with the task itself Mr. Ball has inherited a great measure of those qualifications which he praises in his friend. His work is one of the first importance, and it would be difficult to over-estimate its value, not only as a source of biographical detail, but in its wider relation to the history of that age of which Swift and Marl- borough are the most conspicuous figures. Since Scott's edition of 1824 a quantity of new material has been discovered both in the form of letters to or from Swift, and of other documents, valuable for the light which they throw upon matters referred to in his letters, and upon incidents in his life. Among this material are the letters to Knightley Chetwode, which were published by the late Dr. Birkbeck Hill from less accurate copies, and Chetwode's letters to the Dean, which were not included in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's volume ; letters to Archdeacon Walls, which have never before been printed, from Mr. John Murray's collection ; the manuscripts of Archbishop King ; the Cork MSS. ; important letters by Swift obtained from various Reports of the Historical Manu- scripts Commission; and other letters which have hitherto remained Imprinted. The patience and skill with which Mr. Ball has arranged this material leave nothing to be desired; his annotations in particular, by their lucidity, their terseness, and their appositeness, are beyond praise.

The first volume, which covers a period of twenty-two years, from 1690 to 1712, is composed mainly of letters to and from Archbishop King with reference to the remission of the firstfruits and twentieths. The business out of which this correspondence arose is in itself comparatively trivial; but, as with a great dramatic master, we are at once conscious of the play of character and circumstance ; the action is continually shifting under the pressure of diverse egoisms, and the keen, interested, and yet perfectly cold mind records each development and dissects every motive with an almost cynical devotion to truth. The clearness of his vision with respect to the course which events are likely to take is amazing, and when we con- sider that his political sagacity, no less than Machiavelli's, is based upon the essential depravity of human nature, it becomes almost revolting. In this business his pride is involved, and every check increases his zeal and his determination to succeed in his object, while the truth of his portraits becomes more intense, more vital in its revelation of character. We do not personally believe in Swift's " apostasy " from the Whig Party, because, though his destiny had thrown him among Whig surroundings, he never seems to have been anything but a moderate Tory at heart. But were this not so, his experiences of Whig politicians would be sufficient to justify his desertion of them. However greatly we may regret that Marlborough was not allowed to complete his work, and though we may hold the Treaty of Utrecht was a blunder directly responsible for the wars of the next generation, it remains that Swift from the personal, as distinct from the national, point of -view acted according to his conscience. We may trace clearly his gradual alienation from the inter- • The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift. Edited by F. Elrington Ball. With an Introduction by the Very Bey. J. H. Bernard. Vol. I. London : George Bell and Sons. pos. 6d. net.]

view with Godolphin, which he describes to King in the letter dated June 10th, 1708. The Lord Treasurer received him coldly, and after referring bim to the Lord-Lieutenant, Pembroke, agreed to support the remission, provided that the bounty were received with due acknowledgments ; and when pressed by Swift for an explanation of the term "acknowledgments," he replied : " By acknowledgments I do not mean anything under their bands; but I will so far explain myself to tell you, I mean better acknowledgments than those of the clergy of England." Swift understood from this that Godolphin meant

the consent of the clergy to the repeal of the Test, and King, writing to him on this " oraculous sentence," says : " I have thought of two or three meanings it may have, but they appear to me either so trifling or so wicked that I cannot allow myself to think I have hit right." In the same letter Pembroke is exposed : " My Lord Treasurer assured me he had the papers, which His Excellency denied; and talked of it as a matter which had lain long before him, which several

persons in great employments assure me is and must be true." These two episodes show how firmly upon his own experience Swift's mistrust of great men's promises was based; their fragility was to be brought home to him again and again ; no man ever learnt more thoroughly the lesson that in politics at least truth is a thing of times and seasons. It may be, as Sir Henry Craik wrote, that " the dull and pompous dignity and pervading mediocrity of Godolphin was as vinegar to Swift "; but above and beyond this personal antipathy was Swift's conscience, intolerant perhaps, but, we believe, sincere.

The sincerity of his religious convictions, which many question, is discussed by Dr. Bernard, with other matters, in the course of his admirable introduction to this volume.

Dr. Bernard is invariably illuminating. He finds that Swift's " attitude towards many serious questions was that which a later age would have called 'Agnostic ' ; but in regard to what he believed to be fundamentals he was quite

sincere." He quotes a passage from Thoughts on .Religion :- " I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my

own breast, since they are the consequence of that reason which He bath planted in me ; if I take care to conceal those doubts from others, if I use my best endeavours to subdue them, and if they have no influence on the conduct of my life.' Dr. Bernard sums up finally, in a passage which we must compress, thus :—

" The tendency of his 'practical view' of Christianity was to place character and conduct before creed, while he would have counted it dishonest to profess anything which he did not believe.

His mind was not the mind of an ecclesiastic, still less of a mystic ; but so far as we may see, his inmost convictions were not inconsistent with the creed of the Church which he served to the best of his powers Those who know a man best are the best judges of the secrets of his heart, and Swift's friends never questioned his sincerity in the exercise of his sacred calling."

We may quote in this connexion a curious passage in a letter to King dated January 6th, 1708(9), which closely parallels a famous passage of Machiavelli on virtic : "I compare true religion to learning and civility, which have ever been in the

world, but very often shifted their scenes ; sometimes entirely leaving whole countries where they have long flourished, and removing to others that were before barbarous; which has been the case of Christianity itself, particularly in many parts of Africa."

The chief excellence of this work is that through the

letters of his friends Swift's character is more completely revealed to us. Character does not exist in isolation; it is variable, and to a great degree takes its colour from its surroundings. In letters the writer thinks less of himself than of the friend to whom he is writing; his character

subdues itself to the opinions and prejudices of his corre- spondents, practising a kind of harmless deception either from politeness or from a tolerant kindliness. The fact, for instance, that Chetwode should have written to Swift: "The ladies of your acquaintance are, I confess, a little hard upon you in

regard to faces, to tie you down to ugliness and age. But you know the best if it be not just, since the world says you may command a very agreeable one and yet defer it,"—and then have erased the sentence in italics, is characteristic, not only of Chetwode, but also of Swift. So, too, in King's letter to him condemning The Character of the Earl of Wharton; or where he advises Swift to write upon divinity, assuring him that his interest as well as his duty requires it of him and when in a

few days, urging him again, he writes : "You see how malicious some are toward you in printing a parcel of trifles, falsely, as your work," the affected ignorance, the advice, and the assumption that the parcel of trifles were falsely attributed to Swift, all reveal, by implication, that there was in Swift's character a side which the Archbishop respected, and that he, too, was conscious of the "conjured spirit" and the divided nature of his friend. Swift himself was only too conscious of it : " not Presto," he writes to Stella, "but the other I." In this collection of his correspondence we recognise, more com- pletely than in any biography, the divided nature of the man: his charm, which fascinated men and women of such diverse character as St. John and Arbuthnot, Vanessa and the Countess of Orkney; his frank coarseness ; his misanthropy and odd streaks of idealism ; his cynicism ; and his playful scoldings and tenderness. After studying him in all his moods, we cease to attempt any synthesis of his character by piecing it together from his actions, and follow the more human way of relating his actions to a general notion of his character. He seems to stand out, finally, a gigantic figure, like Milton's Satan, in a forlorn and blasted grandeur, or to rear himself up before us, as Dante's Farinata from his blazing sepulchre- " Come avesse lo inferno in gran dispitto."