BOOKS.

MR. CRAIG'S LIFE OF SWIFT.*

SEVEN years have gone by since the publication of the 'first. volume of Forster's Life of Swift called for comment in this- journal. That biography carried us over the most important period of his career. At the close of it, Swift, then about forty-- five years old, was in the pride of his intellect and strength. His genius did not come to maturity very early, and had he died at twenty-seven, his name in our day would be unknown.. When three years older, however, he vindicated his claim to humour by The Battle of the Books, and before he was forty he published The Tale of a Tub, which seems to have been slowly maturing for some years. This great satire, as shameless as it is brilliant, and which amazed Swift in his old age for the in- tellect it displayed, appeared in 1704. Though published anonymously, the authorship was not unknown, and had the writer's purpose been to destroy his prospects in the Church, he could not have achieved his purpose more effectually. We- shall have more to say about this presently. Meanwhile,. following the contents of Mr. Forster's volume, we are car- ried to the time when Swift, a born politician, deserted the Whigs for the Tories, and made so striking a figure in London as the associate of Harley and St. John._ The book, therefore, includes what the reader will regard as- the most interesting period of his life, since it was at this time the "Journal to Stella" was written, and the acquaintance- formed with Hester Vanhomrigh, destined hereafter to be• so tragical. There are obvious faults in Mr. Forster's narrative,. faults of arrangement, and, to our thinking, errors of judg- ment; but the interest of the story was great, and it is impos- sible not to regret that the hand that commenced it was unable- to bring it to a conclusion.

Mr. Craik has many estimable qualities as a biographer. He,. too, like his predecessor, presents his subject on the best side,. and passes lightly over the traits which make Swift's character so perplexing, and at times so offensive. He wastes no words, loses no important points, and expresses his opinions clearly, though not always in the purest English. We do not say the defects of style are glaring. This indeed is far from being the case, but what strikes us throughout is a certain heaviness of movement, a want of the elasticity and the brightness of touch which serve to carry a reader over old ground with the- heartiest goodwill. The author's judgment may be sounder in a few instances than Mr. Forster's—in /inlay important cases, we differ strongly from both,—bat his pages, unlike Forster's, are sometimes just a little dull. A fault like this is like a foggy atmosphere. You cannot put your hand upon it, but you feel its depressing influence.

To write a really satisfactory life of Swift is one of the hardest tasks in literature. In many respects, Mr. Craik is extremely fortunate. He has had access to all the materials collected by

• The Life rf Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, Dablin. By Henry Craik.. M.A. With Portrait, Loudon : J. Murray. 1882.

Mr. Forster ; various unpublished letters and manuscripts have been placed in his hands, and Mr. Elwin, " whose learning, ;great as it is, is not greater than the generosity with which he -comes to the help of others working in the same field," has not only placed at the writer's disposal the results of his own research, but " has given invaluable advice and aid in regard to -some of the most serious difficulties of Swift's life." And, as far as we are able to judge, the biographer has spared no pains in working out his subject. The investigation has been thorough, .and the result, so far as concerns the knowledge of facts, is -entirely satisfactory. Swift's life, however, is full of perplexity, and in such cases we do not always find that Mr. Craik's investigations make the dark places lighter. We are asked at the outset to sympathise with Swift, and admit readily that a biographer unable to do so is in a large measure unfitted for his task, and that the reader should be also ready to take account of the Dean's circumstances, and still more of the morbid nature that made those circumstances intolerable. On this point, Mr. Craik writes with good sense, though possibly with too much readiness to condone the faults of his hero :-

" If we cannot condone much to the child born and nurtured in dependence, taken from his mother's care before he could know its 'value; educated under the eye of a stern and grudging uncle; to one whose opening career was broken by the troubles of his country, and whose spirit, to the last• degree passionate and impetuous, was harnessed to the methodical routine of a timid and somewhat pedantic master, unfit to take the measure of Swift's powers, but -disposed to look upon their occasional assertion as the unwarranted, although, perhaps, excusable eccentricities of an ill-trained youth ; if to all this, and to the fact that the very strength and unruliness of his 'powers were a source of uneasiness and of foreboding to Swift, we are not prepared to excuse much, then the biography of Swift must

• bring to us not a strain of vivid human interest, but the perpetual irritation that powers, always great, but often restless, morbid, and andiaciplined, must produce."

'To this the writer adds that, in addition to his other trials, Swift had ever before him the foreboding of mental darkness. There was another man of robust genius -in that eighteenth century who suffered constantly from the same foreboding,

-whose bodily condition through many years produced a deplor- able melancholy, and whose fight with fortune was more pro- tracted and more severe than Swift's. Johnson had not even a 40 stern and grudging uncle " to start him on the road of life- , very unjust estimate, we think, of Godwin—nor another uncle, upon Godwin's failure, to carry on the same liberality; neither had he a patron like Temple, who, whatever his faults may have

Seen, was the means of bringing Swift at an early age into contact with public men and public affairs. Johnson was as proud a man as Swift, and had far more indignities to suffer; but he

never lost his self-respect, never acted so that the reader of his fife can say, as he must say of the Dean of St. Patrick's, that half his troubles were of his own making. Sympathy, there- fore, may be left for Swift, who, like Johnson, had a deep well of feeling in his nature ; but it will not be one-sided sympathy, and there are passages in his eccentric life which it is impossible to treat with the leniency demanded by Mr. Craik.

We are not disposed to blame Swift with extreme severity for forsaking the Whigs for the Tories, though the time -of his doing so was unfortunate. He had been fed on promises that were not kept, and, after doing for the party what no other living man could have done, was left • out in the cold when Somers was Lord President, and the Whigs' power at its height. It was not, however, until the fall came that Swift openly deserted the camp, and passed over to Harley and St. John. On September 7th, 1710, he arrived in London, and was heartily welcomed by the Whigs. The elections began in October, and it was evident everywhere that the Tories would win the day. On the 4th of the month, Swift was introduced to Harley ; on the 7th, he was treated like an .old friend, asked to dinner, and called by his Christian name. Harley had found a master, and Swift a friend. It is unlikely that, if the Whigs had given Swift the Bishopric he asked for, he would have crossed over to their opponents; and still less likely, had he gained the object of his mission. He had been sent to London long before, by his clerical brethren in Ireland, to obtain the remission of First Fiuits and Tenths, that had been granted to the English, and had received nothing but 'empty words. Since the Whigs had failed him, he would now try the Tories. The new position seems to have been accepted with the heartiest good-will, and Swift exerted his wonderful

art as a pamphleteer to decry Marlborough and the war. For -temporary purposes, he was a dangerous antagonist. No one: living had his humour, his terseness of expression, his skill in

demolishing a foe. And we may add that, when resolved to carry his point, not a scribbler in Grub Street surpassed Swift in mendacity. Personalities were his weapons in prose, as they were Pope's in verse. What he bad to do was to make his foes ridiculous, knowing that ridicule may win the day, when argument fails. "I do not love," he says, " to see personal resentment mix with public affairs ;" but personal feeling, how-

ever misapplied, is better than the spurious indignation devised for party purposes. Swift called himself a High-Church Whig, a creed as anomalous as that of a Tory-Democrat; and his politics were never dissociated from his position as a clergyman. At heart, he was thoroughly sincere in his defence of the Church, though his methods of defending it were tortuous ; and in joining the Tories, he was moved, we think, partly by ambition, partly by resentment, but chiefly by the fear that, according to the cry so common in Anne's reign, the Church was in danger. It was

not Christianity, but religion by Act of Parliament, that Swift

defended. Dissent was hateful to him, scandal was to be avoided, and outward forms respected. If Martin cannot possess the whole kingdom as God and Nature intended,

sectaries like Peter and Jack must not be suffered to flaunt their claims too publicly. Mr. Craik, by the way, in estimating the

Tale of a Tub, disagrees with Swift's previous biographers in. regarding the account of these three typical characters, not only as the most offensive part of the tale, in which most readers will agree with him, but also as the weakest. He is right when he adds :— "The most sacred mysteries of Christianity are treated with a callous indifference, of whose effect Swift was probably utterly un- conscious. In writing the Tale of a Tub, Swift clearly gave himself a freedom in regard to religious matters which he never afterwards assumed. He never of set purpose adopted the tone of the sceptic, and such natural scepticism as was inherent in him he afterwards tamed into silence. But in the Tale of a Tub he treated religious matters not freely only, but with what to ordinary minds appears irreverence. This absolute unconsciousness of the effect of his own words, this impervious insensibility in uttering things from which most men would recoil, is seen still more notably at a later period of Swift's life, in that coarseness, at once so noisome and apathetic, which has left on his later pages a stain of another kind. The same characteristic, which it is difficult to disconnect from the forebodings of mental disease that cast a shadow on his life, now led him to stir to exasperation, and yet all unconsciously, the religious sentiments of those whose Church he desired to defend. But he neither weighed the consequences, nor could he afterwards understand the sensation that he caused."

When Mr. Craik goes on to say that undue weight was

given by Swift's critics "to the scattered pages that seemed to treat too lightly of religions symbols," he apparently for-

gets his admission that the most sacred mysteries of Christ- ianity are treated with a callous indifference.

From this topic let us pass to one which must always have the greatest interest in the story of Swift's life. Yet it might be unreasonable to take up once more a subject

so familiar as the loves of Vanessa, and Stella, were it not that Mr. Craik has, we conceive, formed an unjust view of Hester Vanhomrigh, and a novel, but wholly inadequate, view of the "mysterious and undefined bond" that existed between Stella and Swift. Let us take the Vanessa story first. It is the shortest and most tragical. She was a strikingly beautiful girl of seventeen when she first met Swift,

at her mother's house, a man old enough to be her father.

At that very time, Esther Johnson was paying her last visit to London, but to quote Mr. Forster's words:— "Swift had not named to her these new acquaintances. She was ignorant of them and of their mode of life, or the company they kept, when Swift mentioned them to her, nearly three years later." To this we may add, that though afterwards, in his "Journal to Stella," Swift often alludes to "Mrs. Van.," there is, considering the writer's loquacity upon other subjects, a mysteri- ous silence about the daughter. That Swift, who claimed her as a pupil, as he had before claimed Stella, flirted with Vanessa after his fashion, we have no doubt whatever. The girl had intellect, passion, ambition, and Swift, the companion of states- men and well known as a wit, might readily make an impres- sion on such a nature. It was for him to see the danger, not for her; for him to guard against it, before precautions were too late. As far as we are able to judge, he did nothing of the kind.

We acquit Swift, as his biographer asks us to do, of "a vulgar and thoughtless infidelity." They are not terms to apply to one whose love was of too strange a character to be compared with the affections or follies of ordinary men. He had not forgotten the poor, lonely Stella, he had only found a, more immediate attraction in the society and tuition of Vanessa. He wan conscious, too, as Scott has pointed out, that the attach- ment to the younger pupil was of a nature that could not be gratifying to her predecessor. No one can read the story without seeing that what Mr. Craik calls " the tangle of circumstance " in the Vanessa affair was woven by Swift him- self. He had played with the girl's feelings in London, acting as her mentor, and using those little arts which indicate the closest intimacy ; and when, eventually, she followed him to Dublin, the friendship, to quote Mr. Craik's words, " was suf- fered to drift on, but all outward signs of it were most care- fully dissembled." Yet, according to current report, when Vanessa retired from Dublin to her property near Celbridge, the Dean often visited the poor woman in this retirement, when he would read or write verses in her company. Swift's conduct in this affair is blamed as foolish, but not unnatural. He should have crushed Vanessa's friendship at once, we are told, but did not, because it flattered his weakest side. "It had begun in literary guidance ; it was strengthened by flattery ; it lived on a cold and almost stern repression, fed by confidences as to literary schemes, and by occasional literary compliments ; but it never came to have a real hold over Swift's heart." The point of all the writer's argument comes to this : Swift is blamed for irresolution, blamed, too, for his most unfortunate poem ; but, on the whole, forgetful of the Dean's age and power of fascination, forgetful of Vanessa's susceptible age when the first seeds of love were sown, Swift is excused, and the principal blame thrown upon his victim. We think the view a mistaken one. And Mr. Craik's story of Stella seems to us almost equally unsatisfactory. Our space will not allow us to follow it. We believe, with the biographer, that there are strong grounds for accepting the report of a secret marriage, but the reason assigned for it is astounding. We all know the surmises broached by former writers on the subject, and have felt that Swift may have been more unfortunate than culpable. But Mr. Craik's most prominent suggestion, if it be a true one, leaves the Dean utterly without excuse. He admits that no woman's constancy could have stood a harder trial; that Stella's good name was in danger ; that the mere marriage ceremony which, altering nothing in their lives, left them apart as before, was a mockery ; and that her only hope in accepting Swift's conditions " must have been that some day, if posterity should suspect her honour, the eventual announcement of her marriage might prove its suspicions baseless."

And admitting all this, Mr. Craik adds, by way of explaining Swift's conduct, and apparently excusing it,— "What, then, were the motives that prompted, on Swift's side, a compromise so strange, and in what mood did each accept it ? Swift had doubtless at one time looked on Stella as his future wife. But such thoughts had now passed away. Disappointment was pressing heavily on him. Defeat had just befallen him, and he had not yet recast his weapons for a new fight, or roused his genius to new efforts. His friends were at a distance, some of them scattered in exile. He felt himself thrust, perhaps permanently, into obscurity. It was scarcely wonderful that thoughts which might have been cherished in other days, when his hopes were high, should now grow dim and fade. He bad striven, too, for pecuniary independence, as a means by which he might make himself free in action ; and the fruit of his long efforts was a burden of debt. We havo seen how, prompted by the memory of his early days, and the endless embarrassments with which scanty means torture a proud man, Swift had fixed for himself, with almost morbid pertinacity, a rigid role of parsimony. That parsimony involved no sordid avarice, because at this very time he was sinking some of his means in a gift to his parish. But it determined him never to entangle either himself, or one dear to him, in the endless petty cares of domestic poverty."

The suggestion that poverty was the cause that led Swift to inflict an intolerable wrong upon the woman whom he loved strikes us as ludicrous, and is almost answered by the fact that at his death he left behind him several thousand pounds. And what was his " burden of debt," when he returned to Ireland in

1714 ? According to his reckoning, £1,000 would have covered it all—his income was £700 or £1300 a year—and Stella, whose wise economy was as remarkable as her gracious liberality, would have laughed at any pecuniary sacrifice to relieve a

temporary embarrassment. Had she not sacrificed her life to Swift, given up to him her happiness, risked for him her reputation ? The mysteriousness of Swift's conduct to Vanessa and to Stella is not made plainer by Mr. Craik ; and, on the whole, we think Sir Walter Scott formed a saner view of the subject than more recent biographers.

In his eighteenth and final chapter, Mr. Craik gives an estimate of Swift's character. The Dean had many noble and attaching qualities. If he loved power, he liked to

exercise it for the good of others ; if he insulted acquaint- ances and was a good hater, he was a warm and constant friend ; he did good by stealth, and in acts of charity spared no personal labour ; he exacted much from dependants, but he gave much in return; he was, however, a mass of contradictions, and while one action excites admiration, another instantly calls• for loathing and disgust. In religions matters, he was at once the narrowest of bigots and the most zealous of Churchmen. Mr. Craik thinks his mission was to preach against cant, and that his nature was in the highest sense religious ; but of devout feeling there is not, we believe, a trace in Swift's writings, nor an indication in his life, and he regarded all religious earnest- ness as cant. His writings are not tainted with impurity, but in language they are inexpressibly nasty, and in their persistent effort to degrade human nature must be pronounced grossly- immoral. It is his consummate humour that preserves Swift's name from corruption. The world forgives much to its humour- ists, and in this line the author of Gulliver's Travels is not lo- be surpassed.

Mr. Craik deserves the thanks of the public for the careful' manner in which he has achieved a highly difficult task. If we frequently find reason to differ from him the disagreement is probably inevitable, for Swift's life abounds with doubtful points, and his biographer has endeavoured in all cases to foral an independent judgment.