The Inviolate Dean
Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography. By John Middleton Murry. (Jonathan Cape. 30s.)
THE extreme reluctance of Jonathan Swift to place himself completely within the confidence and power of any other human being is the Fousistent explanation of the many complexities of his life. From lt springs the fascination that that life still holds—a fascination continuously linked with repulsion. Why did Swift equate human contact with violation, keep himself inviolate, and display a cold ;1,islike of close relationship with his own kind in all his actions, rout the great dramatic crises of his life, down to such petty details Its his distrust of personal ministrations as expressed in his nauseous Directions to Servants? The explanation sgoes very deep. ?swift certainly kept a barrier between himself and his fellow men, ,.u„Ht not in order to concentrate more narrowly,on his own writings. here is in this respect a whole world of difference between him and tilC other great Dubliner, James Joyce; for Swift's writings were all Dart of his life—the political pamphlets and Gulliver's Travels as ,Tuch as the Journal to Stella. Swift had no ivory tower, or if he did 1! carried it ar6und with him into coffee houses, royal ante-rooms, efaaPter houses and boudoirs. Similarly in private life he gave more L'rec, IY of himself out of sheer genius for intimacy than most ordinary
elividuals can give with the utmost effort of friendship and love,
tae still, astonishingly, remaining remote and lerrible to his inti- 1131ates. And in public life he also gave freely 'of all he had to give, 1eth during the London episodes of his earlier life and as the great eau of St. Patrick's. Here was the hero, champion and scapegoat gthe Irish—the reformer of his cathedral, freeman of the City of e ublin, succour of the poor, victorious fighter for Irish rights, who, OcePtionally, was neither destroyed nor exiled by his countrymen,
Who repaired the omission by driving himself mad.
nlrt fact Swift kept himself inviolate not for the sake of his writings, id)r for the sake of his life, public or private, but for the sake of an fi eal of behaviour—an impossible and repellant ideal which he and clearly expressed in his description of the Houyhnhnms in the contrast between them and the filthy crypto-humanity of e 'Yahoos in Book IV of Gulliver's Travels. Mr. Middleton Murry tads up to this point throughout his very tgoroughly organised ook and finally Inns his finger on it with unerring accuracy :
It [Book IV] has a kind of nightmare quality which abides In the rnind, and makes it uneasy. To pin this effect of nightmare down to the Yahoos does not correspond to the impression, which eman- ates just as powerfully from the Houyhnhnms themselves. They are more weird than the Yahoos, though they are not repulsive like them. Or they are repulsive in a quite different way.
at is it. Swift's conscious ideal is repulsive. It iftight be crudely Pressed as melts sane in corpore sano, but we,yould have to translate as "A clean mind in a sanitary corpse."
i quotation, goes straight to one of its earliest manifestations in Swift's glacial offer of marriage, on his own terms, to Varina: '
' I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without regarding whether your person be beautiful, or your fortune large. Cleanli- ness in the first and competency in the other, is all 1 look for.
His relative indifference to wealth he demonstrated adequately in later life. But what a tremendous and hideous significance lies in that seemingly harmless word "cleanliness." For cleanliness became an obsession, dislike of contamination became preoccupation with nothing but contamination, tear of dirt was corrupted into disgust, first with womankind and then with all humanity, until, in the final tragedy, the great Dean, whom five men could scarcely hold down, died, himself a hideous example of physical and mental decay, shouting obscenities at the very gates of death. Yet he was still great and he still evokes greatness : "A hater of his kind ran from them,to the wood of madness, his mane foafning in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled."
Mr. Murry does not quote Joyce. He has studied the critics ang commentators but he says little about them. His book is the justi- fication of his method, and if his judgements sometimes have an appearance of emotional dogmatism' they are always illuminating. If the Dean remains inviolate and inviolable who can grumble at that? The unanswered questions will always be there. But Mr. Murry has refined the great questions of Swift's,ljfe and posed them with a rare combination of imagination and critical acumen.
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