BOOKS

The Poetry of Swift

BY M ARIUS BEWLEY OMING again to Swift's poetry,* one feels that 'light verse' provides, after all, an inadequate description for what Swift has given us. The differ- ence between this poetry and that of Prior or Gay is not merely one of a more surely controlled Pace, a more insistent vitality; these are themselves the consequences of a vision and a seriousness that ace pervasive. The air. of casual but assured ease With which Swift draws us so effortlessly through his verse is not only remote from eighteenth- century banality; it is more than a century away from the vapid banter and swagger that the man- ner would degenerate into in, say, Hood. The difference, of course, is a matter of intelligence. Swift's verse is not intellectual, but its appeal con- sists in a play of perception whose vital element is mind. There is still a good deal of seventeenth- century wit in his verse, but it is in the process of being changed into something else. For example, these lines from 'To Lord Harley on his Mar- riage,:

Forgive me, when I fondly thought (By frequent observation taught)

A spirit so inform'd as yours Could never prosper in amours.

The God of Wit, and Light, and Arts, With all acquir'd and natural parts.

Whose harp could savage beasts enchant, Was an unfortunate gallant.

Had Bacchus after Daphne reel'd,

The nymph had soon been brought to yield.

That puts us in mind of The Garden,' but we Catch the differences at once : When we have run our Passion's heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The Gods, that mortal Beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race. Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow.

In Swift, the wit has begun to relax into fun, and the exhilaration that in Marvell springs from the verbal tautness alone grows in large measure from acerb observations on female character of the kind commonly drawn on for social comedy. One is not surprised at the differences, but the resem- blances are worth bearing in mind. Despite the inferiority of Swift's lines to Marvell's there is still a supple. nervous union between the conceits and their expression that is a little more than can he covered by the commendable but loose * THE Co►_t.ECTED POEMS OF JONATHAN SWIFT, in two volumes, Muses' Library. (Routledge and Kegan PLkul, 42s.) They are introduced by Joseph Horrell, whose edition substantially follows the canon of Swift's poems as established by Sir Harold Williams in the edition of 1937. Uniform with these volumes in the M uses' Library is the verse of Charles Cotton (1630-'1687) edited by John Buxton, who has reverted to a manuscript which passed originally among the Poet's friends. Cotton is a late Cavalier writer of some Charm and no great interest, who wrote warm verses about• the country pursuits which made up his life in L Derbyshire. The Cavalier qualities have somewhat slackened by the time they reach him, but `the rough magnanimity of the old English vein,' as Charles Lamb put it, runs through everything he wrote._ Editor, Spectator.

Augustan formula of finding the right places for the right words.

Still, Swift's verse was faced to the future, and such a quality as I have noted serves to remind us only that if Swift's language relates at times to seventeenth-century wit, this was at most only a fortunate underpinning for effects that belonged to a radically different world. Sometimes these effects are of startling originality, as in his un- usual poem, 'Heller Skelter,' which gives us a vivid picture of young attorneys riding circuit. The visual impression the poem leaves us with is as significantly weighted as that of any of Daumier's lawyers. It is the unexpected musical pattern of the poem that makes the deepest impression, and through which we feel the impact of Swift's intention. In a curious way the rhythm anticipates a poem as unlike the eighteenth cen- tury ,as Tennyson's 'Sea-Fairies.' Of course Swift was not interested in the rhythm for its own sake, as Tennyson was. Here, the incantatory music, which becomes more insistent as the poem con- tinues, induces a sense of unreality that makes its own ironic comment on the law. The young attorneys, blurred by the sound to a shadowy, dreamy movement, appear like monstrous child- ren who corrupt the roles from adult life that they parody in play:

And, if they begin a fray, Draw their swords and—run away; All to murder equity, And to take a double fee;

Till the people all are quiet,

And forget to broil and riot,

Low in pocket, cow'd in courage, Safely glad to sup their porridge, And Vacations over—then Hey, for London town again.

Swift's poetry is filled with surprises. He is never the representative poet of the age in the sense that Pope and Johnson are. As an Anglo- Irishman, that was denied him. There is a curious lack of ultimate commitment to the conventional loyalties and patterns of the period that was essen- tial for the development of his irony. But even more than by his curiously poised distance from the English scene, his verse was saved from that anonymity the eighteenth century often mistook for universality by the presence of a personality that no decorum or canons of taste could do much towards confining. Even in a typical piece of realism like the well-known 'Description of the Morning,' whose subject is the same as Book 11 of Gay's Trivia (London streets in the early morn- ing), we feel the pressure of a unique sensibility subduing the matter and manner to a vision hardly less personal than we find in Wordsworth's much greater Westminster Bridge sonnet, which tells us how early-thorning London would look a century later after the impact of Romanticism. These two poems are superb documents for revealing to us the extent and nature of the revolution in sensi- bility that had occurred in the interval between them. and yet both are highly personal. The movement is away from the Augustan respect for the social surfaces (in Swift one feels 'sociological' would sometimes be the better word) towards the unifying power of the inner vision; but one is struck by how much 'inner vision' the verse of the Augustan poet also has to show. If it is different from Coleridge's rather portentous 'esemplastic power,' it is still a vision capable of unifying a considerable range of social experience in terms of an intensely felt conception of human nature. What we are left with is something decidedly more than an itemised account of city sights and sounds.

His conception of human nature is the most important thing about Swift. It is sulphurous; far more so than the obscene, excremental poems of his later years, which were the result of sickness and ought to be forgiven and forgotten, would• indicate. If his disgust focused at last on the physi- cal functions of man, it was because he could never find anything on the credit side of humanity to offset the filth. And although Swift was a moderately decent man, it is doubtful if introspec- tion would have shown him any qualities that would radically have contradicted the indictment he was prepared to bring against mankind. His intelligence told him this, and his pride was great enough to persuade him that few men were morally better.

In 'Description of the Morning' Swift gives us a microcosm that looks a little like the foyer of hell. Wordsworth, looking at the London houses from the top of his coach, would write :

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Swift looked inside the same houses and saw something else: Now Betty from her Master's bed had flown, And softly stole to discompose her own.

It is unusual that Swift is able to sustain the atmosphere of morning throughout this little poem, for the morning he gives us looks rather like other men's night :

The Turnkey now his Flock returning sees, Duly let out a-nights to steal for Fees.

The watchful Bailiffs take their silent stands;

And School-boys lag a ith Satchels in their Hands.

The last line is fine. In its full context these are no Shakespearian school-boys with 'shining morn- ing face,' but rancorous little malcontents waiting under the eyes of the police to perpetuate the cor- rupted world to'which they are the heirs.

At bottom, it is men's fatuousness that excites Swift's animus. His sense of bathos imparts a unique flavour to his revulsion, and makes it • something very different from Pope. Compare Pope's ferocious/description of Lord Hervey in 'An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot' NA ith the burlesque „of George 11's character in Swift's 'On Poetry : a Rhapsody.' Sporus is as solid and as particular as life, but Swift's King George does not exist at all. He becomes merely the occasion permitting the British to exhibit universal fatuity. Swift's disgust is too pervasive and generalising to come easily to a vitriolic focus in a particular person as happens so magnificently in Pope. Pope's hatred creates; Swift's is an acid that dissolves men into their original bathos. But this lack of focus can sometimes become merely au ineffectual blur of disgust.

The hatred became momentously concentrated o,ne last distinguished time in his poem on the Irish House of Commons, 'The Legion Club,' but even here, where the members pass by name be- fore the reader, it is the evil of human nature rather than of particular men that most comes through. If this generalising tendency in Swift's hatred is sometimes a weakness, it is also, .para-

doxically, one of the things that makes him near to us in a century in which evil has been so universal that it seems anonymous. This is one of the things that gives Swift's verse a note of modernity that we do not discover in his greatest contemporaries. But little notes of modernity are everywhere. 'An Eminent Lawyer' advises Dr. Swift on his verse :

Take subjects safer for your Wit, Than those on which you lately writ, Commend the Times, your Thoughts correct, And follow the prevailing sect.

Mr. Nixon might be talking to Mauberley.

The Personality of Jonathan Swift* is a short book dealing with particular questions of Swift scholarship, and with set'eral problematical aspects of Swift's life and character. It remains `undecided whether to be popular or scholarly.

cannot imagine anyone likely to be interested in Swift's 'little language' in his Journal to _Stella needing the elementary information about Varina, Stella, and Vanessa that forms the sub- stance of the first essay. In a chapter of special pleading on Swift's 'obscene' poems, he con- cludes : 'If we are shocked, let us admit it is traditions that shock us, not the man.' Surely the point is how far beyond stock traditions, in cer- tain poems, Swift's loathing led him towards a sick rejection of human nature. Anyway, the poems Professor Ehrenpreis talks about are not the ones, I believe, most people think of when Swift's 'obscenity' is mentioned, and his argu- ments are not so much unconvincing as irrelevant. In a chapter on Swift's madness Professor Ehren- preis attempts to arrive at a legalistic definition of insanity which would exonerate Swift from the charge of ever having been mad at all. Generous but pointless. Our picture of Swift's condition isn't changed; only the words we use to describe it.

* THE PERSONALITY OF JONATHAN SWIFT. By Irvin Ehrenpreis. (Methuen, 15s.)