The Nonesuch Swift
LET it be said at the outset that this is the best selection from Swift that is available, that with regard to some of its contents it is also an extremely important critical edition, and that everyone who is interested in Swift either as a scholar or as a common reader is greatly in the debt of Mr. Hayward for the skill and taste with which he has made it. It contains the whole of Gulliver's Travels, the greater part of A Tale of a Tub and of the Journal to Stella, all of Cadenus and Vanessa and of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, many of his Irish tracts and other political writings, together with a generous selection from his less serious works—viewed merely as a collection of writings there could scarcely be anything more attractive. As a critical selection it is, except in one respect, perfectly representative of Swift, and it is a great achievement on the part of the Nonesuch Press to have made it generally available —this is an unlimited edition—in such attractive form for the extremely moderate sum for which it can be obtained.
The one respect in which it is deficient is in its treatment
of Swift's poetry. " The most indulgent critic," writes Mr. Hayward, in justification of the paucity of his selection, "will discover little trace in it either of fancy or imagination, little evidence, that is to say, of poetic sensibility. He will find, on the other hand, immense facility combined with technical ingenuity and correctness." That is the conventional estimate of Swift's poetry, and is the result of assessing his poetry as If its object had been the same as that of the ordinary social verse of his day : whereas the truth is surely rather that Swift, while adopting—in part ironically—a social medium, succeeded in communicating something entirely different, a kind of sensitized wit which could be found in prose—never to better advantage than in his own—but had not been satisfactorily employed in verse, and that this—under the pressure of a peculiarly intense volume of feeling—took the place of ' fancy ' or ' imagination ' to act as the main- spring of his poetic sensibility. Consequently it seems to me a pity that Mr. Hayward has included so little of it. Moreover, Mr. Hayward's selection from the verse, besides—according to this view—not correctly indicating its relation to Swift's writing as a whole, is not really representative of the body of the verse itself. Mr. Hayward has not included any of his early verses, for which we may perhaps be grateful, or any of his lampoons, which we may agree to be of more interest to the social historian than to the critic of poetry: but he has also completely omitted, to quote his own words, all "those coarse, yet pungent verses, which express Swift's profound disgust for the natural functions of the body "—verses which, however much they may distress fastidious readers, represent an impor- tant and illuminating part of Swift's achievement.
But Swift's poetry, if it is badly represented here, can after all be read elsewhere. Gulliver's Travels, if it is to be read in its complete and most satisfactory form, must be read in this edition, for Mr. Hayward alone of Swift's editors has succeeded in restoring it to what seems likely to be the con- dition in which Swift left it before it underwent the indignities which it suffered at the hands of Motte and his successors. This is the most important piece of editing that Mr. Hayward has done for an author who has probably suffered more than any other English writer from textual interference, but in several other places (e.g. in Cadenus and Vanessa and in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift) his edition embodies important textual discoveries and improvements. For the reader familiar with Swift this book is consequently of the greatest interest, while for those who may have no previous acquaint- ance with his work there could be no better introduction.
DEREK VERSCHOYLE,
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