PREFACE TO SWIFT. IT is inconceivable how large a proportion of Swift's poems are uninteresting. The indelicacy of many is well known. It is not owing to carelessness. It is a strange combination, of great purity and correctness in one sense, and of studied violation of them in the other. But, laying aside this fault, still more are insipid. The matter not being important, the style tires from its very correctness and uniformity; the merit, except in comparatively few specimens, is chiefly negative. And the same might be said of the ideas. They have no absurdity nor affectation; you cannot find fault. If they were the casual thoughts and language of a more careless writer, some of them might attract; and the whole be more worth dipping into, at least. Many are occasional; written on a self-prescribed subject; not produced by the spontaneous occurrence of ideas. Very many were originally merely for his friends, and had better never have been collected for the public. When we talk of Swift's poetry, we must consider that of poetical feeling, in its proper sense, he had not a grain. He not only had it not, but, except in his youth, when he wrote Pindaric Odes, he professedly despised it, avoided every appearance of it, and sometimes directly attacked it, by parodies, &c. We must think of the verses of Butler, rather than of Dryden, much less of Milton or Shakespeare, to judge him by. Imagination, inventive fancy, in the way of wit, and of circumstances to compare or heighten an entertaining idea, he possessed in a great degree; unless we should call this fancy rather the consummate skill in storing up a number of individual realities, often, singly, of little value; as we see in two of his prose works particularly : his Polite Conversation, and Directions to Servants. But the fancy which produces rich, pleasing, or entertaining imagery, he hardly ever shows; not in substance, not in the ornaments of language. Metaphors he almost wholly avoids. I speak of his poems. In prose, now and then, his political spirit produces really eloquent things. In all this he is inferior to Butler. He has not wit, in that sense of the word, to the same extent as his model; indeed, in Voltaire's opinion, no man ever had. Neither had Swift the other requisite to real poetry, feeling of morals, or of passion. His merit, in his best works, is the unrivalled power of producing, and expressing in verse, just, characteristic, amusing circumstances of common life, and above all of conversation, sometimes most unaffectedly conveying the sharpest satire. In his rhymes, he is peculiarly fond of what Butler had led the way in: odd unexpected combinations, chiefly in double endings. In one of his poems, the Legion Club, is a very ingenious attempt to give the names of the Parliament-men whom he satirises, without printing them, by means of the rhymes to which they answer. His easy finished style was acquired by considerable pains, probably, and not very early; but when acquired, he seems to have taken delight in the exercise of the faculty, and to have written many things for the mere pleasure of writing. He was excessively nice and scrupulous about language and metre. He wished to prevail on his friends to avoid triplets and Alexandrines altogether. He is never bald, clumsy, or prosaic in the bad sense. His humour is not burlesque, like that of Rabelais. He does not use learned words or ideas for the sake of joke, like Sydney Smith, or Fielding in Tom Jones. He does not even introduce characters speaking in a puffy style to make them ridiculous. He has no Osricks, nor Pistols. SELECTIONS FROM PRIOR. MAN! foolish man! AN ODE.* I. Scarce know'st thou how thyself began; Scarce hast thou thought enough to prove thou art; Vain are thy thoughts, while thou thyself art dust. II. Let Wit her sails, her oars let Wisdom lend; Yet cease to hope thy short-liv'd bark shall ride What though still it farther tend And, in the bosom of that boundless sea, *Well written, and interesting on account of its similarity to the First Book of his Solomon. B |