CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 3
I. JOHNSON AS SWIFT’S BIOGRAPHER AND CRITIC
Johnson’s Interpretation of Swift’s Life and Personality 8
Hawkesworth and Johnson on Swift’s Political and Religious Views 20
Some Reactions to Johnson’s Life of Swift 23
Johnson’s Judgment of Swift’s Writing 30
II. JOHNSON AS A SWIFTIAN SATIRIST
Political Satire 38
The Extent of Johnson’s Ridicule 52
Social Satire 58
Abuses of Learning 63
The Projector--Collector 65
III. NATURE, REASON, AND MARRIAGE
Nature and Reason 79
Attitudes toward Women 84
The Foundation for Marriage 90
Swift’s Portrait of Stella 100
IV. THE POLITICAL SERMONS OF JOHNSON AND SWIFT
Political Sermons 110
Conclusion 132
BIBLIOGRAPHY 136
INTRODUCTION
Johnson, it is well-known, had conceived a prejudice against Swift. His friends trembled for him when he was writing that life, but were pleased, at last, to see it executed with temper and moderation.1
--Arthur Murphy
This comparative study of Swift and Johnson is an attempt to “illuminate the often puzzling antagonisms” felt for Swift as a person and as a writer by Johnson.”2 It is also, hopefully, the beginning of an assessment of Johnson’s part in the Swiftian tradition. By Swiftian tradition I mean the various images we have of Swift as a man and a style of writing that is characterized by a pungent, concrete and active use of language.
It would be out of place here to attempt a complete listing of Swiftian satire, but two main qualities apply to certain examples of Johnson’s writings. The first one is a convincing portrayal of the absurd and the second is a tragic sense of life which can be sensed in some of his satire. Both Swift and Johnson support Christian and humanistic values when faced with confusion, disbelief, and puerile speculation. In the welter of man’s vanity and foolishness, they search for his dignity.
There have been other comparative studies of Swift and Johnson. Milton Voight describes W.B.C. Watkins’ chapter, “Vive la Bagatelle,” in Perilous Balance as a “modest but perceptive comparative study of Swift and Johnson” (Voight, p.185).
Major critics such as Walter Jackson Bate and W.K.Wimsatt accept Watkins’ interpretation. Though Watkins’ use of his material is at times conjectural, it still remains the most impressive effort to explain the problem of Johnson’s attitude toward Swift.
There also have been a number of studies of Swift’s early biographers. In the parade of biographies, criticism on Johnson’s Life of Swift runs from Thomas Sheridan’s bitter denunciation to a recent tendency of finding Johnson’s work reasonably objective. Donald Berwick 3 correctly observes that serious criticism of Swift begins with Johnson. Philip Sun, 4 who does an admirable job of cataloging Swift’s character traits as they have come down from the eighteenth-century biographies, also praises Johnson’s performance. While Berwick and Sun’s dissertations are primarily concerned with diverse reactions to Swift’s life, I am primarily concerned with Johnson’s reaction, which, though it is critical, is consistent with his major literary principles. This discussion lays the groundwork for Johnson’s part in the Swiftian tradition.
Johnson’s critique of Swift’s life suggests that he thought Swift was often extreme in his attempt to be reasonable; indeed, he often describes Swift as “unreasonable.” However, when he sees Swift’s “wit, confederated with truth,” he does not hesitate to say so.
Perhaps the key to understanding Johnson’ attitude toward Swift lies in his fairy tale, The Fountains. The heroine of that story must surrender her own and other people’s happiness as well, in order to have the gift of wit. Wit enables her to see how the world fails to measure up to reason, and it provides her with all the language of wit to destroy the contentment of others. It leaves her with nothing else but to prepare for her death in order to keep from losing more friends and from discovering more bitter truths.
A recent study by Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, discusses Swift and Johnson, along with several other eighteenth-century writers, such as Dryden, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Burke, and Gibbon. These men are described as Augustan Humanists in order to indicate a unity of thought and rhetoric from the early to the late eighteenth century. Fussell is helpful in drawing Swift and Johnson together through their writings, but in relating them to a larger circle of writers he obscures the special problem of seeing Johnson’s part in the Swiftian tradition.
Another recent study by Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence, considers Swift along with Johnson for an analysis of Johnson’s views on reason and imagination. This book, though, is not a comparative study of Swift and Johnson. Other writers, like W.K. Wimsatt and Bertrand Bronson, have made passing references to the relationship between Swift and Johnson, but as yet there have been no full scale attempts to relate these two major legendary figures of eighteenth century literature.
My thesis is that Swift and Johnson are engaged in the same effort to reconcile nature to reason. Their concern with nature is mainly human nature, rather than the nature of the scientist or speculative philosopher. They both steer a middle course between Shaftesbury’s idea of humanity’s natural benevolence and Mandeville’s view of innate selfishness. The tendency since Boswell’s biography of Johnson is to view Johnson as closer to Shaftesbury and Swift more on Mandeville’s side of this issue, but Johnson is much closer to both Swift and Mandeville. For them, in the words of Johnson, man by instinct is “no better than a wolf.”
Moral feeling and values are created and cultivated through reason, which they regard as the effects of human experience, rather than an “inner light of reason.” The most important task for reason is to guide and control human nature comprised of the passions, appetites, desires, and will. As such, reason is more than the cognitive faculty. Reason actively participates in the formation of all subjective human experience.5
Swift’s and Johnson’s effort to reconcile nature to reason is complicated by their recognition of the pejoration of these words into “cant,” that is, overused rhetoric, and by their desire to avoid “deistic, stoical, anti-Christian, utopian, perfectionistic, or merely cynical thought” (Voight, p. 143). As satirists, Swift and Johnson ridicule reason when it is mechanical or divorced from human instinct, or they ridicule instinct when it becomes rapacious or distorted.
As commentators on the social relations between men and women, they see a reconciliation of the sexes as the harmonization of nature and reason. In their political thought they are concerned with the abuse and usurpation of power. Nature, in the political sense of the word, is “the state of nature,” which they agree with Hobbes is a state of open warfare. But they do not come to his conclusion that tyranny is necessarily preferable to it. Reason is only on the side of the monarch when he acts justly in the interests of the whole state.
They also agree that the lower classes in their ignorance and greed are easily fired with envy. Party politics from above arouses the natural impulse of pride below. The people then become intractable and rebellious. However, the body politic has nature and reason on its side when it overthrows a truly unjust and oppressive monarch or faction. Such was the character of the 1688 Revolution. But the earlier Puritan monarch or faction was the usurpation of a minority who had inflamed the people against a lawful monarch. The Puritan Revolution imposed tyranny whereas the 1688 Revolution restored traditional liberties.
Footnotes to the Introduction
1Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1897), I, 479.
2Milton Voight, Swift and the Twentieth Century (Detroit, 1964), p. 143.
3Donald Berwick, The Reputation of Jonathan Swift (Philadelphia, 1941)
4Unpublished dissertation (Yale University, 1963) by Philip Sun, Swift’s Eighteenth-Century Biographies. Permission to make quotations from this work has been granted by Dr. Sun.
5For a fuller discussion of nature and reason in Swift and Johnson, the following books are particularly useful: Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic (New York, 1961), pp. 59–79; Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 19–63. Kathleen Williams’ discussion in Chapter V, “The Individual and the State,” reinforces my own interpretation of the relationship between nature and reason as I apply it to Swift’s and Johnson’s political thinking.
CHAPTER I
JOHNSON AS SWIFT’S BIOGRAPHER AND CRITIC
Johnson’s Interpretation of Swift’s Life and Personality
Samuel Johnson’s reactions to and appraisals of the life and works of Jonathan Swift must always remain a puzzle to those who appreciated the contributions to English literature of both writers. In his Life of Swift, Boswell thought that “Johnson had a certain degree of prejudice”1 against Swift and that this prejudice manifested itself in conversations as well. Contemporary critics agree with Boswell. James L. Clifford, for example, in a lecture on Samuel Johnson,2 stated that there are those who believe Johnson’s lives of Milton and Gray can be reconciled to modern judgment, but that the Life of Swift falls short of Johnson’s own standards of critical performance.
Boswell’s charge can, to a certain extent, be refuted by showing how much of Johnson’s verdicts on Swift derive from other eighteenth-century accounts of Swift’s life and by showing the consistency in Johnson’s interpretation of Swift. In this chapter I will show the nature of Johnson’s respect for Swift and, in the next one, the influence Swift may have had on Johnson’s satire. Hopefully, that will allow the reader to decide the balance between mere petulance and objective appraisal in Johnson’s portrait of Swift.
Unlike the other eighteenth-century biographers of Swift, Johnson relentlessly pursues a central theme in relating the “facts” of Swift’s life. It is not that he is trying to develop the eighteenth-century psychological commonplace of a “ruling Passion” for his subject. Swift’s compulsions with money and power are symptomatic of a personality structure which Johnson is attempting to reconstruct from the “facts” he had available from his predecessors. It is from such a reconstruction that Johnson could add that Swift was vain and self-pitying, character traits which were not listed in the other biographies.
Johnson organizes his material to enable readers to draw their own thematic conclusion. A fair reading of his Life of Swift should pay homage to the artistic subtleties of Johnsonian biography, where Johnson, at times, uses novelistic techniques.
One kind of organization in the Life of Swift employs the tragic cycle of rise and fall. There is the overall sweep of the cycle from the beginning to the end summarized as “Swift expires a driv’ler and a show.”3 But there are many smaller cycles of rise and fall contained within the larger one. At the beginning of the Life of Swift, Johnson relates the well-known story of Swift’s attaining his degree by “special favor.” Swift turns this “disgrace” to his advantage by studying eight hours a day for seven years “with what improvement is sufficiently known.”4
For Johnson the medium for this change was “shame,” which “had its proper effect in producing reformation” (Lives, III, 2). In another, reversal turns Ireland, Swift’s “state of exile,” into a country where he has “power almost despotic . . . flattery almost idolatrous” (III, 43). But here again there is then another reversal, for this power and flattery add to the decline of his mental powers. Where shame had let Swift to study, flattery leads him into intellectual stagnation. Swift’s life illustrates for Johnson the most profound yet elementary laws of human conduct. “We are commonly taught our duty by fear of shame, and how can they act upon the man who hears nothing but his own praises” (III, 46).
Johnson’s talk of “shame” and “duty” is the beginning of his interpretation of Swift’s personality. Present-day psychological jargon maintains a distinction between character and personality. Character is thought of as the outward face of the individual, his ability to comply with certain social roles, whereas personality suggests the basic structure of the ego operating outside its social context. Johnson makes something of the same distinction: “Swift appears to have preserved the kindness of the great when they wanted him no longer; and therefore it must be allowed that the childish freedom, to which he seems enough inclined, was overpowered by his better qualities” (III, 22). [Italics mine]
Childish is a key word for Johnson’s understanding of Swift. This concept of Swift’s personality may be implied in the next passage: “His beneficence was not graced with tenderness or civility; he relieved without pity, and assisted without kindness; so that those that were fed by him could hardly love him” (III, 57–58).5 [Italics mine] That is, he fulfilled his social role as an agent of charity, but he lacked benevolence or the Pauline concept of charity, which should be love. Although Johnson did not stress sentiment in the giving of charity, the phrase, “he relieved without pity” seems to me significant because Johnson believes that pity is not natural. Children and savages do not feel pity, which is cultivated by reason and is a sign of maturity.6 The absence of pity which Johnson sees in Swift’s charity is perhaps another way Johnson develops the theme of Swift’s childishness.
Psychoanalytic critics of Swift have seen in one of Johnson’s statements a foreshadowing of their own interpretation.7 For Johnson, “the greatest difficulty that occurs in analyzing his character is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust” (Lives, III, 62). He doubts Delany’s explanation that Swift’s mind was tainted by a long visit to Pope. Delany, Johnson maintains, “degrades his hero by making him at fifty-nine the pupil of turpitude, and liable to the malignant influence of an ascendant mind. But the truth is, that Gulliver had described his Yahoos before the visit; and he that had formed those images had nothing filthy to learn.” (III, 63). 8
Johnson also sees Swift as a man who is unable to cope with the problem of aging. If Swift had made as a young man a resolution to study eight hours a day, now he made “some ridiculous resolution or mad vow . . .never to wear spectacles. “ Cut off from conversation and books, his ideas “wore gradually away and left his mind vacant to the vexations of the hour, till at last his anger was heightened into madness” (III, 47). In another passage, Johnson sums up the inexorable process of Swift’s decline by saying, “his asperity continually increasing condemned him to solitude; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity” (III, 45).
For Johnson, Swift’s personality generates an unstable world of emotions, a child’s world of resentment and envy: “He is querulous and fastidious, arrogant and malignant; he scarcely speaks of himself but with indignant lamentations, or of others but with insolent superiority when he is gay, and with angry contempt when he is gloomy” (III, 61). When Bolingbroke offers Swift an English parish, he rejects it and retains “the pleasure of complaining.” (III, 62).
In our own age there have been a battery of terms used by psychoanalytic investigators to describe Swift’s malaise. But Johnson’s explanations of Swift’s behavior is an early part of the Swiftian psychological tradition. Whatever its merits or inaccuracies might be, Swift, in this tradition, is not merely a whipping boy, but an emblem of man’s own concern with the attempt to understand the flaws of human personality development.
This tradition owes a good deal of its material to a group of eighteenth-century writers on Swift. It is useful to turn to them to see how much Johnson made use of their impressions, while contributing something of his own. Johnson’s Life of Swift in the light of these other biographies does not appear as harsh as some readers think it is.
At the beginning of his Life of Swift, 1781, Johnson cites John Hawkesworth. In his biographical profile called, An Account of the Life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift, 1754, Hawkesworth compiled information about Swift from several sources. The first one he mentions is Mrs. Letitia Pilkington’s, Memoirs (1748). A portion of her memoirs was devoted to her acquaintance with Swift. Hawkesworth uses some of her material, but is generally suspicious of her authority. He next refers to the Fifth Earl of Orrery, John Boyle’s, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Swift (1751). These remarks were cast in the form of letters to his son and were answered by Patrick Delany in his, Observations upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks (1754), which was anonymously signed JR.
Delany claimed he was defending Swift against Orrery’s distortions. Both these books were attacked by Swift’s cousin, Deane Swift, in his Essay on Swift (1755), which was a much longer work than the other two and which contained a fragment of Swift’s own account of his life. Deane Swift believed both Orrery and Delany had done a disservice to his kinsman.
Johnson barely mentions Deane Swift’s Essay, but he does use to Jonathan Swift’s own autobiographical fragment found in Deane Swift’s Essay. From all these heated previous accounts of Swift’s life, Hawkesworth had tried to pick together an objective picture for his Account of the life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift.
Philip Sun9 finds in Letitia Pilkington’s Memoirs Swift “somewhat caricatured in the manner of popular, fictional biography of the century.” He is presented by her as a “temperamental, rude, and foul-mouthed old man whose speeches are characterized by buffoonery and cynicism” (Sun, p.16). Johnson must have come across her memoirs, since excerpts appeared in the Gentlemen’s Magazine, but he, like Hawkesworth earlier, probably distrusted her account because of her dubious reputation. Mr. Sun, however, demonstrates that Johnson probably got the remark that Swift “stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter,” from Pilkington. George Birkbeck Hill, the annotator of Johnson’s Life of Swift, could not trace the remark to the other biographies. Pilkington also recorded Swift’s charity of allotting five hundred pounds for loans to the poor of Dublin. Orrery consciously omitted this detail. “I let the fame of it to Mrs. Pilkington’s pen” (Sun, p. 18), he wrote in one of his manuscripts.
Johnson depended mainly on Orrery’s and Delany’s accounts for his image of Swift. Boswell reports how Johnson Praised Delany’s Observations on Swift. “[He] … said that his book and Lord Orrery’s might both be true, though one viewed Swift more, and the other less favorably; and that between both, we might have a complete notion of Swift” (Boswell’s Life, III, 249).10 In his own Life of Swift, Johnson cites Delany, Orrery, Hawkesworth, and Dean Swift. Delany is not only cited but also quoted at length in two places.
A few of Lord Orrery’s remarks are immediately relevant to Johnson’s observations. Orrery believes that Swift’s misanthropy and madness stemmed from “his early and repeated disappointments.”11 Johnson acknowledges these early disappointments. He tells of Swift’s losing both the post of secretary to Lord Berkeley and the Deanery of Derry, again from Berkeley, through the agency of one Bushe. In a man “like Swift such circumvention and inconstancy must have excited violent indignation” (Lives, III, 8).
Johnson, by using the phrase “a man like Swift,” is putting the accent in a different place than Orrery does. It is not the disappointments which determine his character, as Orrery would have it, but his character which determines the effects of his disappointments. I have already shown Johnson’s way of describing Swift’s decline and the responsibility Swift himself had in that decline. Indeed Orrery, who speculates about insanity in the manner of the narrator of A Tale of a Tub or The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, sees Swift embrace his fate like an automaton.
Johnson describes Swift as having had “a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with Oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety. He stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter” (III, 55–56). Orrery on the same subject writes: “Dr. Swift had a natural severity of face, which even his smiles could scarce soften, or his utmost gaiety render placid and serene: but when that sternness of visage was increased with rage, it is scarce possible to imagine looks, or features, that carried in them more terror and austerity” (p.78).
He also observes that to his domestics he was “passionate and churlish” (p. 158). Johnson not only picks up this observation by saying “to his domestics he was naturally rough,” but goes on to narrate a story Orrery related to him directly. Swift, when dining alone with the Lord, observed that Orrery’s servant had committed “fifteen faults.” Johnson sees such acute observation as “tyrannic peevishness.” It is “perpetual” (Lives, III, 56) and it is not easily assuaged by Swift’s occasional acts of kindness to his servants.
On the subject of Swift’s writings there is general agreement among Orrery, Delany, and Johnson that Swift’s use of scatology is reprehensible. Orrery writes: “There are many places that I despise, others that I loath [sic], and others again that delight and improve me…they are of no further use than to show us, in general, the errors of human nature; and to convince us, that neither the height of wit nor genius can bring a man to such a degree of perfection, as vanity would often prompt him to believe” (p.52).
Delany agrees with Orrery on this observation and finds some of Swift’s works a pollution of the imagination and a corruption of style.12 He finds Swift’s maxim “Viva la Bagatelle!” detestable. He squeamishly begs off a discussion of Books II and IV of Gulliver’s Travels, and concludes his discussion of the whole book by declaring: “who would not wish rather to be the author of one Arcadia than fifty Laputas Lilliput’s [sic], and Houyhnhnms . . . .I am sick of this subject” (Delany, p.171).
Swift’s regularity in performing his duties, his exactness in regard to time, and his frugality is found in Orrery’s account: “His attendance upon the public service of the church was regular and uninterrupted; and indeed regularity was peculiar to him in all his actions, even in the greatest trifles” (p. 46). Johnson: “At Laracor he increased the parochial duty by reading prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays and performed all the offices of his profession with great decency and exactness” (Lives, III, 9). Orrery: “His hours of walking, and reading, never varied: His motions were guided by his watch” (p. 246). Johnson: “He did not, however, claim the right of talking alone: for it was his rule, when he had spoken a minute, to give room by a pause for any other speaker. Of time, on all occasions he was an exact computer, and knew the minutes required to every common operation” (III, 60).13
Johnson also notes that Swift’s Polite Conversation and Directions for Servants demonstrate his keen powers of observation. But in the context of his peculiar temperament this “vigilance of minute attention which his works discover” (III, 56) must have made him intolerable to his servants. While traits of regularity and exactness might be thought of as virtues, given the context of Johnson’s Life of Swift they are another instance of pitilessness, especially when they are applied to charitable projects. For Johnson, Swift’s trying to collect punctually his interest-free loans from the poor tradesmen of Dublin betrays either a lack of patience or of pity:
Swift was popular awhile by another mode of beneficence. He set aside some hundreds to be lent in small sums to the poor, from 5s., I think, to 5l. He took no interest, and only required that, at repayment, a small fee should be given to the accountant: but he required that the day of promised payment should be exactly kept. A severe and punctilious temper is ill qualified for transactions with the poor; the day was often broken, and the loan was not repaid. This might have been easily foreseen; but for this Swift had made no provision of patience or pity. He ordered his debtor to be sued. A severe creditor has no popular character; what then was likely to be said of him was loud, and the resentment of the populace outrageous; he was therefore forced to drop his scheme and own the folly of expecting punctuality from the poor (III, 44–45).
However, Johnson is sympathetic toward Swift’s frugality. Orrery had written that Swift “was a mixture of avarice and generosity” and that, while his avarice was frequently prevalent, his generosity “seldom appeared unless excited by compassion” (p. 3). This comment had aroused Delany as one of Orrery’s unflattering observations on Swift. Johnson settles the issue in favor of Swift:
In his economy he practiced a peculiar and offensive parsimony, without disguise or apology. The practice of saving being once necessary, became habitual, and grew first ridiculous, and at last detestable. But his avarice, though it might exclude pleasure, was never suffered to encroach upon his virtue. He was frugal by inclination, but liberal by principle; and if the purpose to which he destined his little accumulations be remembered, with his distribution of occasional charity, it will perhaps appear that he only like one mode of expense better than another, and saved merely that he might have something to give. He did not grow rich by injuring his successors, but left both Laracor and the Deanery more valuable then he found them. –With all this talk of his covetousness and generosity, it should be remembered that he was never rich. The revenue of his Deanery was not much more than seven hundred a year (Lives, III, 57).14
Both Boswell and Sheridan use this passage to illustrate Johnson’s bias against Swift. Though Johnson does raise the possibility that Swift’s passion for a shilling was “deep fixed in his heart” (III, 6), the above passage clearly puts Swift in a good light.
Johnson treats the stories of Swift’s friendships with women more courteously and sympathetically than do either Orrery or Delany.15 Although he does quote Orrery when he says that after Stella’s death “Swift never mentioned her without a sigh,” he does not agree with Orrery’s implication that Swift treated her cruelly. Orrery had written, “he never mentioned her without a sigh: for such is the perverseness of human nature, that we bewail those persons dead, whom we treated cruelly when living” (p. 19). Johnson believes rather Swift’s emotions to be much more genuine. He called Swift a lover and he sees in his papers how much he “wished her life.” Johnson strongly conveys the sense of Swift’s bereavement. As for the doubt raised about Swift’s marriage, Johnson answers affirmatively by citing the authority of Dr. Madden, Dr. Sheridan, and Delany.16
Patrick Delany (1685–1768), who follows Orrery, was from a lower class Irish family. A close friend of Swift, he knew him for twenty-five years. Delany was not harsh in his attack against Orrery’s book, even though it angered Swift’s friends and the Irish people, because he had also been friendly with Orrery. One of Delany’s chief aims in his Observations was to defend Swift from the charge that he had surrounded himself with low company. Another motive was his discontent over Orrery’s aristocratic pretentions in his treatment of Swift. He complains that Orrery has a “high view” of Swift, while he has the advantage of the “low view.” Johnson found Orrery’s and Delany’s books, unsatisfactory as biographical portraits, because they lost sight of Swift in aimless digressions.
Johnson quotes Delany extensively in several critical places in his Life of Swift. One quotation is in relation to the effects of the publication of Cadenus and Vanessa on the Swift-Stella households, and another quotation follows after Johnson explains, “I have here given the character of Swift as he exhibits himself to my perception; but now let another be heard who knew him better” (III, 63). By ending this way, Johnson is allowing for his own doubts about Swift and recognizing Swift’s high reputation. He uses Delany, again, in a discussion of Swift’s religious habits.
Dr. Hawkesworth has been described as a clever imitator of Johnson’s style. A significant portion of Johnson’s Life of Swift commends Hawkesworth’s picture of Swift and states that it was collected “with great diligence and acuteness . . . according to a scheme which I laid before him . . . . I cannot therefore be expected to say much of a life concerning which I had long since communicated my thoughts to a man capable of dignifying his narrations with so much elegance of language and force of sentiment” (III, 1). Hawkesworth was of course a conscious imitator of Johnson’s style, so that it is not easy to prove the extent of Johnson’s help. But the passages I have selected from Hawkesworth seem to me better than imitations.
Hawkesworth and Johnson express compassion for Vanessa and Stella. Hawkesworth is tender in his treatment of Vanessa:
Such was the fate of Vanessa; and surely those whom pity could not restrain from being diligent to load her memory with reproach, to construe appearances in the worst sense, to aggravate folly into vice, and distress into infamy, have not much exalted their own character. . . . (pp. 36–37)
Johnson does not care to comment extensively on this relationship. He calls her “a woman made unhappy by her admiration of wit” and tells us “her history is too well-known to be minutely repeated.” Hawkesworth describes Stella’s feeling for Swift as growing from admiration into complacency and then into love. Johnson uses a similar process to describe Vanessa’s infatuation: “From being proud of his praise, she grew fond of his person” (Lives, III, 31).
Hawkesworth felt that Swift did not intend his relation with Vanessa to go beyond any proper bounds. But he concedes that Swift’s judgment of himself might have been erroneous. Swift was the ‘absolute master of those passions by which the greatest have been enslaved” (Hawkesworth, pp. 47–48). Johnson sneers at that assumption of Swift’s character: “If it be said that Swift should have checked a passion which he never meant to gratify, recourse must be had to that extenuation which he so much despised, ‘men are but men’” (III, 32). He ironically rescues Swift by showing the falsity of Swift’s faith in a principle of self-denial. In this mocking defense of Swift, Johnson reveals his main objection to Swift’s philosophy of human nature, a philosophy which held too rigidly to the ideal of restraint. He expected too much from himself and from Vanessa, just as he had expected too much from the poor in paying debts, or his servants, or mankind in general in his Project for the Advancement of Religion.
Beauty, which alone had been the object of universal admiration and desire, which alone has elevated the possessor from the lowest to the highest station, has given dominion to folly, and armed caprice with the power of life and death, was in Stella only the ornament of intellectual greatness (Hawkesworth, pp. 45–46).
While Johnson acknowledges the possibility of Stella’s beauty, he is skeptical about her intellectual achievements. He calls her virtuous, beautiful and elegant on the basis of the admiration of her lover, who, he says, “makes it very probable.” But he does not believe she had “much literature, for she could not spell her own language” (Lives, III, 42).17 Nor is he impressed with Swift’s collection of her witty sayings. Johnson has recast Hawkesworth’s analysis of Stella by stripping away the concept that beauty was merely an ornament to her life. But while he disagrees with Hawkesworth’s verdict of Stella’s accomplishments, he does support his moral sentiment that beauty by itself has dominion over folly and caprice. The thought in Johnson, however, is that beauty here was fatal to Stella rather than to Swift:
Beauty and the power of pleasing, the greatest external advantages that woman can desire of possess, were fatal to the unfortunate Stella (III, 41).
Johnson maintains that since Swift wanted to keep Stella in his power he hindered her chances of marriage, and then decided to make a secret marriage in order to insure that Stella would not leave him. The marriage was for Swift a way of obtaining all the pleasures of perfect friendship without the uneasiness of conjugal restraint. The marriage was “fatal” to Stella according to Johnson, because Swift was unwilling to own her as his wife when she would have enjoyed it. Though he did finally offer to acknowledge the marriage, ‘it was too late’, because of the “change of his manners and the depravation of his mind” (III, 41–42).
Hawkesworth and Johnson on Swift’s Political and Religious Views
There is complete agreement between Hawkesworth and Johnson in their treatment of Swift’s political and religious views. Both men go into considerable detail praising and describing Swift’s political accomplishments. Writing in the Johnsonian style, Hawkesworth concludes his Account of the Life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift with the picture of Swift as an overreacher:
While he was viewed at a distance with envy, he became a burden to himself; he was forsaken by his friends, and his memory has been loaded with unmerited reproach: his life, therefore, does not afford less instruction than his writings, since to the wise it may teach humility, and to the simple content (p. 76).
This statement also seems to sum up the effect of Swift’s life on others in Johnson’s biography:
“He was not a man to be either loved or envied” (III, 61).18
Johnson twice cites Hawkesworth approvingly in his Life of Swift, first, as we have noted, at the beginning, then later when he discusses Swift’s pamphlets encouraging the Irish to use their own manufactures:
For a man to use the productions of his own labour is surely a natural right, and to like best what he makes himself is a natural passion. But to excite this passion, and enforce this right, appeared so criminal to those who had an interest in the English trade, that the printer was imprisoned; as Hawkesworth justly observes, the attention of the public being by this outrageous resentment turned upon the proposal, the author was by consequence made popular (III, 30–31). [Italics mine]
Whatever Johnson may have felt about Swift’s motives for power, he is generally quite sympathetic with his causes:
In the succeeding reign he delivered Ireland from plunder and oppression; and showed that wit, conferated with truth, had such force as authority was unable to resist (III, 50).19
Hawkesworth, like Johnson, also views Swift’s religious and political activity as his major achievement. He gives an accurate summary of Swift’s political views:
As to his political principles, if his own account of them is to be believed, he abhorred Whiggism only in those who made it consist in damning the church, reviling the clergy, abetting the dissenters, and speaking contemptibly of revealed religion. He always declared himself against a popish successor to the crown, whatever title he might have by proximity of blood; nor did he regard the right to live, upon any other account that as it was established by law, and had much weight in the opinions of the people; he was of the opinion, that when the grievances, suffered under a present government, became greater than those which might probably be expected from changing it by violence, a revolution was justifiable, and this he believed to have been the case in that which was brought about by the Prince of Orange. He had a mortal antipathy against standing armies in time of peace, and was of the opinion that our liberty could never be placed upon a firm foundation, till the ancient law should be revived, by which our parliaments were made annual: he abominated the political scheme of setting up a monied interest in oppositon to the landed, and was an enemy to temporary suspensions of the habeas corpus act. If some asperities, that cannot be justified, have escaped his pen, in papers which were hastily written in the first ardor of his zeal, and often after great provocation from those who wrote against him, surely they may, without the exertion of angelic benevolence be forgiven. (Hawkesworth, p. 26)
Johnson also abhorred Whiggism as a “negation of principle.” He spoke of nature rising up when there was no relief from tyranny. Although he may have had some nostalgic sympathies with the Jacobite cause, he did not debate the succession. As an opponent of the Septennial Act,20 he too favored annual parliaments. In short both Swift and Johnson viewed themselves as moderate Tories. In the last chapter of this dissertation, I will examine their political views in relation to their sermons.
In his summary of Swift’s political views, Hawkesworth cites two of his earlier works, The Sentiments of a Church of England Man and An Argument against Abolishing Christianity. Johnson warmly praises these works:
The Sentiments of a Church of England Man is written with great coolness, moderation, ease, and perspicuity. The Argument against Abolishing Christianity is very happy and judicious irony. One passage in it deserves to be selected (Lives, III, 12).
Johnson quotes the passage in which Swift ironically argues that the convenience of having religion as the butt of jokes or as an exercise in logic for the “freethinkers, the strong reasoners and the men of profound learning” (III, 12) would be undermined if Christianity were abolished. Johnson himself had little sympathy for the clever arguments which might undermine his religion. In another place I would like to go into detail on the similarities of Johnson’s and Swift’s views as expressed in The Sentiments of a Church of England. On the Sacramental Test and The Project for the Advancement of Religion, Johnson expresses mild doubt: The reasonableness of a test is not hard to be proved; but perhaps it must be allowed that the proper test has not been chosen.
In the year following [1709] he wrote a Project for the Advancement of Religion, addressed to Lady Berkeley, by whose kindness it is not unlikely that he was advanced to his benefices. To this project, which is formed with great purity of intention, and displayed with sprightliness and elegance, it can only be objected that, like many projects, it is, if not generally impracticable, yet evidently hopeless, as it supposes more zeal, concord, and perseverance than a view of mankind gives reason for expecting. (III, 13) 21
While Johnson does not praise the literary merits of The Conduct of the Allies, he accepts Swift’s position on the war:
That is now no longer doubted, of which the nation was first informed, that the war was unnecessarily protracted to fill the pockets of Marlborough; and that it would have continued without end if he could have continued his annual plunder. But, Swift, I suppose, did not yet know what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which would have appointed him General for life, had it not become ineffectual by the resolution of Lord Cowper, who refused the seal (III. 18).
Swift and Marlborough are ironically paired in the Vanity of Human Wishes to illustrate the bitter reversal of fortune in “life’s last scene.” Swift triumphs as a Tory pamphleteer but is defeated by life. While he is boasting of his political power, fate is preparing to rob him of Stella. Johnson’s treatment of Swift in the Vanity of Human Wishes again shows Swift’s life as a series of embittering reversals:
In life’s last scene what prodigies surprise,
Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise?
From Marlb’rough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow
And Swift expires a driv’ler and a show. (11. 315-318)
Johnson is also showing in these lines the vanity of both valor and wit in the closing scenes of life, as well as their corruptions.
Some Reactions to Johnson’s Life of Swift
In his review of the Life of Swift, Boswell thinks Johnson shows prejudice, though he does discredit Sheridan’s explanation that Swift’s failure to help Johnson is responsible for this prejudice. Boswell, however, does not know how to account for this prejudice. I have, however, been attempting to show that Johnson’s Life of Swift does not necessarily reflect a prejudice and that it is even more favorable than its critics maintain.
Perhaps the most sensitive handling of the Irish degree incident can be found in Henry Craik’s Life of Swift. After quoting Lord Gower’s letter to Swift he observes:
The application came to nothing: and the fears that Lord Gower expresses of its hopelessness were probably well-founded. Even had such a grant been possible, it seems unlikely that Swift would either have been a suitor to the authorities of Dublin University, or that his recommendation would have been very favourably accepted by them. That the failure of a request, conveyed so indirectly as this, formed any part of the ground for Johnson’s prejudice against Swift, is absolutely without foundation. A far more likely, and, indeed, a far more worthy cause of that prejudice was the very similarity of temperament. Genius is not prone to make allowances. Its possessors are not drawn to one another because they are alike in their haughtiness, in their cynicism, in their intolerance. Johnson knew, and shrank from, the bitterness that was bred in Swift as it was in himself, of hardship, of early poverty, of disappointed hopes, and of the ceaseless burden of ill-health. He had struggled too long against the fatal influences, not to know and dread their strength; and just in proportion as the effort to school himself was painful, so his judgment on another suffering from the same enemy, was severe. Even if Swift neglected to afford aid which it was in his power to bestow, the neglect was one entirely impersonal to Johnson. Swift knew nothing of him: he could not have read his poem: he could have borne no grudge against its author. Had the benefit been conferred, it might have constrained Johnson to a more lenient judgment: that it was not, could scarcely have given to his judgment its severity.22
Craik makes a worthwhile distinction between the words prejudice and severity. Johnson though certainly unprejudiced toward Pope could be just as severe:
In the letters both of Swift and Pope there appears such narrowness of mind as makes them insensible of any excellence that has not some affinity with their own … (Lives, III, 212)
Craik anticipates W.B.C. Watkins’ essay on Johnson and Swift23 when he suggests that the prejudice may have been based upon their similarity of temperaments. But I think Watkins leans too heavily on the side of prejudiced judgment rather than severe judgment. If Johnson’s presumed prejudice is based on his similarity to Swift, then any sign of prejudice as opposed to severe judgment is further evidence of similarity. Severity indicates difference, prejudice indicates similarity is the formula Watkins seems to use (p. 28). For example, are Johnson’s judgments on Swift’s style expressions of prejudice or expression of Preference? Watkins sees Johnson as underrating Swift’s style, “a style far more brilliant than his own” (p. 28). If Johnson underrates Swift’s style, it is just as likely that he does so for literary rather than personal reasons. There are, apparently, some important aesthetic differences between the two writers. Watkins does not sufficiently take these and other differences into his appraisal. The problem for the critic today is to balance Johnson’s unfavorable criticism of Swift between Johnson’s literary values and the distasteful facts he collected on Swift’s life.
Still it might be argued that there were some who gave a brighter picture of Swift. Biographers like Thomas Sheridan did not grapple with his dark side. Boswell, along with others, boasted of his early acquaintance and admiration for Swift. But it may have been this very fashionable appreciation of Swift, which led Johnson to make some of his irritable assertions against him. Johnson, the iconoclast, did not hesitate to expose what he considered the deficiencies of the literary gods. His scrutiny of Milton’s motives was also irritating to eighteenth-century literary men.24
Boswell uses Johnson’s treatment of Swift’s frugality as an evident example of Johnson’s “unfavorable bias.” But Johnson received this idea from other sources including Swift himself, and, as I have shown, he did not censure him on this issue. In this example of Johnson’s bias, Boswell has Johnson explode on the page and then grudgingly examine the circumstances. But in another example, he prefaces the annotation from Johnson with the following remark: “one observation which Johnson makes in Swift’s life should be often inculcated” (Boswell’s Life, IV, 62). He then quotes a passage in which Johnson is upbraiding Swift for his disregard of ceremony and subordination. Johnson thinks Swift’s breach of class discipline is not a sign of “greatness of soul.” Boswell here sees that Johnson is not playing fast and loose with the facts. He cites the passage as an effective reminder of social precept. Boswell’s reaction is snobbery, Johnson’s compassion. He sees that there can be no real freedom between members of different classes. The choice he offers a man in Swift’s position is either to be “repelled with helpless indignity, or endured by clemency and condescension” (Lives, III, 134).
But “with the great,” Swift was neither repelled nor endured; he was accepted for his “better qualities.” Johnson sees Swift’s brilliant wit severely handicapped by an immature personality. Instead of wasting time trying to impress the aristocrats, he should have been taking more pains to set his mind in order.
Boswell was not the only one to observe Johnson’s antipathy for Swift. Bishop Percy also was bewildered by “Johnson’s extraordinary prejudice and dislike of Swift, manifested on all occasions by Johnson, whose political opinions coincided exactly with his.”25 According to Percy, it is not Johnson’s disappointment over the Irish degree which leads him to his dislike, but Dr. Madden’s unflattering impressions of Swift. But the evidence for this explanation is confused (see footnote4 Johnsonian Miscellanies, II, 211–212). James Clifford thinks that “more likely the dislike had been fostered by Birch, who delighted to pass on nasty stories about the far-off Dean during his last years. Johnson’s mind may well have been poisoned by such insidious lies, not disproved in his lifetime.”26
Johnson was not the only one to be accused of writing unfairly about Swift. Sheridan accuses Mrs. Pilkington, Orrery, and Delany. He makes a slight exception for Deane Swift and praises Hawkesworth’s attempt. He is particularly hard on Orrery:
The cruel manner in which he has treated the memory of his friend Swift, as his lordship in the course of the work often affects to call him, had something so surprising in it, that people were at a loss how to account for it, except by supposing it to proceed from some uncommon degree of malevolence in his lordship’s nature. (Sheridan, II, 9)
As in the case of Johnson, Sheridan has to invent a motive for Orrery’s malignity. Sheridan tells the story that Orrery’s father had “in his will, bequeathed his library from him; and this circumstance made the world conclude that he looked upon his son as a blockhead.” In order to save face “he applied himself diligently to a translation of Pliny’s Letters; but he was so long about this task, and put it into so many hands to correct it, that Melmoth’s excellent translation of the same work slipped into the world before his, and forestalled this avenue to fame” (II, 9). Orrery saw then, according to Sheridan, that his friendship with Swift could gain him fame as his biographer; but in order to insure the success of this work, he decided to play the role of critic since “he knew that satire was more likely to procure a rapid sale to the book, than panegyrick” (II, 11).
Sheridan then praises Delany for his attempt to dispel the “malicious lies” furthered by Orrery. He briefly mentions Deane Swift and then casts him into oblivion. He praises Hawkesworth for his “having quickly discerned the truth from the falsehood; wiped away many of the asperations that had been thrown on Swift’s character; and placed it, so far as he went, in its proper light.” But Hawkesworth had no new materials of his own. Johnson then gets his turn. Sheridan criticizes him harshly for not having followed Hawkesworth in “the paths of just and candid criticism.” Instead he chose to follow Orrery’s example, but the dangers of his Life of Swift are greater, because Johnson “is more likely to be generally read than any of the others; on account of the great reputation of the author” (Sheridan, II, 16).
At the end of his own Life of Swift Sheridan goes into a detailed criticism of Johnson’s Life of Swift. He first derides Johnson for being flippant about the place of Swift’s birth. He reports that Johnson’s common expression in talking about Swift was that he “was a very shallow fellow” (II, 73). He also uses Boswell’s example from Johnson’s Life of Swift to show his prejudice, that is, the passage which deals with Swift’s frugality. Both Boswell and Sheridan find Johnson’s conclusion to the question of Swift’s frugality an admission of confusion based on prejudice.
Sheridan also defends Swift against the imputations of eccentricity suggested by a story Johnson relates from Pope. He also lists several other examples of Johnson’s prejudice. But his evidence is not conclusive. One obviously unfair criticism is his complaint that a minor writer is treated more extensively than Swift. “What will posterity say, when they see the Life of Savage extended to double the number of pages, occupied by than that of Swift?”
John Nichols, Sheridan’s publisher, answers this complaint in a footnote: “Much must be allowed for the period of life in which Dr. Johnson wrote the Memoirs of Savage, and the intimacy of friendship in which they had lived” (Sheridan, II, 88). There are several other places in which Nichols has to take exception to Sheridan’s blustering attack against Johnson. In a footnote he says: “Much as we may applaud the honest warmth with which Mr. Sheridan here vindicates the insulted Dean; few men will join him in this severe condemnation of the grave Philologist, whose sturdy morality would bear the strictest investigation” (II, 88). Sheridan at least agrees with Johnson in closing his biography with Delany’s panegyric.
One wonders what Sheridan would have done with Thackeray’s denunciation of Swift or Swift’s twentieth-century psychoanalytic critics, or some of the other present-day severe criticism of Swift that has come from George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and F.R. Leavis. Their performances also include, like Johnson’s, high praise for Swift’s integrity and certain aspects of his artistry. While Swift’s reputation as an artist and a man has been well-secured by such men as Ricardo Quintana and Herbert Davis, there will probably always be those who will quarrel with Swift. The controversial quality of his life and work is one of the things which makes him so perennially interesting. Johnson plays an important part in this tradition of controversy because as an antagonist his judgments are at times insightful and curiously often kind.
Two recent appraisals of Johnson’s Life of Swift do not find it quite so damaging or unfair. Donald Berwick, 27 while offering an insightful reading of the work subscribes to the traditional view of Johnson’s prejudice. I agree with Berwick when he sees Johnson’s portrait as “one of the more laudably realistic” (p. 18) of the early syntheses, and when he sees Johnson’s Swift as a three-dimensional figure. I also agree with his recognition of Johnson’s interpretation of a childish quality in Swift’s personality. But I disagree when he sees Johnson’s Swift as an “extremely unsubtle figure.” Berwick admits that this impression is the view a “cursory reading of the essay” (p. 19) offers. But Johnson’ Swift seems to me to be a complicated character because he suffers tragic reversals and accomplishes much good in his lifetime. However, Berwick recognizes that despite “all his coldness, Johnson judges Swift’s treatment of Stella and Vanessa less harshly than do many of the Dean’s most valiant defenders” (p. 20). He is also more capable than others in showing how Johnson struggles with a prejudice. After listing the contemptuous strokes in Johnson’s portrait, Berwick explains:
In all this Johnson’s position is not entirely untenable though it wilfully evades mention of the brighter side of Swift’s character, it does not accuse him of vices of which he was utterly devoid. When, however, in treating of the insolent letter to Queen Caroline requiring her patronage for Mrs. Barber, it is insisted that the letter was Swift’s and that Swift himself never denied it but shuffled “between cowardice and veracity,” [Boswell’s Tour, 14 September, 1773] we are faced with a different matter. In accusing Swift of cowardice Johnson was guilty of either ignorance or misrepresentation. But false as it is, cowardice rightly belongs with the other failings which compose the man Swift as Johnson saw him. It belongs no less than the arrogance and puerile susceptibility to cheap flattery, no less than the licentiousness and the petulant frolicsomeness, to the picture of arrested development Johnson has drawn. (p. 19)
This comes too close to Sheridan’s appraisal of Johnson’s work. It is one thing when Sir John Hawkins declares in his Life of Samuel Johnson that Swift was overrated, and another when Johnson makes such a conversational aside to Boswell. Although it may be true that he does not list “the brighter side of Swift’s character, “there is a considerable amount of praise for Swift’s role in church and politics, and a fair amount of judicious criticism of his literary work. There is also a considerable temporizing of harsh judgments made by others, such as Swift’s presumed avarice and irreligion. Nor does Berwick make clear why Johnson’s suspicions on the letter to Queen Caroline might reflect “misrepresentation.”
Philip Sun provides a good corrective to the general view which has Johnson lashing Swift in his Life of Swift. Sun establishes that there is more praise than criticism in Johnson’s work. This evidence alone does not prove Johnson’s respect for Swift, but taken along with the fact that Johnson makes frequent use of Swift in the Dictionary,28 that he relies heavily on Swift for his portraits of Addison, Gay, and Pope, that he habitually refers to Swift in conversation, letters, and essays in approbation as well as censure, does lead to the conclusion that Johnson’s criticism of Swift is a delicate matter of praise and blame.
Johnson’s Judgment of Swift’s Writings
Though it is true Johnson thought Swift had a higher reputation as a writer than he deserved, it is not easy to answer why he felt this way. Perhaps he thought Swift’s admirers misunderstood the nature of his writings. Throughout Johnson’s age it is usual to hear Swift compared to Horace:
Horace is the more elegant and delicate: while he condemns, he pleases. Swift takes pleasure in giving pain…. Each poet was the delight of the principal persons of his age…. They both were temperate: both were frugal; both were of the same Epicurean taste. Horace had his Lydia, Swift had his Vanessa. Horace had his Maecenas and his Agrippa. Swift had his Oxford and his Bolingbroke. Horace had his Virgil, Swift had his Pope (Orrery, p. 45).
Monck-Berkeley makes a similar comparison: “in the first place, the ‘Tale of a Tub’ was the work of a very young man; and although the rule of Horace, Nonum prematur in annum was observed, it still made its appearance at an early period of the author’s life” (Sheridan, II, 138).29
It is also usual to hear that an appreciation for Swift is early nurtured, as in the case of Boswell. Monck-Berkeley writes “that I have from my cradle been taught to consider Swift as a man in whom were united splendor of imagination, strength of judgment, sensibility of heart, love of his country, inviolable integrity, and a belief in revelation, that was his rule of conduct here, and his source of hope hereafter” (II, 151). Orrery also writes to his son Hamilton in his Remarks upon Swift in order to have him cultivate an early appreciation for Swift’s work.
Johnson was able to recognize and approve of the Tory and Anglican part of Swift, but I doubt if he saw him as a true representative of neo-classical standards. He uses “original” as a key word at the end of his Life of Swift to describe Swift’s contribution. He describes Gulliver’s Travels as a “production so new and strange that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and amazement…. Criticism was for a while lost in wonder; no rules of judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity” (III, 38). He recommends Swift’s poetry for its easiness and gaiety. Swift wrote “not often to his judgment but to his humour” (III, 66).
These comments suggest that though Johnson thinks Swift exceeds the bounds of propriety as a writer, he still finds him appealing. His comments on A Tale of a Tub are consistent with the others: “of this book charity may be persuaded to think, that it might be written by a man of a peculiar character, without ill intention: but it is certainly of dangerous example” (Lives, III, 10). Elsewhere he expresses great admiration for this work:
Johnson was in high spirits this evening at the club, and talked with great animation and success. He attacked Swift, as he used to do upon all occasions. ‘‘The Tale of a Tub” is so much superiour to his other writings, that one can hardly believe he was the authour of it. There is in it such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life’ (Boswell’s Life, II, 318–319).
At another time he confuses A Tale of a Tub with the History of John Bull when he exclaims “Boswell is now like Jack in A Tale of a Tub who, when he is puzzled by an argument, hangs himself. He thinks I shall cut him down, but I’ll let him hang” (Boswell’s Life, II, 235).30 Though Johnson is arguing for victory and merely teasing Boswell, the allusion shows at least his delight in this kind of playful satire. He argues that A Tale of a Tub is unique for Swift;31 others, including Swift, have acknowledged that fact. Swift exclaimed, after he had Mrs. Whiteway read it to him, “Good God! What a flow of imagination had I, when I wrote this” (Sun, p.191). Herbert Davis agrees: “After A Tale of a Tub was put behind him, he rarely permitted himself to indulge his humour or his literary skill in parody or raillery or any of the tricks of his trade for his amusement only.”32
Johnson also expresses appreciation for certain parts of Gulliver’s Travels: thus “he allowed very great merit to the inventory of articles found in the pockets of the Man Mountain, particularly the description of his watch, which it was conjectured was his god, as he consulted it upon all occasions” (Boswell’s Life, II, 319). There are other favorable comments: “Pope may be said to write always with his reputation in his head; Swift perhaps like a man who remembered he was writing to Pope” (Lives, III, 160).33 Johnson pays further homage to Swift’s insight in his discussion of Pope’s worldly discontent: “Swift’s resentment was unreasonable, but it was sincere; Pope’s the mere mimickry of his friend….”
When he was only twenty-five years old, he related that ‘a glut of study and retirement had thrown him on the world,’ and that there was danger lest ‘a glut of the world should throw him back upon study and retirement.’ To this Swift answered with great propriety, that Pope had not yet either acted or suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it (Lives, III, 211-212).
Johnson often refers to Swift either to denounce or to confirm a position. Mrs. Piozzi relates that Johnson discouraged “general satire, and for the most part professed himself to feel directly contrary to D. Swift; who (says he) hates the world, though he loves John and Robert, and certain individuals” (Johnsonian Miscellanies, I, 327). But others could recognize when he was sounding like Swift. When Lady McLeod asked if no man were naturally good, Johnson replied: “‘No, madam, no more than a wolf,’ – Boswell. ‘Nor no woman, Sir?’ – Johnson, ‘No, Sir.’ – Lady McLeod started at this, saying in a low voice, ‘This is worse than Swift’” (Boswell’s Tour, 251–252).
Boswell’s question brings to mind Hamlet’s response to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. To a certain extent, Johnson and Swift both have a Hamlet complex, i.e., they are disillusioned. In their satire, they are sometimes like the joking graveyard Hamlet. While Johnson does not always recognize Swift’s brilliance, his early experimentation with Swiftian forms suggests he knows its psychological value. Moveover, I view much of Johnson’s role in reporting on early eighteenth century political history as part of the Swiftian tradition and as a positive affirmation of the Swiftian tradition. It also provided the basis for Johnson’s own development as a satirist.
1. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L.F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), IV, 61. Hereafter cited as Boswell’s Life in text.
2. James L. Clifford, “New Approaches to Samuel Johnson,” lecture delivered at State University College at Fredonia, New York, March 29, 1968.
3. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W.J. Bate, et al (New Haven, 1964), VI, 106, 1.318. Hereafter cited as Yale Edition in text. Delbert E. Earisman (Unpublished dissertation, Indiana University, 1959, “Samuel Johnson’s Satire”) discusses Johnson’s use of parabolic satire as a trademark of his satire. He explains the term as a humorous reversal of fortune analogous to the tragic one and gives Don Quixote’s encounters as a classical example of such reversals.
4. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), III, 2. Hereafter cited as Lives in text.
5. Hawkesworth had written: “His bounty had not indeed the indiscriminating ardor of blind instinct, [man does not feel pity by nature] and, if it had, it would not have been the instrument of equal happiness” (The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, ed. John Hawkesworth, London, 1766, I, 63).
6. “We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them” (Boswell’s Life, I, 437).
7. See Milton Voight, Swift and the Twentieth Century (Detroit, 1964) for a discussion of Swift’s psychoanalytic critics.
8. Johnson is just as critical with Pope’s use of “filthy” images.
9. Unpublished dissertation (Yale University, 1963) by Philip Sun. “Swift’s Eighteenth-Century Biographies.”
10. Johnson said that Orrery “was a feebleminded man; that, on the publication of Dr. Delany’s Remarks on his book, he was so much alarmed that he was afraid to read them. Dr. Johnson comforted him by telling him they were both in the right; that Delany had seen most of the good side of Swift, -- Lord Orrery most of the bad.—M’Leod asked, if it was not wrong in Orrery to expose the defects of a man with whom he lived in intimacy, -- Johnson, ‘Why, no, sir, after the man is dead; for then it is done historically’” (Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Allan Wendt, Boston, 1965, p. 269).
11. John Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 5th ed., (London, 1752), p. 84.
12. Patrick Delany, Observations upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks (London, 1754), p. 29.
13. The one-minute rule is from Deane Swift. In An Epistle to a Lady, Swift expresses metaphorically the rule that conversation should be a give and take:
Conversation is but carving,
Carve for all, yourself is starving.
Give no more to ev’ry Guest,
Than he’s able to digest:
Give him always of the Prime,
And, but little at a Time.
Carve to all but just enuff,
Let them neither starve, nor stuff:
And, that you may have your Due,
Let your Neighbours carve for you.
(The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, Oxford, 1958, 2nd ed., II, 633-634, 11. 123–132).
14. Delany had written that Swift was a mixture of frugality and generosity. Swift,
commenting on his own notions of economy, said that it is “the parent of liberty
and ease.” In an exchange of letters between Bolingbroke and Swift, Bolingbroke said about Swift’s concern for money, “Take care, or it will ere long sink into your heart.” Swift, sometime later, wittily replied he would take care to keep money in his head so that it will not sink into his heart. Delany also noted that Swift was “sensible of his propensity to Avarice” (Lives, III, 57).
Johnson’s treatment of Swift’s financial habits and circumstances is consistent with the interpretations of both earlier and later biographers who deal with the same subject. In An Investigation into the Character of Jonathan Swift (New York, 1966), pp. 65–70, Cornelius Van Doorn devotes several pages examining Swift’s numerous remarks on money in The Journal to Stella and in his other correspondences. Van Doorn also lists the opinions of several major biographers on Swift’s parsimony. From all his evidence, he concludes that Swift practiced economy whenever it was needed “and liberality wherever possible” (p.68). This conclusion is essentially the same as Johnson’s. One comment from The Journal to Stella (ed. Harold Williams, Oxford, 1958) deserves to be quoted: “You are as welcome as my blood to every farthing I have in the world; and all that grieves me is, I am not richer…” (I, 275). The passage betrays Swift’s financial insecurity along with his devotion to Stella. His fears about money, especially in light of his obligations as Dean, may have been an important factor in his decision not to marry Stella, or if he did, of not owning it. Johnson, who expressed the desire to remarry, may also have hesitated because of the limitations imposed by his pension.
15. “However incorrect the Life of Swift (as given by Johnson) may be considered, it is but justice to say, that he is the only one of the Dean’s biographers who has offered anything in extenuation of his conduct towards Stella and Vanessa” (Monck-Berkeley, The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, ed. Thomas Sheridan, London, 1808, II, 133–134).
16. Johnson may have seen Dr. Lyons’ doubt raised in a 1779 supplement to Hawkesworth’s edition.
17. Johnson may have received this idea from The Journal to Stella, where Swift teases her repeatedly about her spelling.
18. “Dr. Wilde of Dublin, who has written a most interesting volume on the closing years of Swift’s life, calls Johnson ‘the most malignant of his biographers’: it is not easy for an English critic to please Irishmen—perhaps to try and please them. And yet Johnson truly admires Swift: Johnson does not quarrel with Swift’s change of politics, or doubt his sincerity of religion: about the famous Stella and Vanessa controversy the Doctor does not bear very hardly on Swift. But he could not give the Dean that honest hand of his; the stout old man puts it into his breast, and moves off from him” (The Workds of William Makepeace Thackerasy, London, 1911, VII, 5).
19. “’Talking of the Irish clergy, he said, Swift was a man of great parts, and the instrument of much good to his country’” (Boswell’s Life, II, 132).
20. The Triennial Act of 1694 required that parliament should assemble no less than once in three years. It also required no more than a three year term for any one parliament. The Septennial Act of 1716 decided the supremacy of the Whigs. It sought to discourage frequent election, and to empower the House of Commons over the King and nobles. Johnson writes:
Through Freedom’s Sons no more Remonstrance rings,
Degrading nobles and controlling Kings;
Our Supple Tribes repress their Patriot throats,
And ask no questions but the price of votes;
With Weekly Libels and Septennial Ale,
Their wish is full to riot and to rail.
(Vanity of Human Wishes, II. 93-98)
21. With Boswell and his friends, Johnson animatedly argued against the literary merits of Swift’s “Conduct of the Allies.” Of that work he said Swift “had to count ten, and he has counted it right.” He objects to the merely factual nature of the work. The morning after the quarrel, Boswell “found him highly satisfied with his colloquial prowess the preceding evening. ‘Well, (said he,) we had good talk.’ Boswell, ‘Yes, Sir; you tossed and gored several persons’” (Boswell’s Life, II, 65–66).
22. Henry Craik, The Life of Jonathan Swift (London, 1882).
23. W.B.C. Watkins, Perilous Balance (Cambridge, 1960).
24. Cowper’s reaction to Johnson’s Milton is and example: “His treatment of Milton is unmerciful to the last degree.” In the same letter: “Oh! I could thrash his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket” (Letters of William Cowper, ed. Rev. W. Benham, London, 1884, pp. 33–34).
25. Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1897), II, 211–212.
26. James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1961).
27. Donald M. Berwick, The Reputation of Jonathan Swift (Philadelphia, 1941).
28. In the abridged Johnson’s Dictionary, ed. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne (New York, 1963) there are about one-hundred and twenty-eight quotations from Swift.
29. Something of the same process can be seen in Boswell’s and Johnson’s exchange on Burke: “– Boswell: ‘Do you think, sir, that Burke has read Cicero much?’ – Johnson: ‘I don’t believe it, sir. Burke has great knowledge, great fluency of word, and great promptness of ideas, so that he can speak with great illustration on any subject that comes before him. He is neither like Cicero, nor like Demosthenes, nor like any one else, but speaks as well as he can’” (Boswell’s Tour, p. 253).
30. Boswell is perhaps making the confusion in his record of the conversation.
31. “In his works he has given very different specimens both of sentiments and expression. His Tale of a Tub has little resemblance to his other pieces. It exhibits a vehemence and rapidity of mind, a copiousness of images, and vivacity of diction, such as he afterwards never possessed or never exerted. It is of a mode so distinct and peculiar, that it must be considered by itself; what is true of that is not true of anything else which he has written” (Lives, III, 51).
32. Herbert Davis, Essays on the Eighteenth Century, Presented to David Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1945).
33. Arbuthnot gets the highest praise: “but Arbuthnot like one who lets thoughts drop from his pen as they rise into his mind” (Lives, III, 160).
CHAPTER II
JOHNSON AS A SWIFTIAN SATIRIST
There is no book completely on the subject of Johnson’s satire. In an unpublished dissertation,1 Delbert Earisman studies the classical background, devices, and subjects of Johnson’s satire. But I think he draws too sharp a distinction between the satire of Johnson and Swift. The study is also limited to the periodical essays and Rasselas. On the other hand, Alvin Whitley2 in “The Comedy of Rasselas,” tries to relate Rasselas to Gulliver’s Travels. Gwin Kolb,3 in his review of that essay does not think he succeeds. My sympathies are with Whitley, but I agree with Kolb. Arieh Sachs4 in his Passionate Intelligence also feels that an earlier attempt on his part to show a parallel between Swift and Johnson is unsuccessful. It is difficult to recognize the extent of Swiftian satire in Johnson’s writing. I believe the attempt to view Rasselas and Gulliver’s Travels together is a valid one, but at this point premature. More work has to be done on both books before a clear relationship can be established between them.
The purpose of this chapter is to strengthen the case for Johnson as a Swiftian satirist in manner as well as spirit. I view this study as preliminary to the work of seeing Rasselas in the light of Gulliver’s Travels, a task which is beyond the scope of this dissertation. For the purposes of this discussion, Johnson’s satire is divided into three subjects: political, social, and scientific. The scientific category can be further divided into the ridicule of the projectors and the virtuosi, with the virtuosi representing the abuses of learning and the projectors the abuses of science. Johnson’s political satire is represented by such works as the introductory material to his Parliamentary Debates, which has been at least partially attributed to him, the Marmor Norfolciense (1739), A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739), and A Project for the Employment of Authors (1756), which ridicules the Grub Street writers, but contains political overtones. I also include certain passages from The Review of Soame Jenyns (1756), which in places seems Swiftian in its use of satirical effects, and the Idler 22, which Johnson excluded from the collection, though these two latter pieces are more philosophical than political. Johnson’s periodical essays contain satire on social and scientific subjects. I have chosen examples selectively from this rich body of material, rather than definitively.
The Swiftian materials used for the comparison include Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, A Modest Proposal, certain periodical essays, and the Scriblerian satire.
Political Satire
Some of Johnson’s early satire shows that he may have consciously experimented with Swiftian devices. On April 13, 1738 the House of Common outlawed the publication of transcribed Parliamentary debates. In order to circumvent this ruling, the London Magazine cloaked the debates under the title of Proceedings of the Political Club, using Greek and Roman names for the speakers, so that Walpole became Cicero, Pulteney became Cato, and so forth. Edward Cave quickly took up the idea in his Gentleman’s Magazine, and in the June issue “there was a humorous account of the voyage of Captain Lemuel Gulliver’s grandson to the lands described in Gulliver’s Travels, which set the stage for a series of reports of the Debates in the Senate of Lilliput.5 Anagrams could then be used to disguise the real names of the speakers.
Though most of the evidence for Johnson’s work on this aspect of the debates is internal, recent scholarship tends to accept Hill’s attribution of the introductory narrative as Johnson’s, as well as some other parts of the Gulliverian machinery.6 The State Affairs of Lilliput (its title in the Gentleman’s Magazine was an Appendix to Capt. Lemuel Gulliver’s Account of the Famous Empire of Lilliput) relates the voyage of Gulliver’s grandson to Lilliput where he seeks to vindicate the name of his famous grandfather. Upon his arrival in Lilliput he finds that:
The accusations brought against the Captain by his Enemies were cleared up, or forgot; and the Grandson, at his Arrival, found the Preservation of Mildendo from the flames, and the conquest of the formidable Navy of Blefuscu, the Subject of Epic Poems, and the annual Orations, the old men’s constant topic of Discourse, and the example by which their Youth were animated to Fidelity, Presence of Mind, and Military Prowess (Hoover, p. 174).
The writer of The State Affairs of Lilliput is apparently following Swift’s example in Book I of Gulliver’s Travels by his straight-faced reportage. Although he avoids the first-person narration employed by Swift, his identification with Swift’s fiction of Lilliput is nevertheless strong. The prose style of the passage also suggests an interesting blend of Johnson’s and Swift’s. Later on in the piece there is a humorous display of linguistic knowledge suggestive of Gulliver’s facility with the strange languages he encounters. In this piece, Gulliver’s grandson has “a tolerable knowledge of the Lilliputian Tongue, attain’d by the Help of a Grammar and a Vocabulary, which other Writings in the Language, Captain Gulliver had left behind him.” And after three years the grandson returns with “Histories, Memoirs, Tracts, Speeches, Treaties, Debates, Letters and Instructions” (p. 174), which is to provide the substance for the reports in the Parliamentary Debates.
In general there is a fairly successful adaptation of the facts from Gulliver’s Travels for the purposes of this piece. For example, in describing the additional realms needed to stand for the other countries use in the Parliamentary Debates, the writer has the Lilliputian king explain that had it not been for the war the older Gulliver would probably not have learned about Blefuscu.
One passage in this piece sounds very much like Swift. The Royal Historiographer of Lilliput explains to Gulliver’s grandson that:
Our Ancestors, in ancient Times, had some Regard to the Character of the Person sent to represent them in their National Assembles, and would have shewn some Degree of Resentment, or Indignation, had their Votes been asked for a Murderer, an Adulterer, a known Oppressor, and hireling for Evidence, an Attorney, a Gamester, or a Pimp (p. 174).
In Swift, Gulliver praises the ancient constitution of the Lilliputians and discovers the progressive deterioration of the Lilliputian state over the centuries. Johnson who is critical of the politics of England under Walpole, might relish the irony of the Lilliputian analogy to express his view of governmental corruptions at this time. The series which catalogs vicious characters is obviously Swiftian in its ironic juxtapositions. In the passage, attorney is sandwiched between “an hireling for Evidence” and “a gamester.” Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms wearily reflects that:
here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits….?
Here, “attorney” is pressed against “housebreakers” and “bawds.” The legal profession is being satirized by the company it keeps in both catalogs.
The State of Affairs in Lilliput, is filled with topical allusions of political significance,8 but perhaps the most important is its attack on the colonial policies of England as well as Spain and France:
The People of Degulia, or the Lilliputian Europe which Name is derived from DEGUL, illustrious, (a Word now obsolete, and only known to Antiquaries and Etymologists) are, above those of the other Parts of the World, famous for Arts, Arms, and Navigation, and, in consequence of this superiority, have made Conquests, and settled Colonies in very distant Regions, the Inhabitants of which they look upon as barbarous, tho’ in Simplicity of Manners, Probity, and Temperance superior to themselves; and seem to think that they have a Right to treat them as Passion, Interest, or Caprice shall direct, without much Regard to the Rules of Justice or Humanity; they have carried this imaginary Sovereignty so far, that they have sometimes proceeded to Rapine, Bloodshed and Desolation (Hoover, pp. 176–177).
Again there is the linguistic horseplay which Swift employs in his travels, as well
as elsewhere. But more to the point, there is a denunciation of colonization consistent with Johnson’s lifelong position on the question. Many passages can be marshalled from Johnson to show how little he favors or trusts the claims of the colonizing powers, along with his sympathies for the enslaved Africans and the displaced Indians. For example, in his Observations on the State of Affairs in 1756, he writes that “the American dispute between the French and us is . . . only the quarrel of two robbers for the spoils of a passenger,” and that “they are both injuring the Indians.”9
Swift is also hostile to the rationales which are provided for overseas expansion. In Gulliver’s Travels, he makes his attack through an ingenuous Gulliver’s defense of war and colonization before the King of Brobdingnag. The King, contrary to Gulliver’s designs, is shocked and horrified. As a Brobdingnaggian he makes the apt and famous observation that “the bulk of your natives [appear] to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” (Swift, Works, II, 132). Johnson probably enjoyed this swipe at the European contest for colonies.10 In his two political tracts of 1756, his point of view is Brobdingnaggian in its attempt to analyze the motives of the French and Indian War and scan events since the reign of Queen Elizabeth which let to it.
The French, in one or two ways, get off better than the English because they are able to secure the friendship of the Indians by intermarriage and honest dealing, whereas “our factors and traders, having no other purpose in view than immediate profit, use all the arts of an European counting-house, to defraud the simple hunter of his furs” (Johnson, Works, VI, 142). The writer of the 1738 State of Affairs of Lilliput definitely reflects Johnson’s position on this question.
Another passage from The State Affairs of Lilliput recalls the way alternative arguments are dealt with by Swift. The pursuer after truth and justice is like a rat in a maze: each phrase lets down another wall:
If you endeaver to examine the Foundation of this Authority, they neither produce any grant from a superior Jurisdiction, nor plead the Consent of the People whom they govern in this tyrannical Manner: but either threaten you with Punishment for abridging the Emperor’s Sovereignty, or pity your Stupidity, or tell you in positive terms, that Power is right (Hoover, pp. 176–177).
Those who would claim a divine right to their actions are thrown into a moral abyss through an attack against Papal authority:
To whom, as they happen to be inclined, they sometimes pay an absolute Submission, and as often deny common Respect; but this Grant is not worth Examination, the Pontiff from whom it is derived, being equally at a loss to fix his own authority upon any solid Ground; so that at best the Degulians Claim to these Settlements, is like the Mohametan World, which rests upon an Elephant, which is supported by a Stone, which is supported by nothing (pp. 176–177).
While the main irony here is supported by the tone of the detached observer, whose cool and scholarly discourse on etymology shifts to angered denunciation, it is the allegorical device of Degul which allows the writer to condemn the fraudulent claims of the Europeans for their settlements, just as the floating island of Laputa enables Swift to denounce English oppression over Ireland. In the political tracts of 1756, Johnson states the objections to colonization without the aid of any satirical device.
The Marmor Norolciense (1739) recalls Swift’s Windsor Prophecy and Merlin’s Prediction. Herbert Davis pays respect to Johnson’s belief that there was an actual prophecy for his satire:
It has caused some amusement that Dr. Johnson really believed that Swift was annotating a sixteenth-century Prophecy of Merlin. It would not be surprising to find that he was parodying an actual prophecy, though I have not succeeded in discovering it. It has not been pointed out that he was at least referring to an actual printer, John Hawkyns, who was in London in 1530. . .(Swift, Works, II, xxiv).
The attack directed against Walpole in the Marmor Norfolciense is as strong as Swift’s character assassination of the Duchess of Somerset. In Johnson’s work a large stone is found in the area of Walpole’s home grounds, Norfolk, near Lynn. A scholar feels called upon to exert his intelligence on the stone’s Latin inscriptions. After dismissing the stone’s obvious meanings, the deadpan pedant suggest that “thirty of the most distinguished genius be chosen” to act as commentators, half to be chosen from the army, and half from the inns of court, to “be incorporated into a society for five years, under the name of the Society of Commentators” (Johnson, Works, VI, 109). The vigor of the satire mounts against the legal profession and the army under the mask of the plodding scholar:
A man accustomed to satisfy himself with the obvious and natural meanings of a sentence, does not easily shake off his habit; but a true bred lawyer never contents himself with one sense when there is another to be found.
The lawyers are well known to be very happy in expressing their ideas, being for the most part able to make themselves understood by none but their own fraternity. But the geniuses of the army have sufficient opportunities, by their free access to the levee and the toilet, their constant attendance on balls and assemblies, and that abundant leisure which they enjoy beyond any other body of men, to acquaint themselves with every new word and prevailing mode of expression, and to attain the utmost nicety and most polished prettiness of language.
I cannot but heartily wish, that by a strict search there may be discovered in the army fifteen men who can write and read (Johnson, Works, VI, 109–111).
This satire is followed by a grotesque suggestion to found the Society of Commentators at the Greenwich Hospital where it will be necessary to expel “the seamen as have no pretentions to the settlement there, but fractured limbs, loss of eyes, or decayed constitutions . . .” (Johnson, Works, VI, 112). The scheme ends with a mock calculation to provide for the society’s salary by a tax on bread:
Thus will the ministry have a fair prospect of obtaining the full sense and import
of the prediction, without burthening the public with more than 650,000…which may be paid out of the sinking fund . . . or exise upon bread (VI, 112–113).
While the satire here is directed against Walpole and the Hanoverian king, the irony turns in various directions, through a series of digressions, with the rapidity of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. Perhaps Johnson has A Tale of a Tub as much in mind as the Windsor Prophecy or The Prediction of Merlin. Though Swift enjoyed his Windsor Prophecy, the verse is overtopical, while the meanings in Johnson’s Marmor Norfolciense are clearer and more general. The Prediction of Merlin, which is humorously connected with the Bickerstaff joke, includes a set of clever explanatory notes in the manner of the scholarly gloss, but a character as such is not developed. Johnson obviously went beyond these models, and his Marmor is superior to either of the Swiftian predictions, both in scope and in irony. The scholarly character, who ingenuously gibes against the Daily Gazetteer or proposes a society of commentators seems close to the enthusiastic narrator of A Tale of a Tub, who also proposes that:
Every prince in Christendom will take seven of the deepest scholars in his dominions, and shut them up close for seven years in seven chambers, with a command to write seven ample commentaries on this comprehensive discourse.11
In the Marmor Norfolciense, the narrator believes the commentators will eventually become fit to act as “licensers of the stage.” The stage licensing act of 1737 was first used against Gustavus Vasa, a play by Henry Brooke. Only two weeks after the publication of Marmor Norfolciense, Johnson wrote his Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, a work that did not attract much attention. In it Johnson assumes the mask of defender of the government, innocently arguing the case for injustice. The irony of the wrong-headed defender is carried a bit too staunchly throughout the piece. His zealous defense of the administration is like one of the proposed titles in A Tale of a Tub – A Panegyric upon the World. In order to understand the minds of his opponents, he pretends to be one of their party:
Dissimilation to a true politician is not difficult, and therefore I readily assumed the character of a proselyte; but found, that their principle of action was no other, than that which they make no scruple of avowing in the most public manner, notwithstanding the contempt and ridicule to which it excludes them (Johnson, Works, V, 330).
In his corruption, which he views as practicality, he cannot understand his opponents’ concern for posterity:
Strange delusion! that can confine all their thoughts to a race of men whom they neither know, nor can know; from whom nothing is to be feared, nor anything expected; who cannot even bribe a special jury, nor have so much as a single riband [sic] to bestow (Johnson, Works, V, 331).
With the licensers’ fondness for the “riband” Johnson shows the same scorn as does Swift for unmerited rewards. Doubtlessly, the licenser would feel in place at the court of Lilliput and its breakneck pursuit of rewards:
The natural consequence of these chimeras is contempt of authority, and an irreverence for any superiority but what is founded on merit; and their notions of merit are very peculiar, for it is among them [note the Gulliverian inflection] no great proof of merit to be wealthy and powerful, to wear a garter or a star, to command a regiment or a senate, to have the ear of the minister of the king, or to possess any of those virtues and excellences, which among us entitle a man to little less than worship and prostration (V, 332–333).
The “Lilliputian” vindicator concludes his “well-reasoned” defense with the timely observation: “The licenser having his authority thus extended, will in time enjoy the title and the salary without the trouble of exercising his power and the nation will rest at length in ignorance and peace” (Johnso, Works, V, 334), a state which is similar to the one describe in A Tale of a Tub, as “the Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves” (A Tale, p. 174).
That Johnson should have seen the usefulness of the Swiftian devices, especially in the case of the masks of the ingenue, wrong-headed debater, and projector, seems appropriate in his early anti-slavery position and his denunciation of harsh penal laws. He is Swiftian in his indignation. Both men are aroused to indignation at the manufactured plight of large numbers of people at the hands of a callus government. They subscribe to the principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, a phrase which Donald Greene traces to Francis Hutcheson (1725) and which Robert Voitle believes was borrowed from William Cumberland (Voitle, p.70, fn. 25).
However the application of this principle is not cold, abstract or merely calculating. They are personally engaged in the destinies of those whom they champion. One of the things which makes their conservatism so engaging is a humanitarianism rooted in Christianity and nurtured by classical ideals. The classical view of politics, from Plato onwards, always stressed the need for wisdom in government, and sees the lower classes as lacking the mind and restraint necessary for the complexities of rule. At its worst these classes become a rabble constituting a primordial force of nature. At its best they are the plebians, servants, traders toiling happily in their occupations and content with the share of happiness they have received.
Kings and parliaments are the heads of society, and the church its soul. But as the agencies of reason and morality they are open to the dangers of tyranny, factionalism, and schism. As in the social order, so too in the state, reason is nature’s guide. Kings, parliaments, and clergy may fall, but the ideal of a just and reasonable force restraining the undifferentiated energies of humanity is still the classical vision of all human society.
In their sermons Swift and Johnson also give religious sanctions to this classical view. It is interesting that neither men took the trouble to have their sermons published. As satirists, they reached a wider audience for their political values and make their moral stand more compelling. But for an eighteenth century understanding of Swift and Johnson, the sermons stand as the frank expression of those basic views.
In his period as a Grub Street journalist, Johnson was actively and critically viewing the role of government . Donald Greene evaluates Johnson’s journalism of this early period in The Politics of Samuel Johnson. One might almost say that Johnson was playing at being Swift in this period of his own life. What seems also to emerge, though, even from a casual glance of these pieces, is that Johnson not only employs Swift’s style and devices, but he also finds similar objects for satire. Lawyers, court politicians, Grub Street hacks, dullness and ignorance, prime ministers and kings all come under the lash. It is tempting to suggest that the form of Swift’s satire and its objects are closely bound, and in using these forms Johnson brushed those objects, though to be sure, the pamphlets had their own special purposes. Since he took such an active interest in law, Johnson may have later relented against lawyers,12 but on such subjects as colonies and on the corruption of government Johnson became even more intense in his denunciations of colonial abuses in his later writings.
As late as 1756 he was still writing in a Swiftian vein. In A Project for the Employment of Authors, from the Universal Visiter (April, 1756), Johnson dons the mask of a mild-mannered, reasonable, and plodding projector. As in Swift’s Modest Proposal, the shock is delayed by a careful introductory survey of the problem. Writers are extremely useful to society, but with their ever-increasing numbers, their value declines so that “every man must be content to read his book to himself” (Johnson, Works, V. 358). It is only when the essay is more than half completed that proposals are made. Early in the essay the mild-mannered projector explains that he will not discuss such formidable evils as heresy, sedition, or hypothetical fictions produced by the “misapplication of literature,” but “some lighter and less extensive evils” (V, 356). The essay poses the problem of the relationship between writers and literature in a society which does not reward their endeavors. There can be no question of the usefulness of literature:
Literature is a kind of intellectual light, which like the light of the sun, may sometimes enable us to see what we do not like (V, 356).
But the writer who serves literature can have no guarantee of payment:
The condition is nearly the same of the gatherer of honey, and the gatherer of knowledge. The bee and the author work alike for others, and often lose the profit of their labour (V, 357).
Thus Johnson’s “gatherer(s) of knowledge,” the Grub Street authors, have little “sweetness and light” in their lives:
The Reviewers and Critical Reviewers, the Remarkers and Examiners can satisfy their hunger only by devouring their brethern. I am far from imagining that they are naturally more ravenous or bloodthirsty than those on whom they fall with so much violence and fury; but they are hungry, and hunger must be satisfied; and these savages, when their bellies are full, will fawn on those whom they now bite (V, 360).
In a preceding passage the humor shifts abruptly to a tone of true indignation: “If I were to form an adage of misery, or fix the lowest point ot which humanity could fall, I should be temped to name the life of an author” (V. 358). Swift, unlike Johnson, who knew well the sorrows of Grub Streeet, never intrudes such sympathy for Grub Street writers. Johnson, however, soon resumes his playful attitude with a humorous description of the harried, egocentric “authors.” The projector sums up his observations in the form of a proposal that appropriately follows the description of the writers as wolves:
It was lately proposed, that every man who kept a dog should pay a certain tax, which, as the contriver of ways and means very judiciously observed, would either destroy the dogs, or bring in money. Perhaps it might be proper to lay some such tax upon authors, only the payment must be lessened in proportion as the animal, upon which it is raised, is less necessary; for many a man that would pay for his dog, will dismiss his dedicator. Perhaps if every one who employed or harboured an author, was assessed a groat a year, it would sufficiently lessen the nuisance without destroying the species (V, 360–361).
This logic sounds like Swift’s. Johnson is saying that since authors are treated like dogs, why not go all the way. Alternatives to the proposal are weighed, the way Swift does in his satires. Those who fly by the nets of the tax proposal could be enlisted in the army where their experiences as authors would equip them to meet all the hardships and rigors of military service, though “they are, perhaps, at present a little emaciated and enfeebled, but would soon recover their strength and flesh with good quarters and present pay” (V, 361).
The essay concludes with the teasing of women authors, who are seen as Amazons:
It is more difficult to know what can be done with the ladies of the pen, of whom this age has produced greater numbers than any former time.
I must therefore propose, that they shall form a regiment of themselves, and garrison the town which is supposed to be in the most danger of a French invasion. They will probably have no enemies to encounter; but, if they are once shut up together, they will soon disencumber the public by tearing out the eyes of one another (V, 362).
I will later discuss some other examples from Johnson of satire directed at women seen as Amazons. “The great art of life is to play for much, and to stake little” (V, 362), is the projector’s final maxim. It sums up an important point of the satire, which is an attack against the human inclination to seek a maximum of gain with a minimum of risk. As such the satire moves in two directions. First it criticizes a society that exploits its writers, and then it criticizes writers who fail to use their talents well. This piece has its brilliant flashes. Its logical illogicality proceeds and unfolds very much in the manner of the Swiftian masks.
Johnson again shows the dangers of Grub Street in the character Misellus, whose very name means “poor,” “wretched,” “unfortunate.” He has allowed his role as an author to unbalance him. An excessive anxiety for praise betrays him into the following ironical situation:
I then begged of them to forbear their compliments, and invited them, I could do no less, to dine with me at a tavern. After dinner the book was resumed; but their praises very often so much overpowered my modesty, that I was forced to put about the glass, and had often no means of repressing the clamours of their admiration but by thundering to the drawer for another bottle (II, 79, Rambler 16).
He repeats the performance until he makes the Swiftian computation that “it has already cost me two hogsheads of port, fifteen gallons of arrack, ten dozen of claret, and five-and-forty bottles of champagne,” in order to escape from hearing himself exalted above the greatest men of the learned world, living and dead.
Because he has prematurely presumed himself to be a great author, he is afraid to speak lest the nation will misunderstand him and destroy itself. He puts himself in the same class as Pope and Swift, and he fears that there will be bootleg traffic in his portraits. Thus he changes his wig and wears his hat over his eyes so that he will not be cheated. In final exaggeration there is again a playful ambiguity between ridicule and sympathy:
I am, however, not so much in pain for my face as for my papers, which I dare neither carry with me nor leave behind. I have indeed taken some measures for their preservation, having put them in an iron chest and fixed a padlock upon my closet. I change my lodgings five times a week, and always remove at the dead of night (II, 82).
In the character of Misellus we have someone who is growing ripe for the Bedlam in A Tale of a Tub. Johnson, in Rambler 17, makes an observation which comes close to summing up Swift’s point of view in the well-known digression on madness:
To project the conquest of the world is the madness of might princes; to hope for excellence in every science has been the folly of literary heroes; and both have found at last that they have panted for a height of eminence denied to humanity, and have lost many opportunities of making themselves useful and happy by a vain ambition of obtaining a species of honour which the eternal laws of providence have placed beyond the reach of man (II, 86).
Swift of course puts it more bluntly:
The very same Principle that influences a Bully to break the Windows of a Whore, who has jilted him, naturally stirs up a Great Prince to raise mighty Armies, and dream of nothing but Seiges, Battles, and Victories (A Tale, p. 165).
The key phrase in Johnson’s passage is “denied to humanity.” Those who do more than become a man stop being men. Or in the words of Macbeth: “I do all that becomes a man, who does more is none.” Johnson is sympathetic here, but in the Misellus sketch he has humorously indicated the serious consequences of taking oneself too seriously, as well as the difficulty in not doing so. A prime target for Swift’s and Johnson’s satire is human presumption which leads to madness and chaos. The ridicule of the Grub Street writers ascends to the folly of princes. It is akin to the folly in Pope’s lines: “In Pride, in reas’ning Pride, our error lies/ All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies” (Essay on Man, Epistle I, 11. 123–124).
The Extent of Johnson’s Ridicule
Johnson’s ridicule of Misellus raises the question of how far he would let go in his satire against human folly or deformity. He often makes a distinction between proper and improper satire:
Proper satire is distinguished, by the generality of the reflections, from a Lampoon which is aimed against a particular person; but they are frequently confounded.13
Swift also makes the same distinction:
He lash’d the Vice, but spar’d the Name,
No Individual could resent,
Where Thousands equally were meant.14
This attitude toward satire was largely conventional. Similar views can be found in Dryden, Cervantes, Moliere, and back to the Latin satirists as well. The satirist, since he is a critic and an attacker, has always had to be defensive about his art and aware of its excesses. Swift and Johnson were aware of the destructive nature of ridicule, especially if it were without a moral purpose.
They agree that physical or mental deformities by themselves are not the proper objects of satire. However, these deformities do become subject to attack when they parade as their opposites:
For he abhorr’d that senseless Tribe,
Who call it Humour when they gibe:
He spar’d a Hump, or crooked Nose,
Whose Owners set not up for Beaux.
True genuine Dulness moved his Pity,
Unless it offer’d to be witty.
Those, who their Ignorance confess’d,
He ne’er offended with a Jest;
He laugh’d to hear an Idiot quote
A Verse from Horace learn’d by Rote
(Swift, Poems, II, 571–572).
Johnson echoes the same principle:
Dulness or deformity are not culpable in themselves, but may be very justly reproached when they pretend to the honor of wit, or the influence of beauty (Brown, pp. 229–230).
The abuses for Swift must be correctable:
His Satyr points at no Defect,
But what all Mortals may correct
(Poems, II, 571).
And for Johnson, they must be real: “crimes which, as they never existed, can never be amended.”15
However, if it is true that “the spectrum-analysis of satire runs from the red of invective at one end to the violet of the most delicate irony at the other,”16 then Johnson, unlike Swift, was uncomfortable at the red end, though some of his early writings do “contain a degree of zestful malice which show he was well-versed in the invective of his day.”17 Johnson, like Swift, declared that malice would rob the work of its permanence:
It is of the nature of personal invectives to be soon unintelligible; and the
author that gratifies private malice, animan in volnere ponit, destroys the future efficacy of his own writings, and sacrifices the esteem of succeeding times to the laughter of a day (Brown, p. 229).18
But on the other hand, Johnson could see that “personal resentment, though no laudable motive to satire, can add great force to general principles. Self-love is a busy prompter” (Brown, p. 229). And again, Johnson stated that “the sense of ridicule is given us, and may be lawfully used.” 19
Swift had argued that a “taste for Humour” is the best ingredient for the Horatian satire which “laughs men out of their follies and vices’ (Works, Xii, 33). While some subjects are too serious to be turned into ridicule, it is justifiable to ridicule the abuses of religion, politics, and law. He further argued that there are two ends for the writing of satire—one for the sake of personal pleasure without malice, the second for the improvement of society. Johnson also believes that satirical criticism was useful when “it rectifies error and improves judgment; he that refines the public taste is a public benefactor” (Brown, p. 230). He also praises Swift’s satire when he sees “wit confederated with truth.”
Swift justifies ridicule to the extent that men are ridiculous. The satirist has at least the same right to expose folly as men have to be vicious:
If I ridicule the Follies and Corruptions of a Court, a Ministry, or a Senate, are they not amply paid by Pensions, Titles, and Power, while I expect and desire no other Reward, than that of laughing with a few Friends in a Corner? Yet, if those who take Offence, think me in the Wrong, I am ready to change the Scene with them, whenever they please (Swift, Works, XII, 34).
Though they apparently agree on the justification of ridicule, they seem to disagree on its extent.20 Swift’s explanation of his misanthropy stands as his trademark. In his letter to Pope he writes:
When you think of the World give it one lash the more at my Request. I have ever hated all Nations, professions, and Communities and all my love is toward individuals for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Counsellor such a one, Judge such a one for so with Physicians (I will not Speak of my own Trade) Soldiers, English, Scotch, French; and the rest but principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed my self many years (but do not tell) and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got Materials Towards a Treatise proving the falsity of that Definition animal rationale; and to show it should be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy (though not in Timon’s manner) the whole building of my Travells is erected. And I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my Opinion (Correspondence, III, 103).
Johnson disagrees with this way of judging mankind:
He [Johnson] did not . . .encourage general satire, and for the most part professed himself to feel directly contrary to Dr. Swift; ‘who (says he) hates the world, though he loves John and Robert, and certain individuals.’ . . . nobody had a more just aversion to general satire (Brown, p. 230).
Elsewhere Johnson maintains in direct opposition to Swift’s comment on the same subject, “that the world was well constructed, but that the particular people disgraced the elegance and beauty of the general fabric” (Johnsonian Miscellanies, II, 327).
But Johnson could, on occasion, give vent to his anger against human folly in the form of “general satire.” His excluded Idler 22 stands as a Swiftian indictment against mankind’s capacity for war. The essay, cast in the form of a fable, has a mother vulture explain to her children the dismal facts of man’s carnage. She describes the scene of battle as follows:
When you hear noise and see fire which flashes along the ground, hasten to the place with your swiftest wing, for men are surely destroying one another; you will then find the ground smoking with blood and covered with carcasses; of which many are dismembered and mangled for the convenience of the vulture (Johnson, Yale Edition, II, 319).
The younger vultures are puzzled:
‘But when men have killed their prey,’ said the pupil, ‘why do they not eat it? When the wolf has killed a sheep, he suffers not the vulture to touch it till he is satisfied himself. Is not man another kind of wolf?’ ‘Man,’ said the mother, ‘is the only beast who kills that which he does not devour, and this quality makes him so much a benefactor to our species (II, 319).
The vultures are at a loss to explain the unreasonable actions of men, but the mother vulture passes on the opinion of a wise old vulture:
His opinion was, that men had only the appearance of animal life, being really vegetables with a power of motion; and that as the boughs of an oak are dashed together by the storm, that swine may fatten upon the falling acorns, so men are, by some unaccountable power, driven one against another, till they lose their motion, that vultures may be fed. Others think they have observed something of contrivance and policy among these mischievous beings; and those that hover more closely round them, pretend, that there is, in every herd, one that gives directions to the rest, and seems to be more eminently delighted with a wide carnage. What it is that entitles him to such pre-eminence we know not; he is seldom the biggest or the swiftest, but he shows by his eagerness and diligence that he is more than any of the others, a friend to the vultures (II, 319–320).
These passages are reminiscent of Rochester’s Satire Against Mankind or Book IV of Gulliver in its suggestion of animal superiority to man. Johnson’s exclusion of this essay from a collected edition of The Idlers indicates his reluctance to exploit such a theme.
In the excluded Idler 22, Johnson gives the world the extra lash Swift had asked from Pope. According to William Eddy “Swift sat in Rabelais’ chair, toying with the whip of Juvenal.”21 Johnson shows much reluctance to use that whip. But his control of the Swiftian lash is still apparent in much of his writing. A comparison of passages from A Modest Proposal and Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns’ A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil can illustrate his use of the lash. Topically, the two works are not too remote, since Johnson’s review deals to a large extent with the problem of poverty as well as the general one of evil. Both Swift and Johnson are pillorying the glib theoreticians who find ready answers for human suffering and depravity, 22 For Swift the problem of poverty cannot be reduced to certainty by economic schemes, while for Johnson it certainly cannot be reduced to metaphysics.
To suggest a solution for the deplorable state of Ireland by cultivating infants as edible commodities is part of the same process of abstraction that leads Jenyns to think that human suffering, in whatever its forms, is part of a benevolent cosmic scheme. The enemy for Swift may be England, Irish stupidity, the cold-hearted calculators, or all of them together; but his job is to picture vividly the famine of the land to a complacent audience:
A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter (Works, XII, 112).
And then a subtle shift in tone allows us to hear an ironic Swift rather than the pleading
calculator:
I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents seem to have the best title to the children (SII, 112).
Johnson, in the review, is able to picture satirically the grotesque justice of the gods in Jenyns’ version of the chain of being idea:
Some of them (higher beings), perhaps, are virtuosi, and delight in the operations of an asthma, as a human philosopher in the effects of the air pump. To swell a man with a tympany is as good sport as to blow a frog. Many a merry bout have these frolic beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to see a man tumble again, and all this he knows not why (Works, VI, 65).
In A Modest Proposal, then, Swift subtly shifts from the tone of his disguise to his own indignant voice. Johnson, on the other hand, shifts from the critical reviewer to the disguise of a Jenynsian philosopher contemplating the implications of his philosophy. The passage from Johnson also brings to mind the virtuosi of Book III in Gulliver’s Travels, as well as the language Swift used to convey their feats. Another striking similarity between the two passages is that they show the degradation of the human condition in the face of brutal power: children as food for the landlords; men as guinea pigs to higher beings.23
Johnson continues the habit of introducing hypothetical conditions in his other arguments in order to beat down an opponent by a sardonic parody of his arguments. In a late piece like Taxation no Tyranny (1775), he hypothesizes a congress at Cornwall “seized with the Philadelphia frenzy” issuing a Declaration of Independence and concluding with the threat that:
If any Cornishman shall refuse his name to this just and laudable association, he shall be tumbled from St. Michael’s Mount, or buried alive in a tin mine; and if any emissary shall be found seducing Cornishmen to their former state, he shall be smeared with tar and rolled in feathers, and chased with dogs out of our dominions (Works, VI, 256–257).
This is the language of Swift in its concreteness, directness, and sense of physical action. It is also Swiftian in its search of a satirical fiction that bites. In its absurdity, it still seems close to the truth of what it must feel like to be in a conscripted army.
Social Satire
Many of the Rambler Essays are dramas on social relationships, which are conveyed through the use of a favorite eighteenth-century device–the letter-writer. Johnson’s distaste for Fielding’s comic romance, along with his reluctance to praise Gulliver’s Travels, might be attributable to his preference for dramatic realism, exemplified in the works of Samuel Richardson. Rambler 12 is a masterpiece of such realism. Johnson shows his ability to capture the strident voices of the peevish upperclasses, through his portrayal of Zosima, who finds herself in London when her genteel family can no longer provide for her. For a brief time she is supported by a cold relative, who sets her about the task of finding a place. Then she is sent from house to house where the well-to-do matrons coldly shun her. Madam Bombasine is the first in the gallery of arrogance:
She was two yards round the waist, her voice was at once loud and squeaking, and her face brought to my mind the picture of the full moon (Works, II, 56).
When Zosima tells her that her father had been a gentleman, Madam Bombasine retorts:
‘Pray go to the other end of the town, there are gentlewomen if they would pay their debts: I am sure we have lost enough by gentlewomen.’ Upon this her browed face grew broader with triumph, and I was afraid she would have taken me for the pleasure of continuing her insult; but, happily, the next word was: ‘Pray, Mrs. Gentlewoman, troop downstairs.’ You may believe I obeyed her (II, 56–57).
At the next house, appropriately run by Mrs. Standish, Zosima waits six hours before she is admitted “to the top of the stairs”:
There was a smell of punch, ‘So, young woman, you want a place; whence do you come?’ ‘From the country, madam.’ ‘Yes, they all come out of the country! And what brought you to a town, a bastard? Where do you lodge? At the Seven Dials? What, you never heard of the foundling house?’ Upon this they all laoughed so obstreperously that I took the opportunity of sneaking off in the tumult (II, 57).
She is kept waiting for two hours at the house of an elderly lady who is playing cards. When the woman discovers she can write, she is annoyed:
She wondered what people meant to breed up poor girls to write at that rate. ‘I suppose, Mrs. Flirt, if I was to see your work it would be fine stuff! You may walk. I will not have love-letters written from my house to every young fellow in the street’ (II, 57).
At Lady Lofty’s place Zosima has made the mistake of decking herself out with a few ornaments:
‘Is this the lady that wants a place? Pray, what place would you have, miss? A maid of honour’s place? Servants nowadays!’ ‘Madam, I heard you wanted….’ ‘Wanted what? Somebody finer than myself! A pretty servant, indeed. I should be afraid to speak to her. I suppose, Mrs. Mynx, these fine hands cannot bear wetting. A servant indeed! Pray move off –I am resolved to be the head person in this house. You are ready dressed, the taverns will be open’ (II, 57–58).
Trying not to make the same mistake at the next place, she futilely dons a “clean linen gown”:
‘Are you the trollop that has the impudence to come for my place? What, you have hired that nasty gown and are come to steal a better!’ ‘Madam, I have another, but being obliged to walk—‘ ‘Then these are your manners, with your blushes and your courtesies, to come to me in your worst gown.’ ‘Madam, give me leave to wait upon you in my other.’ ‘Wait on me, you saucy slut! Then you are sure of coming—I could not let such a drab come near me. Here, you girl, that came up with her, have you touched her? If you have, wash your hands
before you dress me. Such trollops! Get you down. What whimpering? Pray walk’ (II, 58).
Abuse follows abuse, but the misery Zosima must endure is finally crowned at the Courtlys. One can only describe the scene as a specimen of pure malice. She is turned about, eyed, laughed at, teased, and when she asks why she is being insulted, the lady exclaims:
‘Insult’ says the lady. ‘Are you come here to be a servant, you fancy baggage, and talk of insulting? What will this world come to if a genleman may not jest with a servant. Well, such servants! Pray begone, and see when you will have the honour to be so insulted again. Servants insulted—a fine time—Insulted! Get downstairs, you slut, or the footman shall insult you.’ (II, 60).
In a melodramatic ending, Euphemia, a generous, open-hearted lady rescues Zosima. Some of Johnson’s other heroines, like Misella and Victoria, are not so easily rescued.
In his collection of cruel, stupid, and conceited characters, Johnson displays an ear for the stereotyped and insulting speech of Zosima’s tormentors reminiscent of the lord and ladies in Swift’s Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, where there is the same trite and teasing talk:
Lady Smart. Why, Wench, I think they tongue runs upon wheels this morning….
Lady Smart. Fie, miss; they say maids should be seen, and not heard.
Neverout, Ah! Dear madam, let the matter fall; Take pity on poor miss; don’t throw water on a drowned rat (Swift, Works, V, 135).
The dramas found in many Rambler essays bear little resemblance to the
light-hearted gaiety of either Steele’s or Addison’s essays. Johnson knew he was not following in Addison’s footsteps. He complains:
Some were angry that the Rambler did not, like the Spectator, introduce himself to the acquaintance of the public by an account of his own birth and studies, an enumeration of his adventures, and a description of his physiognomy. Others soon began to remark that he was solemn, serious, dictorial writer, without sprightliness or gaiety, and called with vehemence for mirth and humor. Another admonished him to have a special eye upon the various clubs of this great city, and informed him that much of the Spectators’s vivacity was laid out upon such assemblies (Works, II, 116).
But he does create many characters in his periodical essays, though unfortunately
They are neither developed nor remembered like Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, Simon Wagstaff, M.G. Drapier, or Martin Scriblerus. In his use of a mask, Johnson is talking through his character rather than against him. His use of the satirical character enables him to descend from the world of abstract moral formulations to a sharp scrutiny of the men and manners which surround him. For his own brand of satire he acknowledges the need to remain within the limits imposed by realism:
Some enlargement may be allowed to declamation, and some exaggeration to burlesque; but as they deviate further from reality they become less and less useful because their lessons will fail of application (Works, III, 464–465).
This statement seems to reveal part of Johnson’s quarrel with Swift’s satire. Swift recorded conversation mainly for the sake of wit, Johnson for reformation. But they were both concerned with the same problem: the debasement of social relations through the debasement of language.
Past editions of Swift have included Tatler 32. But Herbert Davis concludes from the evidence that Swift did not write it: “It is difficult to believe that Swift had anything to do with the writing of this harmless satire, that does not bite; it is therefore not reprinted here” (Swift, Works, II, xxxi). He does concede that Swift may have prompted Steele to write it in retaliation for an unflattering remark made by Mary Astell, the object of ridicule in this satire. In this Tatler, a young man complains that his girl friend is a “professed Platonne”:
why should she wish to be a cherubim, when it is flesh and blood that makes her adorable? If I speak to her, that is a high breach of the idea of intuition. If I offer at her hand or lip, she shrinks from the touch like a sensitive plant, and would contract herself into mere spirit. She calls her chariot, vehicle; her furbelowed scarf, minions; her blue manteau and petticoat is her azure dress; and her fottman goes by the name of Oberon. It is my misfortune to be six feet and a half high, two full spans between the shoulders, thirteen inches diameter in the calves; and, before I was in love, I had a noble stomach, and usually went to bed sober with two bottles.24
Tatler 32 does have a light and affable quality which is generally not found in either Swift’s or Johnson’s satire. They take “unnatural” or “deformed” social behavior more seriously. The correspondent, Charles Study, a name Johnson uses in Adventurer 74, is consoled by Bickerstaff who tells him a story about a Platonic order of ladies, who are eventually conquered by a group of persistent young men. Bickerstaff concludes that Sturdy must be patient because “any unnatural part if long taking up, and as long laying aside” (Roscoe, V, 484).
Whether or not Swift actually wrote Tatler 32, the theme is close to Swift in its ridicule of “any unnatural part.” In a sequel to the teasing of the Platonic ladies, the writer has Madonella, the leader of the Platonnes, turn to a college for women who study ancient languages and Amazonian tactics of warfare.
In Idler 87 Johnson also toys with the possibilities of English women as Amazons. In relief he concludes:
I do not mean to censure the ladies of England as defective in knowledge or in spirit, when I suppose them unlikely to revive the military honours of their sex. The character of the ancient Amazons was rather terrible than lovely; the hand could not be very delicate that was only employed in drawing the bow and brandishing the battle-axe; their power was maintained by cruelty, their courage was deforemed by ferocity, and their example only shews that men and women live best together (Yale Edition, II, 272). [Italics mine]
In the next chapter I will further explore Swift’s and Johnson’s standards for conversation and for the proper relations between men and women, especially in marriage.
Abuses of Learning
Wit and Learning
In his small body of periodical essays Swift did not give full vent to his satirical genius. His thirty-three Examiners are written in the spirit of serious and non-ironic political polemic. In these papers he is trying to justify the ministry of Harley and Bolingbroke, defend his own position on the church, and find meaningful definitions for what he calls the cant words of Whig and Tory. As a periodical essayist, Johnson did not engage in such topical discussions.
Johnson follows Swift’s example of the allegorical fable found in a few Examiners. In Number 14 Swift uses the Allegorical fable for the personification of certain ideas, in this case lying: “The poets tell us that, after the great giants were overthrown by the gods, the Earth in revenge produced her last offspring which was Fame” (Works, III, 9). The Examiner interprets the fable, but then goes on to the genealogy of political lying, which is later described as a winged goddess:
Her large wings, like those of a flying-fish, are of no use but while they are moist; she therefore dips them in mud, and, soaring aloft, scatters it in the eyes of the multitude… (III, 10).
In Examiner 31 there is A Poetical Genealogy and Description of Merit: true merit was the son of Virtue and Honor; but there was likewise a spurious child, who usurped the name…” (III, 98). And again in Examiner 32:
Liberty, the daughter of Oppression, after having brought forth several fair children, as Riches, Arts, Learning, Trade, and many others, was at last delivered of her youngest daughter, called Faction; whom Juno doing the office of the midwife, distorted in her birth, out of envy to the mother, whence it derived its peevishness and sickly constitution (III, 102–103).
It is interesting to see how Johnson uses the allegorical fable for the purposes of literary rather than political criticism:
Wit, cohabiting with Malice, had a son named Satyr, who followed him, carrying a quiver filled with poisoned arrows, which, where they once drew blood, could by no skill ever be extracted. These arrows he frequently shot at Learning, when she was most earnestly or usefully employed…. Minerva therefore deputed criticism to her aid, who generally broke the point of Satyr’s arrows, turned them aside, or retorted them on himself (Works, II, 111).
Using the satirist’s device of the allegorical fable, Johnson here may be indirectly attacking Swift and the other members of the Scriblerus Club. In his Life of Swift, Johnson defends Bentley and Wotton from the unflattering roles Swift casts for them in The Battle of the Books, and in Idler 70 he defends the use of learned words against Swift’s criticism of them:
They that content themselves with general ideas may rest in general terms; but those, whose studies or employments force them upon closer inspection, must have names for particular parts, and worlds by which they may express various modes of combination, such as none but themselves have occasion to consider (Yale Edition, II, 219).
However, Johnson is also critical of pedantry. W.K. Wimsatt indicates in Philosophical Words how some of the humor in The Rambler is a burlesque of scientific and philosophical terminology. In Rambler 191 a young lady complains:
I have been forced …to sit this morning a whole quarter of an hour with your paper before my face; but just as my aunt came in, Phyllida had brought me a letter from Mr. Trip, which I put within the leaves and read…while my aunt imagined, that I was puzzling myself with your philosophy, and often cried out, when she saw me look confused, “If there is any word that you do not understand, child, I will explain it” (Works, III, 387–388).
Johnson here shows that he is good-humoredly aware of the difficulties of his Rambler, especially when he uses “hard” words. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that a large audience could not understand or appreciate the Latin names of the Rambler characters, he uses short English names for his Idler essays. The pace of the Idler is as lively as Swift’s.
The Projector
Johnson was more cautious than Swift in attacking the abuses of learning. For one thing, the new learning was no longer so new. Also, Johnson was not a churchman, but a scholar, and even an amateur chemist. Yet he was aware of the differences between the slow progress of the sciences and the visionary hopes of its practitioners:
When the philosophers of the last age were first congregated into the Royal Society, great expectations were raised of the sudden progress of useful arts; the time was supposed to be near, when engines should turn by a perpetual motion, and health be secured by the universal medicine; when learning should be facilitated by a real character, and commerce extended by ships which could reach their ports in defiance of the tempest (Yale Edition, II, 273).
Johnson’s and Swift’s ridicule of the projector well-illustrates their criticism of perverted or excessive role-playing. The major outlines of Swift’s critique against the “new Learning,” with its abuses of pedantry and pseudo-science, can be derived from such major works as A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, Gulliver’s Travels, especially Book III, along with such minor works as the Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers, and from his part in The Memoirs of Scriblerus. Johnson, like Swift, is disturbed by certain kinds of experimentation. In Idler 17 he deplores the cruelty of experiments upon animals. I would like to quote a lengthy passage from this essay because it displays anger that is unusually strong for the tone of his periodical essays and shows the way he scrutinizes the motives of the experimenter:
The Idlers that sport only with inanimate nature may claim some indulgence; if they are useless, they are still innocent: but there are others, whom I know not how to mention without more emotion than my love of quiet willingly admits. Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge, is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected into the veins.
It is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind with images like these. If such cruelties were not practised, it were to be desired that they should not be conceived; but, since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed once to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence.
Mead has invidiously remarked of Woodward, that he gathered shells and stones, and would pass for a philosopher. With pretensions much less reasonable, the anatomical novice tears out the living bowels of an animal, and styles himself physician, prepares himself by familiar cruelty for that profession which he is to exercise upon the tender and the helpless, upon feeble bodies and broken minds, and by which he has opportunities to extend his arts of torture, and continue those experiments upon infancy and age, which he has hitherto tried upon cats and dogs.
What is alleged in defence of those hateful practices, every one knows; but the truth is, that by knives, fire, and poison, knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained. The experiments that have been tried, are tried again; he that burned an animal with irons yesterday, will be willing to amuse himself with burning another to-morrow. I know not, that by living dissections any discovery has been made by which a single malady is more easily cured. And if the knowledge of physiolgy has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear, who learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his humanity. It is time that universal resentment should arise against these horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart, extinguish those sensations which give man confidence in man, and make the physician more dreadful than the gout or stone (Yale Edition, II, 55–56).
This kind of experimentation recalls the savagery of Swift’s landlords in his Modest Proposal, as well as the cruel absurdities in the Laputan Academy and Johnson’s sadistic higher beings in his Review of Soame Jenyns. In our own age, the awful images Johnson summons reminds us of the Nazi doctors of Hitler’s Germany. The reader is made to feel the suffering inflicted by cruelty through direct indignation. Swift’s thought on the subject of satire is appropriate here:
Satire is reckoned the easiest of all wit; but I take it to be otherwise in very bad times: for it is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues. It is easy enough to do either to people of moderate characters (Works, IV, 245).
But most of Johnson’s virtuosi are presented with some humor. Hermeticus (Rambler, 199) draws the Rambler’s attention to his life:
“Many have signalized themselves by melting their estates in crucibles. I was born to no fortune, and therefore had only my mind and body to devote to knowledge, and the gratitude of posterity will attest, that neither mind nor body has been spared. I have sat whole weeks without sleep by the side of an athanor, to watch the moment of projection; I have made the first experiment in nineteen diving-engines of new construction; I have fallen eleven times speechless under the shock of electricity; I have twice dislocated my limbs, and once fractured my skull, in essaying to fly, and four times endangered my life by submitting to the transfusion of blood” (Works, III, 422–423).
The virtuoso goes on to explain his work on Rabbi Abraham’s magnet and its social applications:
“The calamita, or loadstone that attracts iron, produces many bad fantasies in man. Women fly from this stone. If therefore any husband be disturbed with jealousy, and fear lest his wife converses with other men, let him lay this stone upon her while she is asleep. If she be pure, she will, when she wakes, clasp her husband fondly in her arms; but if she be guilty, she will fall out of bed, and run away” (III, 424).
This device is reminiscent of the lion “who would eat no virgin,” described in Tatler 5, part of which is attributed to Swift. That essay unwinds as a dream, while Johnson’s proceeds as a series of “useful” projects, Earisman in his study of the satire in Johnson’s periodical essays finds Rambler 199 atypical and suspects Johnson’s authorship. Nor does he enjoy it. His main difficulty in accepting the essay is its banter on chastity, which he considers both gross and puritanical, qualities he associates with Swiftian humor.
The objection does not seem justified to me. The chastity project is after all found in a manuscript and recalls the device Johnson uses in Marmor Norfolciense. Neither Johnson nor the projector is speaking–it is Rabbi Abraham. Johnson may even be thinking about an actual manuscript, since his satire on the collectors suggests that he had the opportunity to examine their finds.
For Johnson the enthusiast is unable to foresee the difficulties of his project. Like Misellus, the unfortunate author, he prematurely anticipates success. This eagerness is perhaps one of the manifestations of “the dangerous prevalence of the imagination” which Johnson defines in Rasselas. There is an intimation of this concept in Johnson’s examination of the seventeenth-century members of the Royal Academy:
A voyage to the moon, however romantic and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century, who began to doat upon their glossy plumes, and fluttered with impatience for the hour of their departure (Yale Edition, II, 357).
Though Johnson may have been less distrustful of science than Swift, they both believe that human improvement does not come through experiments with matter or social systems. Man first has to accept his physical and social limitations. Folly is the human failure to recognize the truth about oneself or the principle of moderation. Swiftian satire ridicules any abnormality which dupes the individual into losing some part of his humanity, not just the artificial one of the hunchback posing as a beau or the fool quoting Horace.
The Virtuoso Collector and the Pursuit of Wealth
While the ridicule of the virtuoso collector might not seem so serious as the attack against the abusers of science, this target still lands itself to the display of self-ignorance, immoderate behavior, and an inversion of values. The collector lives in a topsy-turvy world in which the petty takes priority over the important.
The Swiftian passages in the Memoirs of Matinus Scriblerus lend themselves to a comparison with Rambler 82. The elder Scriblerus and Johnson’s Qjisquilius are alike in their delight in trivia and antiquities:
In the City of Munster in Germany. . . .a grave and learned Gentleman, by profession an Antiquary; who among all his invaluable Curiosities, esteemed none more highly than a Skin of the true Pergamenian Parchment, which hung at the upper end of his hall.25
He follows ancient prescriptions of diet “confining himself and his wife for almost the whole first year to Goat’s Milk and Honey.” After the death of his first infant, a female, “he disdained not to treasure up the Embryo in a Vial, among the curiosities of his family” (Kerby-Miller, p.96). Like Johnson’s Hermeticus, he stakes his family treasure on his obsession:
He had already determin’d to set apart several Sums, for the recovery of Manuscripts, the effossion of Coins, the procuring of Mummies; and for all those curious discoveries by which he hoped to become (as himself was wont to say) a second Peireskius (p. 97).
Quisquillius, Johnson’s collector–whose name signifies “the waste or refuse of anything and has also a number of parallel connotations, which are as completely derogatory”26 describes his beginnings: It was observed from my entrance into the world that I had something uncommon in my disposition and that there appeared in me very early tokens of superior genius (Works, II, 383).
Nor does he have an ordinary childhood:
I was always an enemy to trifles: the playthings which my mother bestowed upon me I immediately broke that I might discover the method of their structure and the causes of their structure and the causes of their motions. Of all the toys with which children are delighted I valued only my coral, and as soon as I could speak asked, like Piereso, innumerable questions which the maids about me could not resolve (II, 384).
Martin’s father also esteems precocity:
‘What, bred at home? Have I taken all this pains for a creature that is to live the inglorius life of a Cabbage, to suck the nutritious juices from the spot where he was first planted? No; to perambulate this terraqueous Globe is too small a Range’ (Kerby-Miller, p. 101).
Quisquilius’ description of his toys recalls Chapter V of the Memoirs of Scriblerus, which is entitled “Dissertation upon Playthings.” For both characters the type of play and toys in childhood prepare them for their adult vocations:
Notwithstanding the foregoing injunctions of Dr. Cornelius, he yet condescended to allow the Child the use of some few modern Playthings; such as might prove of any benefit to his mind, by instilling an early notion of the sciences. For example, he found that Marbles taught him Percussion and the Laws of Motion; Nutcrackers the use of the Leaver; swinging on the ends of a Board, the Balance; Bottle-screws, the Vice; Whirligigs, the Axis and Peritrochia; Birdcages, the Pulley; and Tops, the Centrifugal motion (pp. 110–111).
Martin is descended from a “Race of Virtuosi.” He is a more complicated vehicle for satire than his father, Cornelius, who seems to be mere collector. Quisquilius does not reach Martin’s heights, and he sinks lower than Cornelius. The destruction of monasteries infuriated Johnson. Quisquilius laments:
As I grew older I was more thoughtful and serious, and, instead of amusing myself with puerile diversions, mad collections of natural rarities, and never walked into the fields without bringing home stones of remarkable forms or insects of some uncommon species. I never entered an old house from which I did not take away the painted glass, and often lamented that I was not one of that happy generation who demolished the convents and monasteries and broke windows by law (Works, II, 383).
Johnson tried to be fair with this brand of virtuoso. In his several essays on the subject he usually qualifies his criticism, but the final achievements of a Quisquilius could only exasperate him. In the humor of the next passage, there is the empty achievement of the collector conveyed through the image of evaporation:
I can show one vial of which the water was formerly an icicle on the crags of Caucasus, and another that contains what once was snow on the top of Atlas. In a third is dew brushed from a banana in the gardens of Ispahan, and in another brine that has rolled in the Pacific Ocean (II, 386).
Like the seventeenth-century enthusiasts who have already seen their “glossy plumes.” Quisquilius believes he has achieved honor by collectinng rare minutae:
I flatter myself that I am writing to a man who will rejoice at the honour which my labours have procured to my country: and therefore I shall tell you that Britain can, by my care, boast of a snail that has crawled upon the wall of China, a humming-bird which an American princess wore in her ear…(II, 386).
He has strange tokens of royalty and power:
The tooth of an elephant who carried the Queen of Siam, the skin of an ape that was kept in the palace of the Great Mogul, a ribbon that adorned one of the maids of a Turkish sultana, and a scimitar once wielded by a soldier of the Abas the Great (II, 386).
Johnson suggests a moral culpability in those who have not been able to order a proper hierarchy of values:
The virtuoso, therefore, cannot be said to be wholly useless. But perhaps he may be sometimes culpable for confining himself to business below his genius, and losing in petty speculations those hours which, if he had spent them in nobler studies, he might have given new light to the intellectual world. To hew stone would have been unworthy of Palladie, and to have rambled in search of shells and flowers had but ill suited with the capacity of Newton (II, 392).
Johnson extends his criticism of the collector through his eager character Vivaculus (Rambler 177), who finds a nest of waspish collectors in London:
Every one of those virtuosos looked on all his associates as wretches of depraved taste and narrow notions. Their conversation was therefore fretful and waspish, their behaviour brutal, their merriment bluntly sarcastic, and their seriousness gloomy and suspicious (III, 332).
His objection to collectors might be summed up by Pope in his To Augustus: “Authors like coins, grow dear as they grow old;/ It is the rust we value, not the gold.” His criticism of the collector is a conventional subject of Eighteenth-century satire. It is found in Steele, Tatler 158
and 216, and in Addison’s portrait of Tom Folio. Pope ridicules them in The Dunciad. But Johnson does go further. His criticism of the collector relates to his criticism of greed. The urge to collect is easily connected with the pursuit of money. In both cases the principle is acquisitiveness as the rule of life.
For Johnson the universal quest for money is hardly a subject for satire since it is a much more serious problem than mere eccentricity. In Rambler 131 he considers those whose only concern in life is either gaining or hoarding money. Mankind is divided into those who are cheating and those being cheated. He finds the perversions of the law, which enable the predatory to gain their aims, beyond satire. Those who have dedicated their lives to the means of acquiring wealth generally disqualify themselves from any claim to virtue. Mankind cannot return to a Golden Age where there is a community of possessions. Nor is a monastic retreat from the temptation of riches the answer, because the opportunity for doing good is denied by trying to avoid evil.
In the same vein, Johnson protests: “what are all the records of history but narratives of successive villainies, or treasons and usurpation, massacres and wars?” (III, 322). Sternly indicating the avaricious, Johnson uses an image which suggests the Yahoo’s fascination for collecting stones:27
Many there are who openly and almost professedly regulate all their conduct by their love of money, who have no reason for action or forbearance, for compliance or refusal, than that they hope to gain more by one than by the other. These are indeed the meanest and cruellest of human beings, a race with whom, as with some pestiferous animals, the whole creation seems to be at war, but who, however detested or scorned, long continue to add heap to heap, and when they have reduced one to beggary are still permitted to fasten on another (Johnson Works, III, 325). [Italics mine]
The virtuoso, collector and money hoarder are linked by their unsociable pursuit and grasping for the pleasure of acquisition for the sake of acquisition. Opposed to them are those who seem to suffer from inertness or defeat from the normal purposes of life. Suspirius, the screech owl, dampens the spirits of those who have a natural amount of hope, Hypertatus advises the air of the garret to arouse flagging spirits, and another unknown author is self-defeated in a garret where he finally sets fire to the curtains. Hypertatus’ theorizing, which is in certain ways reminiscent of the Aeolists in A Tale of a Tub, is rationalizing against sloth, a vice which has its complement in avarice. Johnson ridicules the slothful and denounces the avaricious.
Johnson’s early political satire reflects his discontent with the Hanoverian succession, the corruptions of government under the Walpole ministry, the status of the army, the legal profession, and English colonial policy. According to Bertrand Bronson “the violence of these attacks on the government Johnson never surpassed. With the fall of Walpole his own anxiety seems to have subsided.”29 He then begins to emphasize the need for a strong central power in government rather than the rights of the individual. Had he remained antagonistic to the government, it is likely that he would have continued playing at being Swift. One story that has neither been proved nor disproved is that Johnson had to seek refuge from government warrants for his arrest after publishing his Marmor Norfolciense. If the story is true the parallel with Swift at this period is strong. His criticism of English colonial policy supports the attribution to him of the Appendix to the State Affairs of Lilliput.
In the Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage Johnson is attacking the legal profession and office holders along with the censorship law. His main concern, though, is to declare the value of literature, to protect the rights of both reader and writer and to elevate its dignity against the arrogance of the other professions. While the Project for the Advancement of Authors is ostensibly an attack against incompetent and savage literary bohemianism of Grub Street, it is also an attack against the patronage system and government which ignores the responsibility of encouraging literature. In this period, Johnson is following the example of Pope in his To Augustus by writing with tongue-in-cheek praise of the government. Though a Grub Street writer himself, he easily identifies with Pope and Swift in his ridicule of literary presumption.
As a social satirist he displays a realism which many called comic. At times it is also dramatic. Like Swift, he is aware of the debasement of conversation. Johnson’s understanding of the social roles of men and women is basically the same as Swift’s. I hope to demonstrate this similarity in the next chapter.
Finally, though it is often pointed out that Johnson criticizes the early Augustans for their satires on the abuses of learning, some of his own satire in The Rambler reflects Scriblerian satire. The early chapters of Martin Scriblerus show the collector of antiquities. He has debased the meaning of studying the ancients by his greed for possession. Humanistic effort should seek to discover “sweetness and light,” rather than an endless parade of curiosities. Johnson’s ridicule of the collector is part of his widening attack against man’s insatiable desire for possession. Swift satirizes this desire with the Yahoos and Johnson denounces it directly in The Rambler. The exclusiong of Idler 22 from the collection is further evidence of Johnson’s reluctance to satirize major evils.
Whatever other differences there are between Swift’s and Johnson’s satire, Johnson seems to me to be a Swiftian satirist because of his grim humor, sense of evil, fast pace and sense of physical action, shifts of tone, and energetic delivery. These qualities operate in the service of Swift’s values of sense and proportion as well. In the next chapter I will consider certain aspects of these values.
It is difficult to find Swiftian counterparts for some of Johnson’s pathetic characters. Johnson is more apt to give freer rein to his melancholy.
In his periodical essays, Johnson is mainly interested in attaching a wide range of eccentricity, pettishness, and dullness. In his attack, there are strong overtones of Swift, or, as in the case of Scriblerian satire, some of the early Augustan satirists as well. Through his own forms of expression, Johnson maintains the tradition of Swift’s moral satire.
Footnotes to Chapter II
1. Unpublished dissertation (Indiana University, 1959) by Delbert L. Earisman, Samuel
Johnson’s Satire.
2. Alvin Whitley, “The Comedy of Rasselas,” ELH, XXIII, (1956), 48–70.
3. Gwin J. Kolb, Philologival Quarterly, XXXVI, III, (July, 1957), 379–381.
4. Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence (Baltimore, 1967), p. 21.
5. James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1961).
6. Benjamin Hoover, Samuel Johnson’s Parliamentary Reporting (Berkeley, 1953), p. 173.
7. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1962), II, 276-277. Hereafter cited as Swift, Works in text.
8. For a discussion of its political content see Donald J. Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1960).
9. The Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 1825), VI, 115. Hereafter cited as Johnson, Works in text.
10. “The English established in those colonies, are in great want of men to inhabit that tract of ground, which lies between them, and the wild Indians who are not reduced under their dominion. We read of some barbarous peoples, whom the Romans placed in their armies, for no other service, than to blunt their enemies’ swords, and after ward to fill up trenches with their dead bodies. And thus our people who transport themselves, are settled in those interjacent tracts, as a screen against the insults of the savages, and may have as much land, as then can afford to pay about a hundred years’ purchase by their labor” (Swift, Works, XII, 60).
11. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub ed. A.C. Guthkelch and D. Nicol Smith (Oxford, 1958), p. 185. Hereafter cited as A Tale in text.
12.“ ‘I would be loath to speak ill of any person…but I am afraid he is an attorney’”(Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, Oxford, 1897, I, 327). “He always hated and censured Swift for his unprovoced bitterness against the professors of medicine…” (I, 223).
13. The Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson, arr. Joseph Epes Brown (New York, 1961) p. 299.
14. “On the Death of Dr. Swift,” The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 2nd ed., Harold Williams (Oxford, 1958), II, 571. But in a letter to Pope, Swift wrote: “Again I insist, you must have your Asterisks filled up with some real names of real Dunces” (The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, Oxford, 1963, III, 293).
15. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W.J. Bate, et al (New Haven, 1963), II, 140. Hereafter cited as Yale Edition in text.
16. David Worcester, The Art of Satire (Cambridge, 1940), p. 16.
17.Edward A. Bloom, Samuel Johnson on Grub Street (Providence, 1957), p.11.
18. Johnson makes a similar observation in the Life of Butler when he says that the present generation finds it difficult to enjoy the humor of Butler’s ridicule of the Puritans.
19. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L.F. Powell (Oxford, 1934),
III, 379–380.
20. It is interesting to see though how similarly both Swift and Johnson react when they become targets for ridicule. In his poem On Censure Swift writes:
Yet whence proceeds this Weight we lay
On what detracting People say?
For let Mankind discharge their Tongues
In Venom till they burst their Lungs,
Their utmost Malice cannot make
Your Head, or Tooth, or Finger, ake,
Nor spoil your Shape, distort your Face,
Or put one Feature out of Place;
Nor will you find your Fortune sink
By what they speak or what they think;
Nor can ten Hundred Thousand Lies
Make you less virtuous, learn’d or wise.
Their Malice—to let them talk (Poems, II, 414).
Boswell records the following story: ‘Once when somebody produced a newspaper in which there was a letter of stupid abuse of Sir Joshua Reynolds, of which Johnson himself come in for a share, – “Pray,” said he, “let us have it read aloud from beginning to end;” which being done, he with a ludicrous earnestness, and not directing his look to any particular person, called out, “Are we alive after all this satire!”’ (Boswell’s Life, IV, 29).
21.Satires and Personal Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed, William Alfred Eddy (London, 1956), p. xxiv.
22. See Swift’s attack against ‘economic projectors’ in his A Modest Proposal.
23. Johnson’s use of satirical masks in his Letter to Lord Chesterfield.
24. The Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Thomas Roscoe (New York, n.d.), V, 481. Hereafter cited as Roscoe in text.
25. Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New Haven, 1950), p. 95.
26. Edward A. Bloom, “Symbolic Names in Johnson’s Periodical Essays,” MLQ, XIII (Dec. 1952), 342.
27. See Norman O. Brown, “The Excremental Vision,” Life Against Death (Connecticut, 1959) for his theory that in Swift’s writings there are intimations of Freud’s theory of sublimation.
28. In the preface, the narrator of A Tale of a Tub explains, “I have recollected, that the shrewdest Pieces of this Treatise, were conceived in bed, in a Garret” (p.44).
29. Bertrand H. Bronson, Johnson Agonistes (Berkeley, 1965), p. 17.
CHAPTER III
NATURE, REASON, AND MARRIAGE
Nature and Reason
Eighteenth-century writers often use as a companion word to nature1___ reason. These two words are often examined as guides to esthetic and moral judgments. Among the many meanings subsumed for nature as living nature is animal instinct. Describing his speculations on the nature of animals, Addison in Spectator 120, observes:
Animals in their Generation are wiser than the Sons of Men; but their Wisdom is confined to a few Particulars, and lies in a very narrow Compass. Take a Brute out of his Instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of Understanding.2
It is interesting to compare Rochester’s treatment of animal instinct and human reason to Addison’s thoughts on the subject. In A Satire against Mankind, Rochester makes a distinction between reason as inhibition and “right reason” which encourages and fulfills desire and appetite:
Thus, whilst ‘gainst false reas’ning I inveigh,
I own right Reason, which I wou’d obey:
And gives us Rules, of good, and ill from thence:
That bounds desires, with a reforming Will,
To keep ‘em more in vigour, not to kill.
Your Reason hinders, mine helps t’enjoy,
Renewing Appetites, yours wou’d destroy.
My Reason is my Friend, yours is a Cheat,
Hunger call’s out, my Reason bids me eat;
Perversely yours, your Appetite does mock,
This asks for Food, that answers what’s a Clock?
This plain distinction Sir your doubt secures,
‘Tis not true Reason I despise but yours.
Thus I think Reason righted, but for Man,
I’le nere recant defend him if you can.
For all his Pride, and his Philosophy,
‘Tis evident, Beasts are in their degree,
As wise at least, and better far than he.3
Animals fulfill their appetites through “right reason,” but men kill, cheat, slander, and betray through their corrupted reason for no natural end. Rochester not only sees human reason as restraint or inhibition, but as a defense against fear: “Men must be Knaves, ‘tis in their own defence’” (p. 122, 1, 160).
Addison is more moderate in his praise for the animal’s faculties:
There is not in my Opinion any thing more mysterious in Nature than this Instinct in Animals, which thus rises above Reason, and falls infinitely short of it. It cannot be accounted for by any Properties in Matter, and at the same Time works after so odd a Manner, that one cannot think it the Faculty of an intellectual Being (Spectator, pp. 492–493).
The alternate distinctions made by Rochester and Addison are typical of a debate among eighteenth-century writers in defining between living nature and reason. Instinct is inexplicable, inevitable, automatic. Reason is illumination or habit fixed by precept and experience. Nature and reason are expressions for the duality between mind and body. Using the idea of the chain of being, Pope depicts man’s dilemma:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast:
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;4 [Italics mine]
Johnson recognizes the limitations of reason. In Chapter XXIX of Rasselas, Nekayah disputes with Rasselas on the role of reason:
There are a thousand familiar disputes which reason never can decide; questions that elude investigation, and make logick ridiculous; cases where something must be done, and where little can be said. Consider the state of mankind, and enquire how few can be supposed to act upon any occasions, whether small or great, with all the reasons of action present to their minds. Wretched would be the pair above all names of wretchedness, who should be doomed to adjust by reason every morning all the minute detail of a domestick day.5
There is enough evidence to think that this is Johnson’s view of the kind of reason Nekayah has in mind. In Idler 100 Johnson shows the defeat of Tim Warner, who tries to base his selection of a mate on nature and reason. Like Rasselas he believes that his wife should be led by reason. Tim makes certain unpleasant discoveries after his marriage about his wife, who is referred to several times throughout the letter as “a good sort of woman”:
Her great principle is, that the orders of a family must not be broken. Every hour of the day has its employment inviolably appropriated, nor will any importunity persuade her to walk in the garden, at the time which she has devoted to her needlework, or to sit up stairs in that part of the forenoon, which she has accustomed herself to spend in the back parlour.6
Further evidence of Johnson’s distaste for reason,s excessive regulation lies in Madame Piozzi’s report:
The nice people found no mercy from Mr. Johnson; such I mean as can dine only at four o’clock, who cannot bear to be waked at an unusual hour, or miss a stated meal.7
In Chapter XVIII of Rasselas, Johnson again ridicules an unwarranted faith in another kind of reason. The philosopher shows “with great strength of sentiment, and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher” (Works, I, 239). But there is no consolation in reason for the philosopher’s natural grief after the death of his daughter. Rasselas discovers “the emptiness of rhetorical sound, and the inefficacy of polished periods and studied sentences” (I, 241). In Rasselas, Johnson is not ridiculing reason but those who think they are in touch with it. He also ridicules the semantics of the philosopher, who advocates living by nature:
To live according to nature, is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to cooperate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things (I, 249).
Johnson as a moral philosopher who believes in using precepts would find some of the philosopher’s advice not only laughable but dangerous: “let them consider the life of animals, whose motions are regulated by instinct…. Let us throw away…precepts” (I, 248).
Johnson’s quarrel is not with reason as restraint or control; it is against mechanical thinking or the impostures of language based on insincere thought. He opens Idler 100 with the following warning:
The uncertainty and defects of language have produced very frequent complaints among the learned; yet there still remain many words among us undefined, which are very necessary to be rightly understood, and which produce very mischievous mistakes when they are erroneously interpreted (Yale Edition, II, 305).
Nature and reason are two such words. In the division between nature and reason–the classicist wants reason to take control as Johnson’s philosopher teaches. However for both Johnson and Swift reason is not enough for true virtue, because mind and body are corrupt. Morality shows the way to avoid pain and danger, but real virtue flows from heaven.8 Swift humorously allegorizes man’s corruptions after the fall:
But, when at last usurping Jove
Old Saturn from his Empire drove;
Then Gluttony with greasy Paws,
Her Napkin pinn’d up to her Jaws. . .
This bloated Harpy sprung from Hell,
Confin’d Thee Goddess to a Cell:
Sprung from her Womb that impious Line,
Contemners of thy Rites divine.
First, lolling Sloth in Woollen Cap,
Taking her After-dinner Nap:
Pale Dropsy with a sallow Face,
Her Belly burst, and slow her Pace:
And, lordly Gout wrapt up in Furr:
And, wheezing Asthma, loth to stir:
Voluptuous Ease, the Child of Wealth
Infecting thus our Hearts by Stealth;9
It is customary to find in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s horses and the Yahoos representing the polarization between reason as excessive restraint and nature as brute instinct. Critical belief has wavered between the horses as an unattainable ideal of uncorrupted reason to a satire on this ideal, with the horses representing the insufficiency of reason for the human condition. Samuel Holt Monk thinks that Gulliver after his stay with the horses is maddened by this conflict:
From the moment that the banished Gulliver despairingly sets sail from Houyhnhnmland, his pride, his misanthropy, his madness are apparent. Deluded by his worship of pure reason, he commits the error of the Houyhnhnms in equating human beings with the Yahoos.10
The questions raised here are whether or not Gulliver is mad, if so, how? and what might be the significance of such madness? R.S. Crane thinks that Plato’s allegory of the cave from the seventh Book of The Republic is relevant to an understanding of Book IV and Gulliver’s state of mind. He also thinks Gulliver has suffered from some sort of derangement:
The argument of the “Voyage to the Houyhnhnms” is, I suggest, of the same general order as this in its essential form–only transposed into an eighteenth-century key of humor and satiric hyperbole and given a moral instead of an intellectual emphasis. As embodied in the fable of Gulliver, who has seen not the sun but merely the noblest of animals and who reacts to the sight and to his enforced return to mankind even more extravagantly than the prisoner, the argument is well calculated to serve Swift’s avowed end of vexing the world by shocking it violently, but wittily, out of its complacency with itself; and it does this, let me add, in a way that no more compels us to identify Swift with his hero than we are obliged to identify Socrates–or Plato–with the man who blundered and made a fool of himself, for a while, on being brought back to the cave.11
A.E. Dyson sees in the creation of the horses and Yahoos Swift splitting man’s emotional and intellectual life beyond repair:
Swift drives a wedge between the intellectual and the emotional, makes one good, the other evil, and pushes them further apart, as moral opposites, than any except the most extreme Puritans have usually done…. The ideal is unattainable, the vicious alternative inescapable, and both are so unattractive that one is at a loss to decide which one dislikes the more.12
Henry W. Sams sees Gulliver as duped by the horses:
At this point it seems reasonable to object to Gulliver himself. Although he inveighs against pride, he displays in his own person the external symptoms by which pride may be recognized. The effect is satiric betrayal.13
F.H. Leavis finds the positives of nature and reason meaningless in Book IV:
Gulliver’s master ‘thought Nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal’, but nature and reason as Gulliver exhibits them are curiously negative, and the reasonable animals appear to have nothing in them to guide.14
I find J. Middleton Murry’s assessment fairer and perhaps somewhat closer to the truth. He defines reason not as the faculty of ratiocination but “the gift of discerning and doing what is good”:
This ‘reason’ exists, according to Swift, as a mere latent potentiality in humans, and only becomes operative when it is purged of what Santayana calls ‘animal egotism.’ And this purgation happens to Gulliver in consequence of his discovery that he belongs to the Yahoo species.15
The debate on Book IV will continue. What I want to point out here is that nature and reason are problematic words for Johnson and Swift, and they probably wanted them to be equally problematic for the reader. Yet much of their writings turn on these two concepts. It is on the subjects of women and marriage that their postures on the debate between nature and reason become apparent.16
Attitudes toward Women
Much work has been done on the subject of Swift’s attitude toward women in an attempt to understand his relations with Vanessa and Stella.His Letter to a Young Lady has been used to illustrate his general views on women and marriage. George Mayhew, in Rage and Raillery, offers the suggestion that the letter has a local or topical rather than a universal meaning. New evidence on the identity of Swift’s young lady he claims supports this interpretation. He offers the possibility that the letter may have been composed by Swift not only for the particular purposes of bringing about a prearranged marriage, but also as a way of extricating himself from his tie with Vanessa, who he knew would read the letter.. Her reaction ot it might be the same as the young lady’s—anger. Stella also would be annoyed, but she would forbear, and then she and the Dean would pick up their relationship as before.
One reason I believe that this letter reflects Swift’s consistent and general view on the subject is the much earlier letter to Varina,17 which reflects similar attitudes, although I suppose it might be argued that he was trying to put her off also. The language in A Letter to a Young Lady may be harsh and satirical in places, but it is substantailly not too different in thought from George Savile’s Advice to a Daughter,18 which was published at the beginning of the century, or other social documents of this kind in that period. Savile is even more extreme in urging his daughter’s submission of her husband whatever his faults. It too emphasizes the duties rather than the pleasures of marriage. Savile sees marriage as a kind of peace treaty between warring states, in which the wife must exert the maximum of diplomacy in order to avert full war. In contrast, Swift does not distinguish so sharply between the woman’s and the man’s interest. His marriage counsel does assume a man who reflects the best values of society. Savile is teaching his daughter how to make the best of whatever falls to her lot. Nor is the advice of cleanliness a singular Swiftian feature. Savile urges it; and so too a late eighteenth-century American letter-writer, who gives his daughter advice on clothes and cleanliness. No would accuse Thomas Jefferson of misogyny,19 or for that matter, suggest that he needs to be psychoanalysed.
The exception taken to Swift’s letter in the eighteenth century from Johnson to our own day is its unflattering portrait of women. In the Life of Swift Johnson comments on the letter by saying that it shows Swift’s low opinion of women. But, as I shall show, some of his own portraits of women in The Rambler relate quite closely to Swift’s Letter to a Young Lady. A present-day critic, Evelyn Hardy, reacts emotionally to the letter:
We are told that Mistress Rochfort did not care for the letter, or Swift’s opinion of women. Do you wonder? For even if she took pains to follow all his precepts she could not, he told her, hope to arrive “in the point of learning to the perfection of a school-boy.” Indeed there is nothing in the letter to show that he valued women for their inherent qualities, the happy complement of the male–their courage (other than mere physical courage), their gentleness, their intuitive gifts, their touching loyalty, protectiveness, and nobility.20
Phyllis Greenacre goes deeper into Swift’s presumed denial of femininity:
With his tendency to the polarization of characteristics he tended to deal life into pairs of opposites. He would see women as essentailly emotional and men as reasonable, temperate and just. It was the women who ere the dangerous seducers and the destroyers of reason.21
Perhaps there is some truth in what these women say, but they put it in an unfortunate way. Swift wanted women to stop being females insofar as that meant acting like monkeys or fools. It is a commonplace and universal paradigm to see maleness as representing reason and femaleness nature. This symbolism is apparent in Greek, Oriental, and Western society.22 George Savile writes to his daughter:
Your Sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength of your Conduct, and our Strength of your Protection: Ours wanteth your Gentleness to soften, and to entertain us (p. 8).
Addison makes a similar observation in Spectator 128:
Women in their Nature are much more gay and joyous than Men; whether it be that their Blood is more refined, their Fibres more delicate, and their animal Spirits more light and volatile; ow whether, as some have imagined, there may not be a kind of Sex in the very Soul, I shall not pretend to determine. As Vivacity if the Gift of Women, Gravity is that of Men (II, 8).
The woman’s submission to man is symbolic of the submission of nature to reason. Johnson made this discovery on his famous wedding ride with Tetty:
Sir, she had read the old romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, Sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the slave of caprice; and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was fairly out of her sight. The road lay between two hedges, so I was sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should soon come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in tears (Boswell’s Life, I, 96).
That Swift was neither for the total denial nor complete indulgence of nature as appetite is seen in his poems. The newly-wedded couple in Strephon and Chloe comes to the bridal bed in a state of bodily denial. For the young man the body exists as a poetic myth of the Renaissance love poems. It has been refined, through idealization, out of existence. After the lovers discover their bodies, they go to the other extreme; they become gross and wanton. Swift ends the poem with commonplace and unambiguous advice:
On Sense and Wit your Passion found,
By Decency cemented round;
Let Prudence with Good Nature strive,
To keep Esteem and Love alive.
Then come old Age when’er it will,
Your Friendship shall continue still:
And thus a mutual gentle Fire,
Shall never but with Life expire (Poems, II, 593).
In a slightly different context, Savile makes a similar point of the need for tempering passion:
There are many who have an Aguish Devotion. Hot and Cold Fits, long Intermissions, and violent Raptures. This unevenness is by all means to be avoided. Let your method be a steady course of good Life, that may run like a smooth Stream, and be a perpetual Spring to furnish to the continued Exercise of Vertue (p.6).
Nature—passion, the body—lives through reason, that is wit, good sense, and decency. Friendship is a prime value because it keeps the other pleasures alive. The word friendship was not a platitude for Swift:
Dear Jim, pardon me, I know not what I am saying; but believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting, and as much engaging, as violent love. Adieu (Correspondence, III, 322).
Herbert Davis sees Swift’s attempt to fashion a “new view of woman” as going beyound his seventeenth-century models. He describes this woman as unromantic but not unpleasing: “She is able to take her place in the world on equal terms, a free, intelligent gentlewoman, worthy of man’s highest regard and friendship whether within or without the bounds of holy matrimony” (Davis, p. 45). I believe Johnson follows the example of Swift in his expectation of women, an expectation based on the urge to balance and reconcile nature to reason and effected by bringing men and women together for the purposes of polite conversation. Though he expressed doubt about the Letter to a Young Lady, he is actually close to Swift’s thinking in fashioning several female portraits in The Rambler.
Johnson also teaches that the distance between men and women should be narrowed for the sake of reason that assumes friendship and understanding. Female behavior when it is either too conventional, i.e., artificially reasonable, or too unconventional, i.e. artificially natural, is disagreeable. In Rambler 115, Camilla sees herself as a disciple of Swift’s advice:
She …proclaimed her approbation of Swift’s opinion that women are only a higher species of monkeys, and confessed that when she considered the behaviour or heard the conversation of her sex she could not but forgive the Turks for suspecting them to want souls (Works, II, 46).
In the portrait of Camilla, Johnson does not disagree with Swift, because Swift in his Letter to a Young Lady also cautions against the kind of role Camilla assumes:
I know very well, that those who are commonly called learned Women, have lost all Manner of Credit by their impertinent Talkativeness, and Conceit of themselves (Works, IX, 92).
It is possible to view Johnson’s coward Anthea also as another representation of a Swiftian attitude toward the female. Swift also expresses distaste for cowardice as a female virtue:
There is, indeed, one Infirmity which is generally allowed you, I mean that of Cowardice . . . At least, if Cowardice be a Sign of Cruelty, (as it is generally granted) I can hardly think it an Accomplishment so desireable [sic], as to be thought worth improving by Affectation (IX, 93).
Anthea, who appears in Rambler 34, completely confirms Swift’s denunciation down to the last detail of seeing cowardice as a sign of cruelty. The objects of Anthea’s frights, such as frogs and coaches, are on the same scale as those listed by Swift. I interpret Johnson’s ironic ending as a sign of Anthea’s cruelty:
At last we came home, and she told her company next day what a pleasant ride had been taken (Works, II, 170).
That she can make such a statement after all the confusion, disorder, and annoyance she has caused by her obsessions reveals the kind of cruelty that accompanies female cowardice. As Johnson humorously displays her, Anthea really wants to manipulate people.
The difficulty in narrowing the distance between the sexes is the attractions of power the woman sees in either extreme. As an Amazon or a coward she is looking for power to master her social unease.
Johnson suggests the possibility of a compromise through the character of Cornelia, while at the same time attacking the conventional role of the wife as a kitchen manager. Lady Bustle is a super-housewife. She is someone who:
makes an orange pudding which is the envy of all the neighbourhood and which she has hitherto found means of mixing and baking with such secrecy, that the ingredient to which it owes its flavour has never been discovered (II, 249).
Cornelia’s humility makes her wonder whether she:
shall throw away the books which I have hitherto thought it my duty to read for The Lady’s Closet Opened, The Complete Servant Maid, and The Court Cook, and resign all curiosity after right and wrong for the art of scalding damascenes without bursting them, and preserving the whiteness of pickled mushrooms (II, 248).
While Lady Bustle’s presumed virtues are humorously dispatched, Cornelia stands as the personification of a modern woman because of her inquisitive concern for the values of right and wrong and her awareness of the roles which are offered to her. She sees Lady Bustle and her entire family, including the husband, engaged in a mindless pursuit of abundance. By this pursuit they have dulled their minds to humanity, thereby losing some of their own. Ultimately her moral neutrality must be seen as a kind of immorality when Cornelia observes that:
She has no curiosity after the events of a war or the fate of heroes in distress; she can hear without the least emotion the ravage of a fire or devastations of a storm. Her neighbours grow rich or poor, come into the world or go out of it, without regard while she is pressing the jelly-bag or airing the state-room (II, 248–249).
By protesting against “these ladies as the great patterns of our sex,” cornelia is protesting against domestic complacency. It is a protest Swift makes when he observes: “your Sex employs more thought, memory, and application to be Fools, than would serve to make them wise and useful.” Swit would agree that a wife should be able to give her husband more than orange-pudding. However, neither Johnson nor Swift felt that it could be love in the romantic sense of the word:
Swift:
Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies (Works, IV, 247).
Johnson:
But love and marriage are different states (Boswell’s Life, I, 381).
It is commonly a weak man who marries for love (III, 3).
The Foundation for Marriage
There are certain significant passages in Gulliver’s Travels where Gulliver records his observations on marriage and the family. The first one is in Chapter VI of Book I:
Their Notions relating to the Duties of Parents and Children differ extremely from ours. For, Since the Conjunction of Male and Female is founded upon the great Law of Nature, in order to propagate and continue the Species; the Lilliputians will needs have it, that Men and Women are joined together like other Animals, by the Motives of Concupiscence; and that their Tenderness towards their Young, proceedeth from the like natural Principle (Works, XI, 60).
The tone of Gulliver’s description is critical of his own countrymen. Gulliver is saying we pretend or are deceived by society, custom, or false reason into thinking that there is some higher mystique for marriage. But the Lilliputians see marriage as mating, and they reason that it is best to remove the children from their family as quickly as possible in order to avoid their corruption by their parents. To what extent is Swift recommending the Lilliputian customs in Chapter VI? Robert Heilman believes that “the Lilliputians, who in the main are an embodiment of European vices, are presented in Chapter VI in strongly utopian terms,”23
Gulliver’s description of the nurseries does reflect the stands Swift took in his tracts on education as well as his work with the Dublin charity schools, which I will discuss in another chapter. Swift and his age believed that education is training the individual to take his proper station in society. Lilliput has also solved the problem of the cottagers and the old. In A Modest Proposal, the “projector” describes the old and sick as no longer a problem because they are daily dying through disease and neglect, Gulliver’s description here may be another chance for Swift to remind the world of Ireland’s wretched economic condition, which he felt needed immediate and, perhaps, desperate measures. His fight against Wood’s half-pence indicates his willingness to take such measures. Viewed in the light of the oppression of the Irish people. Chapter VI is perhaps more of a political attack rather than a serious appraisal of the social relations between men and women.
However, in a section of Chapter 2 of Book III, Swift does delve into the delicate
question of the relationships between men and women, especially in marriage.
Both husbands and wives become the subject of ridicule:
The Women of the Island have Abundance of Vivacity; they contemn their Husbands, and are exceedingly fond of Strangers, whereof there is always a considerable Number from the Continent below…Among these the Ladies chuse their Gallants: But the Vexation is, that they act with too much Ease and Security; for the Husband is always so wrapped in Speculation, that the Mistress and Lever may proceed to the greatest Familiarities before his Face (Works, XI, 165).
The sharpest satire is directed against the lady who runs away from her kind husband in order
To be enslaved by an old , deformed, and brutal footman. The women are ruled out from their
husband’s speculations, which are lopsidedly mathematical and metaphysical.
Their cultivation of a certain kind of reason has made them lose contact not only with their
bodies, but with their ability to react to other people. Johnson in Rambler 24 creates the
character of Gelidus, who seems to have stepped from the floating island. Since his thoughts are
so preoccupied with the sciences, especially the mathematical ones, he like the Laputans, is
oblivious to the human scenes which surround him. In Swift’s comedy of the Laputan husbands
and wives and Johnson’s Gelidius, there is a satire against the usurpation of a particular kind of reason over nature.
Swift’s comedy suggests the bawdiness of the Restoration play, perhaps Wychrerly’s The Country Wife., since the Laputan women can make love in front of their husbands with impunity while the husbands are unattended by their flappers. When the women are confined to the island their husband are indifferent to them. The women will not return therefore when they get permission to visit the islands below, and it is hard for the men to get them to return after they have left.
Swift’s satire is extremely complicated because the brief portrait he draws of the prime minister and his wife is so sympathetic. In some ways the passage seems to go beyond satire. It even suggests twentieth-century themes of sexual behavior which are present in the modern novel and film. Chapter II seems to suggest that men and women become excessively polarized in upper-class society and that leads eventually to alienation.
In Chapter VIII of Book IV Gulliver describes the virtues of the horses. Thackeray assumes that Gulliver’s description of the utopian marriage customs in Books I and IV are close to Swift’s own practice:
In “Gulliver,” the folly of love and marriage is urged by graver arguments and advice. In the famous Lilliputian Kingdom, Swift speaks with approval of the practice of instantly removing children from their parents and educating them by the State; and amongst his favorite horses, a pair of foals are stated to be the very utmost that a well-regulated equine couple would permit themselves. In fact, our great satirist was of the opinion that conjugal love was unadvisable, and illustrated the theory by his own practice and example–God help him! which made him the most wretched being in God’s world.24
Is Swift really a utopianist? It is more likely that he uses utopian ideas as a satirical device to show the world’s imperfections, since his purpose is to vex it. Swift was active enough in real society to realize the remoteness of utopia. The fact is that both Swift and Johnson oppose tampering with the social order. While they see nature and reason as guides under certain conditions, they also stress the values of custom, tradition, and religion as equally, if not more, important guides to human conduct.
The sympathetic captain who saves Gulliver from suicide stands as a living refutation of Gulliver’s identification with the Yahoos. His rejection of his wife and family is more like Cassinus’ confession to Peter: “Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;/ Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia sh—“
(Poems, II, 597), rather than any particular revelation on the subject of marriage. The Houhynhnms do, however, embody a visionary reconciliation between nature and reason. Gulliver observes: “They will have it that Nature teaches them to love the whole Species, and it is Reason only that maketh a Distinction of Persons, where there is a superior Degree of Virtue” (Works, XI, 268). In the face of marriage Johnson does not believe such a reconciliation between nature and reason is possible. For him the question might be phrased as follows: How is it possible to direct one’s love towards mankind and one individual at the same time? In a friendly conversation, he confronts the problem with the precept: “He who hath friends, hath no friend,” and agrees with Soame Jenyns that friendship is not a Christian virtue:
Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren, which is contrary to the virtue of friendship, as described by the ancient philosophers (Boswell’s Life, III, 289).
Mrs. Knowles reminds Johnson that Jesus loved John the best of all his disciples. Though Johnson is well pleased with her answer, Boswell goes on the describe Johnson’s expostulation, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American,” whom he calls “Rascals—Robbers—Pirates” (III, 290). For Johnson as well as Swift, love and hate were at times more justifiable than benevolence, though the Christian ideal exhorts universal love.
In his sermon on marriage Johnson again grapples with the precept—“He who hath friends, hath no friend.” Here Johnson defines benevolence as “a divided affection” which “can hardly rise to friendship”:
As we love one more, we must love another less; and, however impartially we may, for a very short time, distribute our regards, the balance of affection will quickly incline, perhaps against our consent, to one side of the other (Works, IX, 295).
Even if we are able to love all equally there would be the problem of jealousy when each would think his value underrated. In turn the common friend might suffer from the same jealousy when he sees himself held in equal esteem. In such a condition there would be “an endless communication of confidence,” ending in “treachery.” Johnson magisterially answers the questions raised by this precept: “Let these reflections be applied to marriage, and perhaps polygamy may lose its vindicators” (IX, 295).
In the debate on marriage, Rasselas argues on the side of reason and Nekayah on nature. Rasselas tries to silence Nekayah’s objection to marriage as a means of attaining individual happiness:
You surely conclude too hastily from the infelicity of marriage against its institution; will not the misery of life prove equally that life cannot be the gift of heaven? The world must be peopled by marriage, or peopled without it (Works, I, 259).
But Rasselas affirms that what is meant for the whole is also meant for the individual, that what seems to be marital failure is due to the errors made by the individuals concerned, errors such as early marriage. Nekayah is able to counter Rasselas’ justification for the case of early marriage by proposing all the objections to late marriages, and her defense of early marriage shows her to be on the side of nature rather than reason. Instead of answering these new objections directly, Rasselas tries to resolve the problem by again looking at the motive for choice: “Whenever I shall seek a wife, it shall be my first question, whether she be willing to be led by reason?” Here again Nekayah proves her virtuosity in argument by maintaining, as I have already shown, the insufficiency of reason as a moral guide in all cases, a position which expresses Johnson’s own doubts. It is perhaps close to Swift’s assertion that men marry over “the dictates of reason” (Works, IX, 263). Nekayah remains unreconciled between love and duty:
I believe it will be found that those who marry late are best pleased with their children, and those who marry early with their partners (Johnson, Works, I, 262).
Rasselas tries to make a reconciliation:
The union of these two affections would produce all that could be wished. Perhaps there is a time when marriage might unite them, a time neither too early for the father, nor too late for the husband (I, 262).
While the debate does not provide an absolute answer for the justification of marriage, it does develop a larger concept. Every choice involves the rejection of its attendant choices:
Those conditions, which flatter hope and attract desire, are so constituted, that, as we approach one, we recede from another….no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile (I, 263).
In his Life of Swift, Johnson applies Rasselas’ idea of choice to Swift’s relations with Stella, when in intimates that Swift tries to avoid the problem of choice between friendship and domesticity.
A late marriage precludes an early one and marrying precludes not marrying. For Nekayah marriage would mean giving up her dream of a “college of learned women.” Johnson has allowed much on Nekayah’s side of the question. For both Johnson and Swift nature and reason do not provide a clear-cut sanction for marriage. Indeed, each one, in his own way, has said that marriage is not particularly natural or reasonable. For Johnson, in the passages studies from Rasselas, what life clearly offers is the possibility of choice. Along with that offer, goes the moral imperative of accepting choice. “He does nothing who endeavors to do more than is allowed to humanity. Flatter not yourself with contrarieties of pleasure” (I, 263).
Some of the arguments raised in Rasselas are directly answered in Johnson’s first Sermon which contains his most elaborate and closely-reasoned treatment of marriage. Because of his attempt there to dispel all doubt on the importance of marriage, a summary of it is useful.
He introduces his subject by indicating the necessity of society to the happiness of human beings. Although solitude may tempt from afar it will soon be found that “discontent will intrude upon privacy, and temptations follow us to the desert” (Johnson, Works, IX, 289), a theme which occurs in much of Johnson’s writings. Society advances knowledge through conversation and relieves the individual by allowing him to express his problems. Solitude, on the other hand swells “perplexity into distraction” and renders “grief into melancholy” (IX, 289). Human beings also need to have others participate in what they enjoy. Only God is self-sufficient.
Society, which then is so necessary, is composed of different communities each of which are duly subordinate. Each community carries its own particular parallel duties. Johnson then inquires after the duties of the family, which is the lowest sub-division of society. Without a proper understanding of these duties the wife turns rebel and the husband becomes a tyrant. Each one must therefore understand the obligations of marriage, since there is not relief from the offences that fester in the family. In the following passage Johnson displays his awareness of marital unhappiness:
A thousand methods of torture may be invented, a thousand acts of unkindness, or disregard, may be committed, a thousand innocent gratifications may be denied, and a thousand hardships imposed, without any violation of national laws. Life may be imbittered with hourly vexation; and weeks, months, and years, be lingered out in misery, without any legal cause of separation, or possibility of judicial redress. Perhaps not sharper anguish is felt, than that which cannot be complained of, nor any greater cruelties inflicted, than some which no human authority can relieve (IX, 292).
Under these conditions the purpose of marriage as “an institution designed only for the promotion of happiness” backfires, and the objectors of marriage are able to strengthen their arguments. Johnson sees the censurers of marriage falling into two groups, those “heated not with zeal for the right, but with the rage of licentiousness and impatience of restraints.” This group is an enemy to religion as well as to marriage. But the second group, those who “prefer celibacy to a state more immediately devoted to the honour of God, and the regular and assiduous practice of the duties of religion” (IX, 293), are mistaken in thinking the scriptures command abstinence. For Johnson these restraints are unnatural: “But the authors of these rigourous and unnatural schemes of life, though certainly misled by false notions of holiness, and perverted conceptions of the duties of our religion; have at least the merit of mistaken endeavours to promote virtue, and must be allowed to have reasoned at least with some degree of probability, in vindication of their conduct. They were generally persons of piety, and sometimes of knowledge, and are, therefore, not to be confounded with the fool, the drunkard, and the libertine.” (IX, 293–294). The rest of the sermon answers two proposed questions: 1) the nature and end of marriage and 2) the means by which that end is attained. For Johnson the vow of marriage is a vow of perpetual and indissoluble friendship.” He then pursues the parallel between friendship and marriage by examining several maxims relating to friendship to show how they are also true of marriage “in a more literal sense and a stricter acceptation” (IX, 294). Johnson’s list of precepts on friendship25 are all from ancient writers, a fact which reinforces his contention that friendship is not a Christian virtue. After his examination of these precepts Johnson concludes: “Thus marriage appears to differ from friendship chiefly in the degree of its efficacy, and the authority of its institution” (IX, 298). The means for the attainment of the ends of marriage must be recognized as the duties which are the same for friendship, “but exalted to a higher perfection.” There must be an avoidance of passion which would destroy virtue or truth. Each partner in a marriage must be recognized as the duties which are the same for friendship, “but exalted to a higher perfection.” There must be an avoidance of passion which would destroy virtue or truth. Each partner in a marriage should forgive errors and overlook defects as “one of the chief acts of love” (IX, 299). He should end arguments rather than prolong them.
Marriage differs from friendship by producing authority and exacting “an unpleasing duty”–obedience. “All its duties are not reciprocal,” as in the case of friendship. However, authority must not become oppression nor obedience servility. Inasmuch as these conditions can become confused, religion provides a true guide in making these distinctions because “the great rule both of authority and obedience is the law of God” (IX, 299).
The message of this sermon stands at the end, and it might be summarized as follows: Confidence in marriage grows from the individual’s response to his duties and to his submission and restraint under the “law of God.” Savile’s statement on this message in Advice to a Daughter does not make submission reciprocal.
Swift’s Portrait of Stella as an Eighteenth-Century Gentlewoman
In my discussion of Johnson’s Life of Swift, I pointed out that, although Johnson felt Swift overrated Stella and flawed their relationship by erratic behavior, his reatment of the relationship is generally sympathetic so that one eighteenth-century critic of Johnson’s Life of Swift praises him for it.26 While conceding that she may have been virtuous, beautiful, and elegant, he, perhaps unjustly, concluded that “she had not much literature, for she could not spell her own language.” Johnson probably has in mind Swift’s teasing of her spelling in the Journal to Stella. Nor is he impressed with her wit, since “ the smart sayings which Swift himself has collected arrord no splendid specimen” (Johnson, Works, III, 42). Swift overrated her because he had so low an opinion of “female excellence”:
The reader of Swift’s Letter to a Lady on her Marriage may be allowed to doubt whether his opinion of female excellence ought implicitly to be admitted; for if his general thoughts on women were such as he exhibits, a very little sense in a lady would astonish him. (III, 43–43).
Johnson’s doubts about Swift’s opinions on women, I believe, are tempered by his portraits of Camilla and Anthea in The Rambler. In these portraits, Johnson is actually agreeing with Swift on the subject of learned women and female cowardice. Johnson also thought that the relation was flawed by Swift’s desire “to make a mode of happiness for himself, different from the general course of things and order of Providence.” He wanted her without marriage, but he was forced “to appropriate her by a private marriage, to which he had annexed … conjugal restraint.” Stella finally died “under the tyranny of him by whom she was in the highest degree loved and honoured.” The phrase “under the tyranny” seems especially significant since it differs from right government under “the law of God.” This severe judgment, however, is considerably softened by the last part of the sentence: “of him by whom she was in the highest degree loved and honoured” (III, 41–42).
Turning to Swift, let us see how he lays bare his feelings for her in his Journal entries entitled On the Death of Mrs. Johnson. He has just been brought a note telling him of her death and he resolves “to say something of her life and character” (Swift, Works, V, 227).
After relating some facts about her birth and parentage, he writes: “I knew her . . . and her hair was blacker than a raven.” He tells of her moving to Ireland, the gossip, and her ill health. His praise for her mind is unqualified: Never was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind.” She impresses Mr. Addison; she puts a rude coxcomb in his place; her sayings, Bon Mots, are written down. Her servants love and adore her “yet her demeanour was so awful, that they durst not fail in the least point of respect.” The Journal breaks off with Swift complaining “My head aches and I can write no more” (V, 227–229). This statement, aside from describing his illness, seems to reflect the blankness of sorrow. Evelyn Hardy, who reflects the work of psychoanalytical critics, interprets the headache as a flight from his true feelings: “Yet with a lucidity frightening in its cold, analytical intensity, he still tried to shut out suffering as he had tried to exclude love, life, and now death” (p. 232). Swift, she feels, who had blocked out Stella, can now fully accept her after her death:
The recital is like some terrible stony route-march which truth, remorse, his unacknowledged love of Stella, and the need to torture himself, force him to make, almost in expiation. But sorrow will not let him escape her, and it is only after a few days, when he has utterly renounced Stella, and when he has calmed himself, that the sentences flow with ease. Then at last Swift is released and he gives himself to Stella with a simplicity which he had never achieved while she was alive (p. 233).
The description of Stella that comes after her funeral does seem to be a surrendering to her image, not through renouncing Stella but through the control of his grief.
The Journal resumes the next day, the night of the funeral, but his sickness will not allow him to attend: “It is now nine at night, and I am removed into another apartment, that I may not see the light in the church, which is just over against the window of my bed-chamber.” Perhaps trying to summon courage for himself he remembers Stella’s courage: “With all the softness of temper that became a lady, she had the personal courage of a hero” (V. 229). He relates the story of how she is able to beat off burglars by shooting “into the body of one villain, who stood the fairest mark,” and who dies afterwards. But that was not a single act of daring:
She was indeed under some apprehensions of going in a boat, after some danger she had narrowly escaped by water, but she was reasoned thoroughly out of it. She was never known to cry out, or discover any fear, in a coach or on horseback, or any uneasiness by those sudden accidents with which most of her sex, eigher by weakness or affectation, appear so much disordered (V, 230).
All these deeds bring to mind Swift’s comments on female cowardice in his Letter and Johnson’s unflattering portrait of Anthea, the female coward. So too does Stella fulfill Swift’s idea of civilized female conversation:
She never had the least absence of mind in conversation, nor given to interruption, or appeared eager to put in her word by waiting impatiently until another had done. She spoke in a most agreeable voice, in the plainest words, never hesitating, except out of modesty before new faces, where she was somewhat reserved; nor, among her nearest friends, ever spoke much at a time. She was but little versed in the common topics of female chat; scandal, censure, and detraction, never came out of her mouth: Yet, among a few friends, in private conversation, she made little ceremony in discovering her contempt of a coxcomb, and describing all his follies to the life; but the follies of her own sex she was rather inclined to extenuate or to pity (V, 230).
Just as Evremond and Savile had stressed its importance, Swift also devoted considerable space to the subject of conversation, which is one of the higher pleasures of civilized man. Stella fulfills the standards of good conversation laid down by Swift in his Letter to a Young Lady. But unlike Johnson’s Camilla she doesn’t despise her sex.
Swift’s description of her learning is impressive, but he does admit that her “frequent fits of sickness” kept her from further progress:
She was well versed in the Greek and Roman story, and was not unskilled in that of France and England. She spoke French perfectly, but forgot much of it by neglect and sickness. She had read carefully all the best books of travels, which serve to open and enlarge the mind. She understood the Platonic and Epicurean philosophy, and judge very well of the defects of the latter. She made very judicious abstracts of the best books she had read. She understood the nature of government, and could point out all the errors of Hobbes, both in that and religion. She had a good insight into physic, and knew somewhat of anatomy; in both which she was instructed in her younger days by an eminent physician, who had her long under his care, and bore the highest esteem for her person and understanding (V, 231).
Stella knows language, history, philosophy, politics, and even anatomy. From this description it is possible to surmise the curriculum Swift might recommend for the education of a woman. It is basically the liberal arts education of men and women today. While praising her with and her abilities as a critic he also admits that she was sometimes too severe, but he considers that more of a virtue than a fault.
He goes into detail on her economy and her charity and praises her for despising clothes: “She bought cloaths as seldom as possible, and those as plain and cheap as consisted with the situation she was in; and wore no lace for many years” (V, 233). Swift is certainly not singular in advocating restraint in women’s clothes. Savile also regards such restraint as a virtue:
In your Clothes avoid too much Gaudy; do not value your self upon an Imbroidered Gown; and remember, that a reasonable Word, or an obliging Look, will gain you more respect, than all your fine Trappings (p. 25).
Swift allows the reader to hear her act independently at a social gathering. While the other ladies are hiding behind their fans, Stella bravely steps forth to upbraid the double meanings of a coxcomb: “Sir, all these ladies and I understand your meaning very well . . . whatever visit I make, I shall first enquire at the door whether you are in the house, that I may be sure to avoid you” (V, 234). Swift applauds the naturalness of her forthrightness. Here nature, as good habits, purifies the conversation between the sexes.
She fulfills Johnson’s precept to “contract friendship only with the good”:
For she chose her company better: And therefore many, who mistook her and themselves, having solicited her acquantinance, and finding themselves disappointed after a few visits, dropt off…(Swift, Works, V, 235).
She loved Ireland and detested English injustice. She did not parade her knowledge, but wise men “could easily observe that she understood them very well, by the judgment shown in her observations as well as in her questions” (V, 236).
Johnson writes “that he never mentioned her without a sigh” and that after the death of Stella “his benevolence was contracted and his severity exasperated; he drove his acquaintance from his table and wondered why he was deserted” (Lives, III, 43). Whether or not Johnson’s account is accurate, it is apparent that the death of Stella must have had a profound effect upon Swift.
The ideal woman for both men was neither a goddess of the Renaissance love poems nor a servile housekeeper of the Puritan middle class. She had to possess independence, courage, intelligence, and graciousness. Despite Johnson’s minor fault-finding, Stella stands as an example of his own ideal. His portrait of her also represents a model of forbearance since, as he sees it, she goes along with her lover’s attempt to achieve happiness. Swift’s other eighteenth-century biographers viewed the marriage sentimentally or romantically by dwelling on Swift’s unconsumated love. But since the relationship with Stella fulfills the ideals Johnson held for friendship in marriage, he seems to have been moved by the story.
I might conclude this discussion of Swift’s Stella by contrasting her to Johnson’s Miss Gentle (Idler 100), the “good sort of woman”:
All who are not equally pleased with the good and bad, with the elegant and gross, with the witty and the dull, all who distinguish excellence from defect she considers as ill-natured; and she condemns as proud all who repress impertinence or quell presumption, or expect respect from any other eminence than that of fortune, to which she is always willing to pay homage.
There are none whom she openly hates; for if once she sufers, or believes herself to suffer, any contempt of insult, she never dismisses it from her mind but takes all opportunities to tell how easily she can forgive (Yale Edition, II, 308).
How different is Swift’s Stella:
In one of his birthday poems to Stella, which she did not record, Swift sought to reprove Stella for her faults:
Stella, when you these Lines transcribe,
Lest you should take them for a Bribe,
Resolv’d to mortify your Pride,
I’ll here expose your weaker Side,
Your Spirits kindle to a Flame,
Mov’d with the lightest Touch of Blame,
And when a Friend in Kindness tries
To shew you where your Error lies,
Conviction does but more incense;
Perverseness is your whole Defence:
Truth, Judgment, Wit, give Place to Spite,
Regardless both of Wrong and Right.
Your virtues, all suspended, wait
Till Time hath open’d Reason’s Gate:
And what is worse, your Passion bends
Its Force against your nearest Friends;
Which Manners, Decency, and Pride,
Have taught you from the World to hide:
(Poems, II, 730; II, 83–100).27
Her female nature rebels over reason, and rouses passions and spirits that were meant for nobler ends. But though she burns in anger, she does not burn the poem. Miss Genle denies nature. Stella lives in nature and reason.
Footnotes to Chapter III
1. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1960), pp. 70–73 for the number of ways in which he lists “nature” as an esthetic norm.
2. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965), pp. 491–492.
3. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Poems, ed. Vivian De Solar Pinto (Cambridge, 1964), p. 121, II, 98–116.
4. Alexander Pope, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London, 1966), “Essasy on Man,” Epistle II, 11. 1–9, p. 250.
5. The Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 1825), I, 262, Hereafter cited as Johnson, Works in text.
6.The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W.J. Bate, et al (New Haven, 1963), II, 307. Hereafter cited as Yale Edition in text.
7.Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1897), I, 328–329.
8. In his Review of Soame Jenyns Johnson makes the distinction between morality and religion. See Works, VI, 69–71.
9.The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1958), III, 894–895; II, 253–256, 269–280.
10. Samuel Holt Monk, “The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver,” Sewanee Review, LXIII (1955), 69.
11. R.S. Crane, “The Rationale of the Fourth Voyage,” a paper read at the MLA conference in December, 1955.
12. A.E. Dyson, Essays and Studies (London, 1959), p. 64.
13. Henry W. Sams, “Satire as Betrayal,” ELH, XXVI (1959), 41.
14. F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London, 1952), p. 84.
15. J. Middleton Murry, Jonathan Swift (New York, 1955), p. 340.
16. Some of Swift’s and Johnson’s statements on marriage include the concepts of nature and reason. “Matrimony has many children; Repentance, Discord, Poverty, Jealousy, sickness, Spleen, Loathing, etc. (The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Herbert Davis, Oxford, 1962, IV, 252). Hereafter cited as Swift, Works in text. “What they do in Heaven we are ignorant of: what they do not we are told expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in Marriage” (XIV, 244); “no wise Man ever married from the dictates of Reason” (XIV, 263). Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L.F. Powell, Oxford, 1934, II, 165). Hereafter cited as Boswell’s Life in text. “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasure” (Johnson, Works, I, 255).
17. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1963), I, 32–36.
18. The Complete Works of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, ed. Sir William Raleigh (Oxford, 1912).
19. “I do not wish you to be gayly clothed at this time of life, but that what you wear should be fine of its kind; but above all things, and at all times let your clothes be clean, whole, and properly put on. Do not fancy you must wear them till the dirt is visible to the eye. You will be the last who will be sensible of this. Some ladies think they may under the privileges of the dishabille be loose and negligent of their dress in the morning. But be you from the moment you rise till you go to bed as cleanly and properly dressed as at the hours of dinner of tea. A lday who has been seen as a sloven or slut in the morning, will never efface the impression she then made with all the dress and pageantry she can afterwards involve herself in. Nothing is so disguting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours. I hope therefore the moment you rise from bed, your fist work will be to dress yourself in such a stile as that you may be seen by any gentleman without his being able to discover a pin amiss, or any other circumstance of neatness wanting” (The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Edwin M. Betts and James A. Bear, Jr., Columbia, Missouri, 1966, p. 22).
20. Evelyn Hardy, The Conjured Spirit (London, 1949), p. 181.
21. Phyllis Greenacre, Swift and Carroll (New York, 1955), p. 94.
22. See Herbert Davis, Jonathan Swift (New York, 1964), p. 43 for an interesting quotation from William Whately’s Bride-Bush, 1617.
23. Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Robert Heilman (New York, 1950), p. xi.
24. The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (London, 1911), VII, 130.
25. “Friendship amongst equals is the most lasting.” “Strict friendship is to have the same desires and the same aversions.” “Let the religion of the man and woman be the same.” “Friends have everything in common.” “Contract friendship only with the good” (Johnson, Works, IX, 295–296).
26. Monck-Berdeley, cited Chapter I, footnote 15. Thackeray also praised him for this. See also Charles Berwick, The Reputation of Jonathan Swift (Philadelphia, 1941), p. 20.
27. One of Mrs. Piozzi’s anecdotes shows perhaps Johnson competing with Swift: “on another occasion I can boast verses with Swift: “On another occasion I can boast verses from Dr. Johnson. – As I went into his room the morning of my birthday once, and said to him, Nobody sends me any verses now, because I am five-and-thirty years old; and Stella was fed with them till forty-six, I remember. My being just recovered from illness and confinement will account for the manner in which he burst out suddenly, for so he did without the least previous hesitation whatsoever, and without having entertained the smallest intention towards it half a minute before.” After reciting his delightful To Mrs. Thrale, on her completing her thirty-fifth year, Johnson triumphantly remarks: “and now (said he, as I was writing them down), you may see what it is to come for poetry to a Dictionary-maker.” Life Swift, he too could be inclined to tease in his poems. Writing to Mrs. Thrale he threatens: “If you try to plague me I shall tell you that, according to Galen, life begins to decline from thirty-five” (Johnsonian Miscellanies, I, 259–260, 260 fn).
CHAPTER IV
THE POLITICAL SERMONS OF JOHNSON AND SWIFT
Despite his reputation as a critic of Swift’s life and works and his apparent irritability whenever Swift was brought into the conversation, Johnson’s political and religious views, which flow mainly from his Anglicanism, are basically the same as Swift’s. This fact seems to have added to the bewilderment of those who heard him express either prejudice or animosity for the Dean. However, in the work of Johnson and even in some of his utterances on Swift, it is possible to discern rapport in their approach to certain subjects, not only in the writings of the early and middle period, but in those of the later ones as well. One area of agreement, which I have tried to show, lies in their positions on social relations between men and women, especially in marriage. Apart from the need for propagation based upon man’s natural urge, they see the value of marriage as a special testing of character through friendship. They also agree that the temptations of politics provides another and perhaps higher test of character.
For my concluding discussion, I want to compare certain sermons of both authors1 in order to establish the religious basis for some of their political attitudes–attitudes which are encountered throughout their works. In their sermons there is an opportunity to hear Swift and Johnson express themselves unambiguously in the same form. Moreover, the sermons reveal interesting shades of differences between their basic moral concerns. For the most part, the tone of the sermons is personal, not ironic, and argumentative. As a preacher Swift thinks that he is unsuccessful, complaining that he “could only preach pamphlets.”2 But Swift’s published sermons lead Johnson to believe that his judgment of himself as a preacher is “unreasonably severe” (Lives, III, 54). Indeed, he states that Swift was generally too harsh with himself on the matter of his religion. He describes Swift as an active and diligent churchman and relates that Swift was willing to sacrifice his reputation by appearing irreligious in order not to appear hypocritical. While admonishing Swift for keeping his piety secretive, Johnson is actually affirming it and rescuing him from the charge of impiety. His quiet praise of the sermons is an important part of this affirmation.
Both Johnson and Swift composed sermons on the topics of brotherly love, bearing false witness, and the death of Charles I. For the sake of his introductory comments to Swift’s sermons, Louis Landa places the sermons into a rough classification. He describes those sermons dealing with the above topics as belonging “in a group by virtue of their political nature. In one way or another they treat problems growing out of dissent and the relation between church and state, or some political aspect of eighteenth-century religion.”3 Johnson’s sermons on these topics, although not so overtly political, possess strong political overtones. Landa describes the three sermons of Swift as “party documents, two of them openly and violently so, the other by implication” (Swift, Works, IX, 116). Johnson does avoid directness or contentiousness in his sermons.
Maurice Quinlan finds a marked difference in tone between Johnson’s and Swift’s sermons on these topics. He feels that Swift wrote for a particular congregation, Johnson for mankind. He illustrates this belief by summarizing the effects of Swift’s and Johnson’s sermons on false witness. Swift’s sermon was written at a time when Ireland was engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare against England. Since secrecy is absolutely vital in a struggle of this nature, the greatest danger to a man lies in being exposed. Swift therefore addresses himself chiefly to the evil of informing on others. His sermon “warns against any looseness of tongue that might endanger one’s neighbor” (Quinlan, pp. 88–89). Johnson’s interest in the topic is less political. He concentrates on the subject of bearing false witness in terms of calumny:
Even to listen in silent assent while another’s reputation is under attack, he urges, makes one guilty of conniving at evil. The best way to avoid engaging in calumny, he admonishes, is to examine with greater care one’s own faults and to remember “that charity is the height of religious excellence; and that it is one of the characteristics of this virtue, that it thinketh no evil of others” (Quinlan, p. 89). While Quinlan’s statement is basically true, it does not take into account some of the striking similarities in the organization of thought between the two sermons, a similarity which I shall presently show.
But whatever differences there are between these sermons, they still reflect the ideal of eighteenth-century sermon writing of avoiding the complex rhetorical devices used by the seventeenth-century sermonists.
Landa explains: Lengthy allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, the excessive number of quotations, analogies and self-conscious imagery, Greek and Latin phrases, `pert Wit and luscious Eloquence’–the intricate paraphernalia by which the clergymen of that period delivered God’s word to their auditors–had all but disappeared from Anglican sermons by Swift’s time (Swift, Works, IX, 102).The eighteenth-century sermonist was free to divide his thoughts and to explain himself plainly. Swift and Johnson view eloquence in the sermon suspiciously.
In his Letter to a Young Clergyman, Swift describes the art of the ancient orators in arousing the passions as wholly inapporiate for his time. Similarly, when Boswell asked Johnson “what sermons afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence,” Johnson replied “we have no sermons addressed to the passions that are good for any thing; if you mean that kind of eloquence.”4
The sermons of Swift and Johnson reflect an ideal of reasoning men into religion.As Maurice Quinlan points out, the difference in tone owes something to the nature of the audiences each one was trying to reason into religion.
Swift’s sermons assume and audience with limited knowledge and limited capabilities of following subtle arguments. Johnson assumes an audience similar to those who might be able to follow his Idler essays. Generally, he seems to follow the rule laid down by Swift in his Letter to a Young Clergyman to avoid “hard words” and abstruse theological diction. There are a few notable exceptions to this rule in the appearance of such latinate words as “feculence,” and “maceration.” In Sermon XVI he talks about the “attributes of God,” a phrase Swift cautions against:’’
And I defy the greatest Divine to produce any Law, either of God or Man, which obliges me to comprehend the Meaning of Omniscience, Omnipresence, Ubiquity, Attribute, Beatific Vision (Swift, Works, IX, 66).
Both their sermons are marked by brief and informal construction. According to Louis Landa, “Swift’s sermons are rather more extreme than those of his contemporaries” (IX, 103), in this respect. Johnson generally has a longer introductory statement before coming to the divisions of the sermon. Swift’s sermons contain some of the vigor of his other writings, but since he believed that preaching should “tell the People what is their Duty, and to convince them that it is so” (IX, 70), by sense and reason, it is not a form in which he can exert his comic genius. Both Swift and Johnson as sermonists rely on the orthodox and traditional. Landa’s comment on Swift’s sermons could in large part apply to Johnson’s:
We observe in them Swift’s ready and unabashed use of the heritage of ideas—the traditional counsel, the fixed doctrinal notions, the homiletic wisdom of the ages
—that any clergyman had at hand for the edification of his flock; and from this vantage the sermons reveal Swift the divine as he reflects constant and universal elements in Christianity (IX, 101).
Quinlan’s description of Johnson’s sermons almost completes the picture:
Johnson’s sermons are distinguished from the typical sermons of his time, and from most at any time, by the terse and memorable comments woven into the fabric of his discourse. As in his essays, these are usually naked precepts, unembellished by illustration (p.89).
It is possible to add to this observation that there are times when Johnson includes in his sermons an element of debate, as in the case of Sermon I when toward the end of it he magisterially intones his injunction against polygamy.5
The contrast between Swift’s political anxiety and Johnson’s calmer mood is illustrated by their sermons on Charles I, delivered as a January 30 observance sermon, a day which had been set aside after the restoration to commemorate the king’s beheading. Swift begins Sermon VI immediately by pointing out that there are those who are against observing this day. He relates the story of the dethronement, assuming that his audience may not really know much about it, and then he gives a picture of its consequences with an explanation for the need of observance. He places the blame fully on the Puritans while giving an historical account of their origins and motives, as well as of their actions in this period. He sees the rise of atheism as an effect of the Revolution because it brings in its aftermath further schisms which destroy the individual’s attempt to secure certainty for his faith. The country has never fully recovered from those events, and he singles out the destruction of churches as one of the terrible consequences.
Swift argues that the revolution has taught the country the need for good advisers, since it was bad advice which in part caused the king’s downfall. The day of observance also teaches that new doctrines, even on small matters, eventually get out of hand and ultimately threaten the security of large institutions. The ordinary citizen must not become a zealot. If he has visions he must keep them to himself; otherwise he must become like those “ancient Puritan fanatics,” who must:
needs overturn heaven and earth, violate all the laws of God and man, make their country a field of blood, to propagate whatever wild or wicked opinions come into their heads, declaring all their absurdities and blasphemies to proceed from the Holy Ghost (Swift, Works, IX, 227).
Swift urges that between the extremes of total submission to a king, who should not be deified since he is merely a mortal man, to the extreme of blaming the king for all the evils in the state through intolerance of his shortcomings, there is a middle road: “to be good and lyal subjects, yet, according to your power, faithful assertors of your religion and liberties” (IX, 230–231). Thus, there was justifiable cause for the dethronement of James II, who had imposed on the religion and liberties of the people. But Charles was a martyr to those fanatics who were really without just grievances for deposing him.
Johnson begins Sermon XXIII on a quieter note. He does not go into the concrete detail or historical background of Charles’ death, nor does he directly identify the parties concerned. He takes a philosophical stance, while alluding to the Puritans and dissenters, but he sees their motives as sharing in the more common failing of envy, rather than zeal. I society, strife is inevitable because of individual self-interest; God has allowed for strife, by granting man individuality. Butt there must be a discrimination between lawful and unlawful strife. He concedes that the Puritans and dissenters may have been motivated by highter considerations, rather than mere mercantile ones, but they aim at conquest rather than conversion, and their means are unlawful:
To do evil that good may come, can never be the purpose of a man who has not perverted his morality by some false principle (Johnson, Works, IX, 501).
While it is true that oppression can become awful, an individual may feel persecuted when he is not. To those who quarrel with men in power because “they want merit,” Johnson gives this advice: “He that has once concluded it lawful to resist poser, when it wants merit, will soon find a want of merit, to justify his resistance of power” (IX, 503). Johnson also recognizes the revolutionary mood as an attack against the existing class structure and really does not benefit the weak:
[They] …desire times of tumult and disturbance, as affording the fairest opportunities for the active and sagacious to distinguish themselves, and as throwing open the avenues of wealth and honour, to be entered by those who have the greatest quickness of discerment, and celerity of dispatch. In times of peace every thing proceeds in a train of regularity, and there is no sudden advantage to be snatched, nor any unusual change of condition to be hoped…. The great benefit of society is that the weak are protected against the strong. The great evil of confusion is that the world is thrown into the hands, not of the best, but of the strongest (IX, 504).
It is not until near the close of the sermon that Johnson gets to the death of Charles I. He measures the event against all the tokens of “unlawful strife” which he has previously established and finds unjust means and ends, disproportionate measures taken, confusion, usurpation and further schism. Like Swift he recognizes that the imperfections of kings is natural and not a sufficient cause for inciting revolution. They both see the day of observance as a reminder to avoid the unnecessary bloodshed caused by jealousy and hatred. Swift asserts that the country has not fully recovered and Johnson reminds his audience that:
Such are the evils which God sometimes permits to fall upon nations, when they stand secure in their own greatness, and forget their dependence on universal sovereignty, depart from the laws of their Maker, corrupt the purity of his worship, or swerve from the truth of his revelation. Such evils surely we have too much reason to fear again, for we have no right to charge our ancestors with having provoked them by crimes greater than our own (IX, 505–506).
Johnson’s sermon is paced very deliberately. It starts out slowly and reflectively and then begins to accelerate its pace, becoming quite lively in the last few paragraphs when he confronts the event itself. Rather than merely warning his audience to beware of Puritans or dissenters who seduce ordinary people into becoming fanatics, Johnson is telling his audience to be aware of envy, a social flaw, which under certain conditions may overturn society. But behind the difference of Johnson’s probing of motives lies the essential acceptance of the notion that real oppression deserves to be overthrown, while there is no justification either for rebelling in order to perfect society or to impose an individual’s will over others. Both make a distinction between real tyranny and the magnification of the ordinary evils attendant upon government. Swift is mainly interested in identifying the Puritans and their descendants, the dissenters; Johnson is more interested in emphasizing the revolution as part of the general condition of mankind, which could apply anywhere at any time. In a word Swift is concrete, Johnson universal.
In both their sermons on bearing false witness there is again a difference of emphasis on the political and social implications of the topic. Swift, whose career as an anonymous writer of controversial tracts and satires, such as The Drapier Letters, was understandably concerned with the problem of informers, who, he grants in Sermon VII, can be useful to the state. But the problem is that:
when Parties are violently inflamed, which seemeth unfortunately to be our Case at present, there is never wanting a Set of evil Instruments who, either out of mad Zeal, private Hatred, or fifthy Lucre, are always ready to offer their Services to the prevailing Side, and become Accusers of their Brethren without any Regard to Truth or Charity (Works, IX, 180).
He next indicates the different ways in which a man may be called a false witness. There are those who make accusations without the least ground of truth, those who mix falsehood and truth together, those who report remarks out of context. The “blackest kind” seduce others into friendship where they encourage them to give vent to complaints, which are then subsequently perverted. A false witness may also be one who, although he tells the truth, is motivated either by malice or by revenge. There are those who inform for favor or reward; and then finally there are informers who take innocuous remarks and distort them.
The way to protect oneself against false witness, aside from being virtuous, which is not a sure protection, is to avoid politics, controversy, drunkenness, and disloyalty to the king. The way to bear faithful witness is to avoid self-interest and to use discretion in making reports: that is, to judge whether it is really necessary to make the report. Most important of all is the motive behind making the report.
While Johnson is concerned more with the consequences of social defamation brought by false witness, he covers practically the same categories in the same order as does Swift. Introducing his subject in Sermon XVII by pointing out that many are not aware of the magnitude of the vice, he also counts the ways men bear false witness. He starts out with Swift’s first category of those who commit absolute perjury, and like Swift he disdainfully hesitates to linger with the perjurers. There are those who mix truth and falsehood, those who do not get the facts straight, those who assume knowledge of a fact, and those whose intentions are impure:
For to relate reproachful truths, only for the pleasure of depressing the reputation of our neighbour, is far from being innocent. The crime, indeed, doth not fall under the head of calumny, but only differs from it in the falsehood, not in the malice (Works, IX, 445).
Johnson includes defamation and ridicule as forms of false witness:
Defamation is become one of the amusements of life, a cursory part of conversation and social entertainment. Men sport away the reputation of others, without the least reflection upon the injury which they are doing, and applaud the happiness of their own invention, if they can increase the mirth of a feast, or animate conviviality, by slander and detraction (IX, 443).
And then he shifts his attack to those who listen either in silence or approval, or use the information for their own ends. Using sharp language, like Swift, Johnson sys this vice “blacken(s) human nature,” “pollute(s) the earth,” and is practiced by the resentful whom he describes as “villains,” “wretches,” practicing the “vilest arts of detraction” (IX, 447).
Nor is a man exculpated from this vice by charging that everybody else is involved in the deed. The individual is responsible for his own actions: it is the duty of every man to regulate his conduct, not by the example of others, or by his own surmises, but by the invariable rules of equity and truth. Wickedness must be opposed by some, or virtue would be entirely driven out of the world (IX, 445–446).As in the case of sedition, Johnson finds envy at the base of this evil.
He defines envy here as pride coupled with laziness. It is a pride which leads to a process of bringing people down to one’s own level. Unlike Swift, who advises on the way of giving truthful witness, Johnson ends his sermon by recommending charity. Swift ends Sermon V, on the subject of brotherly love, by acknowledging his political concern: “I have now done with my Text, which I confess to have treated in a Manner more suited to the present Times than to the Nature of the Subject in general” (Works, IX, 179).
He begins the sermon by pointing out that the early Christians could feel brotherly toward each other because they were persecuted and were not inclined toward divisive doctrines. The lack of brotherly love in Christianity at the present is due to the Papists and fanatics—the fanatics being the more dangerous of the two. Other causes for the lack of brotherly love are the bad influence of cunning men upon the lower classes, inflammatory sermons from the pulpit, and political activity on the part of the trading people.
Religious feeling suffers when the people take hold of politics: “But where party hath once made entrance, with all its consequences of hatred, envy, partiality and virulence, religion cannot long keep its hold in any state or degree of life whatsoever” (IX, 174–175). With the entry of the people into party politics, friendships and hospitality become severely limited.
Repeatedly here, as well as in the other sermons, Swift insists that the people have not direct concerns with the state as long as the right to worship and to earn a living and to enjoy any of their traditional liberties is not infringed. One might note in passing, how effectively Swift was able to mobilize public opinion in his role as the Drapier. He saw Wood’s patent as an infringement of the economic rights of the people which could justify their refusal to cooperate with the government.
The sermon ends with Swift’s definition of tru moderation. The true moderate allows for liberty of conscience but is till respectful and loyal to state and church, while those who are merely preaching moderation are really intolerant, irreligious, and destructive. Swift seems to be suggesting that brotherly love might begin by accepting the establishment of the church, even by the dissenters.
Johnson, on the same subject in Sermon XI, begins, like Swift, with a discussion of the early Christians, who were able through their small number of followers and dangerous surroundings to come close to the ideal of brotherly love. He too warns how sects, factions, and parties divide men from each other. That all should be of one mind is an unattainable goal since this would assume either that all were wise or that some were forcing others to agree with them. However, professions of belief which may be exacted cannot alter a person’s mind, because mankind has been endowed with freedom of conscience. But men of different opinions can live together through humility, moderation, and charity. However “there is in every mind, implanted by nature, a desire of superiority” (Johnson, Works, IX, 389). This urge often leads to envy and cruelty, which can be counteracted by compassion. Instead of identifying the fanatics as the cause of divisiveness Johnson uses the term “ambition”:
Ambition has effaced all natural consanguinity, by calling nation to war against nation, and making the destruction of one half of mankind the glory of the other. Christian piety, as it revived and enforced all the original and primeval duties of humanity, so it restored, in some degree, that brotherhood, or foundation of kindness, which naturally arises from some common relation (IX, 391).
There are many opportunities to exert pity and help, even for those who have brought their sorrow up themselves. The sermon closes with Johnson recommending courtesy in opposition to “harsh strictness and sour virtue,” in order that Christianity might not be accused of making men “less cheerful as companions, less sociable as neighbors, or less useful as friends” (IX, 394).
In their sermons on the death of Charles I, Swift and Johnson seem to be caught in the same apparent contradiction of rejecting the dethronement of one king while accepting the other. The contradiction can be explained by their acceptance of the Whig position on the revolution and opposition to monarchical absolutism, along with the Tory position of a strong church-state relationship.
From the time of the English reformation the church depended on the crown for its civil authority. After the restoration, the church found it difficult to maintain its authority from the crown against attacks from the dissenters. With the revolution, the church had to decide between the hereditary king or the people. Those who remained loyal to the king found they were excluded. The revolution of 1688 makes it clear that the divine right of the church could not rest on the divine right of the king in English politics. Since Swift and Johnson follow the majority of Englishmen in accepting the primacy of the legislative power, they turn to that agency of government rather than the crown to bolster the claims of the church. The church authority rested on the crown with Charles II and was usurped by a minority. Now it rests on the legislative and can no longer revert to the crown. The problem is how to keep the dissenters, who are abetted by the Whigs, from wielding political influence through the legislative power against the church.6
In The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man, Swift clarifies the difference between the legislative power and the arbitrary power of a king or faction, which he views “as a greater Evil than Anarchy itself; as much as a Savage is in a happier State of Life, than a Slave is in a happier State of Life, than a Slave at the Oar” (Works, II, 15). Recalling the school dispute: “whether under any Pretence whatsoever, it may be lawful to resist the supreme Magistrate, which was held in the negative,” Swift answers they were right but mistook that “to which Passive Obedience was due”:
By the Supreme Magistrate is properly understood the Legislative Power, which in all Government must be absolute and unlimited (II, 16).
Broadly speaking Swift is following John Lock’s theory of constitutional government, that is, government based on the consent of the governed. In one of The Drapier Letters he actually uses Locke’s classic formulation: “for in Reason, all Government, without the Consent of the Governed, is the very Definition of Slavery” (Swift, Works, X, 63).7
Johnson addresses himself to the same problem in his response to Goldsmith’s badgering him on the precept, “the King can do no wrong.” He explains to Goldsmith that there is no redress above the King since he is the head of government, but that “the King, though he should command, cannot force a judge to condemn a man unjustly; therefore it is the judge whom we prosecute and punish” (Boswell’s Life, I, 424). He argues that government requires “ a supreme legislative power,” even when that power is abused. But:
if the abuse be enormous, Nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system (I, 424).
In these passages Johnson is elaborating two principles: the individual is responsible for his actions, and revolution is “natural” under certain circumstances. The two principles are related, because a government that has grown thoroughly corrupt might place an unnatural disadvantage upon the individual’s ability to resist evil. In the example of the King and judge, Johnson seems to be laying down a principle upon which the Nuremburg Trials were conducted. To the argument that these Germans were following the laws of their state, both Johnson and Swift could cite the Laws of God. Unfortunately, for most men, the laws of the state are more compelling, whether or not they are just.
However, they see the human advantages of a stable society. In principle they are reluctant to allow the kind of debate that would produce turmoil in the state and they both take pains to distinguish between freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. Swift makes a forthright distinction between freedom of thought and freedom of expression:
I am in all opinions to believe according to my own impartial reason; which I am bound to inform and improve, as far as my capacity and opportunities will permit (Works, IX, 261).
I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast, since they are the consequence of that reason which he hath planted in me, if I take care to conceal those doubts from others, if I use my best endeavours to subdue them, and if they have no influence on the conduct of my life (IX, 262).
Johnson seems to echo not only Swift’s thought but his language as well:
Every man has a physical right to think as he pleases; for it cannot be discovered how he thinks. He has not a moral right, for he ought to inform himself, and think justly. But, Sir, no member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true (Boswell’s Life, II, 249).
However, in practice Swift and Johnson, while they were defenders of the faith, did not hesitate to express themselves on controversial subjects. Early in his career as a writer Johnson attacked censorship of the theater through the Stage Licensers Act. Nor did he hesitate to write on the unpopular side of an issue. Swift maintained his anonymity in most of his controversial writings, but he was still exposed to danger, especially in his role as champion for the Irish. Johnson outlived his anti-government period, but he did witness the effects of rumor and demogoguery in the Gordon Riots.
In their sermons Swift and Johnson deal also with the problem of poverty. Johnson does not eulogize poverty in his sermons:
Poverty, for the greatest par, produces ignorance; and ignorance facilitates the attack of temptation (Works, IX, 327).
Swift also is aware of the relationship between ignorance and poverty, but he agrees with critics who, as Louis Landa points out, maintain that the schools have “overeducated the charity students and made them unfit for menial work” (Swift, Works, IX, 130). Landa summarizes Swift’s attitude toward the charity schools:
He pleads for the adoption of a simplified and rudimentary curriculum devoted to such fundamentals as reading, writing, and casting of accounts. This training would provide the charity-school students with an education sufficient for their purposes and at the same time prevent them from causing economic dislocation in the better trades by competing with the sons of respectable and self-supporting citizens (IX, 130).
I doubt if Johnson would be completely sympathetic with this point of view. When Boswell asked the use of learning for the ordinary man, Johnson turned to the boy who was rowing them and said:
‘this boy rows us as well without learning, as if he could sing the song of Orpheus to the Argonauts, who were the first sailors.’ He then called to the boy, ‘What would you give, my lad, to know about the Argonauts?’ ‘Sir, (said the boy) I would give what I have.’ Johnson was much pleased with his answer, and we gave him a double fare. Dr. Johnson then turning to me, ‘Sir, (said he) a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge (Boswell’s Life, I, 458).
Swift and Johnson make a distinction between the idle and industrious poor, along with the greater benefits accruing to both the poor and society by helping the so-called industrious poor. Johnson, living in a society that was affluent compared to the austere conditions of Swift’s Ireland, defended luxury by insisting that:
you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it: for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle (Boswell’s Life, III, 291).
When asked if this view were the same as Mandeville’s doctrine of “private vices, public benefits” Johnson replies, “the fallacy of that book is, that Mandeville defines neither vices nor benefits. He reckons among vices everything that gives pleasure” (III, 291). He maintains that “pleasure of itself is not a vice,” and that “the happiness of Heaven will be, that pleasure and virtue will be perfectly consistent” (III, 292). His further reply on Mandeville, who he acknowledges opened his views on life, is that the test of a true vice is to determine “whether more evil than good is produced by it”:
It may happen that good is produced by vice; but not as vice; for instance, a robber may take money from its owner, and give it to one who will make a better use of it. Here is good produced; but not by the robbery as robbery, but as translation of property (III, 292).
As an opponent to British mercantilism, Swift urged the Irish not to squander their wealth on imported goods, especially on the laces and linen or other luxury items from England. He exhorted them to develop their own domestic industries and basic goods. As Louis Landa points out, his economic views were basically the prevailing mercantilist ones of the century, but he felt the abusive treatment of the British had distorted the economic conditions, thereby rendering the basic mercantilist maxims inoperative for Ireland.8 His attitude toward luxury becomes more meaningful in light of Landa’s thesis.
Neither Johnson nor Swift subscribed to the eighteenth-century school of benevolence. Yet Johnson does mention the word in several sermons. He speaks of benevolence as implanted by nature in man, but it withers fast without proper cultivation. According to Louis Landa the idea of Benevolence “is barely hinted at in Swift’s sermon.” For Swift, man “is primarily dominated by pride, self-love, and envy” (Swift, Works, IX, 125). The reasons for doing good are the external injunctions of Christian precept, and unlike the sermonists who emphasize the joy of doing good, Swift takes a subdued view on the delight of doing good.
Man, not God, is responsible for war and starvation. Swift and Johnson see that God gives man a choice for a sane society as long as he accepts a reasonable amount of happiness. In Sermon V Johnson declares in his vindication of the ways of God to man how wonderful a gift is the Christian religion because it assures us of future reward through the happiness that comes from virtue. After drawing a picture of an attainable utopia Johnson urges:
Let no man charge this prospect of things, with being a train of airy phantoms; a visionary scene, with which a gay imagination may be amused in solitude and ease, but which the first survey of the world will show him to be nothing more than a pleasing delusion. Nothing has been mentioned which would not certainly be produced in any nation by a general piety. To effect all this, no miracle is required; men need only unite their endeavours, and exert those abilities which God has conferred upon them, in conformity to the laws of religion (Johnson, Works, IX, 339N340). [Italics mine]
Both Swift and Johnson urge the belief that Christianity provides the key to man’s happiness on this earth by teaching him the true basis of virtue.
As church of England men, Swift and Johnson favor a monarchy on one hand which would protect the church and regulate society in its various divisions, and a legislative body that is not wracked by factionalism on the other. Political liberties are useful to the extent that they allow the ordinary citizen freedom in his own private life and do not controvert the duly established prerogatives of the monarch and church. Attempts to perfect the social or political structures of society can neither eradicate all human misery nor elevate substantial numbers of the population. Though they stress individual charity to the needy as both a social and personal obligation, they also recognize the productive activity of the poor as a better approach to the problem of poverty.
In terms of eighteenth-century politics they are perhaps the two most effective representatives of conservative thought. Their political attitudes reflect basic moral and spiritual values. This type of conservatism, as opposed to the desire to freeze history is definable as a belief in the limited capacities of government for providing social happiness or moral enlightenment. In a sense, it is an attempt to reduce social strife in order to bring men closer to the ideal of community and brotherly love. I believe that Donald Greene’s definition of Johnson as a “skeptical conservative” could also include Swift:
“On the whole, it seems to me, Johnson is much more a type of what may be called the rational or skeptical conservative, of whom Hobbes, Hume, and Gibbon may be cited as other examples. Perhaps Voltaire also belongs in that category; and it is hard to resist mentioning that fine modern specimen, H.L. Mencken (p. 253).
Swift fits into this company because he fulfills the qualities listed by Greene for this type of conservative.9 The political sermons I have compared in this chapter demonstrate Swift’s and Johnson’s aversion to the participation of the lower classes in politics. While they grant that every man has a right to his share of happiness which a system can provide, they do not accede to the principle that each man has an equal right to direct that system.
Johnson was more earnest in his belief that subordination leads to greater human happiness. He criticizes Swift’s attempt to be on equal terms with the nobility. But his criticism is of a practical nature, since he sees Swift defeating his own attempts at happiness. Johnson’s anti-slavery position and his denunciation of harsh penal laws is Swiftian in its indignation. Both men are aroused to indignation at the plight of large numbers of people.
They illustrate the principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, a phrase which Donald Greene traces to Francis Hutcheson (1725) and which Robert Voitle believes was borrowed from William Cumberland (Voitle, p.70, fn. 25).
However the application of this principle is not cold, abstract or merely calculating. They are personally engaged in the destinies of those whom they champion. One of the things which makes their conservatism so engaging is a humanitarianism rooted in Christianity and nurtured by classical ideals.The classical view of politics, from Plato onwards, always stressed the need for wisdom in government, and sees the lower classes as lacking the mind and restraint necessary for the complexities of rule.
At its worst these classes become a rabble which is a primordial force of nature. At its best they are the plebians, servants, traders toiling happily in their occupations and content with the share of happiness they have received.
Kings and parliaments are the heads of society, and the church its soul. But as the agencies of reason and morality they are open to the dangers of tyranny, factionalism, and schism. As in the social order, so too in the state, reason is nature’s guide. Kings, parliaments, and clergy may fall, but the ideal of a just and reasonable force restraining the undifferentiated energies of humanity is still the classical vision of all human society.
In their sermons Swift and Johnson give religious sanctions to this classical view. It is interesting that neither men took the trouble to have their sermons published. As satirists, they reach a wider audience and make their moral ideas more compelling. But for the admirers of Swift and Johnson, the sermons stand as the crystallization of their basic views.
Footnotes to Chapter IV
1. For a discussion of the facts of publication and inclusion of the sermons in the Johnson canon see Maurice Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman’s Religion (Madison, 1964), pp. 85–100. Sermon XXI is the only one that seems doubtful: “There are even approving allusions to the Chain of Being, a theory with which Johnson expressed strong disagreement elsewhere. Furthermore, there are many more quotations from Scripture than is customary in his sermons. Because of these circumstances, jean Hagstrum doubts that Johnson wrote it and believes it may be one of Taylor’s compositions. I, too, find it difficult to ascribe any considerable portion of this sermon to Johnson” (p. 98).
2. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L.f. Powell (Oxford, 1905), III, 54.
3. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis 9Oxford, 1962), IX, 106. Hereafter cited in text as Swift, Works.
4. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L.F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), III, 248.
5. The Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 1825), IX, 295. Hereafter cited in text as Johnson, Works.
6. For an illuminating and detailed, though short, description of Swift’s political thinking as it relates to his position on the church see J.C. Beckett, “Swift as an Ecclesiastical Statesman,” Essays in British and Irish History (London, 1949). See also Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1960), where he discusses the complexities of applying the term “Tory” to Johnson. Greene points out: “Of course, there were certain attitudes that Johnson did share with the traditional Old Tory. Above all, he was a stout partisan of the Church of England, and of the maintenance of its position in the state. This loyalty, more than any other of his political feelings, can be confidently said never to have wavered throughout his adult life. Even in his most vociferously patriot days, when he supported the radical positions of Savage and Henry Brooke, he dissociated himself from their anti-clericalism. His loyalty to the Establishment even included an affection for Whig bishops” (p. 236).
7. Kathleen Williams (Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise, Lawrence, 1965) also sees the influence of Locke: “Like so many Englishmen of his time who abhorred the rebellion of 1641 but accepted the settlement of 1688, Swift found himself somewhere between two extreme and consistent points of view. Faced with the necessity, in a ‘Martyrdom’ sermon, of setting out a coherent theory which will tactfully express his own disapproval of current tendencies, he accepts the moderate position best expressed by that spokesman of the necessary Augustan compromise, John Locke” (p. 103). Some observations on the relationship between Locke and Johnson in Donald Greene seem relevant to Swift’s position as well: “To Locke and his liberal successors, natural rights of men and a mystical compact between rulers and ruled constituted the sanctions that were above the state. All these metaphysical entities Johnson summarily rejected: omnicompetence of whatever is the sovereign power in the state; and the only sanction for the existence of that power was the willingness of the governed to be governed” (p. 244). “the principle of the rule of law enunciated by Locke, an essentially conservative principle, is as much Tory as it is Whig” (p. 245).
8. See Louis A. Landa, “A Modest Proposal and Populousness,” Modern Philology, XL (1942), 161–170.
9. The list includes the following qualities: 1) A disbelief in the happiness brought about through social innovation. 2) A disbelief in a metaphysical approach to political action. The skeptical conservative believes that “many political squabbles are hardly worth the energy that is expended on them.” 3) A disbelief in such abstractions as “the will of the people” or “the spirit of the nation.” “Politics thus resolves itself into questions of morality dealing with the relations between individual human beings, questions to be decided by invoking general moral principles. To Johnson all political questions are thus moral questions: politics is no more than a branch of general human morality.” Greene then contrasts the idealistic conservative: “The idealist conservative…takes more pleasure in contemplating ideas than individuals…The result will be to make politics a separate world of its own in which the ordinary principles of morality, as between individual human beings, do not apply and are replaced by other principles of action which transcend them. Such a concept would have seemed to Johnson mere insanity” (Greene, pp. 254–255). This is the world Swift created with the three quarrelling brothers in A Tale of a Tub, and it is perhaps what Swift meant when he said he loved John, Peter, and Thomas.
Conclusion
Johnson’s part in the Swiftian tradition is to remind his own age of Swift’s skeptical view of man. The difficulty in understanding Johnson’s feeling for Swift lies in his ambiguous portrayal of Swift’s life and work. Yet despite this ambiguity, it is still possible to picture from Johnson a Swift who is energetic, committed to the right causes and whose genius is unique in English literature.
An inventory of Johnson’s remarks on Swift, even if it is complete and two-sided, does not solve the problem. Johnson is at times petulant and obtuse in his criticism of Swift. At other times he is gracious and insightful. One such instance of graciousness, which is not often quoted, is his comment to Bosell that “Swift was man of great parts, and the insturment of much good to his country” (Boswell’s Life, II, 132).
Johnson also showed more insight than the other members of his circle in his comments on Swift’s Conduct of the Allies. What would Swift’s reputation as a writer be today if it had to rest on that work? In his appreciative comments on A Tale of a Tub, though he casts suspicious glances at Swift’s authorship, Johnson pays high tribute to an important work.
The influence of A Tale of a Tub is felt in Johnson’s satire where he riducules projectors, virtuosi, and Grub Street writers. Swift uses the abuses of learning as a vehicle to attack the tendency of irreligion. Although Johnson skirts satire on the abuses of religion there are deep moral meanings implied in his lighter satire.Swift in A Tale of a Tub satirizes materialistic, speculative, and mystical philosophy. Some of this same kind of satire is reflected in Hypertatus’ theorizing on the pneumatic operations of the mind in a garret (Rambler 117) and Hermeticus’ occult discoveries (Rambler 199).
In his two projects, Johnson assumes the voice of the Grub Street enthusiast which Swift used with such complicated dexterity in A Tale of a Tub. Swift’s ridicule of contemporary literary criticism also finds its parallel in Johnson’s comic portrayal of Dick Minim, the literary critic who spouts clichés (Idler 60 and 61). Johnson also takes up Swift’s ridicule of Grub Street as a scene of excess, false hopes, absurdity, and the depravation of literature, especially in his Project for the Advancement of Authors, and his portrayal of Misellus (Rambler 12).
On the subject of science Johnson, like Swift, exhibits distrust for the experimental temper, though perhaps not to the extend of Swift. Neither men were simple opponents of science. What they seem to fear is the detachment of mind from moral values that is manifested by the scientific mind and the possible challenges to religious orthodoxy posed by the new science. Johnson’s defense of the Royal Society is based on his belief that it is pursuing facts rather than formulating new doctrines. He, perhaps more than Swift, recognizes the curiosity of the scientist and the improvements which his learning brings. But at the same time, he is also aware of the scientist’s self-glorification and presumption which stands apart from the utility of his learning.
Particularly offensive to Johnson is the bread of the virtuoso collector. The collector values the rust rather than the gold of antiquity. His passion is related to avarice and his activity at its best is asocial and at its worst anti-social. Johnson’s gallery of enthusiasts like Swift’s are characterized by their failure to recognize the social meaning of man’s activity.
A delicate barometer of social life is the pattern of adjustment between men and women. Nature and reason are limited guides for social harmony and individual happiness. Swift and Johnson object to the worship of physical nature and to the adulation of reason. But in moral matters these terms hold for both of them the same special meaning illustrated by Johnson’s comment to Boswell:
We are all envious naturally; but by checking envy, we get the better of it. So we are all thieves naturally; a child always tries to get at what it wants, the nearest way; by good instruction and good habits this is cured, till a man has not even an inclination to seize what is another’s; has no struggle with himself about it (Boswell’s Life, III, 271).
Johnson is close to Swift’s pessimistic view of man’s natural moral endowments. Man’s socially disruptive “instincts” are checked by the mind until faults are corrected through habit. The process entails conflict which can be reconciled through friendship in the social realm. Friendship in marriage is for Swift and Johnson the highest and most exacting kind of friendship. They both see that harmony in the family is related to harmony in society.
On the other hand, political strife destroys the harmony of society. Johnson’s dismal view of the politics of his time reflects much of Swift’s criticism on the subject:
Johnson arraigned the modern politicks of this country, as entirely devoid of all principle of whatever kind. `Politicks (said he) are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politicks, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it’ (Boswell’s Life, II, 369).
In their sermon writing they believe that men are to be reasoned into religion; they see the
source of virtuous action as a concern for holy blessing, rather than political altruism,
which often becomes political opportunism. In those sermons where they deal with
political problems they are searching for a balance between tyranny and chaos, in which
tyranny represents an excess of reason and chaos an excess of nature. Nor do they make
a distinction between the tyranny of one or of a faction. However, nature asserts itself as
the preferred state of the savage to the slave at an oar or an ascendant force overcoming
great abuses. Swift and Johnson agree with Pope’s image of nature as energy and reason as
control:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.
On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but Passion is the gale;
Nor God alone in the still calm we find,
He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.
(Essay on Man: Epistle II, 11, 105–110).
They use the same chart to weather the tempest and search for God in the storm.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(This is a working bibliography for this dissertation and is not meant to be definitive. Works listed were either quoted or read in connection with preparing this study.)
Collected Editions of Basic Authors
Johnson, Samuel. Johnson’s Dictionary. A Modern Selection, ed. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963.
______________. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. Allan Wendt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.
______________. Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill.3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905.
______________. Fanny Burney, and Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi. The Queeney Letters, Being Letters Addressed to Hester Maria Thrale, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934.
______________. The Works of Samuel Johnson. 9 vols. Oxford, 1825.
______________. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vol. I, ed. E.L. McAdam, Jr. with Donald and Mary Hyde. Vol. I, ed. E.L. McAdam, Jr. with Donald and Mary Hyde. Vol. II, ed. W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, L.F. Powell. Vol. VI, ed. E.L. McAdam, Jr., with George Milne. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.
______________. Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897.
______________. Johnsoniana, ed. Robina Napier. London: George Bell and Sons, 1884.
Swift, Jonathan. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 3 vols., ed. Harold Williams.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
______________. Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948.
______________. The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams. 2nd ed., 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.
______________. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis. 14 vols. Oxford University Press, 1956.
______________. Satires and Personal Writings, ed. William Alfred Eddy. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.
______________. A Tale of a Tub, to which is Added, The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A.C. Guthkelch and D. Nicol Smith. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1958.
______________. The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. Thomas Roscoe, Vol. II. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853.
______________. Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift, ed. George Birkbeck Hill. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1899.
Collected Editions of Other Authors
Addison, Joseph. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
Betts, Edwin Morris and James Adam Bear, Jr. The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1966.
Boswell, James. A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Frederick A. Pottle. New York: McGraw Hill, 1961.
_____________. Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L.F. Powell, 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.
Cowper, William. Letters of William Cowper, rev. W. Benham. London: Macmillan and Co., 1884.
Dryden, John. Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker. Vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926.
Kirby-Miller, Charles, ed. Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
Pope, Alexander. Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Savile, George, Marquis of Halifax. The Complete Works of George Savile, ed. Sir William Raleigh. Oxford, 1912.
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. Poems, ed. Vivian DeSola Pinto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.
Biographical Studies of Swift other than Johnson’s (in chronological order)
Pilkington, Mrs. Letitia. Memoirs (1748), ed. Iris Barry, London, 1928.
Orrery, John Boyle, Earl of _________. Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 5th ed. London: A. Millar, 1752.
Delany, Patrick. Observations Upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks. London, 1754.
Swift, Deane. An Essay Upon the Life, Writing and Character of Dr. Jonathan Swift. London, 1755.
Hawkesworth, John. An Account of the Life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift, in The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, D.D., vols. I and II, ed. John Nicols. London, 1808.
Sheridan, Thomas. ‘Life of Dr. Swift,” The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, D.D., vols. I and II, ed. John Nicols. Longon, 1808.
Craik, Henry. The Life of Jonathan Swift. London: John Murray, 1882.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century, vol. VII of The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. London: Smith Elder and Co., 1911.
Berwick, Donald M. The Reputation of Jonathan Swift. Dissertation, Philadelphia, 1941.
Jackson, R. Wyse. Swift and His Circle. Dublin: The Talbot Press Limited, 1945.
Hardy, Evelyn. The Conjured Spirit Swift. London: The Hogarth Press, 1949.
Greenacre, Phyllis. Swift and Carroll. New York: International Universities Press, 1955.
Murry, J. Middleton. Jonathan Swift. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1955.
Le Brocquy, Sybil. Cadenus. Dublin: Doman Press, 1962.
Sun, Phillip Su Yue. “Swift’s Eighteenth-Century Biographies.” Unpublished dissertation. Yale University, 1963.
Davis, Herbert. Jonathan Swift, Essays on His Satire and Other Studies. New York: Oxford University press, 1964.
Gilbert, Jack G. Jonathan Swift, Romantic and Cynic Moralist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas, 1966.
Van Doorn, Cornelius. An Investigation into the Character of Jonathan Swift. New York: Haskell House, 1966.
Biographical Studies of Johnson
Bloom, Edward A. Samuel Johnson in Grub Street. Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press, 1957.
Clifford, James L. Young Sam Johnson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.
Hawkins, Sir John. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. Bertram H. Davis. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1963.
Macauley’s and Carlyl’s Essays on Samuel Johnson, ed. William Strunk, Jr. New York: Henry Hold and Col., 1895.
Criticism
Bate, Walter Jackson. From classic to Romantic, Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: harper and Row, 1961.
Beaumont, Charles Allen. Swift’s Use of the Bible, A Documentation and a Study in Allusion. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1965.
Beckett, J.C. “Swift As an Ecclesiastical Statesman,” Essays in British and Irish History in Honor of James Eadie Todd, ed. H.A. Cronne, T.W. Moody and D.B. Quinn. London: 1949.
Bloom, Edward A. “Symbolic Names in Johnson’s Periodical Essays,” MLQ, XIII (December, 1952) 333-52.
Bronson, Bertrand H. Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.
Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.
Christie, O.F. Johnson the Essayist, His Opinions on Men, Morals and Manners, A Study. New York: Haskell House, 1966.
Clark, Paul Odell. “A Gulliver Dictionary.” Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1953. (Pamphlet)
Clifford, James L. “New Approaches to Samuel Johnson.” Fredonia, New York, March 29, 1968. (Lecture delivered at State University College at Fredonia.)
Crane, R.S. “The Rationale of the Fourth Voyage.” (A paper read at the MLA conference in December, 1955.) Published in Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, An Annotated Text with Critical Essays, ed. Robert A. Greenberg. New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 1961.
Davis, Herbert. Essays on the Eighteenth Century, Presented to David Nicol Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945.
Dyson, A.E. Essays and Studies, 1958. London: The English Assocaiton, 1959.
Earisman, Delbert L. “Samuel Johnson’s Satire.” Unpublished dissertation. Indiana University, 1959.
Fussell, Paul. The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
Greene, Donald J. The Politics of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.
Hagstrum, Jean H. Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Harth, Phillip. Swift and Anglican Rationalism, The Religious Background of A Tale of a Tub. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Heilman, Robert B., ed. Gulliver’s Travels, A tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books. New York: The Modern Library, 1950.
Kolb, Gwin J. Philological Quarterly, XXXVI, III (July, 1957). 379–381.
Landa, Louis A. “A Modest Proposal and Populousness.” Modern Philology, XL (1942).
Leavis, F.R. The Common Pursuit. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1952.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. Essays in the History of Ideas. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960.
Hoover, Benjamin Beard. Samuel Johnson’s Parliamentary Reporting, Debates in the Senate of Lilliput. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953.
Mayhew, George P. Rage or Raillery. San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1967.
Monk, Samuel Holt. “The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver.” Sewanee Review LXIII (1955), 48–71.
Quinlan, Maurice J. Samuel Johnson, A Layman’s Religion. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
Rosenheim, Edward W., Jr. Swift and the Satirist’s Art. Chicato: University of Chicago press, 1963.
Sachs, Arieh. Passionate Intelligence, Imagination and Reason in the Work of Samuel Johnson. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967.
Sams, Henry W. “Satire as Betrayal.” ELH, XXVI (1959), 38–41.
Starkman, Miriam Kosh. Swift’s Satire on Learning in A Tale of a Tub. Princeton University Press, 1958.
Sutherland, James. English Satire. London: Cambridge University Pess, 1958.
Sutherland, W.O.S., Jr., The Art of the Satirist, Essays on the Satire of Augustan England. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas press, 1965.
Voight, Milton. Swift and the Twentieth Century. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964.
Voitle, Robert. Samuel Johnson the Moralist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Worcester, David. The Art of Satire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940.
Watkins, W.B.C. Perilous Balance, The Tragic Genius of Swift, Johnson and Sterne. Cambridge: Walker-DeBerry, Inc., 1960.
Whitley, Alvin. “The Comedy of Rasselas.” ELH, XXXII (1956), 48–70.
Williams, Kathleen. Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1965.
Wimsatt, W.K., Jr., Philosophic Words. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.
Bibliographical Studies
Clifford, James L. Johnsonian Studies, 1887-1950, A Survey and Bibliography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951.
Landa, Louis A. and James Edward Tobin. Jonathan Swift, A List of Critical Studies Published from 1895 to 1945. New York: Cosmopolitan Science and Art Service Co., Inc., 1945.
Stathis, James J. A Bibliography of Swift Studies, 1945–1965. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1987.
Wahba, Magdi. Johnsonian Studies, including a Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, 1950–1960, compiled by James L. Clifford and Donald J. Greene, Cairo, 1962.
Index
JOHNSON’S QUARREL WITH SWIFT – Jordan P. Richman, Ph.D.
INDEX
Abraham, Rabbi, 67, 68
Account of the Life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift, 1754 (Hawkesworth), 11 ̶ 12, 20
acquisition, pleasure of, 73
actions, responsibility for, 119
Addison, Joseph, 72, 79, 86, 101
Advice to a Daughter (Saville), 85, 99
advisers, need for good, 114
Aeolists, 73
aging, problem of, 11
allegorical fable, 64
Amazons
English women as, 62 ̶ 63
women as, 50
ambition vs. fanatics, 121
An Argument against Abolishing Christianity (Swift), 21
anarchy, 122
Anglicanism, 110
Anthea, 88, 100
social unease of, 89
antipathy, Johnson’s for Swift, 25
antiquities, 69
anti-slavery, 47
Appendix to the State Affairs of Lilliput, 73
arguments, alternative, 43
Astell, Mary, 62
Augustus, To, 74
avarice, 73
Bate, Walter Jackson, 4
Battle of the Books, The, 64, 65
belief, professions of, 120
benevolence, 94, 126
Berwick, Donald, 4, 28 ̶ 29
bias, Johnson’s, 16
Bickerstaff, Isaac, 61, 62
Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers, 65
biographers, Swift’s early, 4
Bolingbroke, ministry of, 63
Bombasine, Madam, 59
Book IV debate, 84
Boswell, James, 16, 94
Boswell’s Life, 132
Boswell’s Tour, 32
Life of Swift, 8
Boyles, John, 12
bread, tax on, 44-45
British mercantilism, 126
Brobdingnag, King of, 42
Bronson, Bertrand, 5, 73
Brooke, Henry, 45
brotherly love, 111, 119
ideal of, 120
Camilla, 100
portrait of, 88
cant, 6
carnage, 55-56
Caroline, Queen, Johnson’s letter to, 29
Cave, Edward, 39
celibacy, 98
Cervantes, 52
chain of being, 57
character, 9 ̶10
charity schools, 124
charity, 119, 127
Pauline concept, 10
Charles I
death of, 111, 116, 121
Johnson on death of, 115
sermons on, 114
chastity
banter on, 67
project, 68
childish, 10
choice, possibility of, 96
Christian ideal of love, 94
Christian precept, 126
Christianity, happiness and, 127
church authority, after reformation, 121-122
classical ideals, 47
Clifford, James L., 8, 26
clothes, restraint in women’s, 103
collectors, objection to, 72
colonial abuses, denunciations of, 48
colonization, denunciation of, 41-42
communities, 97
Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, 38, 45
Conduct of the Allies, The (Swift), 22, 132
conscience, freedom of, 120
conservatism, 47, 127-128
constitutional government, 122
theory of, 122
Cornelia, humility of, 89 ̶ 90
Country Wife, The (Wycherly), 92
courtesy, 121
Courtlys, 60
cowardice, female, 89, 100
as virtue, 88 ̶ 89
coxcomb, double meanings, 104
Crane, R.S., 83
Cumberland, William, 47
Daily Gazetteer, 45
Davis, Herbert, 28, 31, 43, 62, 88
Debates in the Senate of Lilliput, 39
Declaration of Independence, 58
defamation, 118
defeat, 73
Degul, device of, 43
Delany, Patrick, 12, 17, 26
Dissertation upon Playthings,” 70
divine right, 43
doctrine of Mandeville, 125
doing good, 126
domestic complacency, 90
Drapier Letters, The, 117. 122
Drapier, M.G., 61, 120
Dryden, 52
Dublin charity schools, 91
Dunciad, 72
duties, 97
Johnson on, 9
in marriage, 99
Dyson, A.E., 83
Earisman, Delbert, 38
economic rights, 120
Elizabeth, Queen, 42
eloquence, from pulpit, 112
envy, 6, 119
Essay on Man (Pope), 52
Essay on Swift (Deane Swift), 12
Euphemia, 60
European vices, Lilliputians as embodiment, 91
evils, ordinary, 117
Examiner 14, 63
Examiner 31, 64
false witness, 111-112, 117 ̶ 118
listening to, 119
protecting against, 118
fanatics, 117
vs. ambition, 121
female cowardice, Swift on, 102
female excellence, 100
femaleness, 86
Fielding, Henry, 58
flattery, 9
Fountains, The, 4
Free Inquiry into Nature and Origin of Evil, 56
freedom of expression, 123
freedom of thought, 123
friendship, 87
in marriage, 105
precepts on, 98
Swift and Johnson on, 104
vs. marriage, 99
frugality, Swift’s, 16, 25
Fussell, Paul, 5
Gelidus, 92
general satire, 55
Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (Swift), 60
Gentlemen’s Magazine, 12, 39
God, law of, 100
Goldsmith, Oliver, 122
Gordon Riots, 124
Gower, Lord, letter to Swift, 23 ̶ 24
greatest happiness for greatest number principle, 47
Greenacre, Phyllis, 86
Greene, Donald, 47, 48, 127
Greenwich Hospital, 44
Grub Street, 51
journalist, 48
writers, 49 ̶ 50, 52
Gulliver, Captain Lemuel, 61
derangement of, 83
grandson of, 39, 40-41
Gulliver’s Travels, 39, 40, 56, 58, 65
adaptation of facts, 39
Book IV, 83
Johnson’s appreciation of, 32
Gustavus Vasa, 45
Hamlet complex, 32
happiness, 97, 126, 127, 128
individual, 134
Hardy, Evelyn, 86, 101
Harley, ministry of, 63
Hawkesworth, Dr. John, 11, 12, 17 ̶ 20
Hawkins, Sir John, Life of Samuel Johnson, 29
Heilman, Robert, 91
help, 121
Hermeticus, 69
heroines, Johnson’s, 60
Hill, George Birkbeck, 12
Hitler’s Germany, 66
Hobbes, Thomas, 6
hope, 73
Horace, Swift compared to, 30
Horatian satire, 54
Houyhnhnms, 83
human folly, anger against, 55
human happiness, 97
human nature, 5
Swift’s philosophy of, 18
human presumption, 52
human society, classical view, 129
humanitarians, 47
humanitarianism, 128
humor, 54
Johnson’s, 67
Hutcheson, Francis, 47
Huxley, Aldous, 28
Hypertatus’ theorizing, 132
Idler essays, 56, 65 ̶ 66
17, 65 ̶ 66
22, 39, 56, 74
64, 70, 64
87, 62 ̶ 63
100, 81, 82
illumination, 80
imagination, dangerous prevalence of, 68
inertness, 73
instinct, 80
Ireland, 43
state of, 57
Irish people
oppression of, 91
Swift as champion of, 124
James II, dethronement, 115
jealousy, 95
Jefferson, Thomas, 85
Jenyns, Soame, 56 ̶ 57, 94
Jesus, 94
John, 94
Johnson, Mrs., On the Death of, 101
Johnson, Samuel
biography by, subtleties of, 9
as iconoclast, 24 ̶ 25
as social satirist, 74
as Swiftian satirist, 74 ̶ 75
on femaleness, 86 ̶ 87
subjects of satire, 38
use of Swift in Dictionary, 29
Johnsonian Miscellanies I, 32
Journal to Stella, 100
justice, 43
Juvenal, 56
Knowles, Mrs., 94
Kolb, Gwin, 38-39
Lady Bustle, 89
Lady Lofty, 59
Landa, Luis, classification of sermons, 111
language, debasement of, 61
Laputan Academy, 66
Latin satirists, 52
Latinate words, 113
laws of God, 123
laws of state vs. laws of God, 123
Leavis, F.R., 28, 84
legislative body, 127
legislative power, 122
Letter to a Young Clergyman (Swift), 112
Letter to a Young Lady, 84, 85, 86, 88, 102
Life of Samuel Johnson (Hawkins), 29
Life of Savage, 27
Life of Swift (Boswell), 8
Life of Swift (Craik), 23 ̶ 24
Life of Swift (Hill), 12
Life of Swift (Johnson), 4, 15, 17, 64, 85, 96
reactions to, 23 ̶ 24
Lilliput, Empire of, 39
Lilliputians, as embodiment of European vices, 91
literary criticism, Johnson’s use of fable for, 64
living nature, 80
Locke, John, 122
London Magazine, 39
love
Christian ideal of, 94
romantic, 90
lower classes, 6
Madden, Dr., 26
Madonella, 62
maleness, 86
malice, 54
man by instinct, 5
Mandeville, 5
Doctrine of, 125
mankind, general condition, 117
marital unhappiness, 97
Marmor Norfolciense, 38, 43 ̶ 45, 68, 73
marriage vs. friendship, 99
marriage
debate on, 95
family and, 90 ̶ 91
foundation for, 90 ̶ 99
importance of, 97
justification of, 96
mystique for, 91
nature and, 98
obligations of, 97
purpose of, 98
utopian, 93
Martin Scriblerus, 74
Mayhew, George, 84
mechanical thinking, 82
Memoirs (Pilkington), 12
Memoirs of Matinus Scriblerus, 65, 69
mercantilism, British, 126
Merlin’s Prediction, 43
misanthropy, Swift’s, 55
Misellus, 51, 52, 60, 68, 133
misogyny, 85
modern woman, 90
Modest Proposal, 39, 48, 56, 57, 66
Moliere, 52
monarchy, 127
Monck-Berkeley, on Swift and Horace, 30
Monk, Samuel Holt, 83
moral culpability, 71
moral neutrality, 90
morality, 82
Mrs. Mynx, 59
natural moral endowments, 134
nature, 6, 79, 80
as energy, 135
and reason, 6, 82, 105-106
reconciliation of, 5, 94
Nazi doctors, 66
Nekayah, 95
neo-classical standards, 30
Nichols, John, 27
Nuremburg Trials, 123
obedience, 99
Observations on the State of Affairs in 1756, 41, 42
old and sick, problem of, 91
oppression, 117
ordinary evils, 117
Orrery, Earl of,
malignity of, 26 ̶ 27
on Swift, 30
Orwell, George, 28
Papal authority, 43
Parliamentary Debates, 38, 39
party politics, 6, 120
passion
tempering, 87
virtue, truth and, 99
Passionate Intelligence (Sachs), 5, 38
passive obedience, 122
pedantry, criticism of, 64
penal laws, 47, 128
Percy, Bishop, 25 ̶ 26
perjury, 118
personality, 9 ̶10
Swift’s, 10
philosophical terminology, burlesque of, 64
Philosophical Words, 64
piety, Swift’s, 111
Pilkington, Letitia, Mrs.,12, 26
Piozzi, Madame, 32, 81
pity, 121
absence of, 10
lack of in Swift, 15 ̶ 16
Plato, 47
Allegory of, 83
Platonic order of ladies, 62
Polite Conversation and Directions for Servants (Swift), 15
political anxiety, Swift’s, 114
political history, 18th century, Johnson on, 33
political liberties, 127
political polemic, 63
political satire, Johnson’s early, 73
political sermons, religious basis for, 110
political views, religious views and, Swift’s, 20-23
politics, 120
Politics of Samuel Johnson, 48
poor, idle and industrious, 125
Pope, Alexander, 52, 72, 80
Swift’s visit to, 10
poverty, 124
power, 9
precocity, 69 ̶ 70
Prediction of Merlin, The, 45
pride, 119
Proceedings of the Political Club, 39
Project for the Advancement of Authors (Swift), 19, 22, 74, 133
Project for the Employment of Authors, 38, 48
Puritan Revolution, 6
Puritans, 114
Quinlan, Maurice, tone of sermons, 111-112
Quintana, Ricardo, 28
Quisquilius, 69
final achievements, 70 ̶ 71
toys of, 70
Rage and Raillery, Mayhew, 84
Rambler, The, 61, 74, 88, 100
dramas in, 61
number 12, 58, 133
number 16, 51
number 17, 51
number 24, 92
number 34, 89
number 82, 89
number 131, 72
number 191, 64
number 199, 67
Rasselas, 68, 80, 95, 96
Rasselas to Gulliver’s Travels (Kolb), 38-39
reason, 6, 79, 80
as control, 135
faith in, 81
moral feeling, values and, 5 ̶6
nature and, 105 ̶ 106, 129
reasoning, religion and, 113
relationships, between men and women, 92
religion
reasoned into, 134
reasoning and, 113
religious feeling, 120
religious orthodoxy, 133
Remarks on the Life and Writings of Swift (Boyle), 12
Renaissance love poems, 87
Republic, The, 83
resentment, 54
Restoration play, bawdiness of, 92
Review of Soame Jenyns, The, 39, 66
revolution, 117
Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanis, The (Fussell), 5
Richardson, Samuel, 58
ridicule, 118
right reason, 79 ̶ 80
Rochester, Earl of, 56, 79
role playing, criticism of, 65
Royal Academy, 68
Royal Historiographer of Lilliput, 40-41
Royal Society, 133
Sachs, Arieh, 5, 38
Sams, Henry W., 84
Satire Against Mankind (Rochester), 56, 79
satire
directions of, 50
ends of, 54
Johnson’s, 61
objects of, 48, 53
prime target, 52
style and devices, 48
subject for, 72
Swift on, 67
savage, 122
Savile, George, 85
on passion, 87
on submission, 99
on women, 86
scatology, Swift use of, 14 ̶ 15
science, distrust of, 68
scientific language, burlesque of, 64
scientific mind, 133
scorn, for unmerited rewards, 46
Scriblerian satire, 74
Scriblerus Club, 64
Scriblerus, Martin, 61, 69
sedition, 119
self-denial, Swift’s faith in, 18
self-love, 54
Sentiments of a Church of England Man (Swift), 21, 122
Sermon VII, 117
sermon writing, 18th century ideal, 112
sermons
audience of, 113
construction of, 113
debate in, 114
of Swift and Johnson, 48, 129
tone of, 110 -111
topics of, 111
sexual behavior, themes of, 93
Shaftesbury, 5
shame, as medium for change, 9
sharp language, 119
Sheridan, Thomas, 4, 16, 24, 26, 27
1688 Revolution, 6
slave, 122
slavery, 122, 128
defined, 122
sloth, 73
Soame Jenyns, The Review of, 39, 66
social defamation, 118
social harmony, 134
social order, 129
social relations, debasement of, 61
Society of Commentators, 44
society, classical vision of, 47
solitude, 97
Somerset, Duchess of, 44
sorrow, blankness of, 101
Spectator, 79
stable society, 123
Stage Licensers Act (1737), 45, 124
Standish, Mrs., 59
State Affairs of Lilliput, 39, 40, 42
Steele, Robert, 72
Stella, 18 ̶ 20, 84
description of, 101-102
Johnson on Hawkesworth’s analysis of, 19
learning described, 103
Swift’s portrait of, 100
Swift’s relations with, 96
Strife
lawful, 115
unlawful, 115, 116
Study, Charles, 62
submission, in marriage, 99
subordination, 128
Sun, Philip, 4, 12, 29
supreme magistrate, 122
Swift, Jonathan, 12, 57, 122
Swift, Jonathan, 20th century psychoanalytic critics, 28
Swift, Jonathan
characteristics, 15
decline, 11, 13
denunciation by Thackeray, 28
effect of death of Stella, 104
friendships with women, 16 ̶ 17
Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, 60
image of, 13
Johnson’s criticism characterized, 28 ̶ 30
Johnson’s description, 14
Johnson’s interpretation, 8
Johnson’s portrayal, 132
Letter to a Young Clergyman, 112
major achievement, 20
motives for power, 20
overreacher, 20
political views, 20-21
Project for the Advancement of Religion, 19
relations with Stella, 96
central theme, 8̶ 9
style, Johnson’s judgments on, 24
Swiftian devices, 47
Swiftian tradition, Johnson’s part in, 3
Tale of a Tub, A, 39, 45, 46, 51, 65
influence of, 132-133
Johnson’s comments, 31
Tatler
5, 67
32, 62
158, 72
Taxation No Tyranny, 58
Thackeray, William, 93
Tories, Swift and Johnson as moderate, 21
tragic cycle, rise and fall of, 9
trivia, 69
true moderation, 120
truth, 43
passion and, 99
tyranny, 117
Universal Visiter, 48
utopia, attainable, 126
utopian ideas, as satire, 93
values
hierarchy of, 71
of right and wrong, 90
Vanessa, 18 ̶ 20, 84
Vanity of Human Wishes (Johnson), 22 ̶ 23
Varina, letter to, 85
Victoria, 60
Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, 73
virtue, 82, 126
basis of, 127
passion and, 99
virtuoso collector, 68 ̶ 75, 133
Voitle, Robert, 47
Wagstaff, Simon, 61
Walpole, Horace, 44
Ministry, 73
Warner, Tim, 81
Watkins, W.B.C., 24
wealth, pursuit of, 68 ̶ 75
Whiggism, 21
Whiteway, Mrs., 31
Whitley, Alvin, 38
wickedness, 119
Wimsatt, W.K., 4, 5, 64
Windsor Prophecy, 43, 45
wit vs. personality, Swift’s, 25
women
attitudes toward, 84 ̶ 90
good sort compared, 105 ̶ 106
ideal, 105
Wood’s patent, 120
Yahoos, 83
stone collecting, 72 ̶ 73
zealots, 114
Zosima, abuse of, 58 ̶ 60
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