254: The implication underlying Johnson's Life is that the famous sava indignatio the savage indignation of the epitaph in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, was never very deeply grounded. Johnson portrays Swift as a rancorous and petulant man, disappointed of preferment, who reluctantly "turned Irishman for life' when he did not get the bishopric in England that he thought he deserved. The grounds of Swift's pessimism, he implies, are merely circumstantial; if his life, and the chances which influenced its turning points, had been different, Swift would have had a different outlook on things.
As it was, he became petulant, irritable, fretful about trifles, the sort of man who counted the faults of Lord Orrery's servants and despaired of human nature because it was not as he designed it to be. Marooned in Ireland, 'his asperity condemned him to solitude; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity.'
Johnson, on the other hand, believed that human nature was inescabably flawed and the lives of human beings inevitably melancholy. True pessimism, he seems to say, is cooler and steadier than Swift's.
254: [Beckett] had an idea for a play about Samuel Johnson and had begun to work on it, making voluminous notes and writing at least part of the first act. Surprise has been expressed that Beckett should be more interested in Johnson than in Jonathan Swift,...he should have fixed on a fellow Irishman and a fellow graduate of Trinity College, Dublin,
Perhaps, though, one of the reasons for his interest lies precisely in the difference in outlook between the two, a difference important to Beckett and implied very clearly throughout Johnson's Life of Swift.
257: "Beckett read all of Johnson, including his favorite text, the Prayers and Meditations
in the course of his research for the play [on Samuel Johnson he planned to write] and he continued faithful to the great Englishman throughout his life."
