grew more and more whimsical and capricious, morbidly suspicious and morbidly parsimonious; old friends were estranged or removed by death, and new friends did not come forward in their place. For many years, nevertheless, he maintained a correspondence with Pope and Bolingbroke, and with Arbuthnot and Gay until their deaths, with such warmth as to prove that an ill opinion of mankind had not made him a misanthrope, and that human affection and sympathy were still very necessary to him. The letters become scarcer and scarcer with the decay of his faculties; at last, in 1740, comes one to his kind niece, Mrs Whiteway, of heartrending pathos:—
I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am under both of body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture; but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is and your family: I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few; few and miserable they must be. I am, for those few days, yours entirely—Jonathan Swift.
“If I do not blunder, it is Saturday, July 26, 1740.
“If I live till Monday I shall hope to see you, perhaps for the last time.”
Account book entries continue until 1742.
In March 1742 it was necessary to appoint guardians of Swift’s person and estate. In September of the same year his physical malady reached a crisis, from which he emerged a helpless wreck, with faculties paralysed rather than destroyed—“He never talked nonsense or said a foolish thing.” The particulars of his case have been investigated by Dr Bucknill and Sir William Wilde, who have proved that he suffered from nothing that could be called mental derangement until the “labyrinthine vertigo” from which he had suffered all his life, and which he erroneously attributed to a surfeit of fruit, produced paralysis, “a symptom of which was the not uncommon one of aphasia, or the automatic utterance of words ungoverned by intention. As a consequence of that paralysis, but not before, the brain, already weakened by senile decay, at length gave way, and Swift sank into the dementia which preceded his death.” In other words he retained his reason until in his 74th year he was struck down by a new disease in the form of a localized left-sided apoplexy or cerebral softening. Aphasia due to the local trouble and general decay then progressed rapidly together, and even then at 76, two more years were still to elapse before “he exchanged the sleep of idiocy for the sleep of death.” The scene closed on the 10th of October 1745. With what he himself described as a satiric touch, his fortune was bequeathed to found a hospital for idiots and lunatics, now an important institution, as it was in many respects a pioneer bequest. He was interred in his cathedral at midnight on the 22nd of October, in the same coffin as Stella, with the epitaph, written by himself, “Hic depositum est corpus Jonathan Swift, S.T.P., hujus ecclesiae cathedralis decani; ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Abi, viator, et imitare, si poteris, strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicem.”
The stress which Swift thus laid upon his character as an assertor of liberty has hardly been ratified by posterity, which has apparently neglected the patriot for the genius and the wit. Not unreasonably; for if half his patriotism sprang from an instinctive hatred of oppression, the other half was disappointed egotism. He utterly lacked the ideal aspiration which the patriot should possess: his hatred of villany was far more intense than his love of virtue. The same cramping realism clings to him everywhere beyond the domain of politics—in his religion, in his fancies, in his affections. At the same time, it is the secret of his wonderful concentration of power: he realizes everything with such intensity that he cannot fail to be impressive. Except in his unsuccessful essay in history, he never, after the mistake of his first Pindaric attempts, strays beyond his sphere, never attempts what he is not qualified to do, and never fails to do it. His writings have not one literary fault except their occasional looseness of grammar and their frequent indecency. Within certain limits, his imagination and invention are as active as those of the most creative poets. As a master of humour, irony and invective he has no superior; his reasoning powers are no less remarkable within their range, but he never gets beyond the range of an advocate. Few men of so much mental force have had so little genius for speculation, and he is constantly dominated by fierce instincts which he mistakes for reasons. As a man the leading note of his character is the same—strength without elevation. His master passion is imperious pride—the lust of despotic dominion. He would have his superiority acknowledged, and cared little for the rest. Place and profit were comparatively indifferent to him; he declares that he never received a farthing for any of his works except Gulliver’s Travels, and that only by Pope’s management; and he had so little regard for literary fame that he put his name to only one of his writings. Contemptuous of the opinion of his fellows, he hid his virtues, paraded his faults, affected some failings from which he was really exempt, and, since his munificent charity could not be concealed from the recipients, laboured to spoil it by gratuitous surliness. Judged by some passages of his life he would appear a heartless egotist, and yet he was capable of the sincerest friendship and could never dispense with human sympathy. Thus an object of pity as well as awe, he is the most tragic figure in our literature—the only man of his age who could be conceived as affording a groundwork for one of the creations of Shakespeare. “To think of him,” says Thackeray, “is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire.” Nothing finer or truer could be said.
Swift inoculated the Scriblerus Club with his own hatred of pedantry, cant and circumlocution. His own prose is the acme of incisive force and directness. He uses the vernacular with an economy which no other English writer has rivalled. There is a masculinity about his phrases which makes him as clear to the humblest capacity as they are capable of being made to anyone. Ironist as he is, there is no writer that ever wrote whose meaning is more absolutely unmistakable. He is the grand master of the order of plain speech. His influence, which grew during the 18th century in spite of the depreciation of Dr Johnson, has shared in the eclipse of the Queen Anne wits which began about the time of Jeffrey. Yet as the author of Gulliver he is still read all over the world, while in England discipleship to Swift is recognized as one of the surest passports to a prose style. Among those upon whom Swift’s influence has been most discernible may be mentioned Chesterfield, Smollett, Cobbett, Hazlitt, Scott, Borrow, Newman, Belloc.
Authorities:—Among the authorities for Swift’s life the first place is still of course occupied by his own writings, especially the fragment of autobiography now at Trinity College, Dublin, and his Correspondence, which still awaits an authoritative annotated edition. The most important portion is contained in the Journal to Stella. Twenty-five of these letters on Swift’s death became the property of Dr Lyon. Hawkesworth bought them for his 1766 edition of the Works and eventually gave them to the British Museum. Forty additional letters were published by Dean Swift in 1768 (of these only No. 1 survives in the British Museum). Sheridan brought out the complete Journal in 1784 in a mangled form, but the text has as far as possible been restored by modern editors such as Forster, Rylands and Aitken. A full annotated edition is in course of preparation by H. Spencer Scott. The Vanessa correspondence was used by Sheridan, but first published in full by Sir Walter Scott, and Swift’s letters to his friend Knightley Chetwode of Woodbrook between 1714 and 1731, over fifty in number, were first issued by Dr Birkbeck Hill in 1899. The more or less contemporary lives of Swift, most of which contain a certain amount of apocrypha, are those of Lord Orrery (1751); Dr Delany’s Observations on Orrery (1754); Dean Swift’s Essay upon the Life of Swift (1755); and Thomas Sheridan’s Life (of 1785). Dr. Hawkesworth, in the life prefixed to his edition of the Works in 1755, adds little of importance. Dr Johnson’s Life is marred by manifest prejudice. Dr Barrett produced an Essay upon the Early Life of some value (in 1808). Six years later came the useful biography of Sir Walter Scott, and (in 1819) appeared the elaborate Life by W. Monck Mason in the form of an appendix to his ponderous History of St Patrick’s. A new epoch of investigation was inaugurated by John Forster, who began a new scrutiny of the accumulated material and published his first volume in 1875. Invaluable in many respects, it exhibited the process as well as the result of biography, and never got beyond 1711. The Life by Sir Henry Craik (1882 and reissues) now holds the field. Valuable monographs have been produced by Sir Leslie Stephen (Men of Letters and the Memoirs, in the Dict. Nat. Biog.), by Thackeray, in his English Humourists, by W. R. Wilde, in his Closing Years of Dean Swift’s
