The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Swift was an Anglo-Irishman, born in Dublin and dying there, as Dean of St. Patrick^ Cathedral. Like his fellow coun- tryman Shaw [99], he had a genius for exposing the vices and weaknesses of his age. Like Shaw, too, he was a master of the English language, so that today his prose can be read with pleasure even though much of what he wrote about is of inter- est only to scholars. But here ends the parallel. Shaw's was one of the most successfully managed careers in history, Swift's one of the least. Shaw died after bestriding his world like a colos- sus. Swift died much as he foresaw, "like a poisoned rat in a hole."

His century is often called the Age of Reason, and he was one of its chief ornaments. He did worship reason: Gulliver may be seen as a picture of the consequences of humanitys refusal to be reasonable. The irony is that this apostle of reason should also have been a man of volcanic, baffled passions; that the terrible fits of dizziness and, later, deafness from which he suffered beginning in his twentieth year led him at last to the loss of that reason he so much admired; that some enigmatic lack apparently precluded what we think of as a normal sex life; that his split allegiance (was he an Irishman or an Englishman?) helped to unbalance him; that his semiexile in Dublin for his last thirty-two years was a permanent cross to his spirit, even though the Irish loved him as their champion. This man should have been the intellect and conscience of England. But melancholy marked him for her own; ambition denied withered him; and so his life, whose inner secrets we shall probably never know, was what the world called, and he himself called, a failure. Pointing to a blighted tree, he once remarked that he, too, would die first "at the top," and so he did, a ruined monument to frustration.

He left behind him a great mass of poetry and prose. Much of it is in the form of political pamphleteering, for he was in large part a journalist and propagandist. Some of it is in the form of his strange letter-diary, addressed to his ward, and known as the Journal to Stella.

One small part of it is a masterpiece. When first published in 1726 Gulliver was an instant success "from the cabinet council to the nursery." It is one of those curious works to which we may apply Lewis Muniford^ sentence: "The words are for children and the meanings are for men." In fact, how­ever, though children have always taken to their hearts at least the first two books of Gulliver (Lilliput and Brobdingnag), Swift wrote it with a serious purpose—"to mend the world." Gulliver is so rich a book as to bear many interpretations, but I think we may say that Swift wanted to hold up a mirror that would show humanity its true and often repellent face; and by doing so to force us to abandon our illusions, forswear our lies, and more nearly approach that rationality from which his Yahoos are the terrible declension.

In addition Gulliver is a political allegory. Its hidden refer- ences mean less to us than they did to the Londoners of 1726. The best thing is to pay no attention to the transient satire that threads it. As readers have discovered over more than two and a half cen- turies, there is plenty left: irony that applies to the human race wherever and whenever found; a biting humor; delightful inven- tion; and a prose style of utmost clarity and power.

Swift's essence you will find in the last book, describing the voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms. Here the misanthropy flows not from meanness but from an idealism broken under the buffets of fortune. Somehow, despite his ferocity, it is impossible to think of Swift as malicious. His inner contradic- tions are sorrowfully hinted at in the Latin epitaph he wrote for himself. In St. Patrick's Cathedral he lies at peace at last in a place "where bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart.^,,

C.F.

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VOLTAIRE

1694-1778

Candide and other works

Voltaire died at eighty-four, the uncrowned king of intellectual Europe, the undisputed leader of the Age of Enlightenment, the most destructive of the many sappers of the foundations of the Old Regime destroyed by the French Revolution. As dramatist, poet, historian, tale teller, wit, correspondent, con- troversialist, and coruscating personality, he had achieved a formidable reputation. His productivity is unbelievable; he left behind him over fourteen thousand known letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets. Yet he is most easily remem- bered for an extended little bittersweet joke that he wrote in three days. Ali his tens of thousands of ironies fade before the irony of this one circumstance.