`The Risible Faculties'

One might write a fat volume of literary corrections. The point would be to rescue writers from mistaken reputations. Think of John Keats the Seraph and Henry David Thoreau the Do-Gooder. In reality, Keats was a “tough monkey” in the complimentary sense, as Fatso calls Maggio in From Here to Eternity, and Thoreau lauded the psychopath John Brown, burned down a 300-acre woodland and cordially condescended to his fellow Americans – a nasty piece of work who could sometimes write like an angel. Perhaps the most complicatedly misapprehended writer is Jonathan Swift. On the one hand, he is judged a writer of children’s books. You know, giants, little people, talking animals. On the other, he is a Freudian text-book case of “excremental vision.” George Saintsbury writes of Swift:

“It is a commonplace that children, not mere infants, read Gulliver without any sense, without any suspicion of it being other than a `funny’ book. It is not a commonplace, but it is true that it is perfectly possible for any critic who is vieux routier [an old hand] to dismiss or skim over the undermeaning and take the thing as no more than fairly sharp satire.”

The observation comes from The Peace of the Augustans (1916), which carries a marvelous subtitle -- A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Refreshment – neatly capturing my understanding of that century. Saintsbury argues that Swift as a writer in no way contradicts his bucolic subtitle:

“Compare Swift’s actual works . . . with those of other hypochondriacs or whatever you want to call them. Besides his actual misanthropy—his actual misozoia—to coin a more accurate word if it does not exist, Byron’s is mere mountebank’s mummery; Shelley’s, though real, is faint and fitful; Leopardi’s and James Thomson the Second’s suggestive, not indeed of any affectation, but certainly of the `stool to be melancholy upon’—of the fashions of their respective times and of certain accidents of life and fortune.”

Swift’s prose is a model of elegant clarity. He documents the anarchic in an orderly fashion. Saintsbury detects no “moaning or raving” in his work and writes: “. . . Swift is always quiet; and though the association of quietness and peace is sometimes deceptive, there can be very little doubt that it is in more than one sense real.”

It should be pointed out that Saintsbury (1845-1933) himself is seldom quiet. He was a gourmand of the written work (and of food and, especially, wine). His prose is nervous, fulsome and digressive. He is forever coining neologisms, waxing alliteratively, piling on adjectives, borrowing words and phrases from one of the seven languages he spoke, relishing slang, mustering comparisons from his vast reading and composing remarkably long sentences that usually come to a happy resolution. Here’s an example:

“But if Gulliver, with all its terrific truths of satire and its disfigurements of unnecessary nastiness, is, for size and quality, the chief actual divertissement among Swift’s works, there is no lack elsewhere of rest and refreshment which, as such rest and refreshment seldom does, will afford as much satisfaction to the pure intellect as to the risible faculties.”

To his everlasting credit, Saintsbury loves my favorite among Swift’s works, which he calls “the immortal, the unique, the inexhaustible, and marvellous Journal to Stella. Here, almost for the first time, there is not the mere perfection of Art, though the greatest artist could have done nothing finer; but a spontaneous overflow of nature, only unconsciously conditioned by the irrepressible artistic genius of the writer.”

That’s a little rich, I know, but deeply satisfying. Later, Saintsbury confides that Journal to Stella may be “the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography.”