'Come Hither, All Ye Empty Things'

It’s a familiar sentiment I have never understood:

“If I do not love Swift, as, thank God, I do not, however immensely I may admire him, it is because I revolt from the man who placards himself as a professional hater of his own kind . . .”

This dismissal of Swift is Thackeray’s in the final chapter, “On Charity and Humor,” of his English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century: A Series of Lectures (1853). What does charity have to do with humor? Very little. Thackeray was a satirist of sorts, of the polite variety. Swift’s vision reduces the world – especially the social world – to essentials. He has no interest in flattering us, and how we could use him today. Thackeray continues:

“. . . because he chisels his savage indignation on his tombstone, as if to perpetuate his protest against being born of our race—the suffering, the weak, the erring, the wicked, if you will, but still the friendly, the loving children of God our Father; it is because, as I read through Swift’s dark volumes, I never find the aspect of nature seems to delight him, the smiles of children to please him, the sight of wedded love to soothe him. I do not remember in any line of his writing a passing allusion to a natural scene of beauty.”

Earlier in English Humorists, Thackeray condemns in Sterne the quality that is his own gravest fault – sentimentality. He looks to Swift for post-Romantic qualities that would never interest the Irishman. Take Swift’s “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General” – that is, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, whom Swift is credited with helping bring down. Marlborough was a Whig, Swift a Tory. He dismissed the general as a war-profiteer. In Journal to Stella, Swift wrote of him: “I confess my belief that he has not one good quality in the world beside that of a general, and even that I have heard denied by several great soldiers.” Here’s the conclusion to “Satirical Elegy”:

Come hither, all ye empty things,

Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings;

Who float upon the tide of state,

Come hither, and behold your fate.

Let pride be taught by this rebuke,

How very mean a thing’s a Duke;

From all his ill-got honours flung,

Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.”