'The Dean Had Too Much Satyr in His Vein'

 “Vain humankind! Fantastic race! / Thy various follies who can trace?”

Given his temperament, Jonathan Swift could never have run out of things to write about. If not England’s mistreatment of his native Ireland, he always had what Gibbon called “the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” The couplet above -- think of it as Swift Lite -- is from his longest and one of his finest poems, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (written 1731-32, published 1739). The poem is preceded by a La Rochefoucauld Maxim in Swift’s translation:  

 

“In the Adversity of our best Friends, we find something that doth not displease us.”

 

A species within the genus Schadenfreude: “. . . when you sink, I seem the higher.” All of us can be petty, envious and nasty, whether broadcasting it or keeping it to ourselves. Some make a career of it. It comes out as gossip, backstabbing or in active revenge-fueled plotting. This sort of thing I try to keep to myself. I make a learned-the-hard-way distinction between internal fulmination and its external expression, though it doesn’t stop me from secretly envying those without such scruples.

 

Swift’s poem is a slippery thing, its tone and points of view forever shifting. Is he extolling himself at the expense of others in his faux-post mortem or is he indicted along with the rest of us? Parts of “Verses” are written in the third person, which gives him distance. The narrator, who is and is not Swift, works a zoom lens, enlarging and diminishing his focus. Swift is aware that excessive self-castigation can be as prideful as boasting of moral superiority. Remember what Boswell reports Dr. Johnson saying: “All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the reproach of falsehood.” Near the poem’s conclusion, see what the third person gives him the freedom to say:

 

“Perhaps I may allow, the Dean

Had too much Satyr in his Vein;

And seem’d determin’d not to starve it,

Because no Age could more deserve it.

Yet, Malice never was his Aim;

He lash’d the Vice but spar’d the Name.

No Individual could resent,

Where Thousands equally were meant.

His Satyr points at no Defect,

But what all Mortals may correct;

For he abhorr’d that senseless Tribe,

Who call it Humour when they jibe:

He spar’d a Hump or crooked Nose,

Whose Owners set not up for Beaux.

True genuine Dulness mov’d his Pity,

Unless it offer’d to be witty.

Those, who their Ignorance confess’d,

He ne’er offended with a Jest;

But laugh’d to hear an Idiot quote,

A Verse from Horace, learn’d by Rote.”

 

Swift died for real on this date, October 19, in 1745 at age seventy-seven.