The Sketcher.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 243, 15 July 1876, Page 5

The Sketcher.

FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT. (From the Pall Mall Gazette.) Mr. Forster was so long known to be engaged on a biography of Swift that high expectations were formed respecting it, and so far these have certainly not been disappointed. It is impossible to read this volume without admiring the industry with which the author has amassed materials, and his skill in giving them effective shape. Here and there, indeed, as in his previous writings, he is somewhat diffuse, as if he did not believe his points could be seen unless he made them over and over again. There is, however, this to be said, that there was a vast mass of misconception to clear away, and that Mr. Forster's conclusions are often so new that it might seem necessary to bring out with more than usual distinctness each link in the evidence. There is, perhaps, no writer of equal mai"k about whom so many wrong impressions have hitherto prevailed as about Swift. These are partly due to his peculiar way of putting the least favorable construction on his own actions, but much more to the bungling of his early biographers. It was unlucky that the first attempts to interpret so original and complex a nature should have been made by such men as Lord Orrery and Mr. Deane Swift, who were about as capable of understanding him as of discovering the law of gravitation. Johnson might have made valuable contributions to our knowledge, but he was not sufficiently attracted by the sixbject to take the necessary pains ; and Scott, although far nearer the truth than his predecessors, was too much occupied with other work to enter upon a series of elaborats researches. It has thus happened that the mis-statements made soon after Swift's death have been repeated by one writer after another, until a theory of his character has been accepted curiously at variance with the facts. Mr. Forster deserves gratitude for having undertaken to deal afresh, and in earnest, with the whole problem ; and if the remaining volumes are on a level with that now published, we shall at last have a record of Swift's career not unworthy of his fame as one of the greatest of English humorists. The first exaggeration of importance relates to his life at the university, and for this he is himself responsible. "By the ill-treatment of his nearest relations," he says in his fragment of autobiography, "he was so discouraged and sunk in his spirits that he too much neglected his academic studies, for some parts of which he had no great relish by nature, and turned

himself to reading history and poetry, so that when the time came for taking his degree of bachelor of arts, although he had lived with great regularity and due observance of the statutes, he was stopped of his degree for dmlness and insufficiency ; and at last hardly admitted, in a manner little to his credit, which is called in that college specialis gratia, on the 15th February, 1865, with four more on the same footing." Mr. Forster has accidentally obtained possession of one of the rolls of Trinity College, containing the result of the quarterly examination which preceded the bachelor's degree of February, 1685 ; and from this it appears that Swift, if not a brilliant student, was_ fairly diligent, and ranked among the best of his contenrporaries. He neglected philosophy and theology, but in classics stood well. As for the specialis gratia, it did not necessarily imply disgrace, and could have had no such meaning in his case. Why he should have so poor account of himself it is hard to determine. We can hardly suppose, with Mr. Forster, that he wished by such means to throw discredit on Trinity College. It is more probable that he wrote in a moment of depression, and was at any rate not unwilling to make the description of his youth a striking contrast to his later eminence. Much more serious are the misrepresentations connected with his two periods of residence at Moor Park, the first of which began almost immediately after he left college. Macaulay speaks of him as "an eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman, who had narrowly escaped plucking at Dublin," and who " attended Sir William (Temple) as an amanuensis for board and £2O a year, dined at the second table, wrote bad verse in praise of his employer, and made love to a very pretty dark-eyed young girl, who waited on Lady Giffard." "A sharp word or a cold look of the master" is said to have made "the servant miserable during several days," while " the language which he was in the habit of holding to his patron, as far as we can judge from the specimens which still remain, was that of a lacquey, or rather of a beggar." His " tameness," " was merely the tameness with which a tiger, caught, caged, and starved submits to the keeper who brings him food." Macaulay never wrote more reckless sentences, for they rest on grounds that ought not to have satisfied the most superficfal investigator. It is true, as Swift reminds Stella in one of his letters, that Sir William Temple would sometimes " cold and out of humor for two or three days," and then Swift " used to suspect a hundred reasons." But on the whole their relations were perfectly friendly and pleasant. Swift acted as Temple's private secretary, and "there was," says. Mr. Forster, " just so much equality "of intercourse as made any interruption to it sensitively watched and felt. A man such as Macaulay represents would not have been sent to the King on an important mission; he would not have said, on Temple's death, that with him died "all that was good and amiable among men ;" nor would he afterwards have declared of Moor Park that " no time would make him forget it and love it less." At Moor Park the "Battle of the Books" and the "Tale of a Tub" were written; and it may safely be asserted that these masterpieces could not have been produced unless under conditions favorable to the free play of thought and humor. As for "the language of a lacquey, or rather of a beggar," that existed only in Maca,ulay's imagination. The reference is to a letter written by Swift to Temple after his first residence at Moor Park, when he had gone to Ireland to be ordained. The Archbishop of Dublin required a certificate of behavior during his absence from Ireland; and only a testimonial from Temple was considered adequate. Unfortunately Swift had quarrelled with his kinsman, for the latter could ill spare his services, and had been unwilling to part with him. In these circumstance's it was natural that a proud man sho\ild hesitate to ask a favor; but when he persuaded himself to do so, the he used were not more submissive than might be adopted with honor. A more formidable charge might be brought against him on the ground of his motives for becoming a clergyman. These were certainly not very lofty, although it is noteworthy that he did not form a final resolution until "Sir William Temple, then being Master of the Bolls in Ireland, offered him an employ of about £l2O a year in that office." " Whereupon," we are informed in the autobiography, "Mr. Swift told him that since he had now an opportunity of living without being driven into the church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to Ireland and take holy orders. He has often been accused of insincerity in his professed adherence to the faith of the Church of England ; but, although he shocks the proprieties often enough in his treatment of theological subjects, his writings contain innumerable proofs that he had no sympathy with the scepticism of his day. For its more shallow and noisy forms, his "Argument to prove the Inconvenience of abolishing Christianity," displays the keenest contempt. The "pretty, dark-eyed young girl who waited on Lady Giffard" was of course Esther Johnson. Her mother was Lady Giffard's companion ; but she herself waited on no one, and Macaulay ought scarcely to have heightened the effect of his picture by this small touch. Swift's relation to Esther—or, as she will always be better known, Stella—is one of the most perplexing problems of his life, and we are not quite sure that Mr. Forster has satisfactorily solved it. He has, however, placed it in a clearer light than any previous writer, and it is possible that when we have the whole story before us difficulties which at present suggest themselves may vanish. If Swift really "made love" to her at Moor Park, he cannot have done so during his first residence, for when he began his second she was only fifteen years old. She was a child of seven when he first knew her, and even then she had a singular fascination for him. " I had/' he says, " some share in her education, by directing what books she shoxdd read, and perpetu-

ally instructing her in the principles of honor and virtue, from which she never swerved in any one action or moment of her life." She evidently deserved the praises he lavished on her, for, in addition to her love and faithfulness, she was free from that dread of doing anything uncommon which exercises so powerful an influence over the lives of most women. She did not hesitate, at Swift's advice, to go ■with her friend Mrs. Dingley to Ireland, and to lh r e in his lodgings, or vicarage, in his absence, and in rooms near him when he was at home. People formed their own opinions on this eccentric conduct; but so long as she was conscious of no wrong, she seems to have been indifferent to the harsh judgment of her critics. That she passionately loved Swift there can, we think, be no doubt, yet Mr. Forster believes she must have been aware from the beginning that marriage was not to be thought of. This may appear incredible, but the Tisdall correspondence certainly supports the theory. While Esther was in Ireland, Tisdall paid his addresses to her, and wrote to Swift on the subject. The latter was not favorable to the marriage, but with Esther's knowledge he distinctly stated that his inclination could be no bar to Tisdall's. " Nor shall any consideration of my own misfortune of losing so good a friend and companion as her, prevail on me against her interest and settlement in the world, since it is held so necessary and convenient a thing for ladies to marry, and that time takes off from the lustre of virgins in all other eyes but mine." Mr. Forster represents Swift as acting the part of a father rather than that of a lover, but few who read the " Journal to Stella" will believe that his feeling was purely of the paternal kind. That extraordinaiy series of letters can now for the first time be read as Swift wrote them. The " little language" is given unchanged, and a key is provided for most of the curious symbols in -which they abound. It must be a very unsympathetic person indeed who can read them without being touched when he remembers that the writer has the reputation of being the most morose and sorrowful of men. In these letters the fiercest satirist of his age not only unbends and throws aside useless forms, but expresses his playfulness and tenderness in the broken words of a child. " Do you know what," he tells his correspondent, "when I am. writing in our language I make up my mouth just as if I were speaking it. I caught myself at it just now." Mr. Forster is clearly right when he urges that this peculiar mode of speech was a survival from the days when Swift imitated Esther's way of talking. Even as the " Jotirnal " has hitherto been printed, it ought to have raised a suspicion that the last word was not said when the terrible Dean was described as a melancholy misanthrope ; now it should be obvious' to every one that beneath the hard crust of his nature there were elements of passion deeper and more genuine than in any other prominent man of that cold and selfish epoch. The greatest of the remaining difficulties in the period covered by this volume is connected ■with the transfer of Swift's services from the Whig to the Tory party. Jeffrey called this the act of " an apostate in politics ;" and even if a less violent phrase is used, it would be idle to pretend that Swift was actuated solely by public motives. The Whigs had neglected him, and their ingratitude had unquestionably much to do with his readiness in accepting the overtures of Harley and St. John. Mr. Forster has, however, successfully shown that that he at no time considered party distinctions of much importance, and that when he joined the Tories the Toryism he expounded differed little from moderate Whiggism. Only gradually, as issues became more distinct, did he take a more decided position, and return blow for blow. When the volume closes, he is still—at the age of forty-four—writing the Examiner papers with tolerable calmness, although he is already recognised as a Tory chief, and admitted, practically, as a Minister without office to the Cabinet dinner. Perhaps Mr. Forster is hardly severe enough on Swift for the spirit displayed by him in his dealings with the great people with whom he was thus associated. Swift meant his brusqueness to be taken as proof that he was as good as the best : but surely it was a symptom of uneasy selfconsciousness which is anything but a token of strength. It is not only here that Mr. Forster's enthusiasnxinterferes with his impartiality. While Swift, as* a young man, used to visit his mother at Leicester once a year he travelled on foot, and " seeing written over a door ' lodgings for a penny,' he would hire a bed, giving additional sixpence for clean sheets." In explanation of this custom the following sentence is quoted from Dr. Johnson :—"This practice Lord Orrery imputes to his innate love of grossness and vulgarity ; some may ascribe it to his desire of surveying human life through all its varieties." The impression is conveyed that Dr. Johnson thought the choice of a penny lodging indicative of fine qualities ; but the honest Doctor added a clause which Mr. Forster suppresses :—"And others, perhaps with equal probability, to a passion which seems to have been deeply fixed in his heart—the love of a shilling." MODERN MATERIALISM. (From the Canadian Monildy.) The charm of science to the imagination and its gain to life may be almost measured by the number of scattered facts which its analysis can bring inio a common formula. The very sand-grains and raindrops seem to lose in multitude, when the morphological agencies are understood which crystallise and mould them. The greatness of Newton's law lies in the countless host of movements which it swept from all visible space into one sentence and one thought. No sooner does Darwin supply a verified conception which construes the endless differences of organic kinds into a continuous process, than the very relief which he gives to the mind serves, with others if not with himself, as an equivalent to so much evidence. The acoustic reduction of sounds, in their immense variety, to the length, the breadth, and the

form of a wave, is welcomed as a happy discovery from a similar love of rational unity. To simplify is the essence of all scientific explanation. If it does not gain this end, it fails to explain. Its speculative ideal is still, as of old, to reach some monistic principle whence all may flow; and in this interest it is, especially to get rid of dualism by dissolving any partnership with mind, that materialism continues to recommend its claims. Does it really bring in our day the simplification at whicli it aims? Under the eye of modern science matter, pursued into its last haunts, no longer presents itself as one undivided stuff, which can be treated as a continuous substratum absorbent of all number and distinction; but as an infinitude of discrete atoms, each of which might be though all the rest were gone. The conception of them, when pushed to its hypothetical extreme, brings them no nearer to unity than homogeneity—an attribute which itself implies that they are separate and comparable members of a genus. And what is the result of comparing them ? They " are conformed," we are assured, " to a constant type with a precision which is not to be found in tile sensible pro perties of the bodies which they constitute. In the first place, the mass of each individual, and all its other properties, are absolutely unalterable. In the second place, the properties of all of the same kind are absolutely identical. Here, therefore, we have an infinite assemblage of phenomena of resemblance. But further, these atoms, besides the internal vibration of each, are agitated by movements carrying them in all directions, now along free paths, and now into collisions. Here, therefore, we have phenomena of difference in endless variety. And so it comes to this, that our unitary datum breaks up into a genus of innumerable contents, and its individuals are affected both with ideally perfect correspondences and with numerous contrasts of movement. What intellect can pause and compose itself to rest in this vast and restless crowdof assumptions ? Who can restrain the ulterior question —whence, then, these myriad types of the same letter, imprinted on the earth, the sun, the stars, as if the very mould used here had been lent to Sirius and passed on through the constellations. E very where else the likeness of individual things, especially within the same "species"—of daisy to daisy, of bee to bee—have awakened wonder and stimulated thought to plant them in some uniting relation °to a cause beyond themselves ; and not till the common parentage refers them to the same matrix of nature does the questioning about them subside. They quietly settle as derivative where they never be accepted as original. Some chemists think, as Mr. Herbert Spencer reminds us, that in the hydrogen atom we have the ultimate simple unit. By means of the spectroscope, samples of it, and of its internal vibrations, may be brought from Sirius and Aldebaran —distances so great that light itself needs twenty-two years to cross the lesser of them—into exact comparison with our terrestrial specimens;, and were their places changed there would be nothing to betray the secret. So long as no a priori necessity is shown for their quantity of matter being just what it is, and always the same at incommunicable distances, or for their elasticity and time of pulsation having the same measure through myriads of instances, they remain unlinked and separate startingpoints ; and if they explain a finite number of resemblances and differences, it is only by assuming an infinite. ICONOCLASTS. (From the Liberal Review.) The present age is sceptical. Many men profess to believe very little, and a still larger number believe less even than they profess. Faiths and institutions are crumbling away, and new ones are not rising in their places. Life is growing severely practical; sentiment is being put under a ban; and grim logic, as opposed to instinct and faith, seems to be hra fair way of becoming omnipotent with a certain class of persons. If things continue to go on as they are now going it is not improbable that ere long the world will wake up to find that it is peopled by a number of philosophers who, having explained away everything winch has once been believed in, look around in vain for fresh foes to conquer. Unfortunately, however, it is easier to show the fallacy of a system of theology than to found one, and far less difficult to assail a plan of government than to contrive the same. Thus, the iconoclast has an easy, if not a congenial task. There never has yet existed anything which has not had weak points at which vicious and unscrupulous critics might attack it. Yon may show in five minutes where a work of art, which it has taken months, perhaps years, to execute, is at fault ; and in a day or two a few men might destroy St. Paul's Cathedral or any other noble building the erection of which occupied a great spaGe of time. But, though the iconoclast finds his work rendered simple, it is questionable whether there is much ground for satisfaction because things are as they are. It must be remembered that the iconoclast, pure and simple, is drawn from what is essentially a reckless class. It may be an intellectual one, but if it be, the fact remains that its members are human beings who are more or less at war with themselves and the existing order of things. Their mental position is such that they cannot accept anything on trust ; and they are moved to what is something very much like indignation when they see others swallowing and apparently deriving benefit from what their gorge rises against. Thus they are led—no doubt they are actuated by a strong desire to justify themselves —to wage a deadly war with what they are pleased to describe as false superstitions and theories. As what they attack seems, bit by bit, to dwindle away like a summer's morning mist, they discern proof that, however unfortunate may be their position, however painful their doubts, they are, at any rate, in the right. On the other hand, when they see great and confident masses arrayed against them, even though they cannot accept what is Gospel to their oppon-

ents, they become inspired at odd times with unpleasant fears begat by the thought that it is just possible that they are making some gigantic blunder, and that what they persistently deride may, after all, be right. Numbers inspire confidence in the breast of the sceptic quite as much as they do in that of the believer ; and it is, probably, because this is so that thinkers — especially those whose minds are of a theological and an auti-thr.ological bent—invariably use their utmost efforts to induce the multitude to flock around their standards. It may be said that the iconoclast, pure and simple, _ can have no particular object to do battle for, inasmuch as he is constantly shifting from course to course, according to the particular direction in whicli his mind becomes unsettled. But it should be remembered that even he has his ideal. He will tell you, probably, that he is working for the regeneration of the human race and the approach of that time, which is looming in the distance, when it will be a grand thing to be a man. The vagueness that there is about his aims does not detract from what is to him their inestimable worth, and it is questionable whether he ever sees their weak points, so earnestly is he engaged in exposing those of other people's theories. Perhaps, indeed, it would be correct to say that he often works without any particular object in view over and above that of bringing persons down—he could probably say up—to the platform upon which he stands. Hi 3 motive we have indicated, but we ought, perhaps, to addthat his hatred of intellectual chains, which other men meekly wear, amounts to a passion. Of course it is the function of the iconoclast to unsettle. He can see no good in anything that exists. Pessimism appears to be his creed. It is true that Hume was a sceptic in religion and a Tory .in politics, but he was an exception to what appears to be the rule. Noav most men who set up as " religious " reformers, in the sense of desiring to reform religion out of the world and substitute for it a sort of modification of the Epicurean theory, are also desperate radicals. Indeed, religious unbelief and the lower forms of Radicalism seem to go hand in hand.. This would, not perhaps, matter much if those who rushed into the two extremes were the possessors of well-balanced minds. But too frequently they are not. The victims of poverty, of imperfect education, and of fair intellectual calibre, they drink in the outpourings of their representative men with quite as much greediness as less "advanced" people receive their inspiration. Then,-not having the politeness, the prudence, and the ready wit of their pet Gamaliels, they go about making coarse and brutal attacks upon what they really do not understand and cannot appreciate, and propounding absurd schemes in the most' clumsy manner. No doubt, their earnestness is genuine after a fashion, but it is questionable whether it would satisfactorily stand an analysis as to how much of it has its origin in devotion to high principles and how much of it is due to mere unreasoning passion, such as a bull feels when he is brought face to face with another bull. At any rate, they would do well to remember that things which are held to be sacred by many people ought to be treated tenderly, and that ridicule is a bad weapon to employ in theological warfare. Iconoclasts are hardly used. Often they are misunderstood, and more often they are provoked. Many pious men seem to imagine that they are men without consciences and principles. Such an idea is simply absurd, and the action which is often based upon it is contemptible. It may not he easy to defend some of the excesses into which iconoclasts rush, and the bona fides of a proportion of them may be questioned. But the fact that they openly decline to believe in what has not yet been proved ought not to be permitted to weigh against them, nor, because they desire to do what they conceive to be the best for the human race in an unpopular way —unpopular at least so far as respectability is concerned—should they incur censure. A man is not master of his own thoughts, and it may safely be said that an honest sceptic is preferable to an unthinking bigot, who can show no reason for the faith that he alleges is in him. Thus, while iconoclasts have much to learn, and deserve, in many respects, to meet with a sturdy opposition, many of their self-satisfied foes have even more to master and are as deserving of one's hostility. While the one party may be urged to refrain from destroying merely for the sake of destroying, the other party may be persuaded to abstain from preserving merely for the sake of preserving.