Dean Swift: The Politics of Satire
A Symposium on Jonathan Swift and
the Politics in his Age
Conducted at The Deanery of St.
Patrick's, Upper Kevin Street, Dublin
8, on 18 October 2003, with
Dr Robert Mahony in the Chair
'Hand in hand to posterity'?
Reading politics in Swift and Pope
Valerie Rumbold, University
of Birmingham
[Valerie Rumbold is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University
of Birmingham, the author of Women's
Place in Pope's World (Cambridge,
1989) and numerous articles on Pope, and editor of Pope's Dunciad in
the Longman Annotated Texts series (1999). She is currently preparing the
volume of Swift's Parodies and Related Works for the Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, forthcoming later this decade
from Cambridge University Press.]
In February 1727, reporting progress in the printing of their joint Miscellanies,
Pope tells Swift that he hopes they will go 'hand in hand to posterity . . .
diverting others just as we diverted ourselves' (Corr., II, 426). Both had,
after all, been members, along with Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell and Queen Anne's
minister Lord Oxford, of the Scriblerus Club as it had flourished in 1713-14.
After the death of Queen Anne in 1714 had put the Tories out of office, the
incoming Hanoverian regime was to be in the hands of the Whig Sir Robert
Walpole for most of the next forty years; and from the vantage point of this
long Walpolean tyranny (as both Swift and Pope perceived it), these Scriblerian
meetings would be halcyon days to look back on. Hobnobbing with the principal
ministers of state as they negotiated an end to the Whig-supported War of the
Spanish Succession, and looking to a renewal of cultural prospects under a
gratified Queen Anne, Pope and Swift could in these years, as never since,
dedicate their writing to an ongoing, positive assertion of traditional
political and cultural values. But the Queen died, the ministers were
prosecuted, Swift went to Ireland,
and the two friends seldom met again.
In politics, they continued to warm to the same themes and revere the same
heroes, notably Oxford and Bolingbroke, the late Queen's ministers, and
Bishop Atterbury, now all tainted by accusations of Jacobitism. Pope
applauded Swift's defeat of Wood's coinage, which both saw as yet another
corrupt piece of Hanoverian wheeling and dealing; and he did so in the
provocative context of an address to the very king whose mistress had
connived at the scheme in the first place:
Let Ireland tell, how Wit upheld her cause,
Her Trade supported, and supply'd her Laws;
And leave on SWIFT this grateful verse ingrav'd,
The Rights a Court attack'd, a Poet sav'd.
(Epistle to Augustus, lines 221-4)
When Pope elaborated the cumulative project of his own career, the Dunciad,
into its three- and four-book forms, from 1729 onwards, it was to Swift that
he dedicated it, cheering his friend with the thought that there is at least
one English monopoly that benefits the Irish: England has such a monopoly on
stupidity that there's none left over for Ireland (Dunciad in Four Books,
I. 19-28).
Yet despite all this, the political commitments of the two friends have typically
been very differently received by later readers; and in taking up today's
topic of Swift and radicalism, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on why that
might be.
'Radical' as a political term emerges only in the late eighteenth century
to refer to an ideology which, while in some respects it resembled the hatred
of empire and oppression that had animated Swift, stood in a clear line of
descent from the Whig ideology that Swift and Pope both loathed. Swift snipes
at this outlook not just in overtly political works like Modest Proposal
but also in satires like Genteel and Ingenious Conversation that, once
the connotations of party are left behind, may look like fairly trivial
mockery of contemporary taste and manners. To say, therefore, that Swift appeals
to radicals, is to build in a rather large historical irony. The irony, and
the gap in perception it represents, becomes negotiable mainly because the
political configurations in which Swift's (and Pope's) texts originally made
sense had effectively ceased to be meaningful by the middle of the eighteenth
century.
In 1742, while both were in fact still alive, Sir Robert Walpole finally
left office, and the long stand-off between government and opposition ended
in a scramble for power from which the leaders of the Patriot opposition
emerged with principles in tatters. Swift and Pope turned out to have spent
their prime in addressing political values and identities that readers would
very soon find it difficult, pointless, and in some cases counterproductive
to reconstruct. As England
in the second half of the eighteenth century moved on to face an American
War, the French Revolution, and the movement to abolish slavery, reviving the
party politics of the age of Walpole
in all its antagonistic detail became less and less attractive.
In Pope's case, the blurring of political contexts was arguably hastened
by his appointed editor, William Warburton, a clergyman of humble origins
with a career to make, who had in Pope's last years encouraged him towards
high-minded ethical and religious conservatism rather than Tory or Patriot
partisanship. Warburton's orthodox zeal and political caution no doubt helped
him rise to become a bishop; but it decisively alienated, for example, the
radical satirist Charles Churchill, for whom Pope seems to have been
decisively smeared by association. Swift's works arguably benefited from
lacking such a doorkeeper. His politics too had become difficult to grasp
once their original context had disappeared, but with the crucial difference,
as Professor Mahony has pointed out, that 'Swift grew the more useful as the
passage of time eroded historical anomalies to fit the simpler standard of
British-Irish antagonisms characteristic of nineteenth-century nationalism,
and seemed thereby to resolve his own inconsistencies' (xv).
Just how dangerous it might be to Swift's reputation to have the original
context of his politics put back on the agenda was illustrated in 1816 by the
response of the Whig reviewer Francis Jeffrey to Walter Scott's edition of
Swift. For Jeffrey, Swift is damned as a Tory, and a venal one at that:
nothing about him can serve as any kind of inspiration to progressive
thought. As for the Drapier: 'His Irish politics may all be referred to one
principle – a desire to insult and embarrass the government by which he was
neglected, and with which he despaired of being reconciled' (22). Moreover,
'every body is now satisfied of the perfect harmlessness, and indeed of the
great utility, of Wood's scheme for a new copper coinage' (23). Perhaps most
damagingly, Jeffrey points out that by the standard of early C19 Whigs, Swift
was indifferent to Ireland's
greatest problem: 'to the last we hear nothing of its radical grievance, the
oppression of its Catholic population' (22). Jeffrey's fervour for the Whig
tradition casts Swift into the outer darkness of self-interested Tory
bigotry.
William Hazlitt, a man of more radical views than Jeffrey, but an admirer
of Swift, sees that Swift can only be recuperated for progressive readers by
minimising the significance of his politics:
I do not, therefore, agree with the estimate of Swift's moral or
intellectual c\haracter, given by an eminent critic, who does not seem to
have forgotten the party politics of Swift. I do not carry my political resentments
so far back: I can at this time of day forgive Swift for having been a Tory.
I feel little disturbance (whatever I may think of them) at his political
sentiments, which died with him, considering how much else he has left behind
him of a more solid and imperishable nature! (267-8)
In the case of Pope, there was an additional problem, namely a huge shift
in poetic taste. Half a century on, Pope seems to Hazlitt an artificial and
limited poet. Notably, Hazlitt makes no appeal to Pope's politics to revive
the passion with which his work had been consumed within its own context of
controversy. He prefers to read even his most politicised passages in terms
of a lofty moralism: 'The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope,
is the prophetical conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires' (235). He
quotes with admiration Pope's injunction to 'Disdain whatever Cornbury
disdains', commenting 'One would think (though there is no knowing) that a
descendant of this nobleman, if there be such a person living, could hardly
be capable of a mean or paltry action'. Thus distinctive connotations of
Cornbury's career in a rhetoric of Patriot virtue are entirely lost. Even
Byron, a more openly subversive figure and one unusual in his passionate
advocacy of Pope, pitches his claim at a level of ethics so general as to
transcend even nationality: 'He is the moral poet of all Civilization – and
as such let us hope that he will one day be the National poet of Mankind'
(Nicholson, 150-51). As Swift's example showed, resuscitating the Toryism of
dead Tories was no way to commend their work to progressive taste.
Once Swift and Pope had been surgically separated from the Whig/Tory
matrix of their time, Swift proved better equipped to survive the operation
than Pope. While Pope had written mainly in heroic couplets, a form that fell
into relative disfavour from the mid century, Gulliver became a
standard work, and would, in time, qualify Swift to be read as more a
novelist than a satirist. This is, of course, a reading of Gulliver
that rests on considerable anachronisms; and one of the distinctive
contributions made by Professor Donoghue's 1969 Jonathan Swift: A Critical
Introduction is the critical pressure it applies to the by then well
established assumption that Gulliver was to be read as a novel, particularly
as a novel as conceived in the wake of Henry James. On the other hand, to be
read as a novelist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was arguably the
best thing that could have happened to Swift, because it kept him, however
oddly, on the right side of a hierarchy of genre that was shifting decisively
in favour of prose fiction.
Finally, we should perhaps ask whether, intrinsically as opposed to
occasionally, Swift's work really does constitute an exemplar of anti-establishment
satire. In Swift's later life the establishment was Whig, and he opposed it.
It is potentially inspiring to deduce from this that he was essentially,
rather than accidentally, an anti-establishment writer. This makes him easy
for later opponents of established power to appropriate. To insist, on the
contrary, that Swift's opposition to Walpole's
Whig regime was based on specific beliefs and commitments as they were
uniquely inflected in the England
and Ireland
of his time may seem unhelpful and even dog-in-the-mangerish.
On the other hand, the inspiration that might be drawn from Swift is not
necessarily or even obviously liberal and progressive. There is plenty in
Swift, after all, to comfort those who believe that most of the trouble in life
is caused by new-fangled nonsense. A.L.Rowse's Jonathan Swift: Major
Prophet, its universalising moral agenda blazoned boldly in its subtitle,
was published in 1975: on the title-page of the Birmingham University Library
copy a student has ringed the date and written, 'this book should have stayed
there' -- in the context of the present discussion a somewhat plaintive
appeal to the historical particularity from which Rowse works to liberate his
subject for service in the present.
Although Rowse identifies Swift as a Whig and does describe aspects of
early C18th politics, he proclaims at an early stage, without qualification
or nuance, the universal applicability of the principles that Swift inherited
from his royalist grandfather, commenting 'All his life Swift hated fanatics
and doctrinaires and illusionists – quite rightly, for the troubles they
bring down on sensible people' (10). Later he declares, 'Swift was no great
favourite with Victorians, and never with liberals, with their childish
illusions – but we have contemporary Ireland
in ferment once more, like him, to enlighten us' (32-3). He cites Swift's
evocation of what he calls 'the authentic Puritan twang, a nasal whine, which
passed over with the elect into New England'; and he adds: 'Bad as it is
today to live in a society of Leftist liberal cant – about the educability of
everybody, and everybody being not only equal but the same, and what not – it
must have been appalling to live in the England of the Civil War and
Commonwealth, when these hypocrites were on top' (33-4).
Rowse's bugbears of the 1970s are thus uncritically identified with their
remote ideological ancestors: Swift's original contexts are acknowledged in
name only, with no emotional distance left in which his texts' remoteness from
what we can readily identify with might come into focus. In comparison with
progressive readings of Swift, however, with their vested interests in seeing
him as defender of the weak, exposer of corruption, prophet against empire,
even proto-feminist, this unashamedly conservative approach has at least one
merit: it brings us sharp up against much that is harsh in Swift. The narrow
and doctrinaire exclusiveness of much of his political and religious writing,
for instance, is problematic if we want to make Swift a liberal: it is all
grist to the mill if our agenda is to maintain distinctions and hierarchies,
to insist on discipline. Yet, like readings that make Swift a patriot or a
radical, those that make him a conservative disciplinarian also require a degree
of selectivity and of special pleading to bring him round to their agenda.
Trying to co-opt Swift's fascinating exasperations for the agendas of a later
age has proved an activity as questionable as it is, apparently,
irresistible.
Works Cited
Donoghue, Dennis, Jonathan Swift: A Critical
Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)
Jeffrey, Francis, review of Walter Scott's edition of Swift, Edinburgh
Review 27, no. 53 (September 1816), 1-58
Laver, James, ed., Poems of Charles Churchill, 2 vols. in one (London,
Methuen, 1970; reprint of New York: Barnes and Noble, 1933)
Mahony, Robert, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1995)
Nicholson, Andrew, ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
Rowse, A.L., Jonathan Swift: Major Prophet (London: Thames and Hudson,
1975)
Wu, Duncan, ed., The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, 9 vols (London:
Pickering and Chatto, 1998) (Lectures on the English Poets in Vol. 2)
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