Johnson: Life of Swift

Life of Swift
Samuel Johnson
(Bigelow, Smith & Co, 1929) [c.1780]
50 p.

For me the appeal of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets is more Johnson than the poets. That said, Jonathan Swift was a man worthy of this great moralist’s attention. His Life begins with a chronological overview of the main events of Swift’s life and of his principle literary works, and then concludes with an appraisal of his personality and literary merits.

Swift was born in Ireland, and lived most of his life there, with occasional residence in England. He was a late bloomer; his first major literary work (“Dissensions in Athens and Rome”, now mostly forgotten) was not published until he was in his mid-30s. He earned his reputation as a critic and satirist, and became a sort of public figure without ever holding an official public office. Indeed, he entered into the life of a clergyman to earn his daily bread — something that I knew, but had forgotten, and was surprised to learn again. He eventually became the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, a church of the Anglican-affiliated Church of Ireland, and “much against his will commenced Irishman for life”.

Although he had preferred to be in England than Ireland, he became a friend and champion of the Irish people against the English, putting his wit and his influence to work on their behalf. The famous essay “A Modest Proposal” (which Johnson does not mention) is an example of his method. For this advocacy he was widely admired by the Irish.

Swift’s was a difficult personality. Johnson describes him in this way:

He is querulous and fastidious, arrogant and malignant; he scarcely speaks of himself but with indignant lamentations, or of others but with insolent superiority when he is gay, and with angry contempt when he is gloomy.

And, in another place:

His asperity continually increasing, condemned him to solitude; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity.

He was a man whom few dared to cross, possessed of “a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety”. He was not given to laughter, but of course not entirely without humour; his Saharan-grade dry wit served his satirical talents. He was a religious man but he hid his devotions from the view even of his friends. He had a “dread of hypocrisy. Instead of wishing to seem better, he delighted in seeming worse than he was.” He carried on for many years an ambiguous relationship with a woman much his junior, Esther Johnson, whom some believed he had secretly married — Johnson certainly believed it. Upon his death he was buried beside her in his cathedral.

When we think of Swift, we probably think first of either “A Modest Proposal” or Gulliver’s Travels, the two works on which his fame largely rests. About Gulliver Johnson writes that

it was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. Criticism was for a while lost in wonder; no rules of judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity.

He does not specify how it was read by the illiterate, but the point is clear: it was a popular success that defied categorization. It is notable that in our time it is often classified as a children’s book, an indication that we still don’t really know what to make of it. In Swift’s poetry Johnson judges that “there is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers” — perhaps a surprising judgment given that we are here reading from the Lives of the Poets, but so be it. I myself read a volume of Swift’s poetry a few years ago and I agree with Johnson. (Woe betide him who does not!)

For Johnson, Swift is principally admirable for his use of satire in just causes — he “showed that wit, confederated with truth, had such force as authority was unable to resist” — and for the distinctiveness of his literary voice, for

perhaps no writer can easily be found that has borrowed so little, or that, in all his excellences and all his defects, has so well maintained his claim to be considered as original.

**

As I said above, much of the appeal of reading Johnson comes from reading Johnson, whose pen drips aphorisms and pithy judgments as readily as trees drop leaves in an autumn wind. Here is a sampling:

[On criticism of public figures]
Where a wide system of conduct, and the whole of a public character, is laid open to inquiry, the accuser, having the choice of facts, must be very unskilful if he does not prevail.

[On irresolution]
He that knows not whither to go, is in no haste to move.

[On flattery]
He that is much flattered soon learns to flatter himself.

[On peculiar habits]
…singularity, as it implies a contempt of the general practice, is a kind of defiance which justly provokes the hostility of ridicule; he, therefore, who indulges peculiar habits, is worse than others, if he be not better.

[On fruit]
Almost everybody eats as much fruit as he can get, without any great inconvenience.

Big Apple music

Last week we were in New York City for a few days, and while there were able to hear New York Polyphony in concert. This is an ensemble I’ve admired for years, and it was good fortune that they happened to be singing in their hometown during our brief sojourn in the city. We made the trek up to the 92nd St Y to hear them.

They normally pivot between Renaissance and modern music, but on this night we heard only one piece from the sixteenth century — a chanson of Lassus — with most of the programme devoted to nineteenth and twentieth century repertoire: part-songs of Schubert up through part-songs of Parry, with a few modern pieces to add spice. Of the latter, my favourites were Ivan Moody’s challenging settings of Canticum Canticorum, which called for, and received, impeccable tuning and finely controlled ensemble singing. But then we’d not have expected anything less from New York Polyphony. It was a wonderful night of music.

Here is one of the pieces they sang at the show: Joseph Barnby’s Sweet and low.

Ratzinger: In the Beginning

In the Beginning
A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
(Eerdmans, 1986)
100 p.

Based on four Lenten homilies given in 1981, this book examines the first three chapters of Genesis in the light of both the Church’s enduring teaching and our contemporary situation.

It is a theological study, not a scientific one, but Cardinal Ratzinger does grapple with how the sciences have affected our theological understanding of these foundational texts. He makes a basic point — basic, but nonetheless often forgotten — that the Bible is not a scientific text, and should not be read as one. Scripture itself varies its images of God’s creative action, even giving two distinct creation accounts, so that we are to understand that we should distinguish the content — what is being said — from the form in which it is said. And what is being said is something theological:

Its purpose ultimately would be to say one thing: God created the world. The world is not, as people used to think then, a chaos of mutually opposed forces; nor is it the dwelling of demonic powers from which human beings must protect themselves. The sun and the moon are not deities that rule over them, and the sky that stretches over their heads is not full of mysterious and adversary divinities. Rather, all of this comes from one power, from God’s eternal Reason, which became — in the Word — the power of creation. All of this comes from the same Word of God that we meet in the act of faith.

For Christians, by long established tradition, the Scriptures are read and interpreted with the understanding that they form a unity, a unity founded on Christ: the whole points to him. Applied to the Creation accounts, this means that we should not be surprised to find that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who in that particularity might be thought a kind of local deity, is actually the Creator of all things, the God and father of all, whose salvation is ultimately intended for all — and that this universal fatherhood is precisely what Christ came to make manifest. The creative action of God is mediated by his Son, the Word, by whom and in whom the rational structure of reality is constituted — and this order in things is itself one of the principal truths the creation accounts are meant to teach.

The idea that the world is made according to a rational order Ratzinger finds reinforced by the use of numbers in the creation accounts. There are the 7 days of creation, of course, but also instances of three and four, and the phrase “And God said” occurs ten times, which he (following a tradition?) argues is meant to remind us of the Ten Commandments, suggesting a harmony between the physical and moral orders, as both proceeding from the same source.

But what does it mean to talk about Creation in an age that can give a thorough and persuasive temporal account of how the world came to be the way it is? Is it still reasonable to speak about “Creation”? The Catholic tradition says that it is reasonable, for the good and obvious reason that being does not explain itself. The state of things may be, at some level of explanation, explicable in terms of some underlying order, but that underlying order does not account for itself. Scientific explanations of the physical order, no matter how elaborate and ingenious and praiseworthy, are ultimately incomplete, because powerless to account for the principles operative within that physical order. This is an inescapable conclusion derived from the empirical nature of the sciences. Moreover, there are aspects of the world, such as the moral order, which the sciences are not equipped to investigate.

Cardinal Ratzinger takes a special interest in the passage in Genesis 2 (v.4-9) in which God makes man from the dust of the earth. What does this teach us? It does not explain “how human persons come to be but rather what they are”. He identifies at least three things we should notice: first, a man is not God, he is made and does not make himself, he is contingent and not necessary; second, a man is neither a beast nor a demon (as could be inferred from some other, non-Biblical creation stories), but good, as being the special creation of a good God; and third, all men are equal in dignity and, in their common origin, unified. This unity is underlined and augmented by Christianity, for the Incarnation united our common nature to God himself, thereby further uniting each of us to one another, and in a most exalted sense.

In the story of the Fall, we see that humanity, made good in its essence and oriented to God, also lives under limitations imposed by the nature of good and evil. We have freedom, but must not use that freedom in certain ways. Denial of those limitations — which he argues is “a fundamental part of what constitutes modernity” — means a denial of the reality of things as they actually are. When we live in that way, rejecting creation and not acknowledging that things have natures independent of our will, we live in untruth, which the Scriptures call the realm of death. This same denial — called sin — destroys our relationships with one another, with the world, and with its Creator, a destruction that can ultimately be repaired and restored only by the Creator himself, and this is the meaning of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection: to re-establish relationships. Christ, once again, is at the centre.

*

[Creation and humility]
The fundamental Christian attitude is one of humility, a humility of being, not a merely moralistic one: being as receiving, accepting oneself as created and dependent on love.

[Doing and seeing]
People recognize the good only when they themselves do it. They recognize the evil only when they do not do it.