Comparison of Two Eighteenth-Century Satirists, Pope and Swift

A just consideration of the writings of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift will inevitably reflect also the political, social and cultural structure of eighteenth- century England. The Hanoverian kings sat on an uneasy throne: in the first half of that century there were two attempts, one very nearly successful, to unseat them in favour of the exiled Stuarts; there was always the pop of the bursting bubbles of Jacobite plots. The legal persecution of Roman Catholics affected Pope lifelong. He writes thus in 1753 in his brilliant and scathing letter of defence against Lord Hervey’s libels: ‘I beseech your Lordship to consider the injury a man of your high rank and credit may do to a private person, under penal laws and many other disadvantages . . . It is by these alone I have hitherto lived excluded from all posts of profit and trust’.

Swift was as much embittered by the sufferings of the Irish poor as by his own; and even attempted in later years to organise the maimed beggars of Dublin into a kind of trade union. Nor was London a paradise. Capital punishment could be and was inflicted for nearly two hundred ‘crimes’; the gaols stank; yet thugs and footpads roamed after dark, those gangs against whom Fielding broke his health if not his courage, and preserved for us in all their squalid anarchy in Jonathan Wilde. One must set the leisured, delicate world of The Rape of the Lock or Swift’s discourse on bad servants against this harsh background. Swift, however, had always one eye and one ear (till inflammation swelled one to the size of an egg and deafness closed the other) awake to the faces and voices of the submerged class. It is he, not Pope, who suggested to Gay that it would be a pretty thing to write some ‘Newgate pastorals’, thus planting the seed of The Beggar’s Opera. Swift, an Irishman and political pamphleteer for both Whig and Tory, stood always a little outside the maze of English social and literary hierarchies; to Pope, despite his disabilities, these were the breath of life. Hence Pope speaks to a modern reader at a remove; for all his talent, he is dated. The satire of each man has a different basis. To understand this it is necessary to examine briefly the inward as well as the outward environment in which the solitary powers of each were developed.

In her informative but highly coloured biography of Pope, Edith Sitwell draws the conclusion that he is a much maligned man, who was embitteredpage 267 by the cruelty and grossness of his critics and his unsuccess in the field of romance. A juster estimate would be that his invalidism and dwarfishness accentuated his native sensitivity, but that like Tertullian or Jerome (whom he much resembles) he was ascetic in temperament and born with salt, not honey, on his tongue. After Dryden the greatest influence upon his verse is that of Latin poets; perhaps his use of the heroic couplet embodies some of their formal exactitude (as seen through eighteenth-century eyes): certainly the urbane vigour of his satire and its moral tension derives from them. The monotony of his verse which Dr Sitwell denies rises not primarily from his consistent use of the heroic couplet but from his series of heavy antitheses.

Pope is no great philosopher, which is perhaps why he has become in some degree the philosopher of the man in the street; but he is great in anger, and directs the point of a burning-glass upon the vices and follies of persons. Not the state of Denmark, but the character of an individual member of the Danish court is always his perfect theme and playground:

Let Sporus tremble. What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk . . .
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite . . .
Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,
Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad . . . (‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’)

The force of such lines is contained in the use of the particular word or phrase – ‘curd of ass’s milk’, ‘spaniels’, ‘familiar toad’ – instead of that generality of which Dr Johnson approved. Here too Pope stands beside the Latin poets. The Rape of the Lock, a mock-heroic poem, contains fewer of these diminishing images than does his straight satires; for its intention is not to expose sores.

The broader and the more general satire of later parts of the Dunciad was very likely inspired by Swift, who had encouraged his ‘flair for lampooning and the invention of ludicrous incidents’. (Ian Jack in Augustan Satire). The continual embroilments of Pope’s life, his necessarily sedentary habits, kept his eyes fixed either (in satire) upon his opponents in literary politics or (in elegiac and lyrical verse) upon that sphere which his grotto at Twickenham and landscape garden symbolised –

By the hero’s armed shades,
Glittering thro’ the gloomy glades,
By the youths that died for love,
Wand’ring in the myrtle grove . . . (‘Ode on St Cecilia’s Day’)

He was at best a satirist of minute particulars; and as such the unifying focus of eighteenth-century poetry.

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Swift and Pope, apart from friendship, shared two things – the attention of a wider number of cultured readers than England has provided before or since; and the consciousness of grave personal defects. Pope was dwarfish and weak; Swift suffered from increasing deafness, vertigo, and the inroads of manic-depressive insanity. It is possible that Swift’s very plainness of style is an attempt to conquer by conscious levelling the rebellious under-world of his mind. He was influenced by Voltaire, and by Rabelais – whom Pope ‘could never read . . . with any patience’. Pope criticises society from within, by its own moral standards; Swift is the man from Mars to whom all human vanity is apparent, directing his satire against society, from the outside. Like Diogenes he revolts against the human race; and hence comes near in spirit to the modern Romantic. Joyce in Ulysses draws heavily on Swift and Blake, for the energy of these writers was of a kind which did not fit easily either into the cult of sensibility or current rationalism; it was derived from an earthquake- fault in the world of stable knowledge where Swift’s images are frequently surrealistic. He describes in prolonged detail objects of wood, glass and metal. One is reminded of the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, where the same keen interest in physical phenomena is coupled with remoteness and distortion in the human sphere. His satire succeeds not only by bathetic analogy, as in The Tale of a Tub, but also by a dehumanising of human events, so that they can be regarded impersonally as mean and ludicrous. The description of the female Yahoo who approaches Gulliver amorously, or of the various inhabitants of the Tub, carry satire to its polar extreme; for the attitudes of sex and religion, those two incubi and energisers of man, must inevitably appear ludicrous to an outsider. Swift takes the position of an outsider. In The Battle of the Books he comes closer to Pope’s ground. One gathers that this satire was an offspring of the Scriblerus Club, for which Swift, Pope and Arbuthnot were responsible; yet even here depersonalisation is at work. He is indeed capable of genial humour, as when he writes verses on his maidservant, or tenderness as in his letters to Stella. But his greatest work, in prose or verse, rises from a sense of sickness in the scheme of things –

For — swears he knows the cause
Efficient, of the Moon’s decay,
That Cancer with her poisonous claws
Attacks her in the Milky Way . . .

Swift is the satirist par excellence: he satirises everything, even himself. Yet his public satire bore fruit. While Pope gave benefactions in private, Swift defended the Irish poor with volcanic indignation; perhaps because, like himself, they were outsiders.

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