The communication of the secret to Bishop
Berkeley (who was one of Vanessa's executors) may have been the
condition of the suppressing Swift's correspondence with her, and would
have exasperated him to ferocity.
II
We cannot properly understand Swift's cynicism and bring it into any
relation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiability
without taking his whole life into account. Few give themselves the
trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough
to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature
was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it
effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet.
With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole
which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of
momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the Cowleian
Pindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint of
Parisian rather than Theban origin. If the master was but a fresh
example of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of the
flying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not even
the secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earth
while with perfect good faith he went through all the motions of
soaring? Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment,
though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and
the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent.
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