Mr. Forster would
have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to
prove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimate
friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him
sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman.
Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession
which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect
independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes.
He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while he
was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among
savages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood
in his way. A man's little faults are more often the cause of his
greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever
respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly
had the advantage of him in that _savoir vivre_ which makes so large an
element of worldly success. In judging him, however, we must take into
account that his first literary hit was made when he was already
thirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of others
and distrust of himself.
The reaction in Swift's temper and ambition told with the happiest
effect on his prose. For its own purposes, as good working English, his
style (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had no
style at all), has never been matched.
Pages:
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198