Art. 3.-SWIFT'S CORRESPONDENCE.

The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D. Edited by F. Elrington Ball, with an Introduction by the Right Rev. J. H. Bernard, D.D. Vols I-III. London: Bell, 1910-12.

A CLASSICAL edition of a great author confers honour upon all concerned in its preparation, and we can easily believe that to a great publishing house no distinction is more welcome. It must be a consolation to a publisher gifted with a sense of literature to reflect that, if he has perhaps made a fortune out of the profits of much rubbish, he has at least spent some of it upon the worthy production of those great works, more often talked about than read, the sale of which can never be in proportion to the labour and money expended upon them. Not a few instances of the kind will occur to those who are familiar with good libraries, but the most recent example is seen in Messrs George Bell and Sons' elaborate edition of the complete works of Swift, an author who can never be popular in the whole range of his writings, yet whose works demand more learned editing than perhaps any other classic of his rank.

The issue of the Prose Works' in twelve volumes, under the skilful editorship of Mr Temple Scott and his industrious colleagues, has wholly superseded all previous editions, except perhaps for readers who prefer large type and wide margins to accurate texts and exhaustive notes. These luxuries of type and margin, however, are happily supplied, without neglecting the other more important qualities, in the edition of Swift's 'Correspondence' now appearing in six volumes, of which three are so far issued. We had thought it impossible to excel the accuracy and industry of Mr Temple Scott's annotation, yet Dr Elrington Ball bids fair to achieve this pre-eminence; but, as he is the first to confess, with a generous acknowledgment of others' help which is among his natural graces, he could never have succeeded so well if he had not been preceded by the editors of the Prose Works.' When the Correspondence' is complete, with (we make sure) an exhaustive index, we shall possess such a final presentation of the whole of Swift's writings, Vol. 218.-No. 434.

B

so far as they can be identified and traced, as may challenge comparison with the best editions of any English classics. The mantle of H. G. Bohn fell on worthy shoulders; and Messrs Bell are to be at once congratulated and thanked for their judgment and courage.

We are assuming that people outside the circle of serious students of literature do not read Swift. We wish we may be wrong, for, to limit our view to the letters alone, we know of no correspondence that throws a more brilliant light upon a commanding personality and upon the world in which he lived. We envy the sensations of the reader who for the first time enters Swift's world-the society of the early part of the eighteenth century-through these spacious gates. For these volumes do not give us only one side of the correspondence; a great part of letter-writing depends upon whom you are writing to, and letters without their provocations and their replies are maimed. If you may know a man by his friends, you may certainly know a correspondent by the style of the letters written to him; and none shows this more plainly than Swift. No man, assuredly, was less all things to all men,' but none knew better how to fall into the mood of his correspondentthe mood, to wit, imagined by the writer; for the genius of letter-writing consists in sympathetic imagination. You visualise your friend as you imagine he is at the moment you write; and on the fullness of the vision depends the intimacy of the letter. Swift undoubtedly had this gift essential to real letter-writing; without knowing the word telepathy, he 'saw 'his correspondents. The qualification is so obvious that Mr E. V. Lucas does not find it important to include it in the necessary equipment for good correspondence which he enumerates in the preface to his charming 'Selection from Cowper's Letters.' He rightly makes a point of the letter-writer not being a man of action, with too much to tell.

He is then in danger of becoming exciting. The best letterwriters never excite: they entertain, amuse, interest; excite A humorous observer of life, of strong affections, and possessed of sufficient egotism to desire to keep his friends acquainted with his thoughts, adventures, moods, and achievements, is, when he is without responsibilities or harassing demands on his time, in the ideal position to write such letters

as become literature. Cowper at Olney, FitzGerald at Woodbridge, Gray at Cambridge, Walpole at Strawberry Hill— these fulfil the conditions absolutely: all childless; all solitaries, or at least quite happy when solitary; all amateurs; all blessed with a competency; all men of thought rather than action; all interested in themselves; and all possessed of a variety of mind which may be said never to have been in déshabillé' (op. cit. p. v).

It was just when Swift's life corresponded best to these conditions that he wrote some of his best letters. 'My solitary way of life,' he wrote, 'is apt to make me talkative on paper.' The moderate competency of his deanery, the comparative solitude which he courted (though it would be idle to say that he was 'happy' in it), the absence of any very active or harassing responsibilities -all these were the nursery of some of the best letters in our literature; though it would be rash to assert that Swift could not write well in much less favouring circumstances. And in the epistolary twin, the stimulus of his correspondents, Swift was fortunate far beyond most letterwriters-infinitely beyond Cowper, for instance. Statesmen like Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Peterborough; political prelates such as King and Atterbury; Court ladies from the Countess of Orkney-William's 'weakness'-to Lady Masham and Mrs Howard, not forgetting the distressful Ladies Ormond and Bolingbroke; the poets Pope, Prior, Rowe, Gay, Addison-a genius would be hard put to it to find more variously stimulating correspondents. They wrote to Swift more frequently than he to them, and their reproaches for his silences re-echo through the years. They went on writing to him till they died, however; and the wonder of it is that the best part of this wide correspondence has survived and is now printed. Dr Ball has gone very carefully into this question of survival, so far as relates to the letters from 1714 to 1726, and his conclusion (iii, 541) is that

'the greater number of the letters from his [Swift's] more prominent correspondents have been preserved. In the collection in the British Museum, which must have been made by Swift with an idea of its ultimate publication, there is evidence that every letter from his English friends which did not trench dangerously on the politics of the day was kept by him with sedulous care. The letters from the Duchess of

Ormond, some of those from Prior, and the notes sent to him during his two visits to Pope, may be cited as instances that no letter from those whose friendship Swift really valued is likely to have been rejected on account of its slender interest.'

Pope, indeed, weeded out some of his own letters to Swift; and the political letters of Erasmus Lewis, John Barber, and Charles Ford were sometimes too unguarded in their references to be prudently preserved in days when 'the Pretender' was on the horizon. Swift did not reckon his Irish friends or their letters as of any importance; and they on their part did not fully realise his genius, but valued him on other grounds. But they often kept his letters; the series to Chetwode and to Stopford are complete, and 'the care with which Sheridan and Walls cherished even a few lines from his pen leaves the impression that not many letters which they received are missing.' The letters to his more notable English friends seem to have been jealously treasured; the series of his letters is unbroken, or almost so,' says Dr Ball; and the first and second Earls of Oxford, Carteret, Pope, Gay, Atterbury, Mrs Howard, Archbishop King, Addison, and Tickell are found amongst those who recognised that any letter from him was of more than ephemeral interest.' Bolingbroke, Prior, and Arbuthnot were naturally careless men and lost not a few.

Some interesting conclusions may be drawn from the proportion of the letters so far printed in these volumes. Swift appears to have been an infrequent writer. He seldom initiated a correspondence, and his dilatory habits were apt to compel him to a spasmodic and hurried yet by no means careless dispatch of a number of letters by the same mail. He admitted (ii, 284) that 'my nature and custom . . . never suffer me to be a very exact correspondent,' and that he had left off my old custom of answering letters before the post-day; and it happened that upon post-day I never had leisure' (ii, 264)-a confession entirely unoriginal. Taking the letters here printed and omitting the Journal to Stella,' the average comes to hardly more than one letter a week in the earlier, or one a fortnight in the latter part of the period comprised in these three volumes. This is the more remarkable because there is no doubt that Swift loved his friends and knew that they delighted to hear from

him, and further because, judging from the style of his intimate letters, he took a pleasure in writing them. It is difficult to believe that he could have written as he did if he did not enjoy doing it.

Of course, a considerable proportion of these letters are not strictly literary-we do not mean in the sense of letters about books, for Swift was not bookish and seldom mentioned them-but in the sense of literature. To taste his epistolary flavour, a selection would be better than an edition which aims at being exhaustive. Dr Ball's object-the proper object in such an editionis to print every surviving letter from and to Swift from the most correct text and with full explanatory notes. He deals with the matter not as literature but as documents, and he does so rightly. Literary critics may differ on many points in regard to Swift, but none can dispense with an accurate reproduction and elucidation of the documents on which their criticism must rest. Hitherto his correspondence has been treated in a slovenly way. It has come out piecemeal, and suffered by uncritical editing and even by fantastic emendations.' Faulkner, Hawkesworth, Deane Swift, Sheridan, Nichols, followed each other, reprinting and adding, but seldom collating, until Sir Walter Scott in his editions of 1814 and 1824 produced the maximum of material with the minimum of accuracy. 6 There are few letters included in his edition which appear in this one without some alteration,' remarks Dr Ball; for Scott's great genius did not easily condescend to the collation of manuscripts, and he left too much to his underlings. Fortunately a surprisingly large number of the original letters are still in existence. There is a great collection of them in the British Museum, and another in the Forster Library at South Kensington. Mr John Murray is the happy possessor of a long and interesting series of Swift's autograph letters to Archdeacon Walls and others, which he has freely placed at the disposal of the present editor. An important set of original letters from Swift to the first and second Earls of Oxford is preserved among the Duke of Portland's MSS at Welbeck Abbey; others have been unearthed in various private collections by the labours of the Historical Manuscripts Commission; and a number of letters which appear to