of the ferocity of the “Plain Dealer” long before, and the “School for Scandal” long after it; the excellent Ladies Smart and Answerall tear their neighbours’ characters to pieces with much relish but with no malignity. The former, for all her cut-and-dried phrases, is an excellently hospitable hostess, and “her own lord” is as different as possible from the brutal heroes of Restoration comedy, and from the yawning sour-blooded rakes of quality whom a later generation of painters in words and colours were to portray. There is, of course, not a little which would now be horribly coarse, but one knows that it was not in the least so then. And in it, as in the scandal-mongering, there is no bad blood. Tom and the Colonel and Lord Sparkish are fine gentlemen with very loose-hung tongues, and not very strait-laced consciences. But there is nothing about them of the inhumanity which to some tastes spoils the heroes of Congreve and of Vanbrugh.
As for “Miss,” no doubt she says some things which it would be unpleasant to hear one’s sister or one’s beloved say now. But I fell in love with her when I was about seventeen, I think; and from that day to this I have never wavered for one minute in my affection for her. If she is of coarser mould than Millamant, how infinitely does she excel her in flesh and blood—excellent things in woman! She is only here—“this ‘Miss’ of our heart, this ‘Miss’ of our soul,”—here and in a letter or two of the time. The dramatists and the essayists and the poets made her a baggage or a Lydia Languish, a Miss Hoyden or a minx, when they tried her. Hogarth was not enough of a gentleman and Kneller not enough of a genius to put her on canvas. When the regular novelists began, sensibility had set its clutch on heroines. But here she is as Swift saw her—Swift whom every woman whom he knew either loved or hated, and who must, therefore, have known something about women, for all his persistent maltreatment of them. And here, as I have said, the maltreatment ceases. If the handling is not very delicate, it is utterly true, and by no means degrading. There is even dignity in Miss. For all her romps, and her broad speeches, and her more than risky repartees, she knows perfectly well how to pull up her somewhat unpolished admirers when they go too far. And when at three o’clock in the morning, with most of the winnings in her pocket, she demurely refuses the Colonel’s escort (indeed it might have had its dangers), observing, “No, Colonel, thank you; my mamma has sent her chair and footmen,” and leaves the room with the curtsey we can imagine, the picture is so delightful that unholy dreams come upon one. How agreeable it would have been to hire the always available villains, overcome those footmen, put Miss in a coach and six, and secure the services of the also always available parson, regardless of the feelings of my mamma and of the swords of Tom and the Colonel, though not of Miss’s own goodwill! For I should not envy anyone who had tried to play otherwise than on the square with Miss Notable.
For Mr. Wagstaff’s hero I have, as no doubt is natural, by no means as much admiration as for his “heroin.” Mr. Thomas Neverout is a lively youth enough, but considerably farther from the idea—and that not merely the modern idea—of a gentleman, than Miss with all her astounding licence of speech is from the idea—and that not merely the modern idea—of a lady. It is observable that he seldom or never gets the better of her except by mere coarseness, and that he has too frequent recourse to the expedient which even Mr. Wagstaff had the sense to see was not a great evidence of wit, the use of some innuendo or other, at which she is obliged to blush or to pretend want of understanding. At fair weapons she almost always puts him down. In fact, the Colonel, though not precisely a genius, is the better fellow of the two. I do not know whether it was intentional or not, but it is to be observed that my Lord Sparkish, though quite as “smart” in the new-old sense of which this very work is the locus classicus, as the two commoners, is cleaner by a good deal in his language. It is unlike Mr. Wagstaff’s usual precision of information that he gives us no details about Lady Answerall. If there is any indication to show whether she was wife or widow, I have missed it in many readings; but I think she, though still young, was the eldest of the three ladies, and she certainly was handsome. Lady Smart I take to have been plain, from her disparaging reference to Miss: “The girl’s well enough if she had but another nose.” I resent this reference to a feature which I am sure was charming (it was probably retroussé; it was certainly not aquiline); and as Lady Smart was clearly not ill-natured, it follows that she must have been herself either a recognized beauty or not beautiful. We should have had some intimation of the former had it been the case, so I incline to the latter. She had children, and was evidently on the best of terms with her husband, which is very satisfactory.
If it were not for Miss and the dinner—two objects of perennial interest to all men of spirit and taste—I am not sure that I should not prefer the introduction to the conversations themselves. It is indispensable to the due understanding of the latter, and I cannot but think that Thackeray unjustifiably overlooked the excuse it contains for the somewhat miscellaneous and Gargantuan character of the feast which excited his astonishment and horror. But it would be delightful in itself if we were so unfortunate as to have lost the conversations, and, as I have already said, its delight is of a strangely different kind from theirs. Although there are more magnificent and more terrible, more poignant and more whimsical examples of the marvellous Swiftian irony, I do not know that there is any more justly proportioned, more exquisitely modulated, more illustrative of that wonderful keeping which is the very essence and quiddity of the Dean’s humour.
Some things have been lately said, as they are always said from time to time, about the contrast between the Old humour and the New. The contrast, I venture to think, is wrongly stated. It is not a contrast between the old and the new, but, in the first place, between the perennial and the temporary, and in the second between two kinds of humour which, to do them justice, are both perennial enough—the humour which is quiet, subtle, abstracted, independent of catchwords and cant phrases, and the humour which is broad, loud, gesticulative, and prone to rely upon cant phrases and catchwords. Swift has illustrated the two in the two parts of this astonishing book, and whoso looks into the matter a little narrowly will have no difficulty in finding this out. Far be it from me to depreciate the “newer” kind, but I may be permitted to think it the lower. It is certainly the easier. The perpetual stream of irony which Swift pours out here in so quiet yet so steady a flow, is the most difficult of all things to maintain in its perfection. Not more, perhaps, than half-a-dozen writers in all literature, of whom the three chiefs are Lucian, Pascal, and Swift himself, have been quite masters of it, and of these three Swift is the mightiest. Sink below the requisite proportion of bitterness and the thing becomes flat; exceed that proportion and it is nauseous. Perhaps, as one is always fain to persuade oneself in such cases, a distinct quality of palate is required to taste, as well as a distinct power of genius to brew it. It is certain that though there are some in all times who relish this kind of humour (and this is what gives it its supremacy, for examples of the other kind are, at other than their own times, frequently not relished by anybody), they are not often found in large numbers. The liquor is too dry for many tastes; it has too little froth, if not too little sparkle for others. The order of architecture is too unadorned, depends too much upon the bare attraction of symmetry and form, to charm some eyes. But those who have the taste never lose it, never change it, never are weary of gratifying it. Of irony, as of hardly any other thing under the sun, cometh no satiety to the born ironist.
It may be well to end this brief preface by a few words on the principles of editing which I have adopted. There is no omission whatever, except of a very few words—not, I think, half a score in all—which were barely permissible to mouths polite even then, and which now are almost banished from even free conversation. Nor have even these omissions been allowed to mutilate the passages in which they occur; for on Mr. Wagstaff’s own excellent principle, the harmless necessary “blank, which the sagacious reader may fill up in his own mind,” has replaced them.
In respect of annotation the methods of the collection in which this book appears did not permit of any very extensive commentary; and I could not be sorry for this. Anything like full scholia on the proverbs, catchwords, and so forth used, would be enormously voluminous, and a very dull overlaying of matter ill-sortable with dulness. Besides, much of the phraseology is intelligible to anybody intelligent, and not a very little is not yet obsolete in the mouths of persons of no particular originality. You may still
