54.  JONATHAN SWIFT.  TALE OF A TUB.

Swift’s mysterious and saturnine character, his outbursts of terrible rage; his exquisite moments of tenderness; his sledge-hammer blows; his diabolical irony; form a dramatic and tragic spectacle which no psychologist can afford to miss.

With the “saeva indignatio” alluded to in his own epitaph, he puts his back, as it were, to the “flamantia moenia mundi” and hits out, insanely and blindly, at the human crowd he loathes.  His secretive and desperate passion for Stella, his little girl pupil; his barbarous treatment of Vanessa—­his savage championship of the Irish people against the Government—­make up the dominant “notes” of a character so formidable that the terror of his personality strikes us with the force of an engine of destruction.

His misanthropy is like the misanthropy of Shakespeare’s Timon—­his crushing sarcasms strike blow after blow at the poor flesh and blood he despises.  The hatefulness of average humanity drives him to distraction and in his madness, like a wounded Titan, he spares nothing.  To the whole human race he seems to utter the terrible words he puts into the mouth of God: 

     “I to such blockheads set my wit,
     And damn you all—­Go, go, you’re bit!”

55.  CHARLES LAMB.  THE ESSAYS OF ELIA.

Charles Lamb remains, of all English prose-writers, the one whose manner is the most beautiful.  So rich, so delicate, so imaginative, so full of surprises, is the style of this seductive writer, that, for sheer magic and inspiration, his equals can only be found among the very greatest poets.

It is impossible to over-estimate the value of Charles Lamb’s philosophy.  He indicates in his delicate evasive way—­not directly, but as it were, in little fragments and morsels and broken snatches—­a deep and subtle reconciliation between the wisdom of Epicurus and the wisdom of Christ.  And through and beyond all this, there may be felt, as with the great poets, an indescribable sense of something withdrawn, withheld, reserved, inscrutable—­a sense of a secret, rather to be intimated to the initiated, than revealed to the vulgar—­a sense of a clue to a sort of Pantagruelian serenity; a serenity produced by no crude optimism but by some happy inward knowledge of a neglected hope.  The great Rabelaisian motto, “bon espoir y gist au fond!” seems to emanate from the most wistful and poignant of his pages.  He pities the unpitied, he redeems the commonplace, he makes the ordinary as if it were not ordinary, and by the sheer genius of his imagination he throws an indescribable glamour over the “little things” of the darkest of our days.

Moving among old books, old houses, old streets, old acquaintances, old wines, old pictures, old memories, he is yet possessed of so original and personal a touch that his own wit seems as though it were the very soul and body of the qualities he so caressingly interprets.