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A Literary Chestnut: Dryden's “Cousin Swift”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
It is hard to think of another brief quotation in English literary history so felicitous as the one attributed to John Dryden: “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” Here in a single sentence the family relationship between two great writers is established; Dryden is placed as an incisive and prophetic judge of literary worth; Swift is dramatically provided with cause for turning away from his disappointing “Pindarics” to the remarkable prose connected with his name; his somewhat over-stressed “life-long” hatred for Dryden is given its impetus. And if Dryden may be considered representative of the end of the seventeenth century and Swift of the beginning of the eighteenth century in English letters, a whole new age of prose is conveniently suggested in the eight words Dryden is supposed to have uttered. Whether or not he really did utter exactly those words—and I am quite certain that he did not—makes no great difference now: it is too late to add qualifying phrases to all the biographies, critical essays, monographs, and literary histories in which Dryden's pronouncement may be read. It has assumed a quality of fictional truth that renders it more convincing and more “true” than demonstrably authentic pronouncements could be. It is like some of the equally quotable adjudications of Samuel Johnson, chestnuts from the same tree, which also seem too suspiciously apropos to have been casually voiced, though they may have been recorded verbatim. Indeed, the eight words under consideration sound much less like Dryden than like Dr. Johnson himself; but that is a matter I will refer to later on in this paper.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 Johnson's Lives, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), iii, 7-8.
2 Earl Harlan, Elijah Fenton, 1683-1730 (Philadelphia, 1937), pp. 37, 42.
3 Without proof to go on, Malone had no patience with a “most absurd attack” on Swift that whispered how he had been pressed to quit an ecclesiastical benefice for “attempting to commit a Rape….” Letter to Bishop Percy, 28 Sept. 1786, in The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Edmond Malone, ed. Arthur Tillotson, Vol. i of The Percy Letters, ed. D. Nichol Smith and Cleanth Brooks ([Baton Rouge], 1944), p. 97.
4 iii, 7-8, n. 10. For Johnson's dependence on John Nichols for his Life of Fenton, see Edward Hart, “Some New Sources of Johnson's ‘Lives’,” TULA, lxv (Dec. 1950), 1096-99.
5 Shane Leslie, The Skull of Swift (Indianapolis, 1928), pp. 74-75; and F. S. Goodwin, Jonathan Swift, Giant in Chains (New York, 1940), p. 69. The Rose Coffee House has become the conventional backdrop against which the little drama is enacted. In providing this setting, Sir Shane is preceded, for instance, by Emile Pons: “Au Café de la Rose où régnait encore Dryden, bien que détrône par Shadwell le nouveau poète-lauréat, Swift montra son ode à son glorieux aîné et celui-ci lui répondit après l'avoir lue: ‘Jeune homme, vous ne serez jamais poete’.” Les Années de Jeunesse et le “Conte du Tonneau” (Strasbourg, 1925), p. 179.
6 For the exact connection between the cousins, see P. D. Mundy, “Dryden and Swift: Their Relationship,” N&Q, cxlvii (4 Oct. 1924), 243-244.
7 Life of Dryden, in Johnson's Lives, ed. Hill, i, 366.
8 Life of Dryden, in Critical and Miscellaneous Works of John Dryden, i, 239-240, note.
9 For Johnson's generally odd treatment of Swift in his Life of Swift, see Harold Williams, “Swift's Early Biographers,” in Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn, ed. J. L. Clifford and L. A. Landa (Oxford, 1949), pp. 121-128.
10 Ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1920), p. 131.
11 Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756), I, 205. For recent presentations of this device in A Tale of a Tub, see M. K. Starkman, Swift's Satire on Learning in “A Tale of a Tub” (Princeton, 1950), pp. 135-136; R. C. Elliott, “Swift's Tale of a Tub: An Essay in Problems of Structure,” PMLA, lxvi (June 1951), 441-455; and D. P. French, “The Title of ‘A Tale of a Tub’, ” N&Q, cxcvi (27 Oct. 1951), 473-474.
12 Evelyn Hardy, The Conjured Spirit: Swift (London, 1949), p. 39. For the best general account of the prevailing “unwillingness of the commentator to detach the work from the man,” see L. A. Landa, “Jonathan Swift,” in English Institute Essays, 1946 (New York, 1947), pp. 20-40.
13 “The Mass in the Parking Lot,” Furioso, iv (Summer 1949), 49-51.
14 “Mad Mullink and Timothy” (1728), ll. 43-44; and “Robin and Harry” (1729), ll. 17-20. In “To Mr. Congreve” (1693), l. 142, Mr. Bays may be Dryden.
15 In Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Temple Scott (London, 1907), xi, 375.
16 Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. F. E. Ball (London, 1913). Letter to Gay, iv, 22; letter to Beach, v, 162.
17 The Sin of Wit: Jonathan Swift as a Poet (Syracuse, 1950), pp. 84-92.