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Savage Indignation. In an age of savage politics, he was the most savage, in such withering satires as A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposal. When he fought, says Biographer Murry, "he bit like a badger till his teeth met." Men feared him, and three women loved him. Pride, it seems, forbade him to give them a man's love in return. With a lunatic idealism, he could not forgive them for having the natural functions common to all humans.
Biographer Murry mercifully spares the readers a psychiatric treatise on the great dean, but the book does, with immense elaboration, spell out one of the saddest stories in literature. Few Americans read King Lear, and fewer still would read it if it existed only in Scholar Kittredge's famous notes. Middleton Murry's book is of that scholarly kind. Yet, readers who do not insist on a bland diet of print will be well rewarded by this study of a man of tragic genius.
Swift died at 77 in agony (at the onset of his final illness five men were needed to hold him in his bed). The inscription on his tomb in Dublin's St. Patrick's says that "the body of Jonathan Swift . . . is buried here, where fierce indignation [saeva indignatio] can lacerate his heart no more." To this great and terrible man, Biographer Murry says, death was "not the opening of a gate but the closing of a wound."