Jonathan Swift and the Arts by Joseph McMinn (review)

In this unassuming book, Mr. McMinn sets for himself an imposing task, which he accomplishes with fairness, balance, clarity, and good sense, as well as modesty. He wishes to explore Swift’s knowledge of and participation in the arts other than literary: music, gardening, written drama and performed theater, architecture, and painting. The preface to the book cites Ehrenpreis’s emphatic assertion of Swift’s indifference to these sister-arts: “Swift had no ear for music, no eye for painting or sculpture, little understanding of architecture, not the faintest interest in dancing.” By means of careful and wide-ranging scholarship, Mr. McMinn qualifies Ehrenpreis’s rather sweeping denials. He displays no inclination to treat his opponent as a straw man, but freely grants some of his and others’ opposing conclusions while enlarging the parameters of the debate.

For example, Mr. McMinn explores Swift’s indulgence in Irish popular culture, including puppet shows; he lists the volumes of drama, especially classical and French, that Swift coveted; he identifies the portraits that Swift sought out and cherished; he describes Sir Andrew Fountaine’s occasional success in seducing his grudging friend into artistic venues; he brings to the fore Swift’s architectural critiques, as in his poem denigrating Vanbrugh’s “house”; like Ehrenpreis, he details the tone-deaf dean’s punctilious concern for the quality of his choir; and he expatiates on the enormous pleasure Swift took in his garden at Laracor and his beloved “Naboth’s Vineyard,” just to the south of St. Patrick’s. Throughout his discussions of the sister-arts, Mr. McMinn emphasizes how Ireland’s colonial status affected Irish arts and how Swift’s devotion to the Church of Ireland shaped his responses to artistic endeavors.

Mr. McMinn is his own best spokesman. I take the liberty of quoting his conclusions at length:

With music, his sense of religious duty and responsibility is fundamental and enduring. He seems happiest, and least reserved, with gardening, feeling in touch with both a classical tradition of pastoral retreat and a biblical imperative to cultivate the land. His attitude toward theater and drama is, perhaps surprisingly mixed and flexible—his early puritanism giving way to enthusiastic support. Architecture remains a world that he reads and writes about in terms of worldly power and vanity. With painting, he seems quite a man of his time, keen to collect portraits of friends, but shy of cultivating his own image.

Mr. McMinn finally rounds back to his tempered disagreement with Ehrenpreis: “If we remember that all of these artistic activities and fashions entered into Swift’s own imaginative writings, mostly into his poetry, then the cultural divide suggested by Ehrenpreis between literature and the sister-arts no longer seems so wide or irreconcilable.” By this time, Mr. McMinn has so amply proved his case that only the image of Swift-as-dancer has remained beyond his reach.