Endowed with an extraordinary talent rhetoric, this lampoonist of the last years of the reign of the Anne queen seldom speaks in his own name. Inhabited by contradictions, he prefers the masks and appears thus large ironist, able to pass from humor more unslung to the darkest pessimism. Jonathan Swift used her talent to express her attachment impassioned with Ireland and her indignation against oppression and the injustice.

André Breton will pay homage, in her Anthology of black humor, with this wild satirist transformed by the posterity into a writer for children.

In Ireland

Jonathan, English parents, goes down from a family of the Yorkshire terrier. Cromwell then Charles II were accustomed to rewarding their faithful in their offering Irish grounds, and the father of Swift, royalist man of law, had thus joined those which had embarked for Ireland, but he had died little of time afterwards.

Posthumous son high in poverty, the Jonathan young person is very early conscious of the disorders which causes emotional and political instability. His/her uncles provide for his education, which does not fail to humiliate it. He makes his secondary studies in Kilkenny Grammar School, where he counts William Congreve, the future dramatic author, among his young comrades. Continuing its university formation in Trinity College of the university of Dublin, it is there turbulent and, reprimanded for indiscipline, it obtains its diploma only by “special grace”. But soon it must flee the catholic insurrection of 1688, and it takes refuge in London.

In England

The young man becomes the secretary to sir William Temple, old diplomatic, essay writer and memorialist. It was sometimes claimed that Swift was the illegitimate son of John Temple, the father to sir William, which would make of the two men of the half-brothers. It is not certain. In any event, Temple lives great landowners, Moor Park, close to London, in Surrey, where it accommodates its protected. It has a beautiful library, that Jonathan makes profitable, and it enables him to continue studies of theology. The two men remain close but their relations are tended, Swift reproaching in particular Temple for not helping it to obtain a better situation.

Piqued, it returns in 1694 to Dublin, where it is ordered priest of the Church of England of Ireland. One assigns a small parish in North to him, in Kilroot. It is a disaster: Swift is confronted with the Presbyterian ones convinced, the Anglicans are a minority, the church is in ruin. Recluse, discouraged, it gives up the parish the following year. Of this unhappy episode, it will always keep a great mistrust with regard to the dissidents; its honesty towards the Church of Ireland is some hardened.

After this failure, it turns over to Moor Park, where it will remain until death to sir William Temple, in 1699. It is there that it begins its literary career with the Battle of the books, comic sketch on the quarrel between the Old ones and the Modern ones in which Swift takes the party of Old, and especially the Tale of the barrel, celebrates satire of the literary claim and religious fanaticism where it is caught some with all, Anglicans, dissidents and catholics. Published in 1704, the book is a great success but displeases to the Anne queen and to various bishops and probably carried damage to the ecclesiastical career of the writer.

It is also in Moor Park that Swift becomes acquainted with the pupil of Temple, Esther Johnson (Stella), fourteen years her junior, of which he becomes the tutor. The letters that he will write to him regularly of 1710 to 1713 will constitute the Newspaper with Stella. But the relation remains hidden. It is possible that it married it in secrecy; however Swift will never share the life of Stella, who dies in 1728.

The life of the writer is in addition marked by two other women: Jane Waring, met in 1695, qu ' it calls Varina, and which will definitively refuse to marry it in 1700, and Esther Vanhomrigh, called Vanessa, of which it makes knowledge in 1708. Their relation continues until 1723, little before the death of the young woman. This passion will be recalled, not without irony, in Cadenus and Vanessa.

In favor of the whigs

Swift was turned over to Ireland to death to sir William Temple. Chaplain and secretary of Lord Berkeley, one of the three “Lords justice”, then named the following year canon of Patrick Saint and prebendary of Dunlaven, it is divided from now on between Dublin and London. It is now a man of letters, near to Addison and Steele, Congreve and Halifax. Initially favorable to the whigs, it is delivered to the art of the lampoon, the Speech on the fights and the dissensions in Athens and Rome with the Argument against the abolition of Christianity. One also owes him of the gibes against the astrologer John Partridge and of the poems, published in Tatler in 1709, which depict scenes of the London life: “Description of a downpour downtown”, “one morning Description”.

In favor of the tories

Nauseated by the alliance of the whigs with the dissidents, them suspecting of destabilizing the Church of England, Swift rejoins the tories in 1710. It supports the government of Robert Harley, future count d' Oxford; its talents rhetorics already pointed out it and, during four years, he is the principal spokesperson, propagandist and lampoonist. It multiplies the attacks against the whigs in Examining it, that it directs. Follow one another then the political lampoons, including one, the Control of the allies, written in 1711, is intended to convince the Parliament to disengage England of the war of succession of Spain against France.

In 1714, Swift joined the writers Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot and John Gay in Scriblerus Club. It obtains financial aids for friends in difficulty, like Addison. But, this same year, the fall of the government tory, with the death of the queen Anne, and the return of the whigs mark the end of the ambitions of the lampoonist. It returns to Ireland in August.

Whereas it was appointed senior of the cathedral of Patrick Saint in Dublin in 1713, the fall of the tories makes final its voluntary exile to Ireland. It loses the hope to reach one day a bishopric in England, and its visits in London are spaced. Its resentment against the whigs with the power leads it to give an opinion in favor of Ireland violently, against England. It is made the rough defender of the country oppressed, almost patriotic in its desire to encourage the Irishmen with the revolt against the English exploitation. He thus proposes “to burn all that comes from England, except coal”. With his Letters of Mr. B., clothier, in 1724, it gains the battle against the Prime Minister, to sir Robert Walpole, in the business of “half-under” intended for Ireland. The Gulliver's Travels are published two years later. It is the only work for which Swift will be paid: it will touch 200 pounds.

During its last years, it continues to compose lampoons and poems, like the Worms on the death of the Swift senior, written by itself, where it mixes pathos and destroying humor. While it becomes aware that the situation in Ireland cannot improve, an increasing violence gains its writings. Thus, in Modeste Proposition to prevent the children of the poor of Ireland from being with the load of their parents or their country and to make them useful for the public, it suggests, with a wild humor, that the Irish babies are sold to be eaten, “roasts, boiled or braised”, by the English, which would be a source of revenue for the poor parents.

Swift is also a conscientious senior, devoting time, energy and money with the restoration of its church. It is demanding with its parishioners, organizer untiring of the choral society, vituperating against those which sleep during the sermons. It is especially sensitive to the poor: a third of its incomes goes to charity works.

The symptoms of the disease from which he suffered all his life - disorders of the internal ear which affect balance and cause nauseas and giddinesses - are accentuated around 1738. Four years later, it expresses signs of madness, and fall into a state from apathy crossed from flashes from clearness; a decree of insanity is returned against him. He dies in Dublin in 1745, bequeathing money to found a lunatic asylum - the hospital of Patrick Saint for the lunatics will open in 1757. Swift is buried at the sides of Stella to the cathedral Saint Patrick.

The polemic

The work of Swift is that of a polemist, very of denunciation. Proper consent of the writer, it intends “to annoy rather than to divert”. It succeeds there besides: some of its contemporaries but especially criticisms of second half of the XVIII ^E century and those of the XIX ^E century will consider it scandalous, even blasphemous.

Swift excels in the art of the lampoon. As a churchman, he preaches against cupidity, the lust and pride. Work youth, the Tale of the barrel hides under a calculated coldness a provocative heat. It is with ardor that the writer fustigates there any form of claim in the clergy, of some denomination that it is, and without indulgence that it reveals the ridiculous ones.

Irony and the satire

With his Speech on the fights and the dissensions in Athens and Rome, launched against the House of Commons in 1701, the lampoonist tests himself with makes out political. Its natural liveliness and its direction of rhetoric open out in this kind. Become the spokesperson of the tories, it publishes back-to-back several lampoons in 1708-1709. One of its favorite weapons, and that which it handles best, is the irony. Better than anybody, it can calumniate his adversaries with elegance: its targets of predilection are the large ones of this world, such to sir Robert Walpole, the leader of the whigs. Being caught with the play, Swift is devoted to a true war of lampoons against Steele in 1713: with the Considerations on the importance of Dunkirk he retorts with his Considerations on the importance of Guardian, and, the following year, the Crisis he counteracts with the public Spirit of the whigs.

The talent of Swift is not limited to the lampoon. Around 1708, he invents the character of Isaac Bickerstaff, pseudonym under which he composes a series of comic writings which will be very popular. The writer gets busy to uncover human reality under social appearances: he gives of it a demonstration dazzling in his Meditation on a broomstick. One will find the topic at the end of his life in the Instructions with the servants, but the tone - though it constitutes a delight of irony - became rougher.

Morals

It is at the time of its voluntary exile in Ireland that the talent of Swift matures. The polemist transforms himself into moralist, satirical vehemence yields the step to an objectivity of very traditional tone, under which borer nevertheless a subtle irony; the author is ready to write the famous Gulliver's Travels.

After this main work, the writer returns to minor kinds: polemics, madrigals, apologies. One reads sometimes a ferocity despaired in his last pikes. Thus, in its Modeste Proposal, it adopts the learned and serious tone of the honest quite disposed man only to make its remarks even more odious.

The war which the ironist declared with the claim and pride human finds in its poems, where he ridicules the sublime forgery and the specious exaltation. With its tone deliberated on Latin pseudo-eloquence, the epitaph that Swift composed for itself summarizes well the characteristics of the character and work: “The body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, senior of this cathedral, is buried here, where burning indignation will not lacerate any more its heart. Traveller goes and imitates if you can it that which of all its forces was made the champion of freedom. ”