Word: saeva
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...suggests that you need only sketch a bum to get popped into the pot with Daumier, or a street crowd to be compared with Hogarth. The truth in this case is the reverse: as a satirist, as distinct from a funnyman, Grooms hardly exists. His hearty sweetness drives out saeva indignatio...
...goes out with his school comrades to harvest potatoes, he discovers that the "electric plows" of Soviet propaganda do not exist. The insomniac Karlinsky wonders why death has not yet been abolished. And to match his vision of "The Future," one would have to go back to the indignatio saeva of Swift himself...
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...
Some of Swift's best letters and politer verses are included in this volume, and so is the proud Latin epitaph that he wrote for his tomb: ". . . ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit; abi viator et imitare si poteris strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicem . . ." W. B. Yeats, nearly 200 years later gave this inscription a great translation...
...Amis des Noirs, the Philadelphia Democrats, the Rights of Man, the French Revolution, and the distant rumble of the full Napoleonic area. Yet the novelist's personality is too weak for these high and mighty personages and events; it reveals itself as equable where it should assume the "saeva indignatio" of Swift. We have a right to expect vigor, because the historical period with which it deals has long been the "moment" of vigorous writers like Stendahl, Lamartine, Thackeray, and very recently the Russian Vinogradoff. Compare "Black Thunder" with "The Black Consul" and you will have a contemporary measure...