This is one of those cases in which we feel that even biographers are not omniscient; and I must leave it to my readers to choose their own theory, only suggesting that readers too are fallible. But we may still ask what judgment is to be passed upon Swift’s conduct. Both Stella and Vanessa suffered from coming within the sphere of Swift’simperious attraction. Stella enjoyed his friendship through her life at the cost of a partial isolation from ordinary domestic happiness. She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice. It is one of the cases in which, if the actors be our contemporaries, we hold that outsiders are incompetent to form a judgment, as none but the principals can really know the facts. Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace Tisdall? If Stella chose, and chose freely, it is hard to say that she was mistaken, or to blame Swift for a fascination which he could not but exercise. The tragedy of Vanessa suggests rather different reflections. Swift’s duty was plain. Granting what seems to be probable, that Vanessa’s passion took him by surprise, and that he thought himself disqualified for marriage by infirmity and weariness of life, he should have made his decision perfectly plain. He should have forbidden any clandestine relations. Furtive caresses—even on paper, understandings to carry on a private correspondence, fond references to old meetings, were obviously calculated to encourage her passion. He should not only have pronounced it to be hopeless, but made her, at whatever cost, recognize the hopelessness. This is where Swift’s strength seems to have failed him. He was not intentionally cruel; he could not foresee the fatal event; he tried to put her aside, and he felt the “shame, disappointment, grief, surprise,” of which he speaks on the avowal of her love. He gave her the most judicious advice, and tried to persuade her to accept it. But he did not make it effectual. He shrank from inflicting pain upon her and upon himself. He could not deprive himself of the sympathy which soothed his gloomy melancholy. His affection was never free from the egoisticelement which prevented him from acting unequivocally as an impartial spectator would have advised him to act, or as he would have advised another to act in a similar case. And therefore when the crisis came the very strength of his affection produced an explosion of selfish wrath; and he escaped from the intolerable position by striking down the woman whom he loved, and whose love for him had become a burden. The wrath was not the less fatal because it was half composed of remorse, and the energy of the explosion proportioned to the strength of the feeling which had held it in check.
WOOD’S HALFPENCE.
In one of Scott’s finest novels, the old Cameronian preacher, who had been left for dead by Claverhouse’s troopers, suddenly rises to confront his conquerors, and spends his last breath in denouncing the oppressors of the saints. Even such an apparition was Jonathan Swift to comfortable Whigs who were flourishing in the place of Harley and St. John, when, after ten years’ quiescence, he suddenly stepped into the political arena. After the first crushing fall he had abandoned partial hope, and contented himself with establishing supremacy in his chapter. But undying wrath smouldered in his breast till time came for an outburst.
No man had ever learnt more thoroughly the lesson, “put not your faith in princes;” or had been impressed with a lower estimate of the wisdom displayed by the rulers of the world. He had been behind the scenes, and knew that the wisdom of great ministers meant just enough cunning to court the ruin which a little common sense would have avoided. Corruption was at the prow and folly at the helm. The selfish ring which he had denounced so fiercely had triumphed. It had triumphed, as he held, by flattering the new dynasty, hoodwinking the nation, and maligning its antagonists. Thecynical theory of politics was not for him, as for some comfortable cynics, an abstract proposition, which mattered very little to a sensible man; but was embodied in the bitter wrath with which he regarded his triumphant adversaries. Pessimism is perfectly compatible with bland enjoyment of the good things in a bad world; but Swift’s pessimism was not of this type. It meant energetic hatred of definite things and people who were always before him.
With this feeling, he had come to Ireland; and Ireland—I am speaking of a century and a half ago—was the opprobrium of English statesmanship. There Swift had (or thought he had) always before him a concrete example of the basest form of tyranny. By Ireland, I have said, Swift meant, in the first place, the English in Ireland. In the last years of his sanity he protested indignantly against the confusion between the “savage old Irish,” and the English gentry who, he said, were much better bred, spoke better English, and were more civilized than the inhabitants of many English counties.[58]He retained to the end of his life his antipathy to the Scotch colonists. He opposed their demand for political equality as fiercely in the last as in his first political utterances. He contrasted them unfavourably[59]with the Catholics, who had indeed been driven to revolt by massacre and confiscation under Puritan rule, but who were now, he declared, “true Whigs, in the best and most proper sense of the word,” and thoroughly loyal to the house of Hanover. Had there been a danger of a Catholic revolt, Swift’s feelings might have been different; but he always held, that they were “as inconsiderable as the women andchildren,” mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” “out of all capacity of doing any mischief, if they were ever so well inclined.”[60]Looking at them in this way, he felt a sincere compassion for their misery and a bitter resentment against their oppressors. The English, he said, in a remarkable letter,[61]should be ashamed of their reproaches of Irish dulness, ignorance and cowardice. Those defects were the products of slavery. He declared that the poor cottagers had “a much better natural taste for good sense, humour and raillery, than ever I observed among people of the like sort in England. But the millions of oppressions they lie under, the tyranny of their landlords, the ridiculous zeal of their priests, and the misery of the whole nation have been enough to damp the best spirits under the sun.” Such a view is now commonplace enough. It was then a heresy to English statesmen, who thought that nobody but a Papist or a Jacobite could object to the tyranny of Whigs.
Swift’s diagnosis of the chronic Irish disease was thoroughly political. He considered that Irish misery sprang from the subjection to a government not intentionally cruel, but absolutely selfish; to which the Irish revenue meant so much convenient political plunder, and which acted on the principle quoted from Cowley, that the happiness of Ireland should not weigh against the “least conveniency” of England. He summed up his views in a remarkable letter,[62]to be presently mentioned, the substance of which had been orally communicated to Walpole. He said to Walpole, as he said in every published utterance:—first, that the colonists were still Englishmenand entitled to English rights; secondly, that their trade was deliberately crushed, purely for the benefit of the English of England; thirdly, that all valuable preferments were bestowed upon men born in England, as a matter of course; and finally, that in consequence of this, the upper classes, deprived of all other openings, were forced to rack-rent their tenants to such a degree that not one farmer in the kingdom out of a hundred “could afford shoes or stockings to his children, or to eat flesh or drink anything better than sour milk and water twice in a year: so that the whole country, except the Scotch plantation in the north, is a scene of misery and desolation hardly to be matched on this side Lapland.” A modern reformer would give the first and chief place to this social misery. It is characteristic that Swift comes to it as a consequence from the injustice to his own class:—as, again, that he appeals to Walpole not on the simple ground that the people are wretched, but on the ground that they will be soon unable to pay the tribute to England, which he reckons at a million a year. But his conclusion might be accepted by any Irish patriot. Whatever, he says, can make a country poor and despicable, concurs in the case of Ireland. The nation is controlled by laws to which it does not consent; disowned by its brethren and countrymen; refused the liberty of trading even in its natural commodities; forced to seek for justice many hundred miles by sea and land; rendered in a manner incapable of serving the king and country in any place of honour, trust, or profit; whilst the governors have no sympathy with the governed, except what may occasionally arise from the sense of justice and philanthropy.
I am not to ask how far Swift was right in his judgments. Every line which he wrote shows that he wasthoroughly sincere and profoundly stirred by his convictions. A remarkable pamphlet, published in 1720, contained his first utterance upon the subject. It is an exhortation to the Irish to use only Irish manufactures. He applies to Ireland the fable ofArachne and Pallas. The goddess, indignant at being equalled in spinning, turned her rival into a spider, to spin for ever out of her own bowels in a narrow compass. He always, he says, pitied poor Arachne for so cruel and unjust a sentence, “which, however, is fully executed upon us by England with further additions of rigour and severity; for the greatest part of our bowels and vitals is extracted, without allowing us the liberty of spinning and weaving them.” Swift of course accepts the economic fallacy equally taken for granted by his opponents, and fails to see that England and Ireland injured themselves as well as each other by refusing to interchange their productions. But he utters forcibly his righteous indignation against the contemptuous injustice of the English rulers, in consequence of which the “miserable people” are being reduced “to a worse condition than the peasants in France, or the vassals in Germany and Poland.” Slaves, he says, have a natural disposition to be tyrants; and he himself, when his betters give him a kick, is apt to revenge it with six upon his footman. That is how the landlords treat their tenantry.
The printer of this pamphlet was prosecuted. The chief justice (Whitshed) sent back the jury nine times and kept them eleven hours before they would consent to bring in a “special verdict.” The unpopularity of the prosecution became so great that it was at last dropped. Four years afterwards a more violent agitation broke out. A patent had been given to a certain William Wood for supplying Ireland with a copper coinage. Many complaints had been made,and in September, 1723, addresses were voted by the Irish Houses of Parliament, declaring that the patent had been obtained by clandestine and false representations: that it was mischievous to the country: and that Wood had been guilty of frauds in his coinage. They were pacified by vague promises; but Walpole went on with the scheme on the strength of a favourable report of a committee of the Privy Council; and the excitement was already serious when (in 1724) Swift published theDrapier’s Letters, which give him his chief title to eminence as a patriotic agitator.
Swift either shared or took advantage of the general belief that the mysteries of the currency are unfathomable to the human intelligence. They have to do with that world of financial magic in which wealth may be made out of paper, and all ordinary relations of cause and effect are suspended. There is, however, no real mystery about the halfpence. The small coins which do not form part of the legal tender may be considered primarily as counters. A penny is a penny, so long as twelve are change for a shilling. It is not in the least necessary for this purpose that the copper contained in the twelve penny pieces should be worth or nearly worth a shilling. A sovereign can never be worth much more than the gold of which it is made. But at the present day bronze worth only twopence is coined into twelve penny pieces.[63]The coined bronze is worth six times as much as the uncoined. The small coins must have some intrinsic value to deter forgery, and must be made of good materials to stand wear and tear. If these conditions be observed, and a proper number be issued, the value of the penny will be nomore affected by the value of the copper than the value of the banknote by that of the paper on which it is written. This opinion assumes that the copper coins cannot be offered or demanded in payment of any but trifling debts. The halfpence coined by Wood seem to have fulfilled these conditions, and as copper worth twopence (on the lowest computation) was coined into ten halfpence, worth fivepence, their intrinsic value was more than double that of modern halfpence.
The halfpence, then, were not objectionable upon this ground. Nay, it would have been wasteful to make them more valuable. It would have been as foolish to use more copper for the pence as to make the works of a watch of gold if brass is equally durable and convenient. But another consequence is equally clear. The effect of Wood’s patent was that a mass of copper worth about 60,000l.,[64]became worth 100,800l.in the shape of halfpenny pieces. There was therefore a balance of about 40,000l.to pay for the expenses of coinage. It would have been waste to get rid of this by putting more copper in the coins; but if so large a profit arose from the transaction, it would go to somebody. At the present day it would be brought into the national treasury. This was not the way in which business was done in Ireland. Wood was to pay 1000l.a year for fourteen years to the Crown.[65]But 14,000l.still leaves a large margin for profit. What was to become of it? According to the admiring biographer of Sir R.Walpole, the patent had been originally given by Lord Sunderland to the Duchess of Kendal, a lady whom the king delighted to honour. She already received 3000l.a year in pensions upon the Irish establishment, and she sold this patent to Wood for 10,000l.Enough was still left to give Wood a handsome profit; as in transactions of this kind, every accomplice in a dirty business expects to be well paid. So handsome, indeed, was the profit that Wood received ultimately a pension of 3000l.for eight years, 24,000l., that is, in consideration of abandoning the patent. It was right and proper that a profit should be made on the transaction, but shameful that it should be divided between the king’s mistress and William Wood, and that the bargain should be struck without consulting the Irish representatives, and maintained in spite of their protests. The Duchess of Kendal was to be allowed to take a share of the wretched halfpence in the pocket of every Irish beggar. A more disgraceful transaction could hardly be imagined, or one more calculated to justify Swift’s view of the selfishness and corruption of the English rulers.
Swift saw his chance, and went to work in characteristic fashion, with unscrupulous audacity of statement, guided by the keenest strategical instinct. He struck at the heart as vigorously as he had done in theExaminer, but with resentment sharpened by ten years of exile. It was not safe to speak of the Duchess of Kendal’s share in the transaction, though the story, as poor Archdeacon Coxe pathetically declares, was industriously propagated. But the case against Wood was all the stronger. Is he so wicked, asks Swift, as to suppose that a nation is to be ruined that he may gain three or fourscore thousand pounds? Hampden went to prison, he says, rather thanpay a few shillings wrongfully; I, says Swift, would rather be hanged than have all my “property taxed at seventeen shillings in the pound at the arbitrary will and pleasure of the venerable Mr. Wood.” A simple constitutional precedent might rouse a Hampden; but to stir a popular agitation, it is as well to show that the evil actually inflicted is gigantic, independently of possible results. It requires, indeed, some audacity to prove that debasement of the copper currency can amount to a tax of seventeen shillings in the pound on all property. Here, however, Swift might simply throw the reins upon the neck of his fancy. Anybody may make any inferences he pleases in the mysterious regions of currency; and no inferences, it seems, were too audacious for his hearers, though we are left to doubt how far Swift’s wrath had generated delusions in his own mind, and how far he perceived that other minds were ready to be deluded. He revels in prophesying the most extravagant consequences. The country will be undone; the tenants will not be able to pay their rents; “the farmers must rob, or beg, or leave the country; the shopkeepers in this and every other town must break or starve; the squire will hoard up all his good money to send to England and keep some poor tailor or weaver in his house, who will be glad to get bread at any rate.”[66]Concrete facts are given to help the imagination. Squire Conolly must have 250 horses to bring his half-yearly rents to town; and the poor man will have to pay thirty-six of Wood’s halfpence to get a quart of twopenny ale.
How is this proved? One argument is a sufficient specimen. Nobody, according to the patent, was to be forced to take Wood’s halfpence; nor could any one be obligedto receive more than fivepence halfpenny in any one payment. This, of course, meant that the halfpence could only be used as change, and a man must pay his debts in silver or gold whenever it was possible to use a sixpence. It upsets Swift’s statement about Squire Connolly’s rents. But Swift is equal to the emergency. The rule means, he says, that every man must take fivepence halfpenny in every payment,if it be offered; which, on the next page, becomes simply in every payment; therefore making an easy assumption or two, he reckons that you will receive 160l.a year in these halfpence; and therefore (by other assumptions) lose 140l.a year.[67]It might have occurred to Swift, one would think, that both parties to the transaction could not possibly be losers. But he calmly assumes that the man who pays will lose in proportion to the increased number of coins; and the man who receives, in proportion to the depreciated value of each coin. He does not see, or think it worth notice, that the two losses obviously counterbalance each other; and he has an easy road to prophesying absolute ruin for everybody. It would be almost as great a compliment to call this sophistry, as to dignify with the name of satire a round assertion that an honest man is a cheat or a rogue.
The real grievance, however, shows through the sham argument. “It is no loss of honour,” thought Swift, “to submit to the lion; but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat?” Why should Wood have this profit (even if more reasonably estimated) in defiance of the wishes of the nation? It is, says Swift, because he is an Englishman and has great friends. He proposes to meet the attemptby a general agreement not to take the halfpence. Briefly, the halfpence were to be “Boycotted.”
Before this second letter was written the English ministers had become alarmed. A Report of the Privy Council (July 24, 1724) defended the patent, but ended by recommending that the amount to be coined should be reduced to 40,000l.Carteret was sent out as Lord Lieutenant to get this compromise accepted. Swift replied by a third letter, arguing the question of the patent, which he can “never suppose,” or in other words, which everybody knew, to have been granted as a “job for the interest of some particular person.” He vigorously asserts that the patent can never make it obligatory to accept the halfpence, and tells a story much to the purpose from old Leicester experience. The justices had reduced the price of ale to three-halfpence a quart. One of them therefore requested that they would make another order to appoint who should drink it, “for by God,” said he, “I will not.”
The argument thus naturally led to a further and more important question. The discussion as to the patent brought forward the question of right. Wood and his friends, according to Swift, had begun to declare that the resistance meant Jacobitism and rebellion; they asserted that the Irish were ready to shake off their dependence upon the crown of England. Swift took up the challenge and answered resolutely and eloquently. He took up the broadest ground. Ireland, he declared, depended upon England in no other sense than that in which England depended upon Ireland. Whoever thinks otherwise, he said, “I, M. B. despair, desire to be excepted; for I declare, next under God, I depend only on the king my sovereign, and the laws of my own country. I am sofar,” he added, “from depending upon the people of England, that if they should rebel, I would take arms and lose every drop of my blood, to hinder the Pretender from being king of Ireland.”
It had been reported that somebody (Walpole presumably) had sworn to thrust the halfpence down the throats of the Irish. The remedy, replied Swift, is totally in your own hands, “and therefore I have digressed a little ... to let you see that by the laws of God, of Nature, of Nations, and of your own country, you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.” As Swift had already said in the third letter, no one could believe that any English patent would stand half an hour after an address from the English houses of Parliament such as that which had been passed against Wood’s by the Irish Parliament. Whatever constitutional doubts might be raised, it was therefore come to be the plain question whether or not the English ministers should simply override the wishes of the Irish nation.
Carteret, upon landing, began by trying to suppress his adversary. A reward of 300l.was offered for the discovery of the author of the fourth letter. A prosecution was ordered against the printer. Swift went to the levée of the Lord Lieutenant, and reproached him bitterly for his severity against a poor tradesman who had published papers for the good of his country. Carteret answered in a happy quotation from Virgil, a feat which always seems to have brought consolation to the statesman of that day.
Res dura et regni novitas me talia coguntMoliri.
Another story is more characteristic. Swift’s butlerhad acted as his amanuensis, and absented himself one night whilst the proclamation was running. Swift thought that the butler was either treacherous or presuming upon his knowledge of the secret. As soon as the man returned he ordered him to strip off his livery and begone. “I am in your power,” he said, “and for that very reason I will not stand your insolence.” The poor butler departed, but preserved his fidelity; and Swift, when the tempest had blown over, rewarded him by appointing him verger in the cathedral. The grand jury threw out the bill against the printer in spite of all Whitshed’s efforts; they were discharged; and the next grand jury presented Wood’s halfpence as a nuisance. Carteret gave way, the patent was surrendered, and Swift might congratulate himself upon a complete victory.
The conclusion is in one respect rather absurd. The Irish succeeded in rejecting a real benefit at the cost of paying Wood the profit which he would have made, had he been allowed to confer it. Another point must be admitted. Swift’s audacious misstatements were successful for the time in rousing the spirit of the people. They have led, however, to a very erroneous estimate of the whole case. English statesmen and historians[68]have found it so easy to expose his errors that they have thought his whole case absurd. The grievance was not what it was represented, therefore it is argued that there was no grievance. The very essence of the case was that the Irish people were to be plundered by the German mistress; and such plunder was possible because the English people, as Swift says, never thought of Irelandexcept when there was nothing else to be talked of in the coffee-houses.[69]Owing to the conditions of the controversy, this grievance only came out gradually, and could never be fully stated. Swift could never do more than hint at the transaction. His letters (including three which appeared after the last mentioned, enforcing the same case) have often been cited as models of eloquence, and compared to Demosthenes. We must make some deduction from this, as in the case of his former political pamphlets. The intensity of his absorption in the immediate end, deprives them of some literary merits; and we, to whom the sophistries are palpable enough, are apt to resent them. Anybody can be effective in a way, if he chooses to lie boldly. Yet, in another sense, it is hard to over-praise the letters. They have in a high degree the peculiar stamp of Swift’s genius; the vein of the most nervous common-sense and pithy assertion with an undercurrent of intense passion, the more impressive because it is never allowed to exhale in mere rhetoric.
Swift’s success, the dauntless front which he had shown to the oppressor, made him the idol of his countrymen. A drapier’s club was formed in his honour, which collected the letters and drank toasts and sang songs to celebrate their hero. In a sad letter to Pope, in 1737, he complains that none of his equals care for him; but adds that as he walks the streets he has “a thousand hats and blessings upon old scores which those we call the gentry have forgot.” The people received him as their champion. When he returned from England in 1726, bells were rung, bonfires lighted and a guard of honour escorted him to the deanery. Towns voted himtheir freedom and received him like a prince. When Walpole spoke of arresting him, a prudent friend told the minister that the messenger would require a guard of 10,000 soldiers. Corporations asked his advice in elections, and the weavers appealed to him on questions about their trade. In one of his satires,[70]Swift had attacked a certain Serjeant Bettesworth—
Thus at the bar the booby BettesworthThough half-a-crown o’erpays his sweat’s worth.
Bettesworth called upon him with, as Swift reports, a knife in his pocket, and complained in such terms as to imply some intention of personal violence. The neighbours instantly sent a deputation to the dean, proposing to take vengeance upon Bettesworth, and though he induced them to disperse peaceably, they formed a guard to watch the house; and Bettesworth complained that his attack upon the dean had lowered his professional income by 1200l.a year. A quaint example of his popularity is given by Sheridan. A great crowd had collected to see an eclipse. Swift thereupon sent out the bellman to give notice that the eclipse had been postponed by the dean’s orders; and the crowd dispersed.
Influence with the people, however, could not bring Swift back to power. At one time there seemed to be a gleam of hope. Swift visited England twice in 1726 and 1727. He paid long visits to his old friend Pope, and again met Bolingbroke, now returned from exile, and trying to make a place in English politics. Peterborough introduced the dean to Walpole, to whom Swift detailed his views upon Irish politics. Walpole was the last man to set about a great reform from mereconsiderations of justice and philanthropy, and was not likely to trust a confidant of Bolingbroke. He was civil but indifferent. Swift, however, was introduced by his friends to Mrs. Howard, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, soon to become George II. The princess, afterwards Queen Caroline, ordered Swift to come and see her, and he complied, as he says, after nine commands. He told her that she had lately seen a wild boy from Germany, and now he supposed she wanted to see a wild dean from Ireland. Some civilities passed; Swift offered some plaids of Irish manufacture, and the princess promised some medals in return. When, in the next year, George I. died, the Opposition hoped great things from the change. Pulteney had tried to get Swift’s powerful help for theCraftsman, the Opposition organ; and the Opposition hoped to upset Walpole. Swift, who had thought of going to France for his health, asked Mrs. Howard’s advice. She recommended him to stay; and he took the recommendation as amounting to a promise of support. He had some hopes of obtaining English preferment in exchange for his deanery in what he calls (in the date to one of his letters[71]) “wretched Dublin in miserable Ireland.” It soon appeared, however, that the mistress was powerless; and that Walpole was to be as firm as ever in his seat. Swift returned to Ireland, never again to leave it: to lose soon afterwards his beloved Stella, and nurse an additional grudge against courts and favourites.
The bitterness with which he resented Mrs. Howard’s supposed faithlessness is painfully illustrative in truth of the morbid state of mind which was growing upon him.“You think,” he says to Bolingbroke in 1729, “as I ought to think, that it is time for me to have done with the world; and so I would, if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.” That terrible phrase expresses but too vividly the state of mind which was now becoming familiar to him. Separated by death and absence from his best friends, and tormented by increasing illness, he looked out upon a state of things in which he could see no ground for hope. The resistance to Wood’s halfpence had staved off immediate ruin; but had not cured the fundamental evil. Some tracts upon Irish affairs, written after the Drapier’s Letters, sufficiently indicate his despairing vein. “I am,” he says in 1737, when proposing some remedy for the swarms of beggars in Dublin, “a desponder by nature,” and he has found out that the people will never stir themselves to remove a single grievance. His old prejudices were as keen as ever, and could dictate personal outbursts. He attacked the bishops bitterly for offering certain measures which in his view sacrificed the permanent interests of the Church to that of the actual occupants. He showed his own sincerity by refusing to take fines for leases which would have benefited himself at the expense of his successors. With equal earnestness he still clung to the Test Acts, and assailed the Protestant dissenters with all his old bitterness, and ridiculed their claims to brotherhood with Churchmen. To the end he was a Churchman before everything. One of the last of his poetical performances was prompted by the sanction given by the Irish Parliament to an opposition to certain “titles of ejectment.” He had defended the right of the Irish Parliament against English rulers; but when it attackedthe interests of his Church his fury showed itself in the most savage satire that he ever wrote, theLegion Club. It is an explosion of wrath tinged with madness.
Could I from the building’s topHear the rattling thunder drop,While the devil upon the roof(If the devil be thunder-proof)Should with poker fiery redCrack the stones and melt the lead,Drive them down on every skullWhen the den of thieves is full;Quite destroy the harpies’ nest,How might this our isle be blest!
What follows fully keeps up to this level. Swift flings filth like a maniac, plunges into ferocious personalities, and ends fitly with the execration,—
May their God, the devil, confound them.
He was seized with one of his fits whilst writing the poem and was never afterwards capable of sustained composition.
Some further pamphlets—especially one on the State of Ireland—repeat and enforce his views. One of them requires special mention. TheModest Proposal(written in 1729)for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country—the proposal being that they should be turned into articles of food—gives the very essence of Swift’s feeling, and is one of the most tremendous pieces of satire in existence. It shows the quality already noticed. Swift is burning with a passion, the glow of which makes other passions look cold, as it is said that some bright lights cause other illuminating objects to cast a shadow. Yet his face is absolutely grave, and he details his plan as calmly as amodern projector suggesting the importation of Australian meat. The superficial coolness may be revolting to tender-hearted people, and has indeed led to condemnation of the supposed ferocity of the author almost as surprising as the criticisms which can see in it nothing but an exquisite piece of humour. It is, in truth, fearful to read even now. Yet we can forgive and even sympathize when we take it for what it really is—the most complete expression of burning indignation against intolerable wrongs. It utters, indeed, a serious conviction. “I confess myself,” says Swift in a remarkable paper,[72]“to be touched with a very sensible pleasure when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes treble the worth; brought up to steal and beg for want of work; to whom death would be the best thing to be wished for, on account both of themselves and the public.” He remarks in the same place on the lamentable contradiction presented in Ireland to the maxim that the “people are the riches of a nation,” and theModest Proposalis the fullest comment on this melancholy reflection. After many visionary proposals, he has at last hit upon the plan, which has at least the advantage that by adopting it “we can incur no danger of disobliging England. For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country which would be glad to eat up a whole nation without it.”
Swift once asked Delany[73]whether the “corruptions and villanies of men in power did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?” “No,” said Delany. “Why, howcan you help it?” said Swift. “Because,” replied Delany, “I am commanded to the contrary—fret not thyself because of the ungodly.” That, like other wise maxims, is capable of an ambiguous application. As Delany took it, Swift might perhaps have replied that it was a very comfortable maxim—for the ungodly. His own application of Scripture is different. It tells us, he says, in his proposal for using Irish manufactures, that “oppression makes a wise man mad.” If, therefore, some men are not mad, it must be because they are not wise. In truth, it is characteristic of Swift that he could never learn the great lesson of submission even to the inevitable. He could not, like an easy-going Delany, submit to oppression which might possibly be resisted with success; but as little could he submit when all resistance was hopeless. His rage, which could find no better outlet, burnt inwardly and drove him mad. It is very interesting to compare Swift’s wrathful denunciations with Berkeley’s treatment of the same before in theQuerist(1735-7). Berkeley is full of luminous suggestions upon economical questions which are entirely beyond Swift’s mark. He is in a region quite above the sophistries of theDrapier’s Letters. He sees equally the terrible grievance that no people in the world is so beggarly, wretched, and destitute as the common Irish. But he thinks all complaints against the English rule useless and therefore foolish. If the English restrain our trade ill-advisedly, is it not, he asks, plainly our interest to accommodate ourselves to them (No. 136)? Have we not the advantage of English protection without sharing English responsibilities? He asks, “whether England doth not really love us and wish well to us as bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh? and whether it be not our part to cultivate this love and affection all manner of ways?” (Nos. 322, 323.) One canfancy how Swift must have received this characteristic suggestion of the admirable Berkeley, who could not bring himself to think ill of any one. Berkeley’s main contention is no doubt sound in itself, namely, that the welfare of the country really depended on the industry and economy of its inhabitants, and that such qualities would have made the Irish comfortable in spite of all English restrictions and Government abuses. But, then, Swift might well have answered that such general maxims are idle. It is all very well for divines to tell people to become good and to find out that then they will be happy. But how are they to be made good? Are the Irish intrinsically worse than other men, or is their laziness and restlessness due to special and removable circumstances? In the latter case is there not more real value in attacking tangible evils than in propounding general maxims and calling upon all men to submit to oppression, and even to believe in the oppressor’s good-will in the name of Christian charity? To answer those questions would be to plunge into interminable and hopeless controversies. Meanwhile Swift’s fierce indignation against English oppression might almost as well have been directed against a law of nature for any immediate result. Whether the rousing of the national spirit was any benefit is a question which I must leave to others. In any case, the work, however darkened by personal feeling or love of class-privilege, expressed as hearty a hatred of oppression as ever animated a human being.
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS.
The winter of 1713-14 passed by Swift in England was full of anxiety and vexation. He found time, however, to join in a remarkable literary association. The so-called Scriblerus Club does not appear, indeed, to have had any definite organization. The rising young wits, Pope and Gay, both of them born in 1688, were already becoming famous, and were taken up by Swift, still in the zenith of his political power. Parnell, a few years their senior, had been introduced by Swift to Oxford as a convert from Whiggism. All three became intimate with Swift and Arbuthnot, the most learned and amiable of the whole circle of Swift’s friends. Swift declared him to have every quality that could make a man amiable and useful with but one defect—he had “a sort of slouch in his walk;” he was loved and respected by every one, and was one of the most distinguished of the Brothers. Swift and Arbuthnot and their three juniors discussed literary plans in the midst of the growing political excitement. Even Oxford used, as Pope tells us, to amuse himself during the very crisis of his fate by scribbling verses and talking nonsense with the members of this informal Club, and some doggerel lines exchanged with him remain as a specimen—a poor one it is to be hoped—of their intercourse.The familiarity thus begun continued through the life of the members. Swift can have seen very little of Pope. He hardly made his acquaintance till the latter part of 1713; they parted in the summer of 1714; and never met again except in Swift’s two visits to England in 1726-27. Yet their correspondence shows an affection which was no doubt heightened by the consciousness of each that the friendship of his most famous contemporary author was creditable; but which, upon Swift’s side at least, was thoroughly sincere and cordial, and strengthened with advancing years.
The final cause of the Club was supposed to be the composition of a joint-stock satire. We learn from an interesting letter[74]that Pope formed the original design; though Swift thought that Arbuthnot was the only one capable of carrying it out. The scheme was to write the memoirs of an imaginary pedant, who had dabbled with equal wrong-headedness in all kinds of knowledge; and thus recalls Swift’s early performances—theBattle of the Booksand theTale of a Tub. Arbuthnot begs Swift to work upon it during his melancholy retirement at Letcombe. Swift had other things to occupy his mind; and upon the dispersion of the party the Club fell into abeyance. Fragments of the original plan were carried out by Pope and Arbuthnot, and form part of theMiscellanies, to which Swift contributed a number of poetical scraps, published under Pope’s direction in 1726-27. It seems probable thatGulliveroriginated in Swift’s mind in the course of his meditations upon Scriblerus. The composition ofGulliverwas one of the occupations by which he amused himself after recovering from the great shock ofhis “exile.” He worked, as he seems always to have done, slowly and intermittently. Part of Brobdingnag at least, as we learn from a letter of Vanessa’s, was in existence by 1722. Swift brought the whole manuscript to England in 1726, and it was published anonymously in the following winter. The success was instantaneous and overwhelming. “I will make over all my profits” (in a work then being published) “to you,” writes Arbuthnot, “for the property ofGulliver’s Travels, which, I believe, will have as great a run as John Bunyan.” The anticipation was amply fulfilled.Gulliver’s Travelsis one of the very few books some knowledge of which may be fairly assumed in any one who reads anything. Yet something must be said of the secret of the astonishing success of this unique performance.
One remark is obvious.Gulliver’s Travels(omitting certain passages) is almost the most delightful children’s book ever written. Yet it has been equally valued as an unrivalled satire. Old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was “in raptures with it,” says Gay, “and can dream of nothing else.” She forgives his bitter attacks upon her party in consideration of his assault upon human nature. He gives, she declares, “the most accurate” (that is, of course, the most scornful) “account of kings, ministers, bishops, and courts of justice, that is possible to be writ.” Another curious testimony may be noticed. Godwin, when tracing all evils to the baneful effects of government, declares that the author ofGullivershowed a “more profound insight into the true principles of political justice than any preceding or contemporary author.” The playful form was unfortunate, thinks this grave philosopher, as blinding mankind to the “inestimable wisdom” of the work. This double triumph is remarkable. We may not share theopinions of the cynics of the day, or of the revolutionists of a later generation; but it is strange that they should be fascinated by a work which is studied with delight, without the faintest suspicion of any ulterior meaning, by the infantile mind.
The charm of Gulliver for the young depends upon an obvious quality, which is indicated in Swift’s report of the criticism by an Irish bishop, who said that “the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it.” There is something pleasant in the intense gravity of the narrative, which recalls and may have been partly suggested byRobinson Crusoe, though it came naturally to Swift. I have already spoken of his delight in mystification, and the detailed realization of pure fiction seems to have been delightful in itself. The Partridge pamphlets and its various practical jokes are illustrations of a tendency which fell in with the spirit of the time, and of whichGullivermay be regarded as the highest manifestation. Swift’s peculiarity is in the curious sobriety of fancy, which leads him to keep in his most daring flights upon the confines of the possible. In the imaginary travels of Lucian and Rabelais, to whichGulliveris generally compared, we frankly take leave of the real world altogether. We are treated with arbitrary and monstrous combinations which may be amusing, but which do not challenge even a semblance of belief. InGulliverthis is so little the case that it can hardly be said in strictness that the fundamental assumptions are even impossible. Why should there not be creatures in human form with whom as in Lilliput, one of our inches represents a foot, or, as in Brobdingnag, one of our feet represents an inch? The assumption is so modest that we are presented—it may be said—with a definite andsoluble problem. We have not, as in other fictitious worlds, to deal with a state of things in which the imagination is bewildered, but with one in which it is agreeably stimulated. We have certainly to consider an extreme and exceptional case; but one to which all the ordinary laws of human nature are still strictly applicable. In Voltaire’s trifle,Micromegas, we are presented to beings eight leagues in height and endowed with seventy-two senses. For Voltaire’s purpose the stupendous exaggeration is necessary; for he wishes to insist upon the minuteness of human capacities. But the assumption of course disqualifies us from taking any intelligent interest in a region where no precedent is available for our guidance. We are in the air; anything and everything is possible. But Swift modestly varies only one element in the problem. Imagine giants and dwarfs as tall as a house or as low as a footstool, and let us see what comes of it. That is a plain, almost a mathematical problem; and we can therefore judge his success, and receive pleasure from the ingenuity and verisimilitude of his creations.
“When you have once thought of big men and little men,” said Johnson, perversely enough, “it is easy to do the rest.” The first step might perhaps seem in this case to be the easiest; yet nobody ever thought of it before Swift; and nobody has ever had similar good fortune since. There is no other fictitious world the denizens of which have become so real for us, and which has supplied so many images familiar to every educated mind. But the apparent ease is due to the extreme consistency and sound judgment of Swift’s realization. The conclusions follow so inevitably from the primary data that when they are once drawn we agree that they could not have been otherwise; and infer, rashly, that anybody else couldhave drawn them. It is as easy as lying; but everybody who has seriously tried the experiment knows that even lying is by no means so easy as it appears at first sight. In fact, Swift’s success is something unique. The charming plausibility of every incident, throughout the two first parts, commends itself to children, who enjoy definite concrete images, and are fascinated by a world which is at once full of marvels, surpassing Jack the Giant Killer and the wonders seen by Sinbad, and yet as obviously and undeniably true as the adventures of Robinson Crusoe himself. Nobody who has read the book can ever forget it; and we may add that besides the childlike pleasure which arises from a distinct realization of a strange world of fancy, the two first books are sufficiently good-humoured. Swift seems to be amused as well as amusing. They were probably written during the least intolerable part of his exile. The period of composition includes the years of the Vanessa tragedy and of the war of Wood’s halfpence; it was finished when Stella’s illness was becoming constantly more threatening, and published little more than a year before her death. The last books show Swift’s most savage temper; but we may hope that in spite of disease, disappointments, and a growing alienation from mankind, Swift could still enjoy an occasional piece of spontaneous, unadulterated fun. He could still forget his cares, and throw the reins on the neck of his fancy. At times there is a certain charm even in the characters. Every one has a liking for the giant maid of all work, Glumdalelitch, whose affection for her plaything is a quaint inversion of the ordinary relations between Swift and his feminine adorers. The grave, stern, irascible man can relax after a sort, though his strange idiosyncrasy comes out as distinctly in his relaxation as in his passions.
I will not dwell upon this aspect ofGulliver, which is obvious to every one. There is another question which we are forced to ask, and which is not very easy to answer. What doesGullivermean? It is clearly a satire—but who and what are its objects? Swift states his own view very unequivocally. “I heartily hate and detest that animal called man,” he says,[75]“although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.” He declares that man is not ananimal rationale, but onlyrationis capax: and he then adds, “Upon this great foundation of misanthropy ... the whole building of my travels is erected.” “If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it,” he says in the same letter, “I would burn my travels.” He indulges in a similar reflection to Sheridan.[76]“Expect no more from man,” he says, “than such an animal is capable of, and you will every day find my description of Yahoos more resembling. You should think and deal with every man as a villain, without calling him so, or flying from him or valuing him less. This is an old true lesson.” In spite of these avowals, of a kind which, in Swift, must not be taken too literally, we find it rather hard to admit that the essence ofGullivercan be an expression of this doctrine. The tone becomes morose and sombre, and even ferocious; but it has been disputed whether in any case it can be regarded simply as an utterance of misanthropy.
Gulliver’s Travelsbelongs to a literary genus full of grotesque and anomalous forms. Its form is derived from some of the imaginary travels of which Lucian’sTrue History—itself a burlesque of some early travellers’ tales—is the first example. But it has an affinity also to suchbooks as Bacon’sAtlantis, and More’sUtopia; and, again, to later philosophical romances likeCandideandRasselas; and not least, perhaps, to the ancient fables, such asReynard the Fox, to which Swift refers in theTale of a Tub. It may be compared, again, to thePilgrim’s Progress, and the whole family of allegories. The full-blown allegory resembles the game of chess said to have been played by some ancient monarch, in which the pieces were replaced by real human beings. The movements of the actors were not determined by the passions proper to their character, but by the external set of rules imposed upon them by the game. The allegory is a kind of picture-writing, popular, like picture-writing at a certain stage of development, but wearisome at more cultivated periods, when we prefer to have abstract theories conveyed in abstract language, and limit the artist to the intrinsic meanings of the images in which he deals. The whole class of more or less allegorical writing has thus the peculiarity that something more is meant than meets the ear. Part of its meaning depends upon a tacit convention in virtue of which a beautiful woman, for example, is not simply a beautiful woman, but also a representative of Justice and Charity. And as any such convention is more or less arbitrary, we are often in perplexity to interpret the author’s meaning, and also to judge of the propriety of the symbols. The allegorical intention, again, may be more or less present: and such a book as Gulliver must be regarded as lying somewhere between the allegory and the direct revelation of truth, which is more or less implied in the work of every genuine artist. Its true purpose has thus rather puzzled critics. Hazlitt[77]urges, for example, with his usualbrilliancy, that Swift’s purpose was to “strip empty pride and grandeur of the imposing air which external circumstances throw around them.” Swift accordingly varies the scale, so as to show the insignificance or the grossness of our self-love. He does this with “mathematical precision;” he tries an experiment upon human nature; and with the result that “nothing solid, nothing valuable is left in his system but wisdom and virtue.” So Gulliver’s carrying off the fleet of Blefuscu is “a mortifying stroke, aimed at national glory.” “After that, we have only to consider which of the contending parties was in the right.”
Hazlitt naturally can see nothing misanthropical or innocent in such a conclusion. The mask of imposture is torn off the world, and only imposture can complain. This view, which has no doubt its truth, suggests some obvious doubts. We are not invited, as a matter of fact, to attend to the question of right and wrong, as between Lilliput and Blefuscu. The real sentiment in Swift is that a war between these miserable pygmies is, in itself, contemptible; and therefore, as he infers, war between men six feet high is equally contemptible. The truth is that, although Swift’s solution of the problem may be called mathematically precise, the precision does not extend to the supposed argument. If we insist upon treating the question as one of strict logic, the only conclusion which could be drawn from Gulliver is the very safe one that the interest of the human drama does not depend upon the size of the actors. A pygmy or a giant endowed with all our functions and thoughts would be exactly as interesting as a being of the normal stature. It does not require a journey to imaginary regions to teach us so much. And if we say that Swift has shownus in his pictures the real essence of human life, we only say for him what might be said with equal force of Shakspeare or Balzac, or any great artist. The bare proof that the essence is not dependent upon the external condition of size is superfluous and irrelevant; and we must admit that Swift’s method is childish, or that it does not adhere to this strict logical canon.
Hazlitt, however, comes nearer the truth, as I think, when he says that Swift takes a view of human nature such as might be taken by a being of a higher sphere. That, at least, is his purpose; only, as I think, he pursues it by a neglect of “scientific reasoning.” The use of the machinery is simply to bring us into a congenial frame of mind. He strikes the key-note of contempt by his imagery of dwarfs and giants. We despise the petty quarrels of beings six inches high; and therefore we are prepared to despise the wars carried on by a Marlborough and a Eugene. We transfer the contempt based upon mere size, to the motives, which are the same in big men and little. The argument, if argument there be, is a fallacy; but it is equally efficacious for the feelings. You see the pettiness and cruelty of the Lilliputians, who want to conquer an empire defended by toy-ships; and you are tacitly invited to consider whether the bigness of French men-of-war makes an attack upon them more respectable. The force of the satire depends ultimately upon the vigour with which Swift has described the real passions of human beings, big or little. He really means to express a bitter contempt for statesmen and warriors, and seduces us to his side, for the moment, by asking us to look at a diminutive representation of the same beings. The quarrels which depend upon the difference between the high-boots and the low-heeled shoes; or upon breaking eggsat the big or little end; the party intrigues which are settled by cutting capers on the tight-rope, are meant, of course, in ridicule of political and religious parties; and its force depends upon our previous conviction that the party-quarrels between our fellows are, in fact, equally contemptible. Swift’s satire is congenial to the mental attitude of all who have persuaded themselves that men are, in fact, a set of contemptible fools and knaves, in whose quarrels and mutual slaughterings the wise and good could not persuade themselves to take a serious interest. He “proves” nothing, mathematically or otherwise. If you do not share his sentiments, there is nothing in the mere alteration of the scale to convince you that they are right; you may say, with Hazlitt, that heroism is as admirable in a Lilliputian as in a Brobdingnagian, and believe that war calls forth patriotism, and often advances civilization. What Swift has really done is to provide for the man who despises his species a number of exceedingly effective symbols for the utterance of his contempt. A child is simply amused with Bigendians and Littleendians; a philosopher thinks that the questions really at the bottom of church quarrels are in reality of more serious import: but the cynic who has learnt to disbelieve in the nobility or wisdom of the great mass of his species finds a most convenient metaphor for expressing his disbelief. In this wayGulliver’s Travelscontains a whole gallery of caricatures thoroughly congenial to the despisers of humanity.
In Brobdingnag Swift is generally said to be looking, as Scott expresses it, through the other end of the telescope. He wishes to show the grossness of men’s passions, as before he has shown their pettiness. Some of the incidents are devised in this sense; but we may notice thatin Brobdingnag he recurs to the Lilliput view. He gives such an application to his fable as may be convenient, without bothering himself as to logical consistency. He points out indeed the disgusting appearances which would be presented by a magnified human body; but the King of Brobdingnag looks down upon Gulliver, just as Gulliver looked down upon the Lilliputians. The monarch sums up his view emphatically enough by saying, after listening to Gulliver’s version of modern history, that “the bulk of your natives appear to me to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the earth.” In Lilliput and Brobdingnag, however, the satire scarcely goes beyond pardonable limits. The details are often simply amusing, such as Gulliver’s fear when he gets home, of trampling upon the pygmies whom he sees around him. And even the severest satire may be taken without offence by every one who believes that petty motives, folly and selfishness, play a large enough part in human life to justify some indignant exaggerations. It is in the later parts that the ferocity of the man utters itself more fully. The ridicule of the inventors in the third book is, as Arbuthnot said at once, the least successful part of the whole; not only because Swift was getting beyond his knowledge, and beyond the range of his strongest antipathies, but also because there is no longer the ingenious plausibility of the earlier books. The voyage to the Houyhnhnms, which forms the best part, is more powerful, but more painful and repulsive.
A word must here be said of the most unpleasant part of Swift’s character. A morbid interest in the physically disgusting is shown in several of his writings. Some minor pieces, which ought to have been burnt, simplymake the gorge rise. Mrs. Pilkington tells us, and we can for once believe her, that one “poem” actually made her mother sick. It is idle to excuse this on the ground of contemporary freedom of speech. His contemporaries were heartily disgusted. Indeed, though it is true that they revealed certain propensities more openly, I see no reason to think that such propensities were really stronger in them than in their descendants. The objection to Swift is not that he spoke plainly, but that he brooded over filth unnecessarily. No parallel can be found for his tendency even in writers, for example, like Smollett and Fielding, who can be coarse enough when they please, but whose freedom of speech reveals none of Swift’s morbid tendency. His indulgence in revolting images is to some extent an indication of a diseased condition of his mind, perhaps of actual mental decay. Delany says that it grew upon him in his later years, and, very gratuitously, attributes it to Pope’s influence. The peculiarity is the more remarkable, because Swift was a man of the most scrupulous personal cleanliness. He was always enforcing this virtue with special emphasis. He was rigorously observant of decency in ordinary conversation. Delany once saw him “fall into a furious resentment” with Stella for “a very small failure of delicacy.” So far from being habitually coarse, he pushed fastidiousness to the verge of prudery. It is one of the superficial paradoxes of Swift’s character that this very shrinking from filth became perverted into an apparently opposite tendency. In truth, his intense repugnance to certain images led him to use them as the only adequate expression of his savage contempt. Instances might be given in some early satires, and in the attack upon dissenters in theTale of a Tub. His intensity of loathingleads him to besmear his antagonists with filth. He becomes disgusting in the effort to express his disgust. As his misanthropy deepened, he applied the same method to mankind at large. He tears aside the veil of decency to show the bestial elements of human nature; and his characteristic irony makes him preserve an apparent calmness during the revolting exhibition. His state of mind is strictly analogous to that of some religious ascetics, who stimulate their contempt for the flesh by fixing their gaze upon decaying bodies. They seek to check the love of beauty by showing us beauty in the grave. The cynic in Mr. Tennyson’s poem tells us that every face, however full—
Padded round with flesh and blood,Is but moulded on a skull.
Swift—a practised self-tormentor, though not in the ordinary ascetic sense—mortifies any disposition to admire his fellows by dwelling upon the physical necessities which seem to lower and degrade human pride. Beauty is but skin deep; beneath it is a vile carcase. He always sees the “flayed woman” of theTale of a Tub. The thought is hideous, hateful, horrible, and therefore it fascinates him. He loves to dwell upon the hateful, because it justifies his hate. He nurses his misanthropy, as he might tear his flesh to keep his mortality before his eyes.
The Yahoo is the embodiment of the bestial element in man; and Swift in his wrath takes the bestial for the predominating element. The hideous, filthy, lustful monster yet asserts its relationship to him in the most humiliating fashion: and he traces in its conduct the resemblance to all the main activities of the human being. Like the human being it fights and squabbles for thesatisfaction of its lust, or to gain certain shiny yellow stones; it befouls the weak and fawns upon the strong with loathsome compliance; shows a strange love of dirt, and incurs diseases by laziness and gluttony. Gulliver gives an account of his own breed of Yahoos, from which it seems that they differ from the subjects of the Houyhnhnms only by showing the same propensities on a larger scale; and justifies his master’s remark that all their institutions are owing to “gross defects in reason and by consequence in virtue.” The Houyhnhnms meanwhile represent Swift’s Utopia; they prosper and are happy, truthful and virtuous, and therefore able to dispense with lawyers, physicians, ministers and all the other apparatus of an effete civilization. It is in this doctrine, as I may observe in passing, that Swift falls in with Godwin and the revolutionists, though they believed in human perfectibility, whilst they traced every existing evil to the impostures and corruptions essential to all systems of government. Swift’s view of human nature, is too black to admit of any hopes of their millennium.
The full wrath of Swift against his species shows itself in this ghastly caricature. It is lamentable and painful, though even here we recognize the morbid perversion of a noble wrath against oppression. One other portrait in Swift’s gallery demands a moment’s notice. No poetic picture in Dante or Milton can exceed the strange power of his prose description of the Struldbrugs—those hideous immortals who are damned to an everlasting life of drivelling incompetence. It is a translation of the affecting myth of Tithonus into the repulsive details of downright prose. It is idle to seek for any particular moral from these hideous phantoms of Swift’s dismalInferno. They embody the terror whichwas haunting his imagination as old age was drawing upon him. The sight, he says himself, should reconcile a man to death. The mode of reconciliation is terribly characteristic. Life is but a weary business at best; but, at least, we cannot wish to drain so repulsive a cup to the dregs, when even the illusions which cheered us at moments have been ruthlessly destroyed. Swift was but too clearly prophesying the melancholy decay into which he was himself to sink.
The later books ofGulliverhave been in some sense excised from the popular editions of the Travels. The Yahoos, and Houyhnhnms, and Struldbrugs, are indeed known by name almost as well as the inhabitants of Lilliput and Brobdingnag; but this part of the book is certainly not reading for babes. It was probably written during the years when he was attacking public corruption, and when his private happiness was being destroyed, when therefore his wrath against mankind and against his own fate was stimulated to the highest pitch. Readers who wish to indulge in a harmless play of fancy will do well to omit the last two voyages; for the strain of misanthropy which breathes in them is simply oppressive. They are probably the sources from which the popular impression of Swift’s character is often derived. It is important, therefore, to remember that they were wrung from him in later years, after a life tormented by constant disappointment and disease. Most people hate the misanthropist even if they are forced to admire his power. Yet we must not be carried too far by the words. Swift’s misanthropy was not all ignoble. We generally prefer flattery even to sympathy. We like the man who is blind to our faults better than the man who sees them and yet pities our distresses. We have the same kind offeeling for the race as we have in our own case. We are attracted by the kindly optimist who assures us that good predominates in everything and everybody, and believes that a speedy advent of the millennium must reward our manifold excellence. We cannot forgive those who hold men to be “mostly fools,” or, as Swift would assert, mere brutes in disguise, and even carry out that disagreeable opinion in detail. There is something uncomfortable and therefore repellent of sympathy in the mood which dwells upon the darker side of society, even though with wrathful indignation against the irremovable evils. Swift’s hatred of oppression, burning and genuine as it was, is no apology with most readers for his perseverance in asserting its existence. “Speak comfortable things to us” is the cry of men to the prophet in all ages; and he who would assault abuses must count upon offending many who do not approve them, but who would therefore prefer not to believe in them. Swift, too, mixed an amount of egoism with his virtuous indignation, which clearly lowers his moral dignity. He really hates wrongs to his race; but his sensitiveness is roused when they are injuries to himself, and committed by his enemies. The indomitable spirit which made him incapable even of yielding to necessity, which makes him beat incessantly against the bars which it was hopeless to break, and therefore waste powers which might have done good service by aiming at the unattainable, and nursing grudges against inexorable necessity, limits our sympathy with his better nature. Yet some of us may take a different view, and rather pity than condemn the wounded spirit so tortured and perverted, in consideration of the real philanthropy which underlies the misanthropy, and the righteous hatred of brutality andoppression which is but the seamy side of a generous sympathy. At least we should be rather awed than repelled by this spectacle of a nature of magnificent power struck down, bruised and crushed under fortune, and yet fronting all antagonists with increasing pride, and comforting itself with scorn even when it can no longer injure its adversaries.