English Literature
of the Books_ in 1704. The work brought him into notice as the most
powerful satirist of the age, and he soon gave up his church to enter the
strife of party politics. The cheap pamphlet was then the most powerful
political weapon known; and as Swift had no equal at pamphlet writing, he
soon became a veritable dictator. For several years, especially from 1710
to 1713, Swift was one of the most important figures in London. The Whigs
feared the lash of his satire; the Tories feared to lose his support. He
was courted, flattered, cajoled on every side; but the use he made of his
new power is sad to contemplate. An unbearable arrogance took possession of
him. Lords, statesmen, even ladies were compelled to sue for his favor and
to apologize for every fancied slight to his egoism. It is at this time
that he writes in his _Journal to Stella:_
Mr. Secretary told me the Duke of Buckingham had been talking much about me
and desired my acquaintance. I answered it could not be, for he had not yet
made sufficient advances; then Shrewsbury said he thought the Duke was not
used to make advances. I said I could not help that, for I always expected
advances in proportion to men's quality, and more from a Duke than any
other man.
Writing to the Duchess of Queensberry he says:
I am glad you know your duty; for it has been a known and established rule
above twenty years in England that the first advances have been constantly
made me by all ladies who aspire to my acquaintance, and the greater their
quality the greater were their advances.
When the Tories went out of power Swift's position became uncertain. He
expected and had probably been promised a bishopric in England, with a seat
among the peers of the realm; but the Tories offered him instead the place
of dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. It was galling to a man of
his proud spirit; but after his merciless satire on religion, in _The Tale
of a Tub_, any ecclesiastical position in England was rendered impossible.
Dublin was the best he could get, and he accepted it bitterly, once more
cursing the fate which he had brought upon himself.
With his return to Ireland begins the last act in the tragedy of his life.
His best known literary work, _Gulliver's Travels_, was done here; but the
bitterness of life grew slowly to insanity, and a frightful personal
sorrow, of which he never spoke, reached its climax in the death of Esther
Johnson, a beautiful young woman, who had loved Swift ever since the two
had met in Temple's household, and to whom he had written his _Journal to
Stella_. During the last years of his life a brain disease, of which he had
shown frequent symptoms, fastened its terrible hold upon Swift, and he
became by turns an idiot and a madman. He died in 1745, and when his will
was opened it was found that he had left all his property to found St.
Patrick's Asylum for lunatics and incurables. It stands to-day as the most
suggestive monument of his peculiar genius.
THE WORKS OF SWIFT. From Swift's life one can readily foresee the kind of
literature he will produce. Taken together his works are a monstrous satire
on humanity; and the spirit of that satire is shown clearly in a little
incident of his first days in London. There was in the city at that time a
certain astrologer named Partridge, who duped the public by calculating
nativities from the stars, and by selling a yearly almanac predicting
future events. Swift, who hated all shams, wrote, with a great show of
learning, his famous _Bickerstaff Almanac_, containing "Predictions for the
Year 1708, as Determined by the Unerring Stars." As Swift rarely signed his
name to any literary work, letting it stand or fall on its own merits, his
burlesque appeared over the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, a name
afterwards made famous by Steele in _The Tatler_. Among the predictions was
the following:
My first prediction is but a trifle; yet I will mention it to show how
ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns:
it relates to Partridge the almanack maker; I have consulted the star of
his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th
of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise
him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.
On March 30, the day after the prediction was to be fulfilled, there
appeared in the newspapers a letter from a revenue officer giving the
details of Partridge's death, with the doings of the bailiff and the coffin
maker; and on the following morning appeared an elaborate "Elegy of Mr.
Partridge." When poor Partridge, who suddenly found himself without
customers, published a denial of the burial, Swift answered with an
elaborate "Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff," in which he proved by
astrological rules that Partridge was dead, and that the man now in his
place was an impostor trying to cheat the heirs out of their inheritance.
This ferocious joke is suggestive of all Swift's satires. Against any case
of hypocrisy or injustice he sets up a remedy of precisely the same kind,
only more atrocious, and defends his plan with such seriousness that the
satire overwhelms the reader with a sense of monstrous falsity. Thus his
solemn "Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity may be
attended with Some Inconveniences" is such a frightful satire upon the
abuses of Christianity by its professed followers that it is impossible for
us to say whether Swift intended to point out needed reforms, or to satisfy
his conscience,[190] or to perpetrate a joke on the Church, as he had done
on poor Partridge. So also with his "Modest Proposal," concerning the
children of Ireland, which sets up the proposition that poor Irish farmers
ought to raise children as dainties, to be eaten, like roast pigs, on the
tables of prosperous Englishmen. In this most characteristic work it is
impossible to find Swift or his motive. The injustice under which Ireland
suffered, her perversity in raising large families to certain poverty, and
the indifference of English politicians to her suffering and protests are
all mercilessly portrayed; but why? That is still the unanswered problem of
Swift's life and writings.
Swift's two greatest satires are his _Tale of a Tub_ and _Gulliver's
Travels_. The _Tale_ began as a grim exposure of the alleged weaknesses of
three principal forms of religious belief, Catholic, Lutheran, and
Calvinist, as opposed to the Anglican; but it ended in a satire upon all
science and philosophy.
Swift explains his whimsical title by the custom of mariners in throwing
out a tub to a whale, in order to occupy the monster's attention and divert
it from an attack upon the ship,--which only proves how little Swift knew
of whales or sailors. But let that pass. His book is a tub thrown out to
the enemies of Church and State to keep them occupied from further attacks
or criticism; and the substance of the argument is that all churches, and
indeed all religion and science and statesmanship, are arrant hypocrisy.
The best known part of the book is the allegory of the old man who died and
left a coat (which is Christian Truth) to each of his three sons, Peter,
Martin, and Jack, with minute directions for its care and use. These three
names stand for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists; and the way in which
the sons evade their father's will and change the fashion of their garment
is part of the bitter satire upon all religious sects. Though it professes
to defend the Anglican Church, that institution fares perhaps worse than
the others; for nothing is left to her but a thin cloak of custom under
which to hide her alleged hypocrisy.
In _Gulliver's Travels_ the satire grows more unbearable. Strangely enough,
this book, upon which Swift's literary fame generally rests, was not
written from any literary motive, but rather as an outlet for the author's
own bitterness against fate and human society. It is still read with
pleasure, as _Robinson Crusoe_ is read, for the interesting adventures of
the hero; and fortunately those who read it generally overlook its
degrading influence and motive.
_Gulliver's Travels_ records the pretended four voyages of one Lemuel
Gulliver, and his adventures in four astounding countries. The first book
tells of his voyage and shipwreck in Lilliput, where the inhabitants are
about as tall as one's thumb, and all their acts and motives are on the
same dwarfish scale. In the petty quarrels of these dwarfs we are supposed
to see the littleness of humanity. The statesmen who obtain place and favor
by cutting monkey capers on the tight rope before their sovereign, and the
two great parties, the Littleendians and Bigendians, who plunge the country
into civil war over the momentous question of whether an egg should be
broken on its big or on its little end, are satires on the politics of
Swift's own day and generation. The style is simple and convincing; the
surprising situations and adventures are as absorbing as those of Defoe's
masterpiece; and altogether it is the most interesting of Swift's satires.
On the second voyage Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, where the
inhabitants are giants, and everything is done upon an enormous scale. The
meanness of humanity seems all the more detestable in view of the greatness
of these superior beings. When Gulliver tells about his own people, their
ambitions and wars and conquests, the giants can only wonder that such
great venom could exist in such little insects.
In the third voyage Gulliver continues his adventures in Laputa, and this
is a satire upon all the scientists and philosophers. Laputa is a flying
island, held up in the air by a loadstone; and all the professors of the
famous academy at Lagado are of the same airy constitution. The philosopher
who worked eight years to extract sunshine from cucumbers is typical of
Swift's satiric treatment of all scientific problems. It is in this voyage
that we hear of the Struldbrugs, a ghastly race of men who are doomed to
live upon earth after losing hope and the desire for life. The picture is
all the more terrible in view of the last years of Swift's own life, in
which he was compelled to live on, a burden to himself and his friends.
In these three voyages the evident purpose is to strip off the veil of
habit and custom, with which men deceive themselves, and show the crude
vices of humanity as Swift fancies he sees them. In the fourth voyage the
merciless satire is carried out to its logical conclusion. This brings us
to the land of the Houyhnhnms, in which horses, superior and intelligent
creatures, are the ruling animals. All our interest, however, is centered
on the Yahoos, a frightful race, having the form and appearance of men, but
living in unspeakable degradation.
The _Journal to Stella_, written chiefly in the years 1710-1713 for the
benefit of Esther Johnson, is interesting to us for two reasons. It is,
first, an excellent commentary on contemporary characters and political
events, by one of the most powerful and original minds of the age; and
second, in its love passages and purely personal descriptions it gives us
the best picture we possess of Swift himself at the summit of his power and
influence. As we read now its words of tenderness for the woman who loved
him, and who brought almost the only ray of sunlight into his life, we can
only wonder and be silent. Entirely different are his _Drapier's Letters_,
a model of political harangue and of popular argument, which roused an
unthinking English public and did much benefit to Ireland by preventing the
politicians' plan of debasing the Irish coinage. Swift's poems, though
vigorous and original (like Defoe's, of the same period), are generally