Charles Whibley

“ Such a dissimulation, indeed, covers all the kinds of irony—the Sophoclean irony, in accord with which a secret, known to the audience, eludes the personages on the Stage; the Socratic irony, which is no more than a pretended lack of knowledge; and the irony of Swift, in which the word and the spirit are opposed to the sense, and in which a heightened effect is produced by overstating the other side of the case. There is no artifice of literature more instantly effective for those who appreciate it. There is none more fertile in misunderstanding. ”

“ But there were not a dozen Arbuthnots, and the irony of Gulliver was abundantly justified.
And then we hear Thackeray objecting that he would not have liked to live with Swift, he would not have been a friend of the great Dean. As he lay in no danger of this awkward companionship, the objection seems irrelevant. But there is no doubt that the best of Swift's contemporaries were very eager to live with him. He was, so to say, a great centre of amiability and friendship. He held together, in pleasant bondage to himself, the most highly distinguished men of his time. ”

“ He could not regard leniently the folly of those about him. He did not write for his own pleasure, or to put money in his pocket. He wrote in scorn of stupidity, or with a fixed desire to reform abuses. He does not temper the wind of his wrath to his shorn victims. He does not bring an easy message of perfectibility to a sanguine world. He is even cruel in his denunciation of abuses, and those who regard literature as an anodyne do not like cruelty. But let it be remembered that Swift's cruelty was always justified. ”

“ The mathematical accuracy, with which in Gulliver Swift takes the measure of mankind, is allied to another faculty, which he shares with none other except Defoe. And that is the faculty of authentic and plausible narrative. By a hundred small touches, accurately designed, he renders the story of Gulliver's travels credible to its readers. Neither the dwarfs nor the giants make too great a demand upon our faith. And thus Swift achieves, in the face of far greater difficulties, the difficulties of the supernatural, the same sort of triumph of reality which Defoe achieved in Robinson Crusoe. ”

“ The truth is that he was a born idealist, with no desire either to snarl or to smile at life. The master-passion of his mind was anger against injustice and oppression. To the articles of his own faith he was always loyal. The profitable changes of the renegade were as far beyond his reach as the wiles of the time-server. That he thought himself ill-used by the world, that he knew his preferment was incommensurate with his worth and talent is evident. ”

“ He was as remote from the rollicking humour of Rabelais as he was from the light fingered cynicism of Voltaire, who by the way was too much a Frenchman of the 18th century thoroughly to appreciate his brother in irony. Rabelais lived laughing, and died laughing, and when he laughed the laughter of scorn, he would still be merry. Even Coleridge's witty phrase for Swift, "the soul of Rabelais, habitans in sicco," is less luminous than it seems. For, as I have said, the master-passion of Swift is anger against injustice and oppression. ”

“ Is it that we grow more tender as the moment of our great separation approaches? Or is it that they who are to live together in another state, for vera amicitia non nisi inter bonos, begin to feel that divine sympathy which is to be the great bond of their future society? There is no one thought which soothes my mind like this." These words breathe the true spirit of loyalty, and assure us that inter bonos both Bolingbroke and Swift must be counted. And Arbuthnot too sent from his death-bed a last message to Swift. ”

“ Thus the charge that Swift was a misanthrope, if we interpret the term rightly, has, I think, no support in fact. The other charge of cynicism, which has oftentimes been brought against him, is equally insecure. Now the cynic may be defined as one who looks upon life and morals with an indifferent curiosity, whose levity persuades him to smile upon the vices of others, and to let them go to destruction each his own way. Of this kind of cynicism Swift was wholly innocent. He may be absolved also of that cynicism, which the dictionary defines as "captious fault-finding." ”

“ It is plain also that Swift accepts as his own the generous creed of the King of Brobdingnag, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together." Two hundred years after Swift we have re-discovered the truth of this simple doctrine, and nothing but a vain superstition of party can dismiss the moral of Gulliver as shameful, horrible, blasphemous. ”

“ Nor was I deterred from choosing to speak of Jonathan Swift by the reflection, that I should take a view of him and his writings, which was not the view of Leslie Stephen, whom this lecture commemorates. If controversy be the athletics of literature, as I think it is, then Leslie Stephen was not of those who would have resented disagreement. For he was an athlete always—on the running path, on the High Alps, and in his study. Thus was I guided in the choice of my subject.
JONATHAN SWIFT
The most of writers are freed by death from the enmities and controversies of life. ”

“ Swift cared nothing. He loved such of his friends, as he deemed worthy of his love, with an unchanging loyalty. He did not close his eyes to the general infamy of mankind. He had lived at too close quarters with politics and politicians to harbour the genial, easy-going illusions of the philanthropist. While he knew the true worth of his friends, he admitted that such men as they were rare visitants upon this earth. "Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels"—thus he wrote to Pope soon after the publishing of Gulliver. ”

“ Robespierre and the infamous Joseph Le Bon, for instance, loved humanity so dearly that they delighted to see the heads of men and women too fall beneath the knife of the guillotine. Perhaps they thought of Humanity as a tree, which would grow in greater strength and beauty, the more savagely it was pruned. ”

“ They forced the government to withdraw Wood's ha'pence, and they set Swift, who, in Pope's phrase, had unbound "Ireland's copper chains," upon the topmost pinnacle of glory.
Henceforth he was the idol of the Irish people. Once when he returned from London to Dublin, bonfires were lit in his honour, and peals of bells rang out their welcome. In vain did Walpole and the Whigs clamour for his arrest. They were asked if they had 1 0,000 men to spare, for assuredly the Dean could not be taken with less. ”

“ And Swift was not content merely to write letters to his friends. He looked upon practical benevolence as the first duty of friendship. If he could not command the preferment he wished for himself, he could at least help to ensure the preferment of others. The list of those whom he aided in the hour of his influence is long and various. As Mr Lecky says, "there is scarcely a man of genius of the age who was not indebted to him." When service might be rendered, he forgot himself and the claims of party. He collected a thousand guineas for Pope's Iliad. ”

“ The sentimentalists have condemned the conclusions of this celebrated satire as hateful and blasphemous, and it is not easy to follow their argument. If they pretend that it is the purpose of the famous fourth voyage to preach the superiority of all horses to all men, they have singularly misread the fable. Nor is Swift, when he makes the King of Brobdingnag a scourge, wherewith to beat the politicians and plotters of his own land, passing a universal sentence upon the human race. Gulliver himself is not represented as the only man who has escaped the vices of his country. ”

“ Secondly Swift was a great master of irony—the greatest that ever was born in these isles. Great enough to teach a lesson to Voltaire himself, and to inspire the author of Jonathan Wild. And irony does not make for popularity. The plain man likes a plain statement, and resents it, if his idle brain be confused. ”

“ By a stroke of irony, he confesses that the learning most highly prized by the giants, being wholly applied to the improvement of agriculture and the mechanical arts, would be as little esteemed among us, as the ideas, entities, abstractions and transcendental, which we ourselves prized, would be esteemed among them. ”

“ I shall, to the last moment preserve my love and esteem for you, being well assured you will never leave the paths of virtue and honour; for all that is in this world is not worth the least deviation from this way. ”

“ He would have him save his money, that he might live happily independent of court and patronage. He is anxious always lest Gay should squander his talent unworthily, and be content to repeat himself and his old successes. And yet so nicely did he measure the limits of Gay's fancy, that it was he who suggested the theme of The Beggar's Opera. "What think you of a Newgate pastoral," wrote Swift to Pope, in his desire to fit Gay with a subject, "among the thieves and whores there?" ”

“ He commended Congreve to Harley, and was able to write in a letter to Stella: "So I have made a worthy man happy, and that is a good day's work."
But no better example of Swift's kindliness can be found than his treatment of young William Harrison, a little pretty fellow and a Whig, who had come from the University of Oxford a year or two before Swift encountered him. Now young Harrison had more ambition than talent, more hopefulness than industry. He was witty and pleasant in company, and "the fine fellows," said Swift, "invited him to the tavern, and asked him to pay his shot." ”

“ That there was a great lack of pence and ha'pence in Ireland is certain. The want was not supplied most economically by promising comfortable bribes to many personages about the Court, and by making the egregious Wood a present of £3000 a year for eight years. In all these transactions the need and benefit of Ireland were forgotten, and Swift made it his business to paint in the darkest colours what he deemed an injustice done to a whole country. The Drapier's Letters, which were sold by the Flying Stationers for two pence in the streets of Dublin, had their due effect. ”

“ As he seldom laughs, so he is seldom the cause of laughter in others. Rather he is one who, having no illusions himself, would strip away the illusions which mask the faces of men. You marvel at the genius of A Tale of a Tub ”

“ It is not for nothing that Canning's immortal words were put in the mouth of the Friend of Humanity, who finding that he cannot turn the Needy Knifegrinder to political account, gives him kicks for ha'pence, and goes off in "a transport of republican enthusiasm." Such is the Friend of Man at his best. ”

“ His prose is not sonorous, save in pages; it is frequently inaccurate, as any pedant may see for himself. He depends not at all for his effect upon a curious vocabulary. He is as remote from the flamboyancy of his Elizabethan ancestors as from the prim elegance of Addison. ”

“ There is in like manner an honest and comely kind of jesting that consisteth in a certain dissimulation, when a man speaketh one thing and privily meaneth another. I speak not of the manner that is clean contrary, as if one should call a dwarf a giant, and a black man white, or one most ill-favoured beautiful, because they be open contraries. ”

“ We know well enough whither universal philanthropy leads us. The Friend of Man is seldom the friend of men. At his best, he is content with a moral maxim, and buttons up his pocket in the presence of poverty, "I give thee sixpence! ”

“ He warns his fellows solemnly against the frequency of flat unnecessary epithets, and the folly of using old threadbare phrases. He cited it as an eminent virtue in the Brobdingnagians that they avoided nothing more than multiplying unnecessary words, or using various expressions. And it is Dr Johnson, who, in his own despite, has most clearly defined the virtue of Swift's simplicity. Now, Dr Johnson did not like Swift, and a passage in Boswell's Life, dispraising The Conduct of the Allies, is an excellent comment upon the styles of the two great writers. Thus runs the passage: "Johnson. ”