August 
30, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
13 
Stterature anti art 
The Utopian Satirist 
By J. C. Squire 
MR. CHARLES Whiblev has iust published, 
through the Univ;rsitv Press (is. Cid. net), the 
Leslie Stephen Lecture recently delivered by 
him at Cambridge. It was a good lecture, if rather 
permeated with Mr. Whibley's political cranks ; and its chief 
object is to show that Macaulay and other critics have been 
hopelessly astrav in describing Swift as a low and beastly 
ruffian who hated human society and was emphatically unfit 
for it. 
***** 
Mr. Whiblev is, of course, right. Macaulay and Thackeray 
were completely wrong. I do not think it is quite just to sav 
that Macaulay 's opinion was founded on Whig prejudices: 
far more probably it arose from sheer disgust at Swift's fre- 
quent lilthiness, and from misapprehension of his custom of 
representing men, when he was attacking them, as larded 
.vith all tlic disagreeable concomitants of the sty. But 
vilely as he abused mankind, and too habituated though he 
may" have become to e.xaggerated invective, his first impulse 
was an ideahstic one. He detested men, not because they 
were men, but because they were not the men they might be. 
When he called himself a rnisanthrope, he went on to explain 
that he intended to prove " the falsity of that definition 
animal rationale, and to show it should be only ralionis 
capax." He uses his communities in Gulliver to expose in the 
most sa\-age way the defects of \\'estem civilisation : but can 
t'lose who call 'this " cynical " deny that the defects were 
there ? Mr. Whibley refers very properly to bis acceptance 
of the " generous creed " of the King of Brobdingnag. " that 
whoever could make two ears of com. or two blades of grass, 
to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, 
would deser\c better of mankind, and do more essentia) service 
to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together." 
Mr. Whiblev' himself has so marked a disbelief in all politicians 
that he allows this " simple doctrine " to stand by itst;lf. 
But the Utopia in Swift's heart even had room for better 
politicians. Take the introduction to the school of political 
projectors in Laputa : 
In the school of political projectors I was but ill entertained, 
the professors appearing in mv judgment wholly out of their 
senses, which is a scene that never fails to make me melan- 
cholv. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for 
persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of 
their wisdom, capacity, and virtue : of teaching ministers to 
consult the public good ; of rewarding merit, great abilities, 
eminent services ; of instructing princes to know their true 
interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of 
their people ; of choosing for employments persons qualitietl 
to exercise them ; with many other wild impossible 
chimeras; that never entered before into the heart of man 
to conceive, and confirmed in me the old observation, that 
there is nothing, so extravagant and irrational which some 
philosophers have not maintained for truth. 
It is surely obvious that these are not the sentences of a 
hater of mankind, but those of one who was continually 
haunted and tormented by the undeveloped possibilities ot 
mankind. Man is " capable of reason "—and will not use 
it Swift himself stated that he would " forfeit his life. »l anv 
one opinion can be fairiv deduced from that book, '■Thelale 
of a Tub', which is contrary to Religion or Morality. U 
depends, of course, upon what you mean by Religion ; and a 
clergyman of the Established Church was. to say the least, 
unorthodox wlien he informed the Honyhnhms that ' ditter- 
cnc of opinions hath cost many millions of lives ; for instance, 
whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh ; whether the juice 
of a certain berr\- be blood or wine. " But generally speaking, 
his claim was not absurd. E\en his obscenities could scarcely 
give anyone a taste for the obscene, and. comprehensive 
though his irony is. he seldom if ever jeers at genuine virtue 
or makes sport of suffering. As Mr. Whibley suggests, it is 
conceivable that his ironic method has misled people ; though 
how anyone in his senses could have supposed that he meant 
to be taken literally when he argued that the superfluous 
children of the poor Irish should be exported for food, it is 
difficult to conceive. Some, at least of his contemporaries, 
gave him credit for good intentions. The Irish, at one period, 
wou'd have risen in rebellion had the Government gone for 
him. PoiX", Uariey and Bolingbroke knew the warnith of his 
affections. .\nd an obscure publisher, who printed his poems, 
alter remarking on the savagery with which he had written 
about women and \\'higs, thought fit to add : " We have been 
assured by several judicious and learned gentlemen, that what 
the author hath here writ, on either of those two Subjects, 
hath no other Aim than to reform the Errors of both Sexes." 
Surely a large and a lofty aim ! 
***** 
The same bookssller, in the same apology, made another 
true, if oddly expressed, observation : " Whatever he writ, 
whether good, bad or indifferent, is an Original in itself." 
Swift was one of the most natural writers \vc have ever had. 
He did not bother at all about his sentences : he had a quick, 
vivid, witty, logical mind, and his style has precisely those 
qualities. Mr. \\'hibley justly compares him to Defoe, both 
for his easy simplicity and for his power of realistic narrative. 
To make one believe Gtillirer's Travels was an even greater 
feat than that of convincing one that Robinson Crusoe really 
did keep his hold on the rock till the waves abated, land, build 
a hut, read the Bible to his parrot, make a hat out of goatskins 
and see a cannibal's footprints on the sand. But Swift does 
it, and with the most wonderfully cunning touches of veri- 
similitude. How pathetically true Gulliver's longing, when 
•amongst the kindly giants of Brobdingnag, to be " among 
people with whom 1 could converse upon even terms, and 
walk about the streets and fields without fear of being trod 
to death like a frog or a young puppy " ; and still more that 
other flash : 
I likewise broke my right shin against the shell of a snail, 
which I happened to stumble over, as I was walking alone, 
and thinking on poor England. 
But Defoe, outside straight narration, was clumsy. His 
satires are almost, unreadable. Swift was a supreme ironist : 
he was as great at saying something by saying its opposite as 
he was at direct story-telling. That he should have choseO 
irony as his method of attacking abuses was natural. 
♦ * * * * 
For he was, at bottom, a very reticent man. His friends 
had often to deduce his good heart from his good deeds, and 
even in ths letters to Stella he usually keeps to the superficies 
of gossip and scandal. His anger was terrific when it broke 
out. The most amiable of men with his friends, there was 
a passion in him which men feared, something in him, it may 
be, he even feared himself ; though it was to that he owed 
the concentrate force of expression and which must have been 
his chief source of delight. Vive la bagatelle is the motto 
(it was his) of a miserable man. Swift was a miserable man ; 
but the causes of his misery, however obscure they may be, 
were not petty ones. Men are seldom great through being 
unhappy ; Swift is almost unique in English literature in 
that his unhappiness was not the effect but the source of his 
power. The " fierce indignation" that, on his own state- 
ment, consumed him, had to manifest itself in grim jokes 
instead of exalted rhapsodies. At any rate, the ironical 
method became second nature to him. And it has delightful 
results in a small way as well as magnificent results in a large 
way. He was a master of under-statement. " Yesterday I 
saw a woman flayed, and you cannot imagine how it altered 
her appearance for the worse." The little incidental jests are 
scattered all over his minor controversial writings, and even 
in the most necessary preface he took every opportunity of 
gravely pulling the reader's, or even his own leg. One suchjhe 
defended (speaking as one of " The Multitude of writers, 
whereof the whole Multitude of Writers most reasonably 
complains") on the ground that: 
It makes a considerable Addition to the Bulk of the Volume, 
a Circumstance by no Means to be neglected by a skilful 
writer, 
which is an extremely modem thought. " Whatever," he 
added, " word or sentence is printed in a different character, 
shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either of 
wit or sublime." He was, in his queer way, a dreamer ; he 
was a master of English ; a great realist ; and a great wit. 
And if a man should still think he went too far in his exposure 
of the race of " little odious vermin," to which he belonged, 
let him remember two things. One is that Swift projected 
a work entitled A Modest Defence of the Proceedings of the 
Rabble in All Ages. The other is Svvitt's own despairing 
reflection, that " there is not, through all Nature, another so 
callous and insensible a Member as the World's Posteriors, 
whether you apply to it the Toe or the Birch." 
