Swift took up his permanent residence in the Irish capital in 1714.
The Harley Administration had fallen never to rise again. Harley
himself was a prisoner in the Tower, and Bolingbroke a voluntary exile
in France, and an open adherent of the Pretender. Swift came to Dublin
to be met by the jeers of the populace, the suspicion of the government
officials, and the polite indifference of his clerical colleagues. He
had time enough now in which to reflect and employ his brain powers.
For several years he kept himself altogether to his duties as Dean of
the Cathedral of St. Patrick's, only venturing his pen in letters to
dear friends in England—to Pope, Atterbury, Lady Howard. His private
relations with Miss Hester Vanhomrigh came to a climax, also, during
this period, and his peculiar intimacy with “Stella” Johnson took the
definite shape in which we now know it.
He found himself in debt to his predecessor, Sterne, for a large and
comfortless house and for the cost of his own installation into his
office. The money he was to have received (£1,000) to defray these
expenses, from the last administration, was now, on its fall, kept back
from him. Swift had these encumbrances to pay off and he had his
Chapter to see to. He did both in characteristic fashion. By dint of
almost penurious saving he accomplished the former and the latter he
managed autocratically and with good sense. His connection with Oxford
and Bolingbroke had been of too intimate a nature for those in power to
ignore him. Indeed, his own letters to Knightley Chetwode[1] show us
that he was in great fear of arrest. But there is now no doubt that the
treasonable relations between Harley and St. John and the Pretender
were a great surprise to Swift when they were discovered. He himself
had always been an ardent supporter of the Protestant succession, and
his writings during his later period in Ireland constantly emphasize
this attitude of his—almost too much so.
The condition of Ireland as Swift found it in 1714, and as he had
known of it even before that time, was of a kind to rouse a temper like
his to quick and indignant expression. Even as early as the spring of
1716 we find him unable to restrain himself, and in his letter to
Atterbury of April 18th we catch the spirit which, four years later,
showed itself in “The Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish
Manufactures” and the “Drapier's Letters,” and culminated in 1729 in
the terrible “Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor
People from being a Burthen to their Parents.” To Atterbury he wrote:
“I congratulate with England for joining with us here in the
fellowship of slavery. It is not so terrible a thing as you imagine: we
have long lived under it: and whenever you are disposed to know how to
behave yourself in your new condition, you need go no further than me
for a director. But, because we are resolved to go beyond you, we have
transmitted a bill to England, to be returned here, giving the
Government and six of the Council power for three years to imprison
whom they please for three months, without any trial or examination:
and I expect to be among the first of those upon whom this law will be
executed.”
Writing to Archdeacon Walls[2] (May 5th, 1715) of the people in
power, he said:
“They shall be deceived as far as my power reaches, and shall not
find me altogether so great a cully as they would willingly make me.”
At that time England was beginning to initiate a new method for what
it called the proper government of Ireland. Hitherto it had tried the
plan of setting one party in the country against another; but now a new
party was called into being, known as the “English party.” This party
had nothing to do with the Irish national spirit, and any man, no
matter how capable, who held by such a national spirit, was to be set
aside. There was to be no Irish party or parties as such—there was to
be only the English party governing Ireland in the interests of
England. It was the beginning of a government which led to the
appointment of such a man as Primate Boulter, who simply ruled Ireland
behind the Lord Lieutenant (who was but a figurehead) for and on behalf
of the King of England's advisers. Irish institutions, Irish ideas,
Irish traditions, the Irish Church, Irish schools, Irish language and
literature, Irish trade, manufactures, commerce, agriculture—all were
to be subordinated to England's needs and England's demands. At any
cost almost, these were to be made subservient to the interests of
England. So well was this plan carried out, that Ireland found itself
being governed by a small English clique and its Houses of Parliament a
mere tool in the clique's hands. The Parliament no longer represented
the national will, since it did really nothing but ratify what the
English party asked for, or what the King's ministers in England
instructed should be made law.
Irish manufactures were ruined by legislation; the commerce of
Ireland was destroyed by the same means; her schools became practically
penitentiaries to the Catholic children, who were compelled to receive
a Protestant instruction; her agriculture was degraded to the degree
that cattle could not be exported nor the wool sold or shipped from her
own ports to other countries; her towns swarmed with beggars and
thieves, forced there by the desolation which prevailed in the country
districts, where people starved by the wayside, and where those who
lived barely kept body and soul together to pay the rents of the
absentee landlords.
Swift has himself, in the pamphlets printed in the present volume,
given a fairly accurate and no exaggerated account of the miserable
condition of his country at this time; and his writings are amply
corroborated by other men who might be considered less passionate and
more temperate.
The people had become degraded through the evil influence of a
contemptuous and spendthrift landlord class, who considered the tenant
in no other light than as a rent-paying creature. As Roman Catholics
they found themselves the social inferiors of the ruling Protestant
class—the laws had placed them in that invidious position. They were
practically without any defence. They were ignorant, poor, and
half-starved. Thriftless, like their landlords, they ate up in the
autumn what harvests they gathered, and begged for their winter's
support. Adultery and incest were common and bred a body of lawless
creatures, who herded together like wild beasts and became dangerous
pests.
Swift knew all this. He had time, between the years 1714 and 1720,
to find it out, even if he had not known of it before. But the
condition was getting worse, and his heart filled, as he told Pope in
1728, with a “perfect rage and resentment” at “the mortifying sight of
slavery, folly, and baseness about me, among which I am forced to
live.”
He commenced what might be called a campaign of attack in 1720, with
the publication of his tract entitled, “A Modest Proposal for the
Universal Use of Irish Manufactures.” As has been pointed out in the
notes prefixed to the pamphlets in the present volume, England had,
apparently, gone to work systematically to ruin Irish manufactures.
They seemed to threaten ruin to English industries; at least so the
people in England thought. The pernicious legislation began in the
reign of Charles II. and continued in that of William III. The Irish
manufacturer was not permitted to export his products and found a
precarious livelihood in a contraband trade. Swift's “Proposal” is one
of retaliation. Since England will not allow Ireland to send out her
goods, let the people of Ireland use them, and let them join together
and determine to use nothing from England. Everything that came from
England should be burned, except the people and the coal. If England
had the right to prevent the exportation of the goods made in Ireland,
she had not the right to prevent the people of Ireland from choosing
what they should wear. The temper of the pamphlet was mild in the
extreme; but the governing officials saw in it dangerous symptoms. The
pamphlet was stigmatized as libellous and seditious, and the writer as
attempting to disunite the two nations. The printer was brought to
trial, and the pamphlet obtained a tremendous circulation. Although the
jury acquitted the printer, Chief Justice Whitshed, who had, as Swift
puts it, “so quick an understanding, that he resolved, if possible, to
outdo his orders,” sent the jury back nine times to reconsider their
verdict. He even declared solemnly that the author's design was to
bring in the Pretender. This cry of bringing in the Pretender was
raised on any and every occasion, and has been well ridiculed by Swift
in his “Examination of Certain Abuses and Corruptions in the City of
Dublin.” The end of Whitshed's persecution could have been foretold—it
fizzled out in a nolle prosequi.
Following on this interesting commencement came the lengthened
agitation against Wood's Halfpence to which we owe the remarkable
series of writings known now as the “Drapier's Letters.” These are
fully discussed in the volume preceding this. But Swift found other
channels in which to continue rousing the spirit of the people, and
refreshing it to further effort. The mania for speculation which Law's
schemes had given birth to, reached poor Ireland also. People thought
there might be found a scheme on similar lines by which Ireland might
move to prosperity. A Bank project was initiated for the purpose of
assisting small tradesmen. But a scheme that in itself would have been
excellent in a prosperous society, could only end in failure in such a
community as peopled Ireland. Swift felt this and opposed the plan in
his satirical tract, “The Swearer's Bank.” The tract sufficed, for no
more was heard of the National Bank after the House of Commons rejected
it.
The thieves and “roughs” who infested Dublin came in next for
Swift's attention. In characteristic fashion he seized the occasion of
the arrest and execution of one of their leaders to publish a pretended
“Last Speech and Dying Confession,” in which he threatened exposure and
arrest to the remainder of the gang if they did not make themselves
scarce. The threat had its effect, and the city found itself
considerably safer as a consequence.
How Swift pounded out his “rage and resentment” against English
misgovernment, may be further read in the “Story of the Injured Lady,”
and in the “Answer” to that story. The Injured Lady is Ireland, who
tells her lover, England, of her attractions, and upbraids him on his
conduct towards her. In the “Answer” Swift tells the Lady what she
ought to do, and hardly minces matters. Let her show the right spirit,
he says to her, and she will find there are many gentlemen who will
support her and champion her cause.
Then came the plain, pathetic, and truthful recital of the “Short
View of the State of Ireland”—a pamphlet of but a few pages and yet
terribly effective. As an historical document it takes rank with the
experiences of the clergymen, Skelton and Jackson, as well as the more
dispassionate writings of contemporary historians. It is frequently
cited by Lecky in his “History of Ireland.”
What Swift had so far left undone, either from political reasons or
from motives of personal restraint, he completed in what may, without
exaggeration, be called his satirical masterpiece—the “Modest Proposal
for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to
their Parents.” Nothing comparable to this piece of writing is to be
found in any literature; while the mere fact that it came into being
must stand as one of the deadliest indictments against England's
misrule. Governments and rulers have been satirized time and again, but
no similar condition of things has existed with a Swift living at the
time, to observe and comment on them. The tract itself must be read
with a knowledge of the Irish conditions then prevailing; its temper is
so calm and restrained that a reader unacquainted with the conditions
might be misled and think that the author of “Gulliver's Travels” was
indulging himself in one of his grim jokes. That it was not a joke its
readers at the time well knew, and many of them also knew how great was
the indignation which raged in Swift's heart to stir him to so
unprecedented an expression of contempt. He had, as he himself said,
raged and stormed only to find himself stupefied. In the “Modest
Proposal” he changed his tune and
... with raillery to nettle,
Set your thoughts upon their mettle.
Swift has been censured for the cold-blooded cynicism of this piece
of writing, but these censurers have entirely misunderstood both his
motive and his meaning. We wonder how any one could take seriously a
proposal for breeding children for food purposes, and our wonder grows
in reflecting on an inability to see through the thin veil of satire
which barely hid an impeachment of a ruling nation by the mere
statement of the proposal itself. That a Frenchman should so
misunderstand it (as a Frenchman did) may not surprise us, but that any
Englishman should so take it argues an utter absence of humour and a
total ignorance of Irish conditions at the time the tract was written.
But history has justified Swift, and it is to his writings, rather than
to the many works written by more commonplace observers, that we now
turn for the true story of Ireland's wrongs, and the real sources of
her continued attitude of hostility towards England's government of
her.
It has been well noted by one of Swift's biographers, that for a
thousand readers which the “Modest Proposal” has found, there is
perhaps only one who is acquainted with Swift's “Answer to the
Craftsman.” It may be that the title is misleading or uninviting; but
there is no question that this tract may well stand by the side of the
“Modest Proposal,” both for force of argument and pungency of satire.
In its way and within the limits of its more restricted argument it is
one of the ablest pieces of writing Swift has given us on behalf of
Irish liberty.
The title of Irish patriot which Swift obtained was not sought for
by him. It was given him mainly for the part he played, and for the
success he achieved in the Wood's patent agitation. He was acclaimed
the champion of the people, because he had stopped the foolish
manoeuvres of the Walpole Administration. So to label him, however,
would be to do him an injustice. In truth, he would have championed the
cause of liberty and justice in any country in which he lived, had he
found liberty and justice wanting there. The matter of the copper
coinage patent was but a peg for him to hang arguments which applied
almost everywhere. It was not to the particular arguments but to the
spirit which gave them life that we must look for the true value of
Swift's work. And that spirit—honest, brave, strong for the right—is
even more abundantly displayed in the writings we have just considered.
They witness to his championship of liberty and justice, to his
impeachment of selfish office-holders and a short-sighted policy. They
gave him his position as the chief among the citizens of Dublin to whom
he spoke as counsel and adviser. They proclaim him as the friend of the
common people, to whom he was more than the Dean of St. Patrick's. He
may have begun his work impelled by a hatred for Whiggish principles;
but he undoubtedly accomplished it in the spirit of a broad-minded and
far-seeing statesman. The pressing needs of Ireland were too urgent and
crying for him to permit his personal dislike of the Irish natives to
divert him from his humanitarian efforts. If he hated the beggar he was
ready with his charity. The times in which he lived were not times in
which, as he told the freemen of Dublin, “to expect such an exalted
degree of virtue from mortal men.” He was speaking to them of the
impossibility of office-holders being independent of the government
under which they held their offices. “Blazing stars,” he said, “are
much more frequently seen than such heroical virtues.” As the Irish
people were governed by such men he advised them strongly to choose a
parliamentary representative from among themselves. He insisted on the
value of their collected voice, their unanimity of effort, a
consciousness of their understanding of what they wished to bring
about. “Be independent” is the text of all his writings to the people
of Ireland. It is idle to appeal to England's clemency or England's
justice. It is vain to evolve social schemes and Utopian dreams. The
remedy lay in their own hands, if the people only realized it.
“Violent zeal for truth,” Swift noted in one of his “Thoughts on
Religion,” “has a hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition,
or pride.” Examining Swift's writings on behalf of Ireland by the
criterion provided in this statement, we must acquit him entirely of
misusing any of these qualities. If he were bitter or scornful, he was
certainly not petulant. No one has written with more justice or
coolness; the temper is hot but it is the heat of a conscious and
collected indignation. If he wrote or spoke in a manner somewhat
overbearing, it was not because of ambition, since he was now long past
his youth and his mind had become settled in a fairly complacent
acceptance of his position. If he had pride, and he undoubtedly had, it
was nowhere obtruded for personal aggrandizement, but rather by way of
emphasizing the dignity of citizenship, and the value of self-respect.
Assuredly, in these Irish tracts, Swift was no violent zealot for
truth. Indeed, it is a high compliment to pay him, to say that we
wonder he restrained himself as he did.
Swift, however, had his weakness also, and it lay, as weaknesses
generally lie, very close to his strength. Swift's fault as a thinker
was the outcome of his intellectuality—he was too purely intellectual.
He set little store on the emotional side of human nature; his appeal
was always to the reason. He hated cant, and any expression of emotion
appealed to him as cant. He could not bear to be seen saying his
prayers; his acts of charity were surreptitious and given in secret
with an affectation of cynicism, so that they might veil the motive
which impelled them. It may have been pride or a dislike to be
considered sentimental; but his attitude owed its spring to a genuine
faith in his own thought. If Swift had one pride more than another, it
lay in a consciousness of his own superiority over his fellow-mortals.
It was the pride of intellect and a belief that man showed himself best
by following the judgements of the reason. His disgust with people was
born of their unreasonable selfishness, their instinctive greed and
rapacity, their blind stupidity, all which resulted for them in so much
injustice. Had they been reasonable, he would have argued, they would
have been better and happier. The sentiments and the passions were
impulsive, and therefore unreasonable. Swift seemed to have no faith in
their elevation to a higher intellectual plane, and yet he often roused
them by his very appeals to reason. His eminently successful “Drapier's
Letters” are a case in point. Yet we question if Swift were not himself
surprised at their effect. He knew his power later when he threatened
the Archbishop of Armagh, but he, no doubt, credited the result to his
own arguments, and not to the passions he had aroused. His sense of
justice was the strongest, and it was through that sense that the
condition of the people of Ireland appealed to him. He forgot, or he
did not see that the very passion in himself was of prime importance,
since it was really to it that his own efforts were due. The fine
flower of imagination never blossomed in Swift. He was neither prophet
nor poet; but he was a great leader, a splendid captain, a logical
statesman. It is to this lack of imagination that we must look for the
real root of his cynical humour and satirical temper. A more
imaginative man than Swift with much less power would have better
appreciated the weaknesses of humanity and made allowances for them. He
would never have held them up to ridicule and contempt, but would
rather have laid stress on those instincts of honour and nobility which
the most ignorant and least reasoning possess in some degree.
Looking back on the work Swift did, and comparing its effect at the
time with the current esteem in which he is held in the present day, we
shall find that his reputation has altogether changed. In his own day,
and especially during his life in Ireland, his work was special, and
brought him a special repute. He was a party's advocate and the
people's friend. His literary output, distinguished though it was, was
of secondary importance compared with the purpose for which it was
accomplished. He was the friend of Harley, the champion of the
Protestant Church, the Irish patriot, the enemy of Whiggism, the
opponent of Nonconformity. To-day all these phrases mean little or
nothing to those who know of Swift as the author of “A Tale of a Tub,”
and “Gulliver's Travels.” Swift is now accepted as a great satirist,
and admired for the wonderful knowledge he shows of the failings and
weaknesses of human nature. He is admired but never loved. The
particular occasions in his life-time which urged him to rouse passions
mean nothing to us; they have lost the aroma of his just indignation
and are become historical events. What is left of him for us is the
result of cold analysis and almost heartless contempt. How different
would it have been had Swift allied his great gift as a writer to such
a spirit as breathes in the Sermon on the Mount! But to wish this is
perhaps as foolish as to expect dates to grow on thistles. We must
accept what is given us, and see that we, at any rate, steer clear of
the dangers mapped out for us by the travellers of the past.
* * * * *
The editor takes this opportunity to thank Mr. G. Ravenscroft Dennis
and Mr. W. Spencer Jackson for much valuable assistance in the reading
of proofs and the collation of texts.
TEMPLE SCOTT.
NEW YORK,
May 18, 1905.