Art of Letters — The Politics of Swift and Shakespeare:  Swift

(1) SWIFT

There are few greater ironies in history than that the modern Conservatives should be eager to claim Swift as one of themselves.

One finds even the _Morning Post_--which someone has aptly enough named the _Morning Prussian_--cheerfully counting the author of _A Voyage to Houyhnhnms_ in the list of sound Tories.

It is undeniable that Swift wrote pamphlets for the Tory Party of his day.

A Whig, he turned from the Whigs of Queen Anne in disgust, and carried the Tory label for the rest of his life.

If we consider realities rather than labels, however, what do we find were the chief political ideals for which Swift stood?

His politics, as every reader of his pamphlets knows, were, above all, the politics of a pacifist and a Home Ruler--the two things most abhorrent to the orthodox Tories of our own time.

Swift belonged to the Tory Party at one of those rare periods at which it was a peace party.

_The Conduct of the Allies_ was simply a demand for a premature peace.

Worse than this, it was a pamphlet against England's taking part in a land-war on the Continent instead of confining herself to naval operations.

"It was the kingdom's misfortune," wrote Swift, "that the sea was not the Duke of Marlborough's element, otherwise the whole force of the war would infallibly have been bestowed there, infinitely to the advantage of his country."

Whether Swift and the Tories were right in their attack on Marlborough and the war is a question into which I do not propose to enter.

I merely wish to emphasize the fact that _The Conduct of the Allies_ was, from the modern Tory point of view, not merely a pacifist, but a treasonable, document.

Were anything like it to appear nowadays, it would be suppressed under the Defence of the Realm Act.

And that Swift was a hater of war, not merely as a party politician, but as a philosopher, is shown by the discourse on the causes of war which he puts into the mouth of Gulliver when the latter is trying to convey a picture of human society to his Houyhnhnm master: Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretends to any right.

Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with another for fear the other should quarrel with him.

Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak.

Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight till they take ours or give us theirs.

It is a very justifiable cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions among themselves.

It is justifiable to enter into war with our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land that would render our dominions round and complete.

If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living.

There you have "Kultur" wars, and "white man's burden" wars, and wars for "places of strategic importance," satirized as though by a twentieth-century humanitarian.

When the _Morning Post_ begins to write leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that Swift was a Tory in the ordinary meaning of the word.

As for Swift's Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like other Conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential Nationalism by suggesting that Swift was merely a just man righteously indignant at the destruction of Irish manufactures.

At least, one would never gather from the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modern Irish demand for self-government.

Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense in which Washington was an American patriot.

Like Washington, he had no quarrel with English civilization.

He was not an eighteenth-century Sinn Feiner.

He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism was Colonial Nationalism.

As such he was the forerunner of Grattan and Flood, and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond.

While not a Separatist, he had the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined from London.

In his _Short View of the State of Ireland_, published in 1728, he preached the whole gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted by Irishmen like Sir Horace Plunkett to-day.

He declared that one of the causes of a nation's thriving-- ...

is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent, for otherwise they are not a free people.

And, therefore, all appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to another country are so many grievous impoverishments.

He said of the Irish: We are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them by doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the nature of their disease.

In the _Drapier's Letters_ he denied the right of the English Parliament to legislate for Ireland.

He declared that all reason was on the side of Ireland's being free, though power and the love of power made for Ireland's servitude.

"The arguments on both sides," he said in a passage which sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy between England and Ireland, were "invincible": For in reason all government without the consent of the governed is slavery.

But, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt.

It would be interesting to know how the modern Tory, whose gospel is the gospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this with Swift's passionate championship of the "one single man in his shirt."

One wishes very earnestly that the Toryism of Swift were in fact the Toryism of the modern Conservative party.

Had it been so, there would have been no such thing as Carsonism in pre-war England; and, had there been no Carsonism, one may infer from Mr. Gerard's recent revelations, there might have been no European war.

Mr. Whibley, it is only fair to say, is concerned with Swift as a man of letters and a friend, rather than with Swift as a party politician.

The present book is a reprint of the Leslie Stephen lecture which he delivered at Cambridge a few months ago.

It was bound, therefore, to be predominantly literary in interest.

At the same time, Mr. Whibley's political bias appears both in what he says and in what he keeps silent about.

His defence of Swift against the charge of misanthropy is a defence with which we find ourselves largely in agreement.

But Mr. Whibley is too single-minded a party politician to be able to defend the Dean without clubbing a number of his own pet antipathies in the process.

He seems to think that the only alternative to the attitude of Dean Swift towards humanity is the attitude of persons who, "feigning a bland and general love of abtract humanity ...

wreak a wild revenge upon individuals."

He apparently believes that it is impossible for one human being to wish well to the human race in general, and to be affectionate to John, Peter and Thomas in particular.

Here are some of Mr. Whibley's rather wild comments on this topic.

He writes: 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!

I will see thee damned first!"

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 Knife Grinder to political account, give him kicks for ha'pence, and goes off in "a transport of Republican enthusiasm."

Such is the Friend of Man at his best.

"At his best" is good.

It makes one realize that Mr. Whibley is merely playing a game of make-believe, and playing it very hard.

His indictment of humanitarians has about as much, or as little, basis in fact as would an indictment of wives or seagulls or fields of corn.

One has only to mention Shelley with his innumerable personal benevolences to set Mr. Whibley's card-castle of abuse tumbling.

With Mr. Whibley's general view of Swift as opposed to his general view of politics, I find myself for the most part in harmony.

I doubt, however, whether Swift has been pursued in his grave with such torrential malignity as Mr. Whibley imagines.

Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes the breath away.

One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift's writings or his life.

Of course he had done so, but his passion for the sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius of saturnine realism such as Swift's. The truth is, though Swift was among the staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors.

His writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment.

We know of the tenderness of Swift only from a rare anecdote or from the prattle of the _Journal to Stella_.

As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibley rightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of Swift as laughing and shaking in Rabelais's easy chair.

Swift's humour is essentially of the intellect.

He laughs out of his own bitterness rather than to amuse his fellow-men.

As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic.

He is not sufficiently indifferent for that.

He is a satirist, a sort of perverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision.

It is the essential nobleness of Swift's nature which makes the voyage to the Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature.

There are people who pretend that this section of _Gulliver's Travels_ is almost too terrible for sensitive persons to read.

This is sheer affectation.

It can only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible for sensitive persons to live!