The Examiner, the Medley, the Tattler, and the pamphlets of that day bear no analogy to the modern newspaper; their influence did not penetrate to the lower classes of the community, who were still without education.
Swift is condemned by many who are not conversant with his character, his writings, or the times in which he lived. In detached views, no man was more liable to be misunderstood; his individual acts must be compared with his entire conduct, in order to give him his proper place in the gallery of historical characters. The charge of deserting his party is answered by Dr. Johnson, whose evidence is of greater value as he never professed to be his friend. “Swift, by early education, had been associated with the Whigs; but he deserted them when they deserted their principles, yet he never ran into the opposite extreme; for he continued throughout his life to retain the disposition which he assigned to the Church of England man, of thinking commonly with the Whigs of the State and with the Tories of the Church.”
“Swift,” say his opponents, “rails at the whole human race;” so he does, and so do we all, at particular times and seasons; when long experience has shown us the selfishness of some, the hollowness of others, and the base ingratitude of the world. Not having lifted his voice in protestation against the terrible penal laws inflicted on his Catholic brethren, and enacted before his door, is, perhaps, the heaviest indictment brought against his name, and the one which, on examination, will prove the most futile. He was the last man who, from his connection with a discarded Tory party, could have taken action with any effect; for if he had made the attempt, and if complaints had originated from it, they would have been interpreted into murmurs of rebellion. One revolt had been put down in Scotland, in which it was supposed that every Catholic in Ireland was implicated, and another which was hatching in the country, broke out in 1745; consequently, any interference of Swift on behalf of the Roman Catholics would have drawn upon him the total displeasure of the government and have caused him to be voted an enemy to his country, as was done in the case of Lucas, twenty years after. His words on another occasion show that he was not wanting in sympathy towards the native Irish. “The English should be ashamed of the reproaches they cast on their ignorance, dullness, and want of courage; defects arising only from the poverty and slavery they suffer from their inhuman neighbours, and the base, corrupt spirit of too many of the gentry. By such treatment as this the very Grecians are grown slavish, ignorant, and superstitious. I do assert that from several experiments I have made in travelling in both England and Ireland, I have found the poor cottagers in the latter kingdom, who could speak our language, to have a much better natural taste for good sense, humour, and raillery than ever I observed among people of the sort in England. But the million of oppressions the national Irish lie under, the tyranny of their landlords, the ridiculous zeal of their priests and the general misery of the whole nation, have been enough to damp the best spirits under the sun.”
When Swift’s friends were out of power, Oxford no longer at Court and Bolingbroke in exile, he returned to Ireland, and after visiting several parts of the country, and making himself acquainted with the exact condition of the people, he took up the cause of Ireland with a vigour rarely exhibited by any patriot. The last twenty-five years of his sane life were given to his country, during which time he devoted almost all his energy to Irish concerns. His stern sense of justice prompted him to lay bare the wrongs of his native land with the cool calculation of a banker examining accounts, or that of a surgeon cutting open a tumour. His letters, pamphlets, and sermons are full of allusions to the miseries and disabilities of the Irish. In writing to Pope, he disclaims the title of Patriot, and gives us exactly his motive. “What I do,” he says, “is owing to perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness about me, among which I am forced to live.” It is said that he was a disappointed, mortified man. I allow he was. Swift was ill-used as well as his country. Was he therefore not to resent the injuries offered her because wrongs were heaped on himself, or, after remaining quiet under the disappointments of years, are we to suppose that at the end of that period his own private grievances ceased to be intolerable, and that the public provocations which became urgent had no effect upon him?
About 1720, a narrow, exclusive clique governed Ireland in avowed contempt of all phases of Irish opinion. The need of reform had occupied the attention only of an insignificant handful. None had yet succeeded in rousing a national spirit to resist the people’s wrongs, an over-insistence of which wrongs was looked upon as veiled Jacobitism. No doubt Swift’s first motive was opposition to Walpole and his party. He looked back with bitterness to the fall of his friends. He disliked the cant of the Whigs and their travesty of liberty; from that moment his real interest in Ireland began. Swift scorned Jacobitism, and had a righteous contempt for “divine right and absolute prerogative.” He justified the Revolution; was opposed to a Popish successor; had a mortal antipathy to a standing army in time of peace; desired that parliaments should be annual; disliked the monied interest in opposition to the territorial; feared the growth of the national debt; and dreaded further encroachments on the liberty of the subject. He believed the Whig government of Ireland to be founded on corruption. All these opinions went to swell the current of his indignation against Irish wrongs, and it was in consequence of them that he lashed the government with his scorpion pen.
The papers written by Swift during the years 1720 to 1734 are now little studied by the people or their representatives; nevertheless, if carefully examined, they will be found useful in throwing light upon the unsolved problem. They deal with everything connected with the country: with banks, currency, agriculture, fisheries, grazing, beggars, planting, bog-reclaiming and road-making; and all in a style peculiarly his own, a style seldom equalled and never surpassed. His pictures of the state of the country present curious parallels to what we find to-day. There are, of course, references to grievances which have long ceased to exist; such as the penal laws, and the restriction on trade, but there are many long-standing evils which are not much better now than they were in Swift’s day. The rack-renting, absentee landlords are more numerous in 1887 than they were in 1730, while the improvements effected by the tenants were as much a dead loss of capital in the time of Swift, as in the days of Gladstone.
The secret of Swift’s forcible utterances is that he infused himself into everything he wrote; and his writings, in consequence, exhibit, not merely his intellectual power, but also his moral nature, his principles, his prejudices, even his temper. Swift possessed the most masculine intellect of his age, and was the most earnest thinker of his times. He wrote like a man of the world, and a gentleman; scorning the conceits of rhetorical flourish, and never stooping to ad misericordiam appeals for sympathy.
Of all writers of the English language, his style most approximates to that of the old orators of Greece in force, rapidity, directness, dexterity, luminous statement, and honest homeliness. The reader is impelled with his vigour, as a soldier by the blast of a trumpet; while his feelings are captivated by his author’s manifest sincerity; his outburst of derisive scorn and withering invective, alternately heat and chill the blood. Perhaps his merit is most revealed in the profound sagacity of his political observations, infusing into his country that spirit which enabled her to demand those rights she at last established. Swift’s character rose in Ireland with his defence of it in 1724; for, by his conduct then, he acquired