The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII | Page 6

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,