Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/798

 766 SWIFT letters. and her tenderness with a fondness he never exhibits for any other topic. Yet he could never overcome his repug- nance to acknowledge their union till she lay on her death- bed, when he was heard by Mrs Whiteway (his cousin, a lady of fortune and talent, who, though not residing with him, superintended his household during his latter years) to say, "Well my dear, if you wish it, it shall be owned." She answered, "It is too late." On January 28, 1728, she died, and her wretched lover sat down the same night to record her virtues in language of unsurpassed simplicity, but to us who know the story more significant for what it conceals than for what it tells. A lock of her hair is preserved, with the inscription in Swift's handwriting, most affecting in its apparent cynicism, " Only a woman's hair ! " " Only a woman's hair," comments Thackeray ; " only love, only fidelity, purity, innocence, beauty, only the tenderest heart in the world stricken and wounded, and passed away out of reach of pangs of hope deferred, love insulted, and pitiless desertion ; only that lock of hair left, and memory, and remorse, for the guilty, lonely wretch, shuddering over the grave of his victim." The more unanswerable this tremendous indictment appears upon the evidence the greater the probability that the evidence is incomplete. Tout comprendre c'est tout par- donner. The hypothesis to which we have referred must for ever remain an hypothesis, but better than any other it not only excuses but explains. The Between the death of Vanessa and the death of Stella, Drapier's as though withheld by an evil fate until he could no longer enjoy them, came the greatest political and the greatest literary triumph of Swift's life. He had fled to Ireland a broken man, to all appearance politically extinct ; a few years were to raise him once more to the summit of popu- larity, though power was for ever denied him. With his fierce hatred of what he recognized as injustice, it was impossible that he should not feel exasperated at the gross misgovernment of Ireland for the supposed benefit of England, the systematic exclusion of Irishmen from places of honour and profit, the spoliation of the country by absentee landlords, the deliberate discouragement of Irish trade and manufactures. An Irish patriot in the strict sense of the term he was not ; he looked upon the indi- genous population as conquered savages ; but his pride and sense of equity alike revolted against the stay-at- home Englishmen's contemptuous treatment of their own garrison, and he delighted in finding a point in which the triumphant faction was still vulnerable. His Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, published anony- mously in 1720, urging the Irish to disuse English goods, became the subject of a prosecution, which at length had to be dropped. A greater opportunity was at hand. One of the chief wants of Ireland in that day, and for many a day afterwards, was that of small currency adapted to the daily transactions of life. Questions of coinage occupy a large part of the correspondence of the primate, Arch- bishop Boulter, whose anxiety to deal rightly with the matter is evidently very real and conscientious. There is no reason to think that the English ministry wished otherwise ; but secret influences were at work, and a patent for supplying Ireland with a coinage of copper halfpence was accorded to William Wood on such terms that the profit accruing from the difference between the intrinsic and the nominal value of the coins, about 40 per cent., was mainly divided between him and the duchess of Kendal, the king's mistress, by whose influence he had obtained the privilege. Swift now had his opportunity, and the famous letters signed M. B. Drapier (1724) soon set Ireland in a flame. Every effort was used to dis- cover, or rather to obtain legal evidence against, the author, whom. Walpole was assured, it would then have taken ten thousand men to apprehend. None could be procured ; the public passion swept everything before it ; the patent was cancelled ; Wood was compensated by a pension ; Swift was raised to a height of popularity which he retained for the rest of his life ; and the only real sufferers were the Irish people, who lost a convenience so badly needed that they might well have afforded to con- nive at Wood's illicit profits. Perhaps, however, it was worth while to teach the English ministry that not every- thing could be done in Ireland. Swift's pamphlets, written in a style more level with the popular intelligence than even his own ordinary manner, are models alike to the controversialist who aids a good cause and to him who is burdened with a bad one. The former may profit by the study of his marvellous lucidity and vehemence, the latter by his sublime audacity in exaggeration and the sophistry with which he involves the innocent halfpence in the obloquy of the nefarious patentee. The noise of the Drapier's letters had hardly died away when Swift acquired a more durable glory by the publica- tion of Gulliver's Travels in 1726. The work had been at least partly written by 1722, and the keenness of the satire on courts and statesmen suggests that it was planned while Swift's disappointments as a public man were still rankling and recent. It is Swift's peculiar good fortune that his book can dispense with the interpretation of which it is nevertheless susceptible, and may be equally enjoyed whether its inner meaning is apprehended or not. It is so true, so entirely based upon the facts of human nature, that the question what particular class of persons sup- plied the author with his examples of folly or misdoing, however interesting to the commentator, may be neglected by the reader. It is also fortunate for him that in three parts out of the four he should have entirely missed " the chief end I propose to myself, to vex the world rather than divert it." The world, which perhaps ought to have been vexed, chose rather to be diverted ; and the great satirist literally strains his powers ut pueris placeat. Few books have added so much to the innocent mirth of man- kind as the first two parts of Gulliver ; the misanthropy is quite overpowered by the fun. The third part, equally masterly in composition, is less felicitous in invention; and in the fourth Swift has indeed carried out his design of vexing the world at his own cost. Human nature indignantly rejects her portrait in the Yahoo as a gross libel, and the protest is fully warranted. An intelligence from a superior sphere, bound on a voyage to the earth, might actually have obtained a fair idea of average humanity by a preliminary call at Lilliput or Brobdingnag, but not from a visit to the Yahoos. While Gulliver is infinitely the most famous and popular of Swift's works, it exhibits no greater powers of mind than many others. The secret of success, here as elsewhere, is the writer's marvellous imperturbability in paradox, his teeming imag- ination, and his rigid logic. Grant his premises, and all the rest follows ; his world may be turned topsy-turvy, but the relative situation of its contents is unchanged. The pains he took to be correct are evinced by the care with which, as Prof. De Morgan has shown, he calcu- lated the proportions of Lilliput and Brobdingnag to ordinary humanity on the basis of 1 to 12 and 12 to 1 respectively, and his copying the description of the storm word for word from Sturmy's Compleat Mariner. By such accuracy and consistency he has given the wildest fiction imaginable an air of veracity rivalling Defoe. Swift's grave humour and power of enforcing momentous truth by ludicrous exaggeration were next displayed in his Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents, by fatten- ing and eating them (1729), a parallel to the Argument Gulliver's Travels. Swift's latter years.