Sundry Critics (Contemporary and After)

Swift was greatly admired by hardly less feared by English writers - admired for his fertile imagination, stylistic mastery and treacherous satirical methods which often induced his readers to take him seriously at first, approving of his supposed opinions, only to find themselves betrayed by the absurdities into which he led them. (Of this method the Modest Proposal is the best example.)
 One peculiarity of his art stood out for many and - in spite of his authorship of Gulliver’s Travels, so widely taken as a children’s story - caused a deep repugnance at the visceral tendency of his satirical art. This was what has come to be called the “cloacal obsession” - a tendency to invest interest in the bestial and unhygienic side of human nature, a trait so developed in Swift as to strike some older readers as a form of madness.
 The fact that Swift was certified as a lunatic in his last years has done nothing to palliate the suspicion that his visceral misanthropy was a symptom of the ensuing cataclasm in which his mind dramatically decayed. (We now know that he was, in fact, suffering from Meniere’s disease, a condition of the inner ear that causes loud tinnitis and mental distraction as a consequence.)
 Swift’s animosity to English political arrangements in Ireland and, more generally, his belief that the conduct of human affairs was brutal and insane and frankly contrary at almost every point to the professed virtues of Christian religion, led to charges of exaggeration. It is only in modern times that the truth of his satires has come to be universally believed.

Dr. Samuel Johnson characterised Swift in terms of coarseness and ferocity and considered spite to be his motive in having 'turned Irishman for life’ ( Lives of the English Poets, 1779-81.) He wrote: 'It was from the time when he first began to patronise the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity. He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight, and their strength; and gave them some spirit to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects to which they have ever since been making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they have at last established.’ (Ibid.)

'Perhaps no writer can be so easily found that has borrowed so little, or that in his excellencies and all his defects has so well maintained his claim to be considered original.’ (Ibid.)

On Swift’s end: ‘In life’s last scene what prodigies surprise, / Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise? / From Marlb’rough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow / And Swift expires a driv’ler and a show.’ (“The Vanity of Human Wishes”, in Poems, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jnr., with George Milne, Yale Edn. of The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. VI, 1964, p.106, ll.315-18.)

Nathan Drake, Jonathan Swift (1805): 'these great and estimable qualities were sullied and debased by pride, dogmatism and misanthropy; by a temper harsh, gloomy and discontented. Such is the malignancy of a disposition prone to vilify and degrade human nature, that no abilities, however eminent, can atone for such a tendency’ (Vol. 3, p.160; quoted in Robert Mahony, Jonathan Swift, The Irish Identity, 1995).

W. M. Thackeray, 'To think of him is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire.’ ( English Humourists, 1851). Further, regarded him as 'a lonely eagle behind bars’ and considered Gulliver 'horrible, shameful, unmanly blasphemous’ (idem.)

Augustine Birrell : '[H]is language is horrible from first to last. He is full of odious images, of base and abominable allusions ... It is a question not of morality, but of decency, whether it is becoming to sit in the same room with this divine. How the good Sir Walter ever managed to see him through the press is amazing’. (q. source.)

Denis Florence MacCarthy, 'The name of Jonathan Swift is unquestionably the greatest in our literature [...] He was the first Anglo-Irish writer who felt that he was an Irishman, and that his injured and despised country was worthy even of the affectation of patriotism’ ( The Poets and Dramatists of Ireland, Duffy 1846; p.130, quoted in Robert Mahony, op. cit. ; cited in Rosine Auberting, MA Dipl., UUC 1996.)

John Mitchel : '[Swift’s example] penetrated the character of the whole English colony and bore fruit long after that unquiet and haughty heart lay at rest.’ ( History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick to the Present Time, Duffy, 1869, p.94.)

Stephen Gwynn :'For a century and a half from Swift’s day, nearly all the literature that came out of nationalist Ireland was forged as a weapon for combat.’ (Stephen Gwynn, Irish Literature and Drama, 1936, p.12.) Further: '[His works] so affected popular imagination in their lifetimes that a ghost of them survives, vaguely familiar to thousands who in reality know nothing but the name.’ (Ibid.; q.p.)

Shane Leslie : 'Modern Irish nationalism was born at the tip of Swift’s pen ... the first Sinn Feiner - all-aloner.’ ( The Irish Tangle for English Readers, 1946, p.17.)

Arthur Griffith : 'By his great genius, he [Swift] united all Ireland, peer and peasant, Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter, Norman, Cromwellian and Gael in opposition to England .’ (United Irishman, 8 Jan. 1905.)

Irvin Ehrenpreis : 'The Modest Proposal joins not only the Drapier’s but all Swift’s tracts on Ireland in its paradoxical view of human misery. The sufferers whom he wishes to help are people for whom he has a degree of contempt.’ (Swift, The Man, His Work and the Age, 1962-83.)

J. W. Foster : 'Swift was philosophically married to the idea of decline [...]. At best, life was a modest proposal, a holding of the pale of reason against unnecessary degeneration.’ ('Encountering Traditions’, in Foster and Helena C. G. Chesney, ed., Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, Dublin : Lilliput 1997, p.49.)

Victoria Glendinning, 'Swift sought to shock and shame the British public by bringing their unthinking inhumanity to its logical conclusion.’ ( Jonathan Swift, London: Hutchinson 1998, p.164.)


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