Master of Ridicule

In the history of Western satire, two figures dwarf all other contenders: Aristophanes, the scourge of Socrates; and Jonathan Swift, radical enemy of the Whiggish reign of unbridled commercial endeavor and craven religious tolerance. 

Great satire, of course, is typically the chosen literary tool of the reactionary imagination, and this truth is magnificently on display in Swift’s letters, pamphlets, essays, and fictional excursions. For those who seek to defend traditional order, nothing more effectively dissects the pretensions of one’s enemies than ridicule—the cutting edge of the satiric rapier—a weapon Swift wielded so ruthlessly that even today he is often dismissed as a mentally disordered misanthrope. But even if that point were conceded (and it is a dubious one), we would have to add that if Swift loathed humankind, he may well have had good reason.

Swift was born in Dublin in 1667 to English parents who emigrated to Ireland after the Restoration—along with many others who sought to take advantage of cheap lands stolen from Catholic families by Cromwell and his predecessors. The Swifts were moderate Anglicans and were very much a part of the new “Anglican Ascendency” that dominated the region of Ireland known as the Dublin Pale. The majority Catholic population of the island was literally “beyond the Pale” and had by then been stripped of virtually all its traditional rights. Swift’s father was a lawyer who died shortly after Swift was conceived, and Jonathan often later referred to himself as an orphan. 

Indeed, for several of Swift’s earliest years he lived in England under the care of his wet nurse, who had “kidnapped” the boy and chosen not to inform Swift’s mother of her child’s whereabouts. (As fantastic as the story sounds, it does not appear to be entirely apocryphal.) Upon his return to Ireland, he was taken under the wing of his father’s eldest brother, his uncle Godwin, who paid for Swift’s first formal education at Kilkenny College.

Swift was at best an indifferent student, both at Kilkenny and, later, at Trinity College Dublin, where he was enrolled in 1682. Poetry and card playing appear to have been his passions, and he despised the standard curriculum of Greek and Latin, logic, and grammar. Syllogistic reasoning was his bête noire, and in an early flash of satiric inspiration, he wrote: “Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.” Somehow, though, he managed to matriculate, earning a B.A. degree speciali gratia (“by special grace”), a distinction indicating that he earned the degree by the seat of his pants.

As William of Orange prepared to invade England and Ireland, Swift’s uncle Godwin, fearing civil insurrection, arranged for his hasty retreat across the Irish Sea. Swift made his way mostly on foot across England to the estate of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, south of London. Temple was, in fact, a friend of the Swift family and was happy to give refuge to a promising young “orphan,” though, as Swift quickly realized, the title of personal secretary conferred upon him by Temple proved to be little more than demeaning servitude. Swift had arrived in England with great ambitions. He hoped that Temple, a former diplomat with many Whig connections, would help him secure a clerical appointment in one of the prestigious English cathedrals. Temple made promises, but nothing ever came of them. While at Moor Park, Swift also served as a tutor to nine-year-old Esther Johnson, the daughter of Temple’s housekeeper. One of Swift’s most important biographers, Leo Damrosch, has uncovered suggestive evidence that Esther may well have been Temple’s illegitimate daughter. 

Esther’s bond with the writer of A Journal to Stella (the pet name conferred upon her by Swift) was the most
important one of her life—and his. Gallons of ink have been spilled over the centuries in an effort to fathom the secret of the great writer’s friendship with the younger woman who can certainly be described as his muse. Swift’s biographers have differed over whether their relations were ever carnal, though it is certainly true that after his return to Ireland, she joined him there and resided in his household until her death. Most of the evidence is ambiguous, but it is likely that their relations were platonic. Whatever the case, the Letters provide a fascinating glimpse into the kind of sharp intellectual repartee that must have characterized their daily conversation.

After Temple’s death in 1699 and following his wishes, Swift was made responsible for preparing Temple’s papers (official diplomatic correspondence, essays, and pamphlets) for publication—a thankless task that paid little and left Swift hamstrung in his own early literary endeavors. Temple had been close to the Whig monarch, William III (a frequent visitor at Moor Park), and through Temple Swift had become acquainted with most of the men associated with the so-called Whig Junto, the leaders of the Whig party under William III and Queen Anne. More than once in his life, Swift described himself as an “old Whig,” which indicated that he was in sympathy with the Whig understanding of liberty and the prerogatives of parliamentary rule that had grown out of the Glorious Revolution. Yet he came to despise the Whigs’ alliances with commerce and their taste for foreign entanglements (for example, the War of Spanish Succession), which in the case of William III amounted to dreams of imperialist dominance of Europe. 

On these points, he found himself increasingly in sympathy with the relative isolationism of the landowning Tories. Most importantly, Swift’s eventual defection to the Tories was motivated by his defense of the Anglican hierarchy against the dissenting churches favored by the Whigs. The dissenting churches included the Presbyterians, who were associated with the tyrannical social leveling of the Cromwellians, and the so-called Socinians. This term in England had come to designate virtually all of the churches aligned with the radical Reformation. For Swift, such sects were anathema for several reasons, but most importantly because of their fanatical conviction that the Kingdom of God could be established on Earth. His vision of human nature was deeply pessimistic; he believed that any movement that promised to throw off the shackles of hierarchical authority would lead only to a savage Hobbesian debasement. 

In short, while Swift had little interest in theology or supernatural dogma, he saw the Anglican church, the established state church, as the stronghold of social order—as the cornerstone, in fact, of British political stability. This conviction was so deeply rooted in his character that it finally, and ironically, undermined any hope he had in securing the much-coveted ecclesiastical appointment in England that William Temple had refused to secure for him. That is patently evident in his response to the Test Act controversy.

The Act dated back to 1673 and was intended to prevent “those dangers which may happen from popish recusants.” In practice, the Act required any occupant of a [British] civil or military office to take communion in the Church of England at least once a year and to forswear any belief in what the Church of Rome taught about the sacrament. On the face of it, this seems relatively uncontroversial. Virtually all the rights of Catholics had been curtailed—both in Ireland and throughout the British Isles—after 1688, and the possibility of a resurgence of the Jacobite threat was negligible. But the Whigs were eager to abolish the Test Act in an effort to extend religious toleration so that dissenters would be eligible for public office, a move that would, in Swift’s view, open the door to unacceptable political unrest. As he observed in a 1706 collection of aphorisms called Thoughts on Various Subjects, “Liberty of conscience, under the present acceptation, produces revolutions.”

Thus when Swift entered the fray, he did so flying the banner of intolerance and produced one of his most memorable satires, the Argument against Abolishing Christianity in England (1712). As in many of his satires, he adopted for his purpose an alias—the voice of a Whig parliamentarian who speaks with exquisitely reasonable moderation on a recently proposed bill (entirely fictitious) to abolish Christianity.

“I do not yet see the absolute necessity of extirpating the Christian religion from among us,” he states, but what would be truly radical would be to “stand up in defense of real Christianity, such as [was] used in primitive times to … influence men’s belief and actions.” But to resort to such an argument would be to “dig up foundations; to destroy at one blow all the wit and half the learning of the kingdom; to break the entire frame and constitution of things….” However, if his fellow members of Parliament should insist on abolishing Christianity, he will suggest an amendment to the bill: “that instead of the word Christianity, may be put religion in general … which by laying restraints on human nature, is supposed the great enemy to the freedom of
human thought and action.”

Swift manages here to suggest not merely the latent hostility toward religious belief among the Whigs but, more broadly, the idea that Christianity had become little more than a nominal creed among the ruling classes of England. Needless to say, the Whig oligarchs were none too pleased with such an attack.

A few years earlier, Swift had already attacked in the most scathing terms the blatant departure of the Christian churches from their primitive origins in A Tale of a Tub (1704). Whether the Tale quite merits the unreserved praise it has sometimes received, there is no doubt that the play of his wit in this long work is complex and fertile, even as it reveals a certain satiric overreach. 

On its surface, the Tale is a moral fable. Three sons are each given identical coats by their dying father. They are exhorted to cherish said coats and to refrain from ever altering them. Each son proceeds to do precisely that, altering his coat to suit his whims. Yet the Tale is also an allegory. The eldest son, Peter, represents the Roman Catholic Church; the second son, Jack, represents the Calvinists; and the third son, Martin, the Anglican middle way. Peter, of course, covers his coat with vainglorious frills; Jack strips away anything that might reek of ostentation; and Martin, while avoiding ostentation, allows some modest adornment.

Swift’s elaboration of the allegory introduces new and sometimes grotesque hilarities at every turn, but curiously, even Martin, like his brothers, is cast in the mold of a London rake. They are all inveterate pleasure seekers; they drink and fight and dally with ladies of the night—just to mention a few of their corrupt diversions. The problem, as even many of Swift’s contemporaries recognized, is that the satire seems to go well beyond censuring the abandonment of gospel simplicity; it can easily be understood as an attack on religion itself, though to be sure, the Puritans are dealt the most devastating blows.

Many were offended, and Queen Anne was outraged when she learned that the author was the same Mr. Swift who had petitioned her for preferment in the English church. Thus, he found it expedient to turn to his Irish connections, who advanced his cause in Dublin, where he eventually landed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as its Dean—the position he held for the rest of his life. 

To be sure, there is no doubt about the sincerity of his faith, as another of his biographers, John Stubbs, has argued. But his Christianity had little to do with theological distinctions and everything to do with maintaining a coherent moral order. He had some personal experience of the dissenting sects, but his depictions of Catholicism were little more than the common stereotypes that had been rampant in the Protestant nations for well over a century. There is no evidence that he ever attended a Catholic service or read any of the Church Fathers, despite his fluent Latin—at least, according to historian Anne Barbeau Gardiner, until well after the composition of A Tale of a Tub.

More generally, Swift was contemptuous of the modern rationalism that departed from inherited wisdom—whether the wisdom and beliefs of the ancient church or the secular, political wisdom of the Greeks and Romans. Thus, he played a prominent role in the 18th-century debate between the Ancients and Moderns. Swift placed many of those who promoted the new Enlightenment science associated with the Royal Society among the Moderns. However, what particularly incensed him was the pronounced tendency among the Moderns toward Utopian or abstract speculation. One can find evidence of this concern in several of Swift’s works, but it is especially on display in what most would regard as the crown jewel of his satiric endeavors, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). 

Swift had long been an admirer of Thomas More and his Utopia (he despised Henry VIII in part because of his execution of More), and there are some striking resemblances between the voyage of More’s fictitious narrator Raphael Hythloday to the island of Utopus (“Noplace”) and the voyages of explorer Lemuel Gulliver, especially the third and fourth. The latter, “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms,” has been widely regarded as one of Swift’s most disturbing texts and is clearly a satiric thrust at rationalist dreams of human perfection.

The Houyhnhnms are horselike creatures whose apparent freedom from moral weaknesses is evident in their inability to understand lying or the need for money or lawyers. For these cooly logical beings, there is no complication about the apprehension of reality. To reason is to grasp reality directly and without ambiguity. They have no religion and no sense of humor. Nor do they know anything of parties and factions, or pride, or vanity, or of “proud pedants” or “scoundrels raised from the dust on the merit of their vices,” as Gulliver notes. Like the Stoics, the Houyhnhnms sought to live according to nature, but, as Swift stated in Thoughts on Various Subjects, “the Stoical scheme of supplying our wants by loping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.” The point is that the most advanced “modern” thinkers elevated the rational faculty to an absurd degree, making little or no allowance for the passions.

The obvious moral flaw in the Houyhnhnm scheme of society is their vicious practice of slavery. Moreover, their slave population, the Yahoos (apelike humanoids whom Gulliver first encounters when they drop excrement upon his head) unnervingly resemble the human species. Thus they are nonplussed to find that Gulliver, seemingly a kind of Yahoo himself, possesses some semblance of reason.

If the Houyhnhnms are morally blind to the “inhumanity” of their treatment of the Yahoos, the irony is that they are in some degree justified by the sheer degradation of these creatures, and Gulliver’s profound shock at realizing that he shares some kinship with them is a central theme of the book. Though the message is never made quite explicit, Swift suggests that the Yahoos represent an extreme image of man under the curse of Original Sin. It is a forceful reminder that the Utopian vision of human progress can be maintained only by turning a blind eye to the reality of human deformity.

Swift’s satiric ire was particularly triggered by those Moderns he called “projectors.” He was quite familiar, for example, with the utilitarian thought of the Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville, whose economic theories promoted the notion that human vices might profitably be turned to humanitarian advantage. In “A Modest Proposal,” Swift’s last great work, he speaks with the dispassionate voice of one who claims to have worked out a solution to the problem of widespread poverty and starvation in Ireland. Rejecting the “several Schemes of other Projectors,” he turns his attention to the thousands of infants born each year to parents unable to provide for them, who are destined to become beggars in the streets. His states his own scheme with horrifying simplicity:

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own Thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least Objection. I have been assured by a very knowing American … that a young healthy Child well Nursed is at a year Old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome Food, whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or a Ragout. 

From an economic perspective, the great advantage is that impoverished parents of such carefully plumped infants will be able to make a healthy profit on their offspring by selling them to the affluent upper-classes to adorn their tables. 

“I grant,” he writes, “that this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the Parents seem to have the best title to the Children.”

The landlords to whom Swift’s speaker refers were, of course, the absentee landowners who profited enormously off their Irish possessions but lived, for the most part, back in England, paying little attention to the widespread poverty that resulted from their practices.

It is true that Swift once complained bitterly in his later years that his life in Ireland was a kind of “exile” and that he fully expected to die there “in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.” He never liked Ireland and frequently traveled to London for the company of friends like Alexander Pope and John Gay. Yet his sense of moral justice was acute, and he did great service to the suffering Irish on a number of occasions. He was a familiar figure on the streets of Dublin, emptying his pockets of coins for the hungry.

Die there, he did, in 1745. He lies entombed alongside his beloved Stella in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where his inscription reads: 

Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of this cathedral Church, Where fierce indignation can no longer Rend his heart.