Various Pamphlets.—His Argument Against the Abolition of Christianity, Dr. Johnson calls "a very happy and judicious irony." In 1710 he wrote a paper, at the request of the Irish primate, petitioning the queen to remit the first-fruits and twentieth parts to the Irish clergy. In 1712, ten days before the meeting of parliament, he published his Conduct of the Allies, which, exposing the greed of Marlborough, persuaded the nation to make peace. A supplement to this is found in Reflections on the Barrier Treaty, in which he shows how little English interests had been consulted in that negotiation.
His pamphlet on The Public Spirit of the Whigs, in answer to Steele's Crisis, was so terrible a bomb-shell thrown into the camp of his former friends, and so insulting to the Scotch, that £300 were offered by the queen, at the instance of the Scotch lords, for the discovery of the author; but without success.
At last his versatile and powerful pen obtained some measure of reward: in 1713 he was made Dean of St. Patrick's, in Dublin, with a stipend of £700 per annum. This was his greatest and last preferment.
On the accession of George I., in the following year, he paid his court, but was received with something more than coldness. He withdrew to his deanery in Dublin, and, in the words of Johnson, "commenced Irishman for life, and was to contrive how he might be best accommodated in a country where he considered himself as in a state of exile." After some misunderstanding between himself and his Irish fellow-citizens, he espoused their cause so warmly that he became the most popular man in Ireland. In 1721 he could write to Pope, "I neither know the names nor the number of the family which now reigneth, further than the prayer-book informeth me." His letters, signed M. B. Drapier, on Irish manufactures, and especially those in opposition to Wood's monopoly of copper coinage, in 1724, wrought upon the people, producing such a spirit of resistance that the project of a debased coinage failed; and so influential did Swift become, that he was able to say to the Archbishop of Dublin, "Had I raised my finger, the mob would have torn you to pieces." This popularity was increased by the fact that a reward of £300 was offered by Lord Carteret and the privy council for the discovery of the authorship of the fourth letter; but although it was commonly known that Swift was the author, proof could not be obtained. Carteret, the Lord Lieutenant, afterwards said, "When people ask me how I governed Ireland, I said that I pleased Doctor Swift."
Thus far Swift's literary labors are manifest history: we come now to consider that great work, Gulliver's Travels,—the most successful of its kind ever written,—in which, with all the charm of fiction in plot, incident, and description, he pictures the great men and the political parties of the day.
Gulliver's Travels.—Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon's mate, finds himself shipwrecked on the shore of the country of Lilliput, the people of which are only six inches in height. His adventures are so vividly described that our charmed fancy places us among them as we read, and we, for a time, abandon ourselves to a belief in their reality. It was, however, begun as a political satire; in the insignificance of the court of pigmies, he attacks the feebleness and folly of the new reign. Flimnap, the prime minister of Lilliput, is a caricature of Walpole; the Big Indians and Little Indians represent the Protestants and Roman Catholics; the High Heels and Low Heels stand for the Whigs and Tories; and the heir-apparent, who wears one heel high and the other low, is the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., who favored both parties in order to gain both to his purpose.
In his second voyage, that to Brobdignag, his satirical imagination took a wider range—European politics as they appear to a superior intelligence, illustrated by a man of sixty feet in comparison with one of six. As Gulliver had looked with curious contempt upon the united efforts of the Lilliputians, he now found himself in great jeopardy and fear when in the hands of a giant of Brobdignag. As the pigmy metropolis, five hundred yards square, was to London, so were London and other European capitals to the giants' city, two thousand miles in circumference. And what are the armies of Europe, when compared with that magnificent cavalry manœuvring on a parade-ground twenty miles square, each mounted trooper ninety feet high, and all, as they draw their swords at command, representing ten thousand flashes of lightning?
The third part contains the voyage of Gulliver—no less improbable than the former ones—to Laputa, the flying island of projectors and visionaries. This is a varied satire upon the Royal Society, the eccentricities of the savans, empirics of all kinds, mathematical magic, and the like. In this, political schemes to restore the pretender are aimed at. The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea bubble are denounced. Here, too, in his journey to Luggnagg, he introduces the sad and revolting picture of the Struldbrugs, those human beings who live on, losing all their power and becoming hideously old.
In his last voyage—to the land of the Houyhnhnms—his misanthropy is painfully manifest. This is the country where horses are masters, and men a servile and degraded race; and he has painted the men so brutish and filthy that the satire loses its point. The power of satire lies in contrast; we must compare the evil in men with the good: when the whole race is included in one sweeping condemnation, and an inferior being exalted, in opposition to all possibility, the standard is absurd, and the satirist loses his pains.
The horses are the Houyhnhnms, (the name is an attempt to imitate a neigh,) a noble race, who are amazed and disgusted at the Yahoos,—the degraded men,—upon whom Swift, in his sweeping misanthropy, has exhausted his bitterness and his filth.