Not only would he be naked and not ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with the brutes that perish.  His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed and aggressive.  But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with himself.  He despised mankind because he found something despicable in Jonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion to their likeness with himself.  He had more or less consciously sacrificed self-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man’s accidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, as no other “man of his level” in Ireland was, to being happy with the woman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and the independence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude after all.  “Money,” he was fond of saying, “is freedom,” but he never learned that self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect.  With a hearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yet bring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier of three royal strumpets.  How should he be happy who had defined happiness to be “the perpetual possession of being well deceived,” and who could never be deceived himself?  It may well be doubted whether what he himself calls “that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries that in the inside they are good for nothing,” be of so penetrative an insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather that to the empty all things are empty.  Swift’s diseased eye had the microscopic quality of Gulliver’s in Brobdingnag, and it was the loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath.  But with all Swift’s scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his shallow friend Gay that life was a jest.  To his nobler temper it was always profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, we suspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears.  The lesson is worth remembering that his apples of Sodom, like those of lesser men, were plucked from boughs of his own grafting.

But there are palliations for him, even if the world were not too ready to forgive a man everything if he will only be a genius.  Sir Robert Walpole used to say “that it was fortunate so few men could be prime ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking wickedness of mankind.”  Swift, from his peculiar relation to two successive ministries, was in a position to know all that they knew, and perhaps, as a recognized place-broker, even more than they knew, of the selfish servility of men.  He had seen the men who figure so imposingly in the stage-processions of history