Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

220
The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift
greater master of that terse, homely, and nervous logic which appeals
most powerfully to the English mind, and no writer has ever excelled
him in the vivid force of his illustrations, in trenchant, original, and
inventive wit, or in concentrated malignity of invective or satire. With
all the intellectual and most of the moral qualities of the most terrible
partisan he combined many of the gifts of a consummate statesman—a
marvellous power of captivating those with whom he came in contact,
great skill in reading characters and managing men, a rapid, decisive
judgment in emergencies, an eminently practical mind, seizing with a
happy tact the common-sense view of every question he treated, and
almost absolutely free from the usual defects of mere literary politicians.
But for his profession he might have risen to the highest posts
of English statesmanship, and in spite of his profession, and without
any of the advantages of rank or office, he was for some time one of
the most influential men in England. He stemmed the tide of political
literature, which had been flowing strongly against his party, and the
admirable force of his popular reasoning, as well as the fierce virulence
of his attacks, placed him at once in the first position in the fray.
The Tory party, assailed by almost overwhelming combinations from
without, and distracted by the most serious divisions within, found in
him its most powerful defender.
[ . . . ]
Another source of annoyance to Swift was the difficulty with
which he obtained Church preferment. He knew that his political
position was exceedingly transient; he had no resources except his
living. He appears to have taken no pains to make profit from his
writings. “I never got a farthing,” he wrote in 1735, “by anything I
wrote, except once about eight years ago, and that was by Mr. Pope’s
prudent management for me.” By his influence at least one bishopric
and many other places had been given away, and yet he was unable
to obtain for himself any preferment that would place him above the
vicissitudes of politics. The antipathy of the queen was unabated; the
Duchess of Somerset, whose influence at Court was very great, and
whom Swift had bitterly and coarsely satirized, employed herself with
untiring hatred in opposing his promotion, and all the remonstrances
of the ministers and all the entreaties of Lady Masham were unable
to overcome the determination of the queen.
The charge of scepticism was one which Swift bitterly resented,
and there is no class whom he more savagely assailed than the Deists