EARLY WRITINGS.

Swift came to Temple’s house as a raw student. He left it as the author of one of the most remarkable satires ever written. His first efforts had been unpromising enough. Certain Pindaric Odes, in which the youthful aspirant imitated the still popular model of Cowley, are even comically prosaic. The last of them, dated 1691, is addressed to a queer Athenian Society, promoted by a John Dunton, a speculative bookseller, whose Life and Errors is still worth a glance from the curious. The Athenian Society was the name of John Dunton himself, and two or three collaborators who professed in the Athenian Mercury to answer queries ranging over the whole field of human knowledge. Temple was one of their patrons, and Swift sent them a panegyrical ode, the merits of which are sufficiently summed up by Dryden’s pithy criticism—“Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” Swift disliked and abused Dryden ever afterwards, though he may have had better reasons for his enmity than the child’s dislike to bitter medicine. Later poems, the Epistle to Congreve and that to Temple already quoted, show symptoms of growing power and a clearer self-recognition. In Swift’s last residence with Temple, he proved unmistakably that he had learnt the secret often so slowly revealed to great writers, the secret of his real strength. The Tale of a Tub was written about 1696; part of it appears to have been seen at Kilroot by his friend, Waring, Varina’s brother; the Battle of the Books was written in 1697. It is a curious proof of Swift’s indifference to a literary reputation that both works remained in manuscript till 1704. The “little parson cousin” Tom Swift, ventured some kind of claim to a share in the authorship of the Tale of a Tub. Swift treated this claim with the utmost contempt, but never explicitly claimed for himself the authorship of what some readers hold to be his most powerful work.

The Battle of the Books, to which we may first attend, sprang out of the famous controversy as to the relative merits of the ancients and moderns, which began in France with Perrault and Fontenelle; which had been set going in England by Sir W. Temple’s essay upon ancient and modern learning (1692), and which incidentally led to the warfare between Bentley and Wotton on one side, and Boyle and his Oxford allies on the other. A full account of this celebrated discussion may be found in Professor Jebb’s Bentley; and, as Swift only took the part of a light skirmisher, nothing more need be said of it in this place. One point alone is worth notice. The eagerness of the discussion is characteristic of a time at which the modern spirit was victoriously revolting against the ancient canons of taste and philosophy. At first sight, we might therefore expect the defenders of antiquity to be on the side of authority. In fact, however, the argument, as Swift takes it from Temple, is reversed. Temple’s theory, so far as he had any consistent theory, is indicated in the statement that the moderns gathered “all their learning from books in the universities.” Learning, he suggests, may weaken invention; and people who trust to the charity of others will always be poor. Swift accepts and enforces this doctrine. The Battle of the Books is an expression of that contempt for pedants which he had learnt in Dublin, and which is expressed in the ode to the Athenian Society. Philosophy, he tells us in that precious production, “seems to have borrowed some ungrateful taste of doubts, impertinence, and niceties from every age through which it passed” (this, I may observe, is verse), and is now a “medley of all ages,” “her face patched over with modern pedantry.” The moral finds a more poetical embodiment in the famous apologue of the Bee and the Spider in the Battle of the Books. The bee had got itself entangled in the spider’s web in the library, whilst the books were beginning to wrangle. The two have a sharp dispute, which is summed up by Æsop as arbitrator. The spider represents the moderns who spin their scholastic pedantry out of their own insides; whilst the bee, like the ancients, goes direct to nature. The moderns produce nothing but “wrangling and satire, much of a nature with the spider’s poison, which however they pretend to spit wholly out of themselves is improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the insects and vermin of the age.” We, the ancients, “profess to nothing of our own, beyond our wings and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labour and research, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are Sweetness and Light.”

The Homeric battle which follows is described with infinite spirit. Pallas is the patron of the ancients whilst Momus undertakes the cause of the moderns, and appeals for help to the malignant deity Criticism, who is found in her den at the top of a snowy mountain, extended upon the spoils of numberless half-devoured volumes. By her, as she exclaims in the regulation soliloquy, children become wiser than their parents, beaux become politicians, and schoolboys judges of philosophy. She flies to her darling Wotton, gathering up her person into an octavo compass; her body grows white and arid and splits in pieces with dryness; a concoction of gall and soot is strewn in the shape of letters upon her person; and so she joins the moderns, “undistinguishable in shape and dress from the divine Bentley, Wotton’s dearest friend.” It is needless to follow the fortunes of the fight which follows; it is enough to observe that Virgil is encountered by his translator Dryden in a helmet “nine times too large for the head, which appeared situate far in the hinder part, even like the lady in the lobster, or like a mouse under a canopy of state, or like a shrivelled beau within the penthouse of a modern periwig, and the voice was suited to the visage, sounding weak and remote;” and that the book is concluded by an episode, in which Bentley and Wotton try a diversion and steal the armour of Phalaris and Æsop, but are met by Boyle, clad in a suit of armour given him by all the gods, who transfixes them on his spear like a brace of woodcocks on an iron skewer.

The raillery, if taken in its critical aspect, recoils upon the author. Dryden hardly deserves the scorn of Virgil; and Bentley, as we know, made short work of Phalaris and Boyle. But Swift probably knew and cared little for the merits of the controversy. He expresses his contempt with characteristic vigour and coarseness; and our pleasure in his display of exuberant satirical power is not injured by his obvious misconception of the merits of the case. The unflagging spirit of the writing, the fertility and ingenuity of the illustrations, do as much as can be done to give lasting vitality to what is radically (to my taste at least) a rather dreary form of wit. The Battle of the Books is the best of the travesties. Nor in the brilliant assault upon great names do we at present see anything more than the buoyant consciousness of power, common in the unsparing judgments of youth, nor edged as yet by any real bitterness. Swift has found out that the world is full of humbugs; and goes forth hewing and hacking with super-abundant energy, not yet aware that he too may conceivably be a fallible being, and still less that the humbugs may some day prove too strong for him.

The same qualities are more conspicuous in the far greater satire the Tale of a Tub. It is so striking a performance that Johnson, who cherished one of his stubborn prejudices against Swift, doubted whether Swift could have written it. “There is in it,” he said, “such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life.” The doubt is clearly without the least foundation, and the estimate upon which it is based is generally disputed. The Tale of a Tub has certainly not achieved a reputation equal to that of Gulliver’s Travels, to the merits of which Johnson was curiously blind. Yet I think that there is this much to be said in favour of Johnson’s theory, namely, that Swift’s style reaches its highest point in the earlier work. There is less flagging; a greater fulness and pressure of energetic thought; a power of hitting the nail on the head at the first blow, which has declined in the work of his maturer years, when life was weary and thought intermittent. Swift seems to have felt this himself. In the twilight of his intellect, he was seen turning over the pages and murmuring to himself, “Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book!” In an apology (dated 1709) he makes a statement which may help to explain this fact. “The author,” he says, “was then (1696) young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many prejudices as he could.” He resolved, as he adds, “to proceed in a manner entirely new;” and he afterwards claims in the most positive terms that through the whole book (including both the tale and the battle of the books) he has not borrowed one “single hint from any writer in the world.”[12] No writer has ever been more thoroughly original than Swift, for his writings are simply himself.

The Tale of a Tub is another challenge thrown down to pretentious pedantry. The vigorous, self-confident intellect has found out the emptiness and absurdity of a number of the solemn formulÆ which pass current in the world, and tears them to pieces with audacious and rejoicing energy. He makes a mock of the paper chains with which solemn professors tried to fetter his activity, and scatters the fragments to the four winds of heaven. In one of the first sections he announces the philosophy afterwards expounded by Herr TeufelsdrÖckh, according to which “man himself is but a micro-coat;” if one of the suits of clothes called animals “be trimmed up with a gold chain, and a red gown, and a white rod, and a pert look, it is called a Lord Mayor; if certain ermines and furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop.” Though Swift does not himself develop this philosophical doctrine, its later form reflects light upon the earlier theory. For, in truth, Swift’s teaching comes to this, that the solemn plausibilities of the world are but so many “shams”—elaborate masks used to disguise the passions, for the most part base and earthly, by which mankind is really impelled. The “digressions” which he introduces with the privilege of a humorist, bear chiefly upon the literary sham. He falls foul of the whole population of Grub Street at starting, and (as I may note in passing) incidentally gives a curious hint of his authorship. He describes himself as a worn-out pamphleteer who has worn his quill to the pith in the service of the State. “Fourscore and eleven pamphlets have I writ under the reigns and for the service of six-and-thirty patrons.” Porson first noticed that the same numbers are repeated in Gulliver’s Travels; Gulliver is fastened with “fourscore and eleven chains” locked to his left leg “with six-and-thirty padlocks.” Swift makes the usual onslaught of a young author upon the critics, with more than the usual vigour, and carries on the war against Bentley and his ally by parodying Wotton’s remarks upon the ancients. He has discovered many omissions in Homer; “who seems to have read but very superficially either Sendivogus, Behmen, or Anthroposophia Magia.”[13] Homer, too, never mentions a saveall; and has a still worse fault—his “gross ignorance in the common laws of this realm, and in the doctrine as well as discipline of the Church of England”—defects, indeed, for which he has been justly censured by Wotton. Perhaps the most vigorous and certainly the most striking of these digressions, is that upon “the original use and improvement of madness in a commonwealth.” Just in passing, as it were, Swift gives the pith of a whole system of misanthropy, though he as yet seems to be rather indulging a play of fancy, than expressing a settled conviction. Happiness, he says, is a “perpetual possession of being well deceived.” The wisdom which keeps on the surface is better than that which persists in officiously prying into the underlying reality. “Last week I saw a woman flayed,” he observes, “and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.” It is best to be content with patching up the outside, and so assuring the “serene, peaceful state”—the sublimest point of felicity—“of being a fool amongst knaves.” He goes on to tell us how useful madmen may be made: how Curtius may be regarded equally as a madman and a hero for his leap into the gulf; how the raging, blaspheming, noisy inmate of Bedlam is fit to have a regiment of dragoons; and the bustling, sputtering, bawling madman should be sent to Westminster Hall; and the solemn madman, dreaming dreams and seeing best in the dark, to preside over a congregation of dissenters; and how elsewhere you may find the raw material of the merchant, the courtier, or the monarch. We are all madmen, and happy so far as mad: delusion and peace of mind go together; and the more truth we know, the more shall we recognize that realities are hideous. Swift only plays with his paradoxes. He laughs without troubling himself to decide whether his irony tells against the theories which he ostensibly espouses, or those which he ostensibly attacks. But he has only to adopt in seriousness the fancy with which he is dallying, in order to graduate as a finished pessimist. These, however, are interruptions to the main thread of the book, which is a daring assault upon that serious kind of pedantry which utters itself in theological systems. The three brothers, Peter, Martin, and Jack, represent, as we all know, the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, and the Puritanical varieties of Christianity. They start with a new coat provided for each by their father, and a will to explain the right mode of wearing it; and after some years of faithful observance, they fall in love with the three ladies of wealth, ambition, and pride, get into terribly bad ways and make wild work of the coats and the will. They excuse themselves for wearing shoulder-knots by picking the separate letters S, H, and so forth, out of separate words in the will, and as K is wanting, discover it to be synonymous with C. They reconcile themselves to gold lace by remembering that when they were boys they heard a fellow say that he had heard their father’s man say that he would advise his sons to get gold lace when they had money enough to buy it. Then, as the will becomes troublesome in spite of exegetical ingenuity, the eldest brother finds a convenient codicil which can be tacked to it, and will sanction a new fashion of flame-coloured satin. The will expressly forbids silver fringe on the coats; but they discover that the word meaning silver fringe may also signify a broomstick. And by such devices they go on merrily for a time, till Peter sets up to be the sole heir and insists upon the obedience of his brethren. His performances in this position are trying to their temper. “Whenever it happened that any rogue of Newgate was condemned to be hanged, Peter would offer him a pardon for a certain sum of money; which when the poor caitiff had made all shifts to scrape up and send, his lordship would return a piece of paper in this form.

“‘To all mayors, sheriffs, jailors, constables, bailiffs, hangmen, &c. Whereas we are informed that A. B. remains in the hands of you or some of you, under the sentence of death: We will and command you, upon sight hereof to let the said prisoner depart to his own habitation whether he stands condemned for murder, &c., &c., for which this shall be your sufficient warrant; and if you fail hereof, God damn you and yours to all eternity; and so we bid you heartily farewell. Your most humble man’s man, Emperor Peter.’

“The wretches, trusting to this, lost their lives and their money too.” Peter, however, became outrageously proud. He has been seen to take “three old high-crowned hats and clap them all on his head three-storey high, with a huge bunch of keys at his girdle, and an angling-rod in his hand. In which guise, whoever went to take him by the hand in the way of salutation, Peter, with much grace, like a well-educated spaniel, would present them with his foot; and if they refused his civility, then he would raise it as high as their chops, and give him a damned kick on the mouth, which has ever since been called a salute.”Peter receives his brothers at dinner, and has nothing served up but a brown loaf. Come, he says, “fall on and spare not; here is excellent good mutton,” and he helps them each to a shoe. The brothers remonstrate, and try to point out that they see only bread. They argue for some time, but have to give in to a conclusive argument. “‘Look ye, gentlemen,’ cries Peter in a rage, ‘to convince you what a couple of blind, positive, ignorant, wilful puppies you are, I will use but this simple argument. By G— it is true, good, natural mutton as any in Leadenhall Market; and G— confound you both eternally, if you offer to believe otherwise.’ Such a thundering proof as this left no further room for objection; the two unbelievers began to gather and pocket up their mistake as hastily as they could,” and have to admit besides that another large dry crust is true juice of the grape.

The brothers Jack and Martin afterwards fall out: and Jack is treated to a storm of ridicule much in the same vein as that directed against Peter; and, if less pointed, certainly not less expressive of contempt. I need not further follow the details of what Johnson calls this “wild book,” which is in every page brimful of intense satirical power. I must however say a few words upon a matter which is of great importance in forming a clear judgment of Swift’s character. The Tale of a Tub was universally attributed to Swift, and led to many doubts of his orthodoxy and even of his Christianity. Sharpe, Archbishop of York, injured Swift’s chances of preferment by insinuating such doubts to Queen Anne. Swift bitterly resented the imputation. He prefixed an apology to a later edition, in which he admitted that he had said some rash things; but declared that he would forfeit his life if any one opinion contrary to morality or religion could be fairly deduced from the book. He pointed out that he had attacked no Anglican doctrine. His ridicule spares Martin, and is pointed at Peter and Jack. Like every satirist who ever wrote, he does not attack the use but the abuse; and as the Church of England represents for him the purest embodiment of the truth, an attack upon the abuses of religion meant an attack upon other churches only in so far as they diverged from this model. Critics have accepted this apology, and treated poor Queen Anne and her advisers as representing simply the prudery of the tea-table. The question, to my thinking, does not admit of quite so simple an answer.

If, in fact, we ask what is the true object of Swift’s audacious satire, the answer will depend partly upon our own estimate of the truth. Clearly it ridicules “abuses;” but one man’s use is another’s abuse: and a dogma may appear to us venerable or absurd according to our own creed. One test, however, may be suggested, which may guide our decision. Imagine the Tale of a Tub to be read by Bishop Butler and by Voltaire, who called Swift a Rabelais perfectionnÉ. Can any one doubt that the believer would be scandalized and the scoffer find himself in a thoroughly congenial element? Would not any believer shrink from the use of such weapons even though directed against his enemies? Scott urges that the satire was useful to the high church party because, as he says, it is important for any institution in Britain (or anywhere else, we may add) to have the laughers on its side. But Scott was too sagacious not to indicate the obvious reply. The condition of having the laughers on your side is to be on the side of the laughers. Advocates of any serious cause feel that there is a danger in accepting such an alliance. The laughers who join you in ridiculing your enemy, are by no means pledged to refrain from laughing in turn at the laugher. When Swift had ridiculed all the Catholic and all the Puritan dogmas in the most unsparing fashion, could he be sure that the Thirty-nine Articles would escape scot free? The Catholic theory of a church possessing divine authority, the Puritan theory of a divine voice addressing the individual soul, suggested to him, in their concrete embodiments at least, nothing but a horselaugh. Could any one be sure that the Anglican embodiment of the same theories might not be turned to equal account by the scoffer? Was the true bearing of Swift’s satire in fact limited to the deviations from sound Church of England doctrine, or might it not be directed against the very vital principle of the doctrine itself?

Swift’s blindness to such criticisms was thoroughly characteristic. He professes, as we have seen, that he had need to clear his mind of real prejudices. He admits that the process might be pushed too far; that is, that in abandoning a prejudice you may be losing a principle. In fact, the prejudices from which Swift had sought to free himself—and no doubt with great success—were the prejudices of other people. For them he felt unlimited contempt. But the prejudice which had grown up in his mind, strengthened with his strength, and become intertwined with all his personal affections and antipathies, was no longer a prejudice in his eyes, but a sacred principle. The intensity of his contempt for the follies of others shut his eyes effectually to any similarity between their tenets and his own. His principles, true or false, were prejudices in the highest degree, if by a prejudice we mean an opinion cherished because it has somehow or other become ours, though the “somehow” may exclude all reference to reason. Swift never troubled himself to assign any philosophical basis for his doctrines; having, indeed, a hearty contempt for philosophizing in general. He clung to the doctrines of his church, not because he could give abstract reasons for his belief, but simply because the church happened to be his. It is equally true of all his creeds, political or theological, that he loved them as he loved his friends, simply because they had become a part of himself, and were therefore identified with all his hopes, ambitions, and aspirations public or private. We shall see hereafter how fiercely he attacked the dissenters, and how scornfully he repudiated all arguments founded upon the desirability of union amongst Protestants. To a calm outside observer differences might appear to be superficial; but to him, no difference could be other than radical and profound which in fact divided him from an antagonist. In attacking the Presbyterians, cried more temperate people, you are attacking your brothers and your own opinions. No, replied Swift, I am attacking the corruption of my principles; hideous caricatures of myself; caricatures the more hateful in proportion to their apparent likeness. And therefore, whether in political or theological warfare, he was sublimely unconscious of the possible reaction of his arguments.

Swift took a characteristic mode of showing that if upon some points he accidentally agreed with the unbeliever, it was not from any covert sympathy. Two of his most vigorous pieces of satire in later days are directed against the deists. In 1708 he published an Argument to prove that the abolishing of Christianity in England may, as things now stand, be attended with some inconveniences, and perhaps not produce those many good effects proposed thereby. And in 1713, in the midst of his most eager political warfare, he published Mr. Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking, put into plain English, by way of abstract, for use of the poor. No one who reads these pamphlets can deny that the keenest satire may be directed against infidels as well as against Christians. The last is an admirable parody, in which poor Collins’s arguments are turned against himself with ingenious and provoking irony. The first is perhaps Swift’s cleverest application of the same method. A nominal religion, he urges gravely, is of some use, for if men cannot be allowed a God to revile or renounce, they will speak evil of dignities, and may even come to “reflect upon the ministry.” If Christianity were once abolished, the wits would be deprived of their favourite topic. “Who would ever have suspected Asgil for a wit or Toland for a philosopher if the inexhaustible stock of Christianity had not been at hand to provide them with materials?” The abolition of Christianity moreover may possibly bring the Church into danger, for atheists, deists, and Socinians have little zeal for the present ecclesiastical establishment; and if they once get rid of Christianity, they may aim at setting up Presbyterianism. Moreover, as long as we keep to any religion, we do not strike at the root of the evil. The freethinkers consider that all the parts hold together, and that if you pull out one nail the whole fabric will fall. Which, he says, was happily expressed by one who heard that a text brought in proof of the Trinity, was differently read in some ancient manuscript; whereupon he suddenly leaped through a long sorites to the logical conclusion: “Why, if it be as you say, I may safely ... drink on and defy the parson.”

A serious meaning underlies Swift’s sarcasms. Collins had argued in defence of the greatest possible freedom of discussion; and tacitly assumed that such discussion would lead to disbelief of Christianity. Opponents of the liberal school had answered by claiming his first principle as their own. They argued that religion was based upon reason, and would be strengthened instead of weakened by free inquiry. Swift virtually takes a different position. He objects to freethinking because ordinary minds are totally unfit for such inquiries. “The bulk of mankind,” as he puts it, is as “well qualified for flying as thinking;” and therefore free-thought would lead to anarchy, atheism, and immorality, as liberty to fly would lead to a breaking of necks.

Collins rails at priests as tyrants upheld by imposture. Swift virtually replies that they are the sole guides to truth and guardians of morality, and that theology should be left to them, as medicine to physicians and law to lawyers. The argument against the abolition of Christianity takes the same ground. Religion, however little regard is paid to it in practice, is in fact the one great security for a decent degree of social order; and the rash fools who venture to reject what they do not understand, are public enemies as well as ignorant sciolists.

The same view is taken in Swift’s sermons. He said of himself that he could only preach political pamphlets. Several of the twelve sermons preserved are in fact directly aimed at some of the political and social grievances which he was habitually denouncing. If not exactly “pamphlets,” they are sermons in aid of pamphlets. Others are vigorous and sincere moral discourses. One alone deals with a purely theological topic: the doctrine of the Trinity. His view is simply that “men of wicked lives would be very glad if there were no truth in Christianity at all.” They therefore cavil at the mysteries to find some excuse for giving up the whole. He replies in effect that there most be mystery though not contradiction, everywhere, and that if we do not accept humbly what is taught in the Scriptures, we must give up Christianity, and consequently, as he holds, all moral obligation, at once. The cavil is merely the pretext of an evil conscience. Swift’s religion thus partook of the directly practical nature of his whole character. He was absolutely indifferent to speculative philosophy. He was even more indifferent to the mystical or imaginative aspects of religion. He loved downright concrete realities, and was not the man to lose himself in an Oh, altitudo! or in any train of thought or emotion not directly bearing upon the actual business of the world. Though no man had more pride in his order or love of its privileges, Swift never emphasized his professional character. He wished to be accepted as a man of the world and of business. He despised the unpractical and visionary type, and the kind of religious utterance congenial to men of that type was abhorrent to him. He shrank invariably too from any display of his emotion, and would have felt the heartiest contempt for the sentimentalism of his day. At once the proudest and most sensitive of men, it was his imperative instinct to hide his emotions as much as possible. In cases of great excitement, he retired into some secluded corner, where, if he was forced to feel, he could be sure of hiding his feelings. He always masks his strongest passions under some ironical veil, and thus practised what his friends regarded as an inverted hypocrisy. Delany tells us that he stayed for six months in Swift’s house, before discovering that the dean always read prayers to his servants at a fixed hour in private. A deep feeling of solemnity showed itself in his manner of performing public religious exercises, but Delany, a man of a very different temperament, blames his friend for carrying his reserve in all such matters to extremes. In certain respects Swift was ostentatious enough; but this intense dislike to wearing his heart upon his sleeve, to laying bare the secrets of his affections before unsympathetic eyes, is one of his most indelible characteristics. Swift could never have felt the slightest sympathy for the kind of preacher who courts applause by a public exhibition of intimate joys and sorrows; and was less afraid of suppressing some genuine emotion than of showing any in the slightest degree unreal.

Although Swift took in the main what may be called the political view of religion, he did not by any means accept that view in its cynical form. He did not, that is, hold, in Gibbon’s famous phrase, that all religions were equally false and equally useful. His religious instincts were as strong and genuine as they were markedly undemonstrative. He came to take (I am anticipating a little) a gloomy view of the world and of human nature. He had the most settled conviction not only of the misery of human life but of the feebleness of the good elements in the world. The bad and the stupid are the best fitted for life, as we find it. Virtue is generally a misfortune; the more we sympathize, the more cause we have for wretchedness; our affections give us the purest kind of happiness, and yet our affections expose us to sufferings which more than outweigh the enjoyments. There is no such thing, he said in his decline, as “a fine old gentleman;” if so and so had had either a mind or a body worth a farthing, “they would have worn him out long ago.” That became a typical sentiment with Swift. His doctrine was, briefly, that: virtue was the one thing which deserved love and admiration; and yet that virtue in this hideous chaos of a world, involved misery and decay. What would be the logical result of such a creed, I do not presume to say. Certainly, we should guess, something more pessimistic or ManichÆan than suits the ordinary interpretation of Christian doctrine. But for Swift this state of mind carried with it the necessity of clinging to some religious creed: not because the creed held out promises of a better hereafter, for Swift was too much absorbed in the present to dwell much upon such beliefs; but rather because it provided him with some sort of fixed convictions in this strange and disastrous muddle. If it did not give a solution in terms intelligible to the human intellect, it encouraged the belief that some solution existed. It justified him to himself for continuing to respect morality, and for going on living, when all the game of life seemed to be decidedly going in favour of the devil, and suicide to be the most reasonable course. At least, it enabled him to associate himself with the causes and principles which he recognized as the most ennobling element in the world’s “mad farce;” and to utter himself in formulÆ consecrated by the use of such wise and good beings as had hitherto shown themselves amongst a wretched race. Placed in another situation, Swift no doubt might have put his creed—to speak after the Clothes Philosophy—into a different dress. The substance could not have been altered, unless his whole character as well as his particular opinions had been profoundly modified.