THE PRINCE OF JOURNALISTS JOURNALISTS have acquired a habit of talking about each other. Twenty years, or even ten years, ago, they were as little inclined to blow the trumpet of their profession-occupation they would have called it then—as the permanent members of the Civil Service, who, as the late Lord Farrer so admirably said, prefer power to fame. Even their consciousness of one another's infirmities, always perhaps acute, was confined to private conversation. Journalism might have withstood all attacks upon its shrinking modesty but for the establishment of that excellent society, the Institute of Journalists. One form of self-assertion leads to another, and a presumptuous person ventured last summer to deliver at Oxford, in academic disguise, a lecture on Modern Journalism. In the course of it he expressed the opinion that the greatest journalist who ever lived was Jonathan Swift. As I think he was right on that point, however mistaken he may have been on others, I should like to support and develop the paradox. I use the word paradox in its proper sense of what is contrary to accepted belief, but is nevertheless true. If a paradox be not true, it is mere nonsense. No one, or scarcely any one, thinks of Swift as connected with the press. As a satirist, as a poet, above all as a humourist, he is of course an English classic. Politicians, if they have read him, know that, in spite of his cloth, he was pre-eminently a statesman. But few of those who admire him the least have gone so far as to suggest that he was a journalist. Yet he wrote regularly, he wrote anonymously, he wrote on politics, and, if any further proof be needed, he wrote on both sides. He did not indeed write against time. His were days of leisure, not of morning and evening papers. Nor did he write ostensibly for money. But the Deanery of St. Patrick's was a reward for his political services, and may, I suppose, be reckoned as deferred pay. I doubt whether any great writer has put his name to so few productions as Swift. To the day of his death he never would acknowledge the work which prevented him from becoming a Bishop, the Tale of a Tub. The most famous of his controversial tracts were ascribed by a transparent fiction to a draper of Dublin. The one essay which appeared with Swift's name upon the title-page was the plea for setting up an English Academy of Letters, which, if it did not lower his reputation, has certainly not raised it. The robust common sense of Dr. Johnson, who knew the virtues and the foibles of Englishmen with a perfect knowledge, supplied in a single sentence the epitaph of that proposal. If such an academy were created, he said, most men would be willing, and many men would be proud, to disobey its decrees. With that solitary and perfunctory exception, Swift left his arguments and his illustrations, his invective and his sarcasm, to make their own mark upon the world. That that mark would be deep and ineffaceable, he must have known long before his mind sank into prematurely senile decay. No man was more fully conscious of his own tremendous powers. His genius burst, almost without an effort, the bonds of poverty and obscurity, of an uncontrollable temper and a sullen pride. He trampled on the insufferable patronage of the conventionally great with an arrogance more excessive than their own. He propitiated no one, he conciliated no one, and when he was doing the work of a Tory Ministry, he insisted upon a deference from Tory Ministers which in that ceremonious age must have seemed even stranger than it would now. After the death of Sir William Temple, upon whom he was dependent, and to whom in his way he was grateful, he called no man master. Indeed he called hardly any man equal. The force which he wielded without fear or pity, without mercy or scruple, was the force of sheer intellectual supremacy. Of his literary friends the only one who could be compared with him was Pope, and Swift came far nearer to Pope in verse than Pope came to Swift in prose. Among the public men with whom he associated there was none except Lord Oxford and Lord Carteret upon whom he did not look down. Send us back our boobies,' he exclaimed when Carteret came as Viceroy to Dublin. What do we want with men like you?' A characteristic compliment, characteristically worded. Mr. Lecky has very properly included Swift among the leaders of Irish opinion. Yet there were few things which annoyed him so much as to be called an Irishman. That he was born in Ireland he could not deny. But he was ready with an answer. A man, he said, is not a horse because he was born in a stable. Much of his life, as everybody knows, was spent in Ireland, and the whole Cathedral of St. Patrick's, not otherwise interesting, is overshadowed by the awful inscription engraved by his own desire upon his tomb. The boast which he there somewhat inappropriately makes is a true one.' He did fight manfully and consistently for what he believed to Hic depositum est corpus Ubi sæva indignatio Abi Viator, be the liberties of Ireland. But by Ireland he meant Protestant Ireland, and her liberties were bound up for him in a Parliament where no Catholic could sit or be represented. Even upon the Irish House of Commons, when it presumed to touch the rights of the Protestant Church, he turned with a concentrated fury which makes the Legion Club almost terrifying to read after the lapse of more than a century and a half. Swift did not regard the Irish Catholics as citizens. He considered them, in Mr. Gladstone's picturesque phrase, to have nothing human about them except the form. In one respect only he was their friend. Despite his parsimonious habits, the indelible result of early indigence, he was generous to the poor. But his political sympathies and his political support were confined to the Protestants and to the Pale. Swift's politics are not, I think, difficult to understand. He was educated by Sir William Temple in loyalty to the Revolution of 1688, and he received some personal kindness from the King. He never became a Jacobite, or a thoroughgoing supporter of hereditary right. The Whigs did nothing for him after Temple's death, and he had a special grievance against Lord Somers. But his removal from one party to the other was not the mere consequence of personal disappointment. He had to choose between being a High Churchman and being a Whig. He chose not to be a Whig. The position of a Whig clergyman has always been difficult. His politics are apt to make him ashamed of his profession. His profession is apt to make him afraid of his politics. The keen intellect and wholesome character of Sydney Smith raised him above shame or fear. He held that the Whig party and the Church of England were co-ordinate and providential instruments for the promotion of human happiness. Swift's intellect was as subtle as it was capacious, as clear as it was profound. But his character was warped and morbid, perverted by some insidious disease which has puzzled all his biographers, and will puzzle them till the end of time. While his logical powers were singularly acute and penetrating, his passions, and especially the passion of hatred, were altogether beyond the control of his will. If he hated the Whigs for not advancing him in the Church, he hated them also for making light of the holy orders which he had chosen to take. He used to say himself that Et imitare, si poteris, Strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicem. Obiit anno (1745) Mensis Octobris die (19) Etatis anno (78). (Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of this Cathedral Church, where fierce rage can tear the heart no more. Go, traveller, and imitate, if you can, an earnest, manly champion of freedom. He died on the 19th of October, 1745, in the 78th year of his age.) The dates were of course left blank by Swift. No alteration was made in the epitaph, except to fill them in. while the Whigs detested the Church, they were mighty civil to parsons, whereas the Tory high-fliers, who exalted the Church above measure, treated the heirs of the apostolic succession as a kind of upper servants. If Swift had been a layman he would probably have remained a Whig. Why he took orders, except that there was no other visible opening for him, it is difficult to say. But having once put on the gown, he remained throughout his life as staunch to the Church of England and of Ireland as ever was soldier to his regiment or politician to his party. If he had been a student of Shakespeare, which he certainly was not, he might have said with Sir Oliver Martext, 'Not a fantastical fool of them all shall flout me out of my calling.' Sir Walter Scott, in his fascinating Life of Swift which can never be superseded until another man of genius undertakes the task, describes Swift as deeply and sincerely religious. It is presumptuous either to disagree with Sir Walter, or to probe the recesses of the human soul. We cannot follow Swift into his private chapel, or his secret devotions. We can only judge him by his works. There may be religion in the Tale of a Tub, though for my part I think that Queen Anne and Voltaire were right when from their different points of view they regarded it as casting ridicule upon all forms of the Christian faith. It certainly did for Swift what Tristram Shandy did for Sterne. It cost him his chance of a bishopric. And much as one may be disposed to take the side of brilliant eccentricity against orthodox dulness, it is impossible to say that in these instances the royal objections were unfounded. The man who can find religion in Swift's sermons must have a microscopic eye. Tried even by the standard of the eighteenth century, they are singularly secular. But perhaps the surest indication of his real creed is given in the striking verses on the Day of Judgment, which were not published till long after his death. They were privately sent by Chesterfield in a letter to Voltaire, but everybody now knows the vigorous lines: Ye who in divers sects were shammed, I damn such fools! Go, go, you're bit. The ingenious critic is at liberty to observe that Jove is an abbreviation of Jupiter, and that Jupiter was a heathen divinity not entitled to the respect of Christians. Such criticism would prove Montaigne to have believed in miracles. It is of course true that in theological or ecclesiastical controversy Swift always took the orthodox side. He writes as one equally averse from the doctrines of Rome and the doctrines of Geneva. He was as 'sound on the goose' as Parson Thwackum himself. When he said religion he meant the Christian religion; when he said the Christian religion, he meant the Protestant religion; and by the Protestant religion he meant the religion of the Church of England. For the Deists of his time, such as Toland, Asgill, Collins, and Coward, he had a profound and a just contempt. He refers to 'that quality of their voluminous writings which the poverty of the English language compels me to call their style.' In his famous argument upon the inconveniences which would result from the immediate abolition of Christianity by law, he drenches them with vitriolic scorn. But it is all purely intellectual. As if Christianity wasn't good enough, and far too good, for such as you,' is the sentiment which underlies the invective. Professor Huxley was not an orthodox Christian. Yet he said that if Bishop Butler were alive, he would put to silence the shallow infidelity of the day. Swift showed no indignation against Bolingbroke, who was a notorious sceptic, nor against Pope, who was certainly not a Protestant, and was a Catholic only in name. It was the material property, not the spiritual influence of the Church, for which he was most eager to fight. His clear strong mind was fretted by the pretentious cleverness of men who acquired a spurious. reputation for wit and learning by their attacks upon established beliefs. If that is religion, then Swift was religious. But so far as religion is contained in the Sermon on the Mount, or the thirteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians, Swift had no more of it than Bolingbroke and a good deal less than Voltaire. He had the honesty to keep every vestige of it out of his own epitaph on himself. Swift was by far the greatest writer who ever devoted himself to the service of the Tory party. Johnson's political pamphlets are worthless compared with Swift's, and when Burke thundered against the French Revolution he spoke for a large number of Whigs. Although I should not myself rate The Conduct of the Allies so high as The Anatomy of an Equivalent, or Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, I know of no other English pamphleteer who could be put on a level with Halifax, Swift and Burke. But whereas Halifax was for years what we should call a Cabinet Minister, and Burke the greatest orator in the House of Commons, Swift was disqualified from even entering Parliament. Nor was he really trusted by the Ministers whom he served. As Mr. Morley says, he was the dupe of his great friends. They called him Jonathan; they treated him with every external mark of confidence and attention. If they had not, he would have turned upon them with the utmost ferocity. But they did not tell him that they were Jacobites at heart, and in communication with the King over the water. It was not special knowledge that gave Swift the mastery, but the fact that |