t he could manage the
simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a
trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything
something else than it was, he would see things as they were--or as, in
his sullen disgust, they seemed to be--and call them all by their right
names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a
Hottentot--nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble
compromise of the breech-clout. 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 humo