12
PARTISAN REVIEW
tues of his age that we search in vain for any ideas in him that would
seem to anticipate us. He was a man of parts rather than of ideas;
and his very "rationality" is a kind of eighteenth-century prejudice,
having little in common with what we struggle toward as our own,
or even what the same century later in France was to discover so
triumphantly as its own. He lived before modem political alternatives
became very real or meaningful, and only his human ha:tred of the
abuses of power might connect
him
remotely with some of our own
attitudes.
As
a literary man, he is at the farthest distance from that
neurotic specialist, the modem litterateur; he is not even a profes–
sional literary man in the sense of his contemporary, Pope, much less
in the sense of the consecrated
rentier,
Flaubert. Thus we have no
quarrel at all with certain professorial critics who point out that Swift
was primarily interested in power and that he came by writing as
an instrument of power or simply as a diversion. (What an unhappy
conclusion, though, if we thought we had therefore to exclude him
from something called "literature"
! )
And we might even go along
a certain way with the generous hint of these critics that the frustra–
tion of his desires for power explains both his misanthropy and final
insanity.
But does not logic teach us that an induction is strengthened more
by a confirming instance further afield? and which at first glance
might not seem to fall altogether under the class in question? And
if Swift, who sits so solidly in his own age, leads us, when we but
plunge deeply enough, into the world of the modem writer, should
we not feel all the more assured that we have got at least a little
below the surface? Already, beneath the solid outlines of
his
eighteenth–
century figure, I begin to descry the shadows and depths of a
psychic
type,
the writer-which has emerged, to be sure, spectacularly only in
the two following centuries.
Now the trouble with the professors (and not only when they
censure Swift for his craving for power) is that they have uncon–
sciously created a figure of the writer in their own image: a well–
bred person with well-tubbed and scrubbed motives, who approaches
something specialized and disinterested that they call "literature" as if
his function in the end were merely to provide them with books
to teach. Perhaps the great writers themselves have unwittingly
helped toward this deception? Has any one of them ever told
us why he had to become a writer? They tell us instead: "To hold
a mirror up to nature"; "To carry a mirror dawdling down a lane";
"To forge the uncreated conscience of my race"; etc., etc.-great
