ial malignity
as Mr. Whibley imagines. Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes the
breath away. One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift's
writings or his life. Of course he had done so, but his passion for the
sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius of
saturnine realism such as Swift's. The truth is, though Swift was among
the staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors.
His writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment.
We know of the tenderness of Swift only from a rare anecdote or from the
prattle of the _Journal to Stella_. As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibley
rightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of Swift as
laughing and shaking in Rabelais's easy chair. Swift's humour is
essentially of the intellect. He laughs out of his own bitterness rather
than to amuse his fellow-men. As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic. He
is not sufficiently indifferent for that. He is a satirist, a sort of
perverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision. It
is the essential nobleness of Swift's nature which makes the voyage to the
Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature. There are
people who pretend that this section of _Gulliver's Travels_ is almost too
terrible for sensitive persons to read. This is sheer affectation. It can
only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible
for sensitive persons to live!

(2) SHAKESPEARE

Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster. He
plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox's House of
Commons but on Shakespeare's Theatre. He is apparently interested in men
of genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneering
activities. Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who
would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New
Place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "Vote for
Podgkins and Down with the Common People" or "Vote for Podgkins and No
League of Nations." Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and so
he exalts Shakespeare. He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that
has made no difference, He would clearly have taken much the same view of
Shakespeare if he had never read him. To be great, said Emerson, is to be
misunderstood. To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr.
Whibley.

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