INTRODUCTION

Swift has been styled the Prince of Journalists. Like most titles whose
aim is to express in modern words the character and achievements of a man
of a past age, this phrase is not of the happiest. Applied to so
extraordinary a man as Jonathan Swift, it is both misleading and
inadequate. At best it embodies but a half-truth. It belongs to that
class of phrases which, in emphasizing a particular side of the
character, sacrifices truth to a superficial cleverness, and so does
injustice to the character as a whole. The vogue such phrases obtain is
thus the measure of the misunderstanding that is current; so that it
often becomes necessary to receive them with caution and to test them
with care.

A prince in his art Swift certainly was, but his art was not the art of
the journalist. Swift was a master of literary expression, and of all
forms of that expression which aim at embodying in language the common
life and common facts of men and their common nature. He had his
limitations, of course; but just here lies the power of his special
genius. He never attempted to express what he did not fully comprehend.
If he saw things narrowly, he saw them definitely, and there was no
mistaking the ideas he wished to convey. "He understands himself," said
Dr. Johnson, "and his reader always understands him." Within his
limitations Swift swayed a sovereign power. His narrowness of vision,
however, did never blind him to the relations that exist between fact and
fact, between object and subject, between the actual and the possible. At
the same time it was not his province, as it was not his nature, to
handle such relations in the abstract. The bent of his mind was towards
the practical and not the pure reason. The moralist and the statesman
went hand in hand in him--an excellent example of the eighteenth century