Swift, however, had his weakness also, and it lay, as weaknesses
generally lie, very close to his strength. Swift's fault as a thinker
was the outcome of his intellectuality--he was too purely intellectual.
He set little store on the emotional side of human nature; his appeal
was always to the reason. He hated cant, and any expression of emotion
appealed to him as cant. He could not bear to be seen saying his
prayers; his acts of charity were surreptitious and given in secret with
an affectation of cynicism, so that they might veil the motive which
impelled them. It may have been pride or a dislike to be considered
sentimental; but his attitude owed its spring to a genuine faith in his
own thought. If Swift had one pride more than another, it lay in a
consciousness of his own superiority over his fellow-mortals. It was the
pride of intellect and a belief that man showed himself best by
following the judgements of the reason. His disgust with people was born
of their unreasonable selfishness, their instinctive greed and rapacity,
their blind stupidity, all which resulted for them in so much injustice.
Had they been reasonable, he would have argued, they would have been
better and happier. The sentiments and the passions were impulsive, and
therefore unreasonable. Swift seemed to have no faith in their elevation
to a higher intellectual plane, and yet he often roused them by his very
appeals to reason. His eminently successful "Drapier's Letters" are a
case in point. Yet we question if Swift were not himself surprised at
their effect. He knew his power later when he threatened the Archbishop
of Armagh, but he, no doubt, credited the result to his own arguments,
and not to the passions he had aroused. His sense of justice was the
strongest, and it was through that sense that the condition of the
people of Ireland appealed to him. He forgot, or he did not see that the
very passion in himself was of prime importance, since it was really to
it that his own efforts were due. The fine flower of imagination never
blossomed in Swift. He was neither prophet nor poet; but he was a great