'In Large Measure Both Wit and Imagination'

“After ten years’ war with perpetual success, to tell us it is yet impossible to have a good peace, is very surprising, and seems so different from what has ever happened in the world before, that a man of any party may be allowed suspecting that we have either been ill used, or have not made the most of our victories, and might therefore desire to know where the difficulty lay.”

The author is Jonathan Swift. The source is one of his lesser-known works, The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War, published on this date, Nov. 27, in 1711. Swift’s subject is the War of Spanish Succession, which claimed between 400,000 and 1.25 million lives. Britain was at war with France from 1689 to 1697, and again from 1702 until 1714. Hostilities were triggered by the death of Charles II, who left no children and was the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. In 1711, Lord Bolingbroke initiated secret peace negotiations with the French, with a draft agreement to end the fighting signed Sept. 27. The Whigs opposed the treaty with the slogan “No Peace without Spain.” The Peace of Utrecht incrementally ended the war between 1713 and 1715.

Given the war’s remoteness, complexity and seeming triviality, Swift’s propaganda – not always a dirty word – is remarkably engaging to read. He castigates the Dutch, the Austrians, the Whigs and John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, whom Swift is credited with having helped bring down. Swift is a rare writer who is nearly always a pleasure to read, regardless of subject, principally because of the clarity of his prose. The passage quoted above might have been written circa 1971, about another country and another war. This is no simple screed. It courteously but pointedly demands an explanation and is leavened with the lightest touch of irony. One senses the pressing weight of history delicately deployed. Swift’s reasonableness itself is a threat. “Let’s give these people the benefit of the doubt,” our writer suggests, “but not for long.”

In Literature and Western Man (1960), J.B. Priestley calls Swift a “mutilated genius.” We understand what he means. It’s more complicated than that, but will do for a critical epithet. “He had one of the most formidable intellects of the age,” Priestley writes, “he had perhaps the best plain prose style in all English literature; he had in large measure both wit and imagination.” No argument. At this point, Priestley repeats the standard misguided critical consensus:

“But much of his best work, his pamphlets and topical satires, recedes and dwindles with the political conflicts and intrigues of the time, from which he retired, bitterly disappointed, because his party service did not even bring him the bishopric he expected. If he had devoted himself entirely to literature, especially during the years when his genius was at its height, he would undoubtedly have become one of the greatest figures of the century in European literature.”

Which he was, of course. Like many critics and readers, Priestley defines literature narrowly, by academic and marketing category. There’s more to literature than fiction, drama and poetry. As the late David Myers usefully put it: “Literature is simply good writing—where ‘good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.” Here is Swift’s sentence in The Conduct of the Allies immediately following the one cited at the top:

“Then it is natural to inquire into our present condition; how long we shall be able to go on at this rate; what the consequences may be upon the present and future ages; and whether a peace, without that impracticable point which some people do so much insist on, be really ruinous in it self, or equally so with the continuance of the war.”