He who
could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if
he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the
simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler's octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a
trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything
something else than it was, he would see things as they were--or as, in
his sullen disgust, they seemed to be--and call them all by their right
names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a
Hottentot--nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble
compromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and not
ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious
exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical
fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with the
brutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed
and aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with
himself. He despised mankind because he found something despicable in
Jonathan Swift, as he makes Gulliver hate the Yahoos in proportion to
their likeness with himself. He had more or less consciously sacrificed
self-respect for that false consideration which is paid to a man's
accidents; he had preferred the vain pomp of being served on plate, as
no other "man of his level" in Ireland was, to being happy with the
woman who had sacrificed herself to his selfishness, and the
independence he had won turned out to be only a morose solitude after
all.
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