"Money," he was fond of saying, "is freedom," but he never learned
that self-denial is freedom with the addition of self-respect. With a
hearty contempt for the ordinary objects of human ambition, he could yet
bring himself for the sake of them to be the obsequious courtier of
three royal strumpets. How should he be happy who had defined happiness
to be "the perpetual possession of being well deceived," and who could
never be deceived himself? It may well be doubted whether what he
himself calls "that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of
things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries
that in the inside they are good for nothing," be of so penetrative an
insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather
that to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had the
microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the
loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that
tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with
all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his
shallow friend Gay that life was a jest. To his nobler temper it was
always profoundly tragic, and the salt of his sarcasm was more often, we
suspect, than with most humorists distilled out of tears. The lesson is
worth remembering that _his_ apples of Sodom, like those of lesser men,
were plucked from boughs of his own grafting.
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