On Orwell's Politics Vs Literature

SWIFT HAS SOMETIMES BEEN seen as a champion of liberty. In his essay ‘Politics vs Literature’, however, George Orwell took a different view. ‘Swift,’ he wrote, ‘was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.’ At best Swift was ‘a Tory Anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty.’ At worst he was a reactionary, opposed not simply to sham science, but to all science, and even to intellectual curiosity itself. Orwell also portrays Swift as a hater of the human body and an authoritarian. ‘In a political and moral sense,’ writes Orwell, ‘I am against him, so far as I understand him.’ Yet no sooner has he written these words than he goes on to declare that Swift ‘is one of the writers I admire with least reserve’.[1] Orwell presents his riven view of Swift as an example of his own sound judgment. His assessment of Swift’s political outlook is, I believe, in some respects just. Yet if we consider Orwell’s essay sceptically it begins to seem as though he is in a great muddle about Swift. He writes that he is against Swift ‘so far as I understand him’. But does he understand him? There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that he does not, and that his difficulty in understanding Swift has been shared by a large number of modern critics. At one point in his essay Orwell writes that ‘Swift shows no sign of having any religious beliefs.’[2] This view was put forward by a number of commentators from the time of Thackeray, who said of Swift ‘He puts his apostasy out to hire . . . and his sermons have scarce a Christian characteristic’, to the time of Leavis, who once attributed to Swift ‘a complete incapacity even to guess what religious feeling might be’.[3] Such judgments were repeated so frequently that the view eventually hardened into something approaching an orthodoxy and, as Basil Hall noted almost thirty years ago in his essay ‘“An Inverted Hypocrite”: Swift the