In temperament he is opposed to all the writers of his time.  There is no doubt but there was some radical disorder in his system; brain disease clouded his intellect in his old age, and his last years were death in life; right through his life he was a savagely irritable, sardonic, dark and violent man, impatient of the slightest contradiction or thwarting, and given to explosive and instantaneous rage.  He delighted in flouting convention, gloried in outraging decency.  The rage, which, as he said himself, tore his heart out, carried him to strange excesses.  There is something ironical (he would himself have appreciated it) in the popularity of Gulliver’s Travels as a children’s book—­that ascending wave of savagery and satire which overwhelms policy and learning to break against the ultimate citadel of humanity itself.  In none of his contemporaries (except perhaps in the sentimentalities of Steele) can one detect the traces of emotion; to read Swift is to be conscious of intense feeling on almost every page.  The surface of his style may be smooth and equable but the central fires of passion are never far beneath, and through cracks and fissures come intermittent bursts of flame.  Defoe’s irony is so measured and studiously commonplace that perhaps those who imprisoned him because they believed him to be serious are hardly to be blamed; Swift’s quivers and reddens with anger in every line.

But his pen seldom slips from the strong grasp of his controlling art.  The extraordinary skill and closeness of his allegorical writings—­unmatched in their kind—­is witness to the care and sustained labour which went to their making.  He is content with no general correspondences; his allegory does not fade away into a story in which only the main characters have a secondary significance; the minutest circumstances have a bearing in the satire and the moral.  In The Tale of a Tub and in Gulliver’s Travels—­particularly in the former—­the multitude as well as the aptness of the parallels between the imaginary narrative and the facts it is meant to represent is unrivalled in works of the kind.  Only the highest mental powers, working with intense fervour and concentration, could have achieved the sustained brilliancy of the result.  “What a genius I had when I wrote that book!” Swift is said to have exclaimed in his old age when he re-read The Tale of a Tub, and certainly the book is a marvel of constructive skill, all the more striking because it makes allegory out of history and consequently is denied that freedom of narrative so brilliantly employed in the Travels.