Word: swifts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...great Irish evil, which all Irishmen fear, is romanticism; Shaw's conversion was real enough, but common sense, sanity, shrewdness, the practical were the Shavian aims. He was neither a visionary nor a crank; but rather, in the manner of Swift-though far more successful in his mission to the English-a negotiator. By eloquent attack, irony, laughter, bounce, by the intrigue of words and a wit that cut everything to ribbons, in a prose so clear, fast and pure that it was like a charmer's music to the snake, Shaw hypnotized England. People became Socialists without...
More virtuous than Voltaire-he was the good man's Voltaire-Shaw was no more free than the Frenchman from the irresponsibility of a chaotically lucid mind which changed the focus too fast for his own eye. The age of Swift, to which Shaw historically and spiritually belonged, believed in authority; it believed that the moral was the practical; it was worldly, though without huge wealth; it believed in the beatitude of the conventional. It managed to believe in these things and at the same time to preach revolution in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Victorian practicality...
...vein of compromise, the failure to carry anger" for very long, the tendency to become too clever for wrath, weakens him when he is compared with Swift. Compared with Voltaire's, his imagination is drier, lacks picture and lacks nature too. A kind of middle-class gentility preserved him from the great disgusts, the unspeakable horrors which greater imaginations could grasp. The prose is, however, a superb vehicle for the pamphleteer and any page of it is a model of the art of conducting unfair arguments. He was a highly original artist and the art lay in the transmuting...
Defiance & Tear Gas. The attempted assassination of President Truman brought swift action from Mufioz Marin. Crying "This is lunatic gangsterism," he ordered Albizu Campos brought in at all costs. Police threw tear gas into Albizu's beleaguered headquarters. From the balcony, Albizu waggled a soiled white towel on the end of a broom in token of surrender...
...Fanatics. Orwell's purely literary essays are bound by a common thread of dislike for those excesses of thought, even the excesses of such greats as Tolstoy and Swift, which fringe on totalitarian fanaticism. In two brilliant essays he shows how scorn and lack of pity led Swift to portray the ideal Houyhnhnm society as a soulless mechanism, and how Tolstoy's harsh morality blinded him to the truth of Shakespeare's tragedies...