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Title: Swift
Author: Carl Van Doren
Release date: May 9, 2026 [eBook #78641]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Viking Press, 1930
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78641
Credits: Alan, Sean (@parchmentglow) and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SWIFT ***
SWIFT
[Illustration: Jonathan Swift
_The bust in St. Patrick’s Cathedral_]
SWIFT
BY
CARL VAN DOREN
NEW YORK
THE VIKING PRESS
1930
[Illustration]
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1930
SECOND PRINTING NOVEMBER, 1930
COPYRIGHT 1930 BY CARL VAN DOREN
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
CONTENTS
I POOR RELATION 3
II DEPENDENT 17
III VICAR AND WIT 48
IV MAN IN POWER 94
V DEAN AND PATRIOT 140
VI TRAVELLER 179
VII KING OF TRIFLERS 220
VIII CONJURED SPIRIT 255
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 269
INDEX 273
ILLUSTRATIONS
JONATHAN SWIFT FRONTISPIECE
_From the bust by Patrick Cunningham in St. Patrick’s Cathedral,
Dublin_
FACING PAGE
JONATHAN SWIFT as a student at Trinity College 14
_From a portrait by an unknown painter. The portrait is no longer
known to exist, nor is it certainly a portrait of Swift though
generally thought to be_
ESTHER JOHNSON (Stella) 60
_From a portrait by an unknown painter, now in private hands.
The date is unknown but it represents Stella as a young woman_
JONATHAN SWIFT 122
_From a portrait by Charles Jervas, now in the National Portrait
Gallery, London_
ESTHER VANHOMRIGH (Vanessa) 148
_From a portrait by an unknown painter, now in private hands.
The date is uncertain_
ESTHER JOHNSON (Stella) 168
_From a portrait by an unknown painter, now in private hands. It
seems to be of a later date than the portrait of Stella listed above_
JONATHAN SWIFT as Dean of St. Patrick’s 226
_From a portrait by Francis Bindon, now in the Deanery House of
St. Patrick’s Cathedral_
JONATHAN SWIFT in old age 254
_From a portrait attributed to Stephen Slaughter, now in private
hands_
SWIFT
I
POOR RELATION
Jonathan Swift aimed at mankind the most venomous arrow that scorn
has ever yet let loose. Mankind, bland abstraction, caught his arrow,
laughed at it, and turned it over to children to play with. Children,
inoculated with _Gulliver’s Travels_ at an age when it cannot harm
them, are thereafter innocently immune. If they hear of Swift they
recollect their toy, unaware that it was intended to be deadly or that
it has still lost little of its furious poison. Mankind, by a stroke so
bold that it must have been indifferent, has protected itself. Swift
remains a show, the story of his wild assault fades from the record.
Touch the pages of the record, however, and it blazes, a story of fire
in a language of ice.
Everywhere fire and ice, everywhere together. “Remember,” Swift wrote
to a woman who loved him as only men like Swift are loved, “that riches
are nine parts in ten of all that is good in life.” Though he was,
when he said this, designing to chill a love which was warmer than he
wanted it, design alone would not have been enough to prompt these cold
words. He could not have formed them if they had not come from what
he felt to be his reason and what he believed to be his experience.
Always he refused to speak about his fate except in the hard accents of
reason. Always he refused to share in passions, outside his experience,
which might have transformed the universe for him, softening it and
comforting him. Even when they were offered, Swift held back, obstinate
and doubtful. He could imagine no easier freedom. He could imagine no
kinder world.
This caution, in a nature so imperious, had to be learned early to be
learned at all. Swift learned it from an expert teacher waiting for
him when he was born. Poverty of different degrees might have bred him
to resignation or to unconcern, to holiness or to outlawry. Swift’s
poverty had a subtler craft. It fed and clothed and housed everything
about him but his pride. Had that been the mild vanity which is what
most young men mean by pride, he might have gone through his dependent
years unscarred. But the pride of Swift was constitutional, ceaseless,
sensitive, and headlong. Nourished, it would still have fretted;
starved, it rebelled and gave itself to rage for want of action.
“And this it is,” he wrote at twenty-five, “which a person of great
honour in Ireland (and who was pleased to stoop so low as to look into
my mind) used to tell me, that my mind was like a conjured spirit that
would do mischief if I would not give it employment.”
The conjured spirit often brooded over events older than its birth,
telling itself that its mishaps had begun with its ancestors. To go no
further back, there was Swift’s grandfather, Thomas Swift, vicar of
Goodrich in Herefordshire. He had been so stubborn and defiant a victim
of Parliament during the Civil War that when he died in 1658 he had had
no longer any fortune to be divided among his many sons and daughters.
At least five of his sons had consequently taken to the law. All five
of them had gone to Ireland, which was then poor enough to lack lawyers
but not poor enough to be overlooked by Englishmen in search of a
conquered province where they might have the benefit of their blood as
well as of their merits.
Within six or seven years after the father’s death Godwin, Dryden,
Abraham (a merchant), William, Jonathan, and Adam Swift had established
themselves in Dublin. Godwin, four times married, had prospered most.
He had had three heiresses in the steady series of his wives, and had
made other advantageous speculations. Jonathan had prospered least.
Trusting to a minor post as steward of the King’s Inns, he had married
the dowerless Abigail Erick of Leicestershire, begot a daughter, begot
a son, and died. He left his widow a few debts, a few arrears due her
if she could collect them, and an income of twenty pounds a year. When
the posthumous son was born, 30 November 1667, he became at once a
general charge upon a family which was itself dispersed and insecure.
Dispersed and insecure, and yet too mindful of its rank to decline
smoothly to a lower. Had not Barnam Swift, of the Yorkshire branch,
been made an Irish viscount by Charles I, and had not his daughters
married one of them the Earl of Eglinton and the other that Robert
Feilding who for a third or fourth wife was to have, somewhat
bigamously, a former mistress of Charles II? Had not the wife of Thomas
Swift, vicar of Goodrich, been the niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden? Had
not the wife of Thomas Swift, son of the vicar of Goodrich, been the
daughter of Sir William Davenant? Had not the first wife of Godwin
Swift been a cousin of the Marchioness of Ormond? Had not the Swifts
as a rule, whether in Yorkshire or Kent or Herefordshire or Ireland,
married like gentlemen? Had they not lived as much like gentlemen as
the shifting past century had permitted, holding on to land, gaining
place by favour? Was not Godwin Swift, head of the house in Ireland,
attorney-general of the Palatinate of Tipperary because his first,
though not his present, wife was related to the Ormonds who had
favoured him?
The Irish Swifts might be unsettled, but they went their ways in the
shadow of distinction and the light of expectations. For one of them,
the one genius of the race, there was in his youth no relief from the
bitter contrast between his birthright and his circumstances. As a
Swift he could not dig. As Jonathan Swift he could not beg. He had to
accommodate himself to the moods of a family’s charity.
How poor he was must be measured not by his needs but by his pride.
His mother lived in Hoey’s Court, then respectable enough. She had
a nurse whose devotion to him appears in the only incident recorded
of his early childhood. When he was a year old, Swift himself tells,
this nurse, “who was a woman of Whitehaven, being under an absolute
necessity of seeing one of her relations, who was then extremely
sick, and from whom she expected a legacy, and being at the same time
extremely fond of the infant, she stole him on shipboard unknown to
his mother and uncle and carried him with her to Whitehaven, where he
continued for almost three years. For when the matter was discovered
his mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage till
he could be better able to bear it. His nurse was so careful of him
that before he returned he had learned to spell; and by the time that
he was three years old he could read any chapter in the Bible.” This
was no beggar’s brat. And after the child’s return to Dublin, whether
he lived with his mother in Hoey’s Court or at his uncle’s house in
Chancery Lane, there was little change in his condition. He was fed
and clothed and housed.
But when at six he was sent to Kilkenny School there was a change. His
mother had gone, or soon went, with her daughter to her own people in
Leicester. The boy was more than ever dependent upon his uncle, who had
chosen this school because it was under the patronage of the Ormonds.
It is possible only to guess wherein Godwin Swift, who kept the boy
in the school for the next eight years, fell short of what the nephew
expected. Perhaps he stinted him in affection; perhaps he stinted him
in pocket money. That the busy lawyer had not much tenderness to give
to a random nephew, or that he had less money to distribute than his
hungry clan supposed, is now easy to understand. It was not easy for
a schoolboy to understand. This schoolboy, increasing in pride and
exigence, blamed his growing discontent upon his kinsman. Like other
restive children, he cast himself as the tragic hero in an imagined
drama of neglect, multiplying his adversities with an angry egotism.
“I remember, when I was a little boy,” he wrote long afterwards, “I
felt a great fish at the end of my line, which I drew up almost to the
ground; but it dropped in, and the disappointment vexes me to this very
day, and I believe it was the type of all my future disappointments.”
He had formed his habits of brooding early, if he could be so deeply
disappointed as never to forget this mischance, if he could regard the
fish, flopping to preserve its life, as somehow in league against the
tragic hero.
Nothing at Kilkenny broke up the drama of neglect in which he played
his resentful part. Intellectually he was not precocious. He excelled
among the young grammarians, if at all, only by his knack at dog-Latin
and rhymed macaronics. His temper did not dispose him towards obedience
to his masters or towards cheerfulness among his companions. He was
on good terms with his cousin Thomas, son of the son of the vicar of
Goodrich, sent over from England where his father died young, and with
a boy named Francis Stratford, with whom Swift during his subsequent
days of power in London often dined. With William Congreve, also
English, also in Ireland because his father had sought a post there,
Swift was later to be on kind if not close terms. But there is nothing
to prove that in Congreve, two years younger than he, any more than in
Thomas Swift or Stratford, Swift found at school a friend who met his
demanding eagerness.
However far he may have gone in his conscious Ishmaelism at Kilkenny,
he went further at Trinity College, Dublin, to which, with his cousin
Thomas and a few months after his friend Stratford, he was admitted
as a pensioner in April 1682. There, in his own words, “by the ill
treatment of his nearest relations he was so discouraged and sunk in
his spirits that he too much neglected his academic studies, for some
parts of which he had no great relish by nature, and turned himself to
reading history and poetry, so that when the time came for taking his
degree of bachelor of arts, although he lived with great regularity
and due observance of the statutes, he was stopped of his degree for
dulness and insufficiency; and at last hardly admitted in a manner,
little to his credit, which is called in that college _speciali gratia_
on the 15th February 1685 [1686] with four more on the same footing;
and this discreditable mark, as I am told, stands upon record in their
college registry.”
Plain words, but not altogether disinterested. Back of them appears
the tragic hero’s instinct to accuse the inimical or, at best, obtuse
world in which he moved at Trinity. What the dispassionate records show
is that the special grace by which he was admitted to the degree was
an indulgence. A part of his work being unsatisfactory, he might have
been required to wait another year. He was instead admitted on his
general standing. No less than Thomas Swift, reported _mediocriter_
in all three subjects of the examination preceding the degree, and no
less than Stratford, _mediocriter_ in one and _vix mediocriter_ in
two of them, Jonathan Swift, _male_ in philosophy, _bene_ in Greek
and Latin, and _negligenter_ in his Latin essay, became a bachelor of
arts. Nothing but a little annoyance and a Latin phrase differentiated
his wilful degree from their mediocre ones. Moreover, he remained at
Trinity three years longer, and would have become a master of arts
there if the Revolution had not driven him elsewhere early in 1689.
Swift had seemed insufficient only because he was impatient.
Contemptuous of philosophy, which he thought “vain babbling, and a mere
sound of words,” and careless of Latin prose, by which he planned to
live no more than by philosophy, he would not give to them the slight
attention which would have been enough. He would read only on his own
impulse, for his own purpose, and without pedantry. “If a rational man
reads an excellent author with just application he shall find himself
extremely improved, and perhaps insensibly led to imitate that author’s
perfections, although in a little time he should not remember one word
in the book, nor even the subject it handled; for books give the same
turn to our thoughts and way of reasoning that good and ill company do
to our behaviour and conversation; without either loading our memories
or making us even sensible of the change.”
Swift’s reading was always an experience. In a world too narrow for
his powers he turned to poets and historians, who, he discovered and
later said, enlarge the mind and thoughts, extend and refine the
imagination, direct the judgment, lessen the “admiration,” and increase
the fortitude of their readers. For such experiences, during his seven
years at college, the academic penalty of being called irregular was
not a ruinous price.
For Swift, however, too proud to be bored and yet too proud to go
without the rewards of boredom, it was humiliation. He was a rebel
who could not quite glory in his rebellion. If, perversely, he
flung himself now and then into irregularities of conduct, they
left him unsatisfied. Nor were they, it appears, important. He was
fined for absences from chapel and from lectures; he was fined for
“town-haunting,” which meant not being present at nine each evening
when the roll of students was called over. On the date of his
twenty-first birthday, a few weeks before he left the college, a “Sir
Swift,” either Jonathan or Thomas, was censured for being contumacious
and contemptuous to the junior dean, suspended for a month, and ordered
to beg pardon, on his knees and publicly, to the insulted officer.
This was of course nearly three years after Jonathan’s degree, and may
indicate that he had fallen off from his regularity and observance of
the statutes. He had now passed seven years in Dublin. The town had
possibly come to tempt him as much as the college bored him. His later
days at the University, however, were devoted rather to idleness and
scorn than to the ordinary vices of young men.
Drunkenness, gambling, lechery, and rioting were as uncongenial to him
as scholastic disputation. These were for looser minds than his. He
had the pride of intellect which fosters virtue by making vice seem
trifling by comparison, the vagary of feeble wills, the waste of energy
diverted. He could not help realizing that irregularity was folly, and
that it was absurd for him to have lost what fools had won by merely
being regular. His instincts were profoundly on the side of order.
When he disobeyed it was only because he was denied the opportunity to
command.
As tragic hero in his own drama he blamed his faults upon the ill
treatment of his relations, chiefly his uncle Godwin. The accusation is
melodrama. Godwin Swift so declined from his prosperity during these
same years that his health gave way, his mind failed, and he died soon
after, leaving a broken estate to his heirs. During the last stage
he may well have had little money for his nephew, and less tact than
ever in bestowing it, but his failure and death were hardly spite.
Towards William Swift, “the best of my relations,” to whom the nephew
thereafter owed his principal support, and towards certain other uncles
and cousins, Swift felt gratitude. It was Godwin whom he accused of
giving him the education of a dog. The nephew was as unjust as the
uncle was untactful.
All that Swift needed to make him happy was a cheerful way of taking
what he could get. All that he needed to make him blond was fair hair
instead of black on his proud head and in the thick eyebrows under
which his blue eyes burned and challenged out of a face in which
discontent was being written over confidence.
These different needs were equally beyond his reach. He could not
be cheerful, because he was filled and driven by the sense and need
of power. It was his heritage, richer than any he longed for. But
it brought torment as well as exultation. He could not measure his
endowment by that of his friends. They did the same things he did,
and did them more successfully. He could not consult his elders. They
would probably regard his sense of superiority as another half-grown
delusion. He could not even have a full assurance of it himself, for
it was dark and spasmodic, and it furnished no arguments to convince
him that it was genuine. It was not yet conscious of half its aims.
It stirred about in him without directing him where to go or what to
undertake. It demanded knowledge, but not the information which it was
his duty to acquire. It demanded eminence, but not any of the kinds
of eminence to which he had access in school or college. It demanded
expression, but in some powerful language which he had not yet learned.
Above all, it demanded sway, over men and events. And Swift was poor,
obscure, without influence, unable to endure his present fortunes,
unable to decide what career would mend them.
[Illustration: Jonathan Swift as a Student at Trinity College
_Traditionally supposed to be Swift without trustworthy evidence_]
Waiting bred impatience. Impatience set up friction. Friction hurt. He
paid it back with an instinctive hatred which did not always trouble
to be just to its objects. The fish at Kilkenny had disappointed him by
living. His uncle in Dublin had disappointed him by dying. The world
was full of disappointments, and he was the chosen victim.
Yet Swift’s plight was not entirely melodrama which he had elaborated
to console himself. Telling Vanessa that riches are nine parts in ten
of all that is good in life, he added: “and health is the tenth.”
On the whole, he suffered more from lack of health than from lack
of money. Soon after he came of age he began to be afflicted with
the “giddiness and coldness of the stomach” which he attributed to a
surfeit of apples, and not long afterwards with the deafness which he
attributed to catching cold by sitting on the ground. The causes which
he fixed upon may not have been the real ones. The effects were real,
and they harried and frightened him.
His malady, it now seems, was a form of auditory vertigo, the result
perhaps of hæmorrhage in the labyrinth of the ear. In this, if he had
known the truth, he might have found a stroke of malice more sly and
vindictive than any which he thought to accuse his fate of. A little,
invisible, incurable defect doomed him. While his pride towered and his
wrath hurled its freezing accusations, fate could be patient, knowing
that a physical disorder, petty in itself, had helped to rouse this
spiritual tumult. At its own time it would quiet him more horribly
than the most offended thunderbolt.
At twenty-one Swift, born to act incessantly, had not yet played a
part in any actions except those which went on inside his own mind.
Straitened in school and college, he had nevertheless been safe. The
Revolution, which shook the hold of the English colonists, drove
him hurriedly from Ireland to a passing refuge with his mother in
Leicester. He never thought of himself as Irish, and always resented
it if others thought him so. Though he had been born in Ireland, he
had been a member of the English gentry planted there to rule it. He
left because the aborigines, “the savage old Irish” he called them, had
risen to overwhelm their conquerors. He was only returning to his true
country, to make his fortune among his true compatriots. The Revolution
hurried him, but his restless nature would in any case have impelled
him, sooner or later, in the direction of a larger world than Ireland.
II
DEPENDENT
1
Swift’s prospects when he arrived at Leicester were not encouraging.
He could hope for little from Ireland, and his mother lived on twenty
pounds a year. She might be “of an easy, contented spirit,” rising
early and devoting her pious days to needle and book. Her son was of
another temper. He chafed in the unexciting town, where he thought
the inhabitants “a parcel of very wretched fools,” given to lying and
gossiping “above all parts that I was ever in.” His energy would not
let him rest. If he busied himself at all it was with the pastime most
likely to engage a young man during restless leisure.
He philandered with Betty Jones, a cousin of his mother’s. He
philandered with other girls, then or at later visits, not so much out
of interest in them as out of his need to exercise his powers upon
whoever came within range of them. “It is this humour which makes
me so busy when I am in company, to turn all that way; and since it
commonly ends in talk, whether it be love or common conversation, it
is all alike. This is so common that I could remember twenty women
in my life”--he was writing early in 1692--“to whom I behaved myself
just the same way; and I profess without any other design than that of
entertaining myself when I am very idle, or when something goes amiss
in my affairs.”
To divert himself or to ease his frustration: these were the instincts
which had already begun to involve Swift with women. His ruling
instinct was towards action among stubborn men. In relaxed intervals
he found it soothing to let his powers play over natures which seemed
yielding and responsive. In frustrate intervals he turned greedily,
even cruelly, to the same sport, to assure himself that he still had
the faculty of dominion.
His flirtation with Betty Jones, troubling to his mother, came to an
end, and the girl married an innkeeper. Swift before the close of 1689
joined the household of Sir William Temple as something less than
secretary for twenty pounds a year. This connection again he owed to
his uncles, who had been associated in Ireland with Temple’s father and
with Temple himself. “His whole family having been long known to me,”
Temple explained, “obliged me ... to take care of him.”
Swift went to Temple hoping to learn the ways of the world from a
man, also from Ireland, who had risen to influence and very near
to power. For Temple Ireland had been but a springboard. His career
had led him to more impressive quarters of Europe. Having turned to
England shortly after the Restoration, he had made friends at Court,
had been sent to the Continent to safeguard British interests, and had
twice been ambassador at the Hague, where he had helped bring about
the hopeful marriage of William of Orange to the niece of the English
king. Charles II, valuing his ambassador’s astuteness and dexterity,
had more than once offered to make him Secretary of State. He had each
time refused, perceiving that Charles and his ministers had little use
for other qualities which Temple valued in himself, and had taken to
a serene retirement. Not even the accession of William and Mary, or
their grateful offer of the post which he had refused at the hand of
Charles, had been able to bring him back. He preferred to live at Moor
Park, near Farnham in Surrey, remembering the large actions in which he
had taken part, and being a philosopher among the gardens, in the Dutch
manner, which reminded him of the country where he had had his triumphs.
Swift found Temple a man looking at the world as in a mirror. No actual
affairs now concerned him so much as those of his own past, of which
he was writing his memoirs. Reminiscence had not made his judgment
less firm and level than it had been while it was constantly being
tested by the intrigues of disingenuous, unscrupulous men. He was
enlightened, responsible, benevolent. But, never having been ambitious,
he had remained an amateur. “When I was young and in some idle company,
it was proposed that every one should tell what their wishes should
be, if they were sure to be granted; some were very pleasant, and
some very extravagant; mine were health and peace and fair weather.”
Such desires had allowed Temple to cherish as a virtue what included
a touch of weakness and vanity. His retirement had been, in part,
surrender. Disgusted by the conduct of men less virtuous than he, but
also weak and vain, he had retreated to a happy vacuum where he had
gone on cherishing his virtue till it now glowed with the colours of a
philosophic heroism.
Swift, a conjured spirit aching for employment, was employed as
Temple’s amanuensis while the master composed mellifluous essays on
gardens, on health and long life, on popular discontents, on poetry,
and on heroic virtue. Swift, starving for the world, might sometimes
be allowed to keep pace with Temple when, leaving off his moral
considerations, he walked in his gardens, along his trim canal, perhaps
despising the new sciences which had lately come to the notice of
gentlemen, and perhaps wondering from what herbs he could concoct more
potent doses for his household and even for his hopeless, hereditary
gout.
Between Swift and Temple there was enough difference to make a war,
but there was no war. Neither of them entirely realized that they were
wrong pupil and wrong teacher. Temple never realized it. Though he was
kind enough, he was not, as he could not have been, enough concerned to
see deeply into the vexed spirit forced to bend itself to his placid
will. Recommending his dependent to Sir Robert Southwell in May 1690,
he said of Swift only that “he has lived in my house, read to me, writ
for me, and kept all accounts so far as my small occasions required.
He has Latin and Greek, some French, writes a good and current hand,
is very honest and diligent, and has good friends, though they have
for the present lost their fortunes, in Ireland.” Any later conflicts
between them Temple overlooked or forgave with calm magnanimity. At his
death, after a decade of this service of talent by genius, “that great
man,” as Swift precisely put it, “beside a legacy left him the care and
trust and advantage of publishing his posthumous writings.” And on that
same occasion the greater man wrote in his journal that with Temple had
died “all that was good and amiable among men.”
Swift may have been often bored by Temple’s heroic virtue and by his
amateur erudition. He may have felt bewildered when Temple “would look
cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a
hundred reasons.” But the dependent judged his patron rather by his
actions than by his poses. He had gone to Temple to better fortunes
which were desperately low. He had lived nearer to the world than if he
had become a fellow of Trinity. He had learned everything Temple had to
teach.
What fretted Swift at Moor Park was not so much the character of
his patron, or even the mere fact of his own dependence, as the
unsatisfying uses to which he had to put his still undetermined
powers. With all his pride, he could only serve, never command. With
all his acuteness, he could not name his own gifts even to himself.
When, after his first brief stay with Temple, he went to Ireland with
a recommendation to Southwell in the summer of 1690, he could still
consider a fellowship in the college which he hated. Failing to obtain
that, or the degree which he had missed, he continued in Ireland for
another restless year, further broken by ill health, returned to his
mother, and visited his cousin Thomas, who was now at Oxford reading
for his degree at Balliol. Jonathan Swift, again at Moor Park by
Christmas, may already have decided to turn from Trinity to Oxford, but
it was the only decision he had reached before he settled back into his
lowering dependence.
He helped his patron with other of his dilettante labours and copied
the translations from Spanish poetry with which Lady Giffard, Temple’s
sister, embellished the leisure which she could spare from being
Temple’s chief of staff.
Between Lady Giffard and Swift there was, at least in time, a sharp
hostility. If he was bored by the brother he was angered by the sister,
whose record of long devotion was not enough to reconcile him to her
present influence in the household. She, virtual chatelaine by reason
of Lady Temple’s illness, resented the secretary’s unconcern. Lady
Temple--“Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great”--Swift apparently
liked. There was little to bring them into opposition. Nor was there
manifest opposition between him and the other members of the family or
the numerous dependents who had drifted to this patriarchal shelter.
Among them all, however, he found no equal, no congenial friend. Urged
by his pride to passions if not to frenzies, he could pour himself out
neither in activity nor in confidences. Whatever refuge he had from his
idleness and his secrecy was in the society of a child.
The child was Esther Johnson, whom Swift eventually called Stella. Her
father, younger son of a good family in Nottinghamshire, had probably
been a dependent of Temple who served as steward. But by 1689 he was
dead, and his widow was companion to Lady Giffard. Bridget Johnson and
her daughter, or daughters, lived at the edge of the Park in a cottage
where Swift, after he had made friends there, could sometimes forget
his subordination. Stella was eight years old when the young man, then
twenty-two, arrived from Leicester. “Her hair was blacker than a raven,
and every feature of her face in perfection,” he said. “I ... had some
share in her education, by directing what books she should read, and
perpetually instructing her in the principles of honour and virtue.”
He taught her to write, taught her so well that her handwriting could
later be mistaken for his own. He taught himself to depend upon
comforts which only she could give him during those restive years:
admiration without analysis, affection without exigence, a child’s
obedience, a child’s worship.
2
But Stella was for the present at most only an episode, a casual
breathing-spell between battles. Not that Swift was overworked by
Temple. He had too much time on his hands. “There is something in me
which must be employed,” he wrote in February of this second winter at
Moor Park, “and when I am alone turns all, for want of practice, into
speculation and thought; insomuch that in these seven weeks I have been
here, I have writ, and burnt and writ again, upon almost all manner of
subjects, more perhaps than any man in England.” What he wrote could
hardly have been history. He had enough of that with Temple. It was not
philosophy. Writing to his cousin Thomas in May he said he was getting
up his Greek and Latin for the Oxford degree, “but to enter upon the
causes of philosophy is what I protest I will rather die in a ditch
than go about.” It was probably poetry. Some of his poetry has survived.
That his poetry was bad means less than that it was Pindaric. For that
Temple shares the blame. He advised Swift to write like Cowley, and
Swift for a year or so fiercely beat imagined wings to raise himself to
an alien elevation. Flight was not in him.
“It makes me mad,” he wrote to his cousin, “to hear you talk of making
... next morning ... what I could not do under two or three days, nor
does it enter into my head to make anything of a sudden but what I find
to be exceeding silly stuff except by great chance. I esteem the time
of studying poetry to be two hours in the morning, and that only when
the humour sits, which I esteem for the flower of the whole day, and
truly I make bold to employ them that way, and yet I seldom write above
two stanzas in a week--I mean such as are to any Pindaric ode--and yet
I have known myself in so good a humour as to make two in a day, but
it may be no more in a week after, and when all is done I alter them a
hundred times, and yet I do not believe myself to be a laborious dry
writer, because if the fit comes not immediately I never heed it, but
think of something else.”
About this bad poetry he wrote bad prose, but the straggling clauses
make clear what he did not know he said. Lacking the nature for poetry,
he lacked the full desire; lacking the full desire, he lacked both
the ease with which some true poets write and the passion which keeps
the others from caring whether they write with ease or not. Swift was
writing because he was raging. He wanted to be heard if he could not be
felt. Poetry was a kind of power.
Being Swift, he could not take his struggles lightly. “I am over-fond
of my own writings,” he confided. “I would not have the world think
so, for a million, but it is so, and I find when I write what pleases
me I am Cowley to myself and can read it a hundred times over. I know
it is a desperate weakness, and has nothing to defend it but its
secrecy, and I know farther that I am wholly in the wrong, but have
the same pretence the baboon had to praise her children.” The image is
pleasant but incomplete. Though he might then set the baboon’s value
on his strophes, and might all his life hate his cousin John Dryden
for telling him the truth about them, Swift within another year or so
had come to hate them, with that hate which was twin to his love. Or
rather, he had come to hate whatever it was that had fascinated and
then disappointed him.
When he found his hope falling off with his delusion, Swift turned
furious and accusatory. In the last of his early poems he angrily
renounced his Muse:
“_Malignant Goddess! bane to my repose,
Thou universal cause of all my woes;
Say whence it comes that thou art grown of late
A poor amusement of my scorn and hate....
To thee I owe that fatal bent of mind,
Still to unhappy restless thoughts inclined;
To thee, what oft I vainly strive to hide,
That scorn of fools, by fools mistook for pride....
Madness like this no fancy ever seized,
Still to be cheated, never to be pleased.
... From this hour
I here renounce thy visionary power;
And since thy essence on my breath depends,
Thus with a breath the whole delusion ends._”
Poetry had failed him. As soon as he had learned to be honest he said a
bitter farewell. Then he went on to prose.
The second stay with Temple was not continually midnight. In July
1692, after a brief residence at Oxford, Swift received from Hart
Hall, now Hertford College, the degree of master of arts. “I never
was more satisfied,” he wrote his uncle, “than in the behaviour of
the University of Oxford to me. I had all the civilities I could wish
for, and so many favours that I am ashamed to have been more obliged
in a few weeks to strangers than ever I was in seven years to Dublin
College.” At Moor Park, too, his rank became more gratifying. Temple
not only treated his secretary with confidence at home, among his
memoirs and his gardens, but even trusted him abroad.
Once in the spring of 1693, when King William had sent the Earl
of Portland to consult Temple about a proposed bill for triennial
parliaments, Temple, who did not feel sure the Earl would carry his
full message, sent Swift after him to Kensington. There the secretary
talked with both Portland and the King. “But,” as Swift himself related
it, “all in vain. For the King by ill advisers was prevailed upon to
refuse passing the bill. This was the first time that Mr. Swift had
ever any converse with courts, and he told his friends it was the
first incident that helped to cure him of vanity.” But not, plainly,
of pride, which had made him expect that his country counsel would
naturally be taken.
These successes, however, were too small to quiet his fierce
restlessness, which with the decline of his Pindaric hopes began to
clarify itself into satiric hatred. Just before he said his farewell to
poetry he wrote some complimentary verses to Congreve, who had risen
to a sudden fame in London with his first comedy. The compliments were
confused. The lines in which Swift spoke of his own slow fortunes
and his savage plans were as unmistakable as lightning. His “old
unvanquish’d pride,” he wrote, looked with scorn on half mankind, which
must beware of impending maledictions. He wondered that the world
could be so clumsy in the face of
“_My hate, whose lash just Heaven has long decreed
Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed._”
Did the world not know that his wrath was its ruin?
This was language above the capacity of a disappointed minor poet. It
was fury, not peevishness, that lay behind Swift’s threat. His fury, so
long wasted in aimless blows at phantoms, had become confident. Such
confidence, in a man who was not a fool, was a sign of dangerous powers
gathering to attack. They might be in their present mood because they
had so long been checked in their impulses towards action. They may
have sullenly decided upon words because they saw no opportunity for
deeds. But all their hatred was not the consequence of frustration.
Hatred was native to Swift, as love was to St. Francis. If Swift has
been more frequently misunderstood than St. Francis, it is because men
are allowed to love without giving reasons for it, but not to hate.
The growth of Swift’s purpose was of course not obvious to him, and it
was not regular. No doubt he was often at peace in his occupations at
Moor Park or in his relaxed intervals with Stella. His anger rose or
fell with contrary or prosperous days. He could, like many men, be busy
whether he was happy or unhappy. But by nature he was always restless.
His energy drove him to violent exercise, particularly to walking,
which he thought his health required. He liked to walk from Farnham to
London, nearly forty miles away, and even to Leicester, stopping at
dubious inns and amusing himself with the speech and customs of the
people. Nor would his restlessness permit him to regard his dependence,
outwardly comfortable, as more than a starting-point. His temper
demanded independence.
With the help of his uncles he might possibly have become a lawyer.
With the help of the King it is said that he might have become a
captain of dragoons. With the help of Temple he might have become a
clerk in the Rolls office at Dublin, and he was indeed offered such
a post. But none of these careers suited his tastes or promised what
he was looking for. Instead, he decided to take orders and enter the
Church. When Temple had failed to obtain for him, through the favour of
the King, a prebend of Westminster or Canterbury, Swift chose to take
his own steps.
He went to Ireland in May 1694, leaving Temple angry. But as soon as
Swift humbly applied, in October of that year, for a certificate of
“morals and learning” which would satisfy the Irish bishops that he had
properly conducted himself since he left Trinity, Temple, relenting,
furnished it. Swift was ordained deacon the same month and priest in
the following January. Almost immediately he was appointed to the
prebend of Kilroot, a rural parish near Belfast.
Though Swift had had scruples about entering the Church solely as a
livelihood, there was no mystery in his position. “I look upon myself,
in the capacity of clergyman,” he said, “to be one appointed by
Providence for defending a post assigned to me, and for gaining over
as many enemies as I can. Although I think my cause is just, yet one
great motive is my submitting to the pleasure of Providence, and to the
laws of my country.” As to belief: “To say a man is bound to believe is
neither truth nor sense”; “I am in all opinions to believe according
to my own impartial reason; which I am bound to inform and improve, as
far as my capacity and opportunities will permit.” Yet Swift had no
urge towards any heresy. “Violent zeal for truth,” he thought, “hath
an hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride.”
Order was more important than zeal. “Liberty of conscience, properly
speaking, is no more than the liberty of possessing our own thoughts
and opinions, which every man enjoys without fear of the magistrate:
but how far he shall publicly act in pursuance of those opinions is
to be regulated by the laws of the country.” “Every man, as a member
of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his
own opinion in private, without perplexing his neighbour or disturbing
the public.” So a soldier might reason, or a magistrate, or a prime
minister. Swift was not a philosopher full of ideas, not a prospector
for truths still to be found. Although, in spite of this rational
attitude towards his calling, he later became jealously devoted to the
Church, that was because they were his calling and his Church.
If he had any illusions as to what it might mean to rule in a parish,
he lost them. Kilroot was dreary and remote, and Swift was no more
contented in his uncomfortable independence than he was rich on his
hundred pounds a year. One such year was as much as he could stand.
He surrendered his prebend to a fellow-clergyman whom he had known at
Oxford, and was back again at Moor Park two years after he had left it.
How idle and frustrate he had been appears from a letter he wrote just
before his willing departure. The letter was to Jane Waring of Belfast,
a cousin to two men who had been students at Trinity when Swift was
there. With her, by Swift poetically called Varina, he had carried on
another of his flirtations. He had even been involved to the point of a
proposal. Cured of poetry, he had not yet been cured of philandering.
He could still use, in writing to her, a language which comes strangely
from a pen assigned to the cause of wrath.
“Impatience,” he began, speaking of himself, “is the most inseparable
quality of a lover,” and he explained, what none knew better than he,
that “every one who hunts after pleasure or fame or fortune is still
restless and uneasy till he has hunted down his game; and all this
is not only very natural but something reasonable too, for a violent
desire is little better than a distemper, and therefore men are not to
blame in looking after a cure.”
When he began to speak of Varina he once more flapped almost Pindaric
wings. “That dearest object upon which all my prospect of happiness
entirely depends is in perpetual danger to be removed for ever from my
sight. Varina’s life is daily wasting ... yet some power that repines
at human felicity has that influence to hold her continually doating
on her cruelty, and me upon the cause of it.... Why was I so foolish
to put my hopes and fears into the power or management of another?”
Having, however, subdued his independence to his longing for her,
he was eager to forgo all other prospects. For her he would stay in
Ireland, even in Kilroot. “But listen to what I here solemnly protest,
by all that can be witness to an oath, that if I leave this kingdom
before you are mine, I will endure the utmost indignities of fortune
rather than ever return again, though the King would send me back his
deputy.”
In the midst of his passion Swift still seemed to be counting on a
refusal, not, possibly, without a bearable sense of safety no matter
how he might forecast his despair. “It was your pity opened the first
way to my misfortune; and now your love is finishing my ruin. And
is it so then? In one fortnight I must take eternal farewell of
Varina, and I wonder will she weep at parting a little to justify her
poor pretences of affection to me?” The certainty of this eternal
farewell made Swift free to bring up his reproaches. “The only
felicity permitted to human life we clog with tedious circumstances
and barbarous formality. By Heaven, Varina, you are more experienced,
and have less virgin innocence than I. Would not your conduct make one
think you were hugely skilled in all the little politic methods of
intrigue?”
Swift himself had been, he said, completely without craft, as without
limits. Such a passion as his had “a property peculiar to itself, to be
most commendable in its extremes.” It was no more capable than piety of
any blameworthy excess. Now he would withhold from her the full reality
of his anguish. “O Varina, how imagination leads me beyond myself and
all my sorrows! It is sunk, and a thousand graves lie open! No, Madam,
I will give you no more of my unhappy temper, though I derive it all
from you.... Only remember, that if you still refuse to be mine, you
will quickly lose, for ever lose, him that is resolved to die as he has
lived, all yours.”
Protest as he might, Swift was in this letter surely as crafty as he
was mawkish. He contrived to put Varina in the wrong so that she might
seem to blame for the end of their provincial interlude. He had been
playing at love because he had had nothing to work at. Now that he had
something better to do, no doubt he meant to do it. But he preferred to
take his leave with his broken heart in his hand. He could at once pay
a generous tribute to the lady’s charms and call attention to his own
sad, proud, faithful carriage at the moment of defeat. His farewell,
however, was not that of a lover who would grieve long. And Swift, soon
back with Temple, quickly found exercise for his powers in concerns
much nearer his heart than any possible Varina.
3
There was now little in his situation at Moor Park to fret his pride.
He knew that if at any time his post became tedious or humiliating he
could again turn for independence, at least, to the Church. He was a
clergyman on leave, as he might have been a soldier temporarily out
of active service. He was a man of learning, already entered upon a
profession, who had consented to be of use to Temple in tasks which
interested them both. Lady Temple had died. Temple, lonely, infirm,
depended probably as much upon Swift’s youth and strength as Swift upon
Temple’s wealth and influence.
Moreover, Stella, fifteen when Swift returned from Kilroot, was an old
comfort and a new delight. “She was sickly from her childhood until
about the age of fifteen; but then grew into perfect health, and was
looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable
young women in London”--and here Swift, writing on the night of
Stella’s death, added his touch of ice--“only a little too fat.” But at
fifteen she could hardly yet have outgrown her design, or have come to
stir in him the affection which he later felt. To her, or to her mother
in the knowledge that it would reach Stella’s eyes, he wrote cheerfully
during one of their visits to London with Temple and Lady Giffard: “I
desire your absence heartily, for now I live in great state, and the
cook comes in to know what I please to have for dinner. I ask very
gravely what is in the house, and accordingly give orders for a dish
of pigeons.... You shall have no more ale unless you send us a letter.
Here is a great bundle and a letter for you; both came together from
London. We all keep home like so many cats.”
That Swift at thirty was at last learning to be easy in his letters is
a sign, possibly that he was happier, certainly that he was busier. “I
myself was never miserable while my thoughts were in a ferment, for I
imagine a dead calm is the troublesomest part of our voyage through
the world.” His calling chosen, Swift could read and write without the
sense, like eating without hunger, that beyond his pleasure lay no
purpose. Reading, he now knew better what to look for. Writing, he now
knew better what to aim at.
For if reading to Swift was experience, writing was action. He later
declared to Pope that “all my endeavours from a boy to distinguish
myself were only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might
be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts: whether
right or wrong it is no great matter; and so the reputation of wit
or great learning does the office of a blue ribbon or of a coach and
six horses.” He wrote to gain influence and to exert it. For literary
reputation he cared almost as little as some gentlemen of letters say
they care. He never took money for his writings except what “Mr. Pope’s
prudent management” got him for _Gulliver_. Swift might be fated by his
gifts to captivate men’s tastes and entertain their imaginations, but
he wanted to master their wills and direct their conduct.
As a preacher he set himself to tell his congregations so clearly
what their duty was that they could have no doubt and no excuse. As a
journalist he used all his skill to move public opinion to political
action. And by his satires he intended to clear the paths of mankind of
the affectations, follies, and vices which tangled what he thought the
straight course of virtue and order. For Swift the words he used were
as bayonets to a soldier, verdicts to a magistrate, laws to a minister.
When at thirty he turned to words in his campaign against fortune, he
meant them to be more than words.
The character of his first satires was determined by his circumstances.
Living a little out of the world, in Temple’s walled, heroic realm,
he had come to despise the buzzing wits and upstart scientists who, he
thought, infested the moral and intellectual life of the times. Though
Dryden was one of the wits and Newton one of the scientists, Swift did
not bother to distinguish among them. His hatred was no more disposed
to scrupulous justice than another man’s love.
As Swift’s cause was partly unjust, so was his ground for this attack
partly accidental. Temple, stalking in virtue, had taken sides in the
controversy, then disturbing France, over the relative merits of the
ancients and the moderns. He had pronounced like a gentleman for the
ancients. “I know of no new philosophers,” Temple said, “that have made
entries upon that noble stage for fifteen hundred years past, unless
Descartes and Hobbes should pretend to it.... There is nothing new in
astronomy to vie with the ancients, unless it be the Copernican system;
nor in physic, unless Harvey’s circulation of the blood.... ’Tis agreed
by the learned that the science of music so admired by the ancients is
wholly lost in the world.... So as those two divine excellencies of
music and poetry are grown, in a manner, but the one fiddling and the
other rhyming.... What traces have we left of that admirable science
or skill in architecture, by which such stupendous fabrics have been
raised of old ... that they hardly fall within our imagination?... The
arts of painting and statuary began to revive with learning in Europe,
and made a great but short flight; so as, for these last hundred years,
we have not had one master, in either of them, who deserved a rank with
those that flourished in that short period.”
Temple could not know that Bach was then alive. Having refused the
embassy to Spain, he had missed a possible chance to hear about
Velasquez. But he might, except for his rank and preoccupations, have
met Rembrandt in Holland or Molière in France or Milton in England. He
had not. He could with a peaceful conscience, plausibly, courteously,
and only now and then ironically, dismiss the moderns.
Perhaps the chief fault of modern learning, he concluded, was that so
many of the learned were not quite men of the world. “The shallow,
the superficial, and the sufficient among scholars” had attracted
ridicule, “and very justly, by pretending to more than they had, or to
more esteem than what they had could deserve, by broaching it in all
places, at all times, upon all occasions, and by living so much among
themselves, or in their closets and cells, as to make them unfit for
all other business and ridiculous in all other conversations.” From
this it had come about that true learning was confused with pedantry
and that both suffered from the present mode of ridicule. “’Tis the
itch of our age and climate, and has overrun both the Court and the
stage; enters a House of Lords and Commons as boldly as a coffee house,
debates of Council as well as private conversation; and I have known
in my life more than one or two ministers of state that would rather
have said a witty thing than done a wise one; and made the company
laugh rather than the kingdom rejoice.”
This was Temple’s attitude, but so was it Swift’s. Though the _Battle
of the Books_ and the _Tale of a Tub_ may have been planned at
Kilroot and subsequently revised in London, they were the fruits,
however unexpected, of that suave garden at Moor Park. Swift took the
superiority of the ancients for granted, with nothing but ridicule
for any modern who doubted it. The contemporary world of learning he
assumed to be made up almost altogether of mean, starved, envious,
strident, stingless fools and fops, ignorant and arrogant, who swarmed
about their betters with a fly’s equal appetite for dung or honey.
Where Swift differed from Temple was where genius differs from talent,
not in mere attitude but in art and passion. Temple had been content
to survey the world in a smooth, stately exposition. Swift brought
his arguments to England, and put them into stories which, in spite
of their humorous allegory, slashed his victims with all the edges of
realism. His ancients and moderns were actual warriors, brawling “on
Friday last” in the King’s library. His criticism was comedy.
“Virgil appeared in shining armour completely fitted to his body. He
was mounted on a dapple-grey steed, the slowness of whose pace was
an effect of the highest mettle and vigour. He cast his eye on the
adverse wing, with a desire to find an object worthy of his valour,
when, behold, upon a sorrel gelding of a monstrous size, appeared a foe
issuing from among the thickest of the enemy’s squadrons; but his speed
was less than his noise; for his horse, old and lean, spent the dregs
of his strength in a high trot which, though it made slow advances,
yet caused a loud clashing of his armour, terrible to hear. The two
cavaliers had now approached within the throw of a lance, when the
stranger desired a parley, and, lifting up the vizard of his helmet, a
face hardly appeared from within, which, after a pause, was known for
that of the renowned Dryden. The brave Ancient suddenly started, as one
possessed with surprise and disappointment together; for the helmet was
nine times too large for the head, which appeared situate far in the
hinder part, even like the lady in a lobster, or like a mouse under a
canopy of state, or like a shrivelled beau from within the penthouse of
a modern periwig; and the voice was suited to the visage, sounding weak
and remote.”
Nor did the genius of Swift surpass the talent of Temple only by the
reach of drama over debate. Temple, speaking of the wits, had said:
“But the last maim given to learning has been by the scorn of pedantry,
which the shallow, the superficial, and the sufficient among scholars
first drew to themselves, and very justly” ... and then he had gone
on to a mild simile of an infection in a town from which everybody
stayed away. Swift, starting at the same point, with the compliment
of imitation, made Temple look like the moon in the same sky with the
sun: “But the greatest maim given to that general reception which the
writings of our society have formerly received (next to the transitory
state of all sublunary things) has been a superficial vein among many
readers of the present age, who will by no means be persuaded to
inspect beyond the surface and the rind of things; whereas, wisdom is
a fox, who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig
out. It is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker,
the homelier, and the coarser coat; and whereof, to a judicious palate,
the maggots are the best. It is a sack-posset, wherein the deeper you
go you will find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we
must value and consider because it is attended with an egg. But then
lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost
you a tooth and pay you with nothing but a worm.”
Temple, reflective over “the vein of ridiculing all that is serious
and good, all honour and virtue, as well as learning and piety,” had
written a polite essay. Swift actively declared a war. His satires were
like a tub thrown by seamen to a whale to keep it off the ship. Let the
yelping wits and empty scholars butt and tumble the satires instead of
harming the commonwealth.
The _Battle of the Books_ was a bagatelle, humorously secret about
the outcome of the skirmish. So, too, the _Tale of a Tub_ did not
trouble to complete the story of Peter and Martin and Jack, the three
brothers who stood for the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and
the Dissenting churches. Swift still lacked, or was too unconcerned to
use, the art which insists upon thorough and finished structure. Broken
meats, he might have said, were fit enough for dogs. The tale itself,
satirizing the abuses of religion, made up no more than a third of the
whole book. The digressions, on the abuses of learning, were the larger
and more varied part. Swift had been a scholar longer than he had been
a clergyman.
It was his duty to defend his Church by cutting down its enemies. He
was ruthless with the quibbles of theology, fanaticism, superstition,
priestly greed and imposture. But he felt a more seasoned malice when
he turned aside to prune and lop among the charlatans of wit whom he
regarded as his own enemies. The strutting poets, the confident blind
critics, the mercenary adulators and detractors, the treatise-mongers,
the multipliers of dedications and prefaces and compendiums and
commentaries and annotations and indexes, the proudly obscure writers:
all these he ridiculed by the contemptuous device of praising them.
Yet they were for him, at most, annoying creatures that he studied
briefly before he trod on them. They had roused only his irritation.
His hate, which after years of brooding had finally found the language
natural to it, was for human life at large.
Temple had said, with a melancholy cadence: “When all is done, human
life is, at the greatest and best, but like a froward child that must
be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls
asleep, and then the care is over.”
Swift saw mankind with a colder eye. “If we take an examination of what
is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the
understanding or the senses, we shall find that all its properties and
adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual
possession of being well deceived. And, first, with relation to the
mind or understanding, ’tis manifest what mighty advantages fiction has
over truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination
can build nobler scenes and produce more wonderful revolutions than
fortune or nature will be at expense to furnish.... Again, if we take
this definition of happiness and examine it with reference to the
senses, it will be acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How fading and
insipid do all objects accost us that are not conveyed in the vehicle
of delusion! How shrunk is everything as it appears in the glass of
nature! So that if it were not for the assistance of artificial
mediums, false lights, refracted angles, varnish, and tinsel, there
would be a mighty level in the felicity and enjoyments of mortal men.”
Credulity, he argued, is better than curiosity, and it is better to
accept the surfaces of life with the senses than to inquire deeper
with the reason. “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly
believe how much it altered her person for the worse.... He that can,
with Epicurus, content his ideas with the films and images that fly
off upon his senses from the superficies of things; such a man, truly
wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy
and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity
called the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state
of being a fool among knaves.”
To this judgment Swift had arrived at thirty in the shadow of Temple at
Moor Park. The neat aim and witty sting of his sentences had less to
do with his effects than the mind and passion which showed through his
clear, hard words. What he said he meant, not partly but wholly; not
with the momentary earnestness of a gesture but with the deep sincerity
of a belief rooted in his constitution by his nature and his experience.
If ever Temple noticed the tiger in his garden he must have wondered.
He might have asked whether it would not be wiser for Swift to smile
at the childish world, and humour it till it slept. And Swift might
have answered that it was beyond a tiger to look like a lamb with its
soft wool, or sound like a lamb with its timid bleat, or skip like a
lamb with its happy legs. Those were the lamb’s gifts. If the lamb was
able to lead a cheerful life in a world of butchers, then it had the
gift of being well deceived. But a tiger’s gifts were stripes and roars
and claws angrier than swords. They did not carry with them the other
gift of being deceived by butchers. The lamb could be caged, and would
grow tame; it could be starved, and would die pitifully. But if the
tiger were caged or starved it would strike back with all its deadly
sinews. To ask a tiger to be serene in its trap and peaceful towards
its captors was simply to ask it to be a lamb. It must be a tiger still.
The dry years of Swift’s dependence upon Temple came to an end with
Temple’s death in January 1699. The satires had not yet been published,
and Swift left Farnham for London with none of the reputation which
they were to bring him. At Farnham, or soon in London, he wrote out a
set of resolutions to warn him when he should be old, as he had lately
seen his patron. Most of the resolutions were civil enough. He would
not, he resolved, be severe with young people or force his company on
them, as he would force on no one his advice or anecdotes. He would not
be peevish, morose, suspicious, covetous, untidy, garrulous, boastful,
positive, opinionative, or open to gossip or flattery. He would not be
scornful of current ways or wits or fashions or men. He would not marry
a young woman. In all these he might have been any young man taking
prudent notes.
But in one of the resolutions he suddenly became Swift. “Not to be
fond of children, or let them come near me hardly.” Stella had been a
child. Had she, coming near him as a child, grown to be what made him
feel that other children might also trouble him? Or was his resolution
only a symptom of his general misanthropy, now so wary that it would
not let mankind approach, even in its least hostile form, for fear of
a weakening influence on the integrity of his hate? At least he had
learned, however he loved the one, to hate the many. His whole history
lay in the seed of that antithesis.
III
VICAR AND WIT
1
Joseph Addison, that year setting out to fit himself for service to
England by travelling on the Continent, could have told Swift, if
he had known him, how to rise in their world. Addison had lived on
at Oxford into a fellowship. He had paid court to Dryden, and by
Dryden had been recommended to Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and by
Tonson to Congreve, and by Congreve to Charles Montague, Chancellor
of the Exchequer, and by Montague to Somers, the Lord Chancellor, and
by Somers to the King. At the University ready to take orders, the
expectant parson had yielded to the claims of Montague upon those
accomplishments and virtues which, Montague told the head of Addison’s
college, were needed to offset the current depravity and corruption.
Dexterous in Latin and English verse, Addison was even more dexterous
in his virtues. Though vain enough, he was not proud. He demanded
little besides a reasonable prosperity and comfortable homage. He felt
no anger because men were slow in recognizing merits which he had not
yet shown. He did not too much mind playing at success as it was then
played. He saw little repugnant in the rules and admired the winners.
It had never struck him that the world was ruled by knaves; it had
never struck him that only fools could be happy. Having taken what he
found for what it was usually said to be, he was shortly to begin his
travels with the approval, and at the expense, of his country.
Swift, with more genius than Addison, had less talent for success. In
1697 he had, presumably on the advice of Temple, put his hopes on the
Earl of Sunderland, already tottering though still Lord Chamberlain.
“My Lord Sunderland fell and I with him,” Swift wrote a few weeks
later. “Since that there have been other courses, which if they
succeed I shall be proud to own the methods, or if otherwise, very
much ashamed.” All these schemes, whatever they were, had failed.
With Temple dead, Swift had to trust to the Earl of Romney to urge
upon the King the preferment which Temple had promised to obtain for
his secretary. Romney, a friend to William in Holland before the
Revolution, and supposed to have been “the great wheel on which the
Revolution rolled,” turned out to have, Swift said, “not a wheel to
turn a mouse.” “After long attendance in vain,” which was what Swift
called a fruitless four or five months, he again went back to Ireland,
in June 1699, chaplain and temporary secretary to the Earl of Berkeley,
one of the Lords Justices.
Dublin was as disappointing as London. Berkeley refused to make Swift
permanent secretary on the ground that he was a clergyman, and soon
afterwards further refused to appoint him dean of Derry on the ground
that he was too young. The man who had found Kilroot unendurable was in
February 1700 assigned to another rustic living, at Laracor, seventeen
miles from Dublin. Nor did it console him that he was made a prebendary
of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and a doctor of divinity of Dublin
University in February 1701. With all his pride and all his powers, he
had been sent to what he thought a shabby garrison on an unimportant
frontier of the Church.
His circumstances seemed now more interesting to Varina, still
unmarried at Belfast. She wrote him a letter. He answered it in a
language as cold as any that ever ended what had begun as a flirtation.
“You would know what gave my temper that sudden turn,” he said, “as
to alter the style of my letters since I last came over. If there has
been that alteration you observe, I have told you the cause abundance
of times. I had used a thousand endeavours and arguments to get you
from the company and place you are in; both on account of your health
and humour, which I thought were like to suffer very much in such air
and before such examples. All I had in answer from you was nothing but
a great deal of arguing, and sometimes in a style so imperious as I
thought might have been spared, when I reflected how much you had been
in the wrong. The other thing you would know is whether this change
of style be owing to the thoughts of a new mistress. I declare, upon
the word of a Christian and a gentleman, it is not; neither had I ever
thoughts of being married to any other person but yourself.” The cause
of his change, he explained, was her indifference to his wishes and his
opinions, particularly about her family. “I think ... that no young
woman in the world of the same income would dwindle away her health and
life in such a sink and among such family conversation. Neither have
all your letters been once able to persuade me that you have the least
value for me, because you so little regarded what I so often said upon
that matter.... I think I have more cause to resent your desires of me
in that case than you have to be angry at my refusals”--his refusals,
it appears, to endure the Warings. “If you like such company and
conduct, much good do you with them! My education has been otherwise.”
At the same time, he would tell her what he had told his uncle Adam in
response to an inquiry which Swift implied had come circuitously from
Varina: “that if your health and my fortune were as they ought, I would
prefer you above all your sex; but that, in the present condition
of both, I thought it was against your opinion, and would certainly
make you unhappy; that, had you any other offers which your friends or
yourself thought more to your advantage, I should think I were very
unjust to be an obstacle in your way.” Since, however, her letter had
showed her satisfied with his fortune, nothing now stood in the way
of their felicity but her health. Nothing, that is, except his terms,
which he reduced to questions.
“Are you in a condition to manage domestic affairs, with an income
of less perhaps than three hundred pounds a year? Have you such an
inclination to my person and humour as to comply with my desires and
way of living and endeavour to make us both as happy as you can?
Will you be ready to engage in those methods I shall direct for the
improvement of your mind, so as to make us entertaining company for
each other, without being miserable when we are neither visiting nor
visited? Can you bend your love and esteem and indifference to others
the same way as I do mine? Shall I have so much power in your heart,
or you so much government of your passions, as to grow in a good
humour upon my approach, though provoked by a ----? Have you so much
good nature as to endeavour by soft words to smooth any rugged humour
occasioned by the cross accidents of life? Shall the place wherever
your husband is thrown be more welcome than courts or cities without
him? In short, these are some of the necessary methods to please men
who, like me, are deep-read in the world; and to a person thus made I
should be proud in giving all due returns towards making her happy.
These are the questions I have always resolved to propose to her with
whom I meant to pass my life; and whenever you can heartily answer them
in the affirmative I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without
regarding whether your person be beautiful or your fortune large.
Cleanliness in the first and competency in the other is all I look
for.... I singled you out at first from the rest of women; and I expect
not to be used like a common lover. When you think fit to send me an
answer to this without ----, I shall then approve myself, by all means
you shall command, Madam, your most obedient humble servant.”
It was as if a glacier had announced the course it meant to take down
its valley. Swift possibly disliked the Warings no more than other men
have disliked their prospective relatives. His terms were possibly no
more ruthless than the assumptions on which other men have entered into
marriage. But few men besides Swift can ever, in such a situation,
have been so revealing and so unsparing. Varina had entertained him at
tedious Kilroot. She had not known how to give up the roundabout arts
of courtship for the forthright sciences of marriage. Her caution had
humiliated him. Her advances now embarrassed him. Himself long past
the time of languishing, he turned the truth loose upon the coquette.
And Varina, who had, as Swift said of young ladies in general, spent
her time in making a net instead of a cage, had had the misfortune to
incur the frankness of the one man then alive who could put the most
naked truth into the most naked words.
If Swift struck too hard for the occasion, it was no more than his
dire intensity often forced him to do. His letter at least closed the
episode. Varina, with these words before her, could understand that she
was not dealing with a common lover, or with a lover at all.
A man who could demand so much of a wife, and say so to a woman, was
no longer at any point in a man’s life where the odds are still on his
marrying. About marriage Swift was frequently explicit. At twenty-five
he declared that, to say nothing of his “cold temper and unconfined
humour,” “the very ordinary observations I made with going half a
mile beyond the University have taught me experience enough not to
think of marriage till I settle my fortune in the world, which I am
sure will not be in some years; and even then myself I am so hard to
please that I suppose I shall put it off to the other world.... Among
all the young gentlemen that I have known to have ruined themselves
by marrying, which I assure you is a great number, I have made this
general rule, that they are either young, raw, ignorant scholars who,
for want of knowing company, believe every silk petticoat includes an
angel, or else they have been a sort of honest young men who perhaps
are too literal in rather marrying than burning.... I think I am very
far excluded from listing under either of these heads. I confess I have
known one or two men of sense enough who, inclined to frolics, have
married and ruined themselves out of a maggot; but a thousand household
thoughts, which always drive matrimony out of my mind whenever it
chances to come there, will, I am sure, fright me from that; besides
that, I am naturally temperate, and never engaged in the contrary which
usually produces those effects.”
This may be taken to be the scorn of a young man who has not yet felt
much desire or loneliness. But there is the later belief, cut to an
axiom, that “no wise man ever married from the dictates of reason.”
What then could beguile Swift into marriage, when, for all his passion,
he had undertaken to live as faithfully under the dictates of reason as
under the orders of the Church?
Swift, speaking of himself, seldom spoke less than the exact truth,
though he often, by his harshness, said rather more. In the matter
of marriage his course was, from first to last, as straight as was
possible for a man fascinating to women and inclined to play with them
when his powers were relaxed or his will checked. He had decided that,
his fortunes being so much lower than his pride, and his health so
much less than his strength, he would not marry except on some such
extravagant terms as he proposed at thirty-three to Varina. He knew she
would not accept them. Whether he realized it or not, he preferred his
relationship with Stella to marriage with anybody else.
He turned out to prefer it to marriage with Stella. During the three or
four years after he closed accounts with Varina, Swift came no doubt
as near to marrying Stella as the great drive of his solitary ambition
would let him. But he did not marry her, and he apparently found, as
many men would find if they had the strength to test the principle,
that what seems to be the need to marry, even a woman truly loved, is
a panic impulse in a crisis. Swift, having survived the crisis which
might have made him a husband, did not have to pay the customary price
of losing the woman who might have become his wife. Stella was still
the willing focus of that immense affection which turned the stare or
scowl of hate to the rest of the world.
Only once more did he slip recklessly into his old amusement. Vanessa,
infatuated and unceasing, threatened his solitude. He could not
annihilate her with a letter or subdue her to friendship. He slackly
let the affair drag on to a dreary and then vehement end. But still
he did not break his straight course. He had not wanted to marry. He
had not had to marry. He did not mean to marry. He had said as much to
everybody whose business it could be.
Swift might have been believed if his course, no matter how straight,
had also been usual: if he had spent his days in a cell; if, having
failed to win some desired woman, he had desired no other; if he had
run from woman to woman stopping nowhere long. Instead, he lived in
the world, had as much of the women he wanted as he wanted of them,
and was in many ways faithful to Stella. Gossip, bothered by what is
unusual in the story, has tried to make it fit some more familiar
pattern by imagining hidden circumstances which, if known, would show
Swift to have been more like ordinary men. He may have been impotent,
gossip suggests, and so avoided marriage out of vanity. He may have
had syphilis, and so avoided marriage out of decency. He may, gossip
even during his life went so far as to guess, have married Stella
privately--without licence, witnesses, or record, when he was Dean of
St. Patrick’s! But all these arguments, some of which have been twisted
to coiling lengths, are still the hypotheses of gossip, one as good as
another. Not one of them is as simple and sufficient as the conclusion
that Swift, whom gossips could more easily think inadequate, dissolute,
or secretive, was only, in marriage as in other matters, extraordinary.
2
Writing to Varina in May 1700 he swore that he then had no thoughts of
another mistress or of another wife. As this was not a lover’s letter,
this was hardly a lover’s oath, and may have meant what it said. But,
as chaplain to Lord Berkeley, Swift was still, in a sense, a dependent;
and at Laracor he saw he would be lonely. Of his three livings, Laracor
and the incidental Agher and Rathbeggan, only Laracor had a church.
Swift, arriving dejected and resentful, found himself doubtfully
master of a scattered, monotonous territory with a dilapidated church
and a vicarage and glebe not then fit to live in. The one pleasant
thing about his post was that he could leave his duties in the hands
of curates and himself live much of the time in Dublin lodgings. In
April 1701 he went with Berkeley back to England, to remain there till
September. And there he visited Stella at Farnham.
Her mother had married, or was to marry, another steward of Moor Park,
and the daughter was living with another Temple dependent, Rebecca
Dingley, on the income of a Temple legacy. “Her fortune,” as Swift
told the story on the bitter, truthful night of Stella’s death, “at
that time was in all not above fifteen hundred pounds, the interest
of which was but a scanty maintenance, in so dear a country, for one
of her spirit. Upon this consideration, and indeed very much for my
own satisfaction, who had few friends or acquaintance in Ireland, I
prevailed with her and her dear friend and companion, the other lady,
to draw what money they had into Ireland, a great part of their
fortune being in annuities upon funds. Money was then ten per cent in
Ireland, besides the advantage of turning it, and all the necessaries
of life at half the price. They complied with my advice, and soon
after came over; but, I happening to continue some time longer in
England, they were much discouraged to live in Dublin, where they
were wholly strangers. She was at that time about nineteen years
old, and her person was soon distinguished. But the adventure looked
so like a frolic the censure held for some time, as if there were a
secret history in such a removal; which, however, soon blew off by her
excellent conduct.”
These are the known facts of Stella’s removal to Ireland. Nor was her
life there less prudent than her going. She and Mrs. (that is, Miss)
Dingley lived ordinarily in lodgings with their own servants. When
Swift was at Laracor they lived in a cottage not far away or lodged in
the neighbouring village of Trim. When he was in lodgings in Dublin
they lodged elsewhere in town. Only, it seems, during his absences did
they economize by living in the vicarage at Laracor or in his lodgings
in Dublin. The relations between Stella and Swift were unwaveringly
circumspect. No one knew that he made her an allowance of fifty pounds
a year. “I wonder,” he wrote to a friend in 1726, “how you could expect
to see Mrs. Johnson in a morning, which I, her oldest acquaintance,
have not done these dozen years, except once or twice in a journey.”
The afternoons or evenings which he spent with her are said never to
have been without at least a third person.
She seldom made visits. “But her own lodgings,” Swift said, “from
before twenty years old were frequented by many persons of the graver
sort, who all respected her highly, upon her good sense, good manners
and conversation.... And indeed the greatest number of her acquaintance
was among the clergy.” At first she was extravagant, “and so continued
till about two-and-twenty; when, by advice of some friends, and the
fright of paying large bills of tradesmen who enticed her into their
debt, she began to reflect upon her own folly.”
Did Stella, prudently setting out for Ireland at twenty, foresee so
many clergymen? Could she without flares of rebellion give up her
extravagance, even to “avoiding all expense in clothes (which she ever
despised) beyond what was merely decent”? Had she in her nature no
veins of natural folly waiting to be uncovered? Was there in her no
longing for unreasonable adventures?
So far as marriage was concerned she knew, before too long, where Swift
stood. Another of her clergymen, William Tisdall, himself began to
court Stella. Finding how much authority Swift had with her, Tisdall
wrote to him, then in London, hinting, it seems, that Swift had used
his power in behalf of his own designs. Swift’s answer, in April 1704,
left no doubt in Tisdall, nor in Stella, to whom Tisdall must have
shown it.
[Illustration: Esther Johnson (Stella)
_As a young woman_]
“I will, upon my conscience and honour, tell you the naked truth.
First, I think I have said to you before that, if my fortunes and
humour served me to think of that state, I should certainly, among all
persons on earth, make your choice, because I never saw that person
whose conversation I utterly valued but hers. This was the utmost I
ever gave way to. And, secondly, I must assure you sincerely that this
regard of mine never once entered into my head to be an impediment
to you; but I judged it would, perhaps, be a clog to your rising in
the world; and I did not conceive you were then rich enough to make
yourself and her happy and easy. But that objection is now quite
removed by what you have at present.... I declare I have no other; nor
shall any consideration of my own misfortune of losing so good a friend
and companion as her prevail on me against her interest and settlement
in the world, since it is held so necessary and convenient a thing for
ladies to marry; and that time takes off from the lustre of virgins in
all other eyes but mine.”
Swift insisted that he had done nothing to stand in Tisdall’s way, and
that he had indeed thought the affair too far along to be broken off;
“since I supposed the town had got it in their tongues, and therefore I
thought it could not miscarry without some disadvantage to the lady’s
credit. I ... must add that though it hath come in my way to converse
with persons of the first rank, and that sex, more than is usual to men
of my level and of our function, yet I have nowhere met with a humour,
a wit, or conversation so agreeable, a better portion of good sense,
or a truer judgment of men and things. I mean here in England, for as
to the ladies of Ireland I am a perfect stranger.... I give you joy of
your good fortunes, and envy very much your prudence and temper, and
love of peace and settlement; the reverse of which has been the great
uneasiness of my life, and is like to continue so. And what is the
result?... I find nothing but the good words and wishes of a decayed
Ministry, whose lives and mine will probably wear out before they can
serve either my little hopes or their own ambition. Therefore I am
resolved suddenly to retire, like a discontented courtier, and vent
myself in study and speculation, till my own humour or the scene here
shall change.”
This was the same language as that Swift used after Stella’s death,
when he called her “the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that
I or perhaps any other person ever was blessed with,” and said he could
not remember that he had “ever once heard her make a wrong judgment of
persons, books, or affairs.” He could then say also, out of his long
experience, that she was “the most disinterested mortal I ever knew
or heard of.” But his praise was for her intellectual, moral, and
social virtues, as it had always been. Not a surviving syllable about
her suggests desire. None comes nearer to it than his words that “she
had a gracefulness somewhat more than human in every motion, word, and
action.” And they were written for posterity when she was dead, not
when she was twenty-three and he faced a rival.
Stella, scrutinizing the letter to Tisdall, could no more find a
possible husband there than Varina had found in her letter four years
earlier. Tisdall, however, was rejected.
And not a surviving syllable from Stella tells whether she knew of any
barrier between her and Swift except the cold sword of his ambitious
pride, or whether she struggled against fitting herself to the place
he made for her, or whether she ever felt bitterness or regret. The
discretion as native to her as to Swift protected her almost entirely
from scandal, even in the mouths of his most loquacious enemies. He
alone was blamed, for leaving her alone. Stella seems not to have
blamed him. She preferred what she had of Swift to all she might have
had of Tisdall or any other possible husband.
She knew that Swift’s devotion was partly his pride admiring itself
in its glass. He trusted her judgment, which was a bright reflection
of his own. He took her advice, which was coloured by what she deftly
guessed to be his will. But she was no such replica in dough as might
have bored him or might have shamed him into guilt for using her as
he did. She was witty and lively, talked back to him, was charmingly
perverse when he convinced her of her errors, and would not allow him
to have a maid or housekeeper “with a tolerable face.” Stella gave
him, when he was resisted elsewhere, the comfort of feeling over her
that power without which his temper could not live. She saw, however,
that she was a need as well as a comfort. She could feel an occasional
thrill of power in her general peace of compliance.
For nearly a decade after Stella went to Ireland the record is so
silent about her that she has to be guessed at. Then for three years
during which Swift wrote his journal to her, his light brings her to
life. After that, silence and obscurity, seldom broken till the light
shines again in Swift’s grief over her last illness. She hardly lives
except in his words.
Once, however, Swift’s mirror answered him. It was in an exchange of
verses between them when she had been for twenty years his closest
friend. His verses showed how little time had taken from her lustre in
his eyes. He had never “admitted love a guest,” but he could imagine
nothing beyond what he had had from their friendship.
“_In all the habitudes of life,
The friend, the mistress, and the wife,
Variety we still pursue,
In pleasure seek for something new;
Or else, comparing with the rest,
Take comfort that our own is best....
But his pursuits are at an end
Whom Stella chooses for a friend._”
And Stella, with verses of her own on Swift’s birthday, answered him in
kind. It was “your pupil and your humble friend” who congratulated him.
The sum of her praise was that he had taught her to value her mind more
than her person.
“_When men began to call me fair,
You interposed your timely care.
You early taught me to despise
The ogling of a coxcomb’s eyes;
Showed where my judgment was misplaced;
Refined my fancy and my taste._”
Now, Stella gratefully assured him, she had a better fate than that of
women “with no endowments but a face.”
“_You taught how I might youth prolong,
By knowing what was right and wrong;
How from my heart to bring supplies
Of lustre to my fading eyes;
How soon a beauteous mind repairs
The loss of changed or falling hairs;
How wit and virtue from within
Send out a smoothness o’er the skin.
Your lectures could my fancy fix,
And I can please at thirty-six._”
Yet in this reasonable tribute Stella let her rhyme coax her into
a favourable prevarication. She was not thirty-six, but forty. She
would still give herself a slight advantage when she pronounced her
judgment on the frailty of beauty, which she had to endure, Swift only
to observe. He had been, as she said, her early and her only guide.
After so many years her verses and her words were, as much as her
handwriting, like his. But with a betraying phrase she could still show
a tenderness for that person which her philosopher had taught her to
value less than her mind.
3
The conquest of Stella, absolute and lasting, gave Swift his only
relief from his ambition. His outward life during these ten years in
Ireland need not have been hateful to him if his pride had left him
free to enjoy it. The income from his livings was perhaps not much over
two hundred pounds a year, but it enabled him to rebuild the vicarage
at Laracor and to lay out a garden. He had a stream straightened to
resemble a canal and a willow-walk where he might remember Moor Park
as Temple had remembered Holland. The parish duties were so slight
that Swift could consider Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan as hardly
more than sinecures, of which he took the pay and left the work to
deputies. In Dublin, where besides being a prebendary of the Cathedral
he was, after Berkeley’s recall, chaplain to the Duke of Ormond and
the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Lieutenants, Swift was domestically allied
with the rulers of the kingdom. Moreover, he was only once long out of
England. He travelled back and forth over the anxious bridge of his
expectations. In London he published the letters, essays, and memoirs
which Temple had left to him. And there he soon took a commanding
though scornful rank among the wits he ridiculed.
Swift always valued conversation, “so useful and innocent a pleasure,
so fitted for every period and condition of life, and so much in all
men’s power.” He went to such coffee houses as the Whig St. James’s and
the more neutral Will’s. But he never thought of himself as belonging
with the general army of the wits. “The worst conversation I ever
remember to have heard in my life,” he said, “was that at Will’s coffee
house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble.
That is to say, five or six men who had writ plays, or at least
prologues, or had share in a miscellany, came thither and entertained
one another with their trifling composures, in so important an air
as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature or that the
fate of kingdoms depended on them. And they were usually attended
with an humble audience of young students from the inns of court or
the universities, who, at due distance, listened to these oracles and
returned home with great contempt for their law and philosophy, their
heads filled with trash, under the name of politeness, criticism, and
belles lettres.”
If now and then Swift unbent his powers and talked in clubs, played at
cold hoaxes, or wrote verse, no longer Pindaric, it was in the mood of
idleness which had formerly turned him to flirtations. His successes
came not from the pains he took but from the natural skill of his
strong mind set to work at trifles. He moved among the wits proudly,
somewhat gigantic, somewhat ominous.
His interests were in public affairs, in the government of the realm,
in the whole behaviour of mankind. He began to write about politics
while he was still chaplain to Berkeley. The Lords and Commons were in
abusive conflict. Large tracts of land in Ireland having been forfeited
to the Crown after the Revolution, the King had made grants of it to
his favourites and to a former mistress. In 1700 the Commons had voted
to annul these grants and to make other grants to other favourites.
The Lords had resisted, but had finally given way. Lord Somers, the
Whig leader of the Ministry, had been so displeasing to the Commons
that the King had forced him to resign. The majority in the Parliament
of 1701 was Tory, as was the Ministry. The Tories, blaming William
and his Whig advisers for their foreign policy, impeached Somers,
Portland, Orford, and Halifax (lately Addison’s Charles Montague). The
Lords supported the impeached peers. Swift, returning with Berkeley
to England in April, saw in the conflict a danger to the state, and
undertook a warning. He was still so near Moor Park that he came only
slyly into the open in his discourse, full of modern parallels, on the
dissensions between the nobles and commons in Athens and Rome.
But he wrote less like a philosopher than like a governor, contemptuous
of political metaphysics. No doubt there ought to be a proper balance
of power among the forces in a state; “although I should think
that the saying _vox populi vox dei_ ought to be understood of the
universal bent and current of a people, not of the bare majority of a
few representatives, which is often procured by little arts and great
industry and application; wherein those who engage in the pursuits of
malice and revenge are much more sedulous than such as would prevent
them.” How the universal bent and current of a people was to be
recognized and encouraged Swift did not make plain. “Some physicians
have thought that if it were practicable to keep the several humours
of the body in an exact and equal balance of each with the opposite,
it might be immortal; and so perhaps would a political body if the
balance of power could be always held exactly even. But, I doubt, this
is as impossible in practice as the other.”
In practice he found the populace always greedy and slippery. “When
a child grows easy and content by being humoured; and when a lover
becomes satisfied by small compliances, without farther pursuits; then
expect to find popular assemblies content with small concessions.” “I
think it is an universal truth that the people are much more dexterous
at pulling down and setting up than at preserving what is fixed; and
they are not fonder of seizing more than their own than they are of
delivering it up again to the worst bidder, with their own into the
bargain. For, although in their corrupt notions of divine worship they
are apt to multiply their gods, yet their earthly devotion is seldom
paid to above one idol at a time, of their own creation; whose oar they
pull with less murmuring, and much more skill, than when they share the
lading or even hold the helm.”
There was, Swift thought, no mysterious virtue in any gathering of
men. “It is hard to recollect one folly, infirmity, or vice to which
a single man is subjected and from which a body of commons, either
collective or represented, can be wholly exempt. For, beside that they
are composed of men with all their infirmities about them, they have
also the ill fortune to be generally led and influenced by the very
worst among themselves, I mean popular orators, tribunes, or, as they
are now styled, great speakers, leading men, and the like. Whence it
comes to pass that in their results we have sometimes found the same
spirit of cruelty and revenge, of malice and pride, the same blindness
and obstinacy and unsteadiness, the same ungovernable rage and anger,
the same injustice, sophistry, and fraud that ever lodged in the breast
of any individual.”
The evil to be avoided, Swift held, was the tyranny equally of the one,
of the few, or of the many. But when the many are tyrants the tyranny
of the one is not far off. “A usurping populace is its own dupe, a
mere underworker, and a purchaser in trust for some single tyrant
whose state and power they advance to their own ruin, with as blind an
instinct as those worms that die with weaving magnificent habits for
beings of a superior nature to their own.”
Any governor, reading Swift’s discourse, must have felt behind it a
congenial mind and will. Swift might dread the tyranny of a king. He
might even, as he later wrote, “prefer a well-instituted commonwealth
before a monarchy.” But what he really dreaded was disorder. “If,” he
said, “I should insist upon liberty of conscience, form conventicles of
republicans, and print books preferring that government and condemning
what is established, the magistrate would, with great justice, hang me
and my disciples.” Better the certain magistrate than the uncertain
mob. Swift was no less on the side of power because he wanted power
himself. He regarded the demand for popular rights as a king might
regard it: that is, as a mode of usurpation. He regarded the prospect
of revolution as a general might regard it: that is, as a threat of
mutiny. Let theorists be hanged. Though the end of government was
liberty, the way to it did not lead through unrest. Unrest was itself
the tyranny of the many, and it might at any time become the tyranny of
the one. Liberty lay between these extremes. Mankind, unless it gave
itself to dictatorship or to confusion, had to be governed by the few.
Not, however, by the casual few of birth or wealth. By the chosen few
of knowledge, skill, and virtue. Swift did not say, at first or ever,
how these few were to be chosen. Like all the men, in all the ages, who
have held to this appealing doctrine, he assumed that the choice of
governors ought to be as natural as it was logical. And, like most of
them, he assumed that he belonged among the governors.
Rather, he assumed that he belonged beside them. Swift had already come
to think of himself as first of all a churchman, not a statesman but
the driving conscience of statesmen. Having delivered his warning in
his pamphlet, written in London, he left it with the printer and went
back to Ireland, to establish himself in Laracor. “The book was,” he
says, “greedily bought and read; and charged sometimes upon my Lord
Somers and some time upon the Bishop of Salisbury.” Associated at a
distance with men so powerful, Swift, returning to England for the
summer of 1702, and owning the authorship, came closer to the seats
of power than he had ever come before. “My Lords Somers and Halifax,
as well as the Bishop ... desired my acquaintance, with great marks
of esteem and professions of kindness--not to mention the Earl of
Sunderland, who had been of my old acquaintance. They lamented that
they were not able to serve me since the death of the King; and were
very liberal in promising me the greatest preferments I could hope for,
if ever it came in their power. I soon grew domestic with Lord Halifax,
and was as often with Lord Somers as the formality of his nature (the
only unconversable fault he has) made it agreeable to me.”
Swift was, in his relations with the great, no country parson tickled
with a dinner. He stood before them like a man there in his own right.
“It was then I first began to trouble myself with the difference
between the principles of Whig and Tory; having formerly employed
myself in other and, I think much better, speculations. I talked often
upon this subject with Lord Somers; told him that, having been long
conversant with the Greek and Roman authors, and therefore a lover of
liberty, I found myself much inclined to be what they called a Whig in
politics; and that, besides, I thought it impossible, upon any other
principle, to defend or submit to the Revolution. But as to religion
I confessed myself to be a high churchman, and that I did not conceive
how any one who wore the habit of clergyman could be otherwise.” A high
churchman, and a haughty one. Though he might then prefer the Whigs to
the Tories, his real allegiance was to the Church. He served it when he
served whatever party favoured it. He was above the battle in which he
fought. He looked for large rewards with the assurance of his calling
as well as with the arrogance of his temper.
But Somers and Halifax were not in office. Swift went back to Ireland,
unrewarded, for another year of rueful banishment.
When he once more returned to England late in 1703, he seemed, to his
own pride, to have done nothing in the world. Yet he had an honourable
profession. He had an income for life. He had a mistress, of a kind,
who was young, beautiful, witty, and devoted. He had ruling friends
in Ireland and was beginning to have others in England. He was the
author of the most brilliant prose satire so far written in English,
and the master of the best prose of his age. Something boundless in
him, however, or something perverse, kept him from more than brief
satisfactions. Content to be a clergyman, he could not wait to be
a bishop. Untroubled by debts, he longed for a fortune. Happy with
Stella for a friend, he would not commit himself to her in marriage.
A scholar, a clergyman, and a wit, he cared little for the company of
his fellows. He thought the scholars pedantic, the clergymen dull and
tattling--
“_And deal in vices of the graver sort,
Tobacco, censure, coffee, pride, and port_”--
the wits frivolous and feeble. His satires had remained for half a
dozen years unpublished. He could be at ease only among the great,
and even there he did not lend himself wholly to their purposes. He
stood solitary on the peak of his own nature, his scornful eyes raking
mankind.
From this height he flung down his _Tale of a Tub_ early in 1704.
Mankind at large took no notice. Mankind at large has no eyes to
read with, no skin to feel a lash with. As Swift himself said in his
preface, “Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an
offence by any, since every individual person makes bold to understand
it of others, and very wisely removes his particular part of the burden
upon the shoulders of the world, which are broad enough, and able to
bear it.” Nor did the pedants and wits flinch at his thrusts much more
sharply, since he named few of them, than the nameless run of men. The
pedants might grumble, but the wits, who also liked to sting, could
take a craftsman’s pleasure in the accurate rapture of his stinging.
Swift of course pricked no active folly and stabbed no active vice
by his satires. Fools did not read him. Wise men were only confirmed
in their wisdom. His hatred caused less reformation than delight. The
delight which men felt in his arguments and allegories, so cutting,
so copious, so downright, so fanciful, was the delight which men feel
when one of them uses words as most of them have not the gift to do,
only the bursting desire. Swift, who scorned to be a man of words, was
accepted for his words. Somers, to whom the book was dedicated, and
Halifax, who knew how to put such skill as Swift’s to use, repeated
their promises. They did not tell him it was not his counsel that they
needed.
Yet while he was making friends he was also making enemies. Mankind was
not a sensitive body, able to feel in any of its parts any indignity to
the whole. The pedants or the wits were not. The Church was. It thought
of itself as marked off from the world, like its consecrated altars, to
be approached with reverence. There were, as Swift contended, abuses
of religion which called for satire, and which could be satirized
without any hurt to true religion. But the line between the uses and
the abuses of religion was often faint. One man’s devotion could be
another man’s fanaticism. Firmness could become stoniness and never
know it. Laughter, even when aimed at what was false, could wound in
two directions. Swift, high on his peak of scorn, let his laughter fall
with a harsh inclusiveness.
When, for instance, he touched the doctrine of transubstantiation,
he traced its origin to a noisy episode in the career of the Catholic
among the three brothers of the allegory. Peter, having no mutton for
his dinner, served up a brown loaf to Martin and Jack. He told them
it was mutton. They refused, at first politely and then heatedly, to
believe him. “‘Look ye, gentlemen,’ cries Peter in a rage, ‘to convince
you what a couple of blind, positive, ignorant, wilful puppies you
are, I will use but this plain argument: By G----, it is true, good,
natural mutton as any in Leadenhall market; and G---- condemn you both
eternally if you believe otherwise.’ Such a thundering proof as this
left no farther room for objection.”
Here was rough language to use so near the communion table, no matter
what the precise beliefs of the bystanders regarding the disputed
miracle. A total unbeliever could not have spoken more gratingly. Even
in that vigorous age a clergyman had to watch his voice if he was
to become a bishop. Swift might please the lords temporal with his
originality and force, but he could not please the lords spiritual
without orthodoxy and decorum. Within the Church he was always, from
the time _A Tale of a Tub_ was understood to be by him, a churchman
suspected of irreverence--or, as he phrased it, “the sin of wit.”
This dangerous book, published with mystifying stealth, Swift never
acknowledged, though after a scuffle of ascriptions it settled down at
his door. The authorship was first his humorous and afterwards his
cautious secret. When, having published the satires, he followed his
letter to Tisdall back to Ireland, he was still barely known in London
for his genius. There are almost no records of where he had lodged, of
how he had spent his days and nights. A dim figure, flashing seldom out
of the dark.
One anecdote, of the many which have gathered about his magnetic
reputation, may tell something like the truth. For days after his
earliest appearance at the St. James’s coffee house, the story goes,
he did not speak. He would come in, lay his hat on a table, walk
conspicuously up and down the room for an hour, take up his hat, pay
his money at the bar, and leave without a word. At last, one evening,
he looked several times at a man in boots, who seemed to have just come
from the country. The mad parson, as he was already called, went up
to the booted stranger and said abruptly: “Pray, Sir, do you remember
any good weather in the world?” The man stared but said he thanked
God he could remember a great deal of good weather. “That is more,”
said Swift, “than I can say. I never remember any weather that was not
too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. But, however God Almighty
contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.” Then again he
took his hat and left.
The next three and a half years in Ireland saw him more at ease with
more companions. At Laracor he planted, besides willows, holly, apple,
cherry trees. He fished for eel and pike and trout. “I carry double the
flesh that you saw about me at London,” he wrote to John Temple, who
had invited him to revisit Moor Park in 1706; though Swift insisted
that he had, to such a sign of fortune, “no manner of title, having
neither purchased it by luxury nor good humour.” His congregation might
be no more than fifteen persons, “most of them gentle and all simple,”
but he had numerous friends in the region of Laracor.
In Dublin he could talk clerical politics with the Primate of Ireland
and the Archbishop of Dublin, both Swift’s friends, and secular
politics with the Lord Lieutenants to whom he was chaplain. At the
Castle he was cheerful with the successive households of Ormond and
Pembroke. With a small circle of Pembroke’s intimate guests he punned
tumultuously and infectiously. He drank wine, took snuff, and gambled
for trifling stakes. He was often at the house of the dean of St.
Patrick’s, who gave good dinners to bishops and to clergymen willing to
become bishops. There was also a sort of club with which various women,
Stella among them, met on Saturday evenings, for dinner and ombre or
picquet. Stella was liked and admired by Swift’s friends. If he was
lonely and restless he had his genius to blame.
4
He was lonely and steadily more restless. The idyl of Laracor was too
mild to hold him. The work and play of Dublin were too small. Just
before his fortieth birthday he left Ireland, in the party of Lord
Pembroke, again to try at fortune on fortune’s own ground. He had at
least the advantage, now, of being on an official errand to the great
men whose favour he personally needed. Commissioned by his Archbishop,
he was to act as lobbyist in the matter of the First Fruits. Queen
Anne, devoted to the interests of the Church, had given up her right to
the first year’s income of every ecclesiastical benefice in England.
The Irish Church hoped she would extend the same bounty to Ireland.
The whole sum at issue was not above a thousand pounds a year.
Swift, proud as a mountain, took up the little cause. It brought him
a new experience of the delaying, forgetting, bargaining habits of
politicians.
He had to move softly to avoid the jealousy of Pembroke, who as viceroy
of Ireland was the proper channel for any such appeal to the Crown. At
first Somers, though influential with the Ministry, was still out of
office. He referred Swift to Sunderland, son of Swift’s former friend,
son-in-law of Marlborough, and a Secretary of State. Sunderland said he
would go with Swift to Godolphin, Lord Treasurer, but ended by merely
making an appointment. Godolphin declared “he was passive in this
business,” which was really Pembroke’s responsibility. Swift consulted
Pembroke, and was told that everything depended on the Queen. Passed
shiftily from hand to hand, Swift saw that none of the great men was
interested, though none of them would take the trouble to tell the
truth. After a year he heard from Pembroke that the grant had been
made, and a little later learned that Pembroke had lied. But the Earl
of Wharton had been appointed Lord Lieutenant. Swift went to Wharton,
“which was the first attendance I ever paid him.” Wharton had nothing
for him but cloudy excuses and windy promises. “I took the boldness to
begin answering those objections, and designed to offer some reasons;
but he rose suddenly, turned off the discourse, and seemed in haste;
so I was forced to take my leave.” At a subsequent meeting at Somers’s
house Wharton “received me as dryly as before.”
Thereafter Swift hated Wharton as he never hated another man. All the
exasperations of a wasted year came together into a single fury which,
when Swift had a chance, poured itself out into the abuse which has
made Wharton better known for it than for all he ever did himself.
Lobbying for the First Fruits, Swift looked out also for his own
advancement. But he went through his visit to England always in
suspense and never satisfied. First he hoped to be chosen Bishop of
Waterford. He believed he had the favour of Somers and possibly of
the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen. Another clergyman of the
Pembroke circle was preferred. “Now I must retire to my morals,” Swift
wrote a friend, “and pretend to be wholly without ambition and to
resign with patience.... And after this if you will not allow me to
be a good courtier, I will pretend to it no more. But let us talk no
further on this subject. I am stomach-sick of it already.” Then he
hoped to be sent as secretary to Vienna, if Lord Berkeley should go
as ambassador. “I shall be out of the way of parties until it shall
please God I have some place to retire to a little above contempt.” The
Ministry promised Swift the post, but Berkeley’s age and ill health
kept him in England. Swift would have accepted a Dublin parish which
had been proposed to him; the living did not fall vacant. He might have
been expected to be chaplain to Wharton, as he had been to Ormond and
Pembroke; he was not chosen. He was urged by the Archbishop of Dublin
to try for the deanery of Down; Wharton’s chaplain became dean. On
the day, after Swift’s return to Ireland, when the Bishop of Cork was
dying of spotted fever Swift wrote to Halifax asking for his interest
with Somers, now Lord President, for this bishopric. Wharton, according
to Swift, engaged his credit to get the place for a clergyman who
had married a “cast wench” of Wharton’s--although the Queen, indeed,
prevented such a scandal. To make the story as complete as a farce,
the clergyman in question may have been that junior dean of Trinity
College before whom, on his knees, Swift on his twenty-first birthday
may have had to beg pardon for being contemptuous and contumacious.
Yet towards the close of his cycle of anxiety Swift could write
ingratiatingly to Halifax: “I must take leave to reproach your Lordship
for a most inhuman piece of cruelty, for I can call your extreme good
usage of me no better, since it has taught me to hate the place where I
am banished, and raised my thoughts to an imagination that I might live
to be some way useful or entertaining if I were permitted to live in
town.... I have been studying how to be revenged of your Lordship, and
have found out the way. They have in Ireland the same idea with us, of
your Lordship’s generosity, magnificence, wit, judgment, and knowledge
in the enjoyment of life. But I shall quickly undeceive them by letting
them plainly know that you have neither interest nor fortune which you
can call your own; both having been long made over to the corporation
of deserving men in want, who have appointed you their advocate and
steward, which the world is pleased to call patron and protector. I
shall inform them that myself and about a dozen others kept the best
table in England, to which because we admitted your Lordship in common
with us, made you our manager, and sometimes allowed you to bring
a friend, therefore ignorant people would needs take you to be the
owner.... Pray, my Lord, desire Dr. South to die about the fall of
the leaf, for he has a prebend of Westminster which will make me your
neighbour, and a sinecure in the country, both in the Queen’s gift,
which my friends have often told me would fit me extremely.”
And Halifax could magniloquently answer: “I am quite ashamed for myself
and my friends to see you left in a place so incapable of tasting you;
and to see so much merit and so great qualities unrewarded by those
who are sensible of them. Mr. Addison and I are entered into a new
confederacy, never to give over the pursuit, nor to cease reminding
those who can serve you, till your worth is placed in that light
where it ought to shine. Dr. South holds out still, but he cannot
be immortal. The situation of his prebendary would make me doubly
concerned in serving you, and upon all occasions that shall offer
I will be your constant solicitor, your sincere admirer, and your
unalterable friend.”
Handsome compliment, handsome acknowledgment, and no real confidence
between the writers. What Swift actually thought of Halifax was that
he gave deserving men “only good words and dinners; I never heard him
say one good thing, or seem to taste what was said by another.” What
Halifax actually thought of Swift must be guessed at. But no patron
used to “soft dedication all day long” could quite relish a follower so
bound to lead. Swift would never be as remote from politics as Newton,
whom Halifax had made Warden and then Master of the Mint, nor as
obliging and grateful in the midst of politics as Addison, who through
Halifax had entered the busy circle where few men went long without
places. Halifax and Somers and Pembroke no more than Godolphin and
Sunderland and Wharton by this time could imagine in Swift’s hand the
supple, obedient pen which they required.
There was proof to support their doubts. They had been willing to
bargain with him, or through him with the Irish Church, about the
First Fruits. Let the Church consent to the repeal of the Sacramental
Test which excluded Dissenters from office. The Whigs, standing to
gain votes from the pleased Dissenters, would then be better able to
persuade the Queen to widen her bounty. The repeal would mean only the
surrender of a principle, and it would save the Irish clergy a thousand
pounds a year. Swift, without a thought of accommodating the ministers
or even of earning their possible rewards, had instead written too
vigorously, and not surreptitiously enough, against the repeal. He saw
it as a selfish experiment which England wanted to try first on Ireland
before trying it nearer home. “If your little finger be sore,” he said
to England with a snarling humility, “and you think a poultice made of
our vitals will give it any ease, speak the word and it shall be done.”
Somers, Lord President, and Wharton, Lord Lieutenant, from that moment
must have known that Swift was not their man. The sin of wit they could
forgive, and indeed encourage. They could neither encourage nor forgive
the sin of such independence. Braver statesmen than they might have
hesitated to keep a tiger on the hearth.
Swift, learning on this visit to England that the great are not always
to be trusted by the proud and truthful, should have become finally
aware that he was not a Whig, perhaps that he was not a Tory. As a
churchman he stood not so much between the parties as above them both.
“I should think,” he said in one of the pamphlets in which he stretched
the muscles which the ministers would not let him use, “that ... to
preserve the constitution entire in Church and State, whoever has a
true value for both would be sure to avoid the extremes of Whig for the
sake of the former and the extremes of Tory on account of the latter.”
Arbitrary power he still hated and looked upon “as a greater evil than
anarchy itself; as much as a savage is in a happier state of life
than a slave at the oar.” Yet his passion was, as always, for order.
The legislature, he thought, could not be placed in too many hands;
the administration, however, not in too few. Sects might indeed be
tolerated in a state, but “a government cannot give them too much ease
nor trust them with too little power.” Order, as he understood it,
was the consequence of virtue among the people, and therefore a higher
concern than politics could reach to. It was the natural concern of the
Church.
Like a churchman, like a magistrate, Swift proposed that manners be
reformed by the advancement of religion. If the Queen should make
stricter demands upon all who came near her, “morality and religion
would soon become fashionable court virtues, and be taken up as the
only methods to get or keep employments there; which alone would have
mighty influence upon many of the nobility and principal gentry.” The
example of the Court would go far to reform the town, and the town
the rest of the kingdom. “How ready ... would most men be to step
into the paths of virtue and piety if they infallibly led to favour
and fortune!” Swift could even contemplate “something parallel to the
office of censors anciently in Rome,” which in England he believed
“could be easily limited from running into any exorbitances.” British
Catos could reduce the vices of the army, the universities, the law
courts, the public service, the press, the taverns. And the Church
could provide the Catos if clergymen, ceasing to live so largely to
themselves and with each other, would “make themselves as agreeable as
they can in the conversations of the world.”
Nor did Swift stop with arguing soberly like a parson. He went on to
irony, like a wit. He could not feel sure, he said, that Christianity
had to be abolished, as the world thought. He meant, of course,
“nominal Christianity, the other having been for some time wholly laid
aside by general consent.” Nominal Christianity had its uses. It gave
men a God to revile, when otherwise they might abuse the government.
It furnished each parish with at least one person who could read and
write. It kept ten thousand men so poor that they were healthy, and
good for the breed. It set one day in seven aside for pleasure, extra
business, gallantry, and sleep. It made certain kinds of behaviour,
because they were forbidden, more enticing. It gave the vulgar various
pleasant superstitions with which to amuse the children and to shorten
tiresome winter nights. It sustained the spirit of opposition, of
eccentricity, of fanaticism. However, Swift ended, if Christianity was
to be abolished, so ought every vestige of religion for fear there
might still be some restraint laid on human nature. Let freedom come,
even though bank stocks might fall one per cent.
5
No matter what grave words he used, Swift had to set them to witty
tunes. They came, it seems, so effortlessly that he undervalued them,
overlooking them in the thunder of his will. He valued only what he did
not have: influence at a Court he despised, power over men he hated.
Addison could call him, for his wit, “the greatest genius of his age.”
Swift wanted, as Addison had elsewhere rhetorically put it, to ride in
the whirlwind and direct the storm. There was no help for his charging
desire. His will was as truly his nature as his wit was.
Yet it was by his wit that he won his hearing, and from the coffee
houses. While he waited, impatient, for a single minister to listen to
his business of the First Fruits, he amused his idleness with a hoax
that ran through the town like a scandal. He predicted, in a burlesque
almanac, that the astrologer John Partridge, who was a cobbler as
well as a quack, would “infallibly die upon the 29th of March next,
about eleven at night, of a raging fever.” When the time came Swift
no less circumstantially announced the death, though it had, he said,
occurred four hours earlier than he had calculated. Partridge, still
as much alive as ever, complained. The coffee houses laughed. There
were other pamphlets on the hoax, in one of which Congreve had a hand.
For more than a year Swift now and then worried his victim. Richard
Steele thought the joke so good, and the name of Isaac Bickerstaff,
which Swift used, so noted, that he made the imaginary Bickerstaff the
apparent editor of the _Tatler_. Another of Swift’s hoaxes had a small
success. Reading to the Countess of Berkeley, he had grown tired of the
pompous commonplaces which soothed her in her favourite author, and had
relieved his boredom by tricking her with a meditation which he had
written upon a broomstick. Now the story got out, and the wits laughed
at the trick and at the parody, which was seen in manuscript and may
have been printed.
In both hoaxes the delighted wits felt not only Swift’s comic skill
but the imperious insolence which lay behind it. Here was a man whose
lightest words left a mark wherever they touched. Here was a learned
clergyman who, as the _Tatler_ said, “writes very like a gentleman and
goes to heaven with a very good mien.”
Much of Swift’s life during this stay in England was off the stage of
the wits, nearer officials or drawing-rooms. When he first arrived he
lived in Leicester Fields at the house of Sir Andrew Fountaine, who had
been in Ireland with Pembroke and had found Swift the best pastime of
that wilderness. Afterward in lodgings in the Haymarket, Swift might
have letters sent to him at the St. James’s coffee house or at Steele’s
office in the Cockpit, but when he was kept indoors, as he once was by
broken shins, even Somers came to visit him. During 1708 he was a guest
of both Berkeley and Pembroke in the country. After the hot summer in
town he spent six weeks in Kent and at Epsom, where the Court then
retired to drink the fashionable waters.
In town he was often--much too often for his future peace--at the house
of Mrs. Vanhomrigh, the widow of a former lord mayor of Dublin, who
had come to London about the same time as Swift. She had a daughter
Esther, who claimed to be two years younger than she was, and to have
been born, as she probably had not, on St. Valentine’s day. Through the
Vanhomrighs, friends of Fountaine, Swift met other women, ladies of the
Court, toasts of the clubs, whom he fascinated by his grave impudence.
He insisted that each lady who desired to know him should make the
first advances. When Anne Long, toast of the Kit-Cat club, protested
and held out, Swift drew up a formal treaty of which the plain terms,
with whatever circumlocutions, were that she must within two hours make
“all advances to the said Doctor that he shall demand ... purely upon
account of his great merit.” The lady yielded. Swift might be resisted
when he worked, not when he played.
He had the further comfort that Stella and Rebecca Dingley were in
England for a part of his stay. “Mrs. Johnson,” he wrote to Ireland,
“cannot make a pun if she might have the weight of it in gold.” He
did not introduce her to his new acquaintances, the one Esther to the
other, any more than he told the world his moody secrets. Stella was
his secret. Though he saw her in London and wrote to her after she
returned to Ireland, there are no records of her in his letters except
a mention of her dog. “Pug is very well, and likes London wonderfully,
but Greenwich better, where we could hardly keep him from hunting down
the deer.”
What came nearest to satisfying Swift in 1708 was Addison. When last
Swift had been in London, in the winter of 1703-1704, he had been
still unknown, and Addison, just back from his travels, had been,
thanks to the bad fortune of the Whigs, in eclipse. Swift, leaving his
satires behind him, had gone off to his banishment. Addison, writing a
panegyric on Marlborough on account of Blenheim, had stayed to become
famous over night. When now they met in February, Swift was still
without any influence except that of his own genius, and Addison was
an under-secretary of State. But there was no difference in their
affections. Addison was seldom vain with Swift, whom he called “the
most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of
his age.” Swift was seldom proud with Addison. “If,” he later wrote,
back in Dublin, “you will come over again, when you are at leisure, we
will raise an army and make you king of Ireland.”
They met like princes, with exchange of gifts. Swift gave Addison,
along with Steele, some of his moral fury, which they tempered to
moral irony in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, preferring to laugh, not
scourge, virtue into fashion. Addison gave to Swift some of his smooth
taste with which to revise the story of Baucis and Philemon which Swift
had written in his gruff exile. Too proud to be stubborn about his
verses, Swift, as he loosely said, let Addison “blot out fourscore, add
fourscore, and alter fourscore” of the lines. The poem suffered, but
Swift did not. He would, and did, write more smoothly if it were more
pleasing to Addison. In time Swift came to be aware of Addison’s vanity
and caution, but for months he had no reservations. Addison was Swift’s
first equal friend. Temple had been his teacher, Stella his pupil, his
friends in Ireland mere accidental comrades, the Whig lords and bishops
too great to be easy with. Addison had wit, charm, learning, virtue,
“worth enough,” Swift said, “to give reputation to an age.”
All the spring and summer of 1708 they often dined together, at
different taverns, frequently with Steele or Congreve, with Ambrose
Philips, Addison’s little Whig poetical friend, or with Robert Hunter,
the friend of Swift who was going to be governor of Virginia and who
threatened to make Swift his bishop in a country even more desolate
than Ireland. But it was best when the two could, as Swift wrote to
Hunter, “steal to a pint of bad wine, and wish for no third person but
you.” When Addison went off to Ireland as secretary to Wharton, with a
salary of two thousand pounds a year and a sinecure worth four hundred
more, Swift, still without promotion or much hope, felt no envy. In
Ireland, when he had gone there in June 1709, he buried himself with
Stella at Laracor and left it for Dublin, with its abominable Lord
Lieutenant, only to see Addison.
IV
MAN IN POWER
1
Fortune prefers to turn its wheel to the advantage of men with the
talent for success, but now and then the geniuses, uncompromising,
wilful, audacious, swing upward in the sun. A revolution of the wheel
in London called Swift back in September 1710.
He did not know when he went what he was going to. He was almost
resigned to Laracor and Dublin. “I never went to England with so little
desire in my life,” he wrote to Stella the day after he landed. “I am
perfectly resolved to return as soon as I have done my commission,
whether it succeeds or no.” He had less hope as to the success of his
errand, which again was the First Fruits, than the Irish bishops who
this time had authorized him. Still, there was a chance. Sunderland
and Godolphin had been shaken from their posts by an upheaval among
the Whigs, and Wharton had hurried over to serve his party with his
gift for wheedling and rounding up the voters. Other ministers might
be more favourable to Swift’s embassy. Other friends might help him to
promotion.
At London he found everything “turning upside down; every Whig in
great office will, to a man, be infallibly put out; and we shall have
such a winter as has not been seen in England.” It was already such a
September as Swift had never seen. “The Whigs were ravished to see me,”
he wrote within two days of his arrival, “and would lay hold on me as a
twig while they are drowning, and the great men making me their clumsy
apologies” for their former negligence.
But Swift had come into a new world of new men. Somers was about to be
dismissed. Halifax had only his sinecure. Pembroke was in retirement.
Wharton was to lose his place to the Duke of Ormond. Sunderland had
given way to Henry St. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) as principal
Secretary of State. Godolphin had yielded the rank of first minister
to Robert Harley (later Earl of Oxford), Chancellor of the Exchequer
though not yet Lord Treasurer. The men of Swift’s old world were now
able to do for him as little as they had been willing to do before.
Only the hated Wharton “affected very much to caress” him. Somers was
merely plausible. Halifax moved too slowly. Godolphin, whom Swift saw
at once, was so “short, dry, and morose” that the suitor was enraged.
On his third day in London Swift spent the evening at the St. James’s
coffee house with a friend. “For an hour and a half we talked treason
heartily against the Whigs, their baseness and ingratitude. And I
am come home rolling resentments in my mind and framing schemes of
revenge.”
In spite of the drowning Whigs, and in spite even of Addison, again
in England and at first as affectionate as ever, Swift began to look
towards the Tories. A week, and he was dining with his old friend
of Kilkenny and Trinity, Francis Stratford, a merchant who, “worth
a plumb,” was “lending the government forty thousand pounds.” Two
weeks later, and Swift expected any day to be taken to Harley by
one of Stratford’s friends, Erasmus Lewis, who was one of Harley’s
favourites. “I am already represented to Harley,” Swift told Stella,
“as a discontented person that was ill used for not being Whig enough;
and I hope for good usage from him. The Tories dryly tell me I may make
my fortune if I please; but I do not understand them, or rather, I do
understand them.”
Halifax asked Swift to dinner at Hampton Court and “would have kept me
tomorrow to show me his house and park.... Lord Halifax began a health
to me today. It was the resurrection of the Whigs, which I refused
unless he would add their reformation too.” The next night “after I had
put out my candle ... my landlady came into my room with a servant of
Lord Halifax, to desire I would go dine with him” the following day.
“But I sent him word I had business of great importance that hindered
me.... And today I was brought privately to Mr. Harley, who received
me with the greatest respect and kindness imaginable. He has appointed
me an hour on Saturday at four, afternoon, when I will open my business
to him.”
Exactly a month after Swift reached London he handed Harley his
memorial regarding the First Fruits. “Mr. Harley came out to meet me,
brought me in, and presented me to his son-in-law ... and his own son
and, among others, Will Penn the Quaker. We sat two hours, drinking ...
good wine ... and two hours more he and I alone.” Harley read Swift’s
memorial “and put it in his pocket to show the Queen; ... told me he
must bring Mr. St. John ... and me acquainted; and spoke so many things
of personal kindness and esteem for me that I am inclined half to
believe what some friends have told me, that he would do everything to
bring me over.... He has desired me to dine with him on Tuesday, and
after four hours being with him set me down at St. James’s coffee house
in a hackney coach. All this is odd and comical if you consider him
and me. He knew my Christian name very well.... And now I am going in
charity to send Steele a _Tatler_, who is very low of late.”
Swift, writing that night to Stella, thought that even the _Tale of a
Tub_ might no longer be held against him, as he guessed it had been.
“They may talk of the _you know what_; but, gad, if it had not been for
that I should never have been able to get the access I have had; and
if that helps me to succeed, then that same thing will be serviceable
to the Church.”
Odd and comical, Harley, no more concerned about the bounty of the
First Fruits than about the orthodoxy of the _Tale_, had set out to
seduce the most lively and deadly wit in England. At the price of a
thousand pounds a year, cut out of the Queen’s income, Swift would be a
bargain for her minister.
The minister did not lag in his pursuit. On Tuesday, presenting Swift
to Sir Simon Harcourt, the Attorney-General, Harley said he had
broached the matter of the First Fruits to the Queen, and asked Swift
to dinner on Sunday. On Sunday Harley said the Queen had consented to
the grant. Matthew Prior, a better poet than Addison, dined with them.
After dinner, when Lord Peterborough had come in, the talk shifted to
“a paper of verses” on Godolphin which had just been printed. “Lord
Peterborough would let nobody read them but himself; so he did; and Mr.
Harley bobbed me at every line to take notice of the beauties. Prior
rallied Lord Peterborough for author of them; and Lord Peterborough
said he knew them to be his; and Prior then turned it upon me, and I on
him. I am not guessed at all in town to be the author.” Lucky Tories,
to blunder into such a moving compliment? Or wily Tories, used to poets?
There was some formal delay in the execution of the grant, but Harley
was still, Swift wrote, “so excessively obliging that I know not what
to make of it, unless to show the rascals of the other party that they
used a man unworthily who had deserved better.” St. John, using Swift
“with all the kindness in the world,” said he had never read anything
so good as certain verses by the Tories’ new poet which Swift himself
did not “reckon so very good neither”; and pleased Swift further by
telling him that “Mr. Harley complained he could keep nothing from me,
I had the way so much of getting into him.” Erasmus Lewis tactfully
hinted that Swift, not quite comfortable at leaving his old friends,
might save Steele his post as commissioner of stamps. Swift went to
Addison, as the discreeter person, but “party had so possessed him that
he talked as if he suspected me, and would not fall in with anything I
said. So I stopped short in my overture, and we parted very dryly....
When shall I grow wise? I endeavour to act in the most exact points of
honour and conscience, and my nearest friends will not understand it
so.”
It was not in Swift to be patient. Two weeks later he inquired of
Stella: “Why should the Whigs think I came to England to leave them?
Sure my journey was no secret. I protest sincerely I did all I could
to hinder it ... although now I do not repent it. But who the devil
cares what they think?... Rot ’em for ungrateful dogs. I will make them
repent their usage before I leave this place.” He had already begun
to punish them. Before the end of October he had accepted the secret
editorship of the _Examiner_, the Tory weekly which he edited, and
wrote, until the following June, when, “my style being soon discovered,
and having contracted a great number of enemies, I let it fall into
other hands.”
The step cost Swift his Whig friends. In six weeks: “Mr. Addison and
I hardly meet once a fortnight.” In another month: “I called at the
coffee house, where I had not been in a week, and talked coldly a while
with Mr. Addison. All our friendship and dearness are off. We are
civil acquaintances, talk words of course, of when we shall meet, and
that’s all.” Not even the great affection between the two could hold
Swift to the Whigs. He had never been entirely a Whig, as he was not
now entirely a Tory. He was a churchman, and the Tories had done for
his Church what the Whigs had not done. He was hot for power, and the
Tories had taken him into their councils, as the Whigs had not. At last
he had found something better for him than hopes: work that seemed to
him important, recognition that seemed to him his due. For the first
time in his life his pride was asked to what he considered fit company.
Harley’s dinners were for Swift a sign that his fortunes finally stood
beside his ambition. Nor was he required to argue for principles he did
not believe in. The Tories were, it was easy for him to think, more
truly than the Whigs the party of order in Church and State. When he
had spoken his mind about the Sacramental Test a year before, the Whigs
had turned away from him, as if he were a Tory, and the Archbishop of
Dublin had written to ask “by what artifice did you contrive to pass
for a Whig.” Perhaps he had been a Tory. He would be a Tory. It was
enough for Swift, as it had been enough when he took orders, that he
was assigned a post in a cause which he thought good. He gave to his
cause all his passion, intensity, genius.
2
When Swift closed with Harley there commenced a chapter singular in
history. No other man of affairs has ever made such use of a man of
letters. At the outset Harley so misgauged his pamphleteer that after
three months he could send him a banknote for fifty pounds. It was as
if the squire had tipped the bishop. Swift was furious at “both the
thing and the manner.” He returned the money, refused to dine with
Harley the next day, and demanded satisfaction. “If we let these great
ministers pretend too much,” he wrote to Stella, “there will be no
governing them.” A week later, still unreconciled, he went to the lobby
of the House of Commons, found Harley, and sent him into the House to
call St. John, “to let him know I would not dine with him if he dined
late.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer, soon to be Lord Treasurer, ran
the errand to the Secretary of State for the vicar of Laracor. The
next day Swift told Stella he had “taken Mr. Harley into favour again.”
On Saturday of that week Swift was asked to dine with Harley in the
company of St. John and Harcourt, now Lord Keeper, and became a member
of the group which, meeting every Saturday except when the Queen was at
Windsor, informally concerted the government of the realm. Swift did
not come humbly to this cabinet. “Lord Rivers was got there before me,
and I chid him for presuming to come on a day when only Lord Keeper,
the Secretary, and I were to be there; but he regarded me not. So
we all dined together, and sat down at four; and the Secretary has
invited me to dine with him tomorrow. I told them I had no hopes they
could ever keep in but that I saw they loved each other so well, as
indeed they seem to do. They call me nothing but Jonathan; and I said I
believed they would leave me Jonathan, as they found me.”
Bullying, rallying, Swift took and kept his seat in their councils.
Together they planned the steps that were to be taken to oust the
Whigs, to get rid of the Duke of Marlborough, to bring about the peace.
The ministers devised the necessary intrigues. It was left to Swift
to master and direct public opinion with the _Examiner_ and with the
pamphlets and lampoons with which he entertained, infuriated, aroused,
and reassured the public.
The political situation was intricate in detail but simple in outline.
King William, Prince of Orange, had involved his adoptive England with
his native Holland in the Grand Alliance with Austria against France.
There had for years been a war and there was still a war, of which
some of the English were very tired. The victories of Marlborough
abroad, though gratifying, were hardly as regular as the taxes at
home. The landowners, who tended to be Tories, had begun to wonder
whether they were not paying taxes to help the bankers and jobbers, who
tended to be Whigs, reap enviable profits. Glory was something, but
it cost money. Men muttered in country houses that the Duke had been
riding his whirlwind a long time. They had noted that Godolphin, who
as Lord Treasurer had furnished the war chest, was father to one of
Marlborough’s sons-in-law; and that Sunderland, Secretary of State, was
a son-in-law himself. They had noted, also, that the Duchess, Mistress
of the Robes and, it was said, mistress of Godolphin, did more than
anybody else to make up the Queen’s mind for her. Civil affairs, hardly
less than military, were in the hands of Marlborough, who notoriously
wanted to be Captain-General for life. A little more, and England would
be mortgaged to the Marlboroughs.
Such a prospect ruffled and alarmed the Tories. Marlborough, veering
like Godolphin with the Parliamentary wind, had formerly called himself
a Tory, but now called himself a Whig. The Whigs must share the blame
for the prolongation of the war, for the increase in taxes and prices.
All that was insular in England resisted this burden laid upon it for
the possible benefit of the Continent. The Whigs had been kind to the
Dissenters to gain their support in Marlborough’s enterprises. All that
was orthodox in England resented this comfort given to the sects which
threatened the unity and authority of the Church. Finding itself on the
dizzy brink of altruism and liberalism, England had shrunk back in a
passion for its good old virtues, its stout old order.
The change had not come of itself or from the disinterested conclusions
of philosophers, but had been contrived and forwarded by Harley and
St. John. Both of them had owed much to Marlborough, who in 1704
had approved of Harley for Secretary of State and of St. John for
Secretary at War. Under the wings of that eagle they had plotted
against his feathers. St. John had gifts of eloquence and manipulation
which made him incomparable in the House of Commons. Harley, enough
duller than his colleague to be more widely trusted, was adroit on the
backstairs. Through his cousin Abigail Hill (Mrs. Masham), for whom
the Duchess of Marlborough, also a cousin to the lady, had obtained a
post in the Queen’s bed-chamber, his whispers reached his sovereign.
Marlborough and Godolphin, becoming aware of a secret influence
against them, had in 1708 traced it to Harley and had forced him out
of the cabinet, along with St. John. Harley had continued to whisper.
The Queen, resenting the constant pressure from the Duke and Duchess,
observing the popular unrest, and still listening to the whispers,
had been convinced that the Whigs threatened the peace of the State
and the safety of the Church. From this had come the overthrow of the
Godolphin ministry and the sudden rise to power of the Tories under the
whispering Harley and the glittering St. John. It was policy to win to
their side the wit whom they most desired to have with them and most
feared to have against them.
The arguments put forth may have been suggested by any of the three
men. Of the three, however, only Swift can be credited with the high
scorn, the grave ingenuity of this polemic. It was he who, though he
thought Marlborough “as covetous as hell and ambitious as the prince of
it,” kept his friends from pressing the Duke too hard. Swift had the
tact to be content with pointing out how much it was to the interest of
the commander-in-chief to have the war go on. Public cynicism might be
trusted to do the rest.
Nor did Swift use only arguments. He hit upon the most insidious
illustrations, such as his contrast between the rewards of a Roman
conqueror and those of the Duke. British ingratitude, Swift figured
out, had already been worth something over half a million pounds to
the British general. Roman gratitude, “which a victorious general
received after his return from the most glorious expedition, conquered
some great kingdom, brought the king himself, his family, and nobles
to adorn the triumph in chains, and made the kingdom either a Roman
province or at best a poor depending state in humble alliance to that
empire,” would have amounted to less than a thousand pounds: incense,
a sacrificial bull, an embroidered garment, a statue, a trophy, copper
medals, a triumphal arch and car, and a laurel crown worth twopence.
Ingenious and insistent, Swift continued to pluck the same string until
the public could hear no other note when it heard of Marlborough. After
a year Marlborough fell, and the Duke of Ormond, whom Swift ranked next
to Oxford (lately Harley) and Bolingbroke (lately St. John) among his
friends, was put in command of the armies.
Towards the Whigs at large Swift turned an attention which was no less
masterly. They were, for him, only a brawling faction, hungry for
profits, and not more than a tenth of England. The Whigs, having made
their fortunes at the expense of the majority, meant to go on making
other fortunes, and would stop at no lying, no plotting, no uprising,
no overthrowing which might serve their factious ends. At the same
time, Swift would not admit that he was partisan. “We are unhappily
divided into two parties,” he said, “both which pretend a mighty zeal
for our religion and government, only they disagree about the means.
The evils we must fence against are, on one side, fanaticism and
infidelity in religion, and anarchy, under the name of a commonwealth,
in government; on the other side, popery, slavery, and the Pretender
from France.” Between these two extremes of Whig and Tory Swift
seemed to take his stand. Or rather, again, above both. He was still
a clergyman, who put religion first among his concerns. He was not a
politician, but the conscience of politicians. He was the conscience of
England, tight in its island, deep in its prejudices, contemptuous of
ideals and metaphysics, plain, sturdy, obstinate.
No position was so natural for Swift to take, as no position was so
effective with the voters. Oxford and Bolingbroke might work out of
sight with their intrigues. Swift never ceased to keep the eyes of
the world upon their main purposes. British purposes, for the sake
of British interests, through the exercise of British virtues. The
Revolution was achieved. The Succession was established. It was time
now to make peace with the Continent and to settle down to a British
destiny. The change must not be too precipitate. Swift wrote as firmly
against the ferocious Tories, demanding all places instantly for their
party, as against the ousted Whigs. His variety was in his art, not in
his argument. He could abuse, ridicule, hoax, lampoon, in grim prose
or easy verse. He could parade the accomplishments of the Ministry in
sober pamphlets or could raise clouds of bright dust to hoodwink the
opposition. But always he was Swift, looking down from his peak at the
whole race of mankind, only incidentally and temporarily supporting
Oxford and Bolingbroke.
Throughout the Oxford administration Swift was loyal, less out of need
than out of love. When his associates, disregarding the Grand Alliance,
made a stealthy treaty of peace with France; when, insecure in the
House of Lords, Oxford got the Queen to create a dozen Tory peers who
would know why they were peers; when England, at the treaty of Utrecht,
took the largest share of the spoils though she had tricked and
abandoned the allies: even then Swift loved his friends. Passionately
loyal, he could be affectionately blind.
In Oxford’s thick skin Swift saw a stoic dignity, and in Oxford’s
procrastination something not too far from a noble patience. “Regular
in life,” Swift described the Lord Treasurer to the Archbishop of
Dublin, “with a true sense of religion, an excellent scholar and a
good divine, of a very mild and affable disposition, intrepid in his
notions and indefatigable in business, an utter despiser of money for
himself yet frugal, perhaps to an extremity, for the public.” Nor about
Bolingbroke, libertine in thought and habit, would Swift be squeamish.
He admired that “graceful, amiable person” and that mind “which was
adorned with the choicest gifts that God hath yet thought fit to bestow
upon the children of men.” It was true that the Secretary had been “too
great and criminal a pursuer” of pleasures which could “by no means
be reconciled to religion or morals.” But, Swift explained, “he was
fond of mixing pleasure with business, and of being esteemed excellent
at both; upon which account he had a great respect for the characters
of Alcibiades and Petronius.” Could Socrates resist the charm of
Alcibiades, or Seneca the charm of Petronius?
Swift, moralist that he was, was little less susceptible to the
dissolute Secretary than to the decorous Treasurer. His affection
covered them with its flood. Bolingbroke hated Oxford, and Oxford
suspected Bolingbroke. There was harmony between them only for a few
months, if so long as that. Yet Swift, by nature so misanthropic,
by experience so wary, set out with them in what he thought was a
fellowship of love.
Though he learned better, he remained, to the end of his great episode,
somewhat at the mercy of his love. It was, of course, the corollary
of his hate. Hitherto alone with his pride in what seemed to him a
prison, he had been able to hate all those whose neglect had kept him
there. Such companions as Stella and Addison had been only alleviating
visitors. But now half the circle of his enemies had turned friends,
and had entreated him to help them. They had taken him, apparently, to
their hearts. They had let him, apparently, into their minds. They had
given him a tiger’s share not only in the battle but in the command.
Swift, all of whose emotions were profound, responded with emotions
which were simple: gratitude, fidelity, delight in effort, ardent
comradeship. He was so exultant at being delivered from his prison that
he did not notice that he had been brought out to be harnessed.
Oxford and Bolingbroke must have smiled at his generous tribute to
their virtues. Others did. When Swift wrote to Peterborough, then in
Vienna, that the ministers seemed “heartily to love one another” and
that they loved him too, Peterborough, who had been sent on an embassy
to get him out of the way of the intriguing pair, sceptically wondered
how Swift had come “to frame a system--in the times we live in--to
govern the world by love.” Oxford and Bolingbroke did not trouble
themselves over the excess of Swift’s affection, any more than they
minded his arrogance. They were men of the stormy world, determined
to get places and keep them. They worked for profit. If Swift worked
for love or hate, that was his business. He was not, perhaps, as
indispensable as the backstairs Mrs. Masham, but he could hurt the
Whigs. They gave him all the room they could spare and applauded his
blows.
Loving too much, Swift hated too much, as in his attack on the Earl of
Wharton. “He is,” Swift said, “without the sense of shame or glory as
some men are without the sense of smelling; and therefore a good name
to him is no more than a precious ointment would be to those....
“He seems to be but an ill dissembler and an ill liar, though they are
the two talents he most practises and most values himself upon. The
ends he has gained by lying appear to be more owing to the frequency
than the art of them; his lies being sometimes detected in an hour,
often in a day, and always in a week.... He swears solemnly he loves
and will serve you, and your back is no sooner turned but he tells
those about him you are a dog and a rascal. He goes constantly to
prayers in the forms of his place, and will talk bawdy and blasphemy
at the chapel door. He is a Presbyterian in politics and an atheist
in religion, but he chooses at present to whore with a Papist. In his
commerce with mankind his general rule is to endeavour imposing on
their understandings, for which he has but one receipt, a composition
of lies and oaths; and this he applies indifferently to a freeholder
of forty shillings and a privy councillor, by which the honest are
often either deceived or amused; and either way he gains his point....
With a good natural understanding, a great fluency in speaking, and no
ill taste of wit, he is generally the worst companion in the world;
his thoughts being wholly taken up between vice and politics so that
bawdy, profaneness, and business fill up his whole conversation.... As
some vain young fellows, to make a gallantry appear of consequence,
will choose to venture their necks by climbing up a wall or window at
midnight to a common wench, where they might as freely have gone at
the door and at noonday; so his Excellency, either to keep himself
in practice or to advance the fame of his politics, affects the most
obscure, troublesome, and winding paths, even in the commonest affairs,
those which would as well be brought about in the ordinary forms or
which would proceed of course whether he intervened or no.
“He bears the gallantries of his lady with the indifference of a stoic,
and thinks them well recompensed by a return of children to support his
family, without the fatigues of being a father.
“He has three predominant passions which you will seldom observe united
in the same man, as arising from different dispositions of mind, and
naturally thwarting each other; these are love of power, love of money,
and love of pleasure. They ride him sometimes by turns and sometimes
all together.... He was never known to refuse or keep a promise.... But
here I desire to distinguish between a promise and a bargain; for he
will be sure to keep the latter, when he has had the fairest offer.”
There was, Swift insisted, nothing personal in his remarks. “Whoever
were to describe the nature of a serpent, a wolf, a crocodile, or a
fox must be understood to do it for the sake of others, without any
personal love or hatred of the animals themselves.” Nor would Wharton
take it personally. “When these papers are public ’tis odds but he will
tell me, as he once did upon a like occasion, that ‘he is damnably
mauled,’ and then with the easiest transition in the world ask about
the weather or time of the day.” And in fact, when Swift encountered
Wharton at White’s chocolate house after the character was published,
“Lord Wharton saw me at the door, and I saw him but took no notice and
was going away, but he came through the crowd, called after me, and
asked me how I did.”
This was, as Swift said, “not a humour put on to serve a turn or keep
a countenance, not arising from the consciousness of his innocence or
any grandeur of mind, but the mere unaffected bent of his nature.” Yet
few moralists could have carried themselves more justly under such
abuse. Wharton needed no philosophy in the circumstances. Experience
was enough to tell him that Swift, accusing him of so finished, so
universal a villainy, had blamed him for what was remarkably near a
virtue. The victim himself looked brilliant in this glare of wrath.
Swift’s hate, in its white-hot excess, had grown creative and had
shaped a monster which had an insolent animal beauty along with its
human vices.
But not all of Swift’s victims had Wharton’s whistling unconcern. There
was the Duchess of Somerset, the red-haired Mistress of the Robes after
the Marlboroughs had gone from Court. She had disliked Swift before he
joined the Tories. With Lady Giffard, Temple’s sister, she had resented
the final volume of Temple’s memoirs in 1709. It contained reflections
on certain of the Whig lords, and Swift had published it. The Duchess,
friend to Whigs, decided that he was “a man of no principle, either
of honour or religion.” Swift, knowing this, perversely circulated a
lampoon in which he called her “Carrots” and brought up the old charge
that she had connived in the assassination of her second husband. The
Duchess, who though she had reached a third husband at fifteen had had
no other for nearly thirty years, never forgave Swift. More than any of
his enemies, more than the Archbishop of York, who inflexibly held the
_Tale of a Tub_ against him, she stood between him and the favour of
the Queen. He might serve the ministers as only he could, but he could
not become a bishop without the Queen’s approval. That, while the angry
Duchess lived, he could not get. And the Duchess outlived the Queen.
More love than he needed, more hate than he needed: these were what
hampered Swift in politics. He was impatient of craft, of what he
called “refinements.” “Whatever may be thought or practised by
profound politicians, they will hardly be able to convince the
reasonable part of mankind that the most plain, short, easy, safe,
and lawful way to any good end is not more eligible than one directly
contrary in some or all of these qualities. I have been frequently
assured by great ministers that politics were nothing but common
sense; which, as it was the only true thing they spoke, so it was the
only thing they could have wished I should not believe.” Swift did
believe it. His whole instinct was to frame clear policies and go the
straight way to work with them. In this he resembled statesmen of the
first rank. But he lacked, what statesmen of the first rank have, the
touch of dispassion in his passion. He trusted his friends more than
they deserved, because they were his friends. He worried and tore his
enemies, even when nothing was to be gained by it, because they were
his enemies. Zealous for order in the state, he could not keep order in
himself. He had the excess and disproportion of genius.
Nor did his defects reduce him merely to the second rank of
statesmen. They reduced him to the third. In the second were Oxford
and Bolingbroke. They were neither clear in their policies nor
straightforward in their methods, but they had the patience of guile,
the persistence of selfishness, the pliability of talent. Moreover,
they were men of rank and fortune, and they were in office. If at first
they were afraid of Swift, and then came to treasure his virtues, they
also found that they could, by dividing his love and hate, rule him.
After his hate had sent him out against their enemies, his love brought
him back to their leash. Let him hold himself to be their conscience.
They knew how to deal with consciences.
There is a record, written about October 1713, which painfully, almost
shockingly, places Swift in his true relations with the Ministry. The
scene is the Queen’s antechamber at Windsor.
“Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business and acted as
master of requests. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak to his
brother the Duke of Ormond to get a chaplain’s place established in
the garrison of Hull for Mr. Fiddes, a clergyman in that neighbourhood
who had lately been in gaol and published sermons to pay fees. He
was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake with my Lord Treasurer that
according to his petition he should obtain a salary of two hundred
pounds per annum, as minister of the English Church at Rotterdam. He
stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going in with the red bag to the Queen, and
told him aloud he had something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer.
He talked with the son of Dr. Davenant to be sent abroad, and took out
his pocket-book and wrote down several things as memoranda to do for
him. He turned to the fire and took out his gold watch, and telling him
the time of day, complained it was very late. A gentleman said he was
too fast. ‘How can I help it,’ says the Doctor, ‘if the courtiers give
me a watch that won’t go right?’ Then he instructed a young nobleman
that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a
translation of Homer into English verse, for which, he said, he must
have them all subscribe. ‘For,’ says he, ‘the author shall not begin to
print till I have a thousand guineas for him.’ Lord Treasurer, after
leaving the Queen, came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow
him. Both went off just before prayers.”
Painful and shocking to see a genius so happy in his business, when it
was such small business to be happy in. This was not the carriage of a
man who, for all his sporadic arrogance, would force great rewards from
his patrons.
Throughout 1711 and most of 1712 Swift worked too hard and too
exultantly to have much time for hopes. He wrote often to Stella of
his return to Ireland. Ormond might give him an addition to Laracor.
He might get a Dublin parish. When Peterborough talked of bishops and
deans Swift said his highest ambition was “to live in England, and with
a competency to support me with honour.” It was nearly enough to be
able to advance his friends. The ministers declared that Swift never
came to them without a Whig in his sleeve.
But by the third winter of his power he had begun to starve on his
diet of promises. The rumour that he had been made dean of Wells,
when he had not, fretted him. The deaneries of Ely and Lichfield were
vacant to no advantage of his. The Ministry must, he grumbled through
the winter, do something for him or he would go back to Laracor. In
January 1713 he wrote to Oxford: “I most humbly beg leave to inform
your Lordship that the dean of Wells died this morning at one o’clock.
I entirely submit my poor fortunes to your Lordship.” And Bolingbroke
wrote to Swift with a rhythmic unction: “Though I have not seen you I
did not fail to write to Lord Treasurer. _Non tua res agitur_, dear
Jonathan. It is the Treasurer’s cause; it is my cause; it is every
man’s cause who is embarked in our bottom. Depend upon it that I never
will neglect any opportunity of showing that true esteem, that sincere
affection and honest friendship for you which fill the breast of your
faithful servant.”
It was a ministerial vow. That same month the bishopric of Hereford was
filled, but not by Swift. In April, when the treaty of Utrecht had at
last been signed and Swift considered his work done, there were vacant
preferments on every tree: in England the deaneries of Wells, Ely, and
Lichfield and the canonry of Windsor; in Ireland the bishoprics of
Raphoe and Dromore. Not one of them fell to Swift. Oxford shuffled.
Bolingbroke had Swift to dinner. The Archbishop of York shook his head.
The Duchess of Somerset hissed. The Queen held out. She would not have
Swift a dean or canon in England, or a bishop anywhere. Help came from
the Duke of Ormond. If the present dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin
might be made Bishop of Dromore, Swift could have that deanery. The
Queen consented.
Oxford suddenly became eager to keep Swift in England. Let him be
prebendary of Windsor. “Thus,” wrote Swift, “he perplexes things. I
expect neither. But I confess, as much as I love England, I am so
angry at this treatment that if I had my choice I would rather have
St. Patrick’s.” Did he remember that his old friend Robert Hunter, now
governor of New York, had lately written that he wished Swift could
come to be bishop there? No matter. The appointment was patched up, and
Swift became, as he was to be for the rest of his life, the Dean of St.
Patrick’s.
“All that the Court or Ministry did for me was to let me choose my
station in the country where I am banished.” He was not even allowed
to become Historiographer, to chronicle the reign which he no longer
influenced.
This was the career and this the climax of Swift’s life among the
great. After a summer in Ireland he was, it is true, called back to
London for the fourth and last winter of the Ministry, but his own
future was settled, and his time was chiefly taken up with keeping the
peace between Oxford and Bolingbroke. They were, it seemed to Swift, “a
ship’s crew quarrelling in a storm, or while their enemies are within
gunshot.” The fellowship of love had ceased to exist even for Swift’s
loyal eyes.
The victors were wrangling over the spoils. What about their futures?
The Queen would not live for ever. The Elector of Hanover, upon whom
the Succession had been fixed, was certain to be favourable to the
Whigs. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke, both secretly, were dealing with
the Pretender, willing to ruin the Succession if they could bring in
a prince favourable to Tories. Meanwhile the mutinous Bolingbroke had
determined to be first minister himself. Out-intriguing Oxford, he
won Oxford’s cousin, now Lady Masham, to another allegiance. London
and Windsor buzzed and rumbled. All winter and all spring Swift
struggled to divert or pacify the wranglers. Their war went on. Swift,
despairing, took to a dull, angry retreat in Berkshire. In July 1714
Oxford was forced to break the white staff of his office. Bolingbroke,
however, did not supplant him. In five days the Queen died. The
Whiggish Elector was to become George I. Marlborough, returning from
the Continent, entered London with two hundred men on horseback, drums,
and fifty coaches.
Swift, in a letter to Oxford, said farewell to such power as he had
had. “In your public capacity,” he told him, “you have often angered
me to the heart, but as a private man, never once.... I will never
write to you, if I can help it, otherwise than as to a private person,
nor allow myself to have been obliged by you in any other capacity.
The memory of one great instance of your candour and justice I will
carry to my grave: that having been in a manner domestic with you for
almost four years, it was never in the power of any public or concealed
enemy to make you think ill of me, though malice and envy were often
employed to that end. If I live, posterity shall know that and more,
which ... is all the return I can make you. Will you give me leave to
say how I would desire to stand in your memory: as one who was truly
sensible of the honour you did him, though he was too proud to be vain
upon it; as one who was neither assuming, officious, nor teasing, who
never wilfully misrepresented persons or facts to you, nor consulted
his passions when he gave a character; and lastly, as one whose
indiscretions proceeded altogether from a weak head, and not an ill
heart? I will add one thing more, which is the highest compliment I can
make: that I was never afraid of offending you, nor am I now in any
pain for the manner I write to you in. I have said enough; and, like
one at your levee, having made my bow, I shrink back into the crowd.”
3
Hardly had Swift reached London in 1710 when he sat four hours one
morning to the fashionable Charles Jervas, who, having begun a
portrait on Swift’s previous visit to England, now gave the picture
“quite another turn.” Perhaps he put the gleam of higher prospects into
those eyes which in their extreme moods ranged from fire to stone.
Full-lidded, bold even under the dark and heavy brows, humorously
but not secretively averted, they seemed in the portrait to glance
at something and to stare at everything. Swift’s periwig did not
conceal his proud, arched forehead. His clerical bands plumped out his
well-nourished, worldly chin, double and dimpled. His nose was both
inquiring and commanding, ready to be contemptuous at the first excuse.
But about his mouth there were the signs of another nature, sensitive,
nervous, never calm. The corners would twitch easily, the lips tremble:
the lower disciplined to a counterfeit of straightness, but the upper,
short and friendly, indisciplinably sweet.
This was the face of a man whom nothing on earth could over-awe, yet
who would assert himself too much out of mere touchiness. He would
frighten others yet would hold them, fascinated, dangerously near him.
He would give and receive much love and little happiness. This was the
face that was to be among the best known in London for four years, this
stout body somewhat taller than most men’s, this mind more restless
than any man’s.
[Illustration: Jonathan Swift
_During the Oxford Ministry_]
The Jervas portrait was but the notation of a few hours. The true
likeness of Swift in his days of power he drew himself, in the
journal-letters to Stella which he posted whenever his sheet of paper
was full. Before he left his bed in the morning, after he got into
it at night, at any time during the day, Swift set down, with minor
interruptions, a continuous account of all, or almost all, he did. He
took it for granted that Stella was interested in whatever concerned
him. His journal was partly news sent from the great world to a friend
waiting in a small one, but it was partly, also, a detailed memorandum
written as for his other self. He could be confiding, indiscreet,
coarse, boastful, hilarious, tender, admonitory, savage, absurd,
pouring out what came to him as it came. He wrote now as if this were a
letter to Stella and Rebecca Dingley both, or to either of them; now as
if it were a conversation with himself, in the knowledge that they, and
only they, would hear.
The journal was so intimate that he fell often into a foolish “little
language,” like a giant talking to a baby with what he imagined was the
baby’s vocabulary and pronunciation--or like a lover using silly words
in despair of finding any that were serious enough. Swift’s baby-talk
was a joke kept up between him and Stella, a note of tenderness struck
in this way for want of a chance to sound it with a voice. But he did
not talk down to her. He told her his life.
“I was this morning at ten at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison’s play,
called _Cato_, which is to be acted on Friday. There were not above
half-a-score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish
enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing
them; and the drab that acts Cato’s daughter out in the midst of a
passionate part and then calling out ‘What’s next?’ The Bishop of
Clogher was there too, but he stood privately in a gallery. I went to
dine with Lord Treasurer, but he was gone to Wimbledon, his daughter
Carmarthen’s country seat, seven miles off. So I went back and dined
privately with Mr. Addison, whom I had left to go to Lord Treasurer.
I keep fires yet; I am very extravagant. I sat this evening with Sir
Andrew Fountaine.... It is rainy weather again; nevle saw ze rike
[never saw the like]. This letter shall go tomorrow. Remember, ung
oomens, it is seven weeks since your last, and I allow oo but five
weeks. But oo have been galloping in the country.”
The variety of Swift’s days was in the persons he met and talked with.
His habits had the regularity which goes with being virtuous and poor.
He made, however, no virtue of his poverty. “I love these shabby
difficulties when they are over; but I hate them, because they arise
from not having a thousand pounds a year.”
Though he liked best to make his own meal of a single dish, he despised
a skimpy table. Though he liked to walk, and took a chair or coach
only in bad weather, he minded the expense when he had to ride, not
his loss of an opportunity to trudge like a hero. He thought he was
extravagant about fires, but when he shivered in his lodgings it was
because coal cost money, not because shivering exalted his spirit. He
avoided fruit, he more or less gave up snuff, he put water in his wine.
All these asceticisms were for the sake of his treacherous health, as
was the brandy that he drank, as were the pills and purges, the drops
and ointments with which he fought his many attacks of giddiness. But
never once did he rejoice in the endurance of a saint or the glory of a
martyr. He did not relish even the fasts of his Church. “I hate Lent.
I hate different diets, and furmity and butter, and herb porridge, and
sour devout faces of people who only put on religion for seven weeks.”
Swift was a man of his world in his frank admiration for power,
station, wealth, comfort, elegance, urbanity, learning, wit, manners.
He had come to England to seek a better society than there was
in Laracor or Dublin. His natural handicaps--passion, intensity,
genius--were enough. He would not pretend that his lack of fortune was
a merit. He complained of it, desired to mend it, and kept the best
company he could.
Each morning in his various London lodgings Patrick, the servant whom
Swift had brought over from Ireland, woke his master early, not always
the first time he called. Swift’s sleep was heavy but disturbed. “I
was dreaming the most melancholy things of poor Ppt [Poppet], and was
grieving and crying all night.” Awake, he was likely to stay in bed
till the room was warm, writing, often still by candlelight, as if
Stella and Dingley were beside him. “Morning. I am going this morning
to see Prior, who dines with me at Mr. Harley’s; so I can’t stay
fiddling and talking with dear little brats in a morning, and ’tis
terribly cold. I wish my cold hand was in the warmest place about you,
young women. I’d give ten guineas upon that account with all my heart,
faith. Oh, it starves my thigh. So I’ll rise and bid you good morrow,
my ladies both, good morrow. Come, stand away, let me rise. Patrick,
take away the candle. Is there a good fire? So--up adazy.”
Shaving, every second or third day; brandy, on days when he was giddy;
breakfast of milk porridge or a cake Stella’s mother had made him:
these got Swift ready for his day. He might write at home, all day
when he was busiest, sending out for a chop and a pot of ale for his
dinner. But usually he put on periwig, boots, and black gown with
pudding-sleeves, and left the house, walking, about his pleasure or
his affairs. Perhaps he had morning tea or chocolate with some of the
ladies who delighted in his fame and insolence. Perhaps he conferred
with his printers in the City. Perhaps he waited on one of the lords of
his political fellowship. There were many amusements in London. “Lady
Kerry, Mrs. Pratt, Mrs. Cadogan, and I in one coach, Lady Kerry’s son
and his governor and two gentlemen in another, maids and misses and
little master (Lord Shelburne’s children) in a third, all hackneys,
set out at ten o’clock this morning from Lord Shelburne’s house in
Piccadilly to the Tower, and saw all the sights, lions, etc., then
to Bedlam; then dined at the chop-house behind the Exchange; then to
Gresham College (but the keeper was not at home); and concluded the
night at the puppet-show, whence we came home safe at eight.”
The pivot of Swift’s day was dinner, usually at three. First with
Whigs, then with Tories, he dined through the town and out of it.
“That’s something charms me mightily about London, that you go dine
a dozen miles off in October, stay all day, and return so quickly.
You cannot do anything like this in Dublin.” Within a month after the
Whigs clutched at him he had more invitations than he had afternoons.
He was a wit and scholar; he was a man of influence with the Ministry.
Noblemen with axes to grind begged him to come to their tables. Men
less interested in his power no less eagerly took up the fashion.
Obliging hosts urged him to make his own terms.
“I dined today with a lady of my acquaintance, who was sick, in her
bedchamber, upon three herrings and a chicken; the dinner was my
bespeaking.” “Dr. Arbuthnot ... yesterday gave me my choice of place,
persons, and victuals for today. So I chose to dine with Mrs. Hill
... Mrs. Masham’s sister; no company but us three, and to have a
shoulder of mutton, a small one; which was exactly, only there was too
much victuals besides, and the Doctor’s wife was of the company.” Nor
did Swift make terms only with friends of his own level. Bolingbroke
“showed me his bill of fare to tempt me to dine with him. Poh, said I,
I value not your bill of fare. Give me your bill of company.” About
both the food and the other diners Swift was firm. At the Earl of
Abingdon’s “we had nothing but fish.... Our wine was poison.... His
carps were raw, and his candles tallow. He shall not catch me in haste
again.” And again: “I left a friend’s house today where I was invited,
just when dinner was setting on, and pretended I was engaged, because I
saw some fellows I did not know.”
Better a slice of mutton in his lodgings than indifferent or too
numerous dishes; better his own company than that of “persons unknown,
as bad, for aught I know, as your deans, parsons, and curates.” Swift
rode high, and all Tory London encouraged him.
At many houses where he dined the guests stayed on for the evening.
Swift chose generally to leave at six, to walk in Hyde Park, to visit
other friends, to sit in a coffee house--though after a few months
of his influence with Oxford he gave up coffee houses as too public.
Many of his evenings he went home to write, at first an occasional
_Tatler_, then his weekly _Examiner_, afterwards his pamphlets, at
any time his stinging verses. In his lodgings he might find that
Patrick had forgotten the fire or had neglected to buy coal or had
gone off with the key with which Swift’s papers were locked up. There
would be abuse and apology, neither of which meant anything. The most
regular interruptions of Swift’s evenings came from Oxford, who kept
“cursed hours,” sometimes did not dine till five, and liked Swift to
be with him at supper. “I hate these suppers mortally, but I seldom
eat anything.” Such evenings with Oxford were likely to be long and
convivial, and wearing to Swift, who drank little, ate less, liked as
well to sit beside card-players as to play himself, and was soon bored
by ordinary conversation.
Yet when he had reached his bed and had put on his nightgown and velvet
nightcap--the fur-trimmed one which Dingley sent was “too little and
too hot”--he remembered, no matter how late it was, the journal.
“Pshaw, I must be writing to those dear saucy brats every night,
whether I will or no, let me have what business I will, or come home
ever so late, or be ever so sleepy; but an old saying and a true one,
“‘_Be you lords or be you earls,
You must write to naughty girls._’”
Widely as Swift dined, three days a week were for much of the year
given to his special friends. On Sunday, after going to Court,
which he said served him “as a coffee house,” he usually dined with
Bolingbroke. “Mr. Secretary had too much company with him today; so
I came away soon after dinner. I give no man liberty to swear or talk
bawdy, and I found some of them were in constraint, so I left them to
themselves.” On Saturday Swift dined with Oxford for what the first
minister called his “whipping day”--the day, that is, when the informal
cabinet reviewed the past week and designed the next. “This company,
at first, consisted only of the Lord Keeper Harcourt, the Earl Rivers,
the Earl of Peterborough, Mr. Secretary St. John, and myself; and
here, after dinner, they used to discourse and settle matters of great
importance. Several lords were afterwards, by degrees, admitted....
These meetings were always continued except when the Queen was at
Windsor; but, as they grew more numerous, became of less consequence,
and ended only in drinking and general conversation.” The matters
of great importance were the Ministry’s policies and intrigues. The
general conversation has been lost.
Swift told Stella only that he and his friends had talked, seldom
what they had said. Once, not on a Saturday, when he had opposed the
appointment of a certain commissioner to Spain because he was a “most
covetous cur,” Swift reported the argument with Oxford. “I went on
and said it was a shame to send him; to which he agreed, but desired
I would name some who understood business and do not love money, for
he could not find them. I said there was something in a treasurer
different from other men; that we ought not to make a man a bishop
who does not love divinity, or a general who does not love war; and I
wondered why the Queen would make a man lord treasurer who does not
love money.... Is it not silly to write all this? But it gives you an
idea what our conversation is with mixed company.” When the Earl of
Nottingham had deserted to the Whig side “Lord Treasurer was hinting as
if he wished a ballad was made on him, and I will get up one against
tomorrow.... I was this morning making the ballad, two degrees above
Grub Street ... and then went to dine with our Society.... The printer
came before we parted, and brought the ballad, which made them laugh
very heartily a dozen times.”
The Society which laughed at the ballad claimed the third fixed
dinner of Swift’s week, Thursday, though only during the session of
Parliament. Bolingbroke seems to have planned the club in June 1711,
when Swift was in the country with Lord Shelburne. It was to be small,
weighty, and decent, without the extravagance of the Kit-Cat or the
drunkenness of the Beef-Steak, was to be made up of men of wit and men
of influence, and was to have for its two great ends “the improvement
of friendship and the encouragement of letters.” Swift, back in town,
found himself among the original twelve members and at once the
eagerest. “If we go on as we begin,” he wrote to Stella, “no other
club in this town will be worth talking of.” The men of wit were Swift,
Prior, and John Arbuthnot, the Queen’s physician. There were three
times as many men of influence. Oxford and Harcourt were excluded,
since the club meant to appeal to them for patronage. But their sons
were chosen, and Oxford’s son-in-law, Viscount Dupplin, and Samuel
Masham, the husband of Oxford’s whispering cousin. There were, also,
Bolingbroke, Sir Robert Raymond, Solicitor General, Allen Bathurst,
George Granville, Secretary at War, and Sir William Wyndham.
The members, putting off their titles when they dined, called each
other “Brother.” Each in turn was president of the dinner and paid the
bill until all had had turns, after which the charges of each dinner
were divided among them. They dined sometimes at the houses of the
members, more often at taverns. The dozen or so brothers added after
the first twelve were all on the side of influence rather than of
wit. The richer members, who were men of influence, ran up the cost
of their dinners so that the poorer, who were men of wit, could not
afford it. Yet Swift, though he winced at his bill for seven guineas,
for a year and a half was happy. Power and learning had sat down in an
equal brotherhood. When the Duke of Ormond brought his brother the Earl
of Arran, who was not a member, to a meeting against all order, Swift
opposed his election to the face of the Earl and the Duke. But Swift
was exultant when four of his brothers were among the twelve peers whom
Oxford packed into the House of Lords: the son-in-law Dupplin, the
cousin-in-law Masham, Bathurst, and Granville.
[Illustration: Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa)
_In Ireland_]
It took Swift a year and a half to realize how much more skill than
he the men of influence had at getting what they wanted. Having odd
wells of enthusiasm in him, he had imagined that a club of politicians
could be as much interested in the encouragement of letters as in the
improvement of friendship.
The day after the first meeting in June 1711 he urged Oxford to leave
Congreve, though a Whig, in his post. Oxford said he would. Swift
hurried off to Congreve with the news. “So I have made a worthy man
happy, and that is a good day’s work.” And Swift that same day had
larger plans. “I am proposing to my Lord to erect a society or academy
for correcting and settling our language, that we may not perpetually
be changing as we do. He enters mightily into it.” The pamphlet on
“correcting, ascertaining, and improving the English tongue” was the
only piece of writing Swift ever published with his name. He wrote
again like a governor, demanding that the language be orderly and
stable, regulated by a lawful academy. He wrote, no less, like a
brother of the Society, appealing to Oxford to become the patron of
worthy, needy men of letters. Nothing came of these proposals, though
Oxford brimmed with promises.
Swift undertook to raise money among the members. In February 1713 he
had collected sixty guineas and was “to give them away to two authors
tomorrow; and Lord Treasurer has promised us a hundred pounds to reward
some others.” The sixty pounds went to the two authors, but there was
another in worse need. That was “little Harrison,” a young Oxford poet
for whom Swift had one of his profound, inexplicable tendernesses. “I
went in the morning, and found him mighty ill, and got ... an order for
a hundred pounds from the Treasury to be paid him tomorrow; and I have
got him removed to Knightsbridge for air.” The next day: “I ... desired
a friend to receive the hundred pounds for poor Harrison, and will
carry it to him tomorrow morning.” The day after that: “I took Parnell
this morning, and we walked to see poor Harrison. I had the hundred
pounds in my pocket. I told Parnell I was afraid to knock at the door;
my mind misgave me. I knocked, and his man in tears told me his master
was dead an hour before.... Lord Treasurer was much concerned when I
told him. I could not dine with Lord Treasurer nor anywhere else, but
got a bit of meat toward evening.”
This pathetic episode, hardly more than a touch of melodrama in the
general drama of Swift’s venture, cut him more sharply than his own
mounting disappointment. He had thought that though he might not
help himself he might at least help others. Now it seemed he could
not do even that. He had only kept a few Whig poets in their places.
His scheme for an academy which was to honour and establish letters
among the English was still a mere scheme somewhere on the wind. The
Ministry which he had served was not, after all, to be renowned for its
patronage to learning. The man of wit had looked vainly to the men of
influence.
What Swift, whose pride played tricks with his vision, did not see was
that he had exploited his wit much as Oxford had exploited all the wit
at his command. Oxford had used such men of letters as could be bent
to his political concerns. Swift had bent his talents to pamphlets and
lampoons about the most temporary matters. From Prior he had learned to
write verse more lightly as from Addison he had learned to write more
smoothly. Swift had poured his tremendous prose on the ground, careless
what became of it. Obsessed with the desire for power, he had tried to
win it by such force as politicians use, not by the art natural to him;
among his pretended brothers the Dupplins and Mashams, not among his
true friends the Arbuthnots and Popes.
4
During his final winter in England Swift turned to his true friends.
It was not because he had found where he belonged. It was because he
knew he had failed to belong elsewhere. He was not a bishop. He was
not even an English dean. He was only a great writer, author of a great
satire, making his first plans for the greatest of satires, meditating
a revenge. But his revenge hardly went, that year, beyond a prospectus.
He and Arbuthnot had taken up the rising young poets Parnell, Gay,
and Pope. All five met Saturday evenings at Arbuthnot’s rooms in St.
James’s Palace, where the Scriblerus Club, as they called themselves,
plotted a burlesque biography which was to ridicule false learning.
Oxford had called Swift Dr. Martin, “because martin is a sort of a
swallow, and so is a swift.” From that had come the name of Martinus
Scriblerus, a phantom pedant whose career the Club was to trace through
all his foolish blunders. The leader seems to have been Arbuthnot.
“To talk of Martin in any hands but yours,” Swift wrote to him, “is a
folly. You every day give better hints than all of us together could
do in a twelvemonth.... Pope, who first thought of the hint, has no
genius at all to it, in my mind. Gay is too young. Parnell has some
ideas of it, but is idle. I could put together, and lard, and strike
out well enough. But all that relates to the sciences must be from
you.” Arbuthnot wrote the history of Martin’s youth and education so
wittily that Sterne later pilfered from it for his history of Tristram
Shandy. Pope, hunting among contemporary poets for examples of bathos,
“the art of sinking in poetry,” took the first steps in his war upon
the dunces. Swift was to exhibit Martin on his travels, and had already
thought of taking him among pigmies, among giants, among fantastic
scientists.
The break in the Ministry and the death of the Queen scattered the
Scriblerus Club. Though the members often spoke of it in their letters,
the treatise remained fragments. “I must be a little easy in my mind
before I can think of Scriblerus,” Swift wrote to Pope. It was not
merely an uneasy mind which kept Swift from going on with the project.
Whether or not he was yet aware of it, the scheme was too small for
him. He could no longer be content, as he might have been in the days
of the _Tale of a Tub_, to ridicule pedants.
Swift certainly was not aware, at the Saturday meetings of the Club,
that his friends had by nature a better art than he could ever learn:
the art of valuing their best gifts most, the art of being satisfied
to be themselves. What he did with them he thought of as play. His
work, he thought, was his efforts, vain as they were, in behalf of
Oxford and Bolingbroke. He stood between the ministers and the poets,
eager to be generous. “Of all the world,” Pope wrote, “you are the man,
without flattery, who serve your friends with the least ostentation.
It is almost ingratitude to thank you, considering your temper.” Swift
introduced Parnell to the ministers and interested Bolingbroke in
Parnell’s poetry. Swift helped Gay to his post as secretary with the
envoy to Hanover. Swift got for Pope’s translation of Homer such a list
of subscribers as no book had ever had in England. Swift struck the
vein which in Arbuthnot “lay like a mine in the earth, which the owner
for a long time never knew of.” But Swift did not take a benefit from
their examples.
How could he? Parnell was humble and drifting. Gay was sensual and
lazy, ready to be any man’s dependent, troubled only because patrons
were too few. Pope was first and last a poet who schemed, fought, and
lived for his art, as Swift for action. Arbuthnot was a man of learning
and judgment, of whom Swift said that he had “more wit than we all
have” and Pope said that in wit and humour he was “superior to all
mankind”; but Arbuthnot was not ambitious or misanthropic. He might
scorn the world, but he amply took it as it came. Of all the patterns
by which these others shaped their lives, not a single pattern fitted
Swift.
When, after a summer spent in dejected, furious retirement at Letcombe
in Berkshire, writing various apologias for the fallen Ministry,
Swift went back to Ireland in September 1714, he was beaten but not
reconciled. His impulse was still towards the central fountains of
honour and profit and power. His obsessive desire to master and direct
had not, after all his disappointments, left him in even a sullen
peace. Having been beaten, and not reconciled, he could not study his
failure in a clear light. He did not understand that with his gifts,
wit and learning, passion and intensity and genius, he had been at a
disadvantage with men who had wealth and office, and that though he
could pass them in the long run, he could not be immediately equal
with them. The fault, as he explained it to himself, did not lie in
his passion to do what he was not chiefly designed to do, nor in the
incompetence and deviousness of his political associates, nor in the
catastrophe of the Queen’s death. It lay, he somehow concluded, in the
very constitution of human life.
Let virtue work and sweat as it would to bring order out of the dirty
chaos, nothing permanent could come of it. For a time a few resolute
men might hold up the dreadful weight with their shoulders. But if
there should be one tremor, the momentary pattern would collapse and
the parts of it return to their obstinate disorder. There was no hope.
Scorn and hate were all that any virtuous or reasonable man could feel
towards mankind.
V
DEAN AND PATRIOT
1
Jeers followed Swift out of England, and jeers greeted him in Ireland.
Dublin was full of Whigs. Laracor, which he had kept along with his
deanery, was desolate. “I would retire too, if I could,” he wrote after
a month to Bolingbroke, “but my country seat, where I have an acre
of ground, is gone to ruin. The wall of my own apartment is fallen
down, and I want mud to rebuild it and straw to thatch it. Besides,
a spiteful neighbour has seized on six feet of ground, carried off
my trees, and spoiled my grove.... I have not fortitude enough to go
and see those devastations. But, in return, I live a country life in
town, see nobody, and go every day once to prayers; and hope, in a few
months, to grow as stupid as the present situation of affairs will
require. Well, after all, parsons are not such bad company, especially
when they are under subjection; and I let none but such come near me.”
So a banished general might have said it was not so bad to spend his
time drilling a squad of militia in a distant province.
“You are to understand,” Swift wrote after ten months to Pope, “that I
live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house. My family consists of a
steward, a groom, a helper in the stables, a footman, and an old maid
who are all at board wages, and when I do not dine abroad or make an
entertainment, which last is very rare, I eat a mutton pie and drink
half a pint of wine. My amusements are defending my small dominions
against the archbishop and endeavouring to reduce my rebellious
choir.” So a deposed prime minister might have turned his hand to the
government of a village.
Swift did not neglect his chores. He set to work to subdue the “three
and twenty dignitaries and prebendaries” who made up his chapter at
St. Patrick’s. The chapter yielded. He began to resist his superiors,
particularly the bishops who had deprived him of credit for the grant
of the First Fruits. The bishops became wary. Even in Laracor, where
Swift was only vicar, he demanded better manners from the Welsh bishop
of the diocese, and, somewhat later, wrote to him as vicars seldom
write to bishops: “I am only sorry that you, who are of a country famed
for good nature, have found a way to unite the hasty passion of your
own countrymen with the long, sedate resentment of a Spaniard; but I
have an honourable hope that this proceeding has been more owing to
party than complexion.” Though Swift refused for half a dozen years to
mix in the business of the world which had defeated him, he was, from
the first, gigantic and ominous in his exile.
There was need of caution. During his stay in England he had got out
of touch with Irish affairs, as well as out of sympathy. London had
run him into debt. As dean and vicar he was to have about six or seven
hundred pounds a year when he could get them: an income which made him,
he said, the poorest man in Ireland who dined off plate and the richest
who did not drive his carriage. But the installation at St. Patrick’s
cost a thousand pounds and several stringent years. The Whigs suspected
Swift, like the late ministers, of disloyalty to George I. The
suspicion was absurd. “I look upon the coming of the Pretender,” Swift
said, “as a greater evil than any we are likely to suffer under the
worst Whig ministry that can be found.” Yet when Oxford, Bolingbroke,
and Ormond--“three persons from among the rest of mankind on whose
friendship and protection I might depend, whose conversation I most
valued and chiefly confined myself to”--were charged with the treason
of plotting to bring the Pretender in, when Ormond and Bolingbroke
escaped to France and Oxford went to the Tower, Swift shared their
odium.
The authorities, intercepting letters sent to him, had a chance to
read nothing more treasonable than these words from Ormond: “We have
no new favourite, nor never can. You have left so sweet a relish
by your conversation upon all our pleasures that we cannot bear the
thoughts of intimacy with any person.” With the wives of Bolingbroke
and Ormond Swift carried on a guarded correspondence. To Oxford, in
the Tower, he wrote without reserve, making him “the humblest offers
of my poor service and attendance”--attendance, that is, in prison if
Oxford would permit it. “It is the first time I ever solicited you in
my own behalf, and if I am refused I think it will be the first request
you ever refused me. I do not conceive myself obliged to regulate
my opinions by the proceedings of a House of Lords or Commons; and
therefore, however they may acquit themselves in your Lordship’s case,
I shall take the liberty of thinking and calling you the ablest and
faithfulest minister, the truest lover of your country, that this age
hath produced.” Oxford’s son kept the letter “as a family monument.”
Oxford himself acknowledged it two years later.
While the Jacobite odium hung over Swift he declared, not quite in
earnest, that he would hide himself away in Guernsey or Wales for the
rest of his life. The world was too hateful to live in. Yet what most
distressed him was his grief over the friends with whom he could no
longer be “familiar and customary.” “When I leave a country without
a probability of returning,” he wrote to Pope, “I think as seldom as
I can of what I loved or esteemed in it, to avoid the _desiderium_
which of all things makes life most uneasy.” And to Arbuthnot he wrote:
“Writing to you would make me stark mad. Judge his condition who has
nothing to keep him from being miserable but endeavouring to forget
those for whom he has the greatest value, love, and friendship.”
His friends would not let him sink into such a gulf. “Never,” Arbuthnot
answered him, “repeat that melancholy, tender word, that you will
endeavour to forget me. I am sure I never can forget you till I meet
with, what is impossible, another whose conversation I can delight
so much in as Dr. Swift’s.... That hearty, sincere friendship, that
plain and open ingenuity in all your commerce, is what I am sure I can
never find in another man. I shall want often a faithful monitor, one
that would vindicate me behind my back and tell me my faults to my
face.” Pope wrote to him of “the constant esteem and affection I am
both obliged and inclined to have for you,” and said he regarded him
“as a friend in another world,” much as he regarded his patron saint.
Bolingbroke wrote that for a half hour’s conversation with Swift he
would “barter whole hours of life.” For a year or more Swift could
hardly bring himself to reply. Then, however, the rigour of his despair
began to leave him, his wit to come out of the lair where it had sulked.
To Pope, in 1716, Swift pointed out the use of fools, who, in his
opinion, were “as necessary for a good writer as pen, ink, and paper.”
He could take enough interest in wit to propose to Gay the subject of
another pastoral. “What think you of a Newgate pastoral, among the
whores and thieves there?” In 1717 he wrote once more to Addison,
now Secretary of State, congratulating Addison upon his post and the
Whigs for having chosen one man on his merits. In 1718 Swift wrote to
Oxford’s son that time had sweetened him. “My servants tell all our
neighbourhood that I grow gentler every day, and am content only to
call my footman a fool for that which when you knew me first I would
have broke his head.” And in December 1719 Swift wrote to Bolingbroke a
letter in which his humour played again over his passion.
“I can now express in a hundred words what would formerly have cost me
ten. I can write epigrams of fifty distichs which might be squeezed
into one. I have gone the round of all my stories three or four times
with the younger people, and begin them again. I give hints how
significant a person I have been, and nobody believes me. I pretend
to pity them, but am inwardly angry.... If I boast of having been
valued three hundred miles off, it is of no more use than if I told
how handsome I was when I was young.... If I can prevail on any one
to personate a hearer and admirer, you would wonder what a favourite
he grows. He is sure to have the first glass out of the bottle and
the best bit I can carve. Nothing has convinced me so much that I
am of a little subaltern spirit, _inopis atque pusilli animi_, as to
reflect how I am forced into the most trifling amusements to divert the
vexation of former thoughts and present objects.”
In another man this might have sounded like humility. In Swift it has,
somehow, the imagined sound of a searchlight falling into a dark corner.
He was now almost Swift again. Looking back over his career as a wit
he wrote an ironic letter of advice to a young poet, assuring him that
poetry did not demand religion or learning or even sense of those who
practised it. Ireland, he argued, must have a Grub Street. Ireland must
have a poet laureate, a professor of poetry, a city bard for Dublin, a
poet in fee for every parish. It might have more. “What if every one so
qualified were obliged to add one more than usual to the number of his
domestics, and besides a fool and a chaplain (which are often united
in one person) would retain a poet in his family?” Looking back over
his career as a parson Swift wrote a sober letter of advice to a young
clergyman. To him, not to the poet, Swift said that “proper words in
proper places make the true definition of a style.”
Both these letters dealt with what for Swift was play. He resumed his
work in a pamphlet urging all the Irish, as a protest against the
ruinous export laws, to make a “universal use of Irish manufacture,”
“utterly rejecting and renouncing everything wearable that comes from
England.” Officials fumed. He was, they claimed, trying to divide the
two kingdoms. The printer was brought to trial. When the jury acquitted
him the Lord Chief Justice sent them back nine times, till they were
willing to leave the verdict to the mercy of the judge. Though the
case was dropped when the next Lord Lieutenant came over, the damage
was done. Swift, having once more tasted Whig blood, was on his way to
becoming an Irish patriot.
2
But before he gathered all his forces he had to go through his final
conflict with Stella’s rival. The drama reaching its climax was already
much too long.
He had met Vanessa (Esther Vanhomrigh) early in 1708 in London, where
her mother was living with her children. It pleased the mother to
call the daughter younger than she was, and it did not displease
the daughter. She was a sleepy girl, still, at twenty, undecided
between the nursery and the drawing-room, moody, idle, intelligent.
Swift, at first considering her a child, discovered in her a mind,
and was irresistibly, humorously impelled to shape it. “She had good
principles,” he wrote three years later, “and I have corrected all
her faults.” She had, however, the passion of sleepy women, not the
obedience of Stella.
To that passion Swift was blind, first carelessly, then deliberately.
No doubt he felt it. He had put his entire energy into his pride. His
senses, no matter how cold towards women, must have learned that the
relationship with Stella, no matter how close and kind, was sometimes
dry and mild. She was nearly a wife, and some routine had got into
their companionship. Vanessa was younger. Vanessa was new. Swift, for
all his prudence, enjoyed the tumult in her disposition. Because he
held her, as he seems always to have done, at a safe arm’s-length, he
was obtuse to her eagerness. Obtuse and insufficiently concerned. Being
forty, he could not quite resist such warmth from a girl, did not have
quite the courage to put out such a fire or leave it. Too scrupulous
or too temperate to make the full use of Vanessa’s passion, he went on
idling within its perilous range. He was surprised when he found that
he had on his hands a mistress as extraordinary as the wife he had in
Ireland.
Stella the extraordinary wife. Vanessa the extraordinary mistress.
Swift the extraordinary husband and lover. No other terms will bound
the extraordinary triangle. Gossip then and gossip since has wasted its
strength in trying to find out whether Swift was technically lover or
husband to either of the women. What if he was? What if he was not? The
drama remains the same.
Stella was for nearly forty years, child and woman, “the truest, most
virtuous and valuable friend that I,” Swift said, “or perhaps any
other person, ever was blessed with.” Call Stella his wife or be
pedantic. Vanessa was for fifteen years his occasional companion, his
delight, his torment, to whom he wrote--in bad French--that there was
no merit nor any proof of his good taste in his finding in her all that
nature had given any mortal in the way of honour, virtue, sense, wit,
tenderness, agreeableness, and firmness of spirit. Call Vanessa his
mistress or be pedantic. One side of Swift looked towards a wife, one
towards a mistress. He maintained between them a singular course, but
it was no more singular than his character. He was, after all, only one
man loved by two women.
The friendship begun in 1708 between Swift and Vanessa, anxious to be
possessed but willing to be taught, was kept up during that stay in
England and, by letters, during his next absence in Ireland. When he
returned to become a Tory in 1710 he had so lavish a welcome from the
Vanhomrighs that their house became almost his. He lived near them,
dined with them often and then more often, and had a small room there
in which to read and write.
Stella, hearing about them, seems to have sniffed. “You say they are
of no consequence,” he answered her. “Why, they keep as good female
company as I do male. I see all the drabs of quality at this end of the
town with them.” He spoke in his journal rather of the mother or of the
whole family than of Vanessa.
When, having taken to Chelsea in the spring of 1711, he walked more
or less daily to London and back, he kept his best gown and periwig at
the Vanhomrigh house, and called twice a day to change. Vanessa, with
the family, possibly visited him in Chelsea, as she probably did at
Kensington in the summer of the year after. The Vanhomrighs certainly
visited Swift at Windsor in September 1712, and Vanessa was on some
score disappointed. “Why then,” he wrote, “you should not have come,
and I knew that as well as you.”
So far any strong feelings there may have been in either of them had
not risen into words. He teased her for her dawdling, for her chiding,
for her jealousy of her younger sister, for her habit of coaxing him
for political secrets. She complained, rather childishly, of his
neglect of her when he was out of London. Their letters might have been
between Swift and any young woman of his acquaintance.
But when he went to Ireland in June 1713, sick of England, Vanessa
could not endure the stern break which suited him. The four letters
she wrote before she got an answer were disconsolate. “I find no
conversation on earth comparable but yours.” She had heard of his
illness. “Oh! what would I give to know how you do at this instant.
My fortune is too hard. Your absence was enough, without this cruel
addition.” “How could you be so cruel, to defer telling me the thing
of the world I wished most to know? If you think I write too much,
your only way is to tell me so, or at least to write to me again,
that I may know you don’t quite forget me; for I very much fear that
I never employ a thought of yours now, except when you are reading my
letters, which makes me ply you with them.... If you are very happy it
is ill-natured of you not to tell me, except ’tis what is inconsistent
with mine.”
Swift could not mistake this last clause. In seven words Vanessa made
plain that she was wondering whether he could be happy without her,
asking whether he was by any dreadful chance happy with some one else,
announcing that she thought of him and her as having their happiness in
common. His answer put cold oceans between them.
“I had your last spleenatic letter. I told you when I left England I
would endeavour to forget everything there, and would write as seldom
as I could. I did indeed design one general round of letters to my
friends, but my health has not yet suffered me. I design to pass the
greatest part of the time I stay in Ireland here in the cabin where I
am now writing; neither will I leave the kingdom till I am called for;
and if they have no further service for me I will never see England
again. At my first coming I thought I should have died with discontent,
and was horribly melancholy while they were installing me. But it
begins to wear off and change to dulness. My river walk is extremely
pretty, and my canal in great beauty, and I see trouts playing in it.”
Her ardour, that is, he saw as spleen. He meant to forget her along
with all the others. If he were to go back it would be to politics. He
was dull but not melancholy. Vanessa would be glad to know that there
were fish in his canal.
Politics called Swift back in September, to London and to Vanessa.
There are no letters belonging to that winter, but there is the poem,
apparently written then, in which Swift told the story of Cadenus (that
is _Decanus_, dean) and Vanessa.
He began lightly, with the graces of a contemporary wit. The shepherds
and the nymphs, he said, had gone to law before the court of Venus,
the nymphs accusing the shepherds of resisting love, the shepherds
defending themselves by the counter-accusation that, thanks to the
nymphs, “modern love” was no longer
“_A fire celestial, chaste, refined,
Conceived and kindled in the mind,_”
but had become a “gross desire,” moving through caprice and folly.
Venus, unable to decide the suit, had undertaken an experiment, and
had endowed Vanessa, happily new-born, with all the virtues which the
Queen of Love--or Swift--thought most “lovely in the female kind”: “a
sweetness above all perfumes,” a cleanliness “incapable of outward
stains,” a mind as modest as “the speech of prudes,” and a “gentle,
soft, engaging air.” Not yet satisfied, Venus had fooled Pallas into
thinking that the baby was a boy, and had obtained for her the other
virtues “for manly bosoms chiefly fit”: “knowledge, judgment, wit,”
“justice, truth, and fortitude,” “honour which no breath can stain,”
“open heart and bounteous hand,” and, since “meat must be with money
bought,” as Pallas knew, “some small regard for state and wealth” and a
useful fortune of five thousand pounds.
The romantic Venus, when all this was done, had looked for the
restoration of her power. The realistic Pallas--
“_For how can heavenly wisdom prove
An instrument to earthly love?_”--
had, though enraged by the deceit, left “all things to their natural
course.” And Pallas was justified. The beaux, when Vanessa came to
town, listened to her hermaphroditic discourses--
“_Through nature and through art she ranged,
And gracefully her subject changed_”--
and thought her tiresome. The belles, disgusted by her lack of interest
in clothes and gossip, thought her old-fashioned.
“_To copy her few nymphs aspired;
Her virtues fewer swains admired._”
Vanessa hardened her heart and turned her back on the world.
Was the actual Vanessa, when she had read this far, pleased with the
figure she cut in the fable? Or did the actual Cadenus, if he read it
to her, notice that she twisted in her chair?
The verses went on. Cupid, zealous for his mother’s credit, resolved
to conquer the adamant Vanessa. At first he wasted shaft after shaft.
Cadenus, the girl’s tutor, protected her by “placing still some book
betwixt” her and the mischievous god. Cupid saw he must include the
tutor in his revenge. At a time when Cadenus--
“_Grown old in politics and wit,
Caressed by ministers of state,
Of half mankind the dread and hate_”--
was reading to her, on her demand, from his “poetic works,” Cupid shot
a dart of such length that it pierced the volume and, carrying with
it “some lines more moving than the rest,” reached Vanessa’s heart.
Unlucky Vanessa.
“_Cadenus, common forms apart,
In every scene had kept his heart,
Had sighed and languished, vowed and writ,
For pastime, or to shew his wit,
But books and time and state affairs
Had spoiled his fashionable airs.
He now could praise, esteem, approve,
But understood not what was love.
His conduct might have made him styled
A father, and the nymph his child.
That innocent delight he took
To see the virgin mind her book
Was but the master’s secret joy
In school to hear the finest boy._”
Not having seen the malevolent arrow, he was amazed at the sudden
change in his pupil. She seemed to listen more than ever but she could
not keep her mind on what he said. Modestly he conjectured that he
had bored her with studies too grave for her “tender sex and age.” He
should have known better. “Nature must be nature still.” If she would
excuse him, he would take his leave. But Vanessa, it soon appeared, had
learned what he had taught her.
“_Now, said the nymph, to let you see
My actions with your rules agree,
That I can vulgar forms despise,
And have no secrets to disguise ...
Your lessons found the weakest part,
Aimed at the head but reached the heart._”
Cadenus was overwhelmed with “shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise.”
He could not doubt her words, but he thought he must pretend to, out of
policy. The difference in their ages was too great. Love between them
would be a scandal. He told her she must not seem so tragic when, as he
knew, she was only joking.
Vanessa was too good a disputant to be put off. Reason, she insisted,
was her guide in love. In loving him she was only loving the virtues
and merits which she had observed in him and had made her own. Her love
was as strong as self-love, for it was that. She had seen him full of
“love, esteem, and awe” for dead geniuses. Surely he would have felt
the same emotions if he had lived when they did. Then consider her
case. She lived in the same age with a great genius. It was as much her
duty as her instinct to adore him.
“_Cadenus answers every end,
The book, the author, and the friend.
The utmost her desires will reach
Is but to learn what he can teach.
His converse is a system fit
Alone to fill up all her wit,
While every passion of her mind
In him is centred and confined._”
In that flood of reasons Cadenus wavered. They were his own reasons,
thrown back at him with his skill. He could not think them bad reasons.
He was proud of his pupil for her eloquence. His pride, called up
by her, stayed to caress him. If he had been preferred to all the
“colonels, lords, and beaux” by “so bright a nymph” whom he had never
thought of courting, he must have the qualities which she saw in him.
“_’Tis an old maxim in the schools
That flattery’s the food of fools,
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit._”
Cadenus could not withstand her tribute. Love, of course, was out of
the question.
“_Love why do we one passion call
When ’tis a compound of them all?
Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet,
In all their equipages meet,
Where pleasure mixed with pains appear,
Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear,
Wherein his dignity and age
Forbid Cadenus to engage._”
But he could offer friendship, “a constant, rational delight,” which
was rooted in virtue and so could last, as shifting love could not.
“Gratitude, respect, esteem”: those she could have to make up for his
want of passion. He talked high about friendship.
Vanessa brought him down. If he was to give her “devotion, duty, and
respect,” their rôles would be changed. She would, however, take him
at his word. He could be pupil and she be tutor, though she could see
already that he would have a hard time with the science she had in
mind for him. Any fool knew more than Cadenus about love.
The actual Vanessa, reading or listening, must have nodded, not with
sleep. Did she stamp when the poem broke off?
“_But what success Vanessa met
Is to the world a secret yet.
Whether the nymph to please her swain
Talks in a high romantic strain,
Or whether he at last descends
To act with less seraphic ends,
Or, to compound the business, whether
They temper love and books together,
Must never to mankind be told,
Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold._”
Did the reader or the listener follow the last lines of the fable,
in which, with another flourish of contemporary grace, Venus decided
against the shepherds, said her experiment had failed, left the world
in the hands of her son, “harnessed her doves, and flew to heaven”?
The tragedy of Vanessa was that Swift saw their drama as a comedy.
Experience had fortified him against this scene. With Stella--
“_When men began to call me fair
You interposed your timely care_”--
Swift had already played Cadenus. If his temper had ever inclined him
to love, or if his years had left him more audacity, or if he had
been less absorbed in the great campaign of his pride, he might have
responded to Vanessa--or if, of course, he had felt for her that kind
of passion which makes the sun, or the moon, of a fresh love seem to
shine on an earth just created. He met none of these conditions. He
had an impulse to regulate her mind, but not to possess her person. He
even believed that the desire he had was more important than the one
he lacked. Cold towards Vanessa as flesh and blood, he was warm only
towards the idea of being loved by her.
It was his pride which glowed. If, at the declaration, he had either
loved or hated Vanessa he would have known what to do. He would
have taken her or he would have gone from her, in the storm of any
consequences. As it was, he let his pride seduce him as she could not.
Its device was simple. It argued with him, as no doubt Vanessa did,
that her fiery need of him obliged him to be kind. He hesitated. She
was quick to snatch at her advantage. Give her the present, and she
would not worry about the future. Give her what he could give, and she
would not ask for more. These were promises which no shrewd man would
have trusted. He would have seen through them to what lay behind: the
hope that if he could be held he could be won: the assurance that
any kindness he might show would be more than kindness, would be the
selfishness which she longed to find in him. Swift was not shrewd.
Moved if not convinced, he agreed to do what he could to please her,
not realizing how much it was to indulge himself.
Then, almost as if to clear himself of a last annoying suspicion, he
told the story of Cadenus and Vanessa in the bold but humorous light in
which he saw it. Such lucidity as his would have overpowered a stronger
woman than Vanessa. Whether his version was at all points accurate or
not, she had to fall into the place which his comedy had assigned her.
But she could struggle. The rest of her life was largely taken up by
her efforts to get out of the poem and nearer to the poet. Swift,
having made the blunder of undertaking to meet love with kindness,
could never undo it. Vanessa pursued him like the ghost of his
blunder. In August 1714, when he had sullenly retired to Berkshire,
she surprised him with a visit. “You should not have come by Wantage
for a thousand pound. You used to brag you were very discreet. Where
is it gone?” As soon as he had settled in Ireland, Vanessa followed.
Her mother, having died, had left the daughters something of a fortune,
including a handsome house at Celbridge eleven miles out of Dublin.
From her house in the country or from occasional lodgings in town
Vanessa implored him.
“Once I had a friend that would see me sometimes, and either commend
what I did or advise me what to do, which banished all my uneasiness.
But now, when my misfortunes are increased by being in a disagreeable
place, amongst strange, prying, deceitful people, whose company is so
far from an amusement that it is a very great punishment, you fly me,
and give me no reason but that we are amongst fools and must submit. I
am very well satisfied that we are amongst such, but know no reason for
having my happiness sacrificed to their caprice. You once had a maxim,
which was to act what was right and not mind what the world said. I
wish you would keep to it now. Pray what can be wrong in seeing and
advising an unhappy young woman? I can’t imagine. You can’t but know
that your frowns make my life insupportable. You have taught me to
distinguish and then you leave me miserable.”
Swift answered only that he had “ever feared the tattle of this nasty
town, and told you so.” He begged her to be easy if he saw her still
less often. “These are accidents in life that are necessary and must be
submitted to.”
Vanessa was not so frantic that she could mistake disinclination for
discretion. “You bid me be easy, and you’d see me as often as you
could. You had better said as often as you could get the better of your
inclinations so much, or as often as you remembered that there was such
a one in the world. If you continue to treat me as you do you will not
be made uneasy by me long. ’Tis impossible to describe what I have
suffered since I saw you last. I am sure I could have bore the rack
better than those killing, killing words of yours. Sometimes I have
resolved to die without seeing you more; but those resolves, to your
misfortune, did not last long.... The reason I write to you is because
I cannot tell it you, should I see you. For when I begin to complain,
then you are angry, and there is something in your look so awful that
it strikes me dumb.... I say as little as ever I can. Did you but know
what I thought I am sure it would move you. Forgive me, and believe I
cannot help telling you this and live.”
There are ways to get rid of importunate Vanessas, but they are ways
unknown to men who can try to be kind to women desperately in love
with them. Swift, with his variations of temper, was the worst man in
the world for this Vanessa. In one letter he could write: “A fig for
your letters and messages”; and in another: “I cannot see you, I fear,
today, having affairs of my place to do; but pray think it not want of
friendship or tenderness, which I will always continue to the utmost.”
Vanessa, prying into every sentence to see what might be hidden in it,
turning every word over and over with a lover’s feverish research,
could arrive at the security neither of hope nor of despair.
The affair dragged on, irresistible passion matched with immovable
affection. Swift was Dean of St. Patrick’s, known to be the friend, and
by some gossips thought to be the husband, of Stella, who, though she
did not live at the deanery, was the centre of such life as it had. He
refused to give the world the least excuse for regarding Vanessa as
his mistress. He smothered her with discretion, hating it yet unable
to take a final stand at one extremity or another. When he had snubbed
her long enough to put an end to any ordinary suit, he would turn kind,
would insist upon his esteem and admiration, and so would once more
rouse her. He could or would not learn that her love and his kindness
were oil and water.
During the half-dozen dark years after he left the Court for Ireland
he perversely relished the secret drama, whatever form it took, and
let himself be drawn into various cautious meetings with Vanessa.
When, towards the end of that eclipse, he began to be more thoroughly
himself, he became less cautious. His whole nature, as if by some
rejuvenation, expanded. He took up the cause of Ireland against the
Whigs. He wrote verses, tender, intimate, teasing, to Stella. As if he
thought the conflict between him and Vanessa was settled, he tried to
get back to the old footing.
Instantly her desire flared up. “I here tell you,” she wrote to him,
“that I have determined to try all manner of human arts to reclaim
you.” He did what he could to laugh off her seriousness, even to
praising the art with which she wrote. Nothing would now quiet her. His
least kindness intoxicated her. When he told her to use assumed names
in her letters, which he was afraid might be opened, and dashes for
“everything that may be said to Cad---- at beginning or conclusion,”
she was suddenly in raptures over sharing secrets with him. “---- ----
---- ---- Cad----, you are good beyond expression, and I will never
quarrel again if I can help it.” Swift did not take warning.
“What would you give,” he asked her in August 1720, “to have the
history of Cad---- and ---- exactly written, through all its steps,
from the beginning to this time? I believe it would do well in verse,
and be as long as the other. I hope it will be done. It ought to be an
exact chronicle of twelve years, from the time of spilling the coffee
to drinking of coffee, from Dunstable to Dublin, with every single
passage since. There would be the chapter of the blister; the chapter
of Madam going to Kensington; the chapter of the Colonel’s going to
France; the chapter of the wedding, with the adventure of the lost key;
of the strain; of the joyful return; two hundred chapters of madness;
the chapter of long walks; the Berkshire surprise; fifty chapters
of little times; the chapter of Chelsea; the chapter of swallow and
cluster; a hundred whole books of myself and so low; the chapter of
hide and whisper; the chapter of Who made it so? My sister’s money.”
Vanessa, answering that “it would be too much once to hope for such a
history,” asked him “did those circumstances crowd on you, or did you
recollect them to make me happy?” But, though she might suspect that
he had meant to please her, she could not help exulting that he had
remembered. She was not sure friendship had such a memory. She knew
love had.
Swift had suggested that he might, for the first time, visit her at
Celbridge. “Is it possible you will come and see me? I beg for God sake
you will.” He did visit her. Back in Dublin he advised her to take more
exercise, be cheerful, “read pleasant things that will make you laugh,
and not sit moping with your elbows on your knees on a little stool by
the fire.”
Vanessa was out of hand. “I ... here declare that ’tis not in the power
of art, time, or accident to lessen the unexpressible passion which
I have for -- -- --. Put my passion under the utmost restraint, send
me as distant from you as the earth will allow, yet you cannot banish
those charming ideas which will ever stick by me whilst I have the use
of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul, for there
is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it.... For
heaven’s sake tell me what has caused this prodigious change in you
which I have found of late. If you have the least remains of pity for
me left, tell me tenderly. No, don’t tell it so that it may cause my
present death; and don’t suffer me to lead a life like a languishing
death, which is the only life I can lead if you have lost any of your
tenderness for me.”
Swift did not reply. The death of Vanessa’s sister revived the
correspondence, which went on with the same disparity. “The worst
thing in you and me,” he wrote, “is that we are too hard to please,
and whether we have not made ourselves is the question.... We differ
prodigiously in one point: I fly from the spleen to the world’s end,
you run out of your way to meet it.” He urged her--Swift of all men--to
accept what came and be pleased with it. She did her best to be the
kind of philosopher he specified, but “I find the more I think the more
unhappy I am.”
In his last surviving letter to her he reminded her of the pleasant
episodes “of Windsor, Cleveland Row, Ryder Street, St. James’s,
Kensington, the Sluttery, the Colonel in France.... Cad thinks often of
these, especially on horseback, as I am assured. What a foolish thing
is time, and how foolish is man who would be as angry if time stopped
as if it passed.” This was in August 1722. Vanessa died in June 1723.
The end of the story is all gossip. It says that Vanessa, unable to
endure her jealousy, wrote to Swift, or to Stella, asking if it were
true that Stella was Swift’s wife. It says in one account that Stella
answered that she was, in another that she sent the letter to Swift to
answer. It says that Swift took the letter from Vanessa to Stella, or
to him, and with it rode savagely to Celbridge, entered the room where
Vanessa was, threw down the letter, gave Vanessa a look which for the
last time struck her dumb and, without one of his “killing, killing
words,” left the house. It says that Vanessa thereupon changed her
will, leaving her fortune to strangers, not to Swift, and died.
All gossip, any of it true, or none. Vanessa did leave her fortune to
strangers and did not mention Swift among the friends to whom she gave
small legacies to buy mourning rings. Something had parted Cadenus and
Vanessa before she died. The parting was natural, but tragically late.
She had loved a man whose thoughts, she said, “no human creature is
capable of guessing at, because never any one living thought like you.”
She had spent her life trying to win him, and he had let her spend it.
Dying, she planned what revenge was left to her, the publication of his
poem about Cadenus and Vanessa and of the letters between them.
When the poem, though not the letters, appeared in 1726 to the comfort
of his enemies, Swift kept silence. It had been, he told a friend, a
“cavalier business,” “a private humoursome thing which by an accident
inevitable and the baseness of particular malice” had been made public.
“I never saw it since I writ it.” He refused to “use shifts or arts”
to justify himself, “let people think of me as they please.... I have
borne a great deal more.” He had gone through what was comedy for
him and tragedy for Vanessa. Others must make up their own minds, if
they had them, about who was to blame, if there must be blame, when a
universal Héloïse encountered a special Abélard.
3
With whatever remorse, with whatever relief, with whatever concern for
scandal, Swift the day after Vanessa’s death left Dublin for the south
of Ireland. Stella and Dingley were to spend the summer in the country
at a friend’s house. About Vanessa, so far as any record shows, Swift
was silent, except to refer in a letter to her “incontinence in keeping
secrets.” And Stella was silent, except to remark, when she heard her
rival praised, that the Dean could write finely about a broomstick. If
there was between Swift and Stella such silence about Vanessa as they
kept towards the world it was a silence beyond conjecture. The facts
are drama enough. Stella went noiselessly in one direction. Swift went
restlessly in another.
By the end of June he had made his way past Cork and had written a
Latin poem on the rocks at Carbery where the ocean tore at the cliffs.
By the beginning of August he had come up the west to Galway, still
a hundred miles from home and “half weary of the four hundred I have
rid.” Late in September he was back in Dublin. Stella returned to town.
Swift greeted her with his old raillery. She had been spoiled, he said,
by the “generous wines and costly cheer” of Wood Park, and tried to ape
them on her income.
“_Thus for a week the farce went on;
When, all her country savings gone,
She fell into her former scene,
Small beer, a herring, and the Dean._”
[Illustration: Esther Johnson (Stella)
_Painted probably after Vanessa’s death_]
It happened that during his absence from Dublin both Pope and
Bolingbroke, and a little later Arbuthnot, took up the correspondence
which they, and Swift more than they, had recently neglected. Fresh
memories of England stirred in him. He exchanged affectionate letters
with the Duchess of Ormond and Lady Masham. He wrote to Oxford
demanding the bribe of a letter and a picture, “for who else knows how
to deliver you down to posterity?” Bolingbroke had written: “I have
vowed to read no history of our own country till that body of it which
you promise to finish appears.” Swift thought often of making himself
the real historiographer of those buried, unforgotten years, in spite
of the dullard who had the title. But he was not yet ready for history.
He was still alive to the events passing under his bitter eyes.
Swift hated Ireland because it was his place of banishment: “the
whole kingdom a bare face of nature, without houses or plantations;
filthy cabins, miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in
human shape; one insolent, ignorant, oppressive squire to be found
in twenty miles riding; a parish church to be found only in a summer
day’s journey, in comparison with which an English farmer’s barn is
a cathedral; a bog of fifteen miles round; every meadow a slough,
and every hill a mixture of rock, heath, and marsh; and every male
and female, from the farmer inclusive to the day-labourer, infallibly
a thief and consequently a beggar, which in this island are terms
convertible.” “The old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins,
and no new ones in their stead.” “The wretched merchants, instead
of being dealers, are dwindled to pedlars and cheats.” As to trade,
“nothing worth mentioning except the linen of the north, a trade
casual, corrupted, and at mercy, and some butter from Cork.” The
ports and harbours were of no more use “than a beautiful prospect to
a man shut up in a dungeon.” Travellers never came to Ireland, since
they might expect to find there nothing but misery and desolation.
Whoever could leave the kingdom left at the first chance and stayed
away till the last excuse. Dublin was a “beggarly city,” one-seventh
of its houses falling in ruins, its populace hungry, idle, dissolute,
dirty, and noisy. Though it was the capital of an ancient kingdom, the
government was wholly in the hands of Englishmen who, blind to every
interest but their own, lived there as little as they could manage.
No theoretical doctrine of liberty moved Swift to take up the Irish
cause. “I do profess without affectation,” he explained to Pope,
“that your kind opinion of me as a patriot, since you call it so, is
what I do not deserve; because what I do is owing to perfect rage and
resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness
about me, among which I am forced to live.”
On the Catholic majority, those “savage old Irish,” he spent little
sympathy. They might be above the vermin of the island but they were
below the voters. He had no patience with the Dissenters. They were
outside the Church and to that extent outside his Ireland. Ireland for
him was the English settled there, the noblemen, the landlords, the
clergy, the lawyers, the merchants. Their ancestors had come to rule
the conquered province. They themselves ought now to rule it. Instead,
they were called Irish, which they were not, and in turn were ruled
by the newest English, a changing garrison of place-men. Men born
in Ireland could not hope for posts at home. They had either to rot
on their estates or to go abroad while their tenants were racked to
support them in a dingy splendour. The Irish Parliament had no power.
The laws, all made in England, condemned Ireland to poverty. Cattle
could not be shipped to England, woollen goods could not be shipped
anywhere. Without a free hand in agriculture, manufacture, or trade,
Ireland from being so long bound was numb or sodden.
Mortified by finding himself in exile among slaves, Swift first
despised them and then hated their tyrants. The tyrants were the Whigs
who had driven him out of power. He could not become a slave. He could
not endure a tyrant. Everything in his nature urged him to rouse the
slaves and resist the tyrants. But he had the advantage, when he turned
his fury loose, of a long experience in hating the party to which his
enemies belonged.
Where his whole cause was so good Swift did not need to be fastidious
about his particular occasion for attack. William Wood, an English
ironmonger, in 1722 obtained a patent from the King to coin halfpence
and farthings for Ireland for fourteen years. The Irish were not agreed
that they needed new copper coins, certainly not to the amount of a
hundred thousand pounds. The Irish were not consulted, nor even the
Lord Lieutenant. Higher interests were involved. The patent had really
been granted to the Duchess of Kendal, the King’s mistress, who sold
it to Wood for ten thousand pounds. Walpole, Lord Treasurer, did not
object. The Duchess had been loyal. The King was grateful. Through the
method of the patent she could be rewarded, not by the King directly
but indirectly by his Irish subjects, who already, if they had known
it, contributed three thousand annually in pensions to the loyal lady.
Since there was some risk, Wood deserved a profit for his trouble. The
necessary copper would cost him sixty thousand pounds. When he had
satisfied the Duchess he would still have thirty thousand, of which
perhaps one-fifth would pay for the coinage and about one-seventh go to
fees required by the patent. As jobs went in the government of Ireland
under Walpole, the profit was not unheard of.
But the failure to consult the Irish had angered them. Their Parliament
protested to the Treasury. Lord Carteret, a friend of Swift and now
Secretary of State, was at odds with Walpole. Walpole, persisting, got
Carteret appointed Lord Lieutenant early in 1724, to get rid of him
in London. By the time he reached Dublin the whole country was in a
passion.
The passion was led and guided by Swift. Walpole’s scheme, shabby,
cynical, insulting, brought the satirist with a roar out of his long
silence. He was as crafty as he was furious. Pretending to be a small
tradesman named Drapier, he addressed, between April and November 1724,
a series of letters to the shopkeepers, tradesmen, farmers, and common
people, to his printer, to the nobility and gentry, to the whole people
of Ireland. He was as furious as he was crafty. Wood was a “single,
diminutive, insignificant mechanic.” He and his agents, trying to
force upon the Irish the coins which the patent did not oblige them to
accept, were “enemies to God and this kingdom.” “I will shoot Mr. Wood
and his deputies through the head, like highwaymen or housebreakers, if
they dare to force one farthing of their coin upon me in the payment
of an hundred pounds. It is no loss of honour to submit to the lion,
but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being
devoured alive by a rat.” “I entreat you, my dear countrymen, not to
be under the least concern upon these and the like rumours, which are
no more than the last howls of a dog dissected alive, as I hope he hath
sufficiently been.”
Swift did not dare to accuse the King, and he only hinted at the
honorarium to the Duchess. It was the ministers who had planned this
contemptuous oppression. It was Wood who was to his own advantage
carrying it out at the expense of Ireland. If Wood’s copper became
current every Irishman who received a coin, even in the smallest
transaction, would get less than he gave, and every Irishman who paid
out a coin would give less than he got. While Wood prospered “we should
live together as merry and sociable as beggars, only with this one
abatement, that we should have neither meat to feed nor manufactures to
clothe us, unless we could be content to prance about in coats of mail
or eat brass as ostriches do iron.”
Swift must have known that his arguments were false, must have known
that the intrinsic value of such small coins did not matter and that
they would be as good as any if they were used. He who gave and he
who got could not be equally losers. But Swift did not boggle over
economic niceties. Here was a principle. To accept the coins would be
to surrender to tyrants and become slaves. As soon as he had stirred
the public to a fear of losing money and had assured them they could
lawfully refuse the new halfpence and farthings, he moved towards a
general position.
“Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England? How
have they forfeited their freedom? Is not their Parliament as fair
a representative of the people as that of England?... Are they not
subjects of the same king? Does not the same sun shine upon them? And
have they not the same God for their protector? Am I a freeman in
England, and do I become a slave in six hours by crossing the channel?”
“I have looked over all the English and Irish statutes without finding
any law that makes Ireland depend upon England any more than England
does upon Ireland. We have indeed obliged ourselves to have the same
king with them, and consequently they are obliged to have the same king
with us. For the law was made by our own ancestors, and our ancestors
then were not such fools (whatever they were in the preceding reign) to
bring themselves under I know not what dependence which is now talked
of without any ground of law, reason, or common sense.” “All government
without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”
“The remedy is wholly in your own hands.... By the laws of God, of
Nature, of nations, and of your own country you are and ought to be as
free a people as your brethren in England.”
No voice like this had ever been raised by an Englishman in Ireland.
All the Irish heard it. Never again were its echoes to be long silent
in that country. “Money,” Swift said, “the great divider of the world,
hath by a strange revolution been the great uniter of a most divided
people.”
On the day Carteret landed in October the fourth and most
thorough-going of the Drapier letters was issued. Hawkers crying it
through the streets met the Lord Lieutenant when he arrived in Dublin.
Much as Carteret admired “that genius which has outshone most of
this age and when you will display it again can convince us that its
lustre and strength are still the same,” he could not, in his station,
overlook the Drapier. He offered a reward of three hundred pounds for
information leading to the discovery of the author within six months.
All Dublin, including the Lord Lieutenant, knew that Swift had written
the dangerous letters. But there was no legal proof, even if there
was anywhere an informer. During the six months Swift dined at the
Castle and entertained Lady Carteret at a party in his garden. When
Carteret heard that Swift had “some thoughts of declaring himself” he
advised against it. Their friendship, however, was not tested to the
utmost. Walpole, seeing that the case was hopeless in such a tumult,
gave it up. The patent was withdrawn in 1725 as an instance of royal
favour and condescension. Wood was compensated with a pension of three
thousand pounds a year for twelve years. Carteret later summed up his
administration: “The people ask me how I governed Ireland. I say that
I pleased Dr. Swift.”
Swift, writing to Oxford’s son, apologized for his mention of the
Irish brawl. “This is just of as much consequence to your Lordship
as the news of a skirmish between two petty states in Greece was to
Alexander while he was conquering Persia, but even a knot of beggars
are of importance among themselves.” Yet Swift was too much a soldier
not to enjoy a battle after a stupid peace. Though there were others in
the field, he unmistakably commanded. The Grand Jury and the Liberty
of St. Patrick’s, that part of Dublin over which he as Dean had civil
jurisdiction, formally resolved against the hated coins, as did the
butchers, the brewers, the newsboys or “flying stationers,” and the
Black Guard. There were broadsheets on every corner, songs in every
tavern, some of them written by Swift, all of them in support of the
Drapier. While the furor lasted no jury would find anything seditious
in any pamphlet or lampoon if Wood were mentioned. After the victory
medals were struck in the Drapier’s honour, shops and taverns were
named for him, women carried handkerchiefs with his picture woven on
them. Something legendary began to enlarge Swift’s fame.
Irishmen who could barely spell out his arguments and knew only by
hearsay that he was a man of learning who had been great in London were
roused to veneration. They had thought of him as one of their rulers
sent from England, yet he had joined their cause against the English.
He was not a tyrant but a patriot. Standing superbly against the dread,
incalculable ministers, he had defended men and women to whom halfpence
and farthings were important. They stood uncovered when he passed in
the streets.
They could not know that he had acted, at least at first, out of hate
for their slavery and folly and baseness, out of a fierce unwillingness
to be slavish and foolish and base along with them. He who had had a
hand in ruling an empire would not submit to being counted among the
docile subjects of the province to which he had been banished. Private
resentment had stirred him to public rebellion. He could not help it
if what he had done for hate was the same as if he had done it for
love. Such an outcome was only another proof that the world was wrong.
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, wading home with the Blefuscudian fleet at
the end of a packthread, Swift decently exulted. But he would not let
himself forget that the adventure had taken place among the pigmies.
Whatever he accomplished was a small affair. Great affairs were always
maddeningly beyond him, or, he remembered his days with Oxford, behind
him.
VI
TRAVELLER
1
Swift never set a foot outside Ireland or England except when he
hurried across Wales on his restless journeys between London, the
bright centre of his world, and Dublin, the dreary margin. Though he
constantly diverted himself with books of travel, he found in them
nothing which convinced him that he would anywhere meet more wisdom or
less folly than he everywhere observed. The Scotch were a “poor, fierce
northern people,” the Dutch grasping and shifty, the French frivolous
and Catholic. If he had some liking for the Swedes it was because he
was fascinated by Charles XII, that sudden, terrific king who had
burst upon Europe from his cold peninsula and stirred philosophers to
admiration by such a career as Swift would have chosen for himself. But
dividing mankind into nations was little more than drawing lines on a
map. The whole earth was inhabited by the human race.
Once Swift had hopes of going to Austria, once to Sweden, once to
France. Each time prevented, he hardly grumbled. If he thought of other
countries it was for their better climate, which might, he said, have
kept his wit and humour lively, as Ireland’s had not. “I imagine,” he
wrote in 1724, “France would be proper for me now, and Italy ten years
hence.” But he could not rouse himself from thinking about the world
to travel far to look at it. There was his giddiness, which might at
any time make him reel and fall. There was his deafness, which forced
him to live “among those whom I can govern and make them comply with my
infirmities.” There was the prospect of blindness. “My eyes will not
suffer me to read small prints, nor anything by candlelight, and if I
grow blind, as well as deaf, I must needs become very grave and wise
and insignificant.” He was caged in Ireland, with nothing to do but
pace his cage.
In Ireland, however, Swift was not confined to the cramped cottage at
Laracor or to the hollow deanery in Dublin. During the twelve unbroken
years of his banishment after 1714 he often visited other houses. His
hosts could never have enough of him. Near Laracor were the houses of
Peter Ludlow, George Rochfort, and Knightley Chetwoode. Near Dublin
were the houses of the Grattans and Patrick Delaney and Charles
Ford, with whom Stella spent a summer. Forty miles from Dublin was
Thomas Sheridan’s ramshackle house which Swift could sometimes have
to himself. He is said to have visited an ancestor of the Earls of
Llandaff in Tipperary. He visited the Ashes--St. George Ashe had been
Swift’s college tutor--at Clogher in Tyrone, Robert Cope in Armagh, the
Bishop of Dromore in Down. And during the summers of 1722 and 1723,
when banishment had become almost unendurable, Swift made long, lonely
journeys to the north and to the south. “I have shifted scenes,” he
told Vanessa in July 1722, “oftener than I ever did in my life, and I
believe I have lain in thirty beds since I left the town.”
Six hundred miles in the north, five hundred in the south the year
following, all solitary and speculative. But these were not merely
random travels in search of change and health. Though Swift was still
incorrigibly Swift, he was also Gulliver, now with a purpose studying
the despicable ways of men.
Gulliver’s travels were Swift’s travels, disguised with Swift’s wit,
loaded with Swift’s hate. He gave years to them, as to nothing else
he ever wrote about, five or six years thinking of them as Martin
Scriblerus’s travels, nearly as long thinking of them as Gulliver’s or
his own. “I am now writing a History of my Travels,” Swift told Ford
in April 1721, “which will be a large volume, and gives account of
countries hitherto unknown; but they go on slowly for want of health
and humour.” By December of that year Bolingbroke knew about them. “I
long to see your Travels; for, take it as you will, I do not retract
what I said, and will undertake to find in two pages of your bagatelles
more good sense, useful knowledge, and true religion than you can show
me in the works of nineteen in twenty of the profound divines and
philosophers of the age.” In June 1722 Vanessa had read something about
the giants. In January 1724 Swift was near the end. “I have left the
Country of Horses,” he wrote to Ford, “and am in the Flying Island,
where I shall not stay long, and my two last journeys will soon be
over.” In July 1725 Bolingbroke referred to the pigmies and giants of
which he had heard. In August, Swift wrote to Ford: “I have finished my
Travels, and am now transcribing them. They are admirable things, and
will wonderfully mend the world.”
In September, after a summer at Sheridan’s house in the country,
Swift wrote to Pope: “I have employed my time, besides ditching, in
finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing my Travels, in four
parts complete, newly augmented, and intended for the press when the
world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be found brave
enough to venture his ears.” Thereafter all Swift’s friends waited
to see how he would, as he said, “vex the world rather than divert
it.” They could be sure he had written more than a story of imaginary
voyages in a book. This would be Swift’s revenge.
In the days of the Scriblerus Club it had been planned that Martin
on his first voyage should be carried “by a prosperous storm to a
discovery of the ancient Pygmean empire”; on his second should be
“happily shipwrecked on the land of the giants, the most humane people
in the world”; on his third should reach a “kingdom of philosophers who
govern by the mathematics”; and on his fourth should, among beings not
yet named, “display a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust
of his species.” These plans had broken up with the Club. Returning to
this theme, Swift saw that the bungling Martin would no longer serve.
If he were to be the traveller, much of the folly of the narrative
would have to appear in his misadventures. Better to let the traveller
be a plain, reasonable, unimaginative man who would report what he had
seen in the language of common sense.
Swift’s nature included such a Gulliver. It included, too, an observer
as alien to what went on around him as Gulliver could be on his most
distant, most surprising island. “My disaffection to the world ... has
never varied from the twenty-first ... year of my life.” Disaffection,
singularity, had driven Swift, no less than most men, to think of
himself as playing various rôles. At Kilkenny and Trinity he had been
a tragic hero, neglected and abused by fortune. At Moor Park he had
been a scholar in a garden, despising the rabble of wits and pedants.
At Laracor he had been a soldier in a garrison, when there were wars
elsewhere. In London he had been the conscience and voice of ministers,
insisting upon order and virtue in the state. In Dublin, exiled, he had
turned from governing to resisting and had made himself the hammer of
tyrants. Now he was a creature of a different race, thrown among men,
full of antipathy for them, but full also of a scornful curiosity.
It was the best rôle he ever found. Without once taking ship to the
corners of the earth as Gulliver did, Swift had moved about at home
too large for the pigmies, too small for the giants, too sensible
for the philosophers, too human for the animals. He had never been
able quite to adjust himself to the scale of life as other men lived
it. Other men, even when they had the pride of distinction, could
submit. Swift could not. As if he were really an alien to the race,
he had been obliged, whether he chose or not, to feel and act alien.
Only once in more than fifty years had he found an occupation which
truly involved him, and that only while a short delusion lasted. He
had been unwilling to take a wife, though women desired and loved
him. He had compromised so far as to have friends, but he was always
conscious of the exceptions he was making. “I have ever hated all
nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is towards
individuals.... But principally I hate and detest that animal called
man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This
is the system upon which I have governed myself many years.... Upon
this great foundation of misanthropy ... the whole building of my
Travels is erected; and I will never have peace of mind till all honest
men are of my opinion.”
If he had been fully alien he would not have troubled himself to be a
missionary. He was a man to the extent that he was a moralist as well
as a misanthrope. He would cure if he could. If not, he would punish.
“Drown the world! I am not content with despising it, but I would anger
it if I could with safety.” Here was the flaw in his misanthropy. Here
was the strain of humanity through which he could be fretted and hurt.
Here was the deep source of his fury. But he was alien enough to feel,
dramatically, that he was only a traveller in strange lands.
Yet Swift was not a Timon, bawling and railing. Swift’s misanthropy
was in his constitution, not in his disposition. His friends spoke
always of his sweetness, his charm, his delightful temper, his hearty
affections, his honest generosity. He had about him a magic almost like
beauty’s magic. Nor did they think of him as morose and surly, whatever
he said about himself. “Gulliver is a happy man,” said the experienced
Arbuthnot, “that at his age can write such a merry work.” Swift on his
travels could no more help the wit on his tongue than he could help the
detestation in his heart.
He was as ingenious as he was grave. He took pains, with a few slips,
to draw his pigmies and giants to scale, the pigmies an inch to a human
foot, the giants a foot to a human inch. He deftly commandeered the
inventions of earlier writers: Philostratus, Lucian, Rabelais, Cyrano
de Bergerac, Perrot d’Ablancourt, Tom Brown. The nautical terms paraded
in the voyage to Brobdingnag were copied almost word for word from
a mariner’s handbook. Swift did not disdain to parody contemporary
travellers. Whereas a mere misanthrope would have clamoured, a mere
moralist would have scolded, Swift, being a wit, was satisfied to tell
a story, pretending that he was a spectator who had no share in what he
told. There were the characters, there were the incidents. They could
be understood by anybody who had an understanding.
Consider the insectile people of Lilliput. Swift, in the guise of
Gulliver, was at first received with dread, then with wonder, then with
hospitality. Though they kept him a prisoner, they let him into the
secrets of the Court and of the government, which were preposterously
like England’s. The Lilliputian ministers to commend themselves to the
king capered before him on a tight-rope. Gulliver, whose mind was part
of Swift’s, remembered larger ministers. Flimnap, who could caper an
inch higher than any other lord in the empire, seemed remarkably like
Walpole. The great men of Lilliput who sought honours from their king
competed, by jumping over a stick held in his hand, for silken threads
six inches long, one blue, one red, one green, which reminded Gulliver
of the Order of the Garter, of the Bath, and of the Thistle.
Lilliput and the neighbouring Blefuscu had long been at war. A
Lilliputian schism was the cause. Formerly all the people had broken
their eggs at the larger end. One of their kings, having cut his finger
on the larger end of one of his eggs, had by royal edict made the
smaller end orthodox. There had been a civil war. Some of the defeated
conservatives had fled to Blefuscu and had there found refuge and
favour at the court. England, Gulliver reflected, had been entirely
Catholic before Henry VIII. The Catholic Pretender had fled to France,
and France had long been at war with England.
Grateful for the kindness shown him, Gulliver aided Lilliput in its
war by capturing the Blefuscudian fleet and bringing it as a gift to
his royal host. But the Lilliputians were no more grateful in return
than the English had been to the Oxford ministry for ending the war
with France. One party among the pigmies insisted that Blefuscu be
subjugated to a province with a viceroy, as some of the Whigs had
insisted France might be. The sourest of the tiny ministers became
Gulliver’s enemy, as the dismal Nottingham had become Swift’s.
Gulliver’s chief offence was that, when a fire broke out in the queen’s
apartment at the palace, he extinguished it in a manner more natural to
him than agreeable to the queen. Had not Queen Anne implacably resented
the spattering ridicule which Swift had let fall upon what he thought
was menacing the Church and State? Thereafter the position of Gulliver
in Lilliput was hopeless. The cabinet decided he must die. The friendly
minister Reldresal, who may have stood for Carteret, thought it would
be enough to blind Gulliver and allow him to starve to death.
From that compromise Gulliver escaped to Blefuscu, and back to England,
knowing that the smallest people in the world had all the familiar
follies and vices of mankind in general.
Next Swift, as Gulliver, was blown to the giants of Brobdingnag, that
humane people. It was his turn to be insectile. He was exhibited
as a toy freak by the kind, greedy farmer who had found him.
Scientists wondered what species he could belong to. The king, being
a philosopher, supposed that such creatures as Gulliver “have their
titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and
burrows that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress
and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they
betray.” And when Gulliver had defended his species by an account of
their government and politics, their wars and luxuries, the king,
being a humane philosopher, concluded “your natives to be the most
pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to
crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
He himself abominated mystery, refinement, and intrigue in governors.
He limited government “to common sense and reason, to justice and
lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes.” He
held that “whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass
grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve
better of mankind ... than the whole race of politicians put together.”
Gulliver, or Swift, sardonically despaired of such a monarch. His
people were no better. Their learning was only in morality, history,
poetry, and useful mathematics. They were unable to form conceptions of
what Gulliver meant by “entities, abstractions, and transcendentals.”
They were dull with virtue and peace.
Gulliver found in their habits less to remind him of England than he
had found in Lilliput. His story was taken up with the ingenious shifts
by which he got along among them. But after the giants he could not so
easily return to the old scale of life as he could after the pigmies.
His own people seemed contemptible by their smallness. He was twice as
far from mankind as he had been before.
Swift’s, Gulliver’s, third voyage seems to have been to the Country
of Horses, but when he told the story he saved that for the venomous
conclusion and in the third place put the account of the Flying Island
and the continent which was topsy-turvy with philosophers.
Once more, as in Lilliput, he was often reminded of Europe. The name
of Laputa was like the Spanish for harlot. The island, when its rulers
wished, could hover over stubborn cities and shut out the sun, as
England shut out the sun from Ireland. Whether aloft or on land the
people were rapt in abstruse speculations or abandoned to fantastic
projects. Among the islanders nobody spoke sense except, possibly,
the tradesmen, women, and children. The others were so many pedants
exaggerated from the breed that Swift had detested in his earliest
satires. The Academy of Lagado was a Bedlam of Science, where men wore
out their lives trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, to build
houses downward from the roofs in the fashion of the bees and spiders,
to plow fields only with the snouts of hogs, to make silk from spider
webs, to cure colic with a pair of bellows, to soften marble for
pincushions, to propagate naked sheep, to write books by a mechanical
device, to discover painless methods of taxation.
Gulliver grew dizzy. He lacked the head, as Swift did, for this
whirling universe. It did not steady him when, on the neighbouring
island of Glubbdubdrib, he was allowed to call up the spirits of the
famous dead and found how falsely they had been presented in history.
It did not steady him when in Luggnagg he learned of the immortal
struldbrugs, for whom immortality was only human life prolonged to
an infinity of horrible old age. “I ... thought,” said Gulliver, for
Swift, “that no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run
with pleasure from such a life.” When he was out of the mad lands of
Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, and Luggnagg, he was nearly upside
down, giddy, and three times as far from mankind.
Now for the antipodes of misanthropy. Among the Houyhnhnms Gulliver
was almost undisguisedly Swift. The day on which Gulliver set sail
from Portsmouth was the precise day of September 1710 on which Swift
had arrived in London to make his fortune with the new men in power.
Gulliver’s discovery of an island where the horses were as much wiser
and nobler as they were stronger than the men was such a discovery as
Swift may have made as he rode through desolate, beggarly Ireland.
It is easy to guess, though only to guess, that the device came to his
mind on that dark expedition to the south in the summer of 1723 after
Vanessa’s death. Everywhere he saw the “savage old Irish,” “miserable,
tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape,” living “in
the utmost ignorance, barbarity, and poverty, giving themselves wholly
up to idleness, nastiness, and thievery,” “brought up to steal or beg
for want of work,” so that to them “death would be the best thing to
be wished for both on account of themselves and the public.” Swift had
not yet reached the point where he could take up the cause of these
miserable victims. He felt chiefly a sick repulsion. He would not admit
that they and he were of the same kind. At least they must belong to a
tribe which had degenerated till they were less than beasts.
Less than beasts? Compare them with his horse, healthy, patient,
without follies or vices, incapable of pride. Horses, the animals Swift
had most to do with and knew best, were more fit to rule than degraded
men. Suppose some traveller should find a country where the horses did
rule. Suppose Gulliver were to find it. The Scriblerus Club had not
decided what race Martin was to visit on his fourth voyage, only that
he was to “display a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust
of his species.” Nothing could disgust a traveller, even wholesome
Gulliver, more than to study the horrid antics of a debased human
tribe in the company of utopian horses who could see little difference
between him and those apish copies. Gulliver had been disgusted among
the giants when the maids of honour laid him against their terrible
breasts. That had been only a shrinking of his senses. Now his soul
itself must shrink with an absolute antipathy from which he could not
recover. When he came back he would prefer the horses of England to the
men.
With something like these gathering plans, though they must be guessed
at, in something like this mood, which is certain enough, Swift rode
through the south and west. In September he was in Dublin again. By the
next January he had “left the Country of Horses.”
On his icy, fiery travels among the Houyhnhnms Swift (why call him
Gulliver?) did not bother to observe such stinging likenesses to
particular English persons and episodes as he observed among the
pigmies and the philosophers. The last of his adventures was the
simplest, as it was the most deadly. All actual fantasy, all apparent
fact.
He came upon his first Yahoos without realizing that they were inferior
men and upon his first Houyhnhnms without realizing that they were
superior horses. When he found himself taken for a Yahoo he hurried
to tell his Houyhnhnm master about Europe. He told him of wars, their
causes, means, and ends; of litigation and the arts of lawyers; of
money, and of poverty and riches; of luxury and dissipation; of
diseases and their remedies; of ministers of state and noblemen. The
reasonable Houyhnhnm said he had noticed the rudiments of all these
human ways of life among the Yahoos.
They had their tribal and civil wars. They hoarded shining stones
which they could not use, fought over them, and sometimes lost them
to bystanders who snatched them away as expertly as any lawyer. They
gorged themselves with food and sucked a root that made them drunk.
They had the only diseases in the country, because of their gluttony
and filth. They had in most herds a sort of ruling Yahoo, always
deformed in body and mischievous in disposition, who continued in
office till a worse could be found. They were lewd and promiscuous.
They were invariably dirty and sometimes splenetic. They had, it
appeared, all the human vices except unnatural appetites, these
“politer pleasures” not having occurred to them. They were unteachable
because they were perverse and restive, but they had the brains to be
cunning, malicious, treacherous, revengeful, insolent, abject, and
cruel. It was plain to the Houyhnhnm who talked with Swift that the
visitor was a Yahoo after all. That “small pittance of reason” which by
some accident had been given to the European Yahoos they used only to
multiply their natural corruptions and to acquire new ones not supplied
by nature.
To be fully reasonable was to be like the Houyhnhnms. They did not
know what lying was. They affirmed or denied only when they were
certain. Their two principal virtues were friendship and benevolence,
felt towards the whole species without partiality except where there
were special virtues to attract them. In marriage they were without
jealousy, fondness, quarrelling, or discontent. The young of both sexes
were brought up in moderation, industry, exercise, and cleanliness.
Their only government was an annual council of the entire nation. They
had no literature except poems composed, not written down, in praise
of virtue. They were skilful workmen in the necessary arts, but wasted
no time on superfluity or show. Reasonably born and bred, they lived
reasonably without passions and died reasonably without sickness or
fear.
“At first, indeed, I did not feel that natural awe which the Yahoos and
all other animals bear towards them; but it grew upon me by degrees,
much sooner than I imagined, and was mingled with a respectful love and
gratitude that they would condescend to distinguish me from the rest of
my species. When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or
human race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in
shape and disposition.” Swift would have remained with the Houyhnhnms
for ever if they had not sent him away. The beasts could not tolerate
a man. Nor could a man who had lived among the beasts ever again live
among men without disgust.
The fourth voyage marked the peak of Swift’s fury and of his art.
Great as that art was, it could not quite conceal that fury. The
narrative might seem, however fantastic, to be the very mathematics
of misanthropy, never looser than a syllogism. But the cold tread
of intellect was repeatedly broken by the rush of nerves. The most
reasonable sentence might suddenly throb with words of a shuddering
hate. “Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of
an European army, confounding the ranks, overturning the carriages,
battering the warriors’ faces into mummy by terrible yerks from their
hinder hoofs.” Intellect would have been satisfied with beating the
European Yahoos down; nerves, furious and yet frightened at their own
desperation, must imagine battering the noisome faces into mummy.
Nothing less than an agonized antipathy could have made Swift remark
that the female Yahoo who embraced Gulliver was not red-haired, “which
might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular,” but
“black as a sloe”--or as Stella. Hate possessed him as love possesses
some other men.
If he had been a lover of his kind he might have been hot with praises
for the lofty merits which he found in them, and might have seen the
world smirk at his tribute. Instead, he was a hater. Was there not as
good an excuse for hating as for loving? Was it any less accurate to
perceive ugliness, deformity, vice, stupidity, loathsomeness in the
human race than to perceive beauty, grace, virtue, wit, charm? Swift
would have known that these were absurd questions, asked to no purpose.
Mankind would always answer them for its own comfort, which demands
that love must be, in moral arguments, preferred to hate. The crowded
tribes of the earth lived too precariously to welcome the hate, however
instinctive, which might come among them to separate man from man,
tribe from tribe, man from tribe. Only in the warmth of love could they
live together. If the Swifts of the world must hate they must live
alone, even if what they hated, as with Swift, was hate itself, along
with cruelty, avarice, oppression, filth, intemperance, presumption.
All this Swift had learned. But he had no choice. His nature insisted
upon taking its revenge as a coiled spring insists upon uncoiling as
soon as it is free. He had travelled through the world. He would tell
the whole truth about his travels.
2
A man who had been around the world and under it might after twelve
years of banishment venture from Ireland to London. Swift’s friends had
never ceased urging him to visit them again. He would only now and then
allow himself to think of it.
“What can be the design of your letter but malice,” he wrote to Gay
in January 1723, “to wake me out of a scurvy sleep, which however is
better than none?... I shall not be able to relish my wine, my parsons,
my horses, nor my garden for three months, until the spirit you have
raised shall be dispossessed. I have sometimes wondered that I have
not visited you, but I have been stopped by too many reasons, besides
years and laziness, and yet these are very good ones. Upon my return
after half a year amongst you there would be to me _desiderio nec pudor
nec modus_. I was three years reconciling myself to the scene and the
business to which fortune has condemned me, and stupidity was what
I had recourse to. Besides, what a figure should I make in London,
while my friends are in poverty, exile, distress, or imprisonment, and
my enemies with rods of iron? Yet I often threaten myself with the
journey, and am every summer practising to ride and get health to bear
it. The only inconvenience is that I grow old in the experiment.”
But in November 1724, Oxford having died, Oxford’s son invited Swift to
come to England to write the biography which he had proposed. “There
would be nobody more welcome to me than yourself. You should live in
your own way and do just what was most agreeable to you. I have houses
enough; you shall take your choice.” By September 1725 Swift had his
Travels ready to be printed. With two such reasons for going he had no
excuse for staying. His friends urged him with fresh tenderness and wit.
“I have often imagined to myself,” Pope wrote in October, “that if ever
all of us met again, after so many varieties and changes, after so much
of the old world and of the old man in each of us has been altered,
after there has been such a new heaven and a new earth in our minds and
bodies that scarce a single thought of the one, any more than a single
atom of the other, remains just the same--I have fancied, I say, that
we should meet like the righteous in the millennium, quite in peace,
divested of all our former passions, smiling at all our own designs,
and content to enjoy the kingdom of the just in tranquillity.”
Arbuthnot, just recovering from a nearly fatal illness, had intended to
add a postscript to Pope’s letter. He was so moved by what Swift had
said--“Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn
my Travels”--that he wrote a letter of his own. “For God’s sake do not
tantalize your friends any more. I can prove by twenty unanswerable
arguments that it is absolutely necessary you should come over to
England; that it would be committing the greatest absurdity that ever
was not to do it the next approaching winter. I believe, indeed, it is
just possible to save your soul without it, and that is all.”
Some feverish disorder kept Swift “sitting like a toad in a corner of
his great house” for a part of that winter, but he had set his mind on
England for the spring. “If you do not know me when we meet,” he told
Pope, “you need only keep one of my letters and compare it with my
face, for my face and letters are counterparts of my heart.” About the
middle of March he was in London, in the best of health and spirits,
Pope said, and “the joy of all here who know him, as he was eleven
years ago.”
There were two weeks of joyful, leisurely reunion. Pope left his
villa for Swift’s lodgings. Arbuthnot “led him a course through the
town” with such new men of fashion as Lord Chesterfield and William
Pulteney (later the Earl of Bath). Harcourt and Peterborough made
plans to introduce him to Walpole; Pope, though Arbuthnot got ahead
of him, to the household of the Prince of Wales through Mrs. Howard,
the Princess’s confidante. Swift visited Bolingbroke and Pope in the
country, and by the first of April was ready, with Pope, “to ramble to
Lord Oxford’s and Lord Bathurst’s and other places.” Pope found his
guest “the best-natured and most indulgent man I know.”
Swift had come into a world as strange to him as the world he had found
in 1710. Though the Whigs were in power, they were not the Whigs he had
known. Somers, Halifax, Wharton, and Addison were dead. Congreve was
alive, but gouty and almost blind. Steele was alive, but in Wales and
paralyzed. The Tories Swift had known were scattered. Oxford had died,
Ormond had settled in Spain, Bolingbroke, though pardoned and again in
England, was excluded from the House of Lords. The Society of Brothers
no longer dined together, men of influence with men of wit. Prior was
dead.
Only in what had once been the Scriblerus Club was London much
the same as Swift had left it, except that Parnell too was dead.
Bolingbroke, formerly a kind of honorary member, now gave his time to
philosophizing near Uxbridge about the uses of retirement and scheming
how to get back in power. Pope, having made a fortune out of Homer,
had retired to his house and grotto at Twickenham and was brewing
poison for the dunces. Gay, with a small sinecure and lodgings in the
palace at Whitehall, was completing the fables which he wrote for
Prince William, son of the Prince of Wales. Arbuthnot, still as always
a man of learning, virtue, sense, and wit, called his house in London
Martin’s office, though the Scriblerus Club had given up its regular
meetings.
Swift, being Swift, could not withhold himself from politics. The
authorities in Ireland warned the authorities in England to watch out
for him. Walpole, who may have wanted to win Swift over and who may
have wanted merely to learn about Irish affairs, invited Swift to dine
with him at Chelsea and later to call on him in London. First and last
they were at deadlock, however, though scandal buzzed about a treaty
between them. Walpole’s opinions concerning Ireland, Swift said, “I
could not reconcile to the notions I had of liberty.” “I was neither
offered nor would have received” any promotion “except upon conditions
which would never be granted.” By the end of April he was “weary of
being among ministers whom I cannot govern, who are all rank Tories in
government and worse than Whigs in Church, whereas I was the first man
who taught and practised the direct contrary principle.” If he had
any hope it was in the opposition being organized by Pulteney and Sir
William Wyndham, with the help and advice of Bolingbroke, and with the
name of the Patriots. But Swift’s old zest, perhaps his old delusion,
had gone.
“This is the first time I was ever weary of England and longed to be
in Ireland,” he wrote to Sheridan. “But it is because go I must, for I
do not love Ireland better nor England, as England, worse. In short,
you all live in a wretched, dirty doghole and prison, but it is a
place good enough to die in. I can tell you one thing, that I have had
the fairest offer made me of a settlement here that one can imagine,
which if I were ten years younger I would gladly accept, within ten
miles of London and in the midst of my friends. But I am too old for
new schemes, and especially such as would bridle my freedoms and
liberalities.”
This was Swift’s way of saying that though some unknown patron had
offered him a pleasant living in England, and it tempted him, he
actually preferred Ireland, where he could be, as Dean, independent
and liberal. He was closer to Ireland than he would admit. He did not
during his stay in England even find time to go through the Oxford
papers among which he had once thought he wanted to live over the days
of his power, writing the history of the minister he had served and
loved.
But if public affairs were disappointing, friendship and wit, for
which Swift had his genius, were all he had looked forward to.
His friends would not take his politics too seriously. “I hope,”
Bolingbroke wrote to “the three Yahoos of Twickenham, Jonathan,
Alexander, John,” “Jonathan’s imagination of business will be succeeded
by some imagination more becoming a professor of the divine science
_la bagatelle_.” During May and June Swift was as cheerful as he ever
urged others to be. He was at Twickenham with Gay and Pope, content
to let the world go its way if they could laugh at it. “Mr. Pope ...
prescribes all our visits without our knowledge, and Mr. Gay and I find
ourselves often engaged for three or four days to come, and we neither
of us dare dispute his pleasure.” Bolingbroke and Bathurst were not far
away. Congreve came out to dinner. Mrs. Howard had a house at Marble
Hill. The Prince of Wales’s court left London for Richmond where Swift
made it his habit, as he put it, “to sponge a breakfast once a week.”
The days were as busy, if not as weighty, as they had been for Swift
when he spent them with the Ministry, but in the evenings he played
backgammon with Pope’s mother. Pope, Gay, and Swift went off for two
weeks on horseback, to Lord Cobham’s house at Stowe, to Bathurst’s
house at Cirencester, probably to Windsor Forest. Pope and Swift
seem to have helped Gay with a ballad which he wrote at the inn at
Wokingham. All three of them agreed upon a volume or volumes of
miscellanies in which, as Pope described it, they were to “look like
friends, side by side, serious and merry by turns, not in the stiff
forms of learned authors, flattering each other and setting the rest of
mankind at naught, but in a free, unimportant, natural, easy manner,
diverting others just as we diverted ourselves.”
At the same time, Twickenham saw them working upon bigger schemes. Gay
had his fables, taking from the behaviour of animals the rules for
human conduct which he wittily versified for the little prince. Pope,
angry at the spiteful dunces who had envied his success, was paying
them off in a satire. Swift at first had thought they hardly deserved
it. “Take care the bad poets do not outwit you, as they have served
the good ones in every age, whom they have provoked to transmit their
names to posterity.” Swift himself almost never mentioned fools by name
when he slaughtered them in prose or verse, unless the slaughter were
political. But when he read Pope’s satire he changed his mind, as Pope
had now changed his. Pope was going to burn the verses. Swift saved
them from the fire. When three such wits had come together they might
as well all whip the world. Let Gay have his moral animals, and Pope
his dunces. Swift would take mankind.
They read and discussed his Travels. Pope and Swift thought of means
of publishing the book so stealthily that there would be no danger of
prosecution. The printer, having seen a quarter of it, agreed to pay
within six months the two hundred pounds which Pope made Swift demand.
Only after Swift had left England the middle of August did the printer
receive the manuscript, “he knew not whence, nor from whom, dropped at
his house in the dark from a hackney coach” in which it is likely that
the mystifying Pope enjoyed his subterfuge.
Secret enough, but not half as secret as Swift was about something
dearer to him than any book. From the beginning of his visit he was
worried about Stella, who was very sick at home but tried to keep the
news from him. “I have these two months seen through Mrs. Dingley’s
disguises,” Swift wrote in July. Early in that month he heard that
Stella was in danger. Though it destroyed his peace, he said nothing to
his friends in England. Bolingbroke knew that Swift had a friend called
Stella and gallantly assumed she was his mistress. To Pope and Gay
and Arbuthnot she was at most only a vague shape in Ireland. Neither
at Twickenham nor at Whitehall, where Swift later lived with Gay, was
she more than that. Swift, so long used to discretion where Stella
was concerned, showed them a wit’s face, not a lover’s heart. But his
letters to his friends in Ireland made plain how his grief had shaken
him.
“What you tell me of Mrs. Johnson I have long expected, with great
oppression and heaviness of heart. We have been perfect friends these
thirty-five years. Upon my advice they both came to Ireland and have
been ever since my constant companions; and the remainder of my life
will be a very melancholy scene when one of them is gone whom I most
esteemed upon the score of every good quality than can possibly
recommend a human creature.... My heart has been so sunk that I have
not been the same man, nor ever shall be again, but drag on a wretched
life till it shall please God to call me away.... I wish it could be
brought about that she might make her will....
“Think how I am disposed while I write this, and forgive the
inconsistencies. I would not for the universe be present at such a
trial of seeing her depart. She will be among friends that upon her
account and great worth will tend her with all possible care, where I
should be a trouble to her and the greatest torment to myself. In case
the matter should be desperate I would have you advise, if they come
to town, that they should be lodged in some airy, healthy part and not
in the deanery, which besides, you know, cannot but be a very improper
thing for that house to breathe her last in. This I leave to your
discretion, and I conjure you to burn this letter immediately, without
telling the contents of it to any person alive.
“Pray write me every week, that I may know what steps to take; for I
am determined not to go to Ireland to find her just dead or dying.
Nothing but extremity could make me familiar with those terrible
words, applied to such a dear friend. Let her know I have bought her a
repeating gold watch, for her ease in winter nights. I designed to have
surprised her with it, but now I would have her know it, that she may
see how my thoughts were always to make her easy. I am of opinion that
there is not a greater folly than to contract too great and intimate a
friendship, which must always leave the survivor miserable.... When you
have read this letter twice, and retain what I desire, pray burn it and
let all I have said lie only in your breast.
“Pray write every week.... I would rather have good news from you than
Canterbury, though it were given me upon my own terms.”
What other lover who ever lived could, staggering with grief and dread,
have talked about the terms of his lover’s will, measured her loss
against the gain of an archbishopric, remembered that she must not die
in his house, hesitated to go to her, and commanded that his anguish be
kept secret?
“One of the two oldest and dearest friends I have in the world is in so
desperate a condition of health as makes me expect every post to hear
of her death. It is the younger of the two with whom I have lived in
the greatest friendship for thirty-three years.... For my part, as I
value life very little, so the poor casual remains of it, after such
a loss, would be a burden that I must heartily beg God Almighty to
enable me to bear; and I think there is not a greater folly than that
of entering into too strict and particular a friendship, with the loss
of which a man must be absolutely miserable, but especially at an age
when it is too late to engage in a new friendship. Besides, this was a
person of my own rearing and instructing, from childhood, who excelled
in every good quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature....
Pardon me, I know not what I am saying. But believe me that violent
friendship is much more lasting and as much engaging as violent love.”
Towards the end of July, Swift, at Twickenham, was one day answering
a letter from Sheridan. “The account you give me is nothing but what
I have some time expected with the utmost agonies, and there is one
aggravation of constraint, that where I am I am forced to put on an
easy countenance. It was at this time the best office your friendship
could do, not to deceive me.... I look upon this as the greatest event
that can ever happen to me, but all my preparations will not suffice to
make me bear it like a philosopher, nor altogether like a Christian.
There hath been the most intimate friendship between us from her
childhood, and the greatest merit, on her side, that ever was in one
human creature towards another. Nay, if I were now near her I would not
see her. I could not behave myself tolerably, and should redouble her
sorrow. Judge in what a temper of mind I write this. The very time I am
writing I conclude the fairest soul in the world hath left its body.”
Just then Swift was interrupted. “Confusion! that I am this moment
called down to a visitor, when I am in the country and not in my power
to deny myself.”
He came back to his unfinished letter. “I have passed a very
constrained hour, and now return to say I know not what. I have been
long weary of the world, and shall for my small remainder of years
be weary of life, having for ever lost that conversation which alone
could make it tolerable. I fear while you are reading this you will be
shedding tears at her funeral.”
In a week Swift knew that, no matter what he faced, he must go to
Ireland. Pope, ignorant of the full reason, was so unwilling to lose
his friend that he travelled with him to Chester. “I felt the extreme
heat of the weather,” Pope said, “the inns, the roads, the confinement
and closeness of the uneasy coach, and wished a hundred times I had
either a deanery or a horse in my gift” to keep Swift in England or to
make his journey more comfortable. But there were no words between them
about Stella, as there were no words about her in any of the letters he
wrote back to his English friends. Swift, so copious and eloquent about
most of his passions, about this one was as quiet as a stone. Pope, who
suspected something, risked only a hint in his wish that “you may find
every friend you have there in the state you wish him or her.” Talking
about everything else in the world the two great wits rode in the
uneasy coach to Chester, where Swift was prepared to find mortal news
waiting for him. The only word from him about her is in a letter to an
Irish friend two months later. “Mrs. Johnson is much recovered since I
saw her first, but still very lean and low.”
3
Pope wished “that your visits to us may have no other effect than the
progress of a rich man to a remote estate, which he finds greater than
he expected, which knowledge only serves to make him happier where he
is, with no disagreeable prospect if ever he should choose to remove.”
And Swift, coming home from his rich estate in London, was received,
Arbuthnot said, like a Lord Lieutenant. When the ship was sighted in
Dublin Bay the bells of the city were set to ringing. The Corporation,
with less official citizens, went out in wherries to meet the “Dean,
Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver.” The docks had bunting, every street
a bonfire. The populace cheered their defender as he landed and rode to
his gloomy house.
If Swift was human, as well as Swift, he was warmed by this loud
affection. But they were the people who had hooted him when he came
over to be Dean, before he had fought for them about their copper
farthings. “I have often reflected in how few hours, with a swift horse
or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown to him as
the antipodes.” Between Swift and the Irish, or between him and any
body of men, it was too late for reconciliation. He had been an alien
all his life, and he had proved it in his Travels. There the world
would soon have a chance to study its disgusting face.
_Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World_, published 28
October 1726 to vex the world rather than divert it, diverted
it. Nobody spoke or apparently even thought of prosecution. “The
politicians to a man agree,” Pope and Gay wrote to Swift, “that it
is free from particular reflections, but that the satire on general
societies of men is too severe.” Politicians were no more disposed
than they were obliged to defend the human race against a libel.
Mankind, invincibly abstract, invulnerably obtuse to general assaults,
laughed. “From the highest to the lowest” the book was read, “from the
cabinet council to the nursery.” The Princess of Wales did not care,
probably did not know, that she was supposed to have sat for the Queen
of Brobdingnag. She was delighted. The Duchess of Marlborough was “in
raptures” and willing to forgive her old enemy. Arbuthnot saw that
the book was to be a classic, and forecast for it “as great a run as
John Bunyan.” The first impression was sold within a week. There were
Dublin editions, and translations into French and Dutch within a year.
The third voyage, with its multiplied ridicule of pedants, pleased
the least. That satire was too limited. Readers preferred to see all
mankind in the refracting glass. Monkeys before a mirror, Swift might
have said. They accepted the likenesses which they recognized, but they
did not recognize those which might have vexed them. At least they did
not take such likenesses to themselves. Untroubled by the satire, they
enjoyed the story, so marvellous yet so circumstantial, so ingenious
yet so simple. “Such a merry work,” Arbuthnot called it. Who was there
who could fail to be diverted by these adventures among pigmies and
giants, on an island that moved through the air, in a land where horses
used men as beasts? Who minded that the traveller was a misanthrope?
Misanthropy did not hurt its objects, so long as it confined itself to
words.
Swift, accusing mankind of every vice and folly, had thought of it as
more sensitive or less frivolous than it was. He let drive with all his
pitiless force, and the world applauded his witty marksmanship.
Stella having for the time recovered, Swift went again the next April
to England, where the Earl of Peterborough thought the Dean ran the
risk of becoming a bishop. The second visit was an anticlimax. Swift
made no progress with the life of Oxford. He was completely out of
favour with Walpole. Twickenham, happily as Pope welcomed Swift there,
was not what it had seemed before. It was pleasant to talk with Pope
about his dunces. It was pleasant to read the verses of the opera
which Gay, to whom Swift had said that “a Newgate pastoral might make
an odd, pretty sort of thing,” was writing about rogues and beggars.
It was pleasant to concoct their miscellanies, in which the poems to
Stella were to appear. But it was unpleasant for Swift to be so deaf
that he could hardly hear Pope’s feeble voice or have a share in the
conversation of the friends who came to see them. Swift began to feel
that he was a burden. He would go to London.
He would go to France. Voltaire gave him letters of introduction. Swift
exchanged opinions with his French translator, telling him, in his
French, that if the Travels were calculated only for the British Isles
then the traveller was a pitiable writer. The same vices and the same
follies, he said, reigned everywhere, at least in all the civilized
countries of Europe; and the author who wrote only for one city,
one province, one kingdom, or even one age so little deserved to be
translated that he did not deserve to be read.
The death of George I and the accession to the throne of the Prince and
Princess of Wales, who were the only royal friends Swift ever had, held
him in England. Once more, and for the last time, he was disappointed.
Walpole, after a fluttering interval, retained his power. Wit alone
could not make a man a bishop.
Stella, it turned out, could not be well without Swift. He had left
her settled in the deanery for the summer. In August Sheridan wrote
that she was once more in danger. Swift, at the house of a kinsman in
London, was helpless with his own malady.
“I walk like a drunken man, and am deafer than ever you knew me. If I
had any tolerable health I would go this moment to Ireland. Yet I think
I would not, considering the news I daily expect to hear from you.... I
kept it [Sheridan’s letter] an hour in my pocket with all the suspense
of a man who expected to hear the worst news that fortune could give
him, and at the same time was not able to hold up my head.... I know
not whether it be an addition to my grief or not, that I am now
extremely ill; for it would have been a reproach to me to be in perfect
health when such a friend is desperate. I do profess upon my salvation
that the distressed and desperate condition of our friend makes life
so indifferent to me, who by course of nature have so little left,
that I do not think it worth the time to struggle. Yet I should think,
according to what hath been formerly, that I may happen to overcome
this present disorder. And to what advantage? Why, to see the loss of
that person for whose sake only life was worth preserving.... What have
I to do in the world? I never was in such agonies as when I received
your letter and had it in my pocket. I am able to hold up my head no
longer.”
Still Swift would not tell his English friends about Stella. His secret
had been buried in him too long to be dug up now. Too much of his
heart would have come with it. Suddenly leaving London in September he
lurched across England to Chester. Offered a passage from Parkgate in
the official yacht, he refused, thinking he would be in Ireland sooner
if he rode through Wales and shipped from Holyhead. There the winds
delayed him for a week, spent in the smoky rooms of an inn which had no
decent wine to drink, no books to read, no customers who could speak
English.
Morning and afternoon he walked in the wind on the rocks. “I was so
cunning these three last days that whenever I began to rage and storm
at the weather I took special care to turn my face towards Ireland, in
hopes by my breath to push the wind forward. But now I give up.” Every
night he dined alone, and had five dreary hours ahead of him before
he went to bed. Sleep was no relief. He had fantastic dreams, such as
that Bolingbroke was preaching in St. Patrick’s and quoting Wycherley
in his sermon. Morning was no restoration. Swift looked for the wind
to change, and it would not change. “I live in suspense, which is
the worst circumstance of human nature.” There was nothing to do but
“scribble or sit humdrum.” He scribbled prose and verse.
“_I never was in haste before
To reach that slavish hateful shore.
Before I always found the wind
To me was most malicious kind.
But now the danger of a friend
On whom my fears and hopes depend,
Absent from whom all climes are curst,
With whom I’m happy in the worst,
With rage impatient makes me wait
A passage to the land I hate._”
And when he finally got away the wind was so near a tempest that he was
forced to land at Carlingford, sixty miles from Dublin, and complete
his journey with “lazy dull horses.”
This time Stella, though comforted by his return, was dying. Swift
would not say so to Pope, to whom Sheridan had secretly written the
truth. Again Pope hinted his sympathy. “To your bad health I fear there
was added some disagreeable news from Ireland which might occasion
your so sudden departure.” Swift met the sympathy with a shield. His
health, he said, had driven him home. “Here is my maintenance, and here
my convenience.” He invited Pope to Dublin. “I have a race of orderly
elderly people of both sexes at command who are of no consequence and
have gifts proper for attending us, who can bawl when I am deaf and
tread softly when I am only giddy and would sleep.” Six weeks later he
repeated his invitation. “You may find about six rational, good, civil,
learned, easy companions of the males; fewer of the females, but many
civil, hospitable, and ready to admire and adore.”
Nothing about Stella, who had admired and adored beyond almost any
woman who ever lived. Nothing about Stella to any man during the four
months left to her. But Swift in October and November wrote three
prayers which he used in her last sickness.
“Give her grace to continue sincerely thankful to Thee for the many
favours Thou hast bestowed upon her: the ability and inclination and
practice to do good, and those virtues which have procured the esteem
and love of her friends and a most unspotted name in the world.... We
beseech Thee likewise to compose her thoughts and preserve to her the
use of her memory and reason during the course of her sickness. Give
her a true conception of the vanity, folly, and insignificancy of all
human things.... Let not our grief afflict her mind and thereby have an
effect on her present distempers. Forgive the sorrow and weakness of
those among us who sink under the grief and terror of losing so dear
and useful a friend.”
On a Sunday in January, when Swift had guests at his house, “about
eight o’clock at night a servant brought me a note with an account of
the death of the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I,
or perhaps any other person, ever was blessed with.... As soon as I
am left alone, which is about eleven at night, I resolve, for my own
satisfaction, to say something of her life and character.” He wrote of
her parentage and girlhood, her intelligence and beauty (“only a little
too fat”), her reasons for leaving England for Ireland. “Thus far I
writ the same night between eleven and twelve.”
The next day he wrote of her memory and judgment and gracefulness,
“somewhat more than human,” of her “civility, freedom, easiness, and
sincerity.” “All of us who had the happiness of her friendship agreed
unanimously that in an afternoon or evening’s conversation she never
failed, before we parted, of delivering the best thing that was said in
the company.” He wrote of the love her servants felt for her. “My head
aches, and I can write no more.”
Tuesday was the day of the funeral at St. Patrick’s. “My sickness will
not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am removed into
another apartment that I may not see the light in the church, which
is just over against the window of my bed-chamber.” He wrote of her
courage. She had once shot a burglar, trying to enter her house, and
had killed him. She was never known to cry out with fear or weakness or
affectation. He wrote of her manners, her reading in history, books of
travel, the philosophers. “She had a true taste of wit and good sense,
both in poetry and prose, and was a perfect good critic of style.” He
wrote of her fortune and her management of it.
Afterwards he wrote as he found time. He wrote of her charity, her
tact, her modesty. “She rather chose men for her companions, the usual
topics of ladies’ discourse being such as she had little knowledge of,
and less relish. Yet no man was upon the rack to entertain her, for
she easily descended to anything that was innocent and diverting.” She
loved Ireland more than most natives, and detested “the tyranny and
injustice of England in their treatment of this kingdom. She had indeed
reason to love a country where she had the esteem and friendship of all
who knew her, and the universal good report of all who ever heard of
her.”
This is as strange a language as love ever used, but it is a language
of love, Swift’s language, Swift’s love. After he had written this he
set down some of her sayings, which only a lover could have found as
witty as Swift found them. After that he wrote not a word about her
in any letter that survives. He is said never again to have spoken
her name. He destroyed all her letters to him and all his letters to
her except the journal which he had sent home from London. He would
be as silent as Stella, the most silent of all famous lovers. But he
could not quite equal her silence. On a paper containing some of her
hair he wrote, it is said, the words “Only a woman’s hair.” A giant’s
sentimentality and a devil’s contempt for it. Fire and ice.
VII
KING OF TRIFLERS
1
On the day after Stella died the _Beggar’s Opera_ was first given in
London, the Duke of Argyll starting the applause which in the end
became a delighted clamour. Swift, who had been doubtful about the
dramatic form which Gay had chosen, said the opera would do “more
public service than all the ministers of state from Adam to Walpole.”
When it came to Dublin, and the Lord Lieutenant approved of it, so did
the Dean of St. Patrick’s. Though Swift, who never went to the theatre,
seems now to have made no exception, he spoke as from the Cathedral.
Such humour would probably, he said with another moral comparison, “do
more good than a thousand sermons of so stupid, so injudicious, and
so prostitute a divine” as the court chaplain, later Archbishop of
Canterbury, who had preached against the opera in London. Humour, Swift
explained, was a “happy talent,” “fixed to the very nature of man.”
Satire was public spirit “prompting men of genius and virtue to mend
the world as far as they are able.”
The defence of Gay became a defence of Swift. “I demand whether I have
not as good a title to laugh as men have to be ridiculous, and to
expose vice as another hath to be vicious. If I ridicule the follies
and corruptions of a court, a ministry, or a senate, are they not amply
paid by pensions, titles, and power, while I expect and desire no other
reward than that of laughing with a few friends in a corner?” Surely
the objects of satire were as well off as the satirist. “If those who
take offence think me in the wrong I am ready to change the scene with
them whenever they please.”
In March 1728 Swift impartially observed that “the _Beggar’s Opera_
has knocked down Gulliver; I hope to see Pope’s Dulness knock down the
_Beggar’s Opera_.” The _Dunciad_ appeared in May. It was then without
the inscription to Swift which, included the next year, made him feel
“abstracted from everybody in the happiness of being recorded your
friend while wit and humour and politeness shall have any memorial
among us.” But Swift had already seen the brilliant lines in which
Pope named his friend with the greatest wits and complimented him with
having driven Dulness out of Ireland, to settle, safe from him, in
England.
“_O thou! whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!
Whether thou choose Cervantes’ serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais’ easy chair,
Or praise the Court, or magnify Mankind,
Or thy grieved country’s copper chains unbind;
From thy Bœotia though her power retires,
Mourn not, my Swift, at aught our realm acquires.
Here pleased behold her mighty wings outspread
To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead._”
Swift’s Travels, Gay’s Opera, Pope’s Dunces: Twickenham had borne its
satiric fruits. “Pope, Gay, and I,” Swift later wrote, had done their
best “to make folks merry and wise,” acknowledging “no enemies except
knaves and fools.” But that episode had ended. Swift was never to see
his friends again. Year after year they urged him to come back, and
for a few years he often planned to go. Sickness and pride kept him
in Ireland. The Court had no favours for him. Walpole was hopelessly
in power. Bolingbroke, spinning out a slipshod philosophy for Pope
to versify in his moral essays, tried to entice Swift to a living in
Berkshire, half a day’s journey from Uxbridge and Twickenham. Swift,
relatively a rich man in Ireland, declined to become relatively a poor
man in England. Letters would have to keep their friendship alive.
Half his life he lived in his letters to and from his English friends.
Yet he wrote fitfully, fewer letters than he received. Much as he loved
Arbuthnot, Swift was slow in writing to him. Gay might have to write
twice or three times to draw an answer. When he could, Swift wrote to
two of his friends at once: Bolingbroke and Pope, Arbuthnot and Pope,
Pope and Gay, Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry, Gay’s lively patron.
“It is a very cold scent to continue a correspondence with one whom we
never expect to see.... Mr. Pope and my Lord Bolingbroke themselves,”
Swift wrote in 1734, “begin to fail me.”
The fellowship was mortal. Gay died in 1732. When the news came in a
letter from Arbuthnot and Pope, Swift did not open it for five days,
“by an impulse foreboding some misfortune.” Arbuthnot died in 1735.
“The death of Mr. Gay and the Doctor,” Swift wrote to Pope, “have been
terrible wounds near my heart. Their living would have been a great
comfort to me, although I should never have seen them, like a sum of
money in a bank from which I should at least receive annual interest,
as I do from you and have done from my Lord Bolingbroke.” Bolingbroke
after 1735 spent most of his time in France. Only Pope and Swift were
left, Pope’s mind to outlast Swift’s, Swift’s body to outlast Pope’s.
There was no change in the affection which Swift felt for his friends,
but he could not help getting out of touch with them. England was
soon years away. Despairing of English politics, in the interminable
hands of Walpole, Swift gave up his old concern for government, except
where Ireland was touched. He saw London as the stage of a political
melodrama, with countless Whigs as the villain, and with no hero
except Pulteney and his Patriots. Swift ceased to follow, even as much
as he had done before, the turns and changes of wit. London had Pope,
and London had dunces. In Ireland it was impossible to tell whom Pope
was slashing unless he spelled out the names of his victims. When Swift
read such writers, he was “out of all patience to the present set of
whifflers.” England, London, the Court might still be visible enough to
Swift’s memory, but they no longer stirred with the life which had been
his passion and his magnet. They had stiffened to a picture, and the
years had set them in a frame.
2
It was time for Swift to learn, if he could learn, how to live in
Ireland without raging. For a year or so after Stella’s death he tried
to learn. “Except absence from friends,” he wrote to Pope in May 1728,
“I confess freely that I have no discontent at living here, beside
what arises from a silly spirit of liberty, which as it neither sours
my drink nor hurts my meat nor spoils my stomach farther than in
imagination, so I resolve to throw it off.”
Sheridan, who of Swift’s Irish friends had known Stella best, plotted
diversions. He took Swift south to Wexford about Easter of that year.
Together they began in May to write the _Intelligencer_. This was meant
to be a weekly paper “to inform or divert or correct or vex the town”
of Dublin. The two contributors, who had no editor to keep them going,
did not lose interest till after a dozen issues and did not stop till
after twenty. Sheridan got Swift invited in June to the house of Sir
Arthur Acheson at Market Hill near Armagh. There from June to the next
January, and during the summers of 1729 and 1730, Swift lived with
friends, away from Dublin and the solitude of his deanery.
“I lived very easily in the country,” he wrote to Pope after the
first visit. “Sir Arthur is a man of sense, has a good voice, and my
Lady a better. She is perfectly well bred and desirous to improve her
understanding, which is very good, but cultivated too much like a fine
lady. She was my pupil there, and severely chid when she read wrong.
With that, and walking and making twenty little amusing improvements,
and writing family verses of mirth by way of libels on my Lady, my time
passed very well and in very good order.”
Swift might have said more. Though his host was a member of the Irish
Parliament and high sheriff of his county, and his wife was daughter
of a man who had been for twenty years Chancellor of the Exchequer in
Ireland, Swift with them was like an emperor on a friendly visit. They
seem hardly to have questioned his imperial attitudes. The Dean might
cut down one of the baronet’s favourite trees or have his own way with
such “little amusing improvements” as “zigzags and walks,” “cradles and
caves,” “grottos and seats”--
“_A hole where a rabbit
Would scorn to inhabit,
Dug out in an hour:
He calls it a bower._”
The Dean might tease the lady for her lack of flesh, calling her
Skinnybonia, or for her lack of learning--
“_He loves to be bitter at
A lady illiterate._”
The Dean might condemn her to “dull Bacon’s Essays” or “poor Milton”
while he, not at study or at prayer, amused himself with grooms and
labourers. The Dean might insist that he, not the dairymaid, should
shake cream in a bottle till, after three hours, there was butter for
breakfast. The Dean might take it upon himself to build “two temples
of magnific size” for the “gentle goddess Cloacine.” The Dean might
come down to dinner when he chose, no matter who the guests. But he was
still the Dean, the greatest man in Ireland, great politician, great
wit. To say nothing of his company, his verses, spirited and various,
were ten times a return for his entertainment. They would, Swift
declared, make Market Hill as famous as Penshurst.
[Illustration: Jonathan Swift
_As Dean of St. Patrick’s_]
Swift was king enough in Ireland, if he wanted to be king. When he
went back to Dublin in October 1729 after his second visit to Market
Hill, he was received, a newspaper said, “with great joy by many of our
principal citizens, who also on the same occasion caused the bells
to ring in our cathedrals and had bonfires and other illuminations.”
Both candidates in an election then being held claimed the support of
the Drapier, though it is not certain that either had it. One of them
to win needed only to give out a letter which he said Swift had written
to him. Early the next year the Dean, because he had been, as he now
admitted, the Drapier, was given the freedom of the city in a gold box
brought to him by the Lord Mayor and some of the aldermen. It was an
honour usually reserved for “chief governors or persons in very high
employment.”
It was an honour, and Swift was gratified. Yet in a few weeks he was
writing to Bolingbroke: “I ought to think that it is time for me to
have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better
before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a
poisoned rat in a hole.” His resolve to throw off his discontent had
not been kept. Such cheerfulness as he had felt at Market Hill had not
survived his return to his solitary house. No sooner was he back than
he wrote, or at least published, the most savage of all his pamphlets,
the most terrible outcry of his misanthropy.
It was, he called it, a modest proposal. Everybody knew that Ireland
was starving and nobody knew what to do about it. The problem was not
so difficult. Put simply, it came to this: too little food, too many
mouths. Swift had thought of a way to make more food and fewer mouths.
“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in
London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most
delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted,
baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in
a fricassee or a ragout.” Of the children annually born in Ireland
perhaps thirty thousand could be taken care of by their parents.
Twenty thousand others might be kept “for breed, whereof only one
fourth part to be males, which is more than we allow to sheep, black
cattle, or swine.” That would leave, he calculated, about a hundred
thousand every year “to be offered in sale to the persons of quality
and fortune through the kingdom.... A child will make two dishes in an
entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone the fore or
hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little
pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially
in winter.” Such food would be expensive, but within the reach of
landlords, who, “as they have already devoured most of the parents,
seem to have the best title to the children.”
One of his friends, Swift said, argued that in the present want of
venison it might be well to supply it with boys and girls of twelve
to fourteen. He himself could not agree. The boys of that age from
much exercise would be thin and tough. The girls were too near the
age when they might bear children themselves. “And besides, it is
not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure
such a practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering
upon cruelty, which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest
objection against any project, however well intended.” It would be
enough to limit the proposal to children a year old. The older poor
were already “dying and rotting, by cold and famine and filth and
vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.”
Plausibly, statistically, Swift went over the advantages and
disadvantages of his scheme. The only real objection he could think of
was that it would reduce the number of people in the kingdom. The best
thing that could happen. It was Ireland he was writing about, not any
other country “that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon earth.”
Let no man talk of taxing absentees, or using Irish manufactures only,
or going without luxuries, or forcing landlords to be generous and
shopkeepers honest--as Swift himself had so long and often talked.
None of those expedients had worked, or been tried. They were “vain,
idle, visionary.” This new proposal was “solid and real, of no expense
and little trouble, full in our power.” It would not even disoblige
England. Ireland had hit upon a foodstuff which could not be exported
because it could not stand much salt. Perhaps, however, “I could name a
country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.”
Few of Swift’s readers seem to have shuddered at his proposal. Lord
Bathurst wrote from England that he had almost brought his wife round
to the opinion that the youngest of their children should help provide
for the eldest. After all, any sensible reader knew that the Irish
children would not be eaten, at least in this forthright, economical
way, just as he knew that there were no Houyhnhnms and no Yahoos.
Swift, sensible readers said, was only joking, as the Irish bishop had
said that Gulliver was only lying. Once more the misanthrope had run
against mankind in the abstract.
For Swift there was nothing abstract about it. There was the actual
disease. Here was the only sufficient cure. What if his flesh did creep
when he recommended “buying the children alive, and dressing them hot
from the knife”? What if his nerves did rage when he advised that the
mothers of the children “let them suck plentifully in the last month
so as to render them plump and fat for a good table”? So had his flesh
crept and his nerves raged all over Ireland at the starved desert that
England had made of it. If his cure violated the profoundest human
instincts, so did the disease. Ask the parents if they would not have
been better off if they had been sold for food at a year old instead
of growing up to life in Ireland. Of course the proposal would not be
carried out. Nothing so logical, nothing so mad and merciful, would
ever be carried out. That was mankind. That was mankind.
Except for a few hints, a few urgings, a few arguments, a few
accusations, all scattered and occasional, Swift after his modest
proposal wrote no more prose about Ireland. “Looking upon this kingdom
as absolutely desperate,” he said in 1731, “I would not prescribe a
dose to the dead.”
3
All his life Swift had been alien, but he had never been so solitary
as he now became. His misanthropy, however rooted in his constitution,
however confirmed by his experience, however fortified by his blunt
metaphysics, was not complete. He had had to be perverse to be so
thorough. He had had to deny himself things that he wanted in order
to round out his desolation. Even in his desolation, perverse but not
altogether voluntary, he had needed habitual friends. He was not a
man who could do without women. Stella, in his worst hours, had been
friends and women. After her death he lacked what only a friend who was
also a woman could give him. Without her to consider he settled into a
dark preoccupation with himself. Without her to stir him to variety he
sank into a tedious, disheartening, cold routine, hard and harder to
break through.
At first he dined alone, or with his housekeeper, five nights out of
seven. By 1736 he could say, with a grim flash, “nine days every week I
dine at home.”
“I awake so indifferent to anything which may pass either in the world
or my own little domestic,” he wrote in 1731, “that I hardly think it
worth my time to rise, and would certainly lie all day a-bed if decency
and dread of sickness did not drive me thence.” His breakfast was dull
gruel. “I am wholly a stranger to tea and coffee, the companions of
bread and butter.” When his health allowed him he was “constantly at
morning prayers by nine.” But in 1735: “I very seldom go to church
for fear of being seized with a fit of giddiness in the midst of the
service.” “In a morning I am so pestered by impertinent people and
impertinent business which my station exposes me to that the former
part of the day is wholly lost.” As Dean of St. Patrick’s, as civil
governor of the Cathedral neighbourhood, Swift had duties which he
would not shirk, even to the least detail. Yet they were all minor
duties, too easy to be interesting. And of course he would not think
them important.
Much of Swift’s day was given to walking and riding, “at which,
however, I repine, and would not do it merely to lengthen life, because
it would be ill husbandry, for I should save time by sitting still
though I should die seven years sooner. But the dread of pain and
torture makes me toil to preserve health from hand to mouth as much as
a labourer to support life.” Swift’s exercise, however, was not wholly
deliberate. He had still a fierce energy which kept his body restless
as well as his mind. Writing to Pope, younger by twenty years, and
referring to Bolingbroke, younger by ten, Swift said: “At your or his
time of life I could have leaped over the moon.” And in 1730 he was, he
told Gay, “reputed the best walker in this town and five miles around.”
“Twice a day in fair weather and once in foul” was the remedy Swift
prescribed himself--“I mean exercise ... the cheapest of all drugs.”
This treatment he varied but would not give up. In 1731: “I can walk
eight or ten miles a day and ride thirty Irish ones.” In 1733: “I am
almost every second day on horseback for about a dozen miles.” In 1735:
“I ride a dozen miles as often as I can, and always walk the streets
except in the night, which my head will not suffer me to do.” In 1736:
“I have not an ounce of flesh about me, and cannot ride above a dozen
miles in a day without being sore and bruised and spent.” Later that
same year: “I can neither read nor write nor remember nor converse. All
I have left is to walk and ride.” In 1738: “I seldom walk less than
four miles, sometimes six, eight, ten, or more, never beyond my own
limits; or, if it rains, I walk as much through the house, up and down
stairs.” By 1740, though Swift’s energy was chiefly in his nerves, they
would not let him stop walking back and forth at home for hours a day.
Swift might look eccentric on horseback, with his short gown and his
gambadoes, large boots fastened to the saddle to protect his legs from
wet and cold, but he rode out with a touch of state. Two servants,
“for fear of accidents,” always went with him. Street and road were
his. “I am one of the governors of all the hackney coaches, carts, and
carriages round this town, who dare not insult me like your [English]
rascally wagoners or coachmen, but give me the way; nor is there one
lord or squire for a hundred of yours, to turn me out of the road or
run over me with their coaches and six.” When, once, as he rode on the
strand, some careless hunter fired his gun and frightened the Dean’s
horse, it got into the newspapers.
It was Swift’s habit to take with him, whenever he meant to stop for
dinner with anybody on his ride, his own wine, bread, and chicken in a
basket which one of the servants carried. It was his habit to send word
of his coming with commands. Humorously and arrogantly he announced to
one of his prebendaries, who lived at Wicklow and was almost unknown to
Swift, that the Dean would like to spend Christmas there.
“There is an inhabitant of this city,” Swift wrote, “of whom I suppose
you have often heard. I remember him from my very infancy, but confess
I am not so well acquainted with him as in prudence I ought to be, yet
I constantly pretend to converse with him, being seldom out of his
company, but I do not find that our conversation is very pleasing to
either of us.” This person, to shorten Swift’s account of himself, had
been recommended to Wicklow for its nearness to Dublin and the fine
riding thereabouts.
“By these incitements he seems determined to quarter himself upon you
for three weeks at least, if he can have your consent, or rather that
of your lady, although I find he never had the honour to see her. He
travels with two servants, and consequently three horses; but these
latter are at hack and the former at board-wages, so that neither of
them will trouble you. As to the person himself, he every day drinks
a pint of wine at noon and another at night, and for the trouble he
gives the house he will allow one bottle more every day for the table,
but not one drop for foreigners, who are to drink on your account. He
will further allow one shilling and sixpence English for his commons,
ale and small beer included. But you are to direct how the wine can
be found, and whether he must send it by a Wicklow carrier. But the
bottles, when empty, he must be paid for. These are the conditions,
only adding that the family, during his residence, must be regulated
by his own model, and you are to answer the very next post. He travels
with his own sheets, so that he makes no allowance for that article.
Whether you do or do not approve of these proposals, you are to give me
an account, directed to the D---- of St. P----’s house. And the D----,
after conferring with your future guest, will either return you an
answer or send the gentleman.”
The threatened host saw the humour behind the arrogance, and at once
sent a “kind friendly letter” with a “generous invitation.” When a fit
of giddiness kept Swift from going, he wrote in another tone. “Pray
God protect you and your family. I know not whether you have children,
nor did I ever see your lady or your house; so that I never did beg
an invitation so much against the rules of common good manners, to
one so much a stranger as you have been, against my will, to me. I am
therefore bound in gratitude and by inclination to assure [you] that I
am with much esteem and truth, Sir, your most obedient humble servant.”
In Dublin, on the two evenings a week when Swift did not dine alone, he
limited himself to friends with whom he could use this same insolence,
with or without apology. “I am hated mortally by every creature in
power,” he wrote to Oxford’s son, “and by all their followers.... I do
not visit one lord either temporal or spiritual, nor am acquainted with
above three squires and half-a-dozen parsons.” “There is another race
which I prefer before them, as beef and mutton for constant diet before
partridges. I mean a middle kind both for understanding and fortune,
who are perfectly easy, never impertinent, complying in everything,
ready to do a hundred little offices that ... I may often want, who
dine and sit with me five times for once that I go with them, and whom
I can tell without offence that I am otherwise engaged at present.”
Writing, as in these instances, to his English friends, Swift
exaggerated his isolation, at least for the first few years after
Stella’s death. He saw more friends than he acknowledged. There was
Patrick Delaney, fellow and then professor at Trinity College, whose
marriage to a rich widow--“See,” Swift wrote to Gay, “what it is to
write godly books!”--enabled the lucky man even in destitute Ireland
to have seven or eight guests to dinner once a week. The guests
were so often the same that they were thought of as a kind of club.
Swift was one of them. But he remembered the Society of Brothers
and the Scriblerus Club. There was Thomas Sheridan, perhaps Swift’s
closest friend, “the best scholar in both kingdoms” Swift called him:
schoolmaster, parson, friend of Stella, blunderer, wit.
“_The Dean and Sheridan, I hope,
Will half supply a Gay and Pope_,”
Swift said. But he knew that Delaney’s house, with no matter how many
Sheridans, was a long way from Pope’s villa at Twickenham. There were
Richard Helsham, Swift’s Dublin physician, and George Faulkner, Swift’s
Dublin printer. There were such older friends as Charles Ford and the
brothers Grattan. There were the little poets and wits who rose from
time to time in Ireland and asked for Swift’s encouragement: Matthew
and Letitia Pilkington, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Grierson, Mrs. Sican, William
Dunkin. All eager, and none good. Swift had to be too kind to them to
be kind at all. Dublin was less like London than like Lilliput.
He would not admit that the little people who swarmed to his house
on Sunday evenings came for anything but his wine. Yet, in spite of
his growing avarice, he permitted himself and them the luxury of six,
seven, eight hogsheads of wine a year, and gave dinners, when he gave
dinners, off one of the finest services of plate in Dublin. In 1736,
inviting Lord Castle-Durrow to dine with him, Swift told about his
household economy.
“When I would have a friend eat with me I direct him in general to
send in the morning and inquire whether I dine at home, and alone. I
add a fowl to my commons, and something else if the company be more,
but I never mingle company, nor multiply dishes. I give a reasonable
price for my wine.... I am seldom without eight or nine hogsheads....
If your Lordship will do me the honour when you come to town, you must
submit to the same method. Only perhaps I will order the butler to
see whether, by chance, he can find out an odd bottle of a particular
choice wine which is all spent, although there may be a dozen or two
remaining.... As to puddings, my Lord, I am not only the best but the
sole perfect maker of them in this kingdom. They are universally known
and esteemed under the name of the deanery puddings. Suet and plumbs
are three-fourth of the ingredients. I had them from my ‘Aunt Giffard’
[Lady Giffard, Castle-Durrow’s aunt] who preserved the succession from
the time of Sir W. Temple.”
The “Sunday spongers,” who did not come till evening, found Swift
as a rule more amiable than he let on to the English friends. More
amiable than he generally let on to the spongers. He wrangled with his
servants, who nevertheless adored him. He said cutting, bruising things
to his visitors, and then offset his words by outbursts of tenderness.
He might be violent, but he was seldom depressed, apparently, and
never flat. “Swift is a very odd companion,” a visitor to Dublin in
1733 wrote to a friend, “if that expression is not too familiar for so
extraordinary a genius. He talks a great deal and does not require many
answers. He has infinite spirits, and says abundance of good things in
his common way of discourse.”
His high spirits extended at times to horseplay and complicated hoaxes.
He introduced Mrs. Pilkington, she said, as a wench whom her husband
had brought to a party, and insisted that the game be played all
evening. Swift got up a mock trial, again according to Mrs. Pilkington,
to try his servants for killing a favourite hen. His friends were the
jury, he was the judge. As if his usual solitude were more than he
could bear, although he made himself bear it for five nights a week, he
ran to extravagances when he escaped from it. “I believe the best part
of the reason why men are said to grow children when they are old,”
he wrote to Pope, “is because they cannot entertain themselves with
thinking; which is the very case of little boys and girls, who love to
be noisy among their playfellows.”
Not until 1736, and then not without relapses, did Swift “forbid the
Sunday spongers, whom in the lump I never loved to see, and cared less
to hear when I could not hear at all.”
Mortified by his deafness, and bored by much of what was shouted in the
treble voices which were the only ones he could hear, he spent his nine
evenings a week alone. With his restless imagination he had to make
drama out of his circumstances.
“I often reflect on my present life as the exact burlesque of my middle
age, which passed among ministers.... I am now acting the same things
in miniature, but in a higher station as first minister, nay sometimes
as a prince, in which last quality my housekeeper, a grave elderly
woman, is called at home and in the neighbourhood Sir Robert [Walpole].
My butler is secretary, and has no other defect for that office but
that he cannot write. Yet that is not singular, for I have known three
Secretaries of State upon the same level, and who were too old to mend,
which mine is not. My realm extends a hundred and twenty houses, whose
inhabitants constitute the bulk of my subjects. My grand jury is my
House of Commons, and my Chapter the House of Lords. I must proceed no
further, because my arts of governing are secrets of state.”
This was written with Swift’s hard smile, but he returned often to
his image of dining alone like a king. He was king in his nutshell.
Though he sometimes claimed to be in danger, he was actually safe.
The government would not have dared to touch him. When he stung the
ministers in one of his poems, and Walpole talked of arrest and
punishment, he was told, it is said, that nothing less than an army of
ten thousand men could fetch Swift out of Ireland. When in 1737 it was
proposed to lower the value of the Irish guinea, and the Primate of
Ireland, Walpole’s real lieutenant, accused Swift of raising the mob,
the Dean said that if he had lifted a finger the people would have torn
the Archbishop to pieces. Swift, when the measure was put into effect,
ran up a black flag over his Cathedral and had the bells toll all
day. The authorities thought it as irritating and useless as it was,
but they let the Dean alone. He was intrenched in the Cathedral, with
the Kevin Bail, the rabble of the Liberty, for his bodyguard. He was
intrenched in the affections of all Ireland.
This was forty years after that time at Moor Park when Temple had first
had the chance to notice, as he read the _Tale of a Tub_, that he had a
tiger in his garden. The tiger was older now, and less deadly to the
fools and knaves who had always been his prey. He had lived through
many wounds. Scars covered him. Sickness crippled him. Incapable of
the great raids of his hungry, angry youth, he kept to his lair. But
he roared with the same voice, glared with the same eyes. Caging had
not tamed him or reconciled him to the fate of gentler creatures. The
bitter world had not taught him to be sweet, or to purr with the soft
reverberations of philosophy, or to move with some friendly pack. Even
if he were willing to submit and make a final peace, he could not do
it. He had been born a tiger. At seventy he was a tiger still.
4
“I am in my chamber at five, there sit alone till eleven, and then to
bed. I write pamphlets and follies merely for amusement, and when they
are finished, or I grow weary in the middle, I cast them into the fire,
partly out of dislike, and chiefly because I know they will signify
nothing.” “Finding it troublesome to read at night, and the bad company
here growing tasteless, I am always writing bad prose, or worse verses,
either of rage or raillery, whereof some few escape to give offence, or
mirth, and the rest are burnt.... I am forced to play at small game,
to set the beasts here a-madding, merely for want of better game.” “I
grow gradually so dry that a rhyme with me is almost as hard to find as
a guinea.” “I can as easily write a poem in the Chinese language as
my own. I am as fit for matrimony as invention. And yet I have daily
schemes for innumerable essays in prose, and proceed sometimes to no
less than half a dozen lines, which the next morning become waste
paper.”
Now and then Swift wrote a brief pamphlet concerned with Irish, and
particularly with Church, politics. Many of his verse lampoons or
“libels” were printed as broadsides in Dublin, where they raised their
laugh or their welt and went by with the news. He spent a good deal of
time on his partisan history of the Oxford Ministry, which his English
friends had to work hard to keep him from publishing. He read the books
of other historians and wrote fierce marginal notes which have become
as famous as the books themselves. When a new edition of his Travels
was issued in Ireland he interested himself only enough to “strike
out the hash” which the English printer had put in to pacify the
English ministers. Swift allowed Pope to add another volume to their
miscellanies, the contents being mostly Swift’s. He allowed his Dublin
publisher and his Dublin friends to bring out his collected works, but
he was willing to give little help and would at first hardly look at
the books when they were published.
Swift, who cared so little for literary fame, would neither trouble
himself to bring his writings together nor rouse himself to produce
others of any bulk. His restlessness made him hurry from scheme to
scheme. This was the only action possible to him. Though he was king of
his Cathedral and his Kevin Bail, it was too small a realm to occupy
or satisfy him. If he must be confined to trifles, he would confine
himself to trifles.
He turned often to his anthology of conversation, which was to sum
up the platitudes of fashionable circles as he remembered them from
London; and to his directions to servants, ironically advising them to
do the most stupid and sluttish things they could. Trifles, yet written
with a genius’s sweep of observation, scruple for detail, variety of
thrust and touch. More than all the novels of his century these two
fragments show how gentlemen and ladies talked and how their households
were managed and mismanaged. Swift when he trifled was as thorough as
other men in earnest.
Much of what he wrote, at least of what he saved, was in verse. Years
of verse-making had brought him to absolute ease in metre. When he
chose he could play almost any tune but the sublime, which he never
chose. He could write “a love song in the modern taste.”
“_Melancholy smooth Meander,
Swiftly purling in a round,
On thy margin lovers wander,
With thy flowery chaplets crowned._
_Thus while Philomela drooping
Softly seeks her silent mate,
See the bird of Juno stooping;
Melody resigns to fate._”
He could make an ode which was all rhetoric.
“_So when Amphion bade the lyre
To more majestic sound aspire,
Behold the madding throng,
In wonder and oblivion drowned,
To sculpture turned by magic sound
And petrifying song._”
He could prattle namby-pamby as long as his ink held out.
“_With thy utmost skill express
Nature in her richest dress:
Limpid rivers smoothly flowing,
Orchards by those rivers blowing;
Curling woodbine, myrtle shade,
And the gay enamelled mead,
Where the linnets sit and sing,
Little sportlings of the spring;
Where the breathing field and grove
Soothe the heart and kindle love._”
He could set rolling words to popular airs:
“_What care we how high runs his passion or pride?
Though his soul he despises he values his hide.
Then fear not his tongue or his sword or his knife;
He’ll take his revenge on his innocent wife.
Knock him down, down, down, keep him down._”
But he preferred to write in the plain, brisk, flexible couplets, four
stresses to a line, to which he had turned from his Pindarics and in
which he could join the neatness of verse to the naturalness of prose.
In couplets he wrote the best poems he had written since his story of
Cadenus and Vanessa and his Horatian poems to Oxford. These poems,
Swift’s trifles, were about love and poetry and death.
The poems on love, if they are on it, were written during the two or
three years after Stella’s death. They made even the eighteenth century
squirm. Swift had never hid his meaning behind periphrasis. His tongue
was as rough as a cat’s.
“_Great folks are of a finer mould.
Lord! how politely they can scold!
While a coarse English tongue will itch
For whore and rogue and dog and bitch._”
But Swift had never before spoken with such candour as he now itched to
use, and used.
It was a sick candour. All of these poems on love, or against it,
strummed the same chord. Women, they pointed out, had cosmetic secrets,
soiled linen, and made full use of their alimentary canals. Swift tried
to laugh at his heroes for their shock at the unromantic discovery.
He loathed while he laughed. The poems were the clearest proof that he
was the victim of a pathological fastidiousness. What a healthier man
would have taken for granted, or would have thought of and forgotten,
sickened Swift.
“_For fine ideas vanish fast,
While all the gross and filthy last._”
He had already, by his seasonable and unseasonable emphasis on
cleanliness, betrayed his obsession. Now his antipathy had suddenly
got beyond control. It held up, for the world to see, the things
which had made him shrink from women. Celia, Corinna, Chloe: in their
dressing-rooms were all the deterrents to love.
These poems, ordinarily dismissed as nasty, and unquestionably that,
mark one of the most terrible episodes in Swift’s life. Swift sitting
deaf in his silent house, past sixty, remembering the women he had
loved, the woman he had loved most. Swift asking himself, possibly,
whether with less fastidiousness or with more effort to overcome it he
might not have had something he had missed. Swift, in a rush of old
disgust, telling himself that what he had missed was something he was
better off without, a horror under an illusion. Swift, to make sure,
putting his nauseous images into brutal words. Swift saying to his
Strephon that if he had known what Swift knew, then
“_Your heart had been as whole as mine._”
Swift wondering about “rash mortals,”
“_Since beauty scarce endures a day,
And youth so swiftly glides away,
Why will you make yourself a bubble,
To build on sand with hay and stubble?_”
Swift convinced that his way with Stella had been the way of wisdom.
Or Swift, following no such thought to its conclusion, obtusely
dramatizing his antipathies, unaware what they had cost him. There is
terror in the episode, no matter how it is understood. A sick heart is
a pit without a bottom. A stony heart is a blank mirror to beauty and
chaos both.
As Swift wrote against love, so he wrote against poetry. No ambition,
he said in what he called his rhapsody, required such “heavenly
influence” as the ambition to be a poet. Yet
“_Not beggar’s brat on bulk begot;
Not bastard of a pedlar Scot;
Not boy brought up to cleaning shoes,
The spawn of Bridewell or the stews;
Not infants dropped, the spurious pledges
Of gipsies littered under hedges;
Are so disqualified by fate
To rise in church or law or state
As he whom Phœbus in his ire
Has blasted with poetic fire._”
To be a poet was as insane as to be a lover. There was no market and no
use for poetry.
“_Court, city, country want you not:
You cannot bribe, betray, or plot._”
It took as long to make a poem as to fatten a chicken. It took no
longer to dispose of the chicken than of the poem.
“_Then hear an old experienced sinner
Instructing thus a young beginner._”
Swift went on to tell whoever in spite of his warning was bound to be a
poet how to go about it. He was to chose his subject according to his
gifts, write his poem, have it printed, and wait for it to be damned.
After three such ventures it would be time to “spring more profitable
game” and become a writer for a party. Walpole would pay well and
promptly. Or if poetry failed, the poet could turn critic. Even beyond
that were hordes “of jobbers in the poet’s art”: poets who lived by
nagging their betters, poets who won fame by writing worse than any of
their rivals. And always the worst poets could write about the royal
family. The King could stomach any praise.
Swift mauled George and his Court with nearly a hundred lines of irony,
and then, losing interest, broke off. He would not give himself the
bother of finishing his satire, though it was a passion which he had
suffered from and hated. His poem was only another trifle.
With one of his trifles he did take pains. It was his poem on his
death. “I was forty-seven years old,” he wrote in October 1729, “when
I began to think of death, and the reflections upon it now begin when
I wake in the morning and end when I am going to sleep.” In December
1731 he told Gay: “I have been several months writing near five hundred
lines on a pleasant subject, only to tell what my friends and enemies
will say on me after I am dead. I shall finish it soon, for I add two
lines every week, and blot out four, and alter eight.”
When he wrote the poem Swift did not intend to let it be published
while he was alive. He would keep it by him and enjoy his secret.
He read it to some of his friends, and then to others. It became a
little legend. The legend amused him. He went to the length of writing
another version, between an abridgment and a burlesque, dating it All
Fools’ Day 1733, and contriving to have it come out in London. Then,
to perfect the hoax, he claimed that somebody had partly memorized his
original and played a trick on him. “But even this trick shall not
provoke me to print the true one, which indeed is not proper to be seen
till I can be seen no more.”
He changed his mind. In 1739, when he had become tired even of his
trifles, he published the most surprising of them.
He took for his text a maxim of La Rochefoucauld: “In the adversities
of our best friends we always find something that does not displease
us.”
“_As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature I believe ’em true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind._”
This maxim was thought baser than all the rest, but it could be proved,
Swift said, by both reason and experience. He himself was full of envy.
“_In Pope I cannot read a line
But with a sigh I wish it mine.
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six,
It gives me such a jealous fit
I cry: ‘Pox take him and his wit!’
I grieve to be outdone by Gay
In my own humorous biting way.
Arbuthnot is no more my friend,
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce,
Refined it first, and showed its use....
To all my foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy gifts, but never to my friend.
I tamely can endure the first,
But this with envy makes me burst._”
Swift was being hard on himself to prepare for what came after. He had
never by a word shown any envy whatever towards Pope, who could not
pack more sense in a couplet than Swift in six; or towards Gay, who
could not outdo Swift in his humorous biting way; or towards Arbuthnot,
whose use of irony had taken nothing from Swift’s. But Swift, inverted
hypocrite as Bolingbroke called him, must put on as bad a face as
possible.
His text announced and defended, he told his story. As he grew older
his friends would talk behind his back about his failing body and mind.
They would seem to be concerned, but they would at least be pleased
that they were better off than he. Once they had said he soon must die,
they would rather see him die than have their predictions turn out
wrong.
As soon as he was dead, Dublin would buzz with gossip, chiefly about
what was to become of his money. The news would spread to London. The
Queen would be glad, now, that she had never sent him the presents she
had promised. Walpole would wish it had been some more important man
who had died. Curll the piratical bookseller would hastily get out
three volumes of rubbish and call it Swift’s.
“_Here shift the scene to represent
How those I love my death lament.
Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day.
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen and drop a tear.
The rest will give a shrug and cry:
‘I’m sorry--but we all must die.’_”
“_My female friends, whose tender hearts,
Have better learned to act their parts,
Receive the news in doleful dumps:
‘The Dean is dead (and what is trumps?)’_”
The Dean’s writings would be unobtainable at the bookshops, in case
any country reader inquired for “Swift in Verse and Prose.” In the
clubs and coffee houses, however, there would be some discussion. Swift
imagined the arguments between his supporters and his defamers. Nearly
half his poem was given to what he thought the worst and the best
things that could be said about him. The worst:
“_Alas, poor Dean! his only scope
Was to be held a misanthrope.
This into general odium drew him,
Which if he liked much good may’t do him.
His zeal was not to lash our crimes,
But discontent against the times;
For had we made him timely offers
To raise his post or fill his coffers,
Perhaps he might have truckled down,
Like other brethren of the gown._”
The best:
“_Had he but spared his tongue and pen
He might have rose like other men.
But power was never in his thought,
And wealth he valued not a groat.
Ingratitude he often found,
And pitied those who meant the wound,
But kept the tenor of his mind
To merit well of human kind....
Yet malice never was his aim,
He lashed the vice but spared the name.
No individual could resent
Where thousands equally were meant.
His satire points at no defect
But what all mortals may correct._”
Swift’s analysis of his character was not too accurate. He had suffered
from disappointments. He had taken revenges. He had aimed to hurt as
well as to mend. But accuracy was not his purpose. This was the last
and greatest of his hoaxes. There was more irony about it in 1739 than
there had been when he wrote it. He had outlived Gay and Arbuthnot, who
in the poem grieved a week or a day. There was more irony about it than
he knew. Pope, credited in the poem with the longest grief over his
friend, had by 1739 deceived Swift about the publication of the letters
between them. Swift could not keep his hoax to himself. It was too good
to be left for any man’s survivors. Swift had put all his cynicism and
all his intensity into his lines on his death. But he could not miss
the chance, by publishing them, to amuse himself, in his way, at his
own funeral.
[Illustration: Jonathan Swift
_In old age_]
VIII
CONJURED SPIRIT
“Life is a tragedy,” Swift said, “wherein we sit as spectators
awhile, and then act our own part in it.” But Swift had never waited
for tragedy to come to him. He had always run to meet it. He had,
dramatic and perverse, insisted upon playing the most tragic parts. He
had, whether quite consciously or not, identified himself with that
“conjured spirit” which a “person of great honour in Ireland” had seen
in him when he was young.
Suppose some such spirit had been conjured up by an experiment of
nature, by a hoax of nature, and had been let loose among men. The
spirit’s course would have been like Swift’s. The spirit would have
brought with it enough angelic light, enough diabolic pride, to make it
restless in its human flesh. It would expect to command the inferior
beings it outwardly resembled. It would fret when it saw that its flesh
condemned it to be mistaken for a creature that was merely flesh.
Learning that most men knew nothing beyond mankind, the spirit would
regard them as a wilderness of fools. Learning that the few who ruled
the many were not much less foolish, the spirit would regard the few as
knaves. Both fools and knaves would be repulsive to it.
But the spirit itself, with its burden and disguise of flesh, must be
more or less a man in whatever it did. Too much a spirit to become easy
among men, it would be too much a man to resist some human beings: men
to be friends with, women to love or be loved by. Too much a spirit
to be willing to take its contented stand with the fools ruled by
the knaves, or with the knaves, it would be too much a man to stand
altogether aside and ridicule the world lumbering or raving by. The
spirit would, as Swift did, try to make its way by something which was
neither the authority of a spirit nor the arts of a man. Divided within
itself, it could not trust its instincts to know just what force, what
craft was needed at what times. The spirit could be hoodwinked through
the man. The man could be deluded through the spirit. Even if the
spirit rose to power, it could get only a man’s reward, and only the
reward of a man handicapped by what the spirit had done to alienate
other men.
That reward would never satisfy the spirit. Sent to govern a province,
the spirit would still think of the empire. The respect, the love, the
veneration of the province might reward the man. The spirit would
despise them. To accept them and be satisfied would be to agree too
well with the flesh which the spirit had been conjured to put on. It
would not agree. It could not. It must, helplessly a spirit, endure
its burden and disguise till they were worn out. It could hardly wear
out its flesh. It would have tainted its mortal body with a dark
immortality. It would outlive the men and women whose love had made it
less wretched than it might have been. In the end it would escape only
with fearful convulsions of its heavy carcass.
Swift’s lifelong metaphor of the conjured spirit was mythological, but
only a metaphor could give reality to a man whose spirit so rode his
flesh.
An extraordinary man, with a boundless appetite for power, must master
or please ordinary men, or else go hungry. Swift was born without the
rank and fortune which are such a man’s natural advantages. Worse,
Swift was born without the hide of brass and bowels of iron which
would have been nearly as good for him as rank and fortune. He could
not climb without caring what he set his feet on. He was clumsy with
scruples. He could not take snubs and kicks and stabs as incidental,
hardly personal to him, and unimportant so long as he could survive
them. He was sensitive to every scratch and had quick, ungovernable
impulses to strike back. He could not centre his energies without mercy
even for himself. No man is so extraordinary that he can, starting
below many of his fellows, scramble past them all without a stubborn,
insolent devotion to the main path. Swift was not single-minded enough
to master his world.
Nor would Swift rise, as some men do, by pleasing. He would have had
to be more supple than he was to wriggle far. Even in an age when it
was still barely a disgrace to court a lord, Swift could not court one
long. He was more ready to bully than to flatter. And with his equals
and inferiors he could or would not assure them that their shortcomings
were virtues, their prejudices wisdom. He used a winter speech in the
most comfortable summers. Above all, he had no zeal to please, and
felt small delight in his small successes. He was half ashamed when he
pleased, as if he were a tragedian who had raised a laugh. This was not
his part. This was for mountebanks.
Nothing about Swift was more extraordinary than his blindness to the
part which he played so well while he was failing in the one on which
he had fixed his desire. Still in his twenties, or just out of them, he
raged at Moor Park because he had no chance to command. Yet in those
same years he flung off a prose satire such as no Englishman had ever
written before and such as no Englishman but Swift ever wrote again.
In London, scheming to rule among the Whigs or Tories, half winning,
and then disappointed after his spell of power, Swift, almost without
effort or concern, ruled the wits. In Ireland, where he thought of
himself as a despairing exile, he wrote pamphlets that are monuments,
poems that added to poetry what was almost a new species. He wrote his
Travels in a vain fury of revenge, and entertained the world. On the
other side of every failure was a triumph.
On the other side of all his hatreds were loves. Swift was a
misanthropist, but he is famous for his friendships. He shrank from
women, but he made two women famous. He detested Ireland, but he has
the eternal affection of the Irish. He loathed the human race, but he
has been a delight to it for two centuries. It was his extraordinary
fortune to draw an interest of love from a principal of hate.
No doubt Swift should have measured his gifts more exactly and should
have put himself into more fitting rôles, like any ordinary man of
talent. Swift was outside the shrewd discipline of talent. He could
not sit down and write prose and verse as if they were sufficient
ends. Prose and verse were the weapons he found in his fists, scarcely
realizing how they came there. He used them in his tragic rôle, in the
war of his ambition, not because he valued them but because they were
the only weapons he had. After he had lost his war, and had--singularly
like Temple--given it up as hopeless when he was only forty-five, Swift
would never again allow himself to be consoled. He would not see that
he had been winning, and still was winning, a great war while he was
losing a small one. His pride blinded him.
A few years reverse many verdicts. While Swift was still alive, king
of Ireland but pretending to be king of triflers, he had good reasons
for foreseeing the true verdict upon him. In the long run, he might
have guessed, he would be remembered for what he had written at Moor
Park, before he had even tried the world, or for what he had written
and done in Ireland, after he had bitterly renounced his expectations.
What he had thought his glorious episode, the years with Oxford and
Bolingbroke, would look a little shabby. In time Swift would seem to
have been most splendid when he had been most himself, and not the
satellite of politicians.
Still, Swift might also have understood, if he had been without his
blindness, that simple formulas would not explain him. To do what he
had done he had needed the blind obsession of his will. As a lover
who does nothing but love is seldom the best lover, so the writer who
desires only to write is seldom the best writer. What had raised Swift,
scattered and random as most of his writing was, to the first rank
among writers, had been the high reach of his pride, the magnificence
of his scorn. He had won the war in which he hardly noticed that he was
fighting because he had fought with so much passion in a war which was
not worth it. It was his passion that had mattered, and not his long
illusion. Nature, when it demands prose and verse of its creatures,
cares no more whether they are begotten in illusion than it cares
whether children are begotten in moods of unreason.
If there had been in Dublin some subtle expert able to pry into Swift’s
mind and point out how he could resolve his conflicts, how he could
make his will submit and take what it could get in place of what it
wanted, it might have made Swift happier. Happier and duller. As it
was, he went on in his own way of life to his own way of death.
In April 1740 he wrote his cousin that he had been “these two days
in so miserable a way, and so cruelly tortured, that it can hardly
be conceived. The whole of last night I was equally struck as if I
had been in Phalaris’s brazen bull, and roared as loud for eight or
nine hours.” After three months he wrote her again. “I have been very
miserable all night, and today extremely deaf and full of pain. I am
so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am
under both in body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture
but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is
and your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my
days will be very few; few and miserable they must be.... If I do not
blunder, it is Saturday, July 26, 1740.”
He had still five years, two of torture and three of a dreadful
peace, in which to keep on outliving his friends. He made his will.
Accustomed to giving a third of his income to charity, he now became
more avaricious than ever, to have more money to give. He shut out the
world. His house was his dungeon. His deafness was almost complete, his
giddiness almost unceasing.
Blood seeped through the membranes which his sly fate had made too
thin, into the labyrinth of his ear. A drop there was enough to
overpower him with the din of water-mills, with the thunder of oceans.
What was all his pride, what was all his intellect, against this
everlasting tumult? It had been beating upon his nerves for half a
century. It now beat louder and louder, with fewer intervals in which
he might recover his patience. He had never had any patience. What he
had had was lost in floods of irritation. His reason was clear, when he
could rest from the insensate drums that sounded in his head, but his
memory was dull and thick. He could not remember the words which he had
started to say. In torment and the fear of torment, he could not even
tell what was hurting him. He could not bear to see the few friends
that remained. They might pity him. They could not help him. His old
habits drove him to a furious activity, wearing out his strength.
He was all agony and all rebellion. Once he was found threatening
his reflection in a mirror. His misanthropy had given up the last
exception. He hated himself.
Yet out of this murk could come an occasional glare that was still
Swift. As late as January 1742 he wrote an exhortation to his Chapter.
“Whereas my infirmities of age and ill health have prevented me to
preside in the chapters held for the good order and government of my
Cathedral Church of St. Patrick’s, Dublin,” he began. He had heard
that various members of the choir had assisted at public musical
performances. He would not have it. “And whereas it hath been reported
that I gave a licence to certain vicars to assist at a club of fiddlers
in Fishamble Street, I hereby declare that I remember no such licence
to have been ever signed or sealed by me; and that if ever such
pretended licence should be produced, I do hereby annul and vacate the
said licence: entreating my said Sub-Dean and Chapter to punish such
vicars as shall ever appear there, as songsters, fiddlers, pipers,
trumpeters, drummers, drum-majors, or in any sonal quality, according
to the flagitious aggravations of their respective disobedience,
rebellion, perfidy, and ingratitude. I require my said Sub-Dean to
proceed to the extremity of expulsion if the said vicars should be
found ungovernable, impenitent, or self-sufficient.... My resolution
is to preserve the dignity of my station and the honour of my Chapter;
and, gentlemen, it is incumbent upon you to aid me, and to show who
and what the Dean and Chapter of St. Patrick’s are.”
These are the last words, except in the Cathedral accounts, which Swift
is known to have written. The Chapter could have no doubt who the Dean
of St. Patrick’s was, though he was as old and desolate as Lear. In
February, when Walpole lost his office, Swift, who had vowed to buy a
coach if ever that should happen, bought a coach. He might have little
time left in which to use it, but he would ride through the streets of
Dublin exulting over Walpole’s followers. All Dublin should know who
the Dean of St. Patrick’s was.
He fell like a tower, first a rush of warning stones, then a vast
collapse. In March guardians were assigned to him by the Court of
Chancery. In August a commission inquired into his sanity and found
that he was “of unsound mind and memory, and not capable of taking care
of his person or fortune, and that he hath been so since the twentieth
day of May last past.” From being irritable he became violent. He raged
if anybody, besides his servants, looked at him. “He walked ten hours a
day,” his cousin said, “would not eat or drink if his servant stayed in
the room. His meat was served up ready cut, and sometimes it would lie
an hour on the table before he would touch it, and then eat it walking.”
In September and October his torment reached its horrible peak, beyond
what even he had imagined in his ruthless account of the struldbrugs.
A sudden tumor forced his left eye almost out of its socket. He had
as many boils as Job. “The torture he was in,” his cousin said, “is
not to be described. Five persons could scarce hold him, for a week,
from tearing out his own eyes, and for near a month he did not sleep
two hours in twenty-four.” He had a quiet day or two. When his pain
left him his understanding came back, as if his madness had been only
agony. Nothing less than a cataclysm could subdue that burning mind. A
cataclysm or a stroke of paralysis.
Paralysis brought him the relief of apathy. Swift had submitted. It
took him three years to die, but he lived without rebellion. He no
longer paced his cage. He would hardly leave his chair. His body got
back its flesh. His face lost its wrinkles. His expression was now
benign or childlike. He recognized the few persons whom he saw, but he
seldom spoke. When he tried to speak, he could not always find words.
What he said seemed to come by chance to his tongue, though it was
never nonsense. Once, when his housekeeper took a knife out of his
reach, “he shrugged his shoulders and, rocking himself, said ‘I am what
I am, I am what I am,’ and about six minutes afterwards repeated the
same words two or three times over.”
Hundreds of stories were invented during those three years about the
great mad Dean. One story, not true, was that he sat all day cursing
in his chair. Another, probably not true, was that his servants
exhibited him for money--“And Swift expires a driveller and a show.”
The stories, however, are proof enough of the vigour of the legend
which had gathered around Swift and which still lives in Ireland. The
Irish would not believe that he had hated them as he claimed. His abuse
had been affectionate scolding, no rougher than they could enjoy.
He had stood between them and England. He was a patriot, a man of
learning, very near a saint. There must be magic in him. When he died,
19 October 1745, the people crowded to the deanery to see his body.
They came in reverence. One of them, when nobody was looking, cut off
some of his hair, which “was like flax on the pillow.”
He was buried in the Cathedral beside Stella, as his will directed, “as
privately as possible, and at twelve o’clock at night.” His will was
published as a sixpenny pamphlet almost as soon as he was dead. The
people would be curious, he had said in his poem on his death, about
his will. He left his fortune, about eleven thousand pounds, to build a
hospital for idiots and lunatics.--
“_He left the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad;
And showed by one satiric touch
No nation wanted it so much._”--
He left the tithes of the parish of Effernock to the vicars of Laracor
“for the time being, that is to say, so long as the present Episcopal
religion shall continue to be the national established faith and
profession of this kingdom.” After that, the tithes should go, “while
Christianity under any shape shall be tolerated among us,” to the poor
of Laracor, “still excepting professed Jews, atheists, and infidels.”
To various friends and relatives he left legacies, some of which were
his final jests. To Robert Grattan: “my strong box, on condition of his
giving the sole use of the said box to his brother Dr. James Grattan,
who hath more occasion for it, and the second best beaver hat I shall
die possessed of.” To John Grattan: “my silver box in which the freedom
of the city of Cork was presented to me; in which I desire the said
John to keep the tobacco he usually cheweth, called pigtail.” To John
Jackson: “my third best beaver hat.” To John Worrall: “my best beaver
hat.”
In the same document with these dry bequests he left to the world his
aching epitaph. It was to say to any traveller who came to see it that
the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral, was buried here
in a place where his furious indignation could no longer lacerate his
heart. It was to tell the traveller to go and imitate, if he could,
this strenuous defender of manly liberty. The inscription was to be on
black marble, “in large letters, deeply cut and strongly gilded,” and
in the stately language of the Church and of the ancient Romans.
HIC DEPOSITUM EST CORPUS
JONATHAN SWIFT S.T.P.
HUJUS ECCLESIAE CATHEDRALIS
DECANI
UBI SAEVA INDIGNATIO
ULTERIUS COR LACERARE NEQUIT
ABI VIATOR
ET IMITARE SI POTERIS
STRENUUM PRO VIRILI LIBERTATIS VINDICEM
Bibliographical Note
Swift has here been allowed, so far as possible, to tell his own
story in his own words. They are to be found in his _Correspondence_,
magnificently edited by F. Elrington Ball (6 vols., 1910-1914), in
his _Prose Works_, competently edited by Temple Scott (12 vols.,
1897-1908), and in his _Poems_, inadequately edited by W. E. Browning
(2 vols., 1910) to accompany the _Prose Works_. These sources furnish
the text wherever Swift speaks in the biography, except in the
letters to Vanessa which, like her letters to him, are quoted from
the originals lately discovered and edited by A. Martin Freeman in
_Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift_ (1921). The text
has been modernized. Since so little of what Swift wrote survives in
actual manuscript or in printed versions to which he gave much care,
to reproduce his spelling and punctuation from first or early editions
would be only to perpetuate the vagaries of his different editors and
printers.
Swift’s eighteenth-century biographers, with their passion for gossip,
were all superseded by Sir Walter Scott, who included in his _Works of
Jonathan Swift_ (19 vols., 1814) a memoir written with curiosity and
vigor, if not with exact knowledge. Scott in turn was superseded by
John Forster, whose _Life of Jonathan Swift_ (1875) unfortunately was
carried through only one of the three proposed volumes. The earliest,
and latest, extended, documented, exhaustive biography was Sir Henry
Craik’s _Life of Jonathan Swift_ (1882; 2d edition in 2 vols., 1894),
which remains the best detailed account of Swift’s life. Sir Leslie
Stephen’s _Swift_ (1882) is a masterly critical narrative. Compared to
it the study of Swift in Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_ (1781) seems
full of Johnsonian wrong-headedness, and that in Thackeray’s _English
Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_ (1853) full of Thackerayan whimper
and sniffle. The only recent biographical studies of Swift which are
not negligible are Emile Pons’s _La Jeunesse de Swift et le Conte du
Tonneau_ (1925) and F. Elrington Ball’s _Swift’s Verse_ (1929), which
are both excellent.
Of Swift’s various works the best edited is _A Tale of a Tub: To Which
is Added The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the
Spirit_, by A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (1920), followed
by _Swift: Selections from his Works_ edited by Sir Henry Craik
(1892-1893). As a rule the introductions and notes in Temple Scott’s
_Prose Works_ are as good as any. _The Journal to Stella_ is there
edited by Frederick Ryland, and _Gulliver’s Travels_ by G. R. Dennis.
_Gulliver’s_ _Travels_, one of the greatest books of the world, has
never been satisfactorily edited. When it has the editor it deserves
he will be saved a good deal of work by C. H. Firth’s acute _Political
Significance of Gulliver’s Travels_ (_Proceedings of the British
Academy_, Vol. IX, 1919) and by William A. Eddy’s lubberly but learned
_Gulliver’s Travels: A Critical Study_ (1923).
A bibliography of the writings of Swift is given in Vol. XII of Temple
Scott’s _Prose Works_, and a bibliography of writings by and about him
in Vol. IX (1912) of _The Cambridge History of English Literature_.
The present biography says in the text little more about the specific
works than Swift says himself. Titles and dates, however, are listed in
the Index in the entry “Swift, Jonathan,” which amounts to a precise
chronological survey of his life and of those writings which throw
light on it.
To cite all the general histories of Swift’s age, all the biographies
of his contemporaries, all the memoirs and diaries and letters and
special studies and collateral sources which have contributed to this
narrative would be mere ostentation. But all such sources have been
scrupulously consulted during the period of almost twenty years since
the book was first projected.
Most of Swift’s previous biographers have devoted much of their
energy to debating the many points of gossip which have arisen about
him, particularly about his malady, about his relations to Stella
and Vanessa, and about his eccentricities in Ireland. His latest
biographer has preferred to examine the entire evidence, to select what
he believes to be the truth, to tell it, and to leave gossip where
gossip belongs. He has considered it hardly fair to ask his readers not
only to read his story but also to choose which one of several stories
they would like to believe. His difficulties belong with the secrets of
his trade.
Index
Abingdon, Earl of, 128
Acheson, Sir Arthur, 225, 226
Acheson, Lady, 225, 226
Addison, Joseph, 48-49, 84, 85, 88, 89, 92-93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 109,
123, 124, 135, 145, 200
Agher, 58, 67
Ancients and moderns, 38-40
Anne, Queen, 82, 85, 97, 98, 104, 105, 108, 114, 116, 119, 120, 130,
131, 137, 139, 188
Arbuthnot, John, 127, 132, 135, 136, 138, 144, 169, 185, 199, 200,
201, 205, 210, 211, 212, 222, 223, 251, 252, 254
Argyll, Duke of, 220
Armagh, Archbishop of. _See_ Boulter, Hugh
Arran, Earl of, 116, 132
Ashe, St. George (Bishop of Clogher), 124, 181
Bach, 39
Bacon, Lord, 226
Balliol College, 22
Balnibarbi, 191
Barber, Mary, 237
Bath, Earl of, 200, 202, 224
Bathurst, Lord (Allen Bathurst), 132, 133, 200, 203, 230
_Battle of the Books, The_, 40-41
Baucis and Philemon, 92
Beef-Steak Club, 131
_Beggar’s Opera, The_, 213, 220, 221, 222
Berkeley, Countess of, 89
Berkeley, Earl of, 50, 58, 67, 68, 69, 82, 90
Bickerstaff, Isaac (pseudonym), 89
Blefuscu, 178, 187, 188
Blenheim, Battle of, 92
Bolingbroke, Viscount, 95, 99, 101, 102, 104-105, 107, 108-110,
115-116, 118, 119, 120, 128, 129, 130, 131,
132, 137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 145, 169, 181,
182, 200, 203, 205, 215, 222, 223, 227, 233,
252, 260
Bolingbroke, Viscountess, 143
Boulter, Hugh (Primate of Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh), 241
Brobdingnag, 186, 188-189
Brothers, Society of, 131-135, 200, 237
Brown, Tom, 186
Bunyan, 211
Cadenus (pseudonym), 152-167, 246
Carmarthen, Lady (daughter of Robert Harley), 124
Carteret, Lady, 176
Carteret, Lord, 173, 176, 188
Castle-Durrow, Lord, 238, 239
_Cato_, 123
Cervantes, 221
Charles I, 6
Charles II, 6, 19
Charles XII, 179
Chesterfield, Lord, 200
Chetwoode, Knightley, 180
Clogher, Bishop of. _See_ Ashe, St. George
Cobham, Lord, 203
Congreve, William, 9, 28, 48, 89, 133, 200, 203
Cope, Robert, 181
Country of Horses, 190, 193
Cowley, Abraham, 25, 26
Curll, Edmund, 252
Cyrano de Bergerac, 186
d’Ablancourt, Perrot, 186
Davenant, Henry Molins, 116
Davenant, Sir William, 6
Delaney, Patrick, 180, 237
Descartes, 38
Dingley, Rebecca, 58-59, 91, 123, 126, 129, 168, 205, 206, 207
Drapier, M. B. (pseudonym), 173-177, 227
Dromore, Bishop of (John Stearne), 181
Dryden, Sir Erasmus, 6
Dryden, John, 26, 38, 41, 48
Dublin, Archbishop of. _See_ King, William
_Dunciad, The_, 221, 222
Dunkin, William, 237
Dupplin, Viscount (son-in-law of Robert Harley), 97, 132, 133, 135
Eglinton, Earl of, 6
Evans, John (Bishop of Meath), 141
_Examiner, The_, 99, 102, 128
Faulkner, George, 237, 243
Feilding, Robert, 6
Fiddes, Richard, 116
First Fruits, 80-81, 85, 87, 94, 97, 98, 141
Flying Island, 190
Ford, Charles, 180, 181, 182, 237
Fountaine, Sir Andrew, 90, 91, 124
Gay, John, 136, 138, 145, 197, 201, 203, 204, 205, 211, 213, 220, 221,
222, 223, 233, 237, 250, 251, 252, 254
George I, 120, 142, 172, 174, 213
George II, 213, 249
Giffard, Lady, 22-23, 36, 114, 239
Glubbdubdribb, 190, 191
Godolphin, Earl of, 80, 85, 94, 95, 98, 103, 104
Grand Alliance, 103, 108
Granville, Lord (George Granville), 132, 133
Grattan, the brothers, 180
Grattan, James, 267
Grattan, John, 267
Grattan, Robert, 267
Grierson, Mrs. George, 237
_Gulliver’s Travels_, 3, 37, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186-196, 204,
211-212, 213, 221, 222, 243, 259
Gwynne, Francis, 116
Halifax, Earl of, 48, 69, 73, 74, 76, 82, 83, 84, 85, 95, 96, 200
Hanover, Elector of. _See_ George I
Harcourt, Lord (Sir Simon Harcourt), 98, 102, 130, 132, 200
Harley, Robert. _See_ Oxford, Earl of
Harrison, William, 134
Hart Hall, 27
Harvey, George, 38
Helsham, Richard, 237
Henry VIII, 187
Hertford College (Hart Hall), 27
Hill, Abigail. _See_ Masham, Lady
Hobbes, 38
Homer, 117, 138, 201
Howard, Henrietta, 200, 203
Houyhnhnms, 190, 191, 193-196, 230
Hunter, Robert, 93, 119
_Intelligencer, The_, 224, 225
Jackson, John, 267
Jervas, Charles, 122
Johnson, Bridget (mother of Stella), 23, 36, 58, 126
Johnson, Edward (father of Stella), 23
Johnson, Esther (Hester), 23-24, 29, 35, 36, 47, 57, 58-66, 74, 79,
91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 102, 109, 117, 123,
125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 147, 148, 149, 158,
162, 163, 166, 168, 196, 205-210, 212, 213,
214-219, 220, 224, 231, 237, 246, 248, 266
Jones, Betty, 17, 18
Kendal, Duchess of, 172, 174
Kerry, Lady, 126
Kevin Bail, 241, 244
Kilkenny School, 8, 9, 96, 183
Kilroot, 30, 32, 33, 35, 40, 50, 53
King, William (Archbishop of Dublin), 79, 80, 82, 101, 108
Kit-Cat Club, 91, 131
Lagado, Academy of, 190
Laputa, 190-191
Laracor, 50, 58, 59, 66, 67, 72, 79, 80, 94, 117, 118, 125, 140, 141,
180, 183, 266, 267
La Rochefoucauld, 250, 251
Leicester, 5, 8, 16, 17, 29
Lewis, Erasmus, 96, 99
Lilliput, 178, 186-188, 189, 190, 238
Llandaff, Earls of, 181
Long, Anne, 91
Lucian, 186
Ludlow, Peter, 180
Luggnagg, 191
Marlborough, Duchess of, 103, 104, 114, 211
Marlborough, Duke of, 80, 92, 102, 103, 104, 105, 114, 120
Marsh, Narcissus (Primate of Ireland), 79
Martin (Martinus) Scriblerus, 136, 137, 181, 183, 192, 201
Mary, Queen, 19
Masham, Lady (Abigail Hill), 104, 110, 120, 127, 169
Masham, Lord (Samuel Masham), 132, 133, 135
Meath, Bishop of (John Evans), 141
Milton, 39, 226
Molière, 39
Montague, Charles. _See_ Halifax, Earl of
Moor Park, 19, 22, 27, 29, 32, 35, 40, 44, 58, 66, 69, 79, 183, 241,
258, 260
Newton, Sir Isaac, 38, 85
Nottingham, Earl of, 131, 187
Orford, Earl of, 69
Ormond, Duchess of, 143, 169
Ormond, Duke of, 67, 79, 82, 95, 105, 116, 117, 119, 132, 142, 200
Ormond family, 7, 8
Ormond, Marchioness of, 6
Oxford, 1st Earl of (Robert Harley), 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101-102,
103-105, 107-110, 115, 116, 117,
118, 119, 120, 124, 126, 128,
129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134,
135, 136, 137, 142, 143, 169,
178, 187, 198, 200, 202, 212,
243, 246, 260
Oxford, 2d Earl of (son of Robert Harley), 97, 132, 143, 145, 177,
198, 200, 236
Oxford, University of, 22, 25, 27, 32, 48
Parnell, Thomas, 134, 136, 138, 200
Partridge, John, 89
Patrick (Swift’s servant), 125, 126, 129
Patriots, The, 202, 224
Pembroke, Earl of, 67, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 90
Penn, William, 97
Peterborough, Earl of, 98, 110, 117, 130, 200, 212
Philips, Ambrose, 93
Philostratus, 186
Pilkington, Letitia, 237, 239
Pilkington, Matthew, 237
Pope, Alexander, 37, 117, 135, 137, 141, 143, 144, 169, 170, 182, 198,
200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 209, 210, 211, 213, 216,
221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 233, 237, 240, 243, 251,
252, 254
Pope, Edith (mother of Alexander Pope), 203
Portland, Earl of, 28, 69
Pratt, Mrs. John, 126
Pretender, the (James Stuart), 107, 120, 142, 187
Primate of Ireland. _See_ Marsh, Narcissus, and Boulter, Hugh
Prior, Matthew, 98, 126, 132, 135, 200
Pug (Stella’s dog), 91
Pulteney, William. _See_ Bath, Earl of
Queensberry, Duchess of, 223
Rabelais, 186, 221
Rathbeggan, 58, 67
Raymond, Sir Robert, 132
Rembrandt, 39
Rivers, Earl, 102, 130
Rochfort, George, 180
Romney, Earl of, 49
St. Francis, 29
St. James’s coffee house, 67, 78, 90, 97
St. John, Henry. _See_ Bolingbroke, Viscount
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, 50, 57, 67, 79, 119, 141, 142, 162,
213, 218, 220, 232, 241, 244, 263,
264, 267
St. Patrick’s, Liberty of, 177, 232, 240, 241
Sacramental Test, 85, 101
Salisbury, bishop of (Gilbert Burnet), 73
Scriblerus Club, 136-138, 182, 183, 192, 200, 201, 237
Shandy, Tristram, 136
Shelburne, Lord, 127, 131
Sheridan, Thomas, 180, 182, 202, 208, 214, 216, 224, 225, 237
Sican, Mrs. E., 237
Somers, Lord, 48, 68, 69, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 90, 95, 200
Somerset, Duchess of, 114, 119
South, Robert, 84
Southwell, Sir Robert, 21, 22
_Spectator, The_, 92
Steele, Sir Richard, 89, 92, 93, 97, 99, 100, 200
Stella. _See_ Johnson, Esther (Hester)
Sterne, Laurence, 136
Stratford, Francis, 9, 10, 96
Sunderland, 2d Earl of, 49, 73
Sunderland, 3d Earl of, 80, 85, 94, 95, 103
Swift, Abigail Erick (mother of Jonathan Swift), 5, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17
Swift, Abraham, 5
Swift, Adam, 5, 51
Swift, Barnam, 6
Swift, Dryden, 5
Swift, Godwin, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 15
Swift, Jonathan (father of Jonathan Swift), 5
Swift, Jonathan (30 November 1667-19 October 1745):
ancestry, 5;
family connections, 5-7;
born in Dublin a posthumous child, 6;
taken to England in infancy for almost three years, 7;
dependent on Godwin Swift, 7-15;
at Kilkenny School from six to fourteen, 8-9;
associates at school, 9;
at Trinity College, Dublin, 1682 to 1689, 9-11;
bachelor’s degree 1686, 10;
discontent at Trinity, 10-15;
reading, 11;
academic irregularities, 12-13;
health, 15-16;
leaves Ireland for his mother’s lodgings in Leicester at the
Revolution, 16;
flirtations in Leicester, 17-18;
joins household of Sir William Temple as secretary near end of
1689, 18;
relations with Temple, 18-22;
position as dependent, 21-22;
returns to Ireland in summer of 1690 for year, 22;
visits Oxford in 1691, 22;
relations with other members of Temple household, 22-24;
with Esther Johnson (Stella), 23-24;
writes poetry in the Pindaric fashion, 25-27;
renounces it, 26-27;
_Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and Recovery_
(1693), 26;
master’s degree from Hart Hall (Hertford College), Oxford,
July 1692, 27;
sent by Temple on errand to William III, spring 1693, 28;
becomes conscious of misanthropy, 28-29;
_To Mr. Congreve_ (1693), 28-29;
walking, 30;
desire for independence, 30;
to Ireland May 1694, 30;
ordained deacon October 1694,
priest January 1695, 30;
prebendary of Kilroot 1695-1696, 30-35;
attitude towards the Church, 31-32;
discontent at Kilroot, 32;
flirtation with Jane Waring, 32-35;
returns to Temple late in 1696, 35;
improved position at Moor Park, 35;
Swift’s aims in writing, 36-37;
is drawn by Temple into the controversy over the ancients and the
moderns, 38-40;
writes _The Battle of the Books_ and _A Tale of a Tub_, 40-44;
attitude towards mankind established by thirty, 45;
leaves Moor Park on Temple’s death January 1699, 46;
resolutions _When I Come to Be Old_, 46-47;
goes to London but fails to find preferment at Court, 49-50;
to Ireland June 1699 as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, 50;
vicar of Laracor February 1700, 50;
prebendary of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, 50;
doctor of divinity of Trinity College, February 1701, 50;
ends flirtation with Jane Waring, 50-54;
attitude towards marriage, 54-57;
loneliness at Laracor, 58;
returns to England for April-September 1701, 58;
persuades Stella and Rebecca Dingley to settle in Ireland in
1701, 58-59;
relations with Stella in Ireland, 59-66;
Swift is willing for her to marry William Tisdall, April 1704,
60-63;
verses exchanged between Swift and Stella (1720-1721), 64-66;
Swift’s life in Ireland 1700-1710, 66-67;
chaplain to Ormond and Pembroke, 67;
publishes letters, essays, and memoirs of Temple (1701-1709), 67;
Swift among the wits in London, 67-68;
_Discourse on the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and
Commons in Athens and Rome_ (1701), 68-72;
thereby commends himself to the leading Whigs, 72-74;
in England the winter of 1703-1704, 74-75;
publishes _A Tale of a Tub_ (1704), 75;
reception of the book, 75-77;
rouses suspicion of his orthodoxy, 77;
Swift at the St. James’s coffee house, 78;
in Ireland from 1704 to 1707, 78-79;
in England November 1707-June 1709, 80-93;
lobbyist for the First Fruits
for the Irish Church, 80-81;
hates the Earl of Wharton, 81;
fails to obtain promotion in the Church, 81-83;
relations with the Earl of Halifax, 83-85;
with other Whigs, 85;
_A Letter ... Concerning the Sacramental Test_ (1708), 85-86;
displeases the Whigs, 86;
_Sentiments of a Church of England Man_ (1708), _Project for the
Advancement of Religion_ (1708), _An Argument Against Abolishing
Christianity_ (1708), 86-88;
wins hearing from the coffee houses by his hoaxes on Partridge,
89-90;
_Meditation on a Broomstick_, 89-90;
life and associates in England during 1707-1709, 90-91;
meets the Vanhomrighs, 90-91;
Stella in London, 91;
Swift’s relations with Addison and Steele, 92-93;
revises _Baucis and Philemon_, 92-93;
returns to Ireland and hardly leaves Laracor from June 1709 to
September 1710, 93-94;
goes to London on the fall of the Whigs, 94;
looks towards the Tories, 96;
is won over to the Tory side by Harley, 96-100;
_The Examiner_ (1710-1711), 100;
is estranged from Addison, 100;
Swift’s Toryism, 100-101;
his relations with Harley (afterwards the Earl of Oxford) and
St. John (afterwards Viscount Bolingbroke), 101-102;
his polemic against Marlborough, 105-106;
against the Whigs, 106-108;
his love for his associates, 108-110;
his hate for his enemies, 111-114;
_A Short Character of Thomas Earl of Wharton_ (1710), 111-114;
lampoons the Duchess of Somerset in _The Windsor Prophecy_, 114;
Swift’s defects as a politician, 114-116;
master of requests, 116-117;
made Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, April 1713, 118-119;
summer of 1713 in Ireland, 119;
back for winter of 1713-1714 in England, 119-120;
farewell to Oxford, 120-121;
portrait painted by Charles Jervas, September 1710, 121-122;
_Journal to Stella_ (2 September 1710-6 June 1713), 123-124;
a typical day as revealed in the _Journal_, 125-129;
weekly dinners with Bolingbroke, 129-130;
with Oxford, 130-131;
with the Society of Brothers, 131-135;
the Scriblerus Club organized early in 1714, 136;
Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, 136-137;
Swift’s relations with Arbuthnot, Pope, Gay, Parnell, 137-138;
returns to Ireland, September 1714, not to leave it for twelve
years, 139;
lives in morose retirement for five or six years, 140-146;
offers to join Oxford in the Tower of London, 1715, 143;
letters between Swift and his Scriblerus friends, 143-146;
_A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet_ (1721), 146;
_A Letter to a Young Clergyman_ (published 1721 but written 1720),
146;
_A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture_ (1720),
146-147;
printer of the _Proposal_ prosecuted, 147;
relations with Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa), 147-167;
meets her in 1708 in London, 147;
undertakes to educate her, 147;
a friend of the Vanhomrigh family, 149-150;
letters between Swift and Vanessa during his visit to Ireland in
1713, 150-152;
_Cadenus and Vanessa_ (apparently written 1713-1714, published
1726), 152-158;
Vanessa follows Swift to Ireland 1714, 160;
her pursuit and his discretion, 160-163;
Swift proposes a sequel to _Cadenus and Vanessa_, 164-165;
visits Vanessa at Celbridge in 1720, 165;
break between them, after August 1722, 166-167;
her death, June 1723, 166-167;
Swift leaves for the south of Ireland the next day, 168;
returns in September and resumes relationship with Stella, 168-169;
_Stella at Wood Park_, 168-169;
renews correspondence with English friends, 169;
hatred of Ireland, 169-171;
nevertheless becomes a champion of Irish freedom against the Whigs
in England, 171-172;
Wood’s copper coins, 172-173;
the _Drapier_ letters (1724), 173-176;
Swift becomes the idol of Ireland, 176-178;
travels in Ireland, 180-181;
writing _Gulliver’s Travels_ (1721-1725), 181-182;
Gulliver one of Swift’s rôles, 183-184;
his misanthropy matured, 184-185;
his ingenuity in the _Travels_, 186;
Lilliput, 186-188;
Brobdingnag, 188-189;
Laputa, 190-191;
Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, 191-195;
thinks of returning to England, 197-199;
plans to write life of Oxford, 198;
spends summer of 1726 in England, 199-210;
disagrees with Walpole about the government of Ireland, 201-202;
happy with Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Gay, 202-203;
with Pope and Gay at Twickenham, 203-205;
Stella’s illness, 205-210;
Swift’s letters about her to his Irish friends, 205-209;
returns to Ireland in August, 209-210;
received in Ireland like a Lord Lieutenant, 210;
publishes _Gulliver’s Travels_ (28 October 1726), 211;
immediate success, 211-212;
again in England for the summer of 1727, 212-213;
_Miscellanies in Prose and Verse_ (3 vols., 1727), 213;
plans to go to France, 213;
writes to French translator of _Gulliver_, 213;
disappointed on the accession of George II, 213;
returns to Ireland in September, 215-216;
Stella’s last months and death (January 1728), 216-219;
_On the Death of Mrs. Johnson_ (begun the night of her death,
published after his death), 217-219;
Swift defends _The Beggar’s Opera_ (1728), 220-221;
pleased with Pope’s lines on Swift in _The Dunciad_ (1729), 221-222;
continues his correspondence with his English friends but gets out
of touch with England, 222-224;
diversions in Ireland, 224-226;
three visits to Sir Arthur Acheson during 1728-1730, 225-226;
given the freedom of the City of Dublin in 1730, 227;
_A Modest Proposal_ (1729), 227-230;
increasing solitariness, 231-232;
walking and riding, 232-234;
eccentricity and eminence, 233-236;
Dublin associates, 236-240;
king in a nutshell, 240-241;
Swift’s later literary activity, 242-244;
_The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen_ (posthumous), 243;
_Miscellanies_ (1732), 243;
_The Works of J. S._ (4 vols., 1735), 243;
_A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation_
(published 1738 but written before over a long interval), 244;
_Directions to Servants_ (posthumous), 244;
experiments and parodies in verse, 244-246;
_The Lady’s Dressing Room_, _A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed_,
_Strephon and Chloe_, _Cassinus and Peter_ (published 1732, 1734,
but written during 1730-1731), 246-248;
_On Poetry--A Rhapsody_ (published 1733), 248-249;
_The Life and Genuine Character of Doctor Swift_ (1733), _Verses on
the Death of Doctor Swift_ (1739), 250-254;
Swift’s rôle of conjured spirit, 255-257;
his misjudgment of his gifts, 257-261;
his sufferings after 1740, 261-265;
his last written words (1742), 263;
guardians assigned him in the Court of Chancery in March 1742, 264;
found by a commission to be of unsound mind and memory in August,
264;
climax of his malady, September-October, 264-265;
paralysis and apathy until his death, 265-266;
death, 266;
provisions and jests of his will, 266-267;
epitaph, 267-268
Swift, Thomas, vicar of Goodrich, 5, 6
Swift, Thomas, son of the vicar of Goodrich, 6
Swift, Thomas, grandson of the vicar of Goodrich, 9, 10, 12, 22, 25
Swift, William, 5, 13
_Tale of a Tub, A_, 40, 43-45, 75-78, 97, 98, 114, 137, 241
_Tatler, The_, 89, 90, 92, 97, 128
Temple, Sir John (father of Sir William Temple), 18
Temple, John (nephew of Sir William Temple), 79
Temple, Lady (Dorothy Osborne), 23, 35
Temple, Sir William, 18-22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 35, 36, 38, 39,
40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 49, 58, 66, 67, 93, 114, 239,
241, 259
Timon, 185
Tisdall, William, 60-63, 78
Tonson, Jacob, 48
Trinity College, Dublin, 9-13, 22, 27, 30, 32, 50, 54, 83, 96, 183,
237
Twickenham, 201, 203, 204, 205, 208, 212, 213, 237
Utrecht, Treaty of, 118
Vanessa. _See_ Vanhomrigh, Esther (Hester)
Vanhomrigh, Esther (Hester), 3, 15, 56, 91, 147-167, 168, 181, 182,
191, 246
Vanhomrigh, Mrs. Hester (mother of Vanessa), 90, 147, 149, 150, 160
Vanhomrigh, Mary (sister of Vanessa), 160, 165
Varina. _See_ Waring, Jane
Velasquez, 39
Virgil, 40
Voltaire, 213
Wales, Prince of (George II), 200, 201, 203, 213
Wales, Princess of (Queen Caroline), 200, 211, 213, 252
Walpole, Sir Robert, 172, 173, 176, 186, 200, 201, 212, 213, 220, 222,
223, 240, 241, 249, 253, 264
Waring, Jane, 32-35, 50-54, 56, 57, 63
Wharton, Earl of, 81, 82, 85, 86, 93, 94, 95, 111-113, 114, 200
Whitshed, William (Lord Chief Justice), 147
William III (Prince of Orange), 19, 28, 30, 48, 49, 68, 69, 73, 103
William, Prince (son of George II), 201
Will’s coffee house, 67
Wood, William, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177
Worrall, John, 267
Wycherley, William, 213
Wyndham, Sir William, 132, 202
Yahoos, 193-196, 230
York, Archbishop of (John Sharp), 114, 118
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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