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diff --git a/78641-0.txt b/78641-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d29935 --- /dev/null +++ b/78641-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7344 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78641 *** + + + + + 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. + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78641 *** |