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.