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.