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.