disease. Here was the only sufficient cure. What if his flesh did creep
when he recommended “buying the children alive, and dressing them hot
from the knife”? What if his nerves did rage when he advised that the
mothers of the children “let them suck plentifully in the last month
so as to render them plump and fat for a good table”? So had his flesh
crept and his nerves raged all over Ireland at the starved desert that
England had made of it. If his cure violated the profoundest human
instincts, so did the disease. Ask the parents if they would not have
been better off if they had been sold for food at a year old instead
of growing up to life in Ireland. Of course the proposal would not be
carried out. Nothing so logical, nothing so mad and merciful, would
ever be carried out. That was mankind. That was mankind.
Except for a few hints, a few urgings, a few arguments, a few
accusations, all scattered and occasional, Swift after his modest
proposal wrote no more prose about Ireland. “Looking upon this kingdom
as absolutely desperate,” he said in 1731, “I would not prescribe a
dose to the dead.”
3
All his life Swift had been alien, but he had never been so solitary
as he now became. His misanthropy, however rooted in his constitution,
however confirmed by his experience, however fortified by his blunt
metaphysics, was not complete. He had had to be perverse to be so
thorough. He had had to deny himself things that he wanted in order
to round out his desolation. Even in his desolation, perverse but not
altogether voluntary, he had needed habitual friends. He was not a
man who could do without women. Stella, in his worst hours, had been
friends and women. After her death he lacked what only a friend who was
also a woman could give him. Without her to consider he settled into a
dark preoccupation with himself. Without her to stir him to variety he
sank into a tedious, disheartening, cold routine, hard and harder to
break through.
At first he dined alone, or with his housekeeper, five nights out of
seven. By 1736 he could say, with a grim flash, “nine days every week I
dine at home.”
“I awake so indifferent to anything which may pass either in the world
or my own little domestic,” he wrote in 1731, “that I hardly think it
worth my time to rise, and would certainly lie all day a-bed if decency
and dread of sickness did not drive me thence.” His breakfast was dull
gruel. “I am wholly a stranger to tea and coffee, the companions of
bread and butter.” When his health allowed him he was “constantly at
morning prayers by nine.” But in 1735: “I very seldom go to church
for fear of being seized with a fit of giddiness in the midst of the
service.” “In a morning I am so pestered by impertinent people and
impertinent business which my station exposes me to that the former
part of the day is wholly lost.” As Dean of St. Patrick’s, as civil
governor of the Cathedral neighbourhood, Swift had duties which he
would not shirk, even to the least detail. Yet they were all minor
duties, too easy to be interesting. And of course he would not think
them important.
Much of Swift’s day was given to walking and riding, “at which,
however, I repine, and would not do it merely to lengthen life, because
it would be ill husbandry, for I should save time by sitting still
though I should die seven years sooner. But the dread of pain and
torture makes me toil to preserve health from hand to mouth as much as
a labourer to support life.” Swift’s exercise, however, was not wholly
deliberate. He had still a fierce energy which kept his body restless
as well as his mind. Writing to Pope, younger by twenty years, and
referring to Bolingbroke, younger by ten, Swift said: “At your or his
time of life I could have leaped over the moon.” And in 1730 he was, he
told Gay, “reputed the best walker in this town and five miles around.”
“Twice a day in fair weather and once in foul” was the remedy Swift
prescribed himself--“I mean exercise ... the cheapest of all drugs.”
This treatment he varied but would not give up. In 1731: “I can walk
eight or ten miles a day and ride thirty Irish ones.” In 1733: “I am
almost every second day on horseback for about a dozen miles.” In 1735:
“I ride a dozen miles as often as I can, and always walk the streets
except in the night, which my head will not suffer me to do.” In 1736:
“I have not an ounce of flesh about me, and cannot ride above a dozen
miles in a day without being sore and bruised and spent.” Later that
same year: “I can neither read nor write nor remember nor converse. All
I have left is to walk and ride.” In 1738: “I seldom walk less than
four miles, sometimes six, eight, ten, or more, never beyond my own
limits; or, if it rains, I walk as much through the house, up and down
stairs.” By 1740, though Swift’s energy was chiefly in his nerves, they
would not let him stop walking back and forth at home for hours a day.
Swift might look eccentric on horseback, with his short gown and his
gambadoes, large boots fastened to the saddle to protect his legs from
wet and cold, but he rode out with a touch of state. Two servants,
“for fear of accidents,” always went with him. Street and road were
his. “I am one of the governors of all the hackney coaches, carts, and
carriages round this town, who dare not insult me like your [English]
rascally wagoners or coachmen, but give me the way; nor is there one
lord or squire for a hundred of yours, to turn me out of the road or
run over me with their coaches and six.” When, once, as he rode on the
strand, some careless hunter fired his gun and frightened the Dean’s
horse, it got into the newspapers.
It was Swift’s habit to take with him, whenever he meant to stop for
dinner with anybody on his ride, his own wine, bread, and chicken in a
basket which one of the servants carried. It was his habit to send word
of his coming with commands. Humorously and arrogantly he announced to
one of his prebendaries, who lived at Wicklow and was almost unknown to
Swift, that the Dean would like to spend Christmas there.
“There is an inhabitant of this city,” Swift wrote, “of whom I suppose
you have often heard. I remember him from my very infancy, but confess
I am not so well acquainted with him as in prudence I ought to be, yet
I constantly pretend to converse with him, being seldom out of his
company, but I do not find that our conversation is very pleasing to
either of us.” This person, to shorten Swift’s account of himself, had
been recommended to Wicklow for its nearness to Dublin and the fine
riding thereabouts.
“By these incitements he seems determined to quarter himself upon you
for three weeks at least, if he can have your consent, or rather that
of your lady, although I find he never had the honour to see her. He
travels with two servants, and consequently three horses; but these
latter are at hack and the former at board-wages, so that neither of
them will trouble you. As to the person himself, he every day drinks
a pint of wine at noon and another at night, and for the trouble he
gives the house he will allow one bottle more every day for the table,
but not one drop for foreigners, who are to drink on your account. He
will further allow one shilling and sixpence English for his commons,
ale and small beer included. But you are to direct how the wine can
be found, and whether he must send it by a Wicklow carrier. But the
bottles, when empty, he must be paid for. These are the conditions,
only adding that the family, during his residence, must be regulated
by his own model, and you are to answer the very next post. He travels
with his own sheets, so that he makes no allowance for that article.
Whether you do or do not approve of these proposals, you are to give me
an account, directed to the D---- of St. P----’s house. And the D----,
after conferring with your future guest, will either return you an
answer or send the gentleman.”
The threatened host saw the humour behind the arrogance, and at once
sent a “kind friendly letter” with a “generous invitation.” When a fit
of giddiness kept Swift from going, he wrote in another tone. “Pray
God protect you and your family. I know not whether you have children,
nor did I ever see your lady or your house; so that I never did beg
an invitation so much against the rules of common good manners, to
one so much a stranger as you have been, against my will, to me. I am
therefore bound in gratitude and by inclination to assure [you] that I
am with much esteem and truth, Sir, your most obedient humble servant.”
In Dublin, on the two evenings a week when Swift did not dine alone, he
limited himself to friends with whom he could use this same insolence,
with or without apology. “I am hated mortally by every creature in
power,” he wrote to Oxford’s son, “and by all their followers.... I do
not visit one lord either temporal or spiritual, nor am acquainted with
above three squires and half-a-dozen parsons.” “There is another race
which I prefer before them, as beef and mutton for constant diet before
partridges. I mean a middle kind both for understanding and fortune,
who are perfectly easy, never impertinent, complying in everything,
ready to do a hundred little offices that ... I may often want, who
dine and sit with me five times for once that I go with them, and whom
I can tell without offence that I am otherwise engaged at present.”
Writing, as in these instances, to his English friends, Swift
exaggerated his isolation, at least for the first few years after
Stella’s death. He saw more friends than he acknowledged. There was
Patrick Delaney, fellow and then professor at Trinity College, whose
marriage to a rich widow--“See,” Swift wrote to Gay, “what it is to
write godly books!”--enabled the lucky man even in destitute Ireland
to have seven or eight guests to dinner once a week. The guests
were so often the same that they were thought of as a kind of club.
Swift was one of them. But he remembered the Society of Brothers
and the Scriblerus Club. There was Thomas Sheridan, perhaps Swift’s
closest friend, “the best scholar in both kingdoms” Swift called him:
schoolmaster, parson, friend of Stella, blunderer, wit.
“_The Dean and Sheridan, I hope,
Will half supply a Gay and Pope_,”
Swift said. But he knew that Delaney’s house, with no matter how many
Sheridans, was a long way from Pope’s villa at Twickenham. There were
Richard Helsham, Swift’s Dublin physician, and George Faulkner, Swift’s
Dublin printer. There were such older friends as Charles Ford and the
brothers Grattan. There were the little poets and wits who rose from
time to time in Ireland and asked for Swift’s encouragement: Matthew
and Letitia Pilkington, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Grierson, Mrs. Sican, William
Dunkin. All eager, and none good. Swift had to be too kind to them to
be kind at all. Dublin was less like London than like Lilliput.
He would not admit that the little people who swarmed to his house
on Sunday evenings came for anything but his wine. Yet, in spite of
his growing avarice, he permitted himself and them the luxury of six,
seven, eight hogsheads of wine a year, and gave dinners, when he gave
dinners, off one of the finest services of plate in Dublin. In 1736,
inviting Lord Castle-Durrow to dine with him, Swift told about his
household economy.
“When I would have a friend eat with me I direct him in general to
send in the morning and inquire whether I dine at home, and alone. I
add a fowl to my commons, and something else if the company be more,
but I never mingle company, nor multiply dishes. I give a reasonable
price for my wine.... I am seldom without eight or nine hogsheads....
If your Lordship will do me the honour when you come to town, you must
submit to the same method. Only perhaps I will order the butler to
see whether, by chance, he can find out an odd bottle of a particular
choice wine which is all spent, although there may be a dozen or two
remaining.... As to puddings, my Lord, I am not only the best but the
sole perfect maker of them in this kingdom. They are universally known
and esteemed under the name of the deanery puddings. Suet and plumbs
are three-fourth of the ingredients. I had them from my ‘Aunt Giffard’
[Lady Giffard, Castle-Durrow’s aunt] who preserved the succession from
the time of Sir W. Temple.”
The “Sunday spongers,” who did not come till evening, found Swift
as a rule more amiable than he let on to the English friends. More
amiable than he generally let on to the spongers. He wrangled with his
servants, who nevertheless adored him. He said cutting, bruising things
to his visitors, and then offset his words by outbursts of tenderness.
He might be violent, but he was seldom depressed, apparently, and
never flat. “Swift is a very odd companion,” a visitor to Dublin in
1733 wrote to a friend, “if that expression is not too familiar for so
extraordinary a genius. He talks a great deal and does not require many
answers. He has infinite spirits, and says abundance of good things in
his common way of discourse.”
His high spirits extended at times to horseplay and complicated hoaxes.
He introduced Mrs. Pilkington, she said, as a wench whom her husband
had brought to a party, and insisted that the game be played all
evening. Swift got up a mock trial, again according to Mrs. Pilkington,
to try his servants for killing a favourite hen. His friends were the
jury, he was the judge. As if his usual solitude were more than he
could bear, although he made himself bear it for five nights a week, he
ran to extravagances when he escaped from it. “I believe the best part
of the reason why men are said to grow children when they are old,”
he wrote to Pope, “is because they cannot entertain themselves with
thinking; which is the very case of little boys and girls, who love to
be noisy among their playfellows.”
Not until 1736, and then not without relapses, did Swift “forbid the
Sunday spongers, whom in the lump I never loved to see, and cared less
to hear when I could not hear at all.”
Mortified by his deafness, and bored by much of what was shouted in the
treble voices which were the only ones he could hear, he spent his nine
evenings a week alone. With his restless imagination he had to make
drama out of his circumstances.
“I often reflect on my present life as the exact burlesque of my middle
age, which passed among ministers.... I am now acting the same things
in miniature, but in a higher station as first minister, nay sometimes
as a prince, in which last quality my housekeeper, a grave elderly
woman, is called at home and in the neighbourhood Sir Robert [Walpole].
My butler is secretary, and has no other defect for that office but
that he cannot write. Yet that is not singular, for I have known three
Secretaries of State upon the same level, and who were too old to mend,
which mine is not. My realm extends a hundred and twenty houses, whose
inhabitants constitute the bulk of my subjects. My grand jury is my
House of Commons, and my Chapter the House of Lords. I must proceed no
further, because my arts of governing are secrets of state.”
This was written with Swift’s hard smile, but he returned often to
his image of dining alone like a king. He was king in his nutshell.
Though he sometimes claimed to be in danger, he was actually safe.
The government would not have dared to touch him. When he stung the
ministers in one of his poems, and Walpole talked of arrest and
punishment, he was told, it is said, that nothing less than an army of
ten thousand men could fetch Swift out of Ireland. When in 1737 it was
proposed to lower the value of the Irish guinea, and the Primate of
Ireland, Walpole’s real lieutenant, accused Swift of raising the mob,
the Dean said that if he had lifted a finger the people would have torn
the Archbishop to pieces. Swift, when the measure was put into effect,
ran up a black flag over his Cathedral and had the bells toll all
day. The authorities thought it as irritating and useless as it was,
but they let the Dean alone. He was intrenched in the Cathedral, with
the Kevin Bail, the rabble of the Liberty, for his bodyguard. He was
intrenched in the affections of all Ireland.
This was forty years after that time at Moor Park when Temple had first
had the chance to notice, as he read the _Tale of a Tub_, that he had a
tiger in his garden. The tiger was older now, and less deadly to the
fools and knaves who had always been his prey. He had lived through
many wounds. Scars covered him. Sickness crippled him. Incapable of
the great raids of his hungry, angry youth, he kept to his lair. But
he roared with the same voice, glared with the same eyes. Caging had
not tamed him or reconciled him to the fate of gentler creatures. The
bitter world had not taught him to be sweet, or to purr with the soft
reverberations of philosophy, or to move with some friendly pack. Even
if he were willing to submit and make a final peace, he could not do
it. He had been born a tiger. At seventy he was a tiger still.
4
“I am in my chamber at five, there sit alone till eleven, and then to
bed. I write pamphlets and follies merely for amusement, and when they
are finished, or I grow weary in the middle, I cast them into the fire,
partly out of dislike, and chiefly because I know they will signify
nothing.” “Finding it troublesome to read at night, and the bad company
here growing tasteless, I am always writing bad prose, or worse verses,
either of rage or raillery, whereof some few escape to give offence, or
mirth, and the rest are burnt.... I am forced to play at small game,
to set the beasts here a-madding, merely for want of better game.” “I
grow gradually so dry that a rhyme with me is almost as hard to find as
a guinea.” “I can as easily write a poem in the Chinese language as
my own. I am as fit for matrimony as invention. And yet I have daily
schemes for innumerable essays in prose, and proceed sometimes to no
less than half a dozen lines, which the next morning become waste
paper.”
Now and then Swift wrote a brief pamphlet concerned with Irish, and
particularly with Church, politics. Many of his verse lampoons or
“libels” were printed as broadsides in Dublin, where they raised their
laugh or their welt and went by with the news. He spent a good deal of
time on his partisan history of the Oxford Ministry, which his English
friends had to work hard to keep him from publishing. He read the books
of other historians and wrote fierce marginal notes which have become
as famous as the books themselves. When a new edition of his Travels
was issued in Ireland he interested himself only enough to “strike
out the hash” which the English printer had put in to pacify the
English ministers. Swift allowed Pope to add another volume to their
miscellanies, the contents being mostly Swift’s. He allowed his Dublin
publisher and his Dublin friends to bring out his collected works, but
he was willing to give little help and would at first hardly look at
the books when they were published.
Swift, who cared so little for literary fame, would neither trouble
himself to bring his writings together nor rouse himself to produce
others of any bulk. His restlessness made him hurry from scheme to
scheme. This was the only action possible to him. Though he was king of
his Cathedral and his Kevin Bail, it was too small a realm to occupy
or satisfy him. If he must be confined to trifles, he would confine
himself to trifles.
He turned often to his anthology of conversation, which was to sum
up the platitudes of fashionable circles as he remembered them from
London; and to his directions to servants, ironically advising them to
do the most stupid and sluttish things they could. Trifles, yet written
with a genius’s sweep of observation, scruple for detail, variety of
thrust and touch. More than all the novels of his century these two
fragments show how gentlemen and ladies talked and how their households
were managed and mismanaged. Swift when he trifled was as thorough as
other men in earnest.
Much of what he wrote, at least of what he saved, was in verse. Years
of verse-making had brought him to absolute ease in metre. When he
chose he could play almost any tune but the sublime, which he never
chose. He could write “a love song in the modern taste.”
“_Melancholy smooth Meander,
Swiftly purling in a round,
On thy margin lovers wander,
With thy flowery chaplets crowned._
_Thus while Philomela drooping
Softly seeks her silent mate,
See the bird of Juno stooping;
Melody resigns to fate._”
He could make an ode which was all rhetoric.
“_So when Amphion bade the lyre
To more majestic sound aspire,
Behold the madding throng,
In wonder and oblivion drowned,
To sculpture turned by magic sound
And petrifying song._”
He could prattle namby-pamby as long as his ink held out.
“_With thy utmost skill express
Nature in her richest dress:
Limpid rivers smoothly flowing,
Orchards by those rivers blowing;
Curling woodbine, myrtle shade,
And the gay enamelled mead,
Where the linnets sit and sing,
Little sportlings of the spring;
Where the breathing field and grove
Soothe the heart and kindle love._”
He could set rolling words to popular airs:
“_What care we how high runs his passion or pride?
Though his soul he despises he values his hide.
Then fear not his tongue or his sword or his knife;
He’ll take his revenge on his innocent wife.
Knock him down, down, down, keep him down._”
But he preferred to write in the plain, brisk, flexible couplets, four
stresses to a line, to which he had turned from his Pindarics and in
which he could join the neatness of verse to the naturalness of prose.
In couplets he wrote the best poems he had written since his story of
Cadenus and Vanessa and his Horatian poems to Oxford. These poems,
Swift’s trifles, were about love and poetry and death.
The poems on love, if they are on it, were written during the two or
three years after Stella’s death. They made even the eighteenth century
squirm. Swift had never hid his meaning behind periphrasis. His tongue
was as rough as a cat’s.
“_Great folks are of a finer mould.
Lord! how politely they can scold!
While a coarse English tongue will itch
For whore and rogue and dog and bitch._”
But Swift had never before spoken with such candour as he now itched to
use, and used.
It was a sick candour. All of these poems on love, or against it,
strummed the same chord. Women, they pointed out, had cosmetic secrets,
soiled linen, and made full use of their alimentary canals. Swift tried
to laugh at his heroes for their shock at the unromantic discovery.
He loathed while he laughed. The poems were the clearest proof that he
was the victim of a pathological fastidiousness. What a healthier man
would have taken for granted, or would have thought of and forgotten,
sickened Swift.
“_For fine ideas vanish fast,
While all the gross and filthy last._”
He had already, by his seasonable and unseasonable emphasis on
cleanliness, betrayed his obsession. Now his antipathy had suddenly
got beyond control. It held up, for the world to see, the things
which had made him shrink from women. Celia, Corinna, Chloe: in their
dressing-rooms were all the deterrents to love.
These poems, ordinarily dismissed as nasty, and unquestionably that,
mark one of the most terrible episodes in Swift’s life. Swift sitting
deaf in his silent house, past sixty, remembering the women he had
loved, the woman he had loved most. Swift asking himself, possibly,
whether with less fastidiousness or with more effort to overcome it he
might not have had something he had missed. Swift, in a rush of old
disgust, telling himself that what he had missed was something he was
better off without, a horror under an illusion. Swift, to make sure,
putting his nauseous images into brutal words. Swift saying to his
Strephon that if he had known what Swift knew, then
“_Your heart had been as whole as mine._”
Swift wondering about “rash mortals,”
“_Since beauty scarce endures a day,
And youth so swiftly glides away,
Why will you make yourself a bubble,
To build on sand with hay and stubble?_”
Swift convinced that his way with Stella had been the way of wisdom.
Or Swift, following no such thought to its conclusion, obtusely
dramatizing his antipathies, unaware what they had cost him. There is
terror in the episode, no matter how it is understood. A sick heart is
a pit without a bottom. A stony heart is a blank mirror to beauty and
chaos both.
As Swift wrote against love, so he wrote against poetry. No ambition,
he said in what he called his rhapsody, required such “heavenly
influence” as the ambition to be a poet. Yet
“_Not beggar’s brat on bulk begot;
Not bastard of a pedlar Scot;
Not boy brought up to cleaning shoes,
The spawn of Bridewell or the stews;
Not infants dropped, the spurious pledges
Of gipsies littered under hedges;
Are so disqualified by fate
To rise in church or law or state
As he whom Phœbus in his ire
Has blasted with poetic fire._”
To be a poet was as insane as to be a lover. There was no market and no
use for poetry.
“_Court, city, country want you not:
You cannot bribe, betray, or plot._”
It took as long to make a poem as to fatten a chicken. It took no
longer to dispose of the chicken than of the poem.
“_Then hear an old experienced sinner
Instructing thus a young beginner._”