poet how to go about it. He was to chose his subject according to his
gifts, write his poem, have it printed, and wait for it to be damned.
After three such ventures it would be time to “spring more profitable
game” and become a writer for a party. Walpole would pay well and
promptly. Or if poetry failed, the poet could turn critic. Even beyond
that were hordes “of jobbers in the poet’s art”: poets who lived by
nagging their betters, poets who won fame by writing worse than any of
their rivals. And always the worst poets could write about the royal
family. The King could stomach any praise.
Swift mauled George and his Court with nearly a hundred lines of irony,
and then, losing interest, broke off. He would not give himself the
bother of finishing his satire, though it was a passion which he had
suffered from and hated. His poem was only another trifle.
With one of his trifles he did take pains. It was his poem on his
death. “I was forty-seven years old,” he wrote in October 1729, “when
I began to think of death, and the reflections upon it now begin when
I wake in the morning and end when I am going to sleep.” In December
1731 he told Gay: “I have been several months writing near five hundred
lines on a pleasant subject, only to tell what my friends and enemies
will say on me after I am dead. I shall finish it soon, for I add two
lines every week, and blot out four, and alter eight.”
When he wrote the poem Swift did not intend to let it be published
while he was alive. He would keep it by him and enjoy his secret.
He read it to some of his friends, and then to others. It became a
little legend. The legend amused him. He went to the length of writing
another version, between an abridgment and a burlesque, dating it All
Fools’ Day 1733, and contriving to have it come out in London. Then,
to perfect the hoax, he claimed that somebody had partly memorized his
original and played a trick on him. “But even this trick shall not
provoke me to print the true one, which indeed is not proper to be seen
till I can be seen no more.”
He changed his mind. In 1739, when he had become tired even of his
trifles, he published the most surprising of them.
He took for his text a maxim of La Rochefoucauld: “In the adversities
of our best friends we always find something that does not displease
us.”
“_As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature I believe ’em true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind._”
This maxim was thought baser than all the rest, but it could be proved,
Swift said, by both reason and experience. He himself was full of envy.
“_In Pope I cannot read a line
But with a sigh I wish it mine.
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six,
It gives me such a jealous fit
I cry: ‘Pox take him and his wit!’
I grieve to be outdone by Gay
In my own humorous biting way.
Arbuthnot is no more my friend,
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce,
Refined it first, and showed its use....
To all my foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy gifts, but never to my friend.
I tamely can endure the first,
But this with envy makes me burst._”
Swift was being hard on himself to prepare for what came after. He had
never by a word shown any envy whatever towards Pope, who could not
pack more sense in a couplet than Swift in six; or towards Gay, who
could not outdo Swift in his humorous biting way; or towards Arbuthnot,
whose use of irony had taken nothing from Swift’s. But Swift, inverted
hypocrite as Bolingbroke called him, must put on as bad a face as
possible.
His text announced and defended, he told his story. As he grew older
his friends would talk behind his back about his failing body and mind.
They would seem to be concerned, but they would at least be pleased
that they were better off than he. Once they had said he soon must die,
they would rather see him die than have their predictions turn out
wrong.
As soon as he was dead, Dublin would buzz with gossip, chiefly about
what was to become of his money. The news would spread to London. The
Queen would be glad, now, that she had never sent him the presents she
had promised. Walpole would wish it had been some more important man
who had died. Curll the piratical bookseller would hastily get out
three volumes of rubbish and call it Swift’s.
“_Here shift the scene to represent
How those I love my death lament.
Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day.
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen and drop a tear.
The rest will give a shrug and cry:
‘I’m sorry--but we all must die.’_”
“_My female friends, whose tender hearts,
Have better learned to act their parts,
Receive the news in doleful dumps:
‘The Dean is dead (and what is trumps?)’_”
The Dean’s writings would be unobtainable at the bookshops, in case
any country reader inquired for “Swift in Verse and Prose.” In the
clubs and coffee houses, however, there would be some discussion. Swift
imagined the arguments between his supporters and his defamers. Nearly
half his poem was given to what he thought the worst and the best
things that could be said about him. The worst:
“_Alas, poor Dean! his only scope
Was to be held a misanthrope.
This into general odium drew him,
Which if he liked much good may’t do him.
His zeal was not to lash our crimes,
But discontent against the times;
For had we made him timely offers
To raise his post or fill his coffers,
Perhaps he might have truckled down,
Like other brethren of the gown._”
The best:
“_Had he but spared his tongue and pen
He might have rose like other men.
But power was never in his thought,
And wealth he valued not a groat.
Ingratitude he often found,
And pitied those who meant the wound,
But kept the tenor of his mind
To merit well of human kind....
Yet malice never was his aim,
He lashed the vice but spared the name.
No individual could resent
Where thousands equally were meant.
His satire points at no defect
But what all mortals may correct._”
Swift’s analysis of his character was not too accurate. He had suffered
from disappointments. He had taken revenges. He had aimed to hurt as
well as to mend. But accuracy was not his purpose. This was the last
and greatest of his hoaxes. There was more irony about it in 1739 than
there had been when he wrote it. He had outlived Gay and Arbuthnot, who
in the poem grieved a week or a day. There was more irony about it than
he knew. Pope, credited in the poem with the longest grief over his
friend, had by 1739 deceived Swift about the publication of the letters
between them. Swift could not keep his hoax to himself. It was too good
to be left for any man’s survivors. Swift had put all his cynicism and
all his intensity into his lines on his death. But he could not miss
the chance, by publishing them, to amuse himself, in his way, at his
own funeral.
[Illustration: Jonathan Swift
_In old age_]
VIII
CONJURED SPIRIT
“Life is a tragedy,” Swift said, “wherein we sit as spectators
awhile, and then act our own part in it.” But Swift had never waited
for tragedy to come to him. He had always run to meet it. He had,
dramatic and perverse, insisted upon playing the most tragic parts. He
had, whether quite consciously or not, identified himself with that
“conjured spirit” which a “person of great honour in Ireland” had seen
in him when he was young.
Suppose some such spirit had been conjured up by an experiment of
nature, by a hoax of nature, and had been let loose among men. The
spirit’s course would have been like Swift’s. The spirit would have
brought with it enough angelic light, enough diabolic pride, to make it
restless in its human flesh. It would expect to command the inferior
beings it outwardly resembled. It would fret when it saw that its flesh
condemned it to be mistaken for a creature that was merely flesh.
Learning that most men knew nothing beyond mankind, the spirit would
regard them as a wilderness of fools. Learning that the few who ruled
the many were not much less foolish, the spirit would regard the few as
knaves. Both fools and knaves would be repulsive to it.
But the spirit itself, with its burden and disguise of flesh, must be
more or less a man in whatever it did. Too much a spirit to become easy
among men, it would be too much a man to resist some human beings: men
to be friends with, women to love or be loved by. Too much a spirit
to be willing to take its contented stand with the fools ruled by
the knaves, or with the knaves, it would be too much a man to stand
altogether aside and ridicule the world lumbering or raving by. The
spirit would, as Swift did, try to make its way by something which was
neither the authority of a spirit nor the arts of a man. Divided within
itself, it could not trust its instincts to know just what force, what
craft was needed at what times. The spirit could be hoodwinked through
the man. The man could be deluded through the spirit. Even if the
spirit rose to power, it could get only a man’s reward, and only the
reward of a man handicapped by what the spirit had done to alienate
other men.
That reward would never satisfy the spirit. Sent to govern a province,
the spirit would still think of the empire. The respect, the love, the
veneration of the province might reward the man. The spirit would
despise them. To accept them and be satisfied would be to agree too
well with the flesh which the spirit had been conjured to put on. It
would not agree. It could not. It must, helplessly a spirit, endure
its burden and disguise till they were worn out. It could hardly wear
out its flesh. It would have tainted its mortal body with a dark
immortality. It would outlive the men and women whose love had made it
less wretched than it might have been. In the end it would escape only
with fearful convulsions of its heavy carcass.
Swift’s lifelong metaphor of the conjured spirit was mythological, but
only a metaphor could give reality to a man whose spirit so rode his
flesh.
An extraordinary man, with a boundless appetite for power, must master
or please ordinary men, or else go hungry. Swift was born without the
rank and fortune which are such a man’s natural advantages. Worse,
Swift was born without the hide of brass and bowels of iron which
would have been nearly as good for him as rank and fortune. He could
not climb without caring what he set his feet on. He was clumsy with
scruples. He could not take snubs and kicks and stabs as incidental,
hardly personal to him, and unimportant so long as he could survive
them. He was sensitive to every scratch and had quick, ungovernable
impulses to strike back. He could not centre his energies without mercy
even for himself. No man is so extraordinary that he can, starting
below many of his fellows, scramble past them all without a stubborn,
insolent devotion to the main path. Swift was not single-minded enough
to master his world.
Nor would Swift rise, as some men do, by pleasing. He would have had
to be more supple than he was to wriggle far. Even in an age when it
was still barely a disgrace to court a lord, Swift could not court one
long. He was more ready to bully than to flatter. And with his equals
and inferiors he could or would not assure them that their shortcomings
were virtues, their prejudices wisdom. He used a winter speech in the
most comfortable summers. Above all, he had no zeal to please, and
felt small delight in his small successes. He was half ashamed when he
pleased, as if he were a tragedian who had raised a laugh. This was not
his part. This was for mountebanks.
Nothing about Swift was more extraordinary than his blindness to the
part which he played so well while he was failing in the one on which
he had fixed his desire. Still in his twenties, or just out of them, he
raged at Moor Park because he had no chance to command. Yet in those
same years he flung off a prose satire such as no Englishman had ever
written before and such as no Englishman but Swift ever wrote again.
In London, scheming to rule among the Whigs or Tories, half winning,
and then disappointed after his spell of power, Swift, almost without
effort or concern, ruled the wits. In Ireland, where he thought of
himself as a despairing exile, he wrote pamphlets that are monuments,
poems that added to poetry what was almost a new species. He wrote his
Travels in a vain fury of revenge, and entertained the world. On the
other side of every failure was a triumph.
On the other side of all his hatreds were loves. Swift was a
misanthropist, but he is famous for his friendships. He shrank from
women, but he made two women famous. He detested Ireland, but he has
the eternal affection of the Irish. He loathed the human race, but he
has been a delight to it for two centuries. It was his extraordinary
fortune to draw an interest of love from a principal of hate.
No doubt Swift should have measured his gifts more exactly and should
have put himself into more fitting rôles, like any ordinary man of
talent. Swift was outside the shrewd discipline of talent. He could
not sit down and write prose and verse as if they were sufficient
ends. Prose and verse were the weapons he found in his fists, scarcely
realizing how they came there. He used them in his tragic rôle, in the
war of his ambition, not because he valued them but because they were
the only weapons he had. After he had lost his war, and had--singularly
like Temple--given it up as hopeless when he was only forty-five, Swift
would never again allow himself to be consoled. He would not see that
he had been winning, and still was winning, a great war while he was
losing a small one. His pride blinded him.
A few years reverse many verdicts. While Swift was still alive, king
of Ireland but pretending to be king of triflers, he had good reasons
for foreseeing the true verdict upon him. In the long run, he might
have guessed, he would be remembered for what he had written at Moor
Park, before he had even tried the world, or for what he had written
and done in Ireland, after he had bitterly renounced his expectations.
What he had thought his glorious episode, the years with Oxford and
Bolingbroke, would look a little shabby. In time Swift would seem to
have been most splendid when he had been most himself, and not the
satellite of politicians.
Still, Swift might also have understood, if he had been without his
blindness, that simple formulas would not explain him. To do what he
had done he had needed the blind obsession of his will. As a lover
who does nothing but love is seldom the best lover, so the writer who
desires only to write is seldom the best writer. What had raised Swift,
scattered and random as most of his writing was, to the first rank
among writers, had been the high reach of his pride, the magnificence
of his scorn. He had won the war in which he hardly noticed that he was
fighting because he had fought with so much passion in a war which was
not worth it. It was his passion that had mattered, and not his long
illusion. Nature, when it demands prose and verse of its creatures,
cares no more whether they are begotten in illusion than it cares
whether children are begotten in moods of unreason.
If there had been in Dublin some subtle expert able to pry into Swift’s
mind and point out how he could resolve his conflicts, how he could
make his will submit and take what it could get in place of what it
wanted, it might have made Swift happier. Happier and duller. As it
was, he went on in his own way of life to his own way of death.
In April 1740 he wrote his cousin that he had been “these two days
in so miserable a way, and so cruelly tortured, that it can hardly
be conceived. The whole of last night I was equally struck as if I
had been in Phalaris’s brazen bull, and roared as loud for eight or
nine hours.” After three months he wrote her again. “I have been very
miserable all night, and today extremely deaf and full of pain. I am
so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am
under both in body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture
but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is
and your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my
days will be very few; few and miserable they must be.... If I do not
blunder, it is Saturday, July 26, 1740.”
He had still five years, two of torture and three of a dreadful
peace, in which to keep on outliving his friends. He made his will.
Accustomed to giving a third of his income to charity, he now became
more avaricious than ever, to have more money to give. He shut out the
world. His house was his dungeon. His deafness was almost complete, his
giddiness almost unceasing.
Blood seeped through the membranes which his sly fate had made too
thin, into the labyrinth of his ear. A drop there was enough to
overpower him with the din of water-mills, with the thunder of oceans.
What was all his pride, what was all his intellect, against this
everlasting tumult? It had been beating upon his nerves for half a
century. It now beat louder and louder, with fewer intervals in which
he might recover his patience. He had never had any patience. What he
had had was lost in floods of irritation. His reason was clear, when he
could rest from the insensate drums that sounded in his head, but his
memory was dull and thick. He could not remember the words which he had
started to say. In torment and the fear of torment, he could not even
tell what was hurting him. He could not bear to see the few friends
that remained. They might pity him. They could not help him. His old
habits drove him to a furious activity, wearing out his strength.
He was all agony and all rebellion. Once he was found threatening
his reflection in a mirror. His misanthropy had given up the last
exception. He hated himself.
Yet out of this murk could come an occasional glare that was still
Swift. As late as January 1742 he wrote an exhortation to his Chapter.
“Whereas my infirmities of age and ill health have prevented me to
preside in the chapters held for the good order and government of my
Cathedral Church of St. Patrick’s, Dublin,” he began. He had heard
that various members of the choir had assisted at public musical
performances. He would not have it. “And whereas it hath been reported
that I gave a licence to certain vicars to assist at a club of fiddlers
in Fishamble Street, I hereby declare that I remember no such licence
to have been ever signed or sealed by me; and that if ever such
pretended licence should be produced, I do hereby annul and vacate the
said licence: entreating my said Sub-Dean and Chapter to punish such
vicars as shall ever appear there, as songsters, fiddlers, pipers,
trumpeters, drummers, drum-majors, or in any sonal quality, according
to the flagitious aggravations of their respective disobedience,
rebellion, perfidy, and ingratitude. I require my said Sub-Dean to
proceed to the extremity of expulsion if the said vicars should be
found ungovernable, impenitent, or self-sufficient.... My resolution
is to preserve the dignity of my station and the honour of my Chapter;
and, gentlemen, it is incumbent upon you to aid me, and to show who
and what the Dean and Chapter of St. Patrick’s are.”
These are the last words, except in the Cathedral accounts, which Swift
is known to have written. The Chapter could have no doubt who the Dean
of St. Patrick’s was, though he was as old and desolate as Lear. In
February, when Walpole lost his office, Swift, who had vowed to buy a
coach if ever that should happen, bought a coach. He might have little
time left in which to use it, but he would ride through the streets of
Dublin exulting over Walpole’s followers. All Dublin should know who
the Dean of St. Patrick’s was.
He fell like a tower, first a rush of warning stones, then a vast
collapse. In March guardians were assigned to him by the Court of
Chancery. In August a commission inquired into his sanity and found
that he was “of unsound mind and memory, and not capable of taking care
of his person or fortune, and that he hath been so since the twentieth
day of May last past.” From being irritable he became violent. He raged
if anybody, besides his servants, looked at him. “He walked ten hours a
day,” his cousin said, “would not eat or drink if his servant stayed in
the room. His meat was served up ready cut, and sometimes it would lie
an hour on the table before he would touch it, and then eat it walking.”
In September and October his torment reached its horrible peak, beyond
what even he had imagined in his ruthless account of the struldbrugs.
A sudden tumor forced his left eye almost out of its socket. He had
as many boils as Job. “The torture he was in,” his cousin said, “is
not to be described. Five persons could scarce hold him, for a week,
from tearing out his own eyes, and for near a month he did not sleep
two hours in twenty-four.” He had a quiet day or two. When his pain
left him his understanding came back, as if his madness had been only
agony. Nothing less than a cataclysm could subdue that burning mind. A
cataclysm or a stroke of paralysis.
Paralysis brought him the relief of apathy. Swift had submitted. It
took him three years to die, but he lived without rebellion. He no
longer paced his cage. He would hardly leave his chair. His body got
back its flesh. His face lost its wrinkles. His expression was now
benign or childlike. He recognized the few persons whom he saw, but he
seldom spoke. When he tried to speak, he could not always find words.
What he said seemed to come by chance to his tongue, though it was
never nonsense. Once, when his housekeeper took a knife out of his
reach, “he shrugged his shoulders and, rocking himself, said ‘I am what
I am, I am what I am,’ and about six minutes afterwards repeated the
same words two or three times over.”
Hundreds of stories were invented during those three years about the
great mad Dean. One story, not true, was that he sat all day cursing
in his chair. Another, probably not true, was that his servants
exhibited him for money--“And Swift expires a driveller and a show.”
The stories, however, are proof enough of the vigour of the legend
which had gathered around Swift and which still lives in Ireland. The
Irish would not believe that he had hated them as he claimed. His abuse
had been affectionate scolding, no rougher than they could enjoy.
He had stood between them and England. He was a patriot, a man of
learning, very near a saint. There must be magic in him. When he died,
19 October 1745, the people crowded to the deanery to see his body.
They came in reverence. One of them, when nobody was looking, cut off
some of his hair, which “was like flax on the pillow.”
He was buried in the Cathedral beside Stella, as his will directed, “as
privately as possible, and at twelve o’clock at night.” His will was
published as a sixpenny pamphlet almost as soon as he was dead. The
people would be curious, he had said in his poem on his death, about
his will. He left his fortune, about eleven thousand pounds, to build a
hospital for idiots and lunatics.--
“_He left the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad;
And showed by one satiric touch
No nation wanted it so much._”--
He left the tithes of the parish of Effernock to the vicars of Laracor
“for the time being, that is to say, so long as the present Episcopal
religion shall continue to be the national established faith and
profession of this kingdom.” After that, the tithes should go, “while
Christianity under any shape shall be tolerated among us,” to the poor
of Laracor, “still excepting professed Jews, atheists, and infidels.”
To various friends and relatives he left legacies, some of which were
his final jests. To Robert Grattan: “my strong box, on condition of his
giving the sole use of the said box to his brother Dr. James Grattan,
who hath more occasion for it, and the second best beaver hat I shall
die possessed of.” To John Grattan: “my silver box in which the freedom
of the city of Cork was presented to me; in which I desire the said
John to keep the tobacco he usually cheweth, called pigtail.” To John
Jackson: “my third best beaver hat.” To John Worrall: “my best beaver
hat.”