In treating of the English humourists of the past age, it is of the men
and of their lives, rather than of their books, that I ask permission to
speak to you; and in doing so, you are aware that I cannot hope to
entertain you with a merely humourous or facetious story. Harlequin
without his mask is known to present a very sober countenance, and was
himself, the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the Doctor advised
to go and see Harlequin--a man full of cares and perplexities like the
rest of us, whose Self must always be serious to him, under whatever mask
or disguise or uniform he presents it to the public. And as all of you
here must needs be grave when you think of your own past and present, you
will not look to find, in the histories of those whose lives and feelings
I am going to try and describe to you, a story that is otherwise than
serious, and of ten very sad. If Humour only meant laughter, you would
scarcely feel more interest about humourous writers than about the
private life of poor Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common
with these the power of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose
lives and stories your kind presence here shows that you have curiosity
and sympathy, appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides
our mere sense of ridicule. The humourous writer professes to awaken and
direct your love, your pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth,
pretension, imposture--your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the
oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments
on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon
himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he
finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best we regard him, esteem
him--sometimes love him. And, as his business is to mark other people's
lives and peculiarities, we moralize upon his life when he is gone--and
yesterday's preacher becomes the text for to-day's sermon.
Of English parents, and of a good English family of clergymen, Swift was
born in Dublin in 1667, seven months after the death of his father, who
had come to practise there as a lawyer. The boy went to school at
Kilkenny, and afterwards to Trinity College, Dublin, where he got a
degree with difficulty, and was wild, and witty, and poor. In 1688, by
the recommendation of his mother, Swift was received into the family of
Sir William Temple, who had known Mrs. Swift in Ireland. He left his
patron in 1694, and the next year took orders in Dublin. But he threw up
the small Irish preferment which he got and returned to Temple, in whose
family he remained until Sir William's death in 1699. His hopes of
advancement in England failing, Swift returned to Ireland, and took the
living of Laracor. Hither he invited Hester Johnson, Temple's natural
daughter, with whom he had contracted a tender friendship, while they
were both dependants of Temple's. And with an occasional visit to
England, Swift now passed nine years at home.
In 1709 he came to England, and, with a brief visit to Ireland, during
which he took possession of his deanery of St. Patrick, he now passed
five years in England, taking the most distinguished part in the
political transactions which terminated with the death of Queen Anne.
After her death, his party disgraced, and his hopes of ambition over,
Swift returned to Dublin, where he remained twelve years. In this time
he wrote the famous "Drapier's Letters" and "Gulliver's Travels." He
married Hester Johnson, Stella, and buried Esther Vanhomrigh, Vanessa,
who had followed him to Ireland from London, where she had contracted a
violent passion for him. In 1726 and 1727 Swift was in England, which he
quitted for the last time on hearing of his wife's illness. Stella died
in January, 1728, and Swift not until 1745, having passed the last five
of the seventy-eight years of his life with an impaired intellect and
keepers to watch him.
You know, of course, that Swift has had many biographers; his life has
been told by the kindest and most good-natured of men, Scott, who admires
but can't bring himself to love him; and by stout old Johnson, who,
forced to admit him into the company of poets, receives the famous
Irishman, and takes off his hat to him with a bow of surly recognition,
scans him from head to foot, and passes over to the other side of the
street. Dr. Wilde of Dublin, who has written a most interesting volume
on the closing years of Swift's life, calls Johnson "the most malignant
of his biographers:" it is not easy for an English critic to please
Irishmen--perhaps to try and please them. And yet Johnson truly admires
Swift: Johnson does not quarrel with Swift's change of politics, or doubt
his sincerity of religion: about the famous Stella and Vanessa
controversy the Doctor does not bear very hardly on Swift. But he could
not give the Dean that honest hand of his; the stout old man puts it into
his breast, and moves off from him.
Would we have liked to live with him? That is a question which, in
dealing with these people's works, and thinking of their lives and
peculiarities, every reader of biographies must put to himself. Would
you have liked to be a friend of the great Dean? I should like to have
been Shakspeare's shoeblack--just to have lived in his house, just to
have worshipped him--to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet
serene face. I should like, as a young man, to have lived on Fielding's
staircase in the Temple, and after helping him up to bed perhaps, and
opening his door with his latch-key, to have shaken hands with him in the
morning, and heard him talk and crack jokes over his breakfast and his
mug of small beer. Who would not give something to pass a night at the
club with Johnson, and Goldsmith, and James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck?
The charm of Addison's companionship and conversation has passed to us by
fond tradition--but Swift? If you had been his inferior in parts (and
that, with a great respect for all persons present, I fear is only very
likely), his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied,
scorned, and insulted you; if, undeterred by his great reputation, you
had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you, and not had the
pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram
about you--watched for you in a sewer, and come out to assail you with a
coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon. If you had been a lord with a blue
riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would
have been the most delightful company in the world. He would have been
so manly, so sarcastic, so bright, odd, and original, that you might
think he had no object in view but the indulgence of his humour and that
he was the most reckless, simple creature in the world. How he would
have torn your enemies to pieces for you! and made fun of the Opposition!
His servility was so boisterous that it looked like independence; he
would have done your errands, but with the air of patronizing you, and
after fighting your battles, masked, in the street or the press, would
have kept on his hat before your wife and daughters in the drawing-room,
content to take that sort of pay for his tremendous services as a bravo.
He says as much himself in one of his letters to Bolingbroke:--"All my
endeavours 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 is no great matter. And so the
reputation of wit and great learning does the office of a blue riband or
a coach and six."
Could there be a greater candour? It is an outlaw, who says, "These are
my brains; with these I'll win titles and compete with fortune. These
are my bullets; these I'll turn into gold;" and he hears the sound of
coaches and six, takes the road like Macheath, and makes society stand
and deliver. They are all on their knees before him. Down go my lord
bishop's apron, and his Grace's blue riband, and my lady's brocade
petticoat in the mud. He eases the one of a living, the other of a
patent place, the third of a little snug post about the Court, and gives
them over to followers of his own. The great prize has not come yet.
The coach with the mitre and crosier in it, which he intends to have for
his share, has been delayed on the way from St. James's; and he waits and
waits until nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach
has taken a different road, and escaped him. So he fires his pistols
into the air with a curse, and rides away into his own country.
Swift's seems to me to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale
of ambition, as any hero's that ever lived and failed. But we must
remember that the morality was lax--that other gentlemen besides himself
took the road in his day--that public society was in a strange disordered
condition, and the State was ravaged by other condottieri. The Boyne was
being fought and won, and lost--the bells rung in William's victory, in
the very same tone with which they would have pealed for James's. Men
were loose upon politics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well
as old beliefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift
in the storm. As in the South Sea Bubble, almost everybody gambled; as
in the Railway mania--not many centuries ago--almost every one took his
unlucky share: a man of that time, of the vast talents and ambition of
Swift, could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his
spring at his opportunity. His bitterness, his scorn, his rage, his
subsequent misanthropy, are ascribed by some panegyrists to a deliberate
conviction of mankind's unworthiness, and a desire to amend them by
castigating. His youth was bitter, as that of a great genius bound down
by ignoble ties, and powerless in a mean dependence; his age was bitter,
like that of a great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it,
and lost it, and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile. A
man may attribute to the gods, if he likes, what is caused by his own
fury, or disappointment, or self-will. What public man--what statesman
projecting a _coup_--what king determined on an invasion of his
neighbour--what satirist meditating an onslaught on society or an
individual, can't give a pretext for his move? There was a French
general the other day who proposed to march into this country and put it
to sack and pillage, in revenge for humanity outraged by our conduct at
Copenhagen: there is always some excuse for men of the aggressive turn.
They are of their nature warlike, predatory, eager for fight, plunder,
dominion.
As fierce a beak and talon as ever struck--as strong a wing as ever beat,
belonged to Swift. I am glad, for one, that fate wrested the prey out of
his claws, and cut his wings and chained him. One can gaze, and not
without awe and pity, at the lonely eagle chained behind the bars.
That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, on the 30th November,
1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister island the
honour and glory; but, it seems to me, he was no more an Irishman than a
man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo. Goldsmith was an
Irishman, and always an Irishman: Steele was an Irishman, and always an
Irishman: Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English,
his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he
shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise
thrift and economy, as he used his money: with which he could be generous
and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was
no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of
rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his opinion before
you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness. Dreading ridicule
too, as a man of his humour--above all an Englishman of his
humour--certainly would, he is afraid to use the poetical power which he
really possessed; one often fancies in reading him that he dares not be
eloquent when he might; that he does not speak above his voice, as it
were, and the tone of society.
His initiation into politics, his knowledge of business, his knowledge of
polite life, his acquaintance with literature even, which he could not
have pursued very sedulously during that reckless career at Dublin, Swift
got under the roof of Sir William Temple. He was fond of telling in
after life what quantities of books he devoured there, and how King
William taught him to cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion. It was at
Shene and at Moor Park, with a salary of twenty pounds and a dinner at
the upper servants' table, that this great and lonely Swift passed a ten
years' apprenticeship--wore a cassock that was only not a livery--bent
down a knee as proud as Lucifer's to supplicate my lady's good graces, or
run on his honour's errands. It was here, as he was writing at Temple's
table, or following his patron's walk, that he saw and heard the men who
had governed the great world--measured himself with them, looking up from
his silent corner, gauged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them,
and tried them, and marked them. Ah! what platitudes he must have heard!
what feeble jokes! what pompous commonplaces! what small men they must
have seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth,
silent Irish secretary. I wonder whether it ever struck Temple, that
that Irishman was his master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not
present itself under the ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived
with Swift. Swift sickened, rebelled, left the service--ate humble pie
and came back again; and so for ten years went on, gathering learning,
swallowing scorn, and submitting with a stealthy rage to his fortune.
Temple's style is the perfection of practised and easy good-breeding. If
he does not penetrate very deeply into a subject, he professes a very
gentlemanly acquaintance with it; if he makes rather a parade of Latin,
it was the custom of his day, as it was the custom for a gentleman to
envelope his head in a periwig and his hands in lace ruffles. If he
wears buckles and square-toed shoes, he steps in them with a consummate
grace, and you never hear their creak, or find them treading upon any
lady's train or any rival's heels in the Court crowd. When that grows
too hot or too agitated for him, he politely leaves it. He retires to
his retreat of Shene or Moor Park; and lets the King's party and the
Prince of Orange's party battle it out among themselves. He reveres the
Sovereign (and no man perhaps ever testified to his loyalty by so elegant
a bow); he admires the Prince of Orange; but there is one person whose
ease and comfort he loves more than all the princes in Christendom, and
that valuable member of society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus.
One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds,
clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,--the statesman, the
ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine
gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of
kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or
walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with the
ruddy nymph of gardens.
Temple seems to have received and exacted a prodigious deal of veneration
from his household, and to have been coaxed, and warmed, and cuddled by
the people round about him, as delicately as any of the plants which he
loved. When he fell ill in 1693, the household was aghast at his
indisposition: mild Dorothea, his wife, the best companion of the best of
men--
"Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great,
Trembling beheld the doubtful hand of fate."