MOOR PARK AND KILROOT.
How was this "conjured spirit" to find occupation? The proverbial
occupation of such beings is to cultivate despair by weaving ropes of
sand. Swift felt himself strong; but he had no task worthy of his
strength: nor did he yet know precisely where it lay: he even fancied that
it might be in the direction of Pindaric Odes. Hitherto his energy had
expended itself in the questionable shape of revolt against constituted
authority. But the revolt, whatever its precise nature, had issued in the
rooted determination to achieve a genuine independence. The political
storm which had for the time crushed the whole social order of Ireland
into mere chaotic anarchy, had left him an uprooted waif and stray--a
loose fragment without any points of attachment, except the little
household in Leicester. His mother might give him temporary shelter, but
no permanent home. If, as is probable, he already looked forward to a
clerical career, the Church to which he belonged was, for the time,
hopelessly ruined, and in danger of being a persecuted sect.
In this crisis a refuge was offered to him. Sir William Temple was
connected, in more ways than one, with the Swifts. He was the son of Sir
John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, who had been a friend of
Godwin Swift. Temple himself had lived in Ireland, in early days, and had
known the Swift family. His wife was in some way related to Swift's
mother; and he was now in a position to help the young man. Temple is a
remarkable figure amongst the statesmen of that generation. There is
something more modern about him than belongs to his century. A man of
cultivated taste and cosmopolitan training, he had the contempt of
enlightened persons for the fanaticisms of his times. He was not the man
to suffer persecution, with Baxter, for a creed, or even to lose his head,
with Russell, for a party. Yet if he had not the faith which animates
enthusiasts, he sincerely held political theories--a fact sufficient to
raise him above the thorough-going cynics of the court of the restoration.
His sense of honour, or the want of robustness in mind and temperament,
kept him aloof from the desperate game in which the politicians of the day
staked their lives, and threw away their consciences as an incumbrance.
Good fortune threw him into the comparatively safe line of diplomacy, for
which his natural abilities fitted him. Good fortune, aided by
discernment, enabled him to identify himself with the most respectable
achievements of our foreign policy. He had become famous as the chief
author of the Triple Alliance, and the promoter of the marriage of William
and Mary. He had ventured far enough into the more troublous element of
domestic politics to invent a highly applauded constitutional device for
smoothing the relations between the crown and Parliament. Like other such
devices it went to pieces at the first contact with realities. Temple
retired to cultivate his garden and write elegant memoirs and essays, and
refused all entreaties to join again in the rough struggles of the day.
Associates, made of sterner stuff, probably despised him; but from their
own, that is, the selfish point of view, he was perhaps entitled to laugh
last. He escaped at least with unblemished honour, and enjoyed the
cultivated retirement which statesmen so often profess to desire, and so
seldom achieve. In private, he had many estimable qualities. He was frank
and sensitive; he had won diplomatic triumphs by disregarding the pedantry
of official rules; and he had an equal, though not an equally intelligent,
contempt for the pedantry of the schools. His style, though often
slipshod, often anticipates the pure and simple English of the Addison
period, and delighted Charles Lamb by its delicate flavour of aristocratic
assumption. He had the vanity of a "person of quality,"--a lofty,
dignified air which became his flowing periwig, and showed itself in his
distinguished features. But in youth, a strong vein of romance displayed
itself in his courtship of Lady Temple, and he seems to have been
correspondingly worshipped by her, and his sister, Lady Giffard.
The personal friendship of William could not induce Temple to return to
public life. His only son took office, but soon afterwards killed himself
from a morbid sense of responsibility. Temple retired finally to Moor
Park, near Farnham, in Surrey; and about the same time received Swift into
his family. Long afterwards, John Temple, Sir William's nephew, who had
quarrelled with Swift, gave an obviously spiteful account of the terms of
this engagement. Swift, he said, was hired by Sir William to read to him
and be his amanuensis, at the rate of 20_l._ a year and his board; but
"Sir William never favoured him with his conversation, nor allowed him to
sit down at table with him." The authority is bad, and we must be guided
by rather precarious inferences in picturing this important period of
Swift's career. The raw Irish student was probably awkward, and may have
been disagreeable in some matters. Forty years later, we find from his
correspondence with Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry, that his views as
to the distribution of functions between knives and forks were lamentably
unsettled; and it is probable that he may in his youth have been still
more heretical as to social conventions. There were more serious
difficulties. The difference which separated Swift from Temple is not
easily measurable. How can we exaggerate the distance at which a lad,
fresh from college and a remote provincial society, would look up to the
distinguished diplomatist of sixty, who had been intimate with the two
last kings, and was still the confidential friend of the reigning king,
who had been an actor in the greatest scenes, not only of English, but of
European history, who had been treated with respect by the ministers of
Louis XIV., and in whose honour bells had been rung, and banquets set
forth as he passed through the great continental cities? Temple might have
spoken to him, without shocking proprieties, in terms which, if I may
quote the proverbial phrase, would be offensive "from God Almighty to a
blackbeetle."
Shall I believe a spirit so divine
Was cast in the same mould with mine?
is Swift's phrase about Temple, in one of his first crude poems. We must
not infer that circumstances which would now be offensive to an educated
man--the seat at the second table, the predestined congeniality to the
ladies'-maid of doubtful reputation--would have been equally offensive
then. So long as dependence upon patrons was a regular incident of the
career of a poor scholar, the corresponding regulations would be taken as
a matter of course. Swift was not necessarily more degraded by being a
dependent of Temple's than Locke by a similar position in Shaftesbury's
family. But it is true that such a position must always be trying, as many
a governess has felt in more modern days. The position of the educated
dependent must always have had its specific annoyances. At this period,
when the relation of patron and client was being rapidly modified or
destroyed, the compact would be more than usually trying to the power of
forbearance and mutual kindliness of the parties concerned. The relation
between Sir Roger de Coverley and the old college friend who became his
chaplain meant good feeling on both sides. When poor parson Supple became
chaplain to Squire Western, and was liable to be sent back from London to
Basingstoke in search of a forgotten tobacco-box, Supple must have parted
with all self-respect. Swift has incidentally given his own view of the
case in his _Essay on the Fates of Clergymen_. It is an application of one
of his favourite doctrines--the advantage possessed by mediocrity over
genius in a world so largely composed of fools. Eugenio, who represents
Jonathan Swift, fails in life because as a wit and a poet he has not the
art of winning patronage. Corusodes, in whom we have a partial likeness to
Tom Swift, Jonathan's college contemporary, and afterwards the chaplain of
Temple, succeeds by servile respectability. _He_ never neglected chapel,
or lectures: _he_ never looked into a poem: never made a jest himself, or
laughed at the jests of others: but he managed to insinuate himself into
the favour of the noble family where his sister was a waiting-woman; shook
hands with the butler, taught the page his catechism; was sometimes
admitted to dine at the steward's table; was admitted to read prayers, at
ten shillings a month: and, by winking at his patron's attentions to his
sister, gradually crept into better appointments, married a citizen's
widow, and is now fast mounting towards the top of the ladder
ecclesiastical.
Temple was not the man to demand or reward services so base as those
attributed to Corusodes. Nor does it seem that he would be wanting in the
self-respect which prescribes due courtesy to inferiors, though it admits
of a strict regard for the ceremonial outworks of social dignity. He would
probably neither permit others to take liberties nor take them himself. If
Swift's self-esteem suffered, it would not be that he objected to offering
up the conventional incense, but that he might possibly think that, after
all, the idol was made of rather inferior clay. Temple, whatever his solid
merits, was one of the showiest statesmen of the time; but there was no
man living with a keener eye for realities and a more piercing insight
into shams of all kinds than his raw secretary from Ireland. In later life
Swift frequently expressed his scorn for the mysteries and the
"refinements" (to use his favourite phrase) by which the great men of the
world conceal the low passions and small wisdom actually exerted in
affairs of State. At times he felt that Temple was not merely claiming the
outward show of respect, but setting too high a value upon his real
merits. So when Swift was at the full flood of fortune, when prime
ministers and secretaries of state were calling him Jonathan, or listening
submissively to his lectures on "whipping-day," he reverts to his early
experience. "I often think," he says, when speaking of his own familiarity
with St. John, "what a splutter Sir William Temple makes about being
secretary of state." And this is a less respectful version of a sentiment
expressed a year before, "I am thinking what a veneration we had for Sir
W. Temple because he might have been secretary of state at fifty, and here
is a young fellow hardly thirty in that employment." In the interval there
is another characteristic outburst. "I asked Mr. Secretary (St. John) what
the devil ailed him on Sunday," and warned him "that I would never be
treated like a schoolboy; that I had felt too much of that in my life
already (meaning Sir W. Temple); that I expected every great minister who
honoured me with his acquaintance, if he heard and saw anything to my
disadvantage, would let me know in plain words, and not put me in pain to
guess by the change or coldness of his countenance and behaviour." The day
after this effusion, he maintains that he was right in what he said.
"Don't you remember how I used to be in pain when Sir W. Temple would look
cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a
hundred reasons? I have plucked up my spirits since then; faith, he
spoiled a fine gentleman." And yet, if Swift sometimes thought Temple's
authority oppressive, he was ready to admit his substantial merits.
Temple, he says, in his rough marginalia to Burnet's _History_, "was a man
of sense and virtue;" and the impromptu utterance probably reflects his
real feeling.
The year after his first arrival at Temple's, Swift went back to Ireland
by advice of physicians, who "weakly imagined that his native air might be
of some use to recover his health." It was at this period, we may note in
passing, that Swift began to suffer from a disease which tormented him
through life. Temple sent with him a letter of introduction to Sir Robert
Southwell, Secretary of State in Ireland, which gives an interesting
account of their previous relations. Swift, said Temple, had lived in his
house, read for him, written for him, and kept his small accounts. He knew
Latin and Greek, and a little French; wrote a good hand, and was honest
and diligent. His whole family had long been known to Temple, who would be
glad if Southwell would give him a clerkship, or get him a fellowship in
Trinity College. The statement of Swift's qualifications has now a rather
comic sound. An applicant for a desk in a merchant's office once commended
himself, it is said, by the statement that his style of writing combined
scathing sarcasm with the wildest flights of humour. Swift might have had
a better claim to a place for which such qualities were a recommendation;
but there is no reason beyond the supposed agreement of fools to regard
genius as a disadvantage in practical life, to suppose that Swift was
deficient in humbler attainments. Before long, however, he was back at
Moor Park; and a period followed in which his discontent with the position
probably reached its height. Temple, indeed, must have discovered that his
young dependent was really a man of capacity. He recommended him to
William. In 1692 Swift went to Oxford, to be admitted _ad eundem_, and
received the M.A. degree; and Swift, writing to thank his uncle for
obtaining the necessary testimonials from Dublin, adds that he has been
most civilly received at Oxford, on the strength, presumably, of Temple's
recommendation, and that he is not to take orders till the king gives him
a prebend. He suspects Temple, however, of being rather backward in the
matter, "because (I suppose) he believes I shall leave him, and (upon some
accounts) he thinks me a little necessary to him." William, it is said,
was so far gracious as to offer to make Swift a captain of horse, and
instruct him in the Dutch mode of cutting asparagus. By this last phrase
hangs an anecdote of later days. Faulkner, the Dublin printer, was dining
with Swift, and on asking for a second supply of asparagus, was told by
the Dean to finish what he had on his plate. "What, sir, eat my stalks!"
"Ay, sir; King William always ate his stalks." "And were you," asked
Faulkner's hearer when he related the story, "were you blockhead enough to
obey him?" "Yes," replied Faulkner, "and if you had dined with Dean Swift
_tête-à-tête_ you would have been obliged to eat your stalks too!" For the
present Swift was the recipient not the imposer of stalks; and was to
receive the first shock, as he tells us, that helped to cure him of his
vanity. The question of the Triennial Bill was agitating political
personages in the early months of 1693. William and his favourite
minister, the Earl of Portland, found their Dutch experience insufficient
to guide them in the mysteries of English constitutionalism. Portland came
down to consult Temple at Moor Park; and Swift was sent back to explain to
the great men that Charles I. had been ruined not by consenting to short
Parliaments, but by abandoning the right to dissolve Parliament. Swift
says that he was "well versed in English history, though he was under
twenty-one years old." (He was really twenty-five, but memory naturally
exaggerated his youthfulness). His arguments, however backed by history,
failed to carry conviction, and Swift had to unlearn some of the youthful
confidence which assumes that reason is the governing force in this world,
and that reason means our own opinions. That so young a man should have
been employed on such an errand, shows that Temple must have had a good
opinion of his capacities; but his want of success, however natural, was
felt as a grave discouragement.
That his discontent was growing is clear from other indications. Swift's
early poems, whatever their defects, have one merit common to all his
writings--the merit of a thorough, sometimes an appalling, sincerity. Two
poems which begin to display his real vigour are dated at the end of 1693.
One is an epistle to his schoolfellow, Congreve, expatiating, as some
consolation for the cold reception of the _Double Dealer_, upon the
contemptible nature of town critics. Swift describes, as a type of the
whole race, a Farnham lad who had left school a year before, and had just
returned a "finished spark" from London.
Stock'd with the latest gibberish of the town,
This wretched little fop came in an evil hour to provoke Swift's hate,--
My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed
Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed.
And he already applies it with vigour enough to show that with some of the
satirist's power he has also the indispensable condition of a considerable
accumulation of indignant wrath against the self-appointed arbiters of
taste. The other poem is more remarkable in its personal revelation. It
begins as a congratulation to Temple on his recovery from an illness. It
passes into a description of his own fate, marked by singular bitterness.
He addresses his muse as--
Malignant Goddess! bane to my repose,
Thou universal cause of all my woes.
She is, it seems, a mere delusive meteor, with no real being of her own.
But, if real, why does she persecute him?
Wert thou right woman, thou should'st scorn to look
On an abandon'd wretch by hopes forsook:
Forsook by hopes, ill fortune's last relief,
Assign'd for life to unremitting grief;
For let heaven's wrath enlarge these weary days
If hope e'er dawns the smallest of its rays.
And he goes on to declare after some vigorous lines,
To thee I owe that fatal bent of mind,
Still to unhappy restless thoughts inclined:
To thee what oft I vainly strive to hide,
That scorn of fools, by fools mistook for pride;
From thee whatever virtue takes its rise,
Grows a misfortune, or becomes a vice.
The sudden gush as of bitter waters into the dulcet, insipid current of
conventional congratulation, gives additional point to the sentiment.
Swift expands the last couplet into a sentiment which remained with him
through life. It is a blending of pride and remorse; a regretful admission
of the loftiness of spirit which has caused his misfortunes; and we are
puzzled to say whether the pride or the remorse be the most genuine. For
Swift always unites pride and remorse in his consciousness of his own
virtues.
The "restlessness" avowed in these verses took the practical form of a
rupture with Temple. In his autobiographical fragment he says that he had
a scruple of entering into the church merely for support, and Sir William,
then being Master of the Rolls in Ireland,[6] offered him an employ of
about 120_l._ a year in that office; whereupon Mr. Swift told him that
since he had now an opportunity of living without being driven into the
church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to Ireland and take holy
orders. If the scruple seems rather finely spun for Swift, the sense of
the dignity of his profession is thoroughly characteristic. Nothing,
however, is more deceptive than our memory of the motives which directed
distant actions. In his contemporary letters there is no hint of any
scruple against preferment in the church, but a decided objection to
insufficient preferment. It is possible that Swift was confusing dates,
and that the scruple was quieted when he failed to take advantage of
Temple's interest with Southwell. Having declined, he felt that he had
made a free choice of a clerical career. In 1692, as we have seen, he
expected a prebend from Temple's influence with William. But his doubts of
Temple's desire or power to serve him were confirmed. In June, 1694, he
tells a cousin at Lisbon, "I have left Sir W. Temple a month ago, just as
I foretold it you; and everything happened exactly as I guessed. He was
extremely angry I left him; and yet would not oblige himself any further
than upon my good behaviour, nor would promise anything firmly to me at
all; so that everybody judged I did best to leave him." He is starting in
four days for Dublin, and intends to be ordained in September. The next
letter preserved completes the story, and implies a painful change in this
cavalier tone of injured pride. Upon going to Dublin, Swift had found that
some recommendation from Temple would be required by the authorities. He
tried to evade the requirement, but was forced at last to write a letter
to Temple, which nothing but necessity could have extorted. After
explaining the case, he adds, "the particulars expected of me are what
relates to morals and learning, and the reasons of quitting your honour's
family, that is whether the last was occasioned by any ill actions. They
are all left entirely to your honour's mercy, though in the past I think I
cannot reproach myself any farther than for _infirmities_. This," he adds,
"is all I dare beg at present from your honour, under circumstances of
life not worth your regard;" and all that is left him to wish ("next to
the health and prosperity of your honour's family") is that Heaven will
show him some day the opportunity of making his acknowledgments at "your
honour's" feet. This seems to be the only occasion on which we find Swift
confessing to any fault except that of being too virtuous.
The apparent doubt of Temple's magnanimity implied in the letter was
happily not verified. The testimonial seems to have been sent at once.
Swift, in any case, was ordained deacon on the 28th of October, 1694, and
priest on the 15th of January, 1695. Probably Swift felt that Temple had
behaved with magnanimity, and in any case it was not very long before he
returned to Moor Park. He had received from Lord Capel, then lord deputy,
the small prebend of Kilroot, worth about 100_l._ a year. Little is known
of his life as a remote country clergyman, except that he very soon became
tired of it.[7] Swift soon resigned his prebend (in March, 1698) and
managed to obtain the succession for a friend in the neighbourhood. But
before this (in May, 1696) he had returned to Moor Park. He had grown
weary of a life in a remote district, and Temple had raised his offers. He
was glad to be once more on the edge at least of the great world in which
alone could be found employment worthy of his talents. One other
incident, indeed, of which a fuller account would be interesting, is
connected with this departure. On the eve of his departure, he wrote a
passionate letter to "Varina," in plain English Miss Waring, sister of an
old college chum. He "solemnly offers to forego all" (all his English
prospects, that is) "for her sake." He does not want her fortune; she
shall live where she pleases; till he has "pushed his advancement" and is
in a position to marry her. The letter is full of true lovers'
protestations; reproaches for her coldness; hints at possible causes of
jealousies; declarations of the worthlessness of ambition as compared with
love; and denunciations of her respect for the little disguises and
affected contradictions of her sex, infinitely beneath persons of her
pride and his own; paltry maxims calculated only for the "rabble of
humanity." "By heaven, Varina," he exclaims, "you are more experienced,
and have less virgin innocence than I." The answer must have been
unsatisfactory; though from expressions in a letter to his successor to
the prebend, we see that the affair was still going on in 1699. It will
come to light once more.
Swift was thus at Moor Park in the summer of 1696. He remained till
Temple's death in January, 1699. We hear no more of any friction between
Swift and his patron; and it seems that the last years of their connexion
passed in harmony. Temple was growing old; his wife, after forty years of
a happy marriage, had died during Swift's absence in the beginning of
1695; and Temple, though he seems to have been vigorous, and in spite of
gout a brisk walker, was approaching the grave. He occupied himself in
preparing, with Swift's help, memoirs and letters, which were left to
Swift for posthumous publication. Swift's various irritations at Moor
Park have naturally left a stronger impression upon his history than the
quieter hours in which worry and anxiety might be forgotten in the placid
occupations of a country life. That Swift enjoyed many such hours is
tolerably clear. Moor Park is described by a Swiss traveller who visited
it about 1691,[8] as the "model of an agreeable retreat." Temple's
household was free from the coarse convivialities of the boozing
fox-hunting squires; whilst the recollection of its modest neatness made
the "magnificent palace" of Petworth seem pompous and overpowering. Swift
himself remembered the Moor Park gardens, the special pride of Temple's
retirement, with affection, and tried to imitate them on a small scale in
his own garden at Laracor. Moor Park is on the edge of the great heaths
which stretch southward to Hindhead, and northwards to Aldershot and
Chobham Ridges. Though we can scarcely credit him with a modern taste in
scenery, he at least anticipated the modern faith in athletic exercises.
According to Deane Swift, he used to run up a hill near Temple's and back
again to his study every two hours, doing the distance of half a mile in
six minutes. In later life he preached the duty of walking with admirable
perseverance to his friends. He joined other exercises occasionally. "My
Lord," he says to Archbishop King in 1721, "I row after health like a
waterman, and ride after it like a postboy, and with some little success."
But he had the characteristic passion of the good and wise for walking. He
mentions incidentally a walk from Farnham to London, thirty-eight miles;
and has some association with the Golden Farmer[9]--a point on the road
from which there is still one of the loveliest views in the southern
counties, across undulating breadths of heath and meadow, woodland and
down, to Windsor Forest, St. George's Hill, and the chalk range from
Guildford to Epsom. Perhaps he might have been a mountaineer in more
civilized times; his poem on the Carberry rocks seems to indicate a lover
of such scenery; and he ventured so near the edge of the cliff upon his
stomach, that his servants had to drag him back by his heels. We find him
proposing to walk to Chester at the rate, I regret to say, of only ten
miles a day. In such rambles, we are told, he used to put up at wayside
inns, where "lodgings for a penny" were advertised; bribing the maid with
a tester to give him clean sheets and a bed to himself. The love of the
rough humour of waggoners and hostlers is supposed to have been his
inducement to this practice; and the refined Orrery associates his
coarseness with this lamentable practice; but amidst the roar of railways
we may think more tolerantly of the humours of the road in the good old
days, when each village had its humours and traditions and quaint legends,
and when homely maxims of unlettered wisdom were to be picked up at rustic
firesides.
Recreations of this kind were a relief to serious study. In Temple's
library Swift found abundant occupation. "I am often," he says, in the
first period of his residence, "two or three months without seeing anybody
besides the family." In a later fragment, we find him living alone "in
great state," the cook coming for his orders for dinner, and the
revolutions in the kingdom of the rooks amusing his leisure. The results
of his studies will be considered directly. A list of books read in 1697
gives some hint of their general nature. They are chiefly classical and
historical. He read Virgil, Homer, Horace, Lucretius, Cicero's
_Epistles_, Petronius Arbiter, Ælian, Lucius Florus, Herbert's _Henry
VIII._, Sleidan's _Commentaries, Council of Trent_, Camden's _Elizabeth_,
Burnet's _History of the Reformation_, Voiture, Blackmore's _Prince
Arthur_, Sir J. Davis's poem of _The Soul_, and two or three travels,
besides Cyprian and Irenæus. We may note the absence of any theological
reading, except in the form of ecclesiastical history; nor does Swift
study philosophy, of which he seems to have had a sufficient dose in
Dublin. History seems always to have been his favourite study, and it
would naturally have a large part in Temple's library.
One matter of no small importance to Swift remains to be mentioned.
Temple's family included other dependents besides Swift. The "little
parson cousin," Tom Swift, whom his great relation always mentions with
contempt, became chaplain to Temple. Jonathan's sister was for some time
at Moor Park. But the inmates of the family most interesting to us were a
Rebecca Dingley--who was in some way related to the family--and Esther
Johnson. Esther Johnson was the daughter of a merchant of respectable
family who died young. Her mother was known to Lady Giffard, Temple's
attached sister; and after her widowhood, went with her two daughters to
live with the Temples. Mrs. Johnson lived as servant or companion to Lady
Giffard for many years after Temple's death; and little Esther, a
remarkably bright and pretty child, was brought up in the family, and
received under Temple's will a sufficient legacy for her support. It
was of course guessed by a charitable world that she was a natural
child of Sir William's; but there seems to be no real ground for the
hypothesis.[10] She was born, as Swift tells us, on March 13th, 1681; and
was therefore a little over eight when Swift first came to Temple, and
fifteen when he returned from Kilroot.[11] About this age, he tells us,
she got over an infantile delicacy, "grew into perfect health, and was
looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young
women in London. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of
her face in perfection." Her conduct and character were equally
remarkable, if we may trust the tutor who taught her to write, guided her
education, and came to regard her with an affection which was at once the
happiness and the misery of his life.
Temple died January 26, 1699; and "with him," said Swift at the time, "all
that was good and amiable among men." The feeling was doubtless sincere,
though Swift, when moved very deeply, used less conventional phrases. He
was thrown once more upon the world. The expectations of some settlement
in life had not been realized. Temple had left him 100_l._, the advantage
of publishing his posthumous works, which might ultimately bring in
200_l._ more, and a promise of preferment from the king. Swift had lived
long enough upon the "chameleon's food." His energies were still running
to waste; and he suffered the misery of a weakness due, not to want of
power but want of opportunity. His sister writes to a cousin that her
brother had lost his best friend, who had induced him to give up his Irish
preferment by promising preferment in England, and had died before the
promise had been fulfilled. Swift was accused of ingratitude by Lord
Palmerston, Temple's nephew, some thirty-five years later. In reply, he
acknowledged an obligation to Temple for the recommendation to William and
the legacy of his papers; but he adds, "I hope you will not charge my
living in his family as an obligation; for I was educated to little
purpose if I retired to his house for any other motives than the benefit
of his conversation and advice, and the opportunity of pursuing my
studies. For, being born to no fortune, I was at his death as far to seek
as ever; and perhaps you will allow that I was of some use to him." Swift
seems here to assume that his motives for living with Temple are
necessarily to be estimated by the results which he obtained. But if he
expected more than he got, he does not suggest any want of goodwill.
Temple had done his best; William's neglect and Temple's death had made
goodwill fruitless. The two might cry quits; and Swift set to work, not
exactly with a sense of injury, but probably with a strong feeling that a
large portion of his life had been wasted. To Swift, indeed, misfortune
and injury seem equally to have meant resentment, whether against the
fates or some personal object.
One curious document must be noted before considering the writings which
most fully reveal the state of Swift's mind. In the year 1699 he wrote
down some resolutions, headed "when I come to be old." They are for the
most part pithy and sensible, if it can ever be sensible to make
resolutions for behaviour in a distant future. Swift resolves not to marry
a young woman, not to keep young company unless they desire it, not to
repeat stories, not to listen to knavish, tattling servants, not to be too
free of advice, not to brag of former beauty and favour with ladies, to
desire some good friends to inform him when he breaks these resolutions
and to reform accordingly; and finally, not to set up for observing all
these rules for fear he should observe none. These resolutions are not
very original in substance (few resolutions are), though they suggest some
keen observation of his elders; but one is more remarkable. "Not to be
fond of children, _or let them come near me hardly_." The words in italics
are blotted out by a later possessor of the paper, shocked doubtless at
the harshness of the sentiment. "We do not fortify ourselves with
resolutions against what we dislike," says a friendly commentator, "but
against what we feel in our weakness we have reason to believe we are
really too much inclined to." Yet it is strange that a man should regard
the purest and kindliest of feelings as a weakness to which he is too much
inclined. No man had stronger affections than Swift; no man suffered more
agony when they were wounded; but in his agony he would commit what to
most men would seem the treason of cursing the affections instead of
simply lamenting the injury, or holding the affection itself to be its own
sufficient reward. The intense personality of the man reveals itself
alternately at selfishness and as "altruism." He grappled to his heart
those whom he really loved "as with hoops of steel;" so firmly that they
became a part of himself; and that he considered himself at liberty to
regard his love of friends as he might regard a love of wine, as something
to be regretted when it was too strong for his own happiness. The
attraction was intense; but implied the absorption of the weaker nature
into his own. His friendships were rather annexations than alliances. The
strongest instance of this characteristic was in his relations to the
charming girl, who must have been in his mind when he wrote this strange,
and unconsciously prophetic, resolution.