Part 15

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._”

Swift went on to tell whoever in spite of his warning was bound to be a 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.

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.