Part 16

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.”

In the same document with these dry bequests he left to the world his aching epitaph. It was to say to any traveller who came to see it that the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral, was buried here in a place where his furious indignation could no longer lacerate his heart. It was to tell the traveller to go and imitate, if he could, this strenuous defender of manly liberty. The inscription was to be on black marble, “in large letters, deeply cut and strongly gilded,” and in the stately language of the Church and of the ancient Romans.

HIC DEPOSITUM EST CORPUS JONATHAN SWIFT S.T.P. HUJUS ECCLESIAE CATHEDRALIS DECANI UBI SAEVA INDIGNATIO ULTERIUS COR LACERARE NEQUIT ABI VIATOR ET IMITARE SI POTERIS STRENUUM PRO VIRILI LIBERTATIS VINDICEM

Bibliographical Note

Swift has here been allowed, so far as possible, to tell his own story in his own words. They are to be found in his _Correspondence_, magnificently edited by F. Elrington Ball (6 vols., 1910-1914), in his _Prose Works_, competently edited by Temple Scott (12 vols., 1897-1908), and in his _Poems_, inadequately edited by W. E. Browning (2 vols., 1910) to accompany the _Prose Works_. These sources furnish the text wherever Swift speaks in the biography, except in the letters to Vanessa which, like her letters to him, are quoted from the originals lately discovered and edited by A. Martin Freeman in _Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift_ (1921). The text has been modernized. Since so little of what Swift wrote survives in actual manuscript or in printed versions to which he gave much care, to reproduce his spelling and punctuation from first or early editions would be only to perpetuate the vagaries of his different editors and printers.

Swift’s eighteenth-century biographers, with their passion for gossip, were all superseded by Sir Walter Scott, who included in his _Works of Jonathan Swift_ (19 vols., 1814) a memoir written with curiosity and vigor, if not with exact knowledge. Scott in turn was superseded by John Forster, whose _Life of Jonathan Swift_ (1875) unfortunately was carried through only one of the three proposed volumes. The earliest, and latest, extended, documented, exhaustive biography was Sir Henry Craik’s _Life of Jonathan Swift_ (1882; 2d edition in 2 vols., 1894), which remains the best detailed account of Swift’s life. Sir Leslie Stephen’s _Swift_ (1882) is a masterly critical narrative. Compared to it the study of Swift in Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_ (1781) seems full of Johnsonian wrong-headedness, and that in Thackeray’s _English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_ (1853) full of Thackerayan whimper and sniffle. The only recent biographical studies of Swift which are not negligible are Emile Pons’s _La Jeunesse de Swift et le Conte du Tonneau_ (1925) and F. Elrington Ball’s _Swift’s Verse_ (1929), which are both excellent.

Of Swift’s various works the best edited is _A Tale of a Tub: To Which is Added The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit_, by A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (1920), followed by _Swift: Selections from his Works_ edited by Sir Henry Craik (1892-1893). As a rule the introductions and notes in Temple Scott’s _Prose Works_ are as good as any. _The Journal to Stella_ is there edited by Frederick Ryland, and _Gulliver’s Travels_ by G. R. Dennis. _Gulliver’s_ _Travels_, one of the greatest books of the world, has never been satisfactorily edited. When it has the editor it deserves he will be saved a good deal of work by C. H. Firth’s acute _Political Significance of Gulliver’s Travels_ (_Proceedings of the British Academy_, Vol. IX, 1919) and by William A. Eddy’s lubberly but learned _Gulliver’s Travels: A Critical Study_ (1923).

A bibliography of the writings of Swift is given in Vol. XII of Temple Scott’s _Prose Works_, and a bibliography of writings by and about him in Vol. IX (1912) of _The Cambridge History of English Literature_. The present biography says in the text little more about the specific works than Swift says himself. Titles and dates, however, are listed in the Index in the entry “Swift, Jonathan,” which amounts to a precise chronological survey of his life and of those writings which throw light on it.

To cite all the general histories of Swift’s age, all the biographies of his contemporaries, all the memoirs and diaries and letters and special studies and collateral sources which have contributed to this narrative would be mere ostentation. But all such sources have been scrupulously consulted during the period of almost twenty years since the book was first projected.

Most of Swift’s previous biographers have devoted much of their energy to debating the many points of gossip which have arisen about him, particularly about his malady, about his relations to Stella and Vanessa, and about his eccentricities in Ireland. His latest biographer has preferred to examine the entire evidence, to select what he believes to be the truth, to tell it, and to leave gossip where gossip belongs. He has considered it hardly fair to ask his readers not only to read his story but also to choose which one of several stories they would like to believe. His difficulties belong with the secrets of his trade.

Index

Abingdon, Earl of, 128

Acheson, Sir Arthur, 225, 226

Acheson, Lady, 225, 226

Addison, Joseph, 48-49, 84, 85, 88, 89, 92-93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 109, 123, 124, 135, 145, 200

Agher, 58, 67

Ancients and moderns, 38-40

Anne, Queen, 82, 85, 97, 98, 104, 105, 108, 114, 116, 119, 120, 130, 131, 137, 139, 188

Arbuthnot, John, 127, 132, 135, 136, 138, 144, 169, 185, 199, 200, 201, 205, 210, 211, 212, 222, 223, 251, 252, 254

Argyll, Duke of, 220

Armagh, Archbishop of. _See_ Boulter, Hugh

Arran, Earl of, 116, 132

Ashe, St. George (Bishop of Clogher), 124, 181

Bach, 39

Bacon, Lord, 226

Balliol College, 22

Balnibarbi, 191

Barber, Mary, 237

Bath, Earl of, 200, 202, 224

Bathurst, Lord (Allen Bathurst), 132, 133, 200, 203, 230

_Battle of the Books, The_, 40-41

Baucis and Philemon, 92

Beef-Steak Club, 131

_Beggar’s Opera, The_, 213, 220, 221, 222

Berkeley, Countess of, 89

Berkeley, Earl of, 50, 58, 67, 68, 69, 82, 90

Bickerstaff, Isaac (pseudonym), 89

Blefuscu, 178, 187, 188

Blenheim, Battle of, 92

Bolingbroke, Viscount, 95, 99, 101, 102, 104-105, 107, 108-110, 115-116, 118, 119, 120, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 145, 169, 181, 182, 200, 203, 205, 215, 222, 223, 227, 233, 252, 260

Bolingbroke, Viscountess, 143

Boulter, Hugh (Primate of Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh), 241

Brobdingnag, 186, 188-189

Brothers, Society of, 131-135, 200, 237

Brown, Tom, 186

Bunyan, 211

Cadenus (pseudonym), 152-167, 246

Carmarthen, Lady (daughter of Robert Harley), 124

Carteret, Lady, 176

Carteret, Lord, 173, 176, 188

Castle-Durrow, Lord, 238, 239

_Cato_, 123

Cervantes, 221

Charles I, 6

Charles II, 6, 19

Charles XII, 179

Chesterfield, Lord, 200

Chetwoode, Knightley, 180

Clogher, Bishop of. _See_ Ashe, St. George

Cobham, Lord, 203

Congreve, William, 9, 28, 48, 89, 133, 200, 203

Cope, Robert, 181

Country of Horses, 190, 193

Cowley, Abraham, 25, 26

Curll, Edmund, 252

Cyrano de Bergerac, 186

d’Ablancourt, Perrot, 186

Davenant, Henry Molins, 116

Davenant, Sir William, 6

Delaney, Patrick, 180, 237

Descartes, 38

Dingley, Rebecca, 58-59, 91, 123, 126, 129, 168, 205, 206, 207

Drapier, M. B. (pseudonym), 173-177, 227

Dromore, Bishop of (John Stearne), 181

Dryden, Sir Erasmus, 6

Dryden, John, 26, 38, 41, 48

Dublin, Archbishop of. _See_ King, William

_Dunciad, The_, 221, 222

Dunkin, William, 237

Dupplin, Viscount (son-in-law of Robert Harley), 97, 132, 133, 135

Eglinton, Earl of, 6

Evans, John (Bishop of Meath), 141

_Examiner, The_, 99, 102, 128

Faulkner, George, 237, 243

Feilding, Robert, 6

Fiddes, Richard, 116

First Fruits, 80-81, 85, 87, 94, 97, 98, 141

Flying Island, 190

Ford, Charles, 180, 181, 182, 237

Fountaine, Sir Andrew, 90, 91, 124

Gay, John, 136, 138, 145, 197, 201, 203, 204, 205, 211, 213, 220, 221, 222, 223, 233, 237, 250, 251, 252, 254

George I, 120, 142, 172, 174, 213

George II, 213, 249

Giffard, Lady, 22-23, 36, 114, 239

Glubbdubdribb, 190, 191

Godolphin, Earl of, 80, 85, 94, 95, 98, 103, 104

Grand Alliance, 103, 108

Granville, Lord (George Granville), 132, 133

Grattan, the brothers, 180

Grattan, James, 267

Grattan, John, 267

Grattan, Robert, 267

Grierson, Mrs. George, 237

_Gulliver’s Travels_, 3, 37, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186-196, 204, 211-212, 213, 221, 222, 243, 259

Gwynne, Francis, 116

Halifax, Earl of, 48, 69, 73, 74, 76, 82, 83, 84, 85, 95, 96, 200

Hanover, Elector of. _See_ George I

Harcourt, Lord (Sir Simon Harcourt), 98, 102, 130, 132, 200

Harley, Robert. _See_ Oxford, Earl of

Harrison, William, 134

Hart Hall, 27

Harvey, George, 38

Helsham, Richard, 237

Henry VIII, 187

Hertford College (Hart Hall), 27

Hill, Abigail. _See_ Masham, Lady

Hobbes, 38

Homer, 117, 138, 201

Howard, Henrietta, 200, 203

Houyhnhnms, 190, 191, 193-196, 230

Hunter, Robert, 93, 119

_Intelligencer, The_, 224, 225

Jackson, John, 267

Jervas, Charles, 122

Johnson, Bridget (mother of Stella), 23, 36, 58, 126

Johnson, Edward (father of Stella), 23