Part 2

Swift went to Temple hoping to learn the ways of the world from a man, also from Ireland, who had risen to influence and very near to power. For Temple Ireland had been but a springboard. His career had led him to more impressive quarters of Europe. Having turned to England shortly after the Restoration, he had made friends at Court, had been sent to the Continent to safeguard British interests, and had twice been ambassador at the Hague, where he had helped bring about the hopeful marriage of William of Orange to the niece of the English king. Charles II, valuing his ambassador’s astuteness and dexterity, had more than once offered to make him Secretary of State. He had each time refused, perceiving that Charles and his ministers had little use for other qualities which Temple valued in himself, and had taken to a serene retirement. Not even the accession of William and Mary, or their grateful offer of the post which he had refused at the hand of Charles, had been able to bring him back. He preferred to live at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey, remembering the large actions in which he had taken part, and being a philosopher among the gardens, in the Dutch manner, which reminded him of the country where he had had his triumphs.

Swift found Temple a man looking at the world as in a mirror. No actual affairs now concerned him so much as those of his own past, of which he was writing his memoirs. Reminiscence had not made his judgment less firm and level than it had been while it was constantly being tested by the intrigues of disingenuous, unscrupulous men. He was enlightened, responsible, benevolent. But, never having been ambitious, he had remained an amateur. “When I was young and in some idle company, it was proposed that every one should tell what their wishes should be, if they were sure to be granted; some were very pleasant, and some very extravagant; mine were health and peace and fair weather.” Such desires had allowed Temple to cherish as a virtue what included a touch of weakness and vanity. His retirement had been, in part, surrender. Disgusted by the conduct of men less virtuous than he, but also weak and vain, he had retreated to a happy vacuum where he had gone on cherishing his virtue till it now glowed with the colours of a philosophic heroism.

Swift, a conjured spirit aching for employment, was employed as Temple’s amanuensis while the master composed mellifluous essays on gardens, on health and long life, on popular discontents, on poetry, and on heroic virtue. Swift, starving for the world, might sometimes be allowed to keep pace with Temple when, leaving off his moral considerations, he walked in his gardens, along his trim canal, perhaps despising the new sciences which had lately come to the notice of gentlemen, and perhaps wondering from what herbs he could concoct more potent doses for his household and even for his hopeless, hereditary gout.

Between Swift and Temple there was enough difference to make a war, but there was no war. Neither of them entirely realized that they were wrong pupil and wrong teacher. Temple never realized it. Though he was kind enough, he was not, as he could not have been, enough concerned to see deeply into the vexed spirit forced to bend itself to his placid will. Recommending his dependent to Sir Robert Southwell in May 1690, he said of Swift only that “he has lived in my house, read to me, writ for me, and kept all accounts so far as my small occasions required. He has Latin and Greek, some French, writes a good and current hand, is very honest and diligent, and has good friends, though they have for the present lost their fortunes, in Ireland.” Any later conflicts between them Temple overlooked or forgave with calm magnanimity. At his death, after a decade of this service of talent by genius, “that great man,” as Swift precisely put it, “beside a legacy left him the care and trust and advantage of publishing his posthumous writings.” And on that same occasion the greater man wrote in his journal that with Temple had died “all that was good and amiable among men.”

Swift may have been often bored by Temple’s heroic virtue and by his amateur erudition. He may have felt bewildered when Temple “would look cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons.” But the dependent judged his patron rather by his actions than by his poses. He had gone to Temple to better fortunes which were desperately low. He had lived nearer to the world than if he had become a fellow of Trinity. He had learned everything Temple had to teach.

What fretted Swift at Moor Park was not so much the character of his patron, or even the mere fact of his own dependence, as the unsatisfying uses to which he had to put his still undetermined powers. With all his pride, he could only serve, never command. With all his acuteness, he could not name his own gifts even to himself. When, after his first brief stay with Temple, he went to Ireland with a recommendation to Southwell in the summer of 1690, he could still consider a fellowship in the college which he hated. Failing to obtain that, or the degree which he had missed, he continued in Ireland for another restless year, further broken by ill health, returned to his mother, and visited his cousin Thomas, who was now at Oxford reading for his degree at Balliol. Jonathan Swift, again at Moor Park by Christmas, may already have decided to turn from Trinity to Oxford, but it was the only decision he had reached before he settled back into his lowering dependence.

He helped his patron with other of his dilettante labours and copied the translations from Spanish poetry with which Lady Giffard, Temple’s sister, embellished the leisure which she could spare from being Temple’s chief of staff.

Between Lady Giffard and Swift there was, at least in time, a sharp hostility. If he was bored by the brother he was angered by the sister, whose record of long devotion was not enough to reconcile him to her present influence in the household. She, virtual chatelaine by reason of Lady Temple’s illness, resented the secretary’s unconcern. Lady Temple--“Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great”--Swift apparently liked. There was little to bring them into opposition. Nor was there manifest opposition between him and the other members of the family or the numerous dependents who had drifted to this patriarchal shelter. Among them all, however, he found no equal, no congenial friend. Urged by his pride to passions if not to frenzies, he could pour himself out neither in activity nor in confidences. Whatever refuge he had from his idleness and his secrecy was in the society of a child.

The child was Esther Johnson, whom Swift eventually called Stella. Her father, younger son of a good family in Nottinghamshire, had probably been a dependent of Temple who served as steward. But by 1689 he was dead, and his widow was companion to Lady Giffard. Bridget Johnson and her daughter, or daughters, lived at the edge of the Park in a cottage where Swift, after he had made friends there, could sometimes forget his subordination. Stella was eight years old when the young man, then twenty-two, arrived from Leicester. “Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection,” he said. “I ... had some share in her education, by directing what books she should read, and perpetually instructing her in the principles of honour and virtue.” He taught her to write, taught her so well that her handwriting could later be mistaken for his own. He taught himself to depend upon comforts which only she could give him during those restive years: admiration without analysis, affection without exigence, a child’s obedience, a child’s worship.

2

But Stella was for the present at most only an episode, a casual breathing-spell between battles. Not that Swift was overworked by Temple. He had too much time on his hands. “There is something in me which must be employed,” he wrote in February of this second winter at Moor Park, “and when I am alone turns all, for want of practice, into speculation and thought; insomuch that in these seven weeks I have been here, I have writ, and burnt and writ again, upon almost all manner of subjects, more perhaps than any man in England.” What he wrote could hardly have been history. He had enough of that with Temple. It was not philosophy. Writing to his cousin Thomas in May he said he was getting up his Greek and Latin for the Oxford degree, “but to enter upon the causes of philosophy is what I protest I will rather die in a ditch than go about.” It was probably poetry. Some of his poetry has survived.

That his poetry was bad means less than that it was Pindaric. For that Temple shares the blame. He advised Swift to write like Cowley, and Swift for a year or so fiercely beat imagined wings to raise himself to an alien elevation. Flight was not in him.

“It makes me mad,” he wrote to his cousin, “to hear you talk of making ... next morning ... what I could not do under two or three days, nor does it enter into my head to make anything of a sudden but what I find to be exceeding silly stuff except by great chance. I esteem the time of studying poetry to be two hours in the morning, and that only when the humour sits, which I esteem for the flower of the whole day, and truly I make bold to employ them that way, and yet I seldom write above two stanzas in a week--I mean such as are to any Pindaric ode--and yet I have known myself in so good a humour as to make two in a day, but it may be no more in a week after, and when all is done I alter them a hundred times, and yet I do not believe myself to be a laborious dry writer, because if the fit comes not immediately I never heed it, but think of something else.”

About this bad poetry he wrote bad prose, but the straggling clauses make clear what he did not know he said. Lacking the nature for poetry, he lacked the full desire; lacking the full desire, he lacked both the ease with which some true poets write and the passion which keeps the others from caring whether they write with ease or not. Swift was writing because he was raging. He wanted to be heard if he could not be felt. Poetry was a kind of power.

Being Swift, he could not take his struggles lightly. “I am over-fond of my own writings,” he confided. “I would not have the world think so, for a million, but it is so, and I find when I write what pleases me I am Cowley to myself and can read it a hundred times over. I know it is a desperate weakness, and has nothing to defend it but its secrecy, and I know farther that I am wholly in the wrong, but have the same pretence the baboon had to praise her children.” The image is pleasant but incomplete. Though he might then set the baboon’s value on his strophes, and might all his life hate his cousin John Dryden for telling him the truth about them, Swift within another year or so had come to hate them, with that hate which was twin to his love. Or rather, he had come to hate whatever it was that had fascinated and then disappointed him.

When he found his hope falling off with his delusion, Swift turned furious and accusatory. In the last of his early poems he angrily renounced his Muse:

“_Malignant Goddess! bane to my repose, Thou universal cause of all my woes; Say whence it comes that thou art grown of late A poor amusement of my scorn and hate.... 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.... Madness like this no fancy ever seized, Still to be cheated, never to be pleased. ... From this hour I here renounce thy visionary power; And since thy essence on my breath depends, Thus with a breath the whole delusion ends._”

Poetry had failed him. As soon as he had learned to be honest he said a bitter farewell. Then he went on to prose.

The second stay with Temple was not continually midnight. In July 1692, after a brief residence at Oxford, Swift received from Hart Hall, now Hertford College, the degree of master of arts. “I never was more satisfied,” he wrote his uncle, “than in the behaviour of the University of Oxford to me. I had all the civilities I could wish for, and so many favours that I am ashamed to have been more obliged in a few weeks to strangers than ever I was in seven years to Dublin College.” At Moor Park, too, his rank became more gratifying. Temple not only treated his secretary with confidence at home, among his memoirs and his gardens, but even trusted him abroad.

Once in the spring of 1693, when King William had sent the Earl of Portland to consult Temple about a proposed bill for triennial parliaments, Temple, who did not feel sure the Earl would carry his full message, sent Swift after him to Kensington. There the secretary talked with both Portland and the King. “But,” as Swift himself related it, “all in vain. For the King by ill advisers was prevailed upon to refuse passing the bill. This was the first time that Mr. Swift had ever any converse with courts, and he told his friends it was the first incident that helped to cure him of vanity.” But not, plainly, of pride, which had made him expect that his country counsel would naturally be taken.

These successes, however, were too small to quiet his fierce restlessness, which with the decline of his Pindaric hopes began to clarify itself into satiric hatred. Just before he said his farewell to poetry he wrote some complimentary verses to Congreve, who had risen to a sudden fame in London with his first comedy. The compliments were confused. The lines in which Swift spoke of his own slow fortunes and his savage plans were as unmistakable as lightning. His “old unvanquish’d pride,” he wrote, looked with scorn on half mankind, which must beware of impending maledictions. He wondered that the world could be so clumsy in the face of

“_My hate, whose lash just Heaven has long decreed Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed._”

Did the world not know that his wrath was its ruin?

This was language above the capacity of a disappointed minor poet. It was fury, not peevishness, that lay behind Swift’s threat. His fury, so long wasted in aimless blows at phantoms, had become confident. Such confidence, in a man who was not a fool, was a sign of dangerous powers gathering to attack. They might be in their present mood because they had so long been checked in their impulses towards action. They may have sullenly decided upon words because they saw no opportunity for deeds. But all their hatred was not the consequence of frustration. Hatred was native to Swift, as love was to St. Francis. If Swift has been more frequently misunderstood than St. Francis, it is because men are allowed to love without giving reasons for it, but not to hate.

The growth of Swift’s purpose was of course not obvious to him, and it was not regular. No doubt he was often at peace in his occupations at Moor Park or in his relaxed intervals with Stella. His anger rose or fell with contrary or prosperous days. He could, like many men, be busy whether he was happy or unhappy. But by nature he was always restless. His energy drove him to violent exercise, particularly to walking, which he thought his health required. He liked to walk from Farnham to London, nearly forty miles away, and even to Leicester, stopping at dubious inns and amusing himself with the speech and customs of the people. Nor would his restlessness permit him to regard his dependence, outwardly comfortable, as more than a starting-point. His temper demanded independence.

With the help of his uncles he might possibly have become a lawyer. With the help of the King it is said that he might have become a captain of dragoons. With the help of Temple he might have become a clerk in the Rolls office at Dublin, and he was indeed offered such a post. But none of these careers suited his tastes or promised what he was looking for. Instead, he decided to take orders and enter the Church. When Temple had failed to obtain for him, through the favour of the King, a prebend of Westminster or Canterbury, Swift chose to take his own steps.

He went to Ireland in May 1694, leaving Temple angry. But as soon as Swift humbly applied, in October of that year, for a certificate of “morals and learning” which would satisfy the Irish bishops that he had properly conducted himself since he left Trinity, Temple, relenting, furnished it. Swift was ordained deacon the same month and priest in the following January. Almost immediately he was appointed to the prebend of Kilroot, a rural parish near Belfast.

Though Swift had had scruples about entering the Church solely as a livelihood, there was no mystery in his position. “I look upon myself, in the capacity of clergyman,” he said, “to be one appointed by Providence for defending a post assigned to me, and for gaining over as many enemies as I can. Although I think my cause is just, yet one great motive is my submitting to the pleasure of Providence, and to the laws of my country.” As to belief: “To say a man is bound to believe is neither truth nor sense”; “I am in all opinions to believe according to my own impartial reason; which I am bound to inform and improve, as far as my capacity and opportunities will permit.” Yet Swift had no urge towards any heresy. “Violent zeal for truth,” he thought, “hath an hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride.” Order was more important than zeal. “Liberty of conscience, properly speaking, is no more than the liberty of possessing our own thoughts and opinions, which every man enjoys without fear of the magistrate: but how far he shall publicly act in pursuance of those opinions is to be regulated by the laws of the country.” “Every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private, without perplexing his neighbour or disturbing the public.” So a soldier might reason, or a magistrate, or a prime minister. Swift was not a philosopher full of ideas, not a prospector for truths still to be found. Although, in spite of this rational attitude towards his calling, he later became jealously devoted to the Church, that was because they were his calling and his Church.

If he had any illusions as to what it might mean to rule in a parish, he lost them. Kilroot was dreary and remote, and Swift was no more contented in his uncomfortable independence than he was rich on his hundred pounds a year. One such year was as much as he could stand. He surrendered his prebend to a fellow-clergyman whom he had known at Oxford, and was back again at Moor Park two years after he had left it.

How idle and frustrate he had been appears from a letter he wrote just before his willing departure. The letter was to Jane Waring of Belfast, a cousin to two men who had been students at Trinity when Swift was there. With her, by Swift poetically called Varina, he had carried on another of his flirtations. He had even been involved to the point of a proposal. Cured of poetry, he had not yet been cured of philandering. He could still use, in writing to her, a language which comes strangely from a pen assigned to the cause of wrath.

“Impatience,” he began, speaking of himself, “is the most inseparable quality of a lover,” and he explained, what none knew better than he, that “every one who hunts after pleasure or fame or fortune is still restless and uneasy till he has hunted down his game; and all this is not only very natural but something reasonable too, for a violent desire is little better than a distemper, and therefore men are not to blame in looking after a cure.”

When he began to speak of Varina he once more flapped almost Pindaric wings. “That dearest object upon which all my prospect of happiness entirely depends is in perpetual danger to be removed for ever from my sight. Varina’s life is daily wasting ... yet some power that repines at human felicity has that influence to hold her continually doating on her cruelty, and me upon the cause of it.... Why was I so foolish to put my hopes and fears into the power or management of another?” Having, however, subdued his independence to his longing for her, he was eager to forgo all other prospects. For her he would stay in Ireland, even in Kilroot. “But listen to what I here solemnly protest, by all that can be witness to an oath, that if I leave this kingdom before you are mine, I will endure the utmost indignities of fortune rather than ever return again, though the King would send me back his deputy.”

In the midst of his passion Swift still seemed to be counting on a refusal, not, possibly, without a bearable sense of safety no matter how he might forecast his despair. “It was your pity opened the first way to my misfortune; and now your love is finishing my ruin. And is it so then? In one fortnight I must take eternal farewell of Varina, and I wonder will she weep at parting a little to justify her poor pretences of affection to me?” The certainty of this eternal farewell made Swift free to bring up his reproaches. “The only felicity permitted to human life we clog with tedious circumstances and barbarous formality. By Heaven, Varina, you are more experienced, and have less virgin innocence than I. Would not your conduct make one think you were hugely skilled in all the little politic methods of intrigue?”

Swift himself had been, he said, completely without craft, as without limits. Such a passion as his had “a property peculiar to itself, to be most commendable in its extremes.” It was no more capable than piety of any blameworthy excess. Now he would withhold from her the full reality of his anguish. “O Varina, how imagination leads me beyond myself and all my sorrows! It is sunk, and a thousand graves lie open! No, Madam, I will give you no more of my unhappy temper, though I derive it all from you.... Only remember, that if you still refuse to be mine, you will quickly lose, for ever lose, him that is resolved to die as he has lived, all yours.”

Protest as he might, Swift was in this letter surely as crafty as he was mawkish. He contrived to put Varina in the wrong so that she might seem to blame for the end of their provincial interlude. He had been playing at love because he had had nothing to work at. Now that he had something better to do, no doubt he meant to do it. But he preferred to take his leave with his broken heart in his hand. He could at once pay a generous tribute to the lady’s charms and call attention to his own sad, proud, faithful carriage at the moment of defeat. His farewell, however, was not that of a lover who would grieve long. And Swift, soon back with Temple, quickly found exercise for his powers in concerns much nearer his heart than any possible Varina.

3

There was now little in his situation at Moor Park to fret his pride. He knew that if at any time his post became tedious or humiliating he could again turn for independence, at least, to the Church. He was a clergyman on leave, as he might have been a soldier temporarily out of active service. He was a man of learning, already entered upon a profession, who had consented to be of use to Temple in tasks which interested them both. Lady Temple had died. Temple, lonely, infirm, depended probably as much upon Swift’s youth and strength as Swift upon Temple’s wealth and influence.