Part 3

Moreover, Stella, fifteen when Swift returned from Kilroot, was an old comfort and a new delight. “She was sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen; but then grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London”--and here Swift, writing on the night of Stella’s death, added his touch of ice--“only a little too fat.” But at fifteen she could hardly yet have outgrown her design, or have come to stir in him the affection which he later felt. To her, or to her mother in the knowledge that it would reach Stella’s eyes, he wrote cheerfully during one of their visits to London with Temple and Lady Giffard: “I desire your absence heartily, for now I live in great state, and the cook comes in to know what I please to have for dinner. I ask very gravely what is in the house, and accordingly give orders for a dish of pigeons.... You shall have no more ale unless you send us a letter. Here is a great bundle and a letter for you; both came together from London. We all keep home like so many cats.”

That Swift at thirty was at last learning to be easy in his letters is a sign, possibly that he was happier, certainly that he was busier. “I myself was never miserable while my thoughts were in a ferment, for I imagine a dead calm is the troublesomest part of our voyage through the world.” His calling chosen, Swift could read and write without the sense, like eating without hunger, that beyond his pleasure lay no purpose. Reading, he now knew better what to look for. Writing, he now knew better what to aim at.

For if reading to Swift was experience, writing was action. He later declared to Pope that “all my endeavours from a boy to distinguish myself were only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts: whether right or wrong it is no great matter; and so the reputation of wit or great learning does the office of a blue ribbon or of a coach and six horses.” He wrote to gain influence and to exert it. For literary reputation he cared almost as little as some gentlemen of letters say they care. He never took money for his writings except what “Mr. Pope’s prudent management” got him for _Gulliver_. Swift might be fated by his gifts to captivate men’s tastes and entertain their imaginations, but he wanted to master their wills and direct their conduct.

As a preacher he set himself to tell his congregations so clearly what their duty was that they could have no doubt and no excuse. As a journalist he used all his skill to move public opinion to political action. And by his satires he intended to clear the paths of mankind of the affectations, follies, and vices which tangled what he thought the straight course of virtue and order. For Swift the words he used were as bayonets to a soldier, verdicts to a magistrate, laws to a minister. When at thirty he turned to words in his campaign against fortune, he meant them to be more than words.

The character of his first satires was determined by his circumstances. Living a little out of the world, in Temple’s walled, heroic realm, he had come to despise the buzzing wits and upstart scientists who, he thought, infested the moral and intellectual life of the times. Though Dryden was one of the wits and Newton one of the scientists, Swift did not bother to distinguish among them. His hatred was no more disposed to scrupulous justice than another man’s love.

As Swift’s cause was partly unjust, so was his ground for this attack partly accidental. Temple, stalking in virtue, had taken sides in the controversy, then disturbing France, over the relative merits of the ancients and the moderns. He had pronounced like a gentleman for the ancients. “I know of no new philosophers,” Temple said, “that have made entries upon that noble stage for fifteen hundred years past, unless Descartes and Hobbes should pretend to it.... There is nothing new in astronomy to vie with the ancients, unless it be the Copernican system; nor in physic, unless Harvey’s circulation of the blood.... ’Tis agreed by the learned that the science of music so admired by the ancients is wholly lost in the world.... So as those two divine excellencies of music and poetry are grown, in a manner, but the one fiddling and the other rhyming.... What traces have we left of that admirable science or skill in architecture, by which such stupendous fabrics have been raised of old ... that they hardly fall within our imagination?... The arts of painting and statuary began to revive with learning in Europe, and made a great but short flight; so as, for these last hundred years, we have not had one master, in either of them, who deserved a rank with those that flourished in that short period.”

Temple could not know that Bach was then alive. Having refused the embassy to Spain, he had missed a possible chance to hear about Velasquez. But he might, except for his rank and preoccupations, have met Rembrandt in Holland or Molière in France or Milton in England. He had not. He could with a peaceful conscience, plausibly, courteously, and only now and then ironically, dismiss the moderns.

Perhaps the chief fault of modern learning, he concluded, was that so many of the learned were not quite men of the world. “The shallow, the superficial, and the sufficient among scholars” had attracted ridicule, “and very justly, by pretending to more than they had, or to more esteem than what they had could deserve, by broaching it in all places, at all times, upon all occasions, and by living so much among themselves, or in their closets and cells, as to make them unfit for all other business and ridiculous in all other conversations.” From this it had come about that true learning was confused with pedantry and that both suffered from the present mode of ridicule. “’Tis the itch of our age and climate, and has overrun both the Court and the stage; enters a House of Lords and Commons as boldly as a coffee house, debates of Council as well as private conversation; and I have known in my life more than one or two ministers of state that would rather have said a witty thing than done a wise one; and made the company laugh rather than the kingdom rejoice.”

This was Temple’s attitude, but so was it Swift’s. Though the _Battle of the Books_ and the _Tale of a Tub_ may have been planned at Kilroot and subsequently revised in London, they were the fruits, however unexpected, of that suave garden at Moor Park. Swift took the superiority of the ancients for granted, with nothing but ridicule for any modern who doubted it. The contemporary world of learning he assumed to be made up almost altogether of mean, starved, envious, strident, stingless fools and fops, ignorant and arrogant, who swarmed about their betters with a fly’s equal appetite for dung or honey.

Where Swift differed from Temple was where genius differs from talent, not in mere attitude but in art and passion. Temple had been content to survey the world in a smooth, stately exposition. Swift brought his arguments to England, and put them into stories which, in spite of their humorous allegory, slashed his victims with all the edges of realism. His ancients and moderns were actual warriors, brawling “on Friday last” in the King’s library. His criticism was comedy.

“Virgil appeared in shining armour completely fitted to his body. He was mounted on a dapple-grey steed, the slowness of whose pace was an effect of the highest mettle and vigour. He cast his eye on the adverse wing, with a desire to find an object worthy of his valour, when, behold, upon a sorrel gelding of a monstrous size, appeared a foe issuing from among the thickest of the enemy’s squadrons; but his speed was less than his noise; for his horse, old and lean, spent the dregs of his strength in a high trot which, though it made slow advances, yet caused a loud clashing of his armour, terrible to hear. The two cavaliers had now approached within the throw of a lance, when the stranger desired a parley, and, lifting up the vizard of his helmet, a face hardly appeared from within, which, after a pause, was known for that of the renowned Dryden. The brave Ancient suddenly started, as one possessed with surprise and disappointment together; for the helmet was nine times too large for the head, which appeared situate far in the hinder part, even like the lady in a lobster, or like a mouse under a canopy of state, or like a shrivelled beau from within the penthouse of a modern periwig; and the voice was suited to the visage, sounding weak and remote.”

Nor did the genius of Swift surpass the talent of Temple only by the reach of drama over debate. Temple, speaking of the wits, had said: “But the last maim given to learning has been by the scorn of pedantry, which the shallow, the superficial, and the sufficient among scholars first drew to themselves, and very justly” ... and then he had gone on to a mild simile of an infection in a town from which everybody stayed away. Swift, starting at the same point, with the compliment of imitation, made Temple look like the moon in the same sky with the sun: “But the greatest maim given to that general reception which the writings of our society have formerly received (next to the transitory state of all sublunary things) has been a superficial vein among many readers of the present age, who will by no means be persuaded to inspect beyond the surface and the rind of things; whereas, wisdom is a fox, who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out. It is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the coarser coat; and whereof, to a judicious palate, the maggots are the best. It is a sack-posset, wherein the deeper you go you will find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider because it is attended with an egg. But then lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth and pay you with nothing but a worm.”

Temple, reflective over “the vein of ridiculing all that is serious and good, all honour and virtue, as well as learning and piety,” had written a polite essay. Swift actively declared a war. His satires were like a tub thrown by seamen to a whale to keep it off the ship. Let the yelping wits and empty scholars butt and tumble the satires instead of harming the commonwealth.

The _Battle of the Books_ was a bagatelle, humorously secret about the outcome of the skirmish. So, too, the _Tale of a Tub_ did not trouble to complete the story of Peter and Martin and Jack, the three brothers who stood for the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the Dissenting churches. Swift still lacked, or was too unconcerned to use, the art which insists upon thorough and finished structure. Broken meats, he might have said, were fit enough for dogs. The tale itself, satirizing the abuses of religion, made up no more than a third of the whole book. The digressions, on the abuses of learning, were the larger and more varied part. Swift had been a scholar longer than he had been a clergyman.

It was his duty to defend his Church by cutting down its enemies. He was ruthless with the quibbles of theology, fanaticism, superstition, priestly greed and imposture. But he felt a more seasoned malice when he turned aside to prune and lop among the charlatans of wit whom he regarded as his own enemies. The strutting poets, the confident blind critics, the mercenary adulators and detractors, the treatise-mongers, the multipliers of dedications and prefaces and compendiums and commentaries and annotations and indexes, the proudly obscure writers: all these he ridiculed by the contemptuous device of praising them. Yet they were for him, at most, annoying creatures that he studied briefly before he trod on them. They had roused only his irritation. His hate, which after years of brooding had finally found the language natural to it, was for human life at large.

Temple had said, with a melancholy cadence: “When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and best, but like a froward child that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.”

Swift saw mankind with a colder eye. “If we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find that all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. And, first, with relation to the mind or understanding, ’tis manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can build nobler scenes and produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or nature will be at expense to furnish.... Again, if we take this definition of happiness and examine it with reference to the senses, it will be acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How fading and insipid do all objects accost us that are not conveyed in the vehicle of delusion! How shrunk is everything as it appears in the glass of nature! So that if it were not for the assistance of artificial mediums, false lights, refracted angles, varnish, and tinsel, there would be a mighty level in the felicity and enjoyments of mortal men.” Credulity, he argued, is better than curiosity, and it is better to accept the surfaces of life with the senses than to inquire deeper with the reason. “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.... He that can, with Epicurus, content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superficies of things; such a man, truly wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.”

To this judgment Swift had arrived at thirty in the shadow of Temple at Moor Park. The neat aim and witty sting of his sentences had less to do with his effects than the mind and passion which showed through his clear, hard words. What he said he meant, not partly but wholly; not with the momentary earnestness of a gesture but with the deep sincerity of a belief rooted in his constitution by his nature and his experience.

If ever Temple noticed the tiger in his garden he must have wondered. He might have asked whether it would not be wiser for Swift to smile at the childish world, and humour it till it slept. And Swift might have answered that it was beyond a tiger to look like a lamb with its soft wool, or sound like a lamb with its timid bleat, or skip like a lamb with its happy legs. Those were the lamb’s gifts. If the lamb was able to lead a cheerful life in a world of butchers, then it had the gift of being well deceived. But a tiger’s gifts were stripes and roars and claws angrier than swords. They did not carry with them the other gift of being deceived by butchers. The lamb could be caged, and would grow tame; it could be starved, and would die pitifully. But if the tiger were caged or starved it would strike back with all its deadly sinews. To ask a tiger to be serene in its trap and peaceful towards its captors was simply to ask it to be a lamb. It must be a tiger still.

The dry years of Swift’s dependence upon Temple came to an end with Temple’s death in January 1699. The satires had not yet been published, and Swift left Farnham for London with none of the reputation which they were to bring him. At Farnham, or soon in London, he wrote out a set of resolutions to warn him when he should be old, as he had lately seen his patron. Most of the resolutions were civil enough. He would not, he resolved, be severe with young people or force his company on them, as he would force on no one his advice or anecdotes. He would not be peevish, morose, suspicious, covetous, untidy, garrulous, boastful, positive, opinionative, or open to gossip or flattery. He would not be scornful of current ways or wits or fashions or men. He would not marry a young woman. In all these he might have been any young man taking prudent notes.

But in one of the resolutions he suddenly became Swift. “Not to be fond of children, or let them come near me hardly.” Stella had been a child. Had she, coming near him as a child, grown to be what made him feel that other children might also trouble him? Or was his resolution only a symptom of his general misanthropy, now so wary that it would not let mankind approach, even in its least hostile form, for fear of a weakening influence on the integrity of his hate? At least he had learned, however he loved the one, to hate the many. His whole history lay in the seed of that antithesis.

III

VICAR AND WIT

1

Joseph Addison, that year setting out to fit himself for service to England by travelling on the Continent, could have told Swift, if he had known him, how to rise in their world. Addison had lived on at Oxford into a fellowship. He had paid court to Dryden, and by Dryden had been recommended to Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and by Tonson to Congreve, and by Congreve to Charles Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by Montague to Somers, the Lord Chancellor, and by Somers to the King. At the University ready to take orders, the expectant parson had yielded to the claims of Montague upon those accomplishments and virtues which, Montague told the head of Addison’s college, were needed to offset the current depravity and corruption.

Dexterous in Latin and English verse, Addison was even more dexterous in his virtues. Though vain enough, he was not proud. He demanded little besides a reasonable prosperity and comfortable homage. He felt no anger because men were slow in recognizing merits which he had not yet shown. He did not too much mind playing at success as it was then played. He saw little repugnant in the rules and admired the winners. It had never struck him that the world was ruled by knaves; it had never struck him that only fools could be happy. Having taken what he found for what it was usually said to be, he was shortly to begin his travels with the approval, and at the expense, of his country.

Swift, with more genius than Addison, had less talent for success. In 1697 he had, presumably on the advice of Temple, put his hopes on the Earl of Sunderland, already tottering though still Lord Chamberlain. “My Lord Sunderland fell and I with him,” Swift wrote a few weeks later. “Since that there have been other courses, which if they succeed I shall be proud to own the methods, or if otherwise, very much ashamed.” All these schemes, whatever they were, had failed. With Temple dead, Swift had to trust to the Earl of Romney to urge upon the King the preferment which Temple had promised to obtain for his secretary. Romney, a friend to William in Holland before the Revolution, and supposed to have been “the great wheel on which the Revolution rolled,” turned out to have, Swift said, “not a wheel to turn a mouse.” “After long attendance in vain,” which was what Swift called a fruitless four or five months, he again went back to Ireland, in June 1699, chaplain and temporary secretary to the Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices.

Dublin was as disappointing as London. Berkeley refused to make Swift permanent secretary on the ground that he was a clergyman, and soon afterwards further refused to appoint him dean of Derry on the ground that he was too young. The man who had found Kilroot unendurable was in February 1700 assigned to another rustic living, at Laracor, seventeen miles from Dublin. Nor did it console him that he was made a prebendary of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and a doctor of divinity of Dublin University in February 1701. With all his pride and all his powers, he had been sent to what he thought a shabby garrison on an unimportant frontier of the Church.

His circumstances seemed now more interesting to Varina, still unmarried at Belfast. She wrote him a letter. He answered it in a language as cold as any that ever ended what had begun as a flirtation.

“You would know what gave my temper that sudden turn,” he said, “as to alter the style of my letters since I last came over. If there has been that alteration you observe, I have told you the cause abundance of times. I had used a thousand endeavours and arguments to get you from the company and place you are in; both on account of your health and humour, which I thought were like to suffer very much in such air and before such examples. All I had in answer from you was nothing but a great deal of arguing, and sometimes in a style so imperious as I thought might have been spared, when I reflected how much you had been in the wrong. The other thing you would know is whether this change of style be owing to the thoughts of a new mistress. I declare, upon the word of a Christian and a gentleman, it is not; neither had I ever thoughts of being married to any other person but yourself.” The cause of his change, he explained, was her indifference to his wishes and his opinions, particularly about her family. “I think ... that no young woman in the world of the same income would dwindle away her health and life in such a sink and among such family conversation. Neither have all your letters been once able to persuade me that you have the least value for me, because you so little regarded what I so often said upon that matter.... I think I have more cause to resent your desires of me in that case than you have to be angry at my refusals”--his refusals, it appears, to endure the Warings. “If you like such company and conduct, much good do you with them! My education has been otherwise.”

At the same time, he would tell her what he had told his uncle Adam in response to an inquiry which Swift implied had come circuitously from Varina: “that if your health and my fortune were as they ought, I would prefer you above all your sex; but that, in the present condition of both, I thought it was against your opinion, and would certainly make you unhappy; that, had you any other offers which your friends or yourself thought more to your advantage, I should think I were very unjust to be an obstacle in your way.” Since, however, her letter had showed her satisfied with his fortune, nothing now stood in the way of their felicity but her health. Nothing, that is, except his terms, which he reduced to questions.