Jonathan Swift.
But Dean Swift[108] does not lie in Westminster Abbey. We must go to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, to find his tomb, and that bust of him which looks out upon the main aisle of the old church.
He was born in Dublin, at a house that might have been seen only a few years ago, in Hoey’s Court. His father, however, was English, dying before Swift was born; his mother, too, was English, and so poor that it was only through the charity of an uncle the lad came to have schooling and a place at Trinity College—the charity being so doled out that Swift groaned under it; and groaned under the memory of it all his life. He took his degree there, under difficulties; squabbling with the teachers of logic and metaphysics, and turning his back upon them and upon what they taught.
After some brief stay with his mother in Leicestershire, he goes, at her instance, and in recognition of certain remote kinship with the family of Sir William Temple, to seek that diplomat’s patronage. He was received charitably—to be cordial was not Temple’s manner—at the beautiful home of Sheen;[109] and thereafter, on Temple’s change of residence, was for many years an inmate of the house at Moor Park. There he eats the bread of dependence—sulkily at times, and grudgingly always. Another protégée of the house was a sparkling-eyed little girl, Hester Johnson—she scarce ten when he was twenty-three—and who, doubtless, looked admiringly upon the keen, growling, masculine graduate of Dublin, who taught her to write.
Swift becomes secretary to Sir William; through his influence secures a degree at Oxford (1692); pushes forward his studies, with the Moor Park library at his hand; takes his own measure—we may be sure—of the stately, fine diplomat; measures King William too—who, odd times, visits Temple at his country home, telling him how to cut his asparagus—measures him admiringly, yet scornfully; as hard-working, subtle-thoughted, ambitious, dependent students are apt to measure those whose consequence is inherited and factitious.
Then, with the bread of this Temple charity irking his lusty manhood, he swears (he is overfond of swearing) that he will do for himself. So he tempestuously quits Moor Park and goes back to Ireland, where he takes orders, and has a little parish with a stipend of £100 a year. It is in a dismal country—looking east on the turbid Irish Sea, and west on bog-lands—no friends, no scholars, no poets, no diplomats, no Moor-Park gardens. Tired of this waste, and with new and better proposals from Temple—who misses his labors—Swift throws up his curacy (or whatever it may be) and turns again toward England.
There is record of a certain early flurry of feeling at date of this departure from his first Irish parish—a tender, yet incisive, and tumultuous letter to one “Varina,”[110] for whom he promises to “forego all;” Varina, it would seem, discounted his imperious rapture, without wishing to cut off ulterior hopes. But ulteriors were never in the lexicon of Swift; and he broke away for his old cover at Moor Park. Sir William welcomes, almost with warmth, the returned secretary, who resumes old studies and duties, putting a fiercer appetite to his work, and a greater genius. Miss Hester is there to be guided, too; she sixteen, and he fairly turned among the thirties; she of an age to love moonlight in the Moor Park gardens, and he of an age—when do we have any other?—to love tender worship.
But The Battle of the Books[111] and The Tale of a Tub, are even then seething and sweltering in his thought. They are wonderful products both; young people cannot warm to them as they do to the men of Liliput and of Brobdingnag; but there are old folk who love yet, in odd hours, to get their faculties stirred by contact with the flashing wit and tremendous satire of the books named.
The Battle—rather a pamphlet than a book—deals with the antagonism, then noisy, between advocates of ancient and modern learning, to which Bentley, Wotton, and Temple were parties. Swift strikes off heads all round the arena, but inclines to the side of his patron, Temple; and in a wonderful figure, of wonderful pertinence, and with witty appointments, he likens the moderns to noisome spiders, spinning out of their own entrails the viscous “mathematical” net-work, which catches the vermin on which they feed; and contrasting these with the bees (ancients), who seek natural and purer sources of nutriment—storing “wax and honey,” which are the sources of the “light and sweetness of life.” There are horribly coarse streaks in this satire, as there are in The Tale of a Tub; but the wit is effulgent and trenchant.
In this latter book there is war on all pedantries again; but mostly on shams in ecclesiastic teachings and habitudes; Swift finding (as so many of us do) all the shams, in practices which are not his own. It is a mad, strange, often foul-mouthed book, with thrusts in it that go to the very marrow of all monstrous practices in all ecclesiasticisms; showing a love for what is honest and of good report, perhaps; but showing stronger love for thwacking the skulls of all sinners in high places; and the higher the place the harder is the thwack.
Not long after these things were a-brewing, Sir William Temple died (1699), bequeathing his papers to his secretary. Swift looked for more. So many wasted years! Want of money always irked him. But he goes to London to see after the publication of Temple’s papers. He has an interview with King William—then in his last days—to whom Temple had commended him, but no good comes of that. He does, however, get place as chaplain for Lord Berkeley; goes to Ireland with him; reads good books to Lady Berkeley—among them the Occasional Reflections of the Hon. Robert Boyle, of whose long sentences I gave a taste in an earlier chapter.
Some of these Boyle meditations were on the drollest of topics—as, for instance, “Upon the Sight of a Windmill Standing Still,” and again, “Upon the Paring of a rare Summer Apple.”
Swift had no great appetite for such “parings;” but Lady Berkeley being insatiate, he slips a meditation of his own, in manuscript, between the leaves of the great folio of the Hon. Mr. Boyle; and opening to the very place begins reading, for her edification, “Meditations on a Broomstick.” “Dear me!” says her ladyship, “what a strange subject! But there is no knowing what useful instructions this wonderful man may draw from topics the most trivial. Pray, read on, Mr. Swift.”
And he did. He was not a man given to smiles when a joke was smouldering; and he went through his meditation with as much unction as if the Hon. Robert had written it. The good lady kept her eyes reverently turned up, and never smacked the joke until it came out in full family conclave.
I have told this old story (which, like most good stories, some critics count apocryphal) because it is so like Swift; he had such keen sense of the ridiculous, that he ran like a hound in quest of it—having not only a hound’s scent but a hound’s teeth.
At Laracor, the little Irish parish which he came by shortly after, he had a glebe and a horse, and became in a way domesticated there, so far as such a man could be domesticated anywhere. He duplicated, after a fashion, some features of the Moor-Park gardens; he wrote sermons there which are surprisingly good.
One wonders, as he comes from toiling through the sweat and muck and irreverent satire of The Tale of a Tub, what could have possessed the man to write so piously. He was used to open his sermons with a little prayer that was devout enough and all-embracing enough for the prayer-book. Then there is a letter of his to a young clergyman, giving advice about the make-up of his sermons, which would serve for an excellent week-day discourse at Marquand Chapel.
Indeed he has somewhat to say against the use of “hard words—called by the better sort of vulgar, fine language”—that is worth repeating:
“I will appeal to any man of letters whether at least nineteen or twenty of these perplexing words might not be changed into easy ones, such as naturally first occur to ordinary men; … the fault is nine times in ten owing to affectation, and not want of understanding. When a man’s thoughts are clear, the properest words will generally offer themselves first, and his own judgment will direct him in what order to place them, so as they may be best understood. In short, that simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive to any great perfection, is nowhere more eminently useful than in this.”
But let us not suppose from all this that Swift has settled down tamely, and month by month, into the jog-trot duties of a small Irish vicar; no, no! there is no quiet element in his nature. He has gone back and forth from Dublin to London—sometimes on a Berkeley errand—sometimes on his own. He has met Congreve, an old school-fellow, and Prior and Gay; he has found the way to Will’s Coffee-house and to Button’s;[112] has some day seen Dryden—just tottering to the grave; has certainly dined with Addison, and finished a bottle with Steele. They call him the mad parson at Button’s; they have seen The Tale of a Tub; his epigrams are floating from mouth to mouth; his irony cuts like a tiger’s claw; he feels the power of his genius tingling to his fingertips—he, a poor Irish parson! why, the whole atmosphere around him, whether at London or at Dublin, is charged and surcharged with Satan’s own lightning of worldly promises.
And Hester Johnson, and Moor Park? Well, she has not forgotten him; ah! no; and he has by no means forgotten her. For she, with a good womanly friend, Mrs. Dingley, has gone to live in Ireland; Swift thinks they can live more economically there. These two ladies set up their homestead near to Swift’s vicarage; he goes to see them; they come to see him. He is thirty-three, and past; and she twenty, and described as beautiful. Is there any scandalous talking? Scarce one word, it would seem. He is as considerate as ice; and she as coy as summer clouds.
It does not appear that Swift had literary ambition, as commonly reckoned. That Tale of a Tub lay by him six or seven years before it came to print. He wrote for Steele’s Tatler, and for the Spectator—not with any understanding that his name was to appear, or that he was to be spoken admiringly of. Many of his best things were addressed to friends or acquaintances, and never saw the light through any instigation or privity of his own.
When there was some purpose to effect—some wrong to lash—some puppet to knock down—some tow-head to set on fire—some public drowsiness to wake—he rushed into print with a vengeance. Was it benevolence that provoked him to this? was it public spirit? Who can tell? I think there were many times when he thought as much; but I believe that never a man more often deceived himself than did Swift; and that over and over he mistook the incentives of his own fiery and smarting spirit for the leadings of an angel of light.
When we think of the infrequency and awkwardness of travel in that day, we are not a little amazed to find him going back and forth as he did from Ireland to London. The journey was not, as now, a mere skip over to Holyhead, and then a five hours’ whirl to town, but a long, uncertain sail in some lugger of a vessel—blown as the winds blew—till a landing was made at Bristol or Swansea; and then the four to seven days of coaching (as the roads might be) through Bath to London. Sometimes it is some interest of the poor Irish Church that takes him over, for which we must give him due credit; but oftener it is his own unrest. His energies and his unsatisfied mind starve if not roused and bolstered and chafed by contact with minds as keen and hard, from which will come the fiery disputation that he loves. Great cities, where great interests are astir and great schemes fomenting, are magnets whose drawing power such intellects cannot resist. He is in London five or six months in 1701, six or eight the next year, six or eight the next, and so on.