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.