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.