“To all mayors, sheriffs, jailors, constables, bailiffs, hangmen, etc. Whereas we are informed that A. B. remains in the hands of some of you, under the sentence of death: We will and command you, upon sight hereof to let the said prisoner depart to his own habitation whether he stands condemned for murder, etc., etc., for which this shall be your sufficient warrant; and if you fail hereof, God damn you and yours to all eternity; and so we bid you heartily farewell. Your most humble man’s man, Emperor Peter.”
The wretches, trusting to this, lost their lives and money too. Peter, however, became outrageously proud. He has been seen to take three old high-crowned hats and clap them on his head three-storey high, with a huge bunch of keys at his girdle, and an angling-rod in his hand. In which guise, whoever went to take him by the hand in the way of salutation, Peter, with much grace, like a well-educated spaniel, would present them with his foot; and if they refused his civility, then he would raise it as high as their chops, and give them a damned kick in the mouth, which has ever since been called a salute.
The Tale of a Tub
The next period of his life (1704–14) was occupied mainly in the composition of political tracts, some of which are of great power. Several of them were written for The Examiner, a Tory journal. They include Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (1712) and The Public Spirit of the Whigs (1714). To this period also belongs the Journal to Stella, which is a kind of informal private log-book written by him and sent regularly to Esther Johnson. It has all Swift’s shrewdness and vivacity, without much of the usual scorn and coarseness. It is not as intimate and revealing as the diary of Pepys, yet it gives us many glimpses of the inner man: vain and arrogant, ambitious and crafty, but none the less a generous and considerate friend and a loyal ally.
During the third period—that of his final stay in Ireland—the shadow deepens. The earlier years produce one of the most compelling efforts of his pen. He supported the Irish in their revolt against “Wood’s halfpence,” writing in their cause his Drapier’s Letters (1724). This gained for him an almost embarrassing popularity. Then followed some miscellaneous political work, and then his longest and most famous book, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The main idea of this book is an old one, being at least as old as the time of Lucian, a Greek writer of the second century: it deals with imaginary voyages, in Gulliver’s case among the pigmies (Lilliputians), the giants (Brobdingnagians), the moonstruck philosophers (Laputans), and the race of horses, with their human serfs the Yahoos.
Gulliver’s Travels resembles its fellow-allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress in its popularity and human interest; but in temper the two books are worlds apart. Bunyan views human failings with a discerning eye, but he accepts them with a benign quiescence, and with a tempered faith in man’s ultimate redemption. Swift, on the other hand, said to Pope, “I heartily hate and detest that animal called man,” and this book is an elaboration of that attitude. He magnifies man into a giant, and then he diminishes him into a mannikin, and he finds him wicked and insolent and mean; he regards man in his wisdom, and he finds him a fool; in despair, in the last book of the Travels, he turns from man altogether, and in the brute creation he discovers a charity and sagacity before which humanity grovels as a creature beastly beyond measure. The last stages of the book are morbid and revolting to the point of insanity.
The two earlier stages of the Travels have a charm and vivacity that delight old and young. The bitterness of the satire lurks in the allegory, but it is so delicately tinseled over that it does not repel. The crowded incidents are plausible and lively, and they are often spiced with a quaint and alluring humor; his comments upon mankind are shrewd and arresting, as well as satirical, and are yet not brutal nor obscene. The style is Swift’s best: not mannered or labored; clean, powerful, and tireless; easy without being slovenly, and as clear as summer noonday.
The queen, who often used to hear me talk of my sea-voyages, and took all occasions to divert me when I was melancholy, asked me whether I understood how to handle a sail or an oar, and whether a little exercise of rowing might not be convenient for my health. I answered, that I understood both very well; for although my proper employment had been to be surgeon or doctor to the ship, yet often upon a pinch I was forced to work like a common mariner. But I could not see how this could be done in their country, where the smallest wherry was equal to a first-rate man-of-war among us, and such a boat as I could manage would never live in any of their rivers. Her majesty said, if I would contrive a boat, her own joiner should make it, and she would provide a place for me to sail in. The fellow was an ingenious workman, and, by my instructions, in ten days finished a pleasure-boat, with all its tackling, able conveniently to hold eight Europeans. When it was finished, the queen was so delighted that she ran with it in her lap to the king, who ordered it to be put in a cistern full of water with me in it by way of trial; where I could not manage my two sculls, or little oars, for want of room. But the queen had before contrived another project. She ordered the joiner to make a wooden trough of three hundred feet long, fifty broad, and eight deep, which being well pitched, to prevent leaking, was placed on the floor along the wall in an outer room of the palace. It had a cock near the bottom to let out the water, when it began to grow stale; and two servants could easily fill it in half an hour. Here I often used to row for my own diversion, as well as that of the queen and her ladies, who thought themselves well entertained with my skill and agility. Sometimes I would put up my sail, and then my business was only to steer, while the ladies gave me a gale with their fans; and when they were weary, some of the pages would blow my sail forward with their breath, while I showed my art by steering starboard or larboard, as I pleased. When I had done, Glumdalclitch always carried back my boat into her closet, and hung it on a nail to dry.
JOSEPH ADDISON (1672–1718)
1. His Life. Educated at the Charterhouse, Addison went to Oxford, where he became a Fellow of Magdalen College. He early made his mark as a serious and accomplished scholar, and seems to have attracted the notice of the Whig leaders, who marked him out as a future literary prop of their faction. He obtained a traveling scholarship of three hundred pounds a year, and saw much of Europe under favorable conditions. Then the misfortunes of the Whigs in 1703 reduced him to poverty. In 1704, it is said at the instigation of the leaders of the Whigs, he wrote the poem The Campaign, praising the war policy of the Whigs in general and the worthiness of Marlborough in particular. This poem brought him fame and fortune. He obtained many official appointments and pensions, married a dowager countess (1716), and became a Secretary of State (1717). Two years later he died, at the age of forty-seven.