It is not, however, to be inferred that all Swift’s recreations were so dreary as this Anglo-Latin, or that his facetiousness always covered an aching heart. There is real humour, and not all of bitter flavour, in some of the trifles which passed between Swift and his friends. The most famous is the poem called The Grand Question Debated, the question being whether an old building called Hamilton’s Bawn, belonging to Sir A. Acheson, should be turned into a malthouse or a barrack. Swift takes the opportunity of caricaturing the special object of his aversion, the blustering and illiterate soldier, though he indignantly denies that he had said anything disagreeable to his hospitable entertainer. Lady Acheson encouraged him in writing such “lampoons.” Her taste cannot have been very delicate,[86] and she perhaps did not perceive how a rudeness which affects to be only playful may be really offensive. If the poem shows that Swift took liberties with his friends, it also shows that he still possessed the strange power of reproducing the strain of thought of a vulgar mind which he exhibited in Mr. Harris’s petition. Two other works which appeared in these last years are more remarkable proofs of the same power. The Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation and the Directions to Servants, are most singular performances, and curiously illustrative of Swift’s habits of thought and composition. He seems to have begun them during some of his early visits to England. He kept them by him and amused himself by working upon them, though they were never quite finished. The Polite Conversation was given, as we have seen, to Mrs. Barber in his later years, and the Directions to Servants came into the printer’s hands when he was already imbecile. They show how closely Swift’s sarcastic attention was fixed through life upon the ways of his inferiors. They are a mass of materials for a natural history of social absurdities such as Mr. Darwin was in the habit of bestowing upon the manners and customs of worms. The difference is that Darwin had none but kindly feelings for worms, whereas Swift’s inspection of social vermin is always edged with contempt. The conversations are a marvellous collection of the set of cant phrases which at best have supplied the absence of thought in society. Incidentally there are some curious illustrations of the customs of the day; though one cannot suppose that any human beings had ever the marvellous flow of pointless proverbs with which Lord Sparkish, Mr. Neverout, Miss Notable and the rest manage to keep the ball incessantly rolling. The talk is nonsensical, as most small-talk would be, if taken down by a reporter, and, according to modern standard, hideously vulgar, and yet it flows on with such vivacity that it is perversely amusing.
Lady Answerall. But, Mr. Neverout, I wonder why such a handsome, straight young gentleman as you don’t get some rich widow?
Lord Sparkish. Straight! Ay, straight as my leg, and that’s crooked at the knee.
Neverout. Truth, madam, if it rained rich widows, none would fall upon me. Egad, I was born under a threepenny planet, never to be worth a groat.
And so the talk flows on, and to all appearance might flow for ever.
Swift professes in his preface to have sat many hundred times with his table-book ready, without catching a single phrase for his book in eight hours. Truly he is a kind of Boswell of inanities; and one is amazed at the quantity of thought which must have gone into this elaborate trifling upon trifles. A similar vein of satire upon the emptiness of writers is given in his Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Human Mind; but that is a mere skit compared with this strange performance. The Directions to Servants shows an equal amount of thought exerted upon the various misdoings of the class assailed. Some one has said that it is painful to read so minute and remorseless an exposure of one variety of human folly. Undoubtedly it suggests that Swift must have appeared to be an omniscient master. Delany, as I have said, testifies to his excellence in that capacity. Many anecdotes attest the close attention which he bestowed upon every detail of his servants’ lives, and the humorous reproofs which he administered. “Sweetheart,” he said to an ugly cookmaid who had overdone a joint, “take this down to the kitchen and do it less.” “That is impossible,” she replied. “Then,” he said, “if you must commit faults, commit faults that can be mended.” Another story tells how when a servant had excused himself for not cleaning boots on the ground that they would soon be dirty again, Swift made him apply the same principle to eating breakfast, which would be only a temporary remedy for hunger. In this, as in every relation of life, Swift was under a kind of necessity of imposing himself upon every one in contact with him, and followed out his commands into the minutest details. In the Directions to Servants he has accumulated the results of his experience in one department; and the reading may not be without edification to the people who every now and then announce as a new discovery that servants are apt to be selfish, indolent, and slatternly, and to prefer their own interests to their master’s. Probably no fault could be found with the modern successors of eighteenth-century servants, which has not already been exemplified in Swift’s presentment of that golden age of domestic comfort. The details are not altogether pleasant; but, admitting such satire to be legitimate, Swift’s performance is a masterpiece.
Swift, however, left work of a more dignified kind. Many of the letters in his correspondence are admirable specimens of a perishing art. The most interesting are those which passed between him, Pope, and Bolingbroke, and which were published by Pope’s contrivance during Swift’s last period. “I look upon us three,” says Swift, “as a peculiar triumvirate, who have nothing to expect or fear, and so far fittest to converse with one another.” We may perhaps believe Swift when he says that he “never leaned on his elbow to consider what he should write” (except to fools, lawyers, and ministers), though we certainly cannot say the same of his friends. Pope and Bolingbroke are full of affectations, now transparent enough; but Swift in a few trenchant, outspoken phrases, dashes out a portrait of himself as impressive as it is in some ways painful. We must, indeed, remember in reading his inverse hypocrisy, his tendency to call his own motives by their ugliest names—a tendency which is specially pronounced in writing letters to the old friends whose very names recall the memories of past happiness, and lead him to dwell upon the gloomiest side of the present. There is too a characteristic reserve upon some points. In his last visit to Pope, Swift left his friend’s house after hearing the bad accounts of Stella’s health, and hid himself in London lodgings. He never mentioned his anxieties to his friend, who heard of them first from Sheridan; and in writing afterwards from Dublin, Swift excuses himself for the desertion by referring to his own ill-health—doubtless a true cause (“two sick friends never did well together”)—and his anxiety about his affairs, without a word about Stella. A phrase of Bolingbroke’s in the previous year about “the present Stella, whoever she may be,” seems to prove that he too had no knowledge of Stella except from the poems addressed to the name. There were depths of feeling which Swift could not lay bare to the friend in whose affection he seems most thoroughly to have trusted. Meanwhile he gives full vent to the scorn of mankind and himself, the bitter and unavailing hatred of oppression, and above all for that strange mingling of pride and remorse which is always characteristic of his turn of mind. When he leaves Arbuthnot and Pope he expresses the warmth of his feelings by declaring that he will try to forget them. He is deeply grieved by the death of Congreve, and the grief makes him almost regret that he ever had a friend. He would give half his fortune for the temper of an easy-going acquaintance who could take up or lose a friend as easily as a cat. “Is not this the true happy man?” The loss of Gay cuts him to the heart; he notes on the letter announcing it that he had kept the letter by him five days “by an impulse foreboding some misfortune.” He cannot speak of it except to say that he regrets that long living has not hardened him; and that he expects to die poor and friendless. Pope’s ill-health “hangs on his spirits.” His moral is that if he were to begin the world again, he would never run the risk of a friendship with a poor or sickly man—for he cannot harden himself. “Therefore I argue that avarice and hardness of heart are the two happiest qualities a man can acquire who is late in his life, because by living long we must lessen our friends or may increase our fortunes.” This bitterness is equally apparent in regard to the virtues on which he most prided himself. His patriotism was owing to “perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness;” in which, as he says, he is the direct contrary of Pope, who can despise folly and hate vice without losing his temper or thinking the worse of individuals. “Oppression tortures him,” and means bitter hatred of the concrete oppressor. He tells Barber in 1738 that for three years he has been but the shadow of his former self, and has entirely lost his memory, “except when it is roused by perpetual subjects of vexation.” Commentators have been at pains to show that such sentiments are not philanthropic; yet they are the morbid utterance of a noble and affectionate nature soured by long misery and disappointment. They brought their own punishment. The unhappy man was fretting himself into melancholy and was losing all sources of consolation. “I have nobody now left but you,” he writes to Pope in 1736; his invention is gone; he makes projects which end in the manufacture of waste paper; and what vexes him most is that his “female friends have now forsaken him.” “Years and infirmities,” he says in the end of the same year (about the date of the Legion Club), “have quite broke me; I can neither read, nor write, nor remember, nor converse. All I have left is to walk and ride.” A few letters are preserved in the next two years—melancholy wails over his loss of health and spirit—pathetic expressions of continual affection for his “dearest and almost only constant friend,” and a warm request or two for services to some of his acquaintance.
The last stage was rapidly approaching. Swift who had always been thinking of death in these later years, had anticipated the end in the remarkable verses On the Death of Dr. Swift. This and two or three other performances of about the same period, especially the Rhapsody on Poetry (1733) and the Verses to a Lady are Swift’s chief title to be called a poet. How far that name can be conceded to him is a question of classification. Swift’s originality appears in the very fact that he requires a new class to be made for him. He justified Dryden’s remark in so far as he was never a poet in the sense in which Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley or even Dryden himself were poets. His poetry may be called rhymed prose, and should perhaps be put at about the same level in the scale of poetry as Hudibras. It differs from prose not simply in being rhymed, but in that the metrical form seems to be the natural and appropriate mode of utterance. Some of the purely sarcastic and humorous phrases recall Hudibras more nearly than anything else; as, for example, the often-quoted verses upon small critics in the Rhapsody.
The vermin only tease and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
In the verses on his own death, the suppressed passion, the glow and force of feeling which we perceive behind the merely moral and prosaic phrases seem to elevate the work to a higher level. It is a mere running of every-day language into easy-going verse; and yet the strangely mingled pathos and bitterness, the peculiar irony of which he was the great master, affect us with a sentiment which may be called poetical in substance, more forcibly than far more dignified and in some sense imaginative performances. Whatever name we may please to give to such work, Swift has certainly struck home and makes an impression which it is difficult to compress into a few phrases. It is the essence of all that is given at greater length in the correspondence; and starts from a comment upon Rochefoucauld’s congenial maxim about the misfortunes of our friends. He tells how his acquaintance watch his decay, tacitly congratulating themselves that “it is not yet so bad with us;” how, when he dies, they laugh at the absurdity of his will.