In this crisis a refuge was offered to him. Sir William Temple was connected, in more ways than one, with the Swifts. He was the son of Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, who had been a friend of Godwin Swift. Temple himself had lived in Ireland, in early days, and had known the Swift family. His wife was in some way related to Swift’s mother; and he was now in a position to help the young man. Temple is a remarkable figure amongst the statesmen of that generation. There is something more modern about him than belongs to his century. A man of cultivated taste and cosmopolitan training, he had the contempt of enlightened persons for the fanaticisms of his times. He was not the man to suffer persecution, with Baxter, for a creed, or even to lose his head, with Russell, for a party. Yet if he had not the faith which animates enthusiasts, he sincerely held political theories—a fact sufficient to raise him above the thorough-going cynics of the court of the restoration. His sense of honour, or the want of robustness in mind and temperament, kept him aloof from the desperate game in which the politicians of the day staked their lives, and threw away their consciences as an incumbrance. Good fortune threw him into the comparatively safe line of diplomacy, for which his natural abilities fitted him. Good fortune, aided by discernment, enabled him to identify himself with the most respectable achievements of our foreign policy. He had become famous as the chief author of the Triple Alliance, and the promoter of the marriage of William and Mary. He had ventured far enough into the more troublous element of domestic politics to invent a highly applauded constitutional device for smoothing the relations between the crown and Parliament. Like other such devices it went to pieces at the first contact with realities. Temple retired to cultivate his garden and write elegant memoirs and essays, and refused all entreaties to join again in the rough struggles of the day. Associates, made of sterner stuff, probably despised him; but from their own, that is, the selfish point of view, he was perhaps entitled to laugh last. He escaped at least with unblemished honour, and enjoyed the cultivated retirement which statesmen so often profess to desire, and so seldom achieve. In private, he had many estimable qualities. He was frank and sensitive; he had won diplomatic triumphs by disregarding the pedantry of official rules; and he had an equal, though not an equally intelligent, contempt for the pedantry of the schools. His style, though often slipshod, often anticipates the pure and simple English of the Addison period, and delighted Charles Lamb by its delicate flavour of aristocratic assumption. He had the vanity of a “person of quality,”—a lofty, dignified air which became his flowing periwig, and showed itself in his distinguished features. But in youth, a strong vein of romance displayed itself in his courtship of Lady Temple, and he seems to have been correspondingly worshipped by her, and his sister, Lady Giffard.
The personal friendship of William could not induce Temple to return to public life. His only son took office, but soon afterwards killed himself from a morbid sense of responsibility. Temple retired finally to Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey; and about the same time received Swift into his family. Long afterwards, John Temple, Sir William’s nephew, who had quarrelled with Swift, gave an obviously spiteful account of the terms of this engagement. Swift, he said, was hired by Sir William to read to him and be his amanuensis, at the rate of 20l. a year and his board; but “Sir William never favoured him with his conversation, nor allowed him to sit down at table with him.” The authority is bad, and we must be guided by rather precarious inferences in picturing this important period of Swift’s career. The raw Irish student was probably awkward, and may have been disagreeable in some matters. Forty years later, we find from his correspondence with Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry, that his views as to the distribution of functions between knives and forks were lamentably unsettled; and it is probable that he may in his youth have been still more heretical as to social conventions. There were more serious difficulties. The difference which separated Swift from Temple is not easily measurable. How can we exaggerate the distance at which a lad, fresh from college and a remote provincial society, would look up to the distinguished diplomatist of sixty, who had been intimate with the two last kings, and was still the confidential friend of the reigning king, who had been an actor in the greatest scenes, not only of English, but of European history, who had been treated with respect by the ministers of Louis XIV., and in whose honour bells had been rung, and banquets set forth as he passed through the great continental cities? Temple might have spoken to him, without shocking proprieties, in terms which, if I may quote the proverbial phrase, would be offensive “from God Almighty to a blackbeetle.”
Shall I believe a spirit so divine
Was cast in the same mould with mine?
is Swift’s phrase about Temple, in one of his first crude poems. We must not infer that circumstances which would now be offensive to an educated man—the seat at the second table, the predestined congeniality to the ladies’-maid of doubtful reputation—would have been equally offensive then. So long as dependence upon patrons was a regular incident of the career of a poor scholar, the corresponding regulations would be taken as a matter of course. Swift was not necessarily more degraded by being a dependent of Temple’s than Locke by a similar position in Shaftesbury’s family. But it is true that such a position must always be trying, as many a governess has felt in more modern days. The position of the educated dependent must always have had its specific annoyances. At this period, when the relation of patron and client was being rapidly modified or destroyed, the compact would be more than usually trying to the power of forbearance and mutual kindliness of the parties concerned. The relation between Sir Roger de Coverley and the old college friend who became his chaplain meant good feeling on both sides. When poor parson Supple became chaplain to Squire Western, and was liable to be sent back from London to Basingstoke in search of a forgotten tobacco-box, Supple must have parted with all self-respect. Swift has incidentally given his own view of the case in his Essay on the Fates of Clergymen. It is an application of one of his favourite doctrines—the advantage possessed by mediocrity over genius in a world so largely composed of fools. Eugenio, who represents Jonathan Swift, fails in life because as a wit and a poet he has not the art of winning patronage. Corusodes, in whom we have a partial likeness to Tom Swift, Jonathan’s college contemporary, and afterwards the chaplain of Temple, succeeds by servile respectability. He never neglected chapel, or lectures: he never looked into a poem: never made a jest himself, or laughed at the jests of others: but he managed to insinuate himself into the favour of the noble family where his sister was a waiting-woman; shook hands with the butler, taught the page his catechism; was sometimes admitted to dine at the steward’s table; was admitted to read prayers, at ten shillings a month: and, by winking at his patron’s attentions to his sister, gradually crept into better appointments, married a citizen’s widow, and is now fast mounting towards the top of the ladder ecclesiastical.
Temple was not the man to demand or reward services so base as those attributed to Corusodes. Nor does it seem that he would be wanting in the self-respect which prescribes due courtesy to inferiors, though it admits of a strict regard for the ceremonial outworks of social dignity. He would probably neither permit others to take liberties nor take them himself. If Swift’s self-esteem suffered, it would not be that he objected to offering up the conventional incense, but that he might possibly think that, after all, the idol was made of rather inferior clay. Temple, whatever his solid merits, was one of the showiest statesmen of the time; but there was no man living with a keener eye for realities and a more piercing insight into shams of all kinds than his raw secretary from Ireland. In later life Swift frequently expressed his scorn for the mysteries and the “refinements” (to use his favourite phrase) by which the great men of the world conceal the low passions and small wisdom actually exerted in affairs of State. At times he felt that Temple was not merely claiming the outward show of respect, but setting too high a value upon his real merits. So when Swift was at the full flood of fortune, when prime ministers and secretaries of state were calling him Jonathan, or listening submissively to his lectures on “whipping-day,” he reverts to his early experience. “I often think,” he says, when speaking of his own familiarity with St. John, “what a splutter Sir William Temple makes about being secretary of state.” And this is a less respectful version of a sentiment expressed a year before, “I am thinking what a veneration we had for Sir W. Temple because he might have been secretary of state at fifty, and here is a young fellow hardly thirty in that employment.” In the interval there is another characteristic outburst. “I asked Mr. Secretary (St. John) what the devil ailed him on Sunday,” and warned him “that I would never be treated like a schoolboy; that I had felt too much of that in my life already (meaning Sir W. Temple); that I expected every great minister who honoured me with his acquaintance, if he heard and saw anything to my disadvantage, would let me know in plain words, and not put me in pain to guess by the change or coldness of his countenance and behaviour.” The day after this effusion, he maintains that he was right in what he said. “Don’t you remember how I used to be in pain when Sir W. Temple would look cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons? I have plucked up my spirits since then; faith, he spoiled a fine gentleman.” And yet, if Swift sometimes thought Temple’s authority oppressive, he was ready to admit his substantial merits. Temple, he says, in his rough marginalia to Burnet’s History, “was a man of sense and virtue;” and the impromptu utterance probably reflects his real feeling.
The year after his first arrival at Temple’s, Swift went back to Ireland by advice of physicians, who “weakly imagined that his native air might be of some use to recover his health.” It was at this period, we may note in passing, that Swift began to suffer from a disease which tormented him through life. Temple sent with him a letter of introduction to Sir Robert Southwell, Secretary of State in Ireland, which gives an interesting account of their previous relations. Swift, said Temple, had lived in his house, read for him, written for him, and kept his small accounts. He knew Latin and Greek, and a little French; wrote a good hand, and was honest and diligent. His whole family had long been known to Temple, who would be glad if Southwell would give him a clerkship, or get him a fellowship in Trinity College. The statement of Swift’s qualifications has now a rather comic sound. An applicant for a desk in a merchant’s office once commended himself, it is said, by the statement that his style of writing combined scathing sarcasm with the wildest flights of humour. Swift might have had a better claim to a place for which such qualities were a recommendation; but there is no reason beyond the supposed agreement of fools to regard genius as a disadvantage in practical life, to suppose that Swift was deficient in humbler attainments. Before long, however, he was back at Moor Park; and a period followed in which his discontent with the position probably reached its height. Temple, indeed, must have discovered that his young dependent was really a man of capacity. He recommended him to William. In 1692 Swift went to Oxford, to be admitted ad eundem, and received the M.A. degree; and Swift, writing to thank his uncle for obtaining the necessary testimonials from Dublin, adds that he has been most civilly received at Oxford, on the strength, presumably, of Temple’s recommendation, and that he is not to take orders till the king gives him a prebend. He suspects Temple, however, of being rather backward in the matter, “because (I suppose) he believes I shall leave him, and (upon some accounts) he thinks me a little necessary to him.” William, it is said, was so far gracious as to offer to make Swift a captain of horse, and instruct him in the Dutch mode of cutting asparagus. By this last phrase hangs an anecdote of later days. Faulkner, the Dublin printer, was dining with Swift, and on asking for a second supply of asparagus, was told by the Dean to finish what he had on his plate. “What, sir, eat my stalks!” “Ay, sir; King William always ate his stalks.” “And were you,” asked Faulkner’s hearer when he related the story, “were you blockhead enough to obey him?” “Yes,” replied Faulkner, “and if you had dined with Dean Swift tête-à-tête you would have been obliged to eat your stalks too!” For the present Swift was the recipient not the imposer of stalks; and was to receive the first shock, as he tells us, that helped to cure him of his vanity. The question of the Triennial Bill was agitating political personages in the early months of 1693. William and his favourite minister, the Earl of Portland, found their Dutch experience insufficient to guide them in the mysteries of English constitutionalism. Portland came down to consult Temple at Moor Park; and Swift was sent back to explain to the great men that Charles I. had been ruined not by consenting to short Parliaments, but by abandoning the right to dissolve Parliament. Swift says that he was “well versed in English history, though he was under twenty-one years old.” (He was really twenty-five, but memory naturally exaggerated his youthfulness). His arguments, however backed by history, failed to carry conviction, and Swift had to unlearn some of the youthful confidence which assumes that reason is the governing force in this world, and that reason means our own opinions. That so young a man should have been employed on such an errand, shows that Temple must have had a good opinion of his capacities; but his want of success, however natural, was felt as a grave discouragement.
That his discontent was growing is clear from other indications. Swift’s early poems, whatever their defects, have one merit common to all his writings—the merit of a thorough, sometimes an appalling, sincerity. Two poems which begin to display his real vigour are dated at the end of 1693. One is an epistle to his schoolfellow, Congreve, expatiating, as some consolation for the cold reception of the Double Dealer, upon the contemptible nature of town critics. Swift describes, as a type of the whole race, a Farnham lad who had left school a year before, and had just returned a “finished spark” from London.
Stock’d with the latest gibberish of the town,
This wretched little fop came in an evil hour to provoke Swift’s hate,—
My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed
Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed.