And he already applies it with vigour enough to show that with some of the satirist’s power he has also the indispensable condition of a considerable accumulation of indignant wrath against the self-appointed arbiters of taste. The other poem is more remarkable in its personal revelation. It begins as a congratulation to Temple on his recovery from an illness. It passes into a description of his own fate, marked by singular bitterness. He addresses his muse as—
Malignant Goddess! bane to my repose,
Thou universal cause of all my woes.
She is, it seems, a mere delusive meteor, with no real being of her own. But, if real, why does she persecute him?
Wert thou right woman, thou should’st scorn to look
On an abandon’d wretch by hopes forsook:
Forsook by hopes, ill fortune’s last relief,
Assign’d for life to unremitting grief;
For let heaven’s wrath enlarge these weary days
If hope e’er dawns the smallest of its rays.
And he goes on to declare after some vigorous lines,
To thee I owe that fatal bent of mind,
Still to unhappy restless thoughts inclined:
To thee what oft I vainly strive to hide,
That scorn of fools, by fools mistook for pride;
From thee whatever virtue takes its rise,
Grows a misfortune, or becomes a vice.
The sudden gush as of bitter waters into the dulcet, insipid current of conventional congratulation, gives additional point to the sentiment. Swift expands the last couplet into a sentiment which remained with him through life. It is a blending of pride and remorse; a regretful admission of the loftiness of spirit which has caused his misfortunes; and we are puzzled to say whether the pride or the remorse be the most genuine. For Swift always unites pride and remorse in his consciousness of his own virtues.
The “restlessness” avowed in these verses took the practical form of a rupture with Temple. In his autobiographical fragment he says that he had a scruple of entering into the church merely for support, and Sir William, then being Master of the Rolls in Ireland,[6] offered him an employ of about 120l. a year in that office; whereupon Mr. Swift told him that since he had now an opportunity of living without being driven into the church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to Ireland and take holy orders. If the scruple seems rather finely spun for Swift, the sense of the dignity of his profession is thoroughly characteristic. Nothing, however, is more deceptive than our memory of the motives which directed distant actions. In his contemporary letters there is no hint of any scruple against preferment in the church, but a decided objection to insufficient preferment. It is possible that Swift was confusing dates, and that the scruple was quieted when he failed to take advantage of Temple’s interest with Southwell. Having declined, he felt that he had made a free choice of a clerical career. In 1692, as we have seen, he expected a prebend from Temple’s influence with William. But his doubts of Temple’s desire or power to serve him were confirmed. In June, 1694, he tells a cousin at Lisbon, “I have left Sir W. Temple a month ago, just as I foretold it you; and everything happened exactly as I guessed. He was extremely angry I left him; and yet would not oblige himself any further than upon my good behaviour, nor would promise anything firmly to me at all; so that everybody judged I did best to leave him.” He is starting in four days for Dublin, and intends to be ordained in September. The next letter preserved completes the story, and implies a painful change in this cavalier tone of injured pride. Upon going to Dublin, Swift had found that some recommendation from Temple would be required by the authorities. He tried to evade the requirement, but was forced at last to write a letter to Temple, which nothing but necessity could have extorted. After explaining the case, he adds, “the particulars expected of me are what relates to morals and learning, and the reasons of quitting your honour’s family, that is whether the last was occasioned by any ill actions. They are all left entirely to your honour’s mercy, though in the past I think I cannot reproach myself any farther than for infirmities. This,” he adds, “is all I dare beg at present from your honour, under circumstances of life not worth your regard;” and all that is left him to wish (“next to the health and prosperity of your honour’s family”) is that Heaven will show him some day the opportunity of making his acknowledgments at “your honour’s” feet. This seems to be the only occasion on which we find Swift confessing to any fault except that of being too virtuous.
The apparent doubt of Temple’s magnanimity implied in the letter was happily not verified. The testimonial seems to have been sent at once. Swift, in any case, was ordained deacon on the 28th of October, 1694, and priest on the 15th of January, 1695. Probably Swift felt that Temple had behaved with magnanimity, and in any case it was not very long before he returned to Moor Park. He had received from Lord Capel, then lord deputy, the small prebend of Kilroot, worth about 100l. a year. Little is known of his life as a remote country clergyman, except that he very soon became tired of it.[7] Swift soon resigned his prebend (in March, 1698) and managed to obtain the succession for a friend in the neighbourhood. But before this (in May, 1696) he had returned to Moor Park. He had grown weary of a life in a remote district, and Temple had raised his offers. He was glad to be once more on the edge at least of the great world in which alone could be found employment worthy of his talents. One other incident, indeed, of which a fuller account would be interesting, is connected with this departure. On the eve of his departure, he wrote a passionate letter to “Varina,” in plain English Miss Waring, sister of an old college chum. He “solemnly offers to forego all” (all his English prospects, that is) “for her sake.” He does not want her fortune; she shall live where she pleases; till he has “pushed his advancement” and is in a position to marry her. The letter is full of true lovers’ protestations; reproaches for her coldness; hints at possible causes of jealousies; declarations of the worthlessness of ambition as compared with love; and denunciations of her respect for the little disguises and affected contradictions of her sex, infinitely beneath persons of her pride and his own; paltry maxims calculated only for the “rabble of humanity.” “By heaven, Varina,” he exclaims, “you are more experienced, and have less virgin innocence than I.” The answer must have been unsatisfactory; though from expressions in a letter to his successor to the prebend, we see that the affair was still going on in 1699. It will come to light once more.
Swift was thus at Moor Park in the summer of 1696. He remained till Temple’s death in January, 1699. We hear no more of any friction between Swift and his patron; and it seems that the last years of their connexion passed in harmony. Temple was growing old; his wife, after forty years of a happy marriage, had died during Swift’s absence in the beginning of 1695; and Temple, though he seems to have been vigorous, and in spite of gout a brisk walker, was approaching the grave. He occupied himself in preparing, with Swift’s help, memoirs and letters, which were left to Swift for posthumous publication. Swift’s various irritations at Moor Park have naturally left a stronger impression upon his history than the quieter hours in which worry and anxiety might be forgotten in the placid occupations of a country life. That Swift enjoyed many such hours is tolerably clear. Moor Park is described by a Swiss traveller who visited it about 1691,[8] as the “model of an agreeable retreat.” Temple’s household was free from the coarse convivialities of the boozing fox-hunting squires; whilst the recollection of its modest neatness made the “magnificent palace” of Petworth seem pompous and overpowering. Swift himself remembered the Moor Park gardens, the special pride of Temple’s retirement, with affection, and tried to imitate them on a small scale in his own garden at Laracor. Moor Park is on the edge of the great heaths which stretch southward to Hindhead, and northwards to Aldershot and Chobham Ridges. Though we can scarcely credit him with a modern taste in scenery, he at least anticipated the modern faith in athletic exercises. According to Deane Swift, he used to run up a hill near Temple’s and back again to his study every two hours, doing the distance of half a mile in six minutes. In later life he preached the duty of walking with admirable perseverance to his friends. He joined other exercises occasionally. “My Lord,” he says to Archbishop King in 1721, “I row after health like a waterman, and ride after it like a postboy, and with some little success.” But he had the characteristic passion of the good and wise for walking. He mentions incidentally a walk from Farnham to London, thirty-eight miles; and has some association with the Golden Farmer[9]—a point on the road from which there is still one of the loveliest views in the southern counties, across undulating breadths of heath and meadow, woodland and down, to Windsor Forest, St. George’s Hill, and the chalk range from Guildford to Epsom. Perhaps he might have been a mountaineer in more civilized times; his poem on the Carberry rocks seems to indicate a lover of such scenery; and he ventured so near the edge of the cliff upon his stomach, that his servants had to drag him back by his heels. We find him proposing to walk to Chester at the rate, I regret to say, of only ten miles a day. In such rambles, we are told, he used to put up at wayside inns, where “lodgings for a penny” were advertised; bribing the maid with a tester to give him clean sheets and a bed to himself. The love of the rough humour of waggoners and hostlers is supposed to have been his inducement to this practice; and the refined Orrery associates his coarseness with this lamentable practice; but amidst the roar of railways we may think more tolerantly of the humours of the road in the good old days, when each village had its humours and traditions and quaint legends, and when homely maxims of unlettered wisdom were to be picked up at rustic firesides.