Recreations of this kind were a relief to serious study. In Temple’s library Swift found abundant occupation. “I am often,” he says, in the first period of his residence, “two or three months without seeing anybody besides the family.” In a later fragment, we find him living alone “in great state,” the cook coming for his orders for dinner, and the revolutions in the kingdom of the rooks amusing his leisure. The results of his studies will be considered directly. A list of books read in 1697 gives some hint of their general nature. They are chiefly classical and historical. He read Virgil, Homer, Horace, Lucretius, Cicero’s Epistles, Petronius Arbiter, Ælian, Lucius Florus, Herbert’s Henry VIII., Sleidan’s Commentaries, Council of Trent, Camden’s Elizabeth, Burnet’s History of the Reformation, Voiture, Blackmore’s Prince Arthur, Sir J. Davis’s poem of The Soul, and two or three travels, besides Cyprian and Irenæus. We may note the absence of any theological reading, except in the form of ecclesiastical history; nor does Swift study philosophy, of which he seems to have had a sufficient dose in Dublin. History seems always to have been his favourite study, and it would naturally have a large part in Temple’s library.
One matter of no small importance to Swift remains to be mentioned. Temple’s family included other dependents besides Swift. The “little parson cousin,” Tom Swift, whom his great relation always mentions with contempt, became chaplain to Temple. Jonathan’s sister was for some time at Moor Park. But the inmates of the family most interesting to us were a Rebecca Dingley—who was in some way related to the family—and Esther Johnson. Esther Johnson was the daughter of a merchant of respectable family who died young. Her mother was known to Lady Giffard, Temple’s attached sister; and after her widowhood, went with her two daughters to live with the Temples. Mrs. Johnson lived as servant or companion to Lady Giffard for many years after Temple’s death; and little Esther, a remarkably bright and pretty child, was brought up in the family, and received under Temple’s will a sufficient legacy for her support. It was of course guessed by a charitable world that she was a natural child of Sir William’s; but there seems to be no real ground for the hypothesis.[10] She was born, as Swift tells us, on March 13th, 1681; and was therefore a little over eight when Swift first came to Temple, and fifteen when he returned from Kilroot.[11] About this age, he tells us, she got over an infantile delicacy, “grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection.” Her conduct and character were equally remarkable, if we may trust the tutor who taught her to write, guided her education, and came to regard her with an affection which was at once the happiness and the misery of his life.
Temple died January 26, 1699; and “with him,” said Swift at the time, “all that was good and amiable among men.” The feeling was doubtless sincere, though Swift, when moved very deeply, used less conventional phrases. He was thrown once more upon the world. The expectations of some settlement in life had not been realized. Temple had left him 100l., the advantage of publishing his posthumous works, which might ultimately bring in 200l. more, and a promise of preferment from the king. Swift had lived long enough upon the “chameleon’s food.” His energies were still running to waste; and he suffered the misery of a weakness due, not to want of power but want of opportunity. His sister writes to a cousin that her brother had lost his best friend, who had induced him to give up his Irish preferment by promising preferment in England, and had died before the promise had been fulfilled. Swift was accused of ingratitude by Lord Palmerston, Temple’s nephew, some thirty-five years later. In reply, he acknowledged an obligation to Temple for the recommendation to William and the legacy of his papers; but he adds, “I hope you will not charge my living in his family as an obligation; for I was educated to little purpose if I retired to his house for any other motives than the benefit of his conversation and advice, and the opportunity of pursuing my studies. For, being born to no fortune, I was at his death as far to seek as ever; and perhaps you will allow that I was of some use to him.” Swift seems here to assume that his motives for living with Temple are necessarily to be estimated by the results which he obtained. But if he expected more than he got, he does not suggest any want of goodwill. Temple had done his best; William’s neglect and Temple’s death had made goodwill fruitless. The two might cry quits; and Swift set to work, not exactly with a sense of injury, but probably with a strong feeling that a large portion of his life had been wasted. To Swift, indeed, misfortune and injury seem equally to have meant resentment, whether against the fates or some personal object.
One curious document must be noted before considering the writings which most fully reveal the state of Swift’s mind. In the year 1699 he wrote down some resolutions, headed “when I come to be old.” They are for the most part pithy and sensible, if it can ever be sensible to make resolutions for behaviour in a distant future. Swift resolves not to marry a young woman, not to keep young company unless they desire it, not to repeat stories, not to listen to knavish, tattling servants, not to be too free of advice, not to brag of former beauty and favour with ladies, to desire some good friends to inform him when he breaks these resolutions and to reform accordingly; and finally, not to set up for observing all these rules for fear he should observe none. These resolutions are not very original in substance (few resolutions are), though they suggest some keen observation of his elders; but one is more remarkable. “Not to be fond of children, or let them come near me hardly.” The words in italics are blotted out by a later possessor of the paper, shocked doubtless at the harshness of the sentiment. “We do not fortify ourselves with resolutions against what we dislike,” says a friendly commentator, “but against what we feel in our weakness we have reason to believe we are really too much inclined to.” Yet it is strange that a man should regard the purest and kindliest of feelings as a weakness to which he is too much inclined. No man had stronger affections than Swift; no man suffered more agony when they were wounded; but in his agony he would commit what to most men would seem the treason of cursing the affections instead of simply lamenting the injury, or holding the affection itself to be its own sufficient reward. The intense personality of the man reveals itself alternately at selfishness and as “altruism.” He grappled to his heart those whom he really loved “as with hoops of steel;” so firmly that they became a part of himself; and that he considered himself at liberty to regard his love of friends as he might regard a love of wine, as something to be regretted when it was too strong for his own happiness. The attraction was intense; but implied the absorption of the weaker nature into his own. His friendships were rather annexations than alliances. The strongest instance of this characteristic was in his relations to the charming girl, who must have been in his mind when he wrote this strange, and unconsciously prophetic, resolution.
CHAPTER III.
EARLY WRITINGS.
Swift came to Temple’s house as a raw student. He left it as the author of one of the most remarkable satires ever written. His first efforts had been unpromising enough. Certain Pindaric Odes, in which the youthful aspirant imitated the still popular model of Cowley, are even comically prosaic. The last of them, dated 1691, is addressed to a queer Athenian Society, promoted by a John Dunton, a speculative bookseller, whose Life and Errors is still worth a glance from the curious. The Athenian Society was the name of John Dunton himself, and two or three collaborators who professed in the Athenian Mercury to answer queries ranging over the whole field of human knowledge. Temple was one of their patrons, and Swift sent them a panegyrical ode, the merits of which are sufficiently summed up by Dryden’s pithy criticism—“Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” Swift disliked and abused Dryden ever afterwards, though he may have had better reasons for his enmity than the child’s dislike to bitter medicine. Later poems, the Epistle to Congreve and that to Temple already quoted, show symptoms of growing power and a clearer self-recognition. In Swift’s last residence with Temple, he proved unmistakably that he had learnt the secret often so slowly revealed to great writers, the secret of his real strength. The Tale of a Tub was written about 1696; part of it appears to have been seen at Kilroot by his friend, Waring, Varina’s brother; the Battle of the Books was written in 1697. It is a curious proof of Swift’s indifference to a literary reputation that both works remained in manuscript till 1704. The “little parson cousin” Tom Swift, ventured some kind of claim to a share in the authorship of the Tale of a Tub. Swift treated this claim with the utmost contempt, but never explicitly claimed for himself the authorship of what some readers hold to be his most powerful work.
The Battle of the Books, to which we may first attend, sprang out of the famous controversy as to the relative merits of the ancients and moderns, which began in France with Perrault and Fontenelle; which had been set going in England by Sir W. Temple’s essay upon ancient and modern learning (1692), and which incidentally led to the warfare between Bentley and Wotton on one side, and Boyle and his Oxford allies on the other. A full account of this celebrated discussion may be found in Professor Jebb’s Bentley; and, as Swift only took the part of a light skirmisher, nothing more need be said of it in this place. One point alone is worth notice. The eagerness of the discussion is characteristic of a time at which the modern spirit was victoriously revolting against the ancient canons of taste and philosophy. At first sight, we might therefore expect the defenders of antiquity to be on the side of authority. In fact, however, the argument, as Swift takes it from Temple, is reversed. Temple’s theory, so far as he had any consistent theory, is indicated in the statement that the moderns gathered “all their learning from books in the universities.” Learning, he suggests, may weaken invention; and people who trust to the charity of others will always be poor. Swift accepts and enforces this doctrine. The Battle of the Books is an expression of that contempt for pedants which he had learnt in Dublin, and which is expressed in the ode to the Athenian Society. Philosophy, he tells us in that precious production, “seems to have borrowed some ungrateful taste of doubts, impertinence, and niceties from every age through which it passed” (this, I may observe, is verse), and is now a “medley of all ages,” “her face patched over with modern pedantry.” The moral finds a more poetical embodiment in the famous apologue of the Bee and the Spider in the Battle of the Books. The bee had got itself entangled in the spider’s web in the library, whilst the books were beginning to wrangle. The two have a sharp dispute, which is summed up by Æsop as arbitrator. The spider represents the moderns who spin their scholastic pedantry out of their own insides; whilst the bee, like the ancients, goes direct to nature. The moderns produce nothing but “wrangling and satire, much of a nature with the spider’s poison, which however they pretend to spit wholly out of themselves is improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the insects and vermin of the age.” We, the ancients, “profess to nothing of our own, beyond our wings and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labour and research, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are Sweetness and Light.”