They had for several successive days observed a strange clergyman come into the house who seemed entirely unacquainted with any of those who frequented it, and whose custom was to lay down his hat on a table and walk backward and forward at a good pace, for half an hour or an hour, without speaking to any mortal, or seeming in the least to attend to anything that was going forward there. He then used to take up his hat, pay his money at the bar, and walk away without opening his lips. On one particular evening, as Mr. Addison and the rest were observing him, they saw him cast his eyes several times on a gentleman in boots who seemed to be just come out of the country, and at last advance, as if intending to address him. Eager to hear what this dumb, mad parson had to say, they all quitted their seats to get near him. Swift went up to the country gentleman, and in a very abrupt manner, without any previous salute, asked him, “Pray, sir, do you remember any good weather in the world?” The country gentleman, after staring a little at the peculiarity of his manner, answered, “Yes, sir, I remember a great deal of good weather in my time.” “That is more,” rejoined Swift, “than I can say. I never remember any weather that was not too hot or too cold, or too wet or too dry; but however God Almighty contrives at the end of the year it is all very well.” With which remark he took up his hat, and without uttering a syllable more, or taking the least notice of any one, walked out of the coffee-house.
His whimsical humor, and love of making the spectators stare, remained a characteristic of Swift all his life.
These beginnings of social life were, however, past, and no one was better known or more warmly welcomed, when he appeared with his wig new curled, and his azure eyes aglow, than the Irish parson, waiting upon Providence and the Whigs, whose political pamphlets, and papers in the “Tatler,” and malicious practical joking with poor Partridge, the astrologer, made him, at each appearance, a more notable figure to all the lookers-on. His eyes must have been on fire under those expressive brows when he came to London in 1710, resolved this time to be put off by Whig blandishments no longer, but to try what the other side would do. The other side received him with open arms, and the most instant appreciation of what he was worth to them and what he could do. Harley was not great in any sense of the word, but if he had shown as much insight in the conduct of public affairs as he did in his perception of the workmen best adapted to his purpose, in the struggle upon which he had entered, he would have been the most successful of ministers. He told Swift that his colleagues and himself had been afraid of none but him in the ranks of their enemies, and that they had resolved to have him. And in proof that they were ready to do anything to secure his services, they pushed on and decided as soon as might be his suit for the church, which had hung in the balance so long, was as good as granted, now as far off as ever. It was settled at once, to Swift’s great triumph. And to crown all, the new minister, the greatest man in England, called him Jonathan!—of all wonderful things, what could be more wonderful than that this great wit, this powerful and pitiless satirist, this ambitious man, should be altogether overcome with pleasure when Harley called him by his Christian name! Was it mere servility, vanity, the flattered weakness of a hanger-on in a great man’s familiarity, as everybody says? It is hard to believe this, though it is taken for granted on all sides. Swift seems, at all events, to have had a real affection for the shifty minister, who received him in so different a fashion from that of his former masters. He flung himself into all the backstair intrigues, and collogued with Abigail Masham, and took his share in every plot. When Harley was stabbed, Swift felt for him all the anxiety of a brother. He threw himself into the “Examiner,” the new Tory organ, with fervor and enthusiasm, and expounded the principles of his party and set their plans before the public with a force and clearness which nobody but he, his patrons declared, possessed. The two statesmen, Harley and Bolingbroke, who were so little like each other, so ill calculated to draw together, were alike in this: that neither could be flattering enough or kind enough to the great vassal whom they had secured. He seems to have thought of himself that he was a sort of third consul, an unofficial sharer of their power.
This extraordinary episode in the life of a man of Swift’s profession, and so little likely to come to such promotion, lasted three years; and the history of it is not less remarkable than the fact. It was a period of the greatest intellectual
activity and brilliancy in Swift’s career, and besides his hard political work in the “Examiner” and elsewhere, he flung from him, amid the exhilarating appreciation of the great world and his patrons, a number of the best of his lighter productions. But nothing that he ever wrote can be compared to the letters in which the story of this period is told, since nowhere else do we find the charm of humanity, which is more great and attractive even than genius. As if the rule of paradox was to prevail in his life as well as in his wit, this cynic, misanthrope, and satirist, ignoring love and every softer thought, exhibits himself once to us in an abandon and melting of the heart such as common men are as little capable of as they are of his fierce laughter and bitter jests. If it is the true man whom we see in these unpremeditated and careless pages, written before he got up of a morning, or in the evening when he came home from his entertainments, with the chairmen still wrangling over their sixpences outside, how different is that man from the other who storms and laughs and mocks humanity, and sees through all its miserable pretenses without a thought of pardon or excuse! The “Journal” letters addressed to the ladies in Dublin, Madam P. P. T. and Madam Elderby, the two women who shared his every thought, now so well known as the “Journal to Stella,” are, of all Swift’s works, the only productions that touch the heart. They are not to be numbered among his “works” at all: publication of any kind never seems to have occurred to him, while writing: they are as frank as Pepy’s[spelling per original], and far more simple and true. They are English history and London life, and the eighteenth century, with its mannerisms and quaintness, all in one; and beyond and above every circumstance, they are Swift as he was in his deepest soul,—not as he appeared to men,—a human being full of tenderness, full of fun and innocent humor, full of genius and individual nature, but, above all, of true affection, the warmest domestic love. Passion is not in those delightful pages; but the endearing playfulness, the absolute freedom of self-revelation, the tender intimacy and confidence of members of the same family, whose interests and subjects of thought and talk and merry jests and delusions are one. They describe every day—nay, hour—of his life, every little expedition, all the ups and downs of his occupations and progress, with the boundless freedom and sportive extravagance, the unimpassioned, unabashed adoration of something warmer than a father, more indulgent, more admiring than a brother, yet brother, father, lover, and friend all in one.
Only to a woman could such letters have been addressed, and few women reading them will be disposed to pity Stella or think her life one of blight or injury. Without these the life of the dean would not have touched our human sympathies at all, but now that time has let us thus fully into his confidence, and opened to our sight what was never intended for any but hers and those of her shadow, her guardian, the humble third in this profound and perfect union, it is with moistened eyes that we read the ever living record. There is nothing in the coarse and struggling potency of those books which critics applaud, that comes within a hundred miles of the delightful life and ease of these outpourings of Swift’s innermost soul. The “Tale of a Tub,” the “Battle of the Books,” retain a sort of galvanic existence, but are for the greater part insupportable to the honest readers who have no tradition of superior acumen and perception to maintain. But when we turn to the “Journal,” the clean and wholesome pages smile with a cordial life and reality. If there is here and there a phrase too broad for modern ears, it is nothing more than the language of the time, and has not a ghost of evil meaning in it. The big arrogant wit—not unused to bluster and brag, to act like a tyrant and speak like a bully—meets us there defenseless, with the tenderest light upon his face, in his nightcap and without his wig, smiling over little M. D.’s letter in the wintry mornings, snatching a moment at bedtime when he is already “seepy,” and can do nothing but bid “nite deelest dea M. D. nite deelest loques,” making his mouth, he says, as if he were saying the broken, childish words, retiring into the sanctuary of the little language with an infinite sense of consolation and repose. Outside it may be he swaggered and defied all men, even his patrons; but here an exquisite softness comes over him. However he may be judged or mistaken in the world, he is always understood by the women in that secret world where they make their comments on whatever happens, and merrily answer back again with their criticisms, their strictures, no more afraid of that impetuous, angry genius than if he had been the meekest of rural priests. It is this that has got Swift his hold upon many a reader, who, beginning by hating him, the coarse and bitter wit, the scorner of men and crusher of women’s hearts, has suddenly found his own heart melt in his breast to see the giant lay by his thunders and prattle like an old gossip, like a tender mother, father, all in one, in the baby-talk that first had opened to him the knowledge of all that is sweetest in life. We do not understand the man, much less the woman, who can read without forgiving to Swift all his brutalities, as indeed most women who encountered him seem to have done without that argument. He would treat the fine ladies with the most imperious rudeness, giving forth his rule that it was they who should make advances to him, not he to them, yet captivating even those who resisted in the end.
The little language which this fierce satirist and cynic dared to put in writing, the only man ever so bold as to pay such homage to affection, puzzled beyond measure his first editors and expositors, who, with a horrified prudery, seem to have done their best to interpret and restore it to decorum and dignity; but it has now become the point in his story which is most tenderly recollected, his sacred reconciliation with mankind. A homeless boy, with none of the traditions of a family, finding his unlovely life not less but more unpromising in his first experiences of Temple’s luxurious English home, what a sudden fountain of sweetness must have opened to him in the prattle of the delightful child, which was a new revelation to his heart—revelation of all that kindred meant, and delightful intimacy and familiar love. His little star of life never waned to Swift: Stella grew old, but never outgrew the little language, and every young woman had something in her of the sprightly creature that loved to do his bidding, the P. P. T. who held her own, and put him upon his best behavior often, yet never was other than the “deelest little loque” whom he bantered and laughed at with soft tears of tenderness in his eyes. “Better, thank God, and M. D.’s prayers,” he says among the private scribbles of his daily diary, which neither she nor any one was ever meant to see. Nevertheless, even while he was writing this “Journal,” which is the record of a tender intimacy so remarkable, Swift was meddling with the education of another girl, incautiously, foolishly, who was not of the uninflammable nature of Stella, but a hot-headed, passionate creature who did not at all imagine that the mere
... delight he took
To see the virgin mind her book