Chapter II: Part 2

As Swift’s cause was partly unjust, so was his ground for this attack partly accidental. Temple, stalking in virtue, had taken sides in the controversy, then disturbing France, over the relative merits of the ancients and the moderns. He had pronounced like a gentleman for the ancients. “I know of no new philosophers,” Temple said, “that have made entries upon that noble stage for fifteen hundred years past, unless Descartes and Hobbes should pretend to it.... There is nothing new in astronomy to vie with the ancients, unless it be the Copernican system; nor in physic, unless Harvey’s circulation of the blood.... ’Tis agreed by the learned that the science of music so admired by the ancients is wholly lost in the world.... So as those two divine excellencies of music and poetry are grown, in a manner, but the one fiddling and the other rhyming.... What traces have we left of that admirable science or skill in architecture, by which such stupendous fabrics have been raised of old ... that they hardly fall within our imagination?... The arts of painting and statuary began to revive with learning in Europe, and made a great but short flight; so as, for these last hundred years, we have not had one master, in either of them, who deserved a rank with those that flourished in that short period.”

Temple could not know that Bach was then alive. Having refused the embassy to Spain, he had missed a possible chance to hear about Velasquez. But he might, except for his rank and preoccupations, have met Rembrandt in Holland or Molière in France or Milton in England. He had not. He could with a peaceful conscience, plausibly, courteously, and only now and then ironically, dismiss the moderns.

Perhaps the chief fault of modern learning, he concluded, was that so many of the learned were not quite men of the world. “The shallow, the superficial, and the sufficient among scholars” had attracted ridicule, “and very justly, by pretending to more than they had, or to more esteem than what they had could deserve, by broaching it in all places, at all times, upon all occasions, and by living so much among themselves, or in their closets and cells, as to make them unfit for all other business and ridiculous in all other conversations.” From this it had come about that true learning was confused with pedantry and that both suffered from the present mode of ridicule. “’Tis the itch of our age and climate, and has overrun both the Court and the stage; enters a House of Lords and Commons as boldly as a coffee house, debates of Council as well as private conversation; and I have known in my life more than one or two ministers of state that would rather have said a witty thing than done a wise one; and made the company laugh rather than the kingdom rejoice.”

This was Temple’s attitude, but so was it Swift’s. Though the _Battle of the Books_ and the _Tale of a Tub_ may have been planned at Kilroot and subsequently revised in London, they were the fruits, however unexpected, of that suave garden at Moor Park. Swift took the superiority of the ancients for granted, with nothing but ridicule for any modern who doubted it. The contemporary world of learning he assumed to be made up almost altogether of mean, starved, envious, strident, stingless fools and fops, ignorant and arrogant, who swarmed about their betters with a fly’s equal appetite for dung or honey.

Where Swift differed from Temple was where genius differs from talent, not in mere attitude but in art and passion. Temple had been content to survey the world in a smooth, stately exposition. Swift brought his arguments to England, and put them into stories which, in spite of their humorous allegory, slashed his victims with all the edges of realism. His ancients and moderns were actual warriors, brawling “on Friday last” in the King’s library. His criticism was comedy.

“Virgil appeared in shining armour completely fitted to his body. He was mounted on a dapple-grey steed, the slowness of whose pace was an effect of the highest mettle and vigour. He cast his eye on the adverse wing, with a desire to find an object worthy of his valour, when, behold, upon a sorrel gelding of a monstrous size, appeared a foe issuing from among the thickest of the enemy’s squadrons; but his speed was less than his noise; for his horse, old and lean, spent the dregs of his strength in a high trot which, though it made slow advances, yet caused a loud clashing of his armour, terrible to hear. The two cavaliers had now approached within the throw of a lance, when the stranger desired a parley, and, lifting up the vizard of his helmet, a face hardly appeared from within, which, after a pause, was known for that of the renowned Dryden. The brave Ancient suddenly started, as one possessed with surprise and disappointment together; for the helmet was nine times too large for the head, which appeared situate far in the hinder part, even like the lady in a lobster, or like a mouse under a canopy of state, or like a shrivelled beau from within the penthouse of a modern periwig; and the voice was suited to the visage, sounding weak and remote.”

Nor did the genius of Swift surpass the talent of Temple only by the reach of drama over debate. Temple, speaking of the wits, had said: “But the last maim given to learning has been by the scorn of pedantry, which the shallow, the superficial, and the sufficient among scholars first drew to themselves, and very justly” ... and then he had gone on to a mild simile of an infection in a town from which everybody stayed away. Swift, starting at the same point, with the compliment of imitation, made Temple look like the moon in the same sky with the sun: “But the greatest maim given to that general reception which the writings of our society have formerly received (next to the transitory state of all sublunary things) has been a superficial vein among many readers of the present age, who will by no means be persuaded to inspect beyond the surface and the rind of things; whereas, wisdom is a fox, who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out. It is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the coarser coat; and whereof, to a judicious palate, the maggots are the best. It is a sack-posset, wherein the deeper you go you will find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider because it is attended with an egg. But then lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth and pay you with nothing but a worm.”

Temple, reflective over “the vein of ridiculing all that is serious and good, all honour and virtue, as well as learning and piety,” had written a polite essay. Swift actively declared a war. His satires were like a tub thrown by seamen to a whale to keep it off the ship. Let the yelping wits and empty scholars butt and tumble the satires instead of harming the commonwealth.

The _Battle of the Books_ was a bagatelle, humorously secret about the outcome of the skirmish. So, too, the _Tale of a Tub_ did not trouble to complete the story of Peter and Martin and Jack, the three brothers who stood for the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the Dissenting churches. Swift still lacked, or was too unconcerned to use, the art which insists upon thorough and finished structure. Broken meats, he might have said, were fit enough for dogs. The tale itself, satirizing the abuses of religion, made up no more than a third of the whole book. The digressions, on the abuses of learning, were the larger and more varied part. Swift had been a scholar longer than he had been a clergyman.

It was his duty to defend his Church by cutting down its enemies. He was ruthless with the quibbles of theology, fanaticism, superstition, priestly greed and imposture. But he felt a more seasoned malice when he turned aside to prune and lop among the charlatans of wit whom he regarded as his own enemies. The strutting poets, the confident blind critics, the mercenary adulators and detractors, the treatise-mongers, the multipliers of dedications and prefaces and compendiums and commentaries and annotations and indexes, the proudly obscure writers: all these he ridiculed by the contemptuous device of praising them. Yet they were for him, at most, annoying creatures that he studied briefly before he trod on them. They had roused only his irritation. His hate, which after years of brooding had finally found the language natural to it, was for human life at large.

Temple had said, with a melancholy cadence: “When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and best, but like a froward child that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.”

Swift saw mankind with a colder eye. “If we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find that all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. And, first, with relation to the mind or understanding, ’tis manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can build nobler scenes and produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or nature will be at expense to furnish.... Again, if we take this definition of happiness and examine it with reference to the senses, it will be acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How fading and insipid do all objects accost us that are not conveyed in the vehicle of delusion! How shrunk is everything as it appears in the glass of nature! So that if it were not for the assistance of artificial mediums, false lights, refracted angles, varnish, and tinsel, there would be a mighty level in the felicity and enjoyments of mortal men.” Credulity, he argued, is better than curiosity, and it is better to accept the surfaces of life with the senses than to inquire deeper with the reason. “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.... He that can, with Epicurus, content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superficies of things; such a man, truly wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.”

To this judgment Swift had arrived at thirty in the shadow of Temple at Moor Park. The neat aim and witty sting of his sentences had less to do with his effects than the mind and passion which showed through his clear, hard words. What he said he meant, not partly but wholly; not with the momentary earnestness of a gesture but with the deep sincerity of a belief rooted in his constitution by his nature and his experience.

If ever Temple noticed the tiger in his garden he must have wondered. He might have asked whether it would not be wiser for Swift to smile at the childish world, and humour it till it slept. And Swift might have answered that it was beyond a tiger to look like a lamb with its soft wool, or sound like a lamb with its timid bleat, or skip like a lamb with its happy legs. Those were the lamb’s gifts. If the lamb was able to lead a cheerful life in a world of butchers, then it had the gift of being well deceived. But a tiger’s gifts were stripes and roars and claws angrier than swords. They did not carry with them the other gift of being deceived by butchers. The lamb could be caged, and would grow tame; it could be starved, and would die pitifully. But if the tiger were caged or starved it would strike back with all its deadly sinews. To ask a tiger to be serene in its trap and peaceful towards its captors was simply to ask it to be a lamb. It must be a tiger still.

The dry years of Swift’s dependence upon Temple came to an end with Temple’s death in January 1699. The satires had not yet been published, and Swift left Farnham for London with none of the reputation which they were to bring him. At Farnham, or soon in London, he wrote out a set of resolutions to warn him when he should be old, as he had lately seen his patron. Most of the resolutions were civil enough. He would not, he resolved, be severe with young people or force his company on them, as he would force on no one his advice or anecdotes. He would not be peevish, morose, suspicious, covetous, untidy, garrulous, boastful, positive, opinionative, or open to gossip or flattery. He would not be scornful of current ways or wits or fashions or men. He would not marry a young woman. In all these he might have been any young man taking prudent notes.

But in one of the resolutions he suddenly became Swift. “Not to be fond of children, or let them come near me hardly.” Stella had been a child. Had she, coming near him as a child, grown to be what made him feel that other children might also trouble him? Or was his resolution only a symptom of his general misanthropy, now so wary that it would not let mankind approach, even in its least hostile form, for fear of a weakening influence on the integrity of his hate? At least he had learned, however he loved the one, to hate the many. His whole history lay in the seed of that antithesis.

III

VICAR AND WIT

1

Joseph Addison, that year setting out to fit himself for service to England by travelling on the Continent, could have told Swift, if he had known him, how to rise in their world. Addison had lived on at Oxford into a fellowship. He had paid court to Dryden, and by Dryden had been recommended to Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and by Tonson to Congreve, and by Congreve to Charles Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by Montague to Somers, the Lord Chancellor, and by Somers to the King. At the University ready to take orders, the expectant parson had yielded to the claims of Montague upon those accomplishments and virtues which, Montague told the head of Addison’s college, were needed to offset the current depravity and corruption.

Dexterous in Latin and English verse, Addison was even more dexterous in his virtues. Though vain enough, he was not proud. He demanded little besides a reasonable prosperity and comfortable homage. He felt no anger because men were slow in recognizing merits which he had not yet shown. He did not too much mind playing at success as it was then played. He saw little repugnant in the rules and admired the winners. It had never struck him that the world was ruled by knaves; it had never struck him that only fools could be happy. Having taken what he found for what it was usually said to be, he was shortly to begin his travels with the approval, and at the expense, of his country.

Swift, with more genius than Addison, had less talent for success. In 1697 he had, presumably on the advice of Temple, put his hopes on the Earl of Sunderland, already tottering though still Lord Chamberlain. “My Lord Sunderland fell and I with him,” Swift wrote a few weeks later. “Since that there have been other courses, which if they succeed I shall be proud to own the methods, or if otherwise, very much ashamed.” All these schemes, whatever they were, had failed. With Temple dead, Swift had to trust to the Earl of Romney to urge upon the King the preferment which Temple had promised to obtain for his secretary. Romney, a friend to William in Holland before the Revolution, and supposed to have been “the great wheel on which the Revolution rolled,” turned out to have, Swift said, “not a wheel to turn a mouse.” “After long attendance in vain,” which was what Swift called a fruitless four or five months, he again went back to Ireland, in June 1699, chaplain and temporary secretary to the Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices.

Dublin was as disappointing as London. Berkeley refused to make Swift permanent secretary on the ground that he was a clergyman, and soon afterwards further refused to appoint him dean of Derry on the ground that he was too young. The man who had found Kilroot unendurable was in February 1700 assigned to another rustic living, at Laracor, seventeen miles from Dublin. Nor did it console him that he was made a prebendary of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and a doctor of divinity of Dublin University in February 1701. With all his pride and all his powers, he had been sent to what he thought a shabby garrison on an unimportant frontier of the Church.

His circumstances seemed now more interesting to Varina, still unmarried at Belfast. She wrote him a letter. He answered it in a language as cold as any that ever ended what had begun as a flirtation.

“You would know what gave my temper that sudden turn,” he said, “as to alter the style of my letters since I last came over. If there has been that alteration you observe, I have told you the cause abundance of times. I had used a thousand endeavours and arguments to get you from the company and place you are in; both on account of your health and humour, which I thought were like to suffer very much in such air and before such examples. All I had in answer from you was nothing but a great deal of arguing, and sometimes in a style so imperious as I thought might have been spared, when I reflected how much you had been in the wrong. The other thing you would know is whether this change of style be owing to the thoughts of a new mistress. I declare, upon the word of a Christian and a gentleman, it is not; neither had I ever thoughts of being married to any other person but yourself.” The cause of his change, he explained, was her indifference to his wishes and his opinions, particularly about her family. “I think ... that no young woman in the world of the same income would dwindle away her health and life in such a sink and among such family conversation. Neither have all your letters been once able to persuade me that you have the least value for me, because you so little regarded what I so often said upon that matter.... I think I have more cause to resent your desires of me in that case than you have to be angry at my refusals”--his refusals, it appears, to endure the Warings. “If you like such company and conduct, much good do you with them! My education has been otherwise.”

At the same time, he would tell her what he had told his uncle Adam in response to an inquiry which Swift implied had come circuitously from Varina: “that if your health and my fortune were as they ought, I would prefer you above all your sex; but that, in the present condition of both, I thought it was against your opinion, and would certainly make you unhappy; that, had you any other offers which your friends or yourself thought more to your advantage, I should think I were very unjust to be an obstacle in your way.” Since, however, her letter had showed her satisfied with his fortune, nothing now stood in the way of their felicity but her health. Nothing, that is, except his terms, which he reduced to questions.

“Are you in a condition to manage domestic affairs, with an income of less perhaps than three hundred pounds a year? Have you such an inclination to my person and humour as to comply with my desires and way of living and endeavour to make us both as happy as you can? Will you be ready to engage in those methods I shall direct for the improvement of your mind, so as to make us entertaining company for each other, without being miserable when we are neither visiting nor visited? Can you bend your love and esteem and indifference to others the same way as I do mine? Shall I have so much power in your heart, or you so much government of your passions, as to grow in a good humour upon my approach, though provoked by a ----? Have you so much good nature as to endeavour by soft words to smooth any rugged humour occasioned by the cross accidents of life? Shall the place wherever your husband is thrown be more welcome than courts or cities without him? In short, these are some of the necessary methods to please men who, like me, are deep-read in the world; and to a person thus made I should be proud in giving all due returns towards making her happy. These are the questions I have always resolved to propose to her with whom I meant to pass my life; and whenever you can heartily answer them in the affirmative I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without regarding whether your person be beautiful or your fortune large. Cleanliness in the first and competency in the other is all I look for.... I singled you out at first from the rest of women; and I expect not to be used like a common lover. When you think fit to send me an answer to this without ----, I shall then approve myself, by all means you shall command, Madam, your most obedient humble servant.”

It was as if a glacier had announced the course it meant to take down its valley. Swift possibly disliked the Warings no more than other men have disliked their prospective relatives. His terms were possibly no more ruthless than the assumptions on which other men have entered into marriage. But few men besides Swift can ever, in such a situation, have been so revealing and so unsparing. Varina had entertained him at tedious Kilroot. She had not known how to give up the roundabout arts of courtship for the forthright sciences of marriage. Her caution had humiliated him. Her advances now embarrassed him. Himself long past the time of languishing, he turned the truth loose upon the coquette. And Varina, who had, as Swift said of young ladies in general, spent her time in making a net instead of a cage, had had the misfortune to incur the frankness of the one man then alive who could put the most naked truth into the most naked words.

If Swift struck too hard for the occasion, it was no more than his dire intensity often forced him to do. His letter at least closed the episode. Varina, with these words before her, could understand that she was not dealing with a common lover, or with a lover at all.

A man who could demand so much of a wife, and say so to a woman, was no longer at any point in a man’s life where the odds are still on his marrying. About marriage Swift was frequently explicit. At twenty-five he declared that, to say nothing of his “cold temper and unconfined humour,” “the very ordinary observations I made with going half a mile beyond the University have taught me experience enough not to think of marriage till I settle my fortune in the world, which I am sure will not be in some years; and even then myself I am so hard to please that I suppose I shall put it off to the other world.... Among all the young gentlemen that I have known to have ruined themselves by marrying, which I assure you is a great number, I have made this general rule, that they are either young, raw, ignorant scholars who, for want of knowing company, believe every silk petticoat includes an angel, or else they have been a sort of honest young men who perhaps are too literal in rather marrying than burning.... I think I am very far excluded from listing under either of these heads. I confess I have known one or two men of sense enough who, inclined to frolics, have married and ruined themselves out of a maggot; but a thousand household thoughts, which always drive matrimony out of my mind whenever it chances to come there, will, I am sure, fright me from that; besides that, I am naturally temperate, and never engaged in the contrary which usually produces those effects.”

This may be taken to be the scorn of a young man who has not yet felt much desire or loneliness. But there is the later belief, cut to an axiom, that “no wise man ever married from the dictates of reason.” What then could beguile Swift into marriage, when, for all his passion, he had undertaken to live as faithfully under the dictates of reason as under the orders of the Church?

Swift, speaking of himself, seldom spoke less than the exact truth, though he often, by his harshness, said rather more. In the matter of marriage his course was, from first to last, as straight as was possible for a man fascinating to women and inclined to play with them when his powers were relaxed or his will checked. He had decided that, his fortunes being so much lower than his pride, and his health so much less than his strength, he would not marry except on some such extravagant terms as he proposed at thirty-three to Varina. He knew she would not accept them. Whether he realized it or not, he preferred his relationship with Stella to marriage with anybody else.

He turned out to prefer it to marriage with Stella. During the three or four years after he closed accounts with Varina, Swift came no doubt as near to marrying Stella as the great drive of his solitary ambition would let him. But he did not marry her, and he apparently found, as many men would find if they had the strength to test the principle, that what seems to be the need to marry, even a woman truly loved, is a panic impulse in a crisis. Swift, having survived the crisis which might have made him a husband, did not have to pay the customary price of losing the woman who might have become his wife. Stella was still the willing focus of that immense affection which turned the stare or scowl of hate to the rest of the world.

Only once more did he slip recklessly into his old amusement. Vanessa, infatuated and unceasing, threatened his solitude. He could not annihilate her with a letter or subdue her to friendship. He slackly let the affair drag on to a dreary and then vehement end. But still he did not break his straight course. He had not wanted to marry. He had not had to marry. He did not mean to marry. He had said as much to everybody whose business it could be.

Swift might have been believed if his course, no matter how straight, had also been usual: if he had spent his days in a cell; if, having failed to win some desired woman, he had desired no other; if he had run from woman to woman stopping nowhere long. Instead, he lived in the world, had as much of the women he wanted as he wanted of them, and was in many ways faithful to Stella. Gossip, bothered by what is unusual in the story, has tried to make it fit some more familiar pattern by imagining hidden circumstances which, if known, would show Swift to have been more like ordinary men. He may have been impotent, gossip suggests, and so avoided marriage out of vanity. He may have had syphilis, and so avoided marriage out of decency. He may, gossip even during his life went so far as to guess, have married Stella privately--without licence, witnesses, or record, when he was Dean of St. Patrick’s! But all these arguments, some of which have been twisted to coiling lengths, are still the hypotheses of gossip, one as good as another. Not one of them is as simple and sufficient as the conclusion that Swift, whom gossips could more easily think inadequate, dissolute, or secretive, was only, in marriage as in other matters, extraordinary.

2

Writing to Varina in May 1700 he swore that he then had no thoughts of another mistress or of another wife. As this was not a lover’s letter, this was hardly a lover’s oath, and may have meant what it said. But, as chaplain to Lord Berkeley, Swift was still, in a sense, a dependent; and at Laracor he saw he would be lonely. Of his three livings, Laracor and the incidental Agher and Rathbeggan, only Laracor had a church. Swift, arriving dejected and resentful, found himself doubtfully master of a scattered, monotonous territory with a dilapidated church and a vicarage and glebe not then fit to live in. The one pleasant thing about his post was that he could leave his duties in the hands of curates and himself live much of the time in Dublin lodgings. In April 1701 he went with Berkeley back to England, to remain there till September. And there he visited Stella at Farnham.

Her mother had married, or was to marry, another steward of Moor Park, and the daughter was living with another Temple dependent, Rebecca Dingley, on the income of a Temple legacy. “Her fortune,” as Swift told the story on the bitter, truthful night of Stella’s death, “at that time was in all not above fifteen hundred pounds, the interest of which was but a scanty maintenance, in so dear a country, for one of her spirit. Upon this consideration, and indeed very much for my own satisfaction, who had few friends or acquaintance in Ireland, I prevailed with her and her dear friend and companion, the other lady, to draw what money they had into Ireland, a great part of their fortune being in annuities upon funds. Money was then ten per cent in Ireland, besides the advantage of turning it, and all the necessaries of life at half the price. They complied with my advice, and soon after came over; but, I happening to continue some time longer in England, they were much discouraged to live in Dublin, where they were wholly strangers. She was at that time about nineteen years old, and her person was soon distinguished. But the adventure looked so like a frolic the censure held for some time, as if there were a secret history in such a removal; which, however, soon blew off by her excellent conduct.”

These are the known facts of Stella’s removal to Ireland. Nor was her life there less prudent than her going. She and Mrs. (that is, Miss) Dingley lived ordinarily in lodgings with their own servants. When Swift was at Laracor they lived in a cottage not far away or lodged in the neighbouring village of Trim. When he was in lodgings in Dublin they lodged elsewhere in town. Only, it seems, during his absences did they economize by living in the vicarage at Laracor or in his lodgings in Dublin. The relations between Stella and Swift were unwaveringly circumspect. No one knew that he made her an allowance of fifty pounds a year. “I wonder,” he wrote to a friend in 1726, “how you could expect to see Mrs. Johnson in a morning, which I, her oldest acquaintance, have not done these dozen years, except once or twice in a journey.” The afternoons or evenings which he spent with her are said never to have been without at least a third person.

She seldom made visits. “But her own lodgings,” Swift said, “from before twenty years old were frequented by many persons of the graver sort, who all respected her highly, upon her good sense, good manners and conversation.... And indeed the greatest number of her acquaintance was among the clergy.” At first she was extravagant, “and so continued till about two-and-twenty; when, by advice of some friends, and the fright of paying large bills of tradesmen who enticed her into their debt, she began to reflect upon her own folly.”

Did Stella, prudently setting out for Ireland at twenty, foresee so many clergymen? Could she without flares of rebellion give up her extravagance, even to “avoiding all expense in clothes (which she ever despised) beyond what was merely decent”? Had she in her nature no veins of natural folly waiting to be uncovered? Was there in her no longing for unreasonable adventures?

So far as marriage was concerned she knew, before too long, where Swift stood. Another of her clergymen, William Tisdall, himself began to court Stella. Finding how much authority Swift had with her, Tisdall wrote to him, then in London, hinting, it seems, that Swift had used his power in behalf of his own designs. Swift’s answer, in April 1704, left no doubt in Tisdall, nor in Stella, to whom Tisdall must have shown it.

_As a young woman_]

“I will, upon my conscience and honour, tell you the naked truth. First, I think I have said to you before that, if my fortunes and humour served me to think of that state, I should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice, because I never saw that person whose conversation I utterly valued but hers. This was the utmost I ever gave way to. And, secondly, I must assure you sincerely that this regard of mine never once entered into my head to be an impediment to you; but I judged it would, perhaps, be a clog to your rising in the world; and I did not conceive you were then rich enough to make yourself and her happy and easy. But that objection is now quite removed by what you have at present.... I declare I have no other; nor shall any consideration of my own misfortune of losing so good a friend and companion as her prevail on me against her interest and settlement in the world, since it is held so necessary and convenient a thing for ladies to marry; and that time takes off from the lustre of virgins in all other eyes but mine.”

Swift insisted that he had done nothing to stand in Tisdall’s way, and that he had indeed thought the affair too far along to be broken off; “since I supposed the town had got it in their tongues, and therefore I thought it could not miscarry without some disadvantage to the lady’s credit. I ... must add that though it hath come in my way to converse with persons of the first rank, and that sex, more than is usual to men of my level and of our function, yet I have nowhere met with a humour, a wit, or conversation so agreeable, a better portion of good sense, or a truer judgment of men and things. I mean here in England, for as to the ladies of Ireland I am a perfect stranger.... I give you joy of your good fortunes, and envy very much your prudence and temper, and love of peace and settlement; the reverse of which has been the great uneasiness of my life, and is like to continue so. And what is the result?... I find nothing but the good words and wishes of a decayed Ministry, whose lives and mine will probably wear out before they can serve either my little hopes or their own ambition. Therefore I am resolved suddenly to retire, like a discontented courtier, and vent myself in study and speculation, till my own humour or the scene here shall change.”

This was the same language as that Swift used after Stella’s death, when he called her “the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I or perhaps any other person ever was blessed with,” and said he could not remember that he had “ever once heard her make a wrong judgment of persons, books, or affairs.” He could then say also, out of his long experience, that she was “the most disinterested mortal I ever knew or heard of.” But his praise was for her intellectual, moral, and social virtues, as it had always been. Not a surviving syllable about her suggests desire. None comes nearer to it than his words that “she had a gracefulness somewhat more than human in every motion, word, and action.” And they were written for posterity when she was dead, not when she was twenty-three and he faced a rival.

Stella, scrutinizing the letter to Tisdall, could no more find a possible husband there than Varina had found in her letter four years earlier. Tisdall, however, was rejected.

And not a surviving syllable from Stella tells whether she knew of any barrier between her and Swift except the cold sword of his ambitious pride, or whether she struggled against fitting herself to the place he made for her, or whether she ever felt bitterness or regret. The discretion as native to her as to Swift protected her almost entirely from scandal, even in the mouths of his most loquacious enemies. He alone was blamed, for leaving her alone. Stella seems not to have blamed him. She preferred what she had of Swift to all she might have had of Tisdall or any other possible husband.

She knew that Swift’s devotion was partly his pride admiring itself in its glass. He trusted her judgment, which was a bright reflection of his own. He took her advice, which was coloured by what she deftly guessed to be his will. But she was no such replica in dough as might have bored him or might have shamed him into guilt for using her as he did. She was witty and lively, talked back to him, was charmingly perverse when he convinced her of her errors, and would not allow him to have a maid or housekeeper “with a tolerable face.” Stella gave him, when he was resisted elsewhere, the comfort of feeling over her that power without which his temper could not live. She saw, however, that she was a need as well as a comfort. She could feel an occasional thrill of power in her general peace of compliance.

For nearly a decade after Stella went to Ireland the record is so silent about her that she has to be guessed at. Then for three years during which Swift wrote his journal to her, his light brings her to life. After that, silence and obscurity, seldom broken till the light shines again in Swift’s grief over her last illness. She hardly lives except in his words.

Once, however, Swift’s mirror answered him. It was in an exchange of verses between them when she had been for twenty years his closest friend. His verses showed how little time had taken from her lustre in his eyes. He had never “admitted love a guest,” but he could imagine nothing beyond what he had had from their friendship.

“_In all the habitudes of life,
The friend, the mistress, and the wife,
Variety we still pursue,
In pleasure seek for something new;
Or else, comparing with the rest,
Take comfort that our own is best....
But his pursuits are at an end
Whom Stella chooses for a friend._”

And Stella, with verses of her own on Swift’s birthday, answered him in kind. It was “your pupil and your humble friend” who congratulated him. The sum of her praise was that he had taught her to value her mind more than her person.

“_When men began to call me fair,
You interposed your timely care.
You early taught me to despise
The ogling of a coxcomb’s eyes;
Showed where my judgment was misplaced;
Refined my fancy and my taste._”

Now, Stella gratefully assured him, she had a better fate than that of women “with no endowments but a face.”

“_You taught how I might youth prolong,
By knowing what was right and wrong;
How from my heart to bring supplies
Of lustre to my fading eyes;
How soon a beauteous mind repairs
The loss of changed or falling hairs;
How wit and virtue from within
Send out a smoothness o’er the skin.
Your lectures could my fancy fix,
And I can please at thirty-six._”

Yet in this reasonable tribute Stella let her rhyme coax her into a favourable prevarication. She was not thirty-six, but forty. She would still give herself a slight advantage when she pronounced her judgment on the frailty of beauty, which she had to endure, Swift only to observe. He had been, as she said, her early and her only guide. After so many years her verses and her words were, as much as her handwriting, like his. But with a betraying phrase she could still show a tenderness for that person which her philosopher had taught her to value less than her mind.

3

The conquest of Stella, absolute and lasting, gave Swift his only relief from his ambition. His outward life during these ten years in Ireland need not have been hateful to him if his pride had left him free to enjoy it. The income from his livings was perhaps not much over two hundred pounds a year, but it enabled him to rebuild the vicarage at Laracor and to lay out a garden. He had a stream straightened to resemble a canal and a willow-walk where he might remember Moor Park as Temple had remembered Holland. The parish duties were so slight that Swift could consider Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan as hardly more than sinecures, of which he took the pay and left the work to deputies. In Dublin, where besides being a prebendary of the Cathedral he was, after Berkeley’s recall, chaplain to the Duke of Ormond and the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Lieutenants, Swift was domestically allied with the rulers of the kingdom. Moreover, he was only once long out of England. He travelled back and forth over the anxious bridge of his expectations. In London he published the letters, essays, and memoirs which Temple had left to him. And there he soon took a commanding though scornful rank among the wits he ridiculed.

Swift always valued conversation, “so useful and innocent a pleasure, so fitted for every period and condition of life, and so much in all men’s power.” He went to such coffee houses as the Whig St. James’s and the more neutral Will’s. But he never thought of himself as belonging with the general army of the wits. “The worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life,” he said, “was that at Will’s coffee house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble. That is to say, five or six men who had writ plays, or at least prologues, or had share in a miscellany, came thither and entertained one another with their trifling composures, in so important an air as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them. And they were usually attended with an humble audience of young students from the inns of court or the universities, who, at due distance, listened to these oracles and returned home with great contempt for their law and philosophy, their heads filled with trash, under the name of politeness, criticism, and belles lettres.”

If now and then Swift unbent his powers and talked in clubs, played at cold hoaxes, or wrote verse, no longer Pindaric, it was in the mood of idleness which had formerly turned him to flirtations. His successes came not from the pains he took but from the natural skill of his strong mind set to work at trifles. He moved among the wits proudly, somewhat gigantic, somewhat ominous.

His interests were in public affairs, in the government of the realm, in the whole behaviour of mankind. He began to write about politics while he was still chaplain to Berkeley. The Lords and Commons were in abusive conflict. Large tracts of land in Ireland having been forfeited to the Crown after the Revolution, the King had made grants of it to his favourites and to a former mistress. In 1700 the Commons had voted to annul these grants and to make other grants to other favourites. The Lords had resisted, but had finally given way. Lord Somers, the Whig leader of the Ministry, had been so displeasing to the Commons that the King had forced him to resign. The majority in the Parliament of 1701 was Tory, as was the Ministry. The Tories, blaming William and his Whig advisers for their foreign policy, impeached Somers, Portland, Orford, and Halifax (lately Addison’s Charles Montague). The Lords supported the impeached peers. Swift, returning with Berkeley to England in April, saw in the conflict a danger to the state, and undertook a warning. He was still so near Moor Park that he came only slyly into the open in his discourse, full of modern parallels, on the dissensions between the nobles and commons in Athens and Rome.

But he wrote less like a philosopher than like a governor, contemptuous of political metaphysics. No doubt there ought to be a proper balance of power among the forces in a state; “although I should think that the saying _vox populi vox dei_ ought to be understood of the universal bent and current of a people, not of the bare majority of a few representatives, which is often procured by little arts and great industry and application; wherein those who engage in the pursuits of malice and revenge are much more sedulous than such as would prevent them.” How the universal bent and current of a people was to be recognized and encouraged Swift did not make plain. “Some physicians have thought that if it were practicable to keep the several humours of the body in an exact and equal balance of each with the opposite, it might be immortal; and so perhaps would a political body if the balance of power could be always held exactly even. But, I doubt, this is as impossible in practice as the other.”

In practice he found the populace always greedy and slippery. “When a child grows easy and content by being humoured; and when a lover becomes satisfied by small compliances, without farther pursuits; then expect to find popular assemblies content with small concessions.” “I think it is an universal truth that the people are much more dexterous at pulling down and setting up than at preserving what is fixed; and they are not fonder of seizing more than their own than they are of delivering it up again to the worst bidder, with their own into the bargain. For, although in their corrupt notions of divine worship they are apt to multiply their gods, yet their earthly devotion is seldom paid to above one idol at a time, of their own creation; whose oar they pull with less murmuring, and much more skill, than when they share the lading or even hold the helm.”

There was, Swift thought, no mysterious virtue in any gathering of men. “It is hard to recollect one folly, infirmity, or vice to which a single man is subjected and from which a body of commons, either collective or represented, can be wholly exempt. For, beside that they are composed of men with all their infirmities about them, they have also the ill fortune to be generally led and influenced by the very worst among themselves, I mean popular orators, tribunes, or, as they are now styled, great speakers, leading men, and the like. Whence it comes to pass that in their results we have sometimes found the same spirit of cruelty and revenge, of malice and pride, the same blindness and obstinacy and unsteadiness, the same ungovernable rage and anger, the same injustice, sophistry, and fraud that ever lodged in the breast of any individual.”

The evil to be avoided, Swift held, was the tyranny equally of the one, of the few, or of the many. But when the many are tyrants the tyranny of the one is not far off. “A usurping populace is its own dupe, a mere underworker, and a purchaser in trust for some single tyrant whose state and power they advance to their own ruin, with as blind an instinct as those worms that die with weaving magnificent habits for beings of a superior nature to their own.”

Any governor, reading Swift’s discourse, must have felt behind it a congenial mind and will. Swift might dread the tyranny of a king. He might even, as he later wrote, “prefer a well-instituted commonwealth before a monarchy.” But what he really dreaded was disorder. “If,” he said, “I should insist upon liberty of conscience, form conventicles of republicans, and print books preferring that government and condemning what is established, the magistrate would, with great justice, hang me and my disciples.” Better the certain magistrate than the uncertain mob. Swift was no less on the side of power because he wanted power himself. He regarded the demand for popular rights as a king might regard it: that is, as a mode of usurpation. He regarded the prospect of revolution as a general might regard it: that is, as a threat of mutiny. Let theorists be hanged. Though the end of government was liberty, the way to it did not lead through unrest. Unrest was itself the tyranny of the many, and it might at any time become the tyranny of the one. Liberty lay between these extremes. Mankind, unless it gave itself to dictatorship or to confusion, had to be governed by the few.

Not, however, by the casual few of birth or wealth. By the chosen few of knowledge, skill, and virtue. Swift did not say, at first or ever, how these few were to be chosen. Like all the men, in all the ages, who have held to this appealing doctrine, he assumed that the choice of governors ought to be as natural as it was logical. And, like most of them, he assumed that he belonged among the governors.

Rather, he assumed that he belonged beside them. Swift had already come to think of himself as first of all a churchman, not a statesman but the driving conscience of statesmen. Having delivered his warning in his pamphlet, written in London, he left it with the printer and went back to Ireland, to establish himself in Laracor. “The book was,” he says, “greedily bought and read; and charged sometimes upon my Lord Somers and some time upon the Bishop of Salisbury.” Associated at a distance with men so powerful, Swift, returning to England for the summer of 1702, and owning the authorship, came closer to the seats of power than he had ever come before. “My Lords Somers and Halifax, as well as the Bishop ... desired my acquaintance, with great marks of esteem and professions of kindness--not to mention the Earl of Sunderland, who had been of my old acquaintance. They lamented that they were not able to serve me since the death of the King; and were very liberal in promising me the greatest preferments I could hope for, if ever it came in their power. I soon grew domestic with Lord Halifax, and was as often with Lord Somers as the formality of his nature (the only unconversable fault he has) made it agreeable to me.”

Swift was, in his relations with the great, no country parson tickled with a dinner. He stood before them like a man there in his own right. “It was then I first began to trouble myself with the difference between the principles of Whig and Tory; having formerly employed myself in other and, I think much better, speculations. I talked often upon this subject with Lord Somers; told him that, having been long conversant with the Greek and Roman authors, and therefore a lover of liberty, I found myself much inclined to be what they called a Whig in politics; and that, besides, I thought it impossible, upon any other principle, to defend or submit to the Revolution. But as to religion I confessed myself to be a high churchman, and that I did not conceive how any one who wore the habit of clergyman could be otherwise.” A high churchman, and a haughty one. Though he might then prefer the Whigs to the Tories, his real allegiance was to the Church. He served it when he served whatever party favoured it. He was above the battle in which he fought. He looked for large rewards with the assurance of his calling as well as with the arrogance of his temper.