Chapter VI: Part 6

Gulliver’s travels were Swift’s travels, disguised with Swift’s wit, loaded with Swift’s hate. He gave years to them, as to nothing else he ever wrote about, five or six years thinking of them as Martin Scriblerus’s travels, nearly as long thinking of them as Gulliver’s or his own. “I am now writing a History of my Travels,” Swift told Ford in April 1721, “which will be a large volume, and gives account of countries hitherto unknown; but they go on slowly for want of health and humour.” By December of that year Bolingbroke knew about them. “I long to see your Travels; for, take it as you will, I do not retract what I said, and will undertake to find in two pages of your bagatelles more good sense, useful knowledge, and true religion than you can show me in the works of nineteen in twenty of the profound divines and philosophers of the age.” In June 1722 Vanessa had read something about the giants. In January 1724 Swift was near the end. “I have left the Country of Horses,” he wrote to Ford, “and am in the Flying Island, where I shall not stay long, and my two last journeys will soon be over.” In July 1725 Bolingbroke referred to the pigmies and giants of which he had heard. In August, Swift wrote to Ford: “I have finished my Travels, and am now transcribing them. They are admirable things, and will wonderfully mend the world.”

In September, after a summer at Sheridan’s house in the country, Swift wrote to Pope: “I have employed my time, besides ditching, in finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing my Travels, in four parts complete, newly augmented, and intended for the press when the world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be found brave enough to venture his ears.” Thereafter all Swift’s friends waited to see how he would, as he said, “vex the world rather than divert it.” They could be sure he had written more than a story of imaginary voyages in a book. This would be Swift’s revenge.

In the days of the Scriblerus Club it had been planned that Martin on his first voyage should be carried “by a prosperous storm to a discovery of the ancient Pygmean empire”; on his second should be “happily shipwrecked on the land of the giants, the most humane people in the world”; on his third should reach a “kingdom of philosophers who govern by the mathematics”; and on his fourth should, among beings not yet named, “display a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust of his species.” These plans had broken up with the Club. Returning to this theme, Swift saw that the bungling Martin would no longer serve. If he were to be the traveller, much of the folly of the narrative would have to appear in his misadventures. Better to let the traveller be a plain, reasonable, unimaginative man who would report what he had seen in the language of common sense.

Swift’s nature included such a Gulliver. It included, too, an observer as alien to what went on around him as Gulliver could be on his most distant, most surprising island. “My disaffection to the world ... has never varied from the twenty-first ... year of my life.” Disaffection, singularity, had driven Swift, no less than most men, to think of himself as playing various rôles. At Kilkenny and Trinity he had been a tragic hero, neglected and abused by fortune. At Moor Park he had been a scholar in a garden, despising the rabble of wits and pedants. At Laracor he had been a soldier in a garrison, when there were wars elsewhere. In London he had been the conscience and voice of ministers, insisting upon order and virtue in the state. In Dublin, exiled, he had turned from governing to resisting and had made himself the hammer of tyrants. Now he was a creature of a different race, thrown among men, full of antipathy for them, but full also of a scornful curiosity.

It was the best rôle he ever found. Without once taking ship to the corners of the earth as Gulliver did, Swift had moved about at home too large for the pigmies, too small for the giants, too sensible for the philosophers, too human for the animals. He had never been able quite to adjust himself to the scale of life as other men lived it. Other men, even when they had the pride of distinction, could submit. Swift could not. As if he were really an alien to the race, he had been obliged, whether he chose or not, to feel and act alien. Only once in more than fifty years had he found an occupation which truly involved him, and that only while a short delusion lasted. He had been unwilling to take a wife, though women desired and loved him. He had compromised so far as to have friends, but he was always conscious of the exceptions he was making. “I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is towards individuals.... But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years.... Upon this great foundation of misanthropy ... the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I will never have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion.”

If he had been fully alien he would not have troubled himself to be a missionary. He was a man to the extent that he was a moralist as well as a misanthrope. He would cure if he could. If not, he would punish. “Drown the world! I am not content with despising it, but I would anger it if I could with safety.” Here was the flaw in his misanthropy. Here was the strain of humanity through which he could be fretted and hurt. Here was the deep source of his fury. But he was alien enough to feel, dramatically, that he was only a traveller in strange lands.

Yet Swift was not a Timon, bawling and railing. Swift’s misanthropy was in his constitution, not in his disposition. His friends spoke always of his sweetness, his charm, his delightful temper, his hearty affections, his honest generosity. He had about him a magic almost like beauty’s magic. Nor did they think of him as morose and surly, whatever he said about himself. “Gulliver is a happy man,” said the experienced Arbuthnot, “that at his age can write such a merry work.” Swift on his travels could no more help the wit on his tongue than he could help the detestation in his heart.

He was as ingenious as he was grave. He took pains, with a few slips, to draw his pigmies and giants to scale, the pigmies an inch to a human foot, the giants a foot to a human inch. He deftly commandeered the inventions of earlier writers: Philostratus, Lucian, Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac, Perrot d’Ablancourt, Tom Brown. The nautical terms paraded in the voyage to Brobdingnag were copied almost word for word from a mariner’s handbook. Swift did not disdain to parody contemporary travellers. Whereas a mere misanthrope would have clamoured, a mere moralist would have scolded, Swift, being a wit, was satisfied to tell a story, pretending that he was a spectator who had no share in what he told. There were the characters, there were the incidents. They could be understood by anybody who had an understanding.

Consider the insectile people of Lilliput. Swift, in the guise of Gulliver, was at first received with dread, then with wonder, then with hospitality. Though they kept him a prisoner, they let him into the secrets of the Court and of the government, which were preposterously like England’s. The Lilliputian ministers to commend themselves to the king capered before him on a tight-rope. Gulliver, whose mind was part of Swift’s, remembered larger ministers. Flimnap, who could caper an inch higher than any other lord in the empire, seemed remarkably like Walpole. The great men of Lilliput who sought honours from their king competed, by jumping over a stick held in his hand, for silken threads six inches long, one blue, one red, one green, which reminded Gulliver of the Order of the Garter, of the Bath, and of the Thistle.

Lilliput and the neighbouring Blefuscu had long been at war. A Lilliputian schism was the cause. Formerly all the people had broken their eggs at the larger end. One of their kings, having cut his finger on the larger end of one of his eggs, had by royal edict made the smaller end orthodox. There had been a civil war. Some of the defeated conservatives had fled to Blefuscu and had there found refuge and favour at the court. England, Gulliver reflected, had been entirely Catholic before Henry VIII. The Catholic Pretender had fled to France, and France had long been at war with England.

Grateful for the kindness shown him, Gulliver aided Lilliput in its war by capturing the Blefuscudian fleet and bringing it as a gift to his royal host. But the Lilliputians were no more grateful in return than the English had been to the Oxford ministry for ending the war with France. One party among the pigmies insisted that Blefuscu be subjugated to a province with a viceroy, as some of the Whigs had insisted France might be. The sourest of the tiny ministers became Gulliver’s enemy, as the dismal Nottingham had become Swift’s.

Gulliver’s chief offence was that, when a fire broke out in the queen’s apartment at the palace, he extinguished it in a manner more natural to him than agreeable to the queen. Had not Queen Anne implacably resented the spattering ridicule which Swift had let fall upon what he thought was menacing the Church and State? Thereafter the position of Gulliver in Lilliput was hopeless. The cabinet decided he must die. The friendly minister Reldresal, who may have stood for Carteret, thought it would be enough to blind Gulliver and allow him to starve to death.

From that compromise Gulliver escaped to Blefuscu, and back to England, knowing that the smallest people in the world had all the familiar follies and vices of mankind in general.

Next Swift, as Gulliver, was blown to the giants of Brobdingnag, that humane people. It was his turn to be insectile. He was exhibited as a toy freak by the kind, greedy farmer who had found him. Scientists wondered what species he could belong to. The king, being a philosopher, supposed that such creatures as Gulliver “have their titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and burrows that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray.” And when Gulliver had defended his species by an account of their government and politics, their wars and luxuries, the king, being a humane philosopher, concluded “your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

He himself abominated mystery, refinement, and intrigue in governors. He limited government “to common sense and reason, to justice and lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes.” He held that “whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind ... than the whole race of politicians put together.” Gulliver, or Swift, sardonically despaired of such a monarch. His people were no better. Their learning was only in morality, history, poetry, and useful mathematics. They were unable to form conceptions of what Gulliver meant by “entities, abstractions, and transcendentals.” They were dull with virtue and peace.

Gulliver found in their habits less to remind him of England than he had found in Lilliput. His story was taken up with the ingenious shifts by which he got along among them. But after the giants he could not so easily return to the old scale of life as he could after the pigmies. His own people seemed contemptible by their smallness. He was twice as far from mankind as he had been before.

Swift’s, Gulliver’s, third voyage seems to have been to the Country of Horses, but when he told the story he saved that for the venomous conclusion and in the third place put the account of the Flying Island and the continent which was topsy-turvy with philosophers.

Once more, as in Lilliput, he was often reminded of Europe. The name of Laputa was like the Spanish for harlot. The island, when its rulers wished, could hover over stubborn cities and shut out the sun, as England shut out the sun from Ireland. Whether aloft or on land the people were rapt in abstruse speculations or abandoned to fantastic projects. Among the islanders nobody spoke sense except, possibly, the tradesmen, women, and children. The others were so many pedants exaggerated from the breed that Swift had detested in his earliest satires. The Academy of Lagado was a Bedlam of Science, where men wore out their lives trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, to build houses downward from the roofs in the fashion of the bees and spiders, to plow fields only with the snouts of hogs, to make silk from spider webs, to cure colic with a pair of bellows, to soften marble for pincushions, to propagate naked sheep, to write books by a mechanical device, to discover painless methods of taxation.

Gulliver grew dizzy. He lacked the head, as Swift did, for this whirling universe. It did not steady him when, on the neighbouring island of Glubbdubdrib, he was allowed to call up the spirits of the famous dead and found how falsely they had been presented in history. It did not steady him when in Luggnagg he learned of the immortal struldbrugs, for whom immortality was only human life prolonged to an infinity of horrible old age. “I ... thought,” said Gulliver, for Swift, “that no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure from such a life.” When he was out of the mad lands of Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, and Luggnagg, he was nearly upside down, giddy, and three times as far from mankind.

Now for the antipodes of misanthropy. Among the Houyhnhnms Gulliver was almost undisguisedly Swift. The day on which Gulliver set sail from Portsmouth was the precise day of September 1710 on which Swift had arrived in London to make his fortune with the new men in power. Gulliver’s discovery of an island where the horses were as much wiser and nobler as they were stronger than the men was such a discovery as Swift may have made as he rode through desolate, beggarly Ireland.

It is easy to guess, though only to guess, that the device came to his mind on that dark expedition to the south in the summer of 1723 after Vanessa’s death. Everywhere he saw the “savage old Irish,” “miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape,” living “in the utmost ignorance, barbarity, and poverty, giving themselves wholly up to idleness, nastiness, and thievery,” “brought up to steal or beg for want of work,” so that to them “death would be the best thing to be wished for both on account of themselves and the public.” Swift had not yet reached the point where he could take up the cause of these miserable victims. He felt chiefly a sick repulsion. He would not admit that they and he were of the same kind. At least they must belong to a tribe which had degenerated till they were less than beasts.

Less than beasts? Compare them with his horse, healthy, patient, without follies or vices, incapable of pride. Horses, the animals Swift had most to do with and knew best, were more fit to rule than degraded men. Suppose some traveller should find a country where the horses did rule. Suppose Gulliver were to find it. The Scriblerus Club had not decided what race Martin was to visit on his fourth voyage, only that he was to “display a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust of his species.” Nothing could disgust a traveller, even wholesome Gulliver, more than to study the horrid antics of a debased human tribe in the company of utopian horses who could see little difference between him and those apish copies. Gulliver had been disgusted among the giants when the maids of honour laid him against their terrible breasts. That had been only a shrinking of his senses. Now his soul itself must shrink with an absolute antipathy from which he could not recover. When he came back he would prefer the horses of England to the men.

With something like these gathering plans, though they must be guessed at, in something like this mood, which is certain enough, Swift rode through the south and west. In September he was in Dublin again. By the next January he had “left the Country of Horses.”

On his icy, fiery travels among the Houyhnhnms Swift (why call him Gulliver?) did not bother to observe such stinging likenesses to particular English persons and episodes as he observed among the pigmies and the philosophers. The last of his adventures was the simplest, as it was the most deadly. All actual fantasy, all apparent fact.

He came upon his first Yahoos without realizing that they were inferior men and upon his first Houyhnhnms without realizing that they were superior horses. When he found himself taken for a Yahoo he hurried to tell his Houyhnhnm master about Europe. He told him of wars, their causes, means, and ends; of litigation and the arts of lawyers; of money, and of poverty and riches; of luxury and dissipation; of diseases and their remedies; of ministers of state and noblemen. The reasonable Houyhnhnm said he had noticed the rudiments of all these human ways of life among the Yahoos.

They had their tribal and civil wars. They hoarded shining stones which they could not use, fought over them, and sometimes lost them to bystanders who snatched them away as expertly as any lawyer. They gorged themselves with food and sucked a root that made them drunk. They had the only diseases in the country, because of their gluttony and filth. They had in most herds a sort of ruling Yahoo, always deformed in body and mischievous in disposition, who continued in office till a worse could be found. They were lewd and promiscuous. They were invariably dirty and sometimes splenetic. They had, it appeared, all the human vices except unnatural appetites, these “politer pleasures” not having occurred to them. They were unteachable because they were perverse and restive, but they had the brains to be cunning, malicious, treacherous, revengeful, insolent, abject, and cruel. It was plain to the Houyhnhnm who talked with Swift that the visitor was a Yahoo after all. That “small pittance of reason” which by some accident had been given to the European Yahoos they used only to multiply their natural corruptions and to acquire new ones not supplied by nature.

To be fully reasonable was to be like the Houyhnhnms. They did not know what lying was. They affirmed or denied only when they were certain. Their two principal virtues were friendship and benevolence, felt towards the whole species without partiality except where there were special virtues to attract them. In marriage they were without jealousy, fondness, quarrelling, or discontent. The young of both sexes were brought up in moderation, industry, exercise, and cleanliness. Their only government was an annual council of the entire nation. They had no literature except poems composed, not written down, in praise of virtue. They were skilful workmen in the necessary arts, but wasted no time on superfluity or show. Reasonably born and bred, they lived reasonably without passions and died reasonably without sickness or fear.

“At first, indeed, I did not feel that natural awe which the Yahoos and all other animals bear towards them; but it grew upon me by degrees, much sooner than I imagined, and was mingled with a respectful love and gratitude that they would condescend to distinguish me from the rest of my species. When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or human race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in shape and disposition.” Swift would have remained with the Houyhnhnms for ever if they had not sent him away. The beasts could not tolerate a man. Nor could a man who had lived among the beasts ever again live among men without disgust.

The fourth voyage marked the peak of Swift’s fury and of his art. Great as that art was, it could not quite conceal that fury. The narrative might seem, however fantastic, to be the very mathematics of misanthropy, never looser than a syllogism. But the cold tread of intellect was repeatedly broken by the rush of nerves. The most reasonable sentence might suddenly throb with words of a shuddering hate. “Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European army, confounding the ranks, overturning the carriages, battering the warriors’ faces into mummy by terrible yerks from their hinder hoofs.” Intellect would have been satisfied with beating the European Yahoos down; nerves, furious and yet frightened at their own desperation, must imagine battering the noisome faces into mummy. Nothing less than an agonized antipathy could have made Swift remark that the female Yahoo who embraced Gulliver was not red-haired, “which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular,” but “black as a sloe”--or as Stella. Hate possessed him as love possesses some other men.

If he had been a lover of his kind he might have been hot with praises for the lofty merits which he found in them, and might have seen the world smirk at his tribute. Instead, he was a hater. Was there not as good an excuse for hating as for loving? Was it any less accurate to perceive ugliness, deformity, vice, stupidity, loathsomeness in the human race than to perceive beauty, grace, virtue, wit, charm? Swift would have known that these were absurd questions, asked to no purpose. Mankind would always answer them for its own comfort, which demands that love must be, in moral arguments, preferred to hate. The crowded tribes of the earth lived too precariously to welcome the hate, however instinctive, which might come among them to separate man from man, tribe from tribe, man from tribe. Only in the warmth of love could they live together. If the Swifts of the world must hate they must live alone, even if what they hated, as with Swift, was hate itself, along with cruelty, avarice, oppression, filth, intemperance, presumption.

All this Swift had learned. But he had no choice. His nature insisted upon taking its revenge as a coiled spring insists upon uncoiling as soon as it is free. He had travelled through the world. He would tell the whole truth about his travels.

2

A man who had been around the world and under it might after twelve years of banishment venture from Ireland to London. Swift’s friends had never ceased urging him to visit them again. He would only now and then allow himself to think of it.

“What can be the design of your letter but malice,” he wrote to Gay in January 1723, “to wake me out of a scurvy sleep, which however is better than none?... I shall not be able to relish my wine, my parsons, my horses, nor my garden for three months, until the spirit you have raised shall be dispossessed. I have sometimes wondered that I have not visited you, but I have been stopped by too many reasons, besides years and laziness, and yet these are very good ones. Upon my return after half a year amongst you there would be to me _desiderio nec pudor nec modus_. I was three years reconciling myself to the scene and the business to which fortune has condemned me, and stupidity was what I had recourse to. Besides, what a figure should I make in London, while my friends are in poverty, exile, distress, or imprisonment, and my enemies with rods of iron? Yet I often threaten myself with the journey, and am every summer practising to ride and get health to bear it. The only inconvenience is that I grow old in the experiment.”

But in November 1724, Oxford having died, Oxford’s son invited Swift to come to England to write the biography which he had proposed. “There would be nobody more welcome to me than yourself. You should live in your own way and do just what was most agreeable to you. I have houses enough; you shall take your choice.” By September 1725 Swift had his Travels ready to be printed. With two such reasons for going he had no excuse for staying. His friends urged him with fresh tenderness and wit.

“I have often imagined to myself,” Pope wrote in October, “that if ever all of us met again, after so many varieties and changes, after so much of the old world and of the old man in each of us has been altered, after there has been such a new heaven and a new earth in our minds and bodies that scarce a single thought of the one, any more than a single atom of the other, remains just the same--I have fancied, I say, that we should meet like the righteous in the millennium, quite in peace, divested of all our former passions, smiling at all our own designs, and content to enjoy the kingdom of the just in tranquillity.”

Arbuthnot, just recovering from a nearly fatal illness, had intended to add a postscript to Pope’s letter. He was so moved by what Swift had said--“Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my Travels”--that he wrote a letter of his own. “For God’s sake do not tantalize your friends any more. I can prove by twenty unanswerable arguments that it is absolutely necessary you should come over to England; that it would be committing the greatest absurdity that ever was not to do it the next approaching winter. I believe, indeed, it is just possible to save your soul without it, and that is all.”

Some feverish disorder kept Swift “sitting like a toad in a corner of his great house” for a part of that winter, but he had set his mind on England for the spring. “If you do not know me when we meet,” he told Pope, “you need only keep one of my letters and compare it with my face, for my face and letters are counterparts of my heart.” About the middle of March he was in London, in the best of health and spirits, Pope said, and “the joy of all here who know him, as he was eleven years ago.”

There were two weeks of joyful, leisurely reunion. Pope left his villa for Swift’s lodgings. Arbuthnot “led him a course through the town” with such new men of fashion as Lord Chesterfield and William Pulteney (later the Earl of Bath). Harcourt and Peterborough made plans to introduce him to Walpole; Pope, though Arbuthnot got ahead of him, to the household of the Prince of Wales through Mrs. Howard, the Princess’s confidante. Swift visited Bolingbroke and Pope in the country, and by the first of April was ready, with Pope, “to ramble to Lord Oxford’s and Lord Bathurst’s and other places.” Pope found his guest “the best-natured and most indulgent man I know.”

Swift had come into a world as strange to him as the world he had found in 1710. Though the Whigs were in power, they were not the Whigs he had known. Somers, Halifax, Wharton, and Addison were dead. Congreve was alive, but gouty and almost blind. Steele was alive, but in Wales and paralyzed. The Tories Swift had known were scattered. Oxford had died, Ormond had settled in Spain, Bolingbroke, though pardoned and again in England, was excluded from the House of Lords. The Society of Brothers no longer dined together, men of influence with men of wit. Prior was dead.

Only in what had once been the Scriblerus Club was London much the same as Swift had left it, except that Parnell too was dead. Bolingbroke, formerly a kind of honorary member, now gave his time to philosophizing near Uxbridge about the uses of retirement and scheming how to get back in power. Pope, having made a fortune out of Homer, had retired to his house and grotto at Twickenham and was brewing poison for the dunces. Gay, with a small sinecure and lodgings in the palace at Whitehall, was completing the fables which he wrote for Prince William, son of the Prince of Wales. Arbuthnot, still as always a man of learning, virtue, sense, and wit, called his house in London Martin’s office, though the Scriblerus Club had given up its regular meetings.

Swift, being Swift, could not withhold himself from politics. The authorities in Ireland warned the authorities in England to watch out for him. Walpole, who may have wanted to win Swift over and who may have wanted merely to learn about Irish affairs, invited Swift to dine with him at Chelsea and later to call on him in London. First and last they were at deadlock, however, though scandal buzzed about a treaty between them. Walpole’s opinions concerning Ireland, Swift said, “I could not reconcile to the notions I had of liberty.” “I was neither offered nor would have received” any promotion “except upon conditions which would never be granted.” By the end of April he was “weary of being among ministers whom I cannot govern, who are all rank Tories in government and worse than Whigs in Church, whereas I was the first man who taught and practised the direct contrary principle.” If he had any hope it was in the opposition being organized by Pulteney and Sir William Wyndham, with the help and advice of Bolingbroke, and with the name of the Patriots. But Swift’s old zest, perhaps his old delusion, had gone.

“This is the first time I was ever weary of England and longed to be in Ireland,” he wrote to Sheridan. “But it is because go I must, for I do not love Ireland better nor England, as England, worse. In short, you all live in a wretched, dirty doghole and prison, but it is a place good enough to die in. I can tell you one thing, that I have had the fairest offer made me of a settlement here that one can imagine, which if I were ten years younger I would gladly accept, within ten miles of London and in the midst of my friends. But I am too old for new schemes, and especially such as would bridle my freedoms and liberalities.”

This was Swift’s way of saying that though some unknown patron had offered him a pleasant living in England, and it tempted him, he actually preferred Ireland, where he could be, as Dean, independent and liberal. He was closer to Ireland than he would admit. He did not during his stay in England even find time to go through the Oxford papers among which he had once thought he wanted to live over the days of his power, writing the history of the minister he had served and loved.

But if public affairs were disappointing, friendship and wit, for which Swift had his genius, were all he had looked forward to. His friends would not take his politics too seriously. “I hope,” Bolingbroke wrote to “the three Yahoos of Twickenham, Jonathan, Alexander, John,” “Jonathan’s imagination of business will be succeeded by some imagination more becoming a professor of the divine science _la bagatelle_.” During May and June Swift was as cheerful as he ever urged others to be. He was at Twickenham with Gay and Pope, content to let the world go its way if they could laugh at it. “Mr. Pope ... prescribes all our visits without our knowledge, and Mr. Gay and I find ourselves often engaged for three or four days to come, and we neither of us dare dispute his pleasure.” Bolingbroke and Bathurst were not far away. Congreve came out to dinner. Mrs. Howard had a house at Marble Hill. The Prince of Wales’s court left London for Richmond where Swift made it his habit, as he put it, “to sponge a breakfast once a week.”

The days were as busy, if not as weighty, as they had been for Swift when he spent them with the Ministry, but in the evenings he played backgammon with Pope’s mother. Pope, Gay, and Swift went off for two weeks on horseback, to Lord Cobham’s house at Stowe, to Bathurst’s house at Cirencester, probably to Windsor Forest. Pope and Swift seem to have helped Gay with a ballad which he wrote at the inn at Wokingham. All three of them agreed upon a volume or volumes of miscellanies in which, as Pope described it, they were to “look like friends, side by side, serious and merry by turns, not in the stiff forms of learned authors, flattering each other and setting the rest of mankind at naught, but in a free, unimportant, natural, easy manner, diverting others just as we diverted ourselves.”

At the same time, Twickenham saw them working upon bigger schemes. Gay had his fables, taking from the behaviour of animals the rules for human conduct which he wittily versified for the little prince. Pope, angry at the spiteful dunces who had envied his success, was paying them off in a satire. Swift at first had thought they hardly deserved it. “Take care the bad poets do not outwit you, as they have served the good ones in every age, whom they have provoked to transmit their names to posterity.” Swift himself almost never mentioned fools by name when he slaughtered them in prose or verse, unless the slaughter were political. But when he read Pope’s satire he changed his mind, as Pope had now changed his. Pope was going to burn the verses. Swift saved them from the fire. When three such wits had come together they might as well all whip the world. Let Gay have his moral animals, and Pope his dunces. Swift would take mankind.

They read and discussed his Travels. Pope and Swift thought of means of publishing the book so stealthily that there would be no danger of prosecution. The printer, having seen a quarter of it, agreed to pay within six months the two hundred pounds which Pope made Swift demand. Only after Swift had left England the middle of August did the printer receive the manuscript, “he knew not whence, nor from whom, dropped at his house in the dark from a hackney coach” in which it is likely that the mystifying Pope enjoyed his subterfuge.

Secret enough, but not half as secret as Swift was about something dearer to him than any book. From the beginning of his visit he was worried about Stella, who was very sick at home but tried to keep the news from him. “I have these two months seen through Mrs. Dingley’s disguises,” Swift wrote in July. Early in that month he heard that Stella was in danger. Though it destroyed his peace, he said nothing to his friends in England. Bolingbroke knew that Swift had a friend called Stella and gallantly assumed she was his mistress. To Pope and Gay and Arbuthnot she was at most only a vague shape in Ireland. Neither at Twickenham nor at Whitehall, where Swift later lived with Gay, was she more than that. Swift, so long used to discretion where Stella was concerned, showed them a wit’s face, not a lover’s heart. But his letters to his friends in Ireland made plain how his grief had shaken him.

“What you tell me of Mrs. Johnson I have long expected, with great oppression and heaviness of heart. We have been perfect friends these thirty-five years. Upon my advice they both came to Ireland and have been ever since my constant companions; and the remainder of my life will be a very melancholy scene when one of them is gone whom I most esteemed upon the score of every good quality than can possibly recommend a human creature.... My heart has been so sunk that I have not been the same man, nor ever shall be again, but drag on a wretched life till it shall please God to call me away.... I wish it could be brought about that she might make her will....

“Think how I am disposed while I write this, and forgive the inconsistencies. I would not for the universe be present at such a trial of seeing her depart. She will be among friends that upon her account and great worth will tend her with all possible care, where I should be a trouble to her and the greatest torment to myself. In case the matter should be desperate I would have you advise, if they come to town, that they should be lodged in some airy, healthy part and not in the deanery, which besides, you know, cannot but be a very improper thing for that house to breathe her last in. This I leave to your discretion, and I conjure you to burn this letter immediately, without telling the contents of it to any person alive.

“Pray write me every week, that I may know what steps to take; for I am determined not to go to Ireland to find her just dead or dying. Nothing but extremity could make me familiar with those terrible words, applied to such a dear friend. Let her know I have bought her a repeating gold watch, for her ease in winter nights. I designed to have surprised her with it, but now I would have her know it, that she may see how my thoughts were always to make her easy. I am of opinion that there is not a greater folly than to contract too great and intimate a friendship, which must always leave the survivor miserable.... When you have read this letter twice, and retain what I desire, pray burn it and let all I have said lie only in your breast.

“Pray write every week.... I would rather have good news from you than Canterbury, though it were given me upon my own terms.”

What other lover who ever lived could, staggering with grief and dread, have talked about the terms of his lover’s will, measured her loss against the gain of an archbishopric, remembered that she must not die in his house, hesitated to go to her, and commanded that his anguish be kept secret?

“One of the two oldest and dearest friends I have in the world is in so desperate a condition of health as makes me expect every post to hear of her death. It is the younger of the two with whom I have lived in the greatest friendship for thirty-three years.... For my part, as I value life very little, so the poor casual remains of it, after such a loss, would be a burden that I must heartily beg God Almighty to enable me to bear; and I think there is not a greater folly than that of entering into too strict and particular a friendship, with the loss of which a man must be absolutely miserable, but especially at an age when it is too late to engage in a new friendship. Besides, this was a person of my own rearing and instructing, from childhood, who excelled in every good quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature.... Pardon me, I know not what I am saying. But believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting and as much engaging as violent love.”

Towards the end of July, Swift, at Twickenham, was one day answering a letter from Sheridan. “The account you give me is nothing but what I have some time expected with the utmost agonies, and there is one aggravation of constraint, that where I am I am forced to put on an easy countenance. It was at this time the best office your friendship could do, not to deceive me.... I look upon this as the greatest event that can ever happen to me, but all my preparations will not suffice to make me bear it like a philosopher, nor altogether like a Christian. There hath been the most intimate friendship between us from her childhood, and the greatest merit, on her side, that ever was in one human creature towards another. Nay, if I were now near her I would not see her. I could not behave myself tolerably, and should redouble her sorrow. Judge in what a temper of mind I write this. The very time I am writing I conclude the fairest soul in the world hath left its body.”

Just then Swift was interrupted. “Confusion! that I am this moment called down to a visitor, when I am in the country and not in my power to deny myself.”

He came back to his unfinished letter. “I have passed a very constrained hour, and now return to say I know not what. I have been long weary of the world, and shall for my small remainder of years be weary of life, having for ever lost that conversation which alone could make it tolerable. I fear while you are reading this you will be shedding tears at her funeral.”

In a week Swift knew that, no matter what he faced, he must go to Ireland. Pope, ignorant of the full reason, was so unwilling to lose his friend that he travelled with him to Chester. “I felt the extreme heat of the weather,” Pope said, “the inns, the roads, the confinement and closeness of the uneasy coach, and wished a hundred times I had either a deanery or a horse in my gift” to keep Swift in England or to make his journey more comfortable. But there were no words between them about Stella, as there were no words about her in any of the letters he wrote back to his English friends. Swift, so copious and eloquent about most of his passions, about this one was as quiet as a stone. Pope, who suspected something, risked only a hint in his wish that “you may find every friend you have there in the state you wish him or her.” Talking about everything else in the world the two great wits rode in the uneasy coach to Chester, where Swift was prepared to find mortal news waiting for him. The only word from him about her is in a letter to an Irish friend two months later. “Mrs. Johnson is much recovered since I saw her first, but still very lean and low.”

3

Pope wished “that your visits to us may have no other effect than the progress of a rich man to a remote estate, which he finds greater than he expected, which knowledge only serves to make him happier where he is, with no disagreeable prospect if ever he should choose to remove.” And Swift, coming home from his rich estate in London, was received, Arbuthnot said, like a Lord Lieutenant. When the ship was sighted in Dublin Bay the bells of the city were set to ringing. The Corporation, with less official citizens, went out in wherries to meet the “Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver.” The docks had bunting, every street a bonfire. The populace cheered their defender as he landed and rode to his gloomy house.

If Swift was human, as well as Swift, he was warmed by this loud affection. But they were the people who had hooted him when he came over to be Dean, before he had fought for them about their copper farthings. “I have often reflected in how few hours, with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown to him as the antipodes.” Between Swift and the Irish, or between him and any body of men, it was too late for reconciliation. He had been an alien all his life, and he had proved it in his Travels. There the world would soon have a chance to study its disgusting face.

_Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World_, published 28 October 1726 to vex the world rather than divert it, diverted it. Nobody spoke or apparently even thought of prosecution. “The politicians to a man agree,” Pope and Gay wrote to Swift, “that it is free from particular reflections, but that the satire on general societies of men is too severe.” Politicians were no more disposed than they were obliged to defend the human race against a libel. Mankind, invincibly abstract, invulnerably obtuse to general assaults, laughed. “From the highest to the lowest” the book was read, “from the cabinet council to the nursery.” The Princess of Wales did not care, probably did not know, that she was supposed to have sat for the Queen of Brobdingnag. She was delighted. The Duchess of Marlborough was “in raptures” and willing to forgive her old enemy. Arbuthnot saw that the book was to be a classic, and forecast for it “as great a run as John Bunyan.” The first impression was sold within a week. There were Dublin editions, and translations into French and Dutch within a year.

The third voyage, with its multiplied ridicule of pedants, pleased the least. That satire was too limited. Readers preferred to see all mankind in the refracting glass. Monkeys before a mirror, Swift might have said. They accepted the likenesses which they recognized, but they did not recognize those which might have vexed them. At least they did not take such likenesses to themselves. Untroubled by the satire, they enjoyed the story, so marvellous yet so circumstantial, so ingenious yet so simple. “Such a merry work,” Arbuthnot called it. Who was there who could fail to be diverted by these adventures among pigmies and giants, on an island that moved through the air, in a land where horses used men as beasts? Who minded that the traveller was a misanthrope? Misanthropy did not hurt its objects, so long as it confined itself to words.

Swift, accusing mankind of every vice and folly, had thought of it as more sensitive or less frivolous than it was. He let drive with all his pitiless force, and the world applauded his witty marksmanship.

Stella having for the time recovered, Swift went again the next April to England, where the Earl of Peterborough thought the Dean ran the risk of becoming a bishop. The second visit was an anticlimax. Swift made no progress with the life of Oxford. He was completely out of favour with Walpole. Twickenham, happily as Pope welcomed Swift there, was not what it had seemed before. It was pleasant to talk with Pope about his dunces. It was pleasant to read the verses of the opera which Gay, to whom Swift had said that “a Newgate pastoral might make an odd, pretty sort of thing,” was writing about rogues and beggars. It was pleasant to concoct their miscellanies, in which the poems to Stella were to appear. But it was unpleasant for Swift to be so deaf that he could hardly hear Pope’s feeble voice or have a share in the conversation of the friends who came to see them. Swift began to feel that he was a burden. He would go to London.

He would go to France. Voltaire gave him letters of introduction. Swift exchanged opinions with his French translator, telling him, in his French, that if the Travels were calculated only for the British Isles then the traveller was a pitiable writer. The same vices and the same follies, he said, reigned everywhere, at least in all the civilized countries of Europe; and the author who wrote only for one city, one province, one kingdom, or even one age so little deserved to be translated that he did not deserve to be read.

The death of George I and the accession to the throne of the Prince and Princess of Wales, who were the only royal friends Swift ever had, held him in England. Once more, and for the last time, he was disappointed. Walpole, after a fluttering interval, retained his power. Wit alone could not make a man a bishop.

Stella, it turned out, could not be well without Swift. He had left her settled in the deanery for the summer. In August Sheridan wrote that she was once more in danger. Swift, at the house of a kinsman in London, was helpless with his own malady.

“I walk like a drunken man, and am deafer than ever you knew me. If I had any tolerable health I would go this moment to Ireland. Yet I think I would not, considering the news I daily expect to hear from you.... I kept it [Sheridan’s letter] an hour in my pocket with all the suspense of a man who expected to hear the worst news that fortune could give him, and at the same time was not able to hold up my head.... I know not whether it be an addition to my grief or not, that I am now extremely ill; for it would have been a reproach to me to be in perfect health when such a friend is desperate. I do profess upon my salvation that the distressed and desperate condition of our friend makes life so indifferent to me, who by course of nature have so little left, that I do not think it worth the time to struggle. Yet I should think, according to what hath been formerly, that I may happen to overcome this present disorder. And to what advantage? Why, to see the loss of that person for whose sake only life was worth preserving.... What have I to do in the world? I never was in such agonies as when I received your letter and had it in my pocket. I am able to hold up my head no longer.”

Still Swift would not tell his English friends about Stella. His secret had been buried in him too long to be dug up now. Too much of his heart would have come with it. Suddenly leaving London in September he lurched across England to Chester. Offered a passage from Parkgate in the official yacht, he refused, thinking he would be in Ireland sooner if he rode through Wales and shipped from Holyhead. There the winds delayed him for a week, spent in the smoky rooms of an inn which had no decent wine to drink, no books to read, no customers who could speak English.

Morning and afternoon he walked in the wind on the rocks. “I was so cunning these three last days that whenever I began to rage and storm at the weather I took special care to turn my face towards Ireland, in hopes by my breath to push the wind forward. But now I give up.” Every night he dined alone, and had five dreary hours ahead of him before he went to bed. Sleep was no relief. He had fantastic dreams, such as that Bolingbroke was preaching in St. Patrick’s and quoting Wycherley in his sermon. Morning was no restoration. Swift looked for the wind to change, and it would not change. “I live in suspense, which is the worst circumstance of human nature.” There was nothing to do but “scribble or sit humdrum.” He scribbled prose and verse.

“_I never was in haste before
To reach that slavish hateful shore.
Before I always found the wind
To me was most malicious kind.
But now the danger of a friend
On whom my fears and hopes depend,
Absent from whom all climes are curst,
With whom I’m happy in the worst,
With rage impatient makes me wait
A passage to the land I hate._”

And when he finally got away the wind was so near a tempest that he was forced to land at Carlingford, sixty miles from Dublin, and complete his journey with “lazy dull horses.”

This time Stella, though comforted by his return, was dying. Swift would not say so to Pope, to whom Sheridan had secretly written the truth. Again Pope hinted his sympathy. “To your bad health I fear there was added some disagreeable news from Ireland which might occasion your so sudden departure.” Swift met the sympathy with a shield. His health, he said, had driven him home. “Here is my maintenance, and here my convenience.” He invited Pope to Dublin. “I have a race of orderly elderly people of both sexes at command who are of no consequence and have gifts proper for attending us, who can bawl when I am deaf and tread softly when I am only giddy and would sleep.” Six weeks later he repeated his invitation. “You may find about six rational, good, civil, learned, easy companions of the males; fewer of the females, but many civil, hospitable, and ready to admire and adore.”