Chapter VII: Part 7

Nothing about Stella, who had admired and adored beyond almost any woman who ever lived. Nothing about Stella to any man during the four months left to her. But Swift in October and November wrote three prayers which he used in her last sickness.

“Give her grace to continue sincerely thankful to Thee for the many favours Thou hast bestowed upon her: the ability and inclination and practice to do good, and those virtues which have procured the esteem and love of her friends and a most unspotted name in the world.... We beseech Thee likewise to compose her thoughts and preserve to her the use of her memory and reason during the course of her sickness. Give her a true conception of the vanity, folly, and insignificancy of all human things.... Let not our grief afflict her mind and thereby have an effect on her present distempers. Forgive the sorrow and weakness of those among us who sink under the grief and terror of losing so dear and useful a friend.”

On a Sunday in January, when Swift had guests at his house, “about eight o’clock at night a servant brought me a note with an account of the death of the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I, or perhaps any other person, ever was blessed with.... As soon as I am left alone, which is about eleven at night, I resolve, for my own satisfaction, to say something of her life and character.” He wrote of her parentage and girlhood, her intelligence and beauty (“only a little too fat”), her reasons for leaving England for Ireland. “Thus far I writ the same night between eleven and twelve.”

The next day he wrote of her memory and judgment and gracefulness, “somewhat more than human,” of her “civility, freedom, easiness, and sincerity.” “All of us who had the happiness of her friendship agreed unanimously that in an afternoon or evening’s conversation she never failed, before we parted, of delivering the best thing that was said in the company.” He wrote of the love her servants felt for her. “My head aches, and I can write no more.”

Tuesday was the day of the funeral at St. Patrick’s. “My sickness will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am removed into another apartment that I may not see the light in the church, which is just over against the window of my bed-chamber.” He wrote of her courage. She had once shot a burglar, trying to enter her house, and had killed him. She was never known to cry out with fear or weakness or affectation. He wrote of her manners, her reading in history, books of travel, the philosophers. “She had a true taste of wit and good sense, both in poetry and prose, and was a perfect good critic of style.” He wrote of her fortune and her management of it.

Afterwards he wrote as he found time. He wrote of her charity, her tact, her modesty. “She rather chose men for her companions, the usual topics of ladies’ discourse being such as she had little knowledge of, and less relish. Yet no man was upon the rack to entertain her, for she easily descended to anything that was innocent and diverting.” She loved Ireland more than most natives, and detested “the tyranny and injustice of England in their treatment of this kingdom. She had indeed reason to love a country where she had the esteem and friendship of all who knew her, and the universal good report of all who ever heard of her.”

This is as strange a language as love ever used, but it is a language of love, Swift’s language, Swift’s love. After he had written this he set down some of her sayings, which only a lover could have found as witty as Swift found them. After that he wrote not a word about her in any letter that survives. He is said never again to have spoken her name. He destroyed all her letters to him and all his letters to her except the journal which he had sent home from London. He would be as silent as Stella, the most silent of all famous lovers. But he could not quite equal her silence. On a paper containing some of her hair he wrote, it is said, the words “Only a woman’s hair.” A giant’s sentimentality and a devil’s contempt for it. Fire and ice.

VII

KING OF TRIFLERS

1

On the day after Stella died the _Beggar’s Opera_ was first given in London, the Duke of Argyll starting the applause which in the end became a delighted clamour. Swift, who had been doubtful about the dramatic form which Gay had chosen, said the opera would do “more public service than all the ministers of state from Adam to Walpole.” When it came to Dublin, and the Lord Lieutenant approved of it, so did the Dean of St. Patrick’s. Though Swift, who never went to the theatre, seems now to have made no exception, he spoke as from the Cathedral. Such humour would probably, he said with another moral comparison, “do more good than a thousand sermons of so stupid, so injudicious, and so prostitute a divine” as the court chaplain, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who had preached against the opera in London. Humour, Swift explained, was a “happy talent,” “fixed to the very nature of man.” Satire was public spirit “prompting men of genius and virtue to mend the world as far as they are able.”

The defence of Gay became a defence of Swift. “I demand whether I have not as good a title to laugh as men have to be ridiculous, and to expose vice as another hath to be vicious. If I ridicule the follies and corruptions of a court, a ministry, or a senate, are they not amply paid by pensions, titles, and power, while I expect and desire no other reward than that of laughing with a few friends in a corner?” Surely the objects of satire were as well off as the satirist. “If those who take offence think me in the wrong I am ready to change the scene with them whenever they please.”

In March 1728 Swift impartially observed that “the _Beggar’s Opera_ has knocked down Gulliver; I hope to see Pope’s Dulness knock down the _Beggar’s Opera_.” The _Dunciad_ appeared in May. It was then without the inscription to Swift which, included the next year, made him feel “abstracted from everybody in the happiness of being recorded your friend while wit and humour and politeness shall have any memorial among us.” But Swift had already seen the brilliant lines in which Pope named his friend with the greatest wits and complimented him with having driven Dulness out of Ireland, to settle, safe from him, in England.

“_O thou! whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!
Whether thou choose Cervantes’ serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais’ easy chair,
Or praise the Court, or magnify Mankind,
Or thy grieved country’s copper chains unbind;
From thy Bœotia though her power retires,
Mourn not, my Swift, at aught our realm acquires.
Here pleased behold her mighty wings outspread
To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead._”

Swift’s Travels, Gay’s Opera, Pope’s Dunces: Twickenham had borne its satiric fruits. “Pope, Gay, and I,” Swift later wrote, had done their best “to make folks merry and wise,” acknowledging “no enemies except knaves and fools.” But that episode had ended. Swift was never to see his friends again. Year after year they urged him to come back, and for a few years he often planned to go. Sickness and pride kept him in Ireland. The Court had no favours for him. Walpole was hopelessly in power. Bolingbroke, spinning out a slipshod philosophy for Pope to versify in his moral essays, tried to entice Swift to a living in Berkshire, half a day’s journey from Uxbridge and Twickenham. Swift, relatively a rich man in Ireland, declined to become relatively a poor man in England. Letters would have to keep their friendship alive.

Half his life he lived in his letters to and from his English friends. Yet he wrote fitfully, fewer letters than he received. Much as he loved Arbuthnot, Swift was slow in writing to him. Gay might have to write twice or three times to draw an answer. When he could, Swift wrote to two of his friends at once: Bolingbroke and Pope, Arbuthnot and Pope, Pope and Gay, Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry, Gay’s lively patron. “It is a very cold scent to continue a correspondence with one whom we never expect to see.... Mr. Pope and my Lord Bolingbroke themselves,” Swift wrote in 1734, “begin to fail me.”

The fellowship was mortal. Gay died in 1732. When the news came in a letter from Arbuthnot and Pope, Swift did not open it for five days, “by an impulse foreboding some misfortune.” Arbuthnot died in 1735. “The death of Mr. Gay and the Doctor,” Swift wrote to Pope, “have been terrible wounds near my heart. Their living would have been a great comfort to me, although I should never have seen them, like a sum of money in a bank from which I should at least receive annual interest, as I do from you and have done from my Lord Bolingbroke.” Bolingbroke after 1735 spent most of his time in France. Only Pope and Swift were left, Pope’s mind to outlast Swift’s, Swift’s body to outlast Pope’s.

There was no change in the affection which Swift felt for his friends, but he could not help getting out of touch with them. England was soon years away. Despairing of English politics, in the interminable hands of Walpole, Swift gave up his old concern for government, except where Ireland was touched. He saw London as the stage of a political melodrama, with countless Whigs as the villain, and with no hero except Pulteney and his Patriots. Swift ceased to follow, even as much as he had done before, the turns and changes of wit. London had Pope, and London had dunces. In Ireland it was impossible to tell whom Pope was slashing unless he spelled out the names of his victims. When Swift read such writers, he was “out of all patience to the present set of whifflers.” England, London, the Court might still be visible enough to Swift’s memory, but they no longer stirred with the life which had been his passion and his magnet. They had stiffened to a picture, and the years had set them in a frame.

2

It was time for Swift to learn, if he could learn, how to live in Ireland without raging. For a year or so after Stella’s death he tried to learn. “Except absence from friends,” he wrote to Pope in May 1728, “I confess freely that I have no discontent at living here, beside what arises from a silly spirit of liberty, which as it neither sours my drink nor hurts my meat nor spoils my stomach farther than in imagination, so I resolve to throw it off.”

Sheridan, who of Swift’s Irish friends had known Stella best, plotted diversions. He took Swift south to Wexford about Easter of that year. Together they began in May to write the _Intelligencer_. This was meant to be a weekly paper “to inform or divert or correct or vex the town” of Dublin. The two contributors, who had no editor to keep them going, did not lose interest till after a dozen issues and did not stop till after twenty. Sheridan got Swift invited in June to the house of Sir Arthur Acheson at Market Hill near Armagh. There from June to the next January, and during the summers of 1729 and 1730, Swift lived with friends, away from Dublin and the solitude of his deanery.

“I lived very easily in the country,” he wrote to Pope after the first visit. “Sir Arthur is a man of sense, has a good voice, and my Lady a better. She is perfectly well bred and desirous to improve her understanding, which is very good, but cultivated too much like a fine lady. She was my pupil there, and severely chid when she read wrong. With that, and walking and making twenty little amusing improvements, and writing family verses of mirth by way of libels on my Lady, my time passed very well and in very good order.”

Swift might have said more. Though his host was a member of the Irish Parliament and high sheriff of his county, and his wife was daughter of a man who had been for twenty years Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ireland, Swift with them was like an emperor on a friendly visit. They seem hardly to have questioned his imperial attitudes. The Dean might cut down one of the baronet’s favourite trees or have his own way with such “little amusing improvements” as “zigzags and walks,” “cradles and caves,” “grottos and seats”--

“_A hole where a rabbit
Would scorn to inhabit,
Dug out in an hour:
He calls it a bower._”

The Dean might tease the lady for her lack of flesh, calling her Skinnybonia, or for her lack of learning--

“_He loves to be bitter at
A lady illiterate._”

The Dean might condemn her to “dull Bacon’s Essays” or “poor Milton” while he, not at study or at prayer, amused himself with grooms and labourers. The Dean might insist that he, not the dairymaid, should shake cream in a bottle till, after three hours, there was butter for breakfast. The Dean might take it upon himself to build “two temples of magnific size” for the “gentle goddess Cloacine.” The Dean might come down to dinner when he chose, no matter who the guests. But he was still the Dean, the greatest man in Ireland, great politician, great wit. To say nothing of his company, his verses, spirited and various, were ten times a return for his entertainment. They would, Swift declared, make Market Hill as famous as Penshurst.

_As Dean of St. Patrick’s_]

Swift was king enough in Ireland, if he wanted to be king. When he went back to Dublin in October 1729 after his second visit to Market Hill, he was received, a newspaper said, “with great joy by many of our principal citizens, who also on the same occasion caused the bells to ring in our cathedrals and had bonfires and other illuminations.” Both candidates in an election then being held claimed the support of the Drapier, though it is not certain that either had it. One of them to win needed only to give out a letter which he said Swift had written to him. Early the next year the Dean, because he had been, as he now admitted, the Drapier, was given the freedom of the city in a gold box brought to him by the Lord Mayor and some of the aldermen. It was an honour usually reserved for “chief governors or persons in very high employment.”

It was an honour, and Swift was gratified. Yet in a few weeks he was writing to Bolingbroke: “I ought to think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.” His resolve to throw off his discontent had not been kept. Such cheerfulness as he had felt at Market Hill had not survived his return to his solitary house. No sooner was he back than he wrote, or at least published, the most savage of all his pamphlets, the most terrible outcry of his misanthropy.

It was, he called it, a modest proposal. Everybody knew that Ireland was starving and nobody knew what to do about it. The problem was not so difficult. Put simply, it came to this: too little food, too many mouths. Swift had thought of a way to make more food and fewer mouths.

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.” Of the children annually born in Ireland perhaps thirty thousand could be taken care of by their parents. Twenty thousand others might be kept “for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males, which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine.” That would leave, he calculated, about a hundred thousand every year “to be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom.... A child will make two dishes in an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.” Such food would be expensive, but within the reach of landlords, who, “as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”

One of his friends, Swift said, argued that in the present want of venison it might be well to supply it with boys and girls of twelve to fourteen. He himself could not agree. The boys of that age from much exercise would be thin and tough. The girls were too near the age when they might bear children themselves. “And besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty, which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however well intended.” It would be enough to limit the proposal to children a year old. The older poor were already “dying and rotting, by cold and famine and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.”

Plausibly, statistically, Swift went over the advantages and disadvantages of his scheme. The only real objection he could think of was that it would reduce the number of people in the kingdom. The best thing that could happen. It was Ireland he was writing about, not any other country “that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon earth.” Let no man talk of taxing absentees, or using Irish manufactures only, or going without luxuries, or forcing landlords to be generous and shopkeepers honest--as Swift himself had so long and often talked. None of those expedients had worked, or been tried. They were “vain, idle, visionary.” This new proposal was “solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our power.” It would not even disoblige England. Ireland had hit upon a foodstuff which could not be exported because it could not stand much salt. Perhaps, however, “I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.”

Few of Swift’s readers seem to have shuddered at his proposal. Lord Bathurst wrote from England that he had almost brought his wife round to the opinion that the youngest of their children should help provide for the eldest. After all, any sensible reader knew that the Irish children would not be eaten, at least in this forthright, economical way, just as he knew that there were no Houyhnhnms and no Yahoos. Swift, sensible readers said, was only joking, as the Irish bishop had said that Gulliver was only lying. Once more the misanthrope had run against mankind in the abstract.

For Swift there was nothing abstract about it. There was the actual disease. Here was the only sufficient cure. What if his flesh did creep when he recommended “buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife”? What if his nerves did rage when he advised that the mothers of the children “let them suck plentifully in the last month so as to render them plump and fat for a good table”? So had his flesh crept and his nerves raged all over Ireland at the starved desert that England had made of it. If his cure violated the profoundest human instincts, so did the disease. Ask the parents if they would not have been better off if they had been sold for food at a year old instead of growing up to life in Ireland. Of course the proposal would not be carried out. Nothing so logical, nothing so mad and merciful, would ever be carried out. That was mankind. That was mankind.

Except for a few hints, a few urgings, a few arguments, a few accusations, all scattered and occasional, Swift after his modest proposal wrote no more prose about Ireland. “Looking upon this kingdom as absolutely desperate,” he said in 1731, “I would not prescribe a dose to the dead.”

3

All his life Swift had been alien, but he had never been so solitary as he now became. His misanthropy, however rooted in his constitution, however confirmed by his experience, however fortified by his blunt metaphysics, was not complete. He had had to be perverse to be so thorough. He had had to deny himself things that he wanted in order to round out his desolation. Even in his desolation, perverse but not altogether voluntary, he had needed habitual friends. He was not a man who could do without women. Stella, in his worst hours, had been friends and women. After her death he lacked what only a friend who was also a woman could give him. Without her to consider he settled into a dark preoccupation with himself. Without her to stir him to variety he sank into a tedious, disheartening, cold routine, hard and harder to break through.

At first he dined alone, or with his housekeeper, five nights out of seven. By 1736 he could say, with a grim flash, “nine days every week I dine at home.”

“I awake so indifferent to anything which may pass either in the world or my own little domestic,” he wrote in 1731, “that I hardly think it worth my time to rise, and would certainly lie all day a-bed if decency and dread of sickness did not drive me thence.” His breakfast was dull gruel. “I am wholly a stranger to tea and coffee, the companions of bread and butter.” When his health allowed him he was “constantly at morning prayers by nine.” But in 1735: “I very seldom go to church for fear of being seized with a fit of giddiness in the midst of the service.” “In a morning I am so pestered by impertinent people and impertinent business which my station exposes me to that the former part of the day is wholly lost.” As Dean of St. Patrick’s, as civil governor of the Cathedral neighbourhood, Swift had duties which he would not shirk, even to the least detail. Yet they were all minor duties, too easy to be interesting. And of course he would not think them important.

Much of Swift’s day was given to walking and riding, “at which, however, I repine, and would not do it merely to lengthen life, because it would be ill husbandry, for I should save time by sitting still though I should die seven years sooner. But the dread of pain and torture makes me toil to preserve health from hand to mouth as much as a labourer to support life.” Swift’s exercise, however, was not wholly deliberate. He had still a fierce energy which kept his body restless as well as his mind. Writing to Pope, younger by twenty years, and referring to Bolingbroke, younger by ten, Swift said: “At your or his time of life I could have leaped over the moon.” And in 1730 he was, he told Gay, “reputed the best walker in this town and five miles around.” “Twice a day in fair weather and once in foul” was the remedy Swift prescribed himself--“I mean exercise ... the cheapest of all drugs.”

This treatment he varied but would not give up. In 1731: “I can walk eight or ten miles a day and ride thirty Irish ones.” In 1733: “I am almost every second day on horseback for about a dozen miles.” In 1735: “I ride a dozen miles as often as I can, and always walk the streets except in the night, which my head will not suffer me to do.” In 1736: “I have not an ounce of flesh about me, and cannot ride above a dozen miles in a day without being sore and bruised and spent.” Later that same year: “I can neither read nor write nor remember nor converse. All I have left is to walk and ride.” In 1738: “I seldom walk less than four miles, sometimes six, eight, ten, or more, never beyond my own limits; or, if it rains, I walk as much through the house, up and down stairs.” By 1740, though Swift’s energy was chiefly in his nerves, they would not let him stop walking back and forth at home for hours a day.

Swift might look eccentric on horseback, with his short gown and his gambadoes, large boots fastened to the saddle to protect his legs from wet and cold, but he rode out with a touch of state. Two servants, “for fear of accidents,” always went with him. Street and road were his. “I am one of the governors of all the hackney coaches, carts, and carriages round this town, who dare not insult me like your [English] rascally wagoners or coachmen, but give me the way; nor is there one lord or squire for a hundred of yours, to turn me out of the road or run over me with their coaches and six.” When, once, as he rode on the strand, some careless hunter fired his gun and frightened the Dean’s horse, it got into the newspapers.

It was Swift’s habit to take with him, whenever he meant to stop for dinner with anybody on his ride, his own wine, bread, and chicken in a basket which one of the servants carried. It was his habit to send word of his coming with commands. Humorously and arrogantly he announced to one of his prebendaries, who lived at Wicklow and was almost unknown to Swift, that the Dean would like to spend Christmas there.

“There is an inhabitant of this city,” Swift wrote, “of whom I suppose you have often heard. I remember him from my very infancy, but confess I am not so well acquainted with him as in prudence I ought to be, yet I constantly pretend to converse with him, being seldom out of his company, but I do not find that our conversation is very pleasing to either of us.” This person, to shorten Swift’s account of himself, had been recommended to Wicklow for its nearness to Dublin and the fine riding thereabouts.

“By these incitements he seems determined to quarter himself upon you for three weeks at least, if he can have your consent, or rather that of your lady, although I find he never had the honour to see her. He travels with two servants, and consequently three horses; but these latter are at hack and the former at board-wages, so that neither of them will trouble you. As to the person himself, he every day drinks a pint of wine at noon and another at night, and for the trouble he gives the house he will allow one bottle more every day for the table, but not one drop for foreigners, who are to drink on your account. He will further allow one shilling and sixpence English for his commons, ale and small beer included. But you are to direct how the wine can be found, and whether he must send it by a Wicklow carrier. But the bottles, when empty, he must be paid for. These are the conditions, only adding that the family, during his residence, must be regulated by his own model, and you are to answer the very next post. He travels with his own sheets, so that he makes no allowance for that article. Whether you do or do not approve of these proposals, you are to give me an account, directed to the D---- of St. P----’s house. And the D----, after conferring with your future guest, will either return you an answer or send the gentleman.”

The threatened host saw the humour behind the arrogance, and at once sent a “kind friendly letter” with a “generous invitation.” When a fit of giddiness kept Swift from going, he wrote in another tone. “Pray God protect you and your family. I know not whether you have children, nor did I ever see your lady or your house; so that I never did beg an invitation so much against the rules of common good manners, to one so much a stranger as you have been, against my will, to me. I am therefore bound in gratitude and by inclination to assure [you] that I am with much esteem and truth, Sir, your most obedient humble servant.”

In Dublin, on the two evenings a week when Swift did not dine alone, he limited himself to friends with whom he could use this same insolence, with or without apology. “I am hated mortally by every creature in power,” he wrote to Oxford’s son, “and by all their followers.... I do not visit one lord either temporal or spiritual, nor am acquainted with above three squires and half-a-dozen parsons.” “There is another race which I prefer before them, as beef and mutton for constant diet before partridges. I mean a middle kind both for understanding and fortune, who are perfectly easy, never impertinent, complying in everything, ready to do a hundred little offices that ... I may often want, who dine and sit with me five times for once that I go with them, and whom I can tell without offence that I am otherwise engaged at present.”

Writing, as in these instances, to his English friends, Swift exaggerated his isolation, at least for the first few years after Stella’s death. He saw more friends than he acknowledged. There was Patrick Delaney, fellow and then professor at Trinity College, whose marriage to a rich widow--“See,” Swift wrote to Gay, “what it is to write godly books!”--enabled the lucky man even in destitute Ireland to have seven or eight guests to dinner once a week. The guests were so often the same that they were thought of as a kind of club. Swift was one of them. But he remembered the Society of Brothers and the Scriblerus Club. There was Thomas Sheridan, perhaps Swift’s closest friend, “the best scholar in both kingdoms” Swift called him: schoolmaster, parson, friend of Stella, blunderer, wit.

“_The Dean and Sheridan, I hope,
Will half supply a Gay and Pope_,”

Swift said. But he knew that Delaney’s house, with no matter how many Sheridans, was a long way from Pope’s villa at Twickenham. There were Richard Helsham, Swift’s Dublin physician, and George Faulkner, Swift’s Dublin printer. There were such older friends as Charles Ford and the brothers Grattan. There were the little poets and wits who rose from time to time in Ireland and asked for Swift’s encouragement: Matthew and Letitia Pilkington, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Grierson, Mrs. Sican, William Dunkin. All eager, and none good. Swift had to be too kind to them to be kind at all. Dublin was less like London than like Lilliput.

He would not admit that the little people who swarmed to his house on Sunday evenings came for anything but his wine. Yet, in spite of his growing avarice, he permitted himself and them the luxury of six, seven, eight hogsheads of wine a year, and gave dinners, when he gave dinners, off one of the finest services of plate in Dublin. In 1736, inviting Lord Castle-Durrow to dine with him, Swift told about his household economy.

“When I would have a friend eat with me I direct him in general to send in the morning and inquire whether I dine at home, and alone. I add a fowl to my commons, and something else if the company be more, but I never mingle company, nor multiply dishes. I give a reasonable price for my wine.... I am seldom without eight or nine hogsheads.... If your Lordship will do me the honour when you come to town, you must submit to the same method. Only perhaps I will order the butler to see whether, by chance, he can find out an odd bottle of a particular choice wine which is all spent, although there may be a dozen or two remaining.... As to puddings, my Lord, I am not only the best but the sole perfect maker of them in this kingdom. They are universally known and esteemed under the name of the deanery puddings. Suet and plumbs are three-fourth of the ingredients. I had them from my ‘Aunt Giffard’ [Lady Giffard, Castle-Durrow’s aunt] who preserved the succession from the time of Sir W. Temple.”

The “Sunday spongers,” who did not come till evening, found Swift as a rule more amiable than he let on to the English friends. More amiable than he generally let on to the spongers. He wrangled with his servants, who nevertheless adored him. He said cutting, bruising things to his visitors, and then offset his words by outbursts of tenderness. He might be violent, but he was seldom depressed, apparently, and never flat. “Swift is a very odd companion,” a visitor to Dublin in 1733 wrote to a friend, “if that expression is not too familiar for so extraordinary a genius. He talks a great deal and does not require many answers. He has infinite spirits, and says abundance of good things in his common way of discourse.”

His high spirits extended at times to horseplay and complicated hoaxes. He introduced Mrs. Pilkington, she said, as a wench whom her husband had brought to a party, and insisted that the game be played all evening. Swift got up a mock trial, again according to Mrs. Pilkington, to try his servants for killing a favourite hen. His friends were the jury, he was the judge. As if his usual solitude were more than he could bear, although he made himself bear it for five nights a week, he ran to extravagances when he escaped from it. “I believe the best part of the reason why men are said to grow children when they are old,” he wrote to Pope, “is because they cannot entertain themselves with thinking; which is the very case of little boys and girls, who love to be noisy among their playfellows.”

Not until 1736, and then not without relapses, did Swift “forbid the Sunday spongers, whom in the lump I never loved to see, and cared less to hear when I could not hear at all.”

Mortified by his deafness, and bored by much of what was shouted in the treble voices which were the only ones he could hear, he spent his nine evenings a week alone. With his restless imagination he had to make drama out of his circumstances.

“I often reflect on my present life as the exact burlesque of my middle age, which passed among ministers.... I am now acting the same things in miniature, but in a higher station as first minister, nay sometimes as a prince, in which last quality my housekeeper, a grave elderly woman, is called at home and in the neighbourhood Sir Robert [Walpole]. My butler is secretary, and has no other defect for that office but that he cannot write. Yet that is not singular, for I have known three Secretaries of State upon the same level, and who were too old to mend, which mine is not. My realm extends a hundred and twenty houses, whose inhabitants constitute the bulk of my subjects. My grand jury is my House of Commons, and my Chapter the House of Lords. I must proceed no further, because my arts of governing are secrets of state.”

This was written with Swift’s hard smile, but he returned often to his image of dining alone like a king. He was king in his nutshell. Though he sometimes claimed to be in danger, he was actually safe. The government would not have dared to touch him. When he stung the ministers in one of his poems, and Walpole talked of arrest and punishment, he was told, it is said, that nothing less than an army of ten thousand men could fetch Swift out of Ireland. When in 1737 it was proposed to lower the value of the Irish guinea, and the Primate of Ireland, Walpole’s real lieutenant, accused Swift of raising the mob, the Dean said that if he had lifted a finger the people would have torn the Archbishop to pieces. Swift, when the measure was put into effect, ran up a black flag over his Cathedral and had the bells toll all day. The authorities thought it as irritating and useless as it was, but they let the Dean alone. He was intrenched in the Cathedral, with the Kevin Bail, the rabble of the Liberty, for his bodyguard. He was intrenched in the affections of all Ireland.

This was forty years after that time at Moor Park when Temple had first had the chance to notice, as he read the _Tale of a Tub_, that he had a tiger in his garden. The tiger was older now, and less deadly to the fools and knaves who had always been his prey. He had lived through many wounds. Scars covered him. Sickness crippled him. Incapable of the great raids of his hungry, angry youth, he kept to his lair. But he roared with the same voice, glared with the same eyes. Caging had not tamed him or reconciled him to the fate of gentler creatures. The bitter world had not taught him to be sweet, or to purr with the soft reverberations of philosophy, or to move with some friendly pack. Even if he were willing to submit and make a final peace, he could not do it. He had been born a tiger. At seventy he was a tiger still.

4

“I am in my chamber at five, there sit alone till eleven, and then to bed. I write pamphlets and follies merely for amusement, and when they are finished, or I grow weary in the middle, I cast them into the fire, partly out of dislike, and chiefly because I know they will signify nothing.” “Finding it troublesome to read at night, and the bad company here growing tasteless, I am always writing bad prose, or worse verses, either of rage or raillery, whereof some few escape to give offence, or mirth, and the rest are burnt.... I am forced to play at small game, to set the beasts here a-madding, merely for want of better game.” “I grow gradually so dry that a rhyme with me is almost as hard to find as a guinea.” “I can as easily write a poem in the Chinese language as my own. I am as fit for matrimony as invention. And yet I have daily schemes for innumerable essays in prose, and proceed sometimes to no less than half a dozen lines, which the next morning become waste paper.”

Now and then Swift wrote a brief pamphlet concerned with Irish, and particularly with Church, politics. Many of his verse lampoons or “libels” were printed as broadsides in Dublin, where they raised their laugh or their welt and went by with the news. He spent a good deal of time on his partisan history of the Oxford Ministry, which his English friends had to work hard to keep him from publishing. He read the books of other historians and wrote fierce marginal notes which have become as famous as the books themselves. When a new edition of his Travels was issued in Ireland he interested himself only enough to “strike out the hash” which the English printer had put in to pacify the English ministers. Swift allowed Pope to add another volume to their miscellanies, the contents being mostly Swift’s. He allowed his Dublin publisher and his Dublin friends to bring out his collected works, but he was willing to give little help and would at first hardly look at the books when they were published.

Swift, who cared so little for literary fame, would neither trouble himself to bring his writings together nor rouse himself to produce others of any bulk. His restlessness made him hurry from scheme to scheme. This was the only action possible to him. Though he was king of his Cathedral and his Kevin Bail, it was too small a realm to occupy or satisfy him. If he must be confined to trifles, he would confine himself to trifles.

He turned often to his anthology of conversation, which was to sum up the platitudes of fashionable circles as he remembered them from London; and to his directions to servants, ironically advising them to do the most stupid and sluttish things they could. Trifles, yet written with a genius’s sweep of observation, scruple for detail, variety of thrust and touch. More than all the novels of his century these two fragments show how gentlemen and ladies talked and how their households were managed and mismanaged. Swift when he trifled was as thorough as other men in earnest.

Much of what he wrote, at least of what he saved, was in verse. Years of verse-making had brought him to absolute ease in metre. When he chose he could play almost any tune but the sublime, which he never chose. He could write “a love song in the modern taste.”

“_Melancholy smooth Meander,
Swiftly purling in a round,
On thy margin lovers wander,
With thy flowery chaplets crowned._

_Thus while Philomela drooping
Softly seeks her silent mate,
See the bird of Juno stooping;
Melody resigns to fate._”

He could make an ode which was all rhetoric.

“_So when Amphion bade the lyre
To more majestic sound aspire,
Behold the madding throng,
In wonder and oblivion drowned,
To sculpture turned by magic sound
And petrifying song._”

He could prattle namby-pamby as long as his ink held out.

“_With thy utmost skill express
Nature in her richest dress:
Limpid rivers smoothly flowing,
Orchards by those rivers blowing;
Curling woodbine, myrtle shade,
And the gay enamelled mead,
Where the linnets sit and sing,
Little sportlings of the spring;
Where the breathing field and grove
Soothe the heart and kindle love._”

He could set rolling words to popular airs:

“_What care we how high runs his passion or pride?
Though his soul he despises he values his hide.
Then fear not his tongue or his sword or his knife;
He’ll take his revenge on his innocent wife.
Knock him down, down, down, keep him down._”

But he preferred to write in the plain, brisk, flexible couplets, four stresses to a line, to which he had turned from his Pindarics and in which he could join the neatness of verse to the naturalness of prose. In couplets he wrote the best poems he had written since his story of Cadenus and Vanessa and his Horatian poems to Oxford. These poems, Swift’s trifles, were about love and poetry and death.

The poems on love, if they are on it, were written during the two or three years after Stella’s death. They made even the eighteenth century squirm. Swift had never hid his meaning behind periphrasis. His tongue was as rough as a cat’s.

“_Great folks are of a finer mould.
Lord! how politely they can scold!
While a coarse English tongue will itch
For whore and rogue and dog and bitch._”

But Swift had never before spoken with such candour as he now itched to use, and used.

It was a sick candour. All of these poems on love, or against it, strummed the same chord. Women, they pointed out, had cosmetic secrets, soiled linen, and made full use of their alimentary canals. Swift tried to laugh at his heroes for their shock at the unromantic discovery. He loathed while he laughed. The poems were the clearest proof that he was the victim of a pathological fastidiousness. What a healthier man would have taken for granted, or would have thought of and forgotten, sickened Swift.

“_For fine ideas vanish fast,
While all the gross and filthy last._”

He had already, by his seasonable and unseasonable emphasis on cleanliness, betrayed his obsession. Now his antipathy had suddenly got beyond control. It held up, for the world to see, the things which had made him shrink from women. Celia, Corinna, Chloe: in their dressing-rooms were all the deterrents to love.

These poems, ordinarily dismissed as nasty, and unquestionably that, mark one of the most terrible episodes in Swift’s life. Swift sitting deaf in his silent house, past sixty, remembering the women he had loved, the woman he had loved most. Swift asking himself, possibly, whether with less fastidiousness or with more effort to overcome it he might not have had something he had missed. Swift, in a rush of old disgust, telling himself that what he had missed was something he was better off without, a horror under an illusion. Swift, to make sure, putting his nauseous images into brutal words. Swift saying to his Strephon that if he had known what Swift knew, then

“_Your heart had been as whole as mine._”

Swift wondering about “rash mortals,”

“_Since beauty scarce endures a day,
And youth so swiftly glides away,
Why will you make yourself a bubble,
To build on sand with hay and stubble?_”

Swift convinced that his way with Stella had been the way of wisdom. Or Swift, following no such thought to its conclusion, obtusely dramatizing his antipathies, unaware what they had cost him. There is terror in the episode, no matter how it is understood. A sick heart is a pit without a bottom. A stony heart is a blank mirror to beauty and chaos both.

As Swift wrote against love, so he wrote against poetry. No ambition, he said in what he called his rhapsody, required such “heavenly influence” as the ambition to be a poet. Yet

“_Not beggar’s brat on bulk begot;
Not bastard of a pedlar Scot;
Not boy brought up to cleaning shoes,
The spawn of Bridewell or the stews;
Not infants dropped, the spurious pledges
Of gipsies littered under hedges;
Are so disqualified by fate
To rise in church or law or state
As he whom Phœbus in his ire
Has blasted with poetic fire._”

To be a poet was as insane as to be a lover. There was no market and no use for poetry.

“_Court, city, country want you not:
You cannot bribe, betray, or plot._”

It took as long to make a poem as to fatten a chicken. It took no longer to dispose of the chicken than of the poem.

“_Then hear an old experienced sinner
Instructing thus a young beginner._”

Swift went on to tell whoever in spite of his warning was bound to be a poet how to go about it. He was to chose his subject according to his gifts, write his poem, have it printed, and wait for it to be damned. After three such ventures it would be time to “spring more profitable game” and become a writer for a party. Walpole would pay well and promptly. Or if poetry failed, the poet could turn critic. Even beyond that were hordes “of jobbers in the poet’s art”: poets who lived by nagging their betters, poets who won fame by writing worse than any of their rivals. And always the worst poets could write about the royal family. The King could stomach any praise.

Swift mauled George and his Court with nearly a hundred lines of irony, and then, losing interest, broke off. He would not give himself the bother of finishing his satire, though it was a passion which he had suffered from and hated. His poem was only another trifle.

With one of his trifles he did take pains. It was his poem on his death. “I was forty-seven years old,” he wrote in October 1729, “when I began to think of death, and the reflections upon it now begin when I wake in the morning and end when I am going to sleep.” In December 1731 he told Gay: “I have been several months writing near five hundred lines on a pleasant subject, only to tell what my friends and enemies will say on me after I am dead. I shall finish it soon, for I add two lines every week, and blot out four, and alter eight.”

When he wrote the poem Swift did not intend to let it be published while he was alive. He would keep it by him and enjoy his secret. He read it to some of his friends, and then to others. It became a little legend. The legend amused him. He went to the length of writing another version, between an abridgment and a burlesque, dating it All Fools’ Day 1733, and contriving to have it come out in London. Then, to perfect the hoax, he claimed that somebody had partly memorized his original and played a trick on him. “But even this trick shall not provoke me to print the true one, which indeed is not proper to be seen till I can be seen no more.”

He changed his mind. In 1739, when he had become tired even of his trifles, he published the most surprising of them.

He took for his text a maxim of La Rochefoucauld: “In the adversities of our best friends we always find something that does not displease us.”

“_As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature I believe ’em true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind._”

This maxim was thought baser than all the rest, but it could be proved, Swift said, by both reason and experience. He himself was full of envy.

“_In Pope I cannot read a line
But with a sigh I wish it mine.
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six,
It gives me such a jealous fit
I cry: ‘Pox take him and his wit!’
I grieve to be outdone by Gay
In my own humorous biting way.
Arbuthnot is no more my friend,
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce,
Refined it first, and showed its use....
To all my foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy gifts, but never to my friend.
I tamely can endure the first,
But this with envy makes me burst._”

Swift was being hard on himself to prepare for what came after. He had never by a word shown any envy whatever towards Pope, who could not pack more sense in a couplet than Swift in six; or towards Gay, who could not outdo Swift in his humorous biting way; or towards Arbuthnot, whose use of irony had taken nothing from Swift’s. But Swift, inverted hypocrite as Bolingbroke called him, must put on as bad a face as possible.

His text announced and defended, he told his story. As he grew older his friends would talk behind his back about his failing body and mind. They would seem to be concerned, but they would at least be pleased that they were better off than he. Once they had said he soon must die, they would rather see him die than have their predictions turn out wrong.

As soon as he was dead, Dublin would buzz with gossip, chiefly about what was to become of his money. The news would spread to London. The Queen would be glad, now, that she had never sent him the presents she had promised. Walpole would wish it had been some more important man who had died. Curll the piratical bookseller would hastily get out three volumes of rubbish and call it Swift’s.

“_Here shift the scene to represent
How those I love my death lament.
Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day.
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen and drop a tear.
The rest will give a shrug and cry:
‘I’m sorry--but we all must die.’_”

“_My female friends, whose tender hearts,
Have better learned to act their parts,
Receive the news in doleful dumps:
‘The Dean is dead (and what is trumps?)’_”

The Dean’s writings would be unobtainable at the bookshops, in case any country reader inquired for “Swift in Verse and Prose.” In the clubs and coffee houses, however, there would be some discussion. Swift imagined the arguments between his supporters and his defamers. Nearly half his poem was given to what he thought the worst and the best things that could be said about him. The worst:

“_Alas, poor Dean! his only scope
Was to be held a misanthrope.
This into general odium drew him,
Which if he liked much good may’t do him.
His zeal was not to lash our crimes,
But discontent against the times;
For had we made him timely offers
To raise his post or fill his coffers,
Perhaps he might have truckled down,
Like other brethren of the gown._”

The best: