Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Swift apparently controlled his desires successfully. Nokes oversimplifies when he comments, “Throughout his career Swift was fascinated with exposing what exactly was contained within a silk petticoat.”45 We don’t know that. He almost never mentions the most interesting thing under the petticoat, unlike that other witty clergyman, Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy is full of muffs and clefts and fingers in the pie.

  Jane Waring played hard to get; she probably thought that a young clergyman with little money was an unpromising prospect. And it turned out that Swift was only briefly in her neighborhood. By April of 1696 he had decided to return to Moor Park, eighteen months after leaving there. In a long letter he reproached Jane for her behavior in elevated romantic language:

  Would to Heaven you were but a while sensible of the thoughts into which my present distractions plunge me—they hale me a thousand ways, and I am not able to bear them. ’Tis so, by Heaven: the love of Varina is of more tragical consequence than her cruelty. Would to God you had hated and scorned me from the beginning. It was [your] pity opened the first way to my misfortunes, and now your love is finishing my ruin. . . . By Heaven, Varina, you are more experienced and have less virgin innocence than I. Would not your conduct make one think you were highly skilled in all the little polite methods of intrigue? . . . Oh Varina! how imagination leads me beyond my self and all my sorrows—’Tis sunk, and a thousand graves lie open—No Madam—I will give you no more of my unhappy temper, though I derive it all from you.46

  It was evidently Jane’s power over him that Swift feared.

  The other surviving letter is a strange one. It dates from 1700, four years later. Swift and Jane Waring must have continued to correspond, for he speaks of “your letters,” but he now complains that her “great sweetness of nature and humour” had given way to “a severe indifference.” Perhaps there was a physical obstacle as well. “You told me the doctors advised you against marriage, as what would certainly hazard your life.” Jane’s health was poor, and the implication was that childbirth would be too risky. At any rate, Swift says that if the doctors have changed their mind, he is prepared to offer marriage, but only with clear provisos:

  Have you so much good nature as to endeavour by soft words to smooth any rugged humour, occasioned by the cross accidents of life? Shall the place wherever your husband is thrown be more welcome than courts or cities without him? In short, these are some of the necessary methods to please men who, like me, are deep read in the world. . . . These are the questions I have always resolved to propose to her with whom I meant to pass my life; and whenever you can heartily answer them in the affirmative, I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without regarding whether your person be beautiful or your fortune large. Cleanliness in the first, and competency in the other, is all I look for.47

  Is he saying that he would love her even if she weren’t beautiful, or that she actually isn’t? Her fortune is a sore point too, since she might suspect he is after her for her money.

  It is quite possible, as Ehrenpreis suggests, that Swift didn’t really want this marriage anymore, and was offering it in the coolest possible terms so that Jane would be sure to refuse. But it may also be that she had continued to tease, and that he was simply asking whether she could consent wholeheartedly to be his wife. “To this not unreasonable query,” Denis Johnston says, “he seems to have got no reply. So there the matter ended.”48

  What did Swift carry away from his year at Kilroot? Nothing but disappointment. There was the romantic interest that turned sour, professional ambitions that seemed hopelessly stalled, and a renewed consciousness of being an outsider—a southerner in the north, a Church of Ireland priest in a sea of Presbyterians.

  All that survives from Swift’s time at Kilroot is the abandoned churchyard, in which the oldest gravestone dates from 1743. That stone commemorates a resident who was old enough to have heard Swift preach in her youth: “Here lyeth the body of Margrat Stevenson who died May the 16th 1743 aged 99 years.”49 If Swift could see the place today it might fulfill his grimmest expectations. The site is dominated by a gigantic power plant, a cement works, and the entrance to an underground network of salt mines. The salt is inferior in quality and is used on icy roads.

  CHAPTER 4

  Moor Park Once More

  THE WAITING GAME

  In 1695 Swift had been eager to escape from Moor Park; a year later he was ready to return. His chances for advancement could hardly be worse there than they were in Kilroot. His cousin Thomas had taken his place as Temple’s secretary, but Thomas now went off to his curacy, and Jonathan resumed his old position. He retained the Kilroot living for a couple of years, probably for the income, while someone else handled the minimal duties. Then he resigned it in favor of his friend John Winder.

  Temple had advised Swift to hold on to Kilroot indefinitely. “I would not consent to it,” Swift told Winder. Temple was still making no effort to get Swift an appointment in England, and Swift was apparently burning his Irish bridges in an effort to force Temple’s hand. It was impossible to force. For a while Swift hoped that an appointment might be arranged by one of Temple’s friends, the Earl of Sunderland, who held the high position of lord chamberlain. But in December of 1697 Sunderland resigned, and Swift wrote to Winder, “My Lord Sunderland fell and I with him. Since that, there have been other courses, which if they succeed I shall be proud to own the methods, or if otherwise, very much ashamed.” Craik interprets this as meaning “that though he is sure of the honesty of his means, he will still be ashamed of having tried at all, if these means do not end successfully.”1

  Temple may not have been as much at fault as Swift believed. Louis Landa, in his account of Swift’s career in the Church, makes a notable point. He had set his sights on the royal prebends at Canterbury and Westminster, but they were valuable and prestigious, and he was an obscure young man with hardly any experience. Why should the commission of six bishops in charge of appointments have considered him qualified?2 But Swift was always sure of his own merits, and a grudge collector too.

  For an entire three-year period, from 1696 through 1698, we have almost no information about Swift’s doings. The only surviving letters are the three that have already been quoted, to Jane Waring, to Winder, and to Stella (the one about the parrot and the rooks). A single incident happened to get recorded, and it gives a glimpse of Swift’s characteristic fearlessness. The story comes from William Flower, who was related to the Temple family, and who wrote to Swift many years later: “As several little accidents make indelible impressions upon the minds of schoolboys, near thirty years ago, when I was one, I remember I was committed to your care from Sheen to London. We took water at Mortlake; the commander of the little skiff was very drunk and insolent, put us ashore at Hammersmith, yet insisted with very abusive language on his fare, which you courageously refused. The mob gathered; I expected to see your gown stripped off, and for want of a blanket to take a flight with you in it. But by your powerful eloquence you saved your bacon and money, and we happily proceeded on our journey.” We don’t have Swift’s reply, but when Flower was raised to the peerage later on, Swift wrote to congratulate him.3

  SELF-EDUCATION AT MOOR PARK

  If Swift couldn’t gain employment at court or in the Church of England, he could at least improve his education, which had been very narrow at Trinity College. Temple was a voracious reader with a superb library, and Swift took advantage of it. During the single year of 1697, for which a list still exists, he read the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid twice each, and the poems of Horace as well. (Incidentally, he read Latin with ease, but probably not Greek, unless it was printed with a facing Latin translation.)4 He also read numerous books in French, and histories in both French and English.

  History was a favorite genre for the rest of Swift’s life. What mainly interested him was the interplay of personalities, with their complicated motives, covert betrayals, and heavily masked truth. He would undoubtedly have ag
reed with Voltaire’s conclusion to his massive Essai sur les moeurs: “Since nature has placed self-interest, pride, and all the passions in the human heart, it is not surprising that we have viewed, over a span of ten centuries, an almost continuous succession of crimes and disasters.” Long after Moor Park, Swift made Gulliver tell the story of English history to the king of Brobdingnag, who then summarizes it as “an heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments; the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce.” After hearing Gulliver praise England and its ways, the king declares, “By what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”5 Statements like this earned Swift a reputation for misanthropy and, as we will see, he didn’t altogether disagree.

  In later days Swift was deeply proud of the way he had educated himself. “If anyone was cried up to him as a great scholar,” Delany remembered, “his first question was, How old is he? and the next, How many years he had passed in a close application to his studies? And if the space fell short of his period, he answered with contempt, ‘He a scholar? ’Tis impossible! No man can be a scholar that has not passed many years in hard study, and an application to good books.’”6

  “When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly,” Swift once wrote, “it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me.” The books he owned that have survived show that he constantly talked back, filling the margins with comments and objections, as he did when he referred to King William’s morals. Describing this period ten years later, he said of himself, “The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could.”7 That was his lifelong goal: to be faithful to firm principles, but only after thinking them through.

  In one important way, Sir William was a model. In an era when prose was often wordy and pretentious, Temple’s was notable for colloquial directness. Patterned after Montaigne’s essays, though without Montaigne’s complexity and depth, Temple’s offered genial, relaxed good sense. He was especially good at pithy analogies: “The abilities of man must fall short on one side or other, like too scanty a blanket when you are abed: if you pull it upon your shoulders, you leave your feet bare; if you thrust it down upon your feet, your shoulders are uncovered.”8 That sentence could easily be mistaken for one by Swift.

  The persona Temple projected was attractive, too. Years later David Hume, a gifted stylist himself, praised the relaxed, familiar quality of Temple’s writing: “We enter into acquaintance with the character of the author, full of honour and humanity, and fancy that we are engaged not in the perusal of a book, but in conversation with a companion.” Samuel Johnson made a less obvious point: “Sir William Temple was the first writer who gave cadence to English prose. Before his time they were careless of arrangement, and did not mind whether a sentence ended with an important word or an insignificant word, or with what part of speech it was concluded.” Despite the magniloquence of Johnson’s own style, he said he modeled it originally on Temple’s.9

  Thirty years after Swift left Moor Park, when young Sheridan was entering Trinity College, Swift urged him to spend some time every day studying English—which was not included, of course, in the curriculum. “When I asked him what authors he would advise me to read, he immediately replied, Sir William Temple.”10

  “COUSIN SWIFT, YOU WILL NEVER BE A POET”

  Sir William was a fan of the poet Abraham Cowley, who had died in the year of Swift’s birth. Swift now claimed to love Cowley too. But the handful of poems Swift wrote at Moor Park in Cowley’s style are truly awful.

  Cowley was an imitator of the Greek poet Pindar, and his Pindarics became a fad. “All the boys and girls,” Johnson said in his Life of Cowley, “caught the pleasing fashion, and they that could do nothing else could write like Pindar.” Pindar wrote irregular, rhapsodic, obscure verse that was meant to express emotional excitement. Dryden called Pindar “wild and ungovernable,” and Cowley himself praised Pindar’s “impetuous dithyrambic tide . . . which neither banks nor dikes control.” Possibly Swift did find that kind of verse exciting, since he wrote to his cousin Thomas, “I am Cowley to myself.” More likely, he was trying to impress Temple, and counted on Thomas to pass this hyperbole along.11

  One of Swift’s early poems is Ode to the King, exalting the greatness of Sir William’s friend, and another is Ode to the Honorable Sir William Temple. The very first word of that one is “Virtue,” the subject of one of Temple’s own essays. A. C. Elias, debunking the myth that Swift worshiped Temple, notes drily that this poem dwells on a subject “close to Temple’s heart: Temple’s own greatness and goodness.” Sure enough, Virtue is embodied in Sir William, and it is to be found at Moor Park:

  Sing (belov’d Muse) the pleasures of retreat. . . .

  Sing of thy vales, sing of thy woods, sing of thy fields.

  The river Wey shares this feeling, “loath to see the hated court and town.”12

  Far from hating court and town, that was where Swift wanted to be. Perhaps flattering Sir William would help him to get there.

  Those mighty epithets, learn’d, good, and great,

  Which we ne’er joined before, but in romances meet,

  We find in you at last united grown. . . .

  Shall I believe a spirit so divine

  Was cast in the same mold with mine?

  Flattery was a diet that Temple never tired of, but it didn’t pay off in tangible rewards for Swift. Did Temple pay attention to what comes next?

  Why then does Nature so unjustly share

  Among her elder sons the whole estate?

  In a society based on primogeniture, only the eldest son could inherit an estate. It was in this context that Swift called himself, years later, “a younger son of younger sons.” Since he had no brother, he must have been using the term metaphorically—he was like a younger son, lacking inherited advantages.13

  Similarly calculated to please Temple was Ode to the Athenian Society, in praise of a periodical called the Athenian Gazette (later renamed the Athenian Mercury) that supplied answers to supposedly fascinating questions. Temple thought highly of the society and no doubt encouraged Swift to write this poem. It duly appeared in the periodical—his first publication, and for nine years his only one. Ehrenpreis thinks it endows the Athenians with “incandescent perfections,” but it’s hard to believe Swift was such a fool as to believe that.14

  Some of the Athenian questions were pretty silly, and those are the ones that occasionally get quoted: “How does a horse produce a square turd when its fundament is round?” But mostly the Athenian Mercury, which filled two huge folio volumes when collected, is sensible and often generous:

  QUEST. Whether there be two men in the world with an equal number of hairs on their head?

  ANSW. The question is unanswerable, for it admits of neither experiment nor argument.

  QUEST. Whether it be proper for women to be learned?

  ANSW. On the whole, since they have as noble souls as we, a finer genius, and generally quicker apprehensions, we see no reason why women should not be learned.

  QUEST. Is not kissing an insipid thing? Is there any real pleasure in it?

  ANSW. We must leave that to your own experience, though ’tis much as the person is.15

  There is surely a hint of irony in a reference in this poem to Swift’s “young and (almost) virgin muse.”16 Almost virgin! Perhaps he already suspected what soon turned out to be true, that there was no Athenian Society at all, just a hack journalist named John Dunton and a couple of his friends.

  In the Ode to Temple Swift describes himself as “to th
e Muse’s galley tied.” Bondage to the Muse might be worth it if it led to a well-paying position, as did happen to a number of young writers. But it didn’t for Swift. To make the disappointment more bitter, William Congreve, his Kilkenny schoolmate and two years younger, had already scored a triumph as a London playwright. An ode to Congreve, which Swift wrote at this time, was ostensibly meant as praise, but jealousy and rivalry keep breaking through:

  This could I do, and proudly o’er him tower,

  Were my desires but heightened to my power.17

  Swift hoped his poem would appear in a published version of one of Congreve’s plays, giving his own reputation a boost. He had to feel chagrined that when the play did appear, it was accompanied instead by a masterly tribute by John Dryden, a prominent playwright and the greatest poet of the time. Dryden opens with effortless authority, passing the torch to the younger generation:

  Well then; the promised hour is come at last,

  The present age of wit obscures the past.

  Dryden’s colloquial ease makes Swift’s Pindarics look laboriously old-fashioned. Dryden ends on a movingly personal note:

  Already I am worn with cares and age,

  And just abandoning th’ ungrateful stage . . .

  And take for tribute what these lines express;

  You merit more; nor could my love do less.18

  For Swift, Dryden was to become a bête noire. In a story that comes down from several sources, Swift introduced himself to Dryden in London, showed him his poems, and received the humiliating verdict, “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” They were cousins only in a remote sense, since Dryden’s grandfather and Swift’s maternal great-grandfather were brothers, making them second cousins once removed. In another version what Dryden said was “Young man, you will never be a poet.”19