Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Here is another question. Sir William Temple was a disciple of Epicurus. Was Temple, then, one of those people whose “fortunes and dispositions” gave him the luxury of being well deceived? But if being like that makes you happy, what’s the catch? Erasmus has Folly say, “People say it’s sad to be deceived. Not at all—it’s far sadder not to be deceived.” More cynically, a woman in one of Rochester’s poems says that lovers shouldn’t pry into their mistresses’ secrets:

  They little guess, who at our arts are grieved,

  The perfect joy of being well deceived.27

  So here is the dilemma: what if deception can be life giving and healthy? “In the proportion that credulity is a more peaceful possession of the mind than curiosity, so far preferable is that wisdom which converses about the surface to that pretended philosophy which enters into the depths of things, and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries that in the inside they are good for nothing. . . . Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.”28

  Women weren’t actually flayed, of course, but prostitutes were regularly flogged in public, and continued to be until the nineteenth century. In the library at Trinity College, Swift would have seen the actual flayed and stuffed skin of an executed rebel, with an especially grotesque aspect that a visitor to Dublin noted: “In this passive state he was assaulted by some mice and rats, not sneakingly behind his back, but boldly before his face, which they so much further mortified, even after death, as to eat it up; which loss has since been supplied by tanning the face of one Geoghagan, a Popish priest, executed about six years ago for stealing; which said face is put in the place of Ripley’s.”29

  What makes Swift’s comment about the flayed woman shocking is the off-hand expression “you will hardly believe.” Of course it would be horrifying to see someone flayed. But can we really understand how horrible if we’ve never actually witnessed it? And who would witness it if they could avoid it? Maybe outsides aren’t so bad after all. “It is better, by and large,” Denis Donoghue says, pondering this passage, “to take things as they come and leave them as they are.”30

  The argument in favor of being well deceived has always struck readers as a high point of the Tale of a Tub, yet it has provoked endless argument. The whole point of a paradox is to entertain incompatible views without choosing between them. “Wisdom” that demands a definite conclusion—either it’s very good to be deceived, or else it’s very bad—is just as reductive as the kinds of wisdom that Swift mocks with a cascade of analogies: “Wisdom is a fox, who after long hunting will at last cost you the pains to dig out. . . . Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But then, lastly, ’tis a nut, which unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm.”31

  A passage in the “Digression concerning Madness” may have special implications for Swift. “When a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding as well as common sense is kicked out of doors, the first proselyte he makes is himself.”32 In the empiricist psychology that was then standard, imagination was a threat, since wish-fulfilling fantasy can overwhelm rational judgment and even lead to insanity. Is Swift appealing to reason as a defense against his own anarchic impulses? The Tale of a Tub is one long feat of imagination, and its ambiguities suggest that the imagination is not always under control. “Perhaps the ideological substance was orthodox,” Rawson suggests, “because beneath it lay a temperament (reflected in the style!) that knew itself to be subversive.”33

  This line of thinking could explain why middle-of-the-road Martin, the second of the three brothers and Swift’s exemplar of true religion, doesn’t do or say much, and is described as “extremely phlegmatic and sedate.” That must be meant to suggest the stability of the Church of England, but “phlegmatic” and “sedate” are words that no one would ever associate with Jonathan Swift. It’s Jack and Peter, not Martin, who interest him, because they represent the psychopathology of religious experience.34

  31. Bedlam.

  Swift’s fascination while he was in London with Bedlam, the popular name for Bethlehem Hospital, is especially interesting. Mental illness was thought to be the result of a physiological imbalance that could be corrected by forcing invisible “animal spirits” back into their proper channels. A wide range of tortures was prescribed. There were purging and bleeding, of course, as was done for every kind of illness. But in addition patients were suspended from the ceiling in a chair and whirled round until they lost consciousness, or blistered with hot irons, or dropped into icy water, and they were routinely chained up and beaten.

  Bedlam was a tourist attraction, where “keepers” charged a penny to show their charges like animals in a zoo. In a Tale of a Tub illustration, visitors are shown peering through the gratings. The chained inmate in the foreground is acting out Swift’s description, in which he is ironically referred to as a student, with his keepers as the professors: “Is any student tearing his straw in piecemeal, swearing and blaspheming, biting his grate, foaming at the mouth, and emptying his piss pot in the spectators’ faces?” Swift recommends that depending on their particular obsessions, the inmates be sent into the army, the law courts, or the royal court, where they will feel right at home.35

  On at least one occasion Swift saw Bedlam up close.36 It must have made a strong impression, since he was later elected one of the hospital’s governors. Presumably he asked to be. At the end of his life he made plans to found a mental hospital in Dublin, and left his entire fortune for that purpose. In that city the majority of the mentally ill simply wandered the streets helplessly, badly needing an institution to take care of them. Swift felt deep sympathy for their plight, especially after he began to experience symptoms of dementia, and he wanted to ensure that they would be treated more humanely than the inmates of Bedlam were.

  HOSTILE REACTIONS

  In the Tale Swift pretends to believe that it would be impossible to misinterpret his meaning. If seven scholars were locked up for seven years to write commentaries, “whatever difference may be found in their several conjectures, they will be all, without the least distortion, manifestly deducible from the text.”37 But isn’t that a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that the text can be made to mean almost anything? Plenty of readers were certain they knew what it meant, and they were outraged.

  One broad and disparate group was especially indignant, and that was the Dissenters. Jack, in the Tale, represents the radical extreme of Protestantism, but Swift habitually lumped together, as he said elsewhere, every sect that stayed outside of the Anglican Church—“the whole herd of Presbyterians, Independents, Atheists, Anabaptists, Deists, Quakers, and Socinians.” In actuality there were drastically different versions of Dissent, ranging from sober Presbyterians to wild inner-light visionaries, and the visionaries were by now a tiny minority. Swift was being outrageous in tarring them all with the same brush to make the whole lot look like a menace to society.38

  Daniel Defoe, who once hoped to enter the Presbyterian ministry, soon guessed that Swift was the author of the Tale, and turned his “Aeolist” metaphor against him. “All his notion dissolved in its native vapour called wind, and flew upward in blue strakes of a livid flame called blasphemy, which burnt up all the wit and fancy of the author, and left a strange stench behind it that has this unhappy quality in it, that everybody that reads the book smells the author, though he be never so far off—nay, though he took shipping to Dublin, to secure his friends from the least danger of a conjecture.”39

  Dissenters weren’t the only ones who found the Tale objectionable. Martin gambles and whores just as much as his brothers do, and that seems a strange way to defend the Church of England. It was also easy to detect irreverence in passages like this one: “The fumes issuing from a jakes [privy] will furnish as comely and useful a vapor as incense from an altar.” An
Anglican critic named William Wotton, Temple’s old opponent in the ancients versus moderns controversy, complained that Swift was playing “a game at leapfrog between the flesh and spirit,” reducing spiritual experience to disgusting physicality. St. Paul, mysteriously but memorably, testified that he was afflicted with “a thorn in the flesh.” In Swift’s account of fanaticism, Wotton observes, “he tells us ‘that the thorn in the flesh serves for a spur to the spirit,’ and it seemed to Wotton that this was meant as ridicule of St. Paul.40

  Even Swift’s admirers foresaw trouble ahead. Francis Atterbury, dean of Carlisle and later a bishop, told a friend, “Bating the profaneness of it in some places, it is a book to be valued, being an original in its kind, full of wit, humour, good sense, and learning. . . . The town is wonderfully pleased with it.” But then Atterbury added, “The author of A Tale of a Tub will not as yet be known; and if it be the man I guess, he hath reason to conceal himself, because of the profane strokes in that piece, which would do his reputation and interest in the world more harm than the wit can do him good.”41 Atterbury was right about that.

  Six years later, smarting from criticisms, Swift brought out a new edition of the Tale with an “Apology” at the beginning, declaring that he would “forfeit his life, if any one opinion can be fairly deduced from that book which is contrary to religion or morality.” He also had the clever idea of co-opting the critical comments that Wotton had published, inserting them as footnotes of his own. And he continued ever after to insist that his satire supported true religion:

  Humour and mirth had place in all he writ:

  He reconciled divinity and wit.42

  There was one last minor irritant. To Swift’s disgust, his “little parson cousin” Thomas went around hinting that he was the real author of the Tale of a Tub. Swift figured out what had happened. “Having lent him a [manuscript] copy of some part of, etc., and he showing it after I was gone for Ireland, and the thing abroad, he affected to talk suspiciously, as if he had some share in it.” (The “etc.” was to avoid naming the Tale of a Tub in writing.) It’s possible that at Moor Park the cousins had shared some ideas for a satire, and that when the Tale finally appeared Thomas recognized bits and pieces from those days.43 After Swift challenged his cousin to prove his authorship publicly, Thomas shut up, but whatever their relationship had once been, it was now over for good.

  When it came time for the English bishopric that Swift believed he deserved, it would be the Tale of a Tub that would ruin his career hopes, for it would convince the pious Queen Anne that he must never be made a bishop. And although he was willing to have his authorship suspected, he never acknowledged it explicitly. Anonymity was a protection from prosecution, of course, but it was also a strategy for disguising his voice and disavowing his own words. He wanted to taunt readers with impunity, and he was always unwilling to give away much of himself, even from behind a mask. In a startling analogy he remarked, “A copy of verses kept in the cabinet, and only shown to a few friends, is like a virgin much sought after and admired; but when printed and published, is like a common whore, whom anybody may purchase for half a crown.”44

  CHAPTER 9

  Swift and God

  THE HIDDEN GOD

  Throughout Swift’s life he was hounded by accusations that he was too irreverent for a clergyman, and maybe not even a believer at all. When he was installed as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, some mocking verses were allegedly tacked to the door:

  Look down, St. Patrick, look we pray,

  On thine own church and steeple;

  Convert thy Dean on this great day,

  Or else God help the people.

  A hostile writer later commented that Swift’s “affection to the Church was never doubted, though his Christianity was ever questioned.”1

  Swift’s inverted hypocrisy was partly to blame, since he avoided any conventional display of piety. Did it flatter his pride to know that he was better than people thought he was? At any rate, those who knew him best never doubted his sincerity. Patrick Delany, a fellow clergyman, once lived with him for a period of months without suspecting that the servants reported to him every evening for prayers, “without any notice from a bell, or audible call of any kind, except the striking of the clock.” Delany was impressed also by the way Swift said grace at meals, “with an emphasis and fervor which everyone around him saw and felt; and with his hands clasped into one another, and lifted up to his breast, but never higher.” Swift’s secretiveness seemed quixotic to Delany, though. “How happy had it been, both for himself and the world, had he carefully governed his life by that apostolic and truly divine precept, abstain from all appearance of evil.”2

  And there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of Swift’s faith. In this regard, a striking anecdote from his final years has not been noticed by biographers. According to a servant who attended him when his dementia was getting worse, “Whilst the power of speech remained, he continued constant in his private devotions; as his memory failed they were gradually shortened, till at last he could only repeat the Lord’s Prayer. That, however, he continued to do till the power of utterance forever ceased.” Swift’s friend Dr. Lyon preserved his personal prayer book, “which, being fouled with the snuff from his fingers, shows the parts of it which he most approved.”3

  There is an important difference, however, between sincerity and authenticity. However earnestly Swift performed his devotions, in private as well as in public, he may still have harbored doubts. And if he did, it’s inconceivable that he would have allowed anyone to know it.

  With his probing, corrosive intelligence, Swift surely experienced a temptation to skepticism. Johnson, a fierce defender of orthodoxy, acknowledged that “everything which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote.” In his Dictionary Johnson defines “belief” as “credit given to something which we know not of ourselves, or on account of the authority by which it is delivered.” In some unpublished remarks, Swift took the same position. “The Scripture system of man’s creation is what Christians are bound to believe, and seems most agreeable of all others to probability and reason. Adam was formed from a piece of clay, and Eve from one of his ribs.” C. S. Lewis comments, “Is it possible that this should not be irony?”4 But if Christians are “bound to believe” the Bible story, that only means that they should try to believe it and keep quiet if they can’t.

  Swift says in another note, “To say a man is bound to believe is neither truth nor sense. You may force men, by interest or punishment, to say or swear they believe, and to act as if they believed. You can go no further.” Lip service is preferable to denial. “The want of belief,” he adds, “is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.” And again: “I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast, since they are the consequence of that reason which he hath planted in me, if I take care to conceal those doubts from others, if I use my best endeavours to subdue them, and if they have no influence on the conduct of my life.”5

  What evidence there is suggests that Swift’s God was distant and impersonal. He despised “fanatics” who claimed to enjoy direct communication with the Almighty, and he would have appreciated the comment by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, “If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.” We know that he owned a copy of Pascal’s Pensées, and he probably agreed with Pascal that “men are in darkness and remote from God, who is hidden from their knowledge; this is the very name which he gives himself in the Scriptures, deus absconditus.” The biblical text is Isaiah 45:15: “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel.”6 The hidden God is a deity in Swift’s own image.

  The historian Lecky put it well: “That Swift would have been a skeptic if he had not been a clergyman is very probable; but this is no disparagement to his sincerity.” In The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit Swift wrote, “It is a sketch of human vanity for every individual to imagi
ne the whole universe is interested in his meanest concern. . . . Who, that sees a little paltry mortal, droning, and dreaming, and driveling to a multitude, can think it agreeable to common good sense that either Heaven or Hell should be put to the trouble of influence or inspection upon what he is about?” This is not far from Voltaire, who makes a Turkish dervish say to Candide, “When his Highness sends a ship to Egypt, do you suppose he worries whether the ship’s mice are comfortable or not?”7

  Swift’s religion was a practical one, and he had little interest in theology. A clergyman’s job, he said, was “to tell the people what is their duty, and then to convince them that it is so.” As for the thorny questions that theologians liked to debate, “I defy the greatest divine to produce any law, either of God or man, which obliges me to comprehend the meaning of omniscience, omnipresence, ubiquity, attribute, beatific vision, with a thousand others so frequent in pulpits.”8

  One of the thorniest theological questions was the nature of the Trinity, three persons yet a single God. Increasing numbers of writers were finding that doctrine untenable, and liberal thinkers were branded with the dread titles of Socinians, Sabellians, and Arians. We know what Swift said in public about the Trinity because he devoted a sermon to it: it was a mystery, and mysteries are by definition impossible to understand. “If you explain them,” he said, “they are mysteries no longer; if you fail, you have labored to no purpose.” Johnson similarly told Boswell, “If you take three and one in the same sense, to be sure you cannot believe it; but the three persons in the Godhead are Three in one sense, and One in another. We cannot tell how; and that is the mystery!”9 Swift would surely have appreciated the story of the Oxford dons who saw an open car go by with three men seated in a row. One of them commented, “There goes an allegory of the Holy Trinity,” and the other replied, “No, for that, you must show me one man in three cars.”