Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Another poem, The Place of the Damned, is a relentless catalogue of human viciousness that pervades every known profession.

  Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves,

  Damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves;

  Damned lawyers and judges, damned lords and damned squires,

  Damned spies and informers, damned friends and damned liars,

  Damned villains, corrupted in every station,

  Damned time-serving priests all over the nation;

  And into the bargain I’ll readily give you

  Damned ignorant prelates, and councilors privy.4

  By this stage, frustrated by his inability to influence events, Swift was spoiling for a fight. When a bill was proposed in the Irish Parliament to extend toleration by abolishing the Test Act, Swift responded with On the Words “Brother Protestants” and “Fellow Christians,” So Familiarly Used by the Advocates for the Repeal of the Test Act. In this poem he suggested sarcastically that Presbyterians were no more like Anglicans than horse turds in a flooded farmyard were like apples.

  A ball of new-dropped horse’s dung,

  Mingling with apples in the throng,

  Said to the pippin, plump and prim,

  “See, brother, how we apples swim.”

  In passing, Swift threw in a jibe at Richard Bettesworth, a pompous serjeant-at-law (the title indicated a barrister) who had presumptuously referred to a distinguished friend of Swift’s as “brother serjeant.”

  Thus at the bar that booby Bettesworth,

  Though half a crown o’er-pays his sweat’s worth,

  Who knows in law nor text nor margent,

  Calls Singleton his brother serjeant.5

  The “margent” is the marginal commentary that interprets the meaning of a law.

  As the younger Sheridan heard it, Bettesworth first encountered these lines when he was reading the poem to friends. “He read it aloud till he had finished the lines relative to himself. He then flung it down with great violence, he trembled and turned pale; and after some pause, his rage for a while depriving him of utterance, he took out his penknife, and opening it, vehemently swore, ‘With this very penknife, by God, will I cut off his ears.’” According to Orrery, Bettesworth added that he intended to make Swift’s head “as round as an apple,” evidently alluding to the apples among the turds.6

  Hastening to the deanery and then to another house where he was told Swift was visiting, Bettesworth, as Swift himself said, “repeated the lines that concerned him with great emphasis.” Swift blandly denied having written them, at which Bettesworth, with surprising perceptiveness, declared that he was convinced of Swift’s authorship because he knew that the words that rhymed with his name “could come from none but me.”7

  In Sheridan’s account, Bettesworth then added: “Well, since you will give me no satisfaction in this affair, let me tell you, your gown is your protection; under the sanction of which, like one of your own Yahoos who had climbed up to the top of a high tree, you sit secure, and squirt your filth round on all mankind.” Swift was amused, saying afterward that “the fellow showed more wit in this than he thought him possessed of.”8

  Swift’s neighbors rallied to his defense. Thirty-one of them signed a declaration promising to “defend the life and limbs of the said Dean.” Ehrenpreis observes that the document is “suspiciously well-worded” and may have been drafted by Swift himself. He sent them a moving response: “I receive with great thankfulness these many kind expressions of your concern for my safety. . . . I am chiefly sorry that by two cruel disorders of deafness and giddiness, which have pursued me for four months, I am not in a condition either to hear or to receive you, much less to return my most sincere acknowledgments, which in justice and gratitude I ought to do. May God bless you and your families in this world, and make you forever happy in the next.”9

  The allusion to Yahoos clearly stung, but Swift had a countermove. In the next year he published a rollicking ballad called The Yahoo’s Overthrow, in which it was Bettesworth who was the Yahoo.

  He kindled, as if the whole satire had been

  The oppression of virtue, not wages of sin;

  He began as he bragged, with a rant and a roar;

  He bragged how he bounced, and he swore how he swore.

  Knock him down, down, down, knock him down.

  After some horseplay the ballad ends by predicting that Bettesworth will make peace by kissing Swift’s rear end.

  And when this is over, we’ll make him amends;

  To the Dean he shall go, they shall kiss and be friends.

  But how? Why, the Dean shall to him disclose

  A face for to kiss, without eyes, ears, or nose.

  Knock him down, down, down, knock him down.

  That insult was a common one. Fielding’s Squire Western frequently invites people to kiss his posterior, though as Fielding notes, “No one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.”10

  The clever rhyme of Bettesworth with “sweat’s worth” was quoted everywhere, and Swift’s antagonist must have rued the day he took him on. “By targeting Bettesworth’s name,” Stephen Karian comments, “Swift left him little defense, since one can deny various attacks on one’s character and abilities, but one cannot escape one’s name.”11 His feeble recourse was to complain that the rhyme was defective, since he preferred his name to be pronounced “Bett-es-worth.”

  One of the last poems Swift ever wrote was the most ferocious of all. It was provoked by an issue that had obsessed him all his life, attacks on the income of the Church. In 1736 the Irish Parliament took up a petition to excuse grazing land from the tithes that other farmland had to pay. There were far-reaching implications. If landowners could win this battle they would soon be launching new ones, and before long there might be no tithes at all.12

  Swift rose to the challenge with an extended invective called A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club. “The Club” was his contemptuous nickname for the Irish House of Commons; he told Sheridan that he was tired of hearing about “the follies, corruptions, and slavish practices of those misrepresentative brutes.” In the poem he adapted the story of the Gadarene swine, in which Jesus rescues a man from demonic possession by causing “unclean spirits” to migrate into a herd of the animals. When he asks the spirits their name they reply, “My name is Legion: for we are many.”13

  The Legion Club begins casually enough, noticing the brand-new Parliament House (today it houses the Bank of Ireland) adjacent to Trinity College.

  As I stroll the city, oft I

  See a building large and lofty,

  Not a bow-shot from the College,

  Half the globe from sense and knowledge.

  But that edifice turns out to be a madhouse, filled with the criminally insane:

  While they sit a-picking straws,

  Let them rave of making laws;

  While they never hold their tongue

  Let them dabble in their dung. . . .

  We may, while they strain their throats,

  Wipe our arses with their votes.14

  More than a dozen members of Parliament are attacked by name. At times the tone is amused and witty:

  Bless us, Morgan! Art thou there, man?

  Bless mine eyes! Art thou the chairman?

  But mostly the fury is overwhelming. Bettesworth predictably shows up, yoked to another fellow Swift despised:

  Tie them, keeper, in a tether,

  Let them stare and stink together;

  Both are apt to be unruly,

  Lash them daily, lash them duly;

  Though ’tis hopeless to reclaim them,

  Scorpion’s rods perhaps may tame them.15

  In Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, Swift claimed that he avoided personal satire:

  Yet malice never was his aim;

  He lashed the vice, but spared the name.

  No individu
al could resent

  Where thousands equally were meant.

  In fact he named a dozen people in that very poem. But he may not have thought there was a contradiction. As a writer commented soon after his death, his “general satire” exposed vice and folly without naming names, “but in his particular satire, when egregious monsters, traitors to the commonwealth and slaves to party, are the objects of his resentment, he cuts without mercy, in order that those who trespass in defiance of laws might live in fear of him.”16

  Swift took more than usual care to conceal his authorship of The Legion Club. He wrote to Sheridan, who was out of town at the time, “Here is a cursed long libel running about in manuscript, on the Legion Club. It is in verse, and the foolish town imputes it to me. There were not above thirteen abused (as it is said) in the original, but others have added more which I never saw, though I have once read the true one.” A week later he wrote again, “I hear it is charged to me, with great personal threatenings from the puppies offended. . . . If I could get the true copy I would send it to you.”17

  Sheridan duly replied, “Surely no person can be so stupid as to imagine you wrote the panegyric on the Legion Club.” Of course he knew perfectly well who wrote it. He and Swift expected their letters to be opened and were careful to leave a false trail. As for the actual manuscript, Swift undoubtedly gave it to someone else for safekeeping, possibly Sheridan himself.18

  “THE SHADOW OF THE SHADOW OF THE SHADOW OF DR. SWIFT”

  In Verses on the Death, Swift imagined himself as “cheerful to his dying day,” but that was not to be. By 1732 he was noticing a serious deficit in short-term memory: “I often forget what I did yesterday, or what passed half an hour ago.” It was a condition he had long foreseen. As early as 1720, when he was walking with Edward Young, secretary to the lord lieutenant at the time, he made a remark that Young put in print much later: “As I and others were taking with him an evening’s walk, about a mile out of Dublin, he stopped short; we passed on; but perceiving that he did not follow us, I went back, and found him fixed as a statue, and earnestly gazing upward at a noble elm, which in its uppermost branches was much withered and decayed. Pointing at it, he said, ‘I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.’”19

  No reason has ever been given to doubt Young’s anecdote; he was a highly principled clergyman as well as a moralizing poet. Ehrenpreis never mentions this story, however, since it apparently does not conform to his own conception of Swift. He may not have noticed that there is corroboration in an independent anecdote from Swift’s friend Faulkner: “One time, in a journey from Drogheda to Navan, he rode before his company, made a sudden stop, dismounted his horse, fell on his knees, lifted up his hands, and prayed in the most devout manner. When his friends came up, he desired and insisted on their alighting, which they did, and asked him the meaning. ‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘pray join your hearts in fervent prayers with mine, that I may never be like this oak tree, which is decayed and withered at the top, whilst all the other parts are sound.’”20 It looks as if this was a comment Swift was in the habit of making.

  Around 1734 there is a marked change in Swift’s correspondence. Depressed, lonely, and sick, he was all too aware that his faculties were fading. The number of personal letters diminishes rapidly, partly because many friends were now dead, and partly because the strain of composing them was too great. Most of what remains is simple messages about practical matters.

  Swift was finding it difficult even to write accurately, and when he read over his letters he was appalled at the number of blunders. “You see by my many blotting and interlinings,” he wrote at the end of one of them, “what a condition my head is in.” That particular letter contained the words “Give me leavelth,” which were crossed out and replaced by “Give me leave to inquire after your health.” There were bizarre spellings, too. The man who had once been so demanding about accurate spelling could now write “liquize” when he meant “likewise.”21 In Swift’s time, the progressive symptoms of dementia were not adequately recognized; a general mental fuzziness was understood to reflect “senility,” but confusion over words may have seemed puzzling.

  Realizing that he was nearly finished as a writer, Swift allowed Faulkner to publish his collected writings in four handsome volumes, with an impressive list of subscribers who made payment in advance—over eight hundred of them, filling eleven pages, from the Earl of Abingdon to a Mr. Zouch. The Reverend Dr. Thomas Sheridan is there, of course, as are the Reverend Dr. Delany, who ordered no fewer than ten sets, and Mrs. Rebecca Dingley. It’s not clear how direct a hand Swift had in the process of publication, but he definitely helped to locate copies of missing works, and took pains to restore passages in Gulliver’s Travels that had been cut in earlier editions.22

  When Motte, Swift’s London publisher, complained that the Faulkner edition was competing with his own, Swift retorted that England had no right to enforce a publishing monopoly. To him this was just one abuse out of many. “I am so incensed against the oppressions from England, and have so little regard to the laws they make, that I do as a clergyman encourage the merchants both to export wool and woolen manufactures to any country in Europe, or anywhere else, and conceal it from the custom-house officers, as I would hide my purse from a highwayman if he came to rob me on the road, although England hath made a law to the contrary.” Ehrenpreis exclaims, “The open appeal to lawlessness astonishes me.”23

  Swift’s championing of Irish rights began to take on eccentric forms. One of his last public acts, in 1738, was to protest a new regulation of the coinage by raising a black flag and having the cathedral bells toll in mourning. A judge commented that with performances like that, “he makes it impossible for one in my station to converse with him.”24

  Swift tried to keep up his exercise program, hard though that was. “My giddiness is more or less constant,” he told Pope in 1736; “I have not an ounce of flesh between the skin and bone, yet I walk often four or five miles, and ride ten or a dozen. But I sleep ill, and have a poor appetite. I can as easily write a poem in the Chinese language as my own.”25 Pope returned warmly affectionate letters, in which, however, Swift detected an element of self-interest. Pope was anxious to retrieve his own letters from Swift, with a view to revising and publishing them. Swift had alarmed him by declaring that he gave orders for all of his correspondence to be destroyed after his death, though that was most likely a teasing joke.

  After a while Pope did get his letters back. And then, since it was considered pretentious for a living person to publish his correspondence, he tried to trick Faulkner into bringing out an allegedly unauthorized edition. His biographer calls the whole performance “a real-life comedy of intrigue, mystification, and deceit. . . . Pope’s willingness throughout the affair to lay his own scheming on the backs of others is painful to behold.”26

  In the fall of 1735, Swift took his very last extended trip. It was to stay with Sheridan once again, who by now had moved to Cavan, ten miles from Quilca, and had opened a new school there. That meant closing down his successful school in Dublin, where Swift used to enjoy examining the students, and seeing much less of his friends. Swift dropped in at Sheridan’s Dublin house just before the move and found workmen packing up furnishings in the parlor where he had often been entertained. As Sheridan’s son remembered, “He burst into tears, and rushed into a dark closet [that is, a small room], where he continued a quarter of an hour before he could compose himself.”27

  In this decision, as in many others, Dr. Sheridan was his own worst enemy. Ten years previously, he had been offered a fine appointment in the diocese of Cork, but had ruined his chances at the last minute by preaching at random on the text “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The day happened to be August 1, the anniversary of George I’s accession to the throne. Naturally enough, he was suspected of Tory sympathies, and the offer was withdrawn. It’s probably true that he just preached, without thinking, a sermon that he happened to have
with him. The archdeacon of Cork must have believed him, since he compensated for Sheridan’s loss with a lease worth ₤250.28

  The Cavan school was turning out to be a failure, and Swift was miserable during the visit. He told Martha Whiteway, in a letter written jointly with Sheridan, “I have been now the third day at Cavan, the Doctor’s Canaan, the dirtiest place I ever saw, with the worst wife and daughter, and the most cursed sluts and servants, on this side Scotland.”29 “Canaan” was ironic, since Cavan was the opposite of a Promised Land. To make matters worse, Swift injured a shin and could neither ride nor walk.

  The younger Sheridan got to know Swift well at this time. Swift was invariably kind to him, and since his eyesight was poor, he would have the boy read aloud for two or three hours every day. But the decline was obvious. No longer portly, “his person was quite emaciated, and bore the marks of many more years than had passed over his head. His memory greatly impaired, and his other faculties much on the decline.” However genial he still was with people he trusted, outsiders found him short-tempered and difficult. “His temper [was] peevish, fretful, morose, and prone to sudden fits of passion.”30

  On one occasion Dr. Sheridan persuaded Swift to host a dinner at an inn for some town dignitaries, in return for the warm welcome they had given when Swift arrived in Cavan. In his own opinion the affair went well, as he told Mrs. Whiteway: “I invited the principal men in town to sup with me at the best inn here. There were sixteen of them, and I came off rarely for about thirty shillings. They were all very modest and obliging.” He meant that he came off cheaply, which always gratified him. But the younger Sheridan remembered what happened very differently. Swift ordered “a very shabby dinner,” began openly calculating the cost before his guests were finished, and yelled at the servants until they ran away. Dr. Sheridan was so disgusted that he left the inn without saying a word.31