SWIFT

Jonathan Swift

The bust in St. Patrick’s Cathedral

SWIFT

BY

CARL VAN DOREN

NEW YORK

THE VIKING PRESS

1930

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1930

SECOND PRINTING NOVEMBER, 1930

COPYRIGHT 1930 BY CARL VAN DOREN

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg 3]

SWIFT

I

POOR RELATION

Jonathan Swift aimed at mankind the most venomous arrow that scorn has ever yet let loose. Mankind, bland abstraction, caught his arrow, laughed at it, and turned it over to children to play with. Children, inoculated with Gulliver’s Travels at an age when it cannot harm them, are thereafter innocently immune. If they hear of Swift they recollect their toy, unaware that it was intended to be deadly or that it has still lost little of its furious poison. Mankind, by a stroke so bold that it must have been indifferent, has protected itself. Swift remains a show, the story of his wild assault fades from the record. Touch the pages of the record, however, and it blazes, a story of fire in a language of ice.

Everywhere fire and ice, everywhere together. “Remember,” Swift wrote to a woman who loved him as only men like Swift are loved, “that riches are nine parts in ten of all that is good in life.” Though he was, when he said this, designing to chill a love which was[Pg 4] warmer than he wanted it, design alone would not have been enough to prompt these cold words. He could not have formed them if they had not come from what he felt to be his reason and what he believed to be his experience. Always he refused to speak about his fate except in the hard accents of reason. Always he refused to share in passions, outside his experience, which might have transformed the universe for him, softening it and comforting him. Even when they were offered, Swift held back, obstinate and doubtful. He could imagine no easier freedom. He could imagine no kinder world.

This caution, in a nature so imperious, had to be learned early to be learned at all. Swift learned it from an expert teacher waiting for him when he was born. Poverty of different degrees might have bred him to resignation or to unconcern, to holiness or to outlawry. Swift’s poverty had a subtler craft. It fed and clothed and housed everything about him but his pride. Had that been the mild vanity which is what most young men mean by pride, he might have gone through his dependent years unscarred. But the pride of Swift was constitutional, ceaseless, sensitive, and headlong. Nourished, it would still have fretted; starved, it rebelled and gave itself to rage for want of action.

“And this it is,” he wrote at twenty-five, “which a person of great honour in Ireland (and who was pleased[Pg 5] to stoop so low as to look into my mind) used to tell me, that my mind was like a conjured spirit that would do mischief if I would not give it employment.”

The conjured spirit often brooded over events older than its birth, telling itself that its mishaps had begun with its ancestors. To go no further back, there was Swift’s grandfather, Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich in Herefordshire. He had been so stubborn and defiant a victim of Parliament during the Civil War that when he died in 1658 he had had no longer any fortune to be divided among his many sons and daughters. At least five of his sons had consequently taken to the law. All five of them had gone to Ireland, which was then poor enough to lack lawyers but not poor enough to be overlooked by Englishmen in search of a conquered province where they might have the benefit of their blood as well as of their merits.

Within six or seven years after the father’s death Godwin, Dryden, Abraham (a merchant), William, Jonathan, and Adam Swift had established themselves in Dublin. Godwin, four times married, had prospered most. He had had three heiresses in the steady series of his wives, and had made other advantageous speculations. Jonathan had prospered least. Trusting to a minor post as steward of the King’s Inns, he had married the dowerless Abigail Erick of Leicestershire, begot a daughter, begot a son, and died. He left his widow a few debts, a few arrears due her[Pg 6] if she could collect them, and an income of twenty pounds a year. When the posthumous son was born, 30 November 1667, he became at once a general charge upon a family which was itself dispersed and insecure.

Dispersed and insecure, and yet too mindful of its rank to decline smoothly to a lower. Had not Barnam Swift, of the Yorkshire branch, been made an Irish viscount by Charles I, and had not his daughters married one of them the Earl of Eglinton and the other that Robert Feilding who for a third or fourth wife was to have, somewhat bigamously, a former mistress of Charles II? Had not the wife of Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich, been the niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden? Had not the wife of Thomas Swift, son of the vicar of Goodrich, been the daughter of Sir William Davenant? Had not the first wife of Godwin Swift been a cousin of the Marchioness of Ormond? Had not the Swifts as a rule, whether in Yorkshire or Kent or Herefordshire or Ireland, married like gentlemen? Had they not lived as much like gentlemen as the shifting past century had permitted, holding on to land, gaining place by favour? Was not Godwin Swift, head of the house in Ireland, attorney-general of the Palatinate of Tipperary because his first, though not his present, wife was related to the Ormonds who had favoured him?

The Irish Swifts might be unsettled, but they went[Pg 7] their ways in the shadow of distinction and the light of expectations. For one of them, the one genius of the race, there was in his youth no relief from the bitter contrast between his birthright and his circumstances. As a Swift he could not dig. As Jonathan Swift he could not beg. He had to accommodate himself to the moods of a family’s charity.

How poor he was must be measured not by his needs but by his pride. His mother lived in Hoey’s Court, then respectable enough. She had a nurse whose devotion to him appears in the only incident recorded of his early childhood. When he was a year old, Swift himself tells, this nurse, “who was a woman of Whitehaven, being under an absolute necessity of seeing one of her relations, who was then extremely sick, and from whom she expected a legacy, and being at the same time extremely fond of the infant, she stole him on shipboard unknown to his mother and uncle and carried him with her to Whitehaven, where he continued for almost three years. For when the matter was discovered his mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage till he could be better able to bear it. His nurse was so careful of him that before he returned he had learned to spell; and by the time that he was three years old he could read any chapter in the Bible.” This was no beggar’s brat. And after the child’s return to Dublin, whether he lived with his mother in

Hoey’s Court or at his uncle’s house in Chancery Lane,[Pg 8] there was little change in his condition. He was fed and clothed and housed.

But when at six he was sent to Kilkenny School there was a change. His mother had gone, or soon went, with her daughter to her own people in Leicester. The boy was more than ever dependent upon his uncle, who had chosen this school because it was under the patronage of the Ormonds. It is possible only to guess wherein Godwin Swift, who kept the boy in the school for the next eight years, fell short of what the nephew expected. Perhaps he stinted him in affection; perhaps he stinted him in pocket money. That the busy lawyer had not much tenderness to give to a random nephew, or that he had less money to distribute than his hungry clan supposed, is now easy to understand. It was not easy for a schoolboy to understand. This schoolboy, increasing in pride and exigence, blamed his growing discontent upon his kinsman. Like other restive children, he cast himself as the tragic hero in an imagined drama of neglect, multiplying his adversities with an angry egotism.

“I remember, when I was a little boy,” he wrote long afterwards, “I felt a great fish at the end of my line, which I drew up almost to the ground; but it dropped in, and the disappointment vexes me to this very day, and I believe it was the type of all my future disappointments.” He had formed his habits of brooding early, if he could be so deeply disappointed as never[Pg 9] to forget this mischance, if he could regard the fish, flopping to preserve its life, as somehow in league against the tragic hero.

Nothing at Kilkenny broke up the drama of neglect in which he played his resentful part. Intellectually he was not precocious. He excelled among the young grammarians, if at all, only by his knack at dog-Latin and rhymed macaronics. His temper did not dispose him towards obedience to his masters or towards cheerfulness among his companions. He was on good terms with his cousin Thomas, son of the son of the vicar of Goodrich, sent over from England where his father died young, and with a boy named Francis Stratford, with whom Swift during his subsequent days of power in London often dined. With William Congreve, also English, also in Ireland because his father had sought a post there, Swift was later to be on kind if not close terms. But there is nothing to prove that in Congreve, two years younger than he, any more than in Thomas Swift or Stratford, Swift found at school a friend who met his demanding eagerness.

However far he may have gone in his conscious Ishmaelism at Kilkenny, he went further at Trinity College, Dublin, to which, with his cousin Thomas and a few months after his friend Stratford, he was admitted as a pensioner in April 1682. There, in his own words, “by the ill treatment of his nearest relations he was so discouraged and sunk in his spirits that[Pg 10] he too much neglected his academic studies, for some parts of which he had no great relish by nature, and turned himself to reading history and poetry, so that when the time came for taking his degree of bachelor of arts, although he lived with great regularity and due observance of the statutes, he was stopped of his degree for dulness and insufficiency; and at last hardly admitted in a manner, little to his credit, which is called in that college speciali gratia on the 15th February 1685 [1686] with four more on the same footing; and this discreditable mark, as I am told, stands upon record in their college registry.”

Plain words, but not altogether disinterested. Back of them appears the tragic hero’s instinct to accuse the inimical or, at best, obtuse world in which he moved at Trinity. What the dispassionate records show is that the special grace by which he was admitted to the degree was an indulgence. A part of his work being unsatisfactory, he might have been required to wait another year. He was instead admitted on his general standing. No less than Thomas Swift, reported mediocriter in all three subjects of the examination preceding the degree, and no less than Stratford, mediocriter in one and vix mediocriter in two of them, Jonathan Swift, male in philosophy, bene in Greek and Latin, and negligenter in his Latin essay, became a bachelor of arts. Nothing but a little annoyance and a Latin phrase differentiated his wilful degree from their mediocre[Pg 11] ones. Moreover, he remained at Trinity three years longer, and would have become a master of arts there if the Revolution had not driven him elsewhere early in 1689.

Swift had seemed insufficient only because he was impatient. Contemptuous of philosophy, which he thought “vain babbling, and a mere sound of words,” and careless of Latin prose, by which he planned to live no more than by philosophy, he would not give to them the slight attention which would have been enough. He would read only on his own impulse, for his own purpose, and without pedantry. “If a rational man reads an excellent author with just application he shall find himself extremely improved, and perhaps insensibly led to imitate that author’s perfections, although in a little time he should not remember one word in the book, nor even the subject it handled; for books give the same turn to our thoughts and way of reasoning that good and ill company do to our behaviour and conversation; without either loading our memories or making us even sensible of the change.”

Swift’s reading was always an experience. In a world too narrow for his powers he turned to poets and historians, who, he discovered and later said, enlarge the mind and thoughts, extend and refine the imagination, direct the judgment, lessen the “admiration,” and increase the fortitude of their readers. For such experiences, during his seven years at college, the academic[Pg 12] penalty of being called irregular was not a ruinous price.

For Swift, however, too proud to be bored and yet too proud to go without the rewards of boredom, it was humiliation. He was a rebel who could not quite glory in his rebellion. If, perversely, he flung himself now and then into irregularities of conduct, they left him unsatisfied. Nor were they, it appears, important. He was fined for absences from chapel and from lectures; he was fined for “town-haunting,” which meant not being present at nine each evening when the roll of students was called over. On the date of his twenty-first birthday, a few weeks before he left the college, a “Sir Swift,” either Jonathan or Thomas, was censured for being contumacious and contemptuous to the junior dean, suspended for a month, and ordered to beg pardon, on his knees and publicly, to the insulted officer. This was of course nearly three years after Jonathan’s degree, and may indicate that he had fallen off from his regularity and observance of the statutes. He had now passed seven years in Dublin. The town had possibly come to tempt him as much as

the college bored him. His later days at the University, however, were devoted rather to idleness and scorn than to the ordinary vices of young men.

Drunkenness, gambling, lechery, and rioting were as uncongenial to him as scholastic disputation. These were for looser minds than his. He had the pride of intellect[Pg 13] which fosters virtue by making vice seem trifling by comparison, the vagary of feeble wills, the waste of energy diverted. He could not help realizing that irregularity was folly, and that it was absurd for him to have lost what fools had won by merely being regular. His instincts were profoundly on the side of order. When he disobeyed it was only because he was denied the opportunity to command.

As tragic hero in his own drama he blamed his faults upon the ill treatment of his relations, chiefly his uncle Godwin. The accusation is melodrama. Godwin Swift so declined from his prosperity during these same years that his health gave way, his mind failed, and he died soon after, leaving a broken estate to his heirs. During the last stage he may well have had little money for his nephew, and less tact than ever in bestowing it, but his failure and death were hardly spite. Towards William Swift, “the best of my relations,” to whom the nephew thereafter owed his principal support, and towards certain other uncles and cousins, Swift felt gratitude. It was Godwin whom he accused of giving him the education of a dog. The nephew was as unjust as the uncle was untactful.

All that Swift needed to make him happy was a cheerful way of taking what he could get. All that he needed to make him blond was fair hair instead of black on his proud head and in the thick eyebrows under which his blue eyes burned and challenged out[Pg 14] of a face in which discontent was being written over confidence.

These different needs were equally beyond his reach. He could not be cheerful, because he was filled and driven by the sense and need of power. It was his heritage, richer than any he longed for. But it brought torment as well as exultation. He could not measure his endowment by that of his friends. They did the same things he did, and did them more successfully. He could not consult his elders. They would probably regard his sense of superiority as another half-grown delusion. He could not even have a full assurance of it himself, for it was dark and spasmodic, and it furnished no arguments to convince him that it was genuine. It was not yet conscious of half its aims. It stirred about in him without directing him where to go or what to undertake. It demanded knowledge, but not the information which it was his duty to acquire. It demanded eminence, but not any of the kinds of eminence to which he had access in school or college. It demanded expression, but in some powerful language which he had not yet learned. Above all, it demanded sway, over men and events. And Swift was poor,

obscure, without influence, unable to endure his present fortunes, unable to decide what career would mend them.

Jonathan Swift as a Student at Trinity College

Traditionally supposed to be Swift without trustworthy evidence

Waiting bred impatience. Impatience set up friction. Friction hurt. He paid it back with an instinctive [Pg 15]hatred which did not always trouble to be just to its objects. The fish at Kilkenny had disappointed him by living. His uncle in Dublin had disappointed him by dying. The world was full of disappointments, and he was the chosen victim.

Yet Swift’s plight was not entirely melodrama which he had elaborated to console himself. Telling Vanessa that riches are nine parts in ten of all that is good in life, he added: “and health is the tenth.” On the whole, he suffered more from lack of health than from lack of money. Soon after he came of age he began to be afflicted with the “giddiness and coldness of the stomach” which he attributed to a surfeit of apples, and not long afterwards with the deafness which he attributed to catching cold by sitting on the ground. The causes which he fixed upon may not have been the real ones. The effects were real, and they harried and frightened him.

His malady, it now seems, was a form of auditory vertigo, the result perhaps of hæmorrhage in the labyrinth of the ear. In this, if he had known the truth, he might have found a stroke of malice more sly and vindictive than any which he thought to accuse his fate of. A little, invisible, incurable defect doomed him. While his pride towered and his wrath hurled its freezing accusations, fate could be patient, knowing that a physical disorder, petty in itself, had helped to rouse this spiritual tumult. At its own time it would[Pg 16] quiet him more horribly than the most offended thunderbolt.

At twenty-one Swift, born to act incessantly, had not yet played a part in any actions except those which went on inside his own mind. Straitened in school and college, he had nevertheless been safe. The Revolution, which shook the hold of the English colonists, drove him hurriedly from Ireland to a passing refuge with his mother in Leicester. He never thought of himself as Irish, and always resented it if others thought him so. Though he had been born in Ireland, he had been a member of the English gentry planted there to rule it. He left because the aborigines, “the savage old Irish” he called them, had risen to overwhelm their conquerors. He was only returning to his true country, to make his fortune among his true compatriots. The Revolution hurried him, but his restless nature would in any case have impelled him, sooner or later, in the direction of a larger world than Ireland.

[Pg 17]

II

DEPENDENT

1