JONATHAN SWIFT

It is very certain that there never has lived a man who would have made a better subject for a psycho-analyst than Jonathan Swift, the ferocious, splenetic, and impotent Dean, of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.

Proud with an inordinate pride, cynically frank and yet pestered by strange and unaccountable inhibitions, the “mad parson” lived out his long life, dependent upon human beings and yet disdainful of them, attracted by the crazy drama of existence and yet at the same time out of conceit with it. Small wonder that the anomalies and contradictions of such a character should have captivated the minds of succeeding generations for nearly two hundred years! Was this man, the savagery of whose glance was actually potent enough to kill, the mere victim of some morbid physical derangement; or did the madness that fell upon him at last owe its origin to a deeper and more terrible cause? Is it really possible that one glimpse into the ghastly secret designs of life is sufficient to shatter, in certain abnormally sensitive temperaments, those delicately adjusted cerebral nerves which distinguish mortal men from the beasts of the field? When we remember the fate of Pascal, of Nietzsche, of Guy de Maupassant, each one of them gifted with just this dangerous, penetrating insight, our hearts quail lest this indeed be so.

With that irony which was characteristic of him, Swift himself affected to attribute his malady to a simple enough cause, to nothing else, in fact, than a youthful surfeit of golden pippins.

“Dropped in Ireland by a perfect accident” he was educated at Dublin University, his expenses being borne by his uncle Godwin, an eminent lawyer, whose benevolence did not save him from the hot tongue of his tetchy nephew who in his autobiographical notes gravely declares him to have been “a little too dexterous in the subtler parts of the law.” Swift’s mind in those days, as he himself tells us, “was like a conjured spirit which would do mischief if I did not give it employment.”

From Dublin he went to Moor Park at Surrey as a secretary to Sir William Temple. His locus standi in this capacity was at first ill-defined and one can well imagine the anguish that the youth’s haughty spirit underwent—already racked with the travail of genius—at finding himself in the position of an upper servant in the well-appointed country house of a pompous English gentleman. A cold, distant look from Sir William was sufficient, so Swift tells us, to put him at odds with himself for days together. In such an atmosphere, stiff, formal, and correct, the youthful satellite was at pains to exercise an ironic submission that ate into his very soul. It was as though a leopard were being fed on lettuce in a rabbit-hutch, or a vulture on groundsel seed in a parrot’s cage.

It was a habit of his to relieve the constraint from which he suffered by rushing off at top speed, whenever occasion offered, to the summit of a neighboring hill. There was only one congenial spirit in that conventional community, a little girl, probably a bastard daughter of Sir William Temple. Something about the sprightly personality of this child thawed the “chilly temper” of the awkward tutor. They were together always, in the cool, spacious library, in the stately oak-paneled hall, and in the ornate stone summer houses of the well ordered garden. “From those hours,” as has been so well said, “the child and man went hand in hand into the eternity of sorrowful fame.”

It was not, however, only the companionship of Stella which relieved the tedium and ignominy of those days; for it was Swift’s custom to make periodical visits to his mother, walking, hedge-stick in hand, all the way from Surrey to Leicester. During these excursions he would sleep at the poorest ale-houses, paying sixpence for clean sheets and, in order the more to taste and relish the precious hours of his freedom, would hold familiar intercourse with the human riffraff which is ever to be found up and down the English turnpike roads. In after years he put such experiences to good use, and it may well be that his peculiar style of writing, at once restrained and outspoken, owes much of its vigor to the curious juxtaposition in which he found himself between ministers of State and hedge rogues. We know that William III as he strolled along the trim borders of Sir William Temple’s kitchen garden expressed his liking for the young secretary by instructing him about the cutting of asparagus after the Dutch manner; may we not also conclude that the eccentric youth picked up from the acquaintanceships that he made on his Majesty’s highways, other scraps of information equally pertinent to life? Just as at Sir William’s board, he was in a position to observe at first hand the foibles and vanities of the great, so on many a sunny settle throughout the midland shires of England he was a constant witness of the grosser peculiarities of the rude and baseborn.

Sir William Temple died in 1699 and Swift, who had already taken orders, now entered upon that career of political pamphleteering which eventually won for him so exceptional a position in the history of those times.

In his “Battle of the Books” he had already showed unmistakable indications of his power. Could there be, for example, a more humorously graphic description of the sentiments of a testy spider disturbed by the foundering movements of a bee entangled in its web?

‘A plague split you,’ said he, ‘for a giddy son of a whore. Is it you with a vengeance that have made this litter here? Could not you look before you, and be damned? Do you think I have nothing better to do, in the Devil’s name, but mend and repair after your arse?’

This work was followed by the “Tale of a Tub,” that extraordinary, profane and sceptical piece of writing in which it would seem that Swift wittingly offended against his own maxim that “the want of a belief is a defect which ought to be concealed when it can not be overcome.” Under the guise of the elder brother Peter he directs his rancorous ridicule against the Roman Catholic Church with all its nice regulations for human conduct. Peter it was who insisted that brothers Martin and Jack—the Church of England and the dissenters—must “by no means break wind at both ends together, without manifest occasion.” Even the divine consolation of the holy sacrament is treated with the utmost irreverence as a “remedy for the worms, especially those of the spleen”; and in reference to the perennial dispute concerning transubstantiation he makes the eldest brother roundly assert that the sacred wafer itself, far from being merely bread is “as true natural mutton as any to be had in Leadenhall Market.”

In spite of such literary conceits, however, Swift remained throughout his life a zealous Champion of the Church of England as by law established. It was chiefly for its sake that he came to play the part of a turncoat and left the Whigs for the Torys, through whose patronage he won for himself the Deanship of St. Patrick’s, Dublin.

Once safely installed in his deanery he lived in Ireland, “like a poisoned rat in a hole,” the plague and scourge of all tyrants and at the last the bitter, misanthropic censor of the whole human race. “Gulliver’s Travels” even, he tells us, was written “to vex rather than divert the world”; and this we can readily believe when we read passages such as the one describing the infant Yahoo, “I observed the young animal’s flesh to smell very rank and the stink was somewhat between a weasel and a fox, but more disagreeable.”

Perhaps it would be best, in order to fully acquaint the reader with his temper, to gather together a few haphazard quotations from his works.

I love only individuals, I hate and detest that animal called man.

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

The merriest countenances are in mourning-coaches.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

A very little wit is valued in a woman, as we are pleased with a few words spoken plain by a parrot.

It is said of the horses in the vision that their power is in their mouths and in their tails. What is said of horses in the vision, in reality may be said of women.

What a fund of nice and curious observation is revealed in his scandalous “Directions to Servants.” How these outrageous sentences seem at once to get under the lid of the decorous indelicacies of society, opening them wide, so to speak, to the sanative influence of light, and air. Such “unconfined humor” has upon it the very stamp and signature of the man who is described as never laughing but “sucking in his cheeks to prevent it” when such a mood was upon him.

Rules that Concern All Servants in General.

When your master or lady calls a servant by name, if that servant be not in the way, none of you are to answer, for then there would be no end to your drudgery. Never come till you have been called three or four times; for nought but dogs will come at the first whistle; and when the master calls ‘who’s there?’ no servant is bound to come. ‘Who’s there’ is no name.

Directions to the Nurse.

If you happen to let the child fall and lame it be sure never confess it, if it dies all is safe.

... to the House Maid.

When you have scoured the brasses and irons in the parlour-chimney, lay the foul wet clout on the next chair that your Lady may see that you have not neglected your work.

His poetry is just as unpardonable, revealing a propensity to expose everything, to gnaw down to the very bone. Probably Dryden was right when he said, “Cousin Swift, you will never make a poet,” and yet these rhyming, facile verses will always possess a curious fascination for certain minds, for they express, in poetry that is no poetry, a morbid reaction to the visible world. Was his incipient sickness revealing itself already in his tabid preoccupation with the excremental? Only a madman surely could make such giddy sport with dung and litter! Or is this fetid, but at the same time strangely formal poetry merely the outcome of a spiritual sensitiveness recoiling with inexpressible bitterness from an ideal of beauty which does not bear too close an inspection?

It is, however, in his prose that one finds Swift’s real power. How often when injustice is rampant in the world and nothing said, have lovers of liberty envied that inimitable style, whose searing quality of venomous satire could not only dislodge the mighty from their seats, but alter the very laws of the land!

Throughout what we may call the militant years of Jonathan Swift’s life, Stella was not the only young girl who, in the words of Dr. Johnson “from being proud of his praise grew fond of his person.” In following his life it becomes apparent that there was something in the morbid construction of his uncommon temperament that enabled him to derive a wanton and perverted satisfaction from mental intercourse with immature women. Both in his journals to Stella and in his letters to Vanessa this curious preoccupation is quite evident. It was this denaturalized and extraordinary man’s vice to make love not with his body but with his genius. This perilous pastime became a kind of obsession with him, an obsession which perhaps alone reconciled him to an existence for which as the years passed his distaste became more and more emphasized. His love letters are all written in ambiguous and masked language as though he half anticipated the fierce searchlight of inquiry that would be poured upon their pages by future generations. “Farewell, dear Sirrahs, dearest lives; there is peace and quiet with M D and nowhere else.”

Esther Vanhomrigh, as the other Esther had done before her, followed her equivocal lover to Ireland only to discover that she was conjured to practise the utmost discretion with regard to the amphibolous relationship. “You have taught me to distinguish and now you leave me miserable,” she wrote reproaching the Dean for his judicious abstentions.

Stella took alarm at the presence of a rival and managed to persuade Swift into marrying her, but even her triumph proved elusive for the Dean insisted upon the ceremony being performed with such rigid secrecy that to this day there are to be found those who hold to the opinion that it never took place at all.

Everybody knows what followed. Vanessa, distressed by a rumour of the wedding, wrote to Stella to have the matter cleared up. When the impolitic epistle was put into Swift’s hands, he rode in a fit of blind rage to Marlay Abbey. He reached the place in the early morning and, going straight up to the bed-room of the unhappy woman, threw the incriminating document at her feet and turned on his heel without a word. A week later Vanessa was dead and underground, killed, so it was said, by the single venomous, asp-like look that her ferocious lover had given her.

There are other equally strange stories connected with him. One of the most significant of these is recounted by Delaney. On one occasion he saw the Dean hurrying away from Archbishop King to whom he had been speaking. “You have just met the most unhappy man who ever lived,” was the only comment vouchsafed by the circumspect prelate. What it was that had been said or confessed during that historic conversation has never been divulged. But whatever horrible thing was hagriding the unfortunate man, worse was to follow.

In January 1732, Stella died. She was buried at midnight in the Cathedral. Swift was too ill to be present; and indeed had to be carried to the back of the deanery so as not to be distracted into a frenzy by the lights that shone into his room from the lanterns of those who were occupied in putting into church-yard mould the body of the only woman he had ever loved. From that hour he never lifted “his sorry head” in mirth again. A blank and hopeless gloom wrapped itself about him. The record of those years is one of the most terrible episodes in all literary history. Never for a moment was he unaware of his impending doom. He knew that he would inevitably go mad.

He was observed one day standing under an elm tree the top branches of which were already fading. “I shall be like that; I shall die first at the top,” he said. Once, when a heavy glass had fallen from its place nearly crushing him, and he was congratulated on his escape, he remarked simply, “I wish it had killed me.” A servant passing near his room overheard the words of a desperate prayer, “that he should be taken away from the evil to come.”

On the anniversaries of his birthday, when all Ireland was agog to do honour to the author of the “Drapier’s Letters,” and “A Modest Proposal,” he would sit quietly at home and read the third chapter of the book of Job, wherein that ancient, long-suffering Jew curses the day on which he was born. Already he began to feel a change coming over him. “Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!” he said once, as he turned over the pages of the “Tale of a Tub.” But worse was to follow.

An abscess as large as a hen’s egg formed over his left eye, and for a month the aging man howled out to the night in abject torment. Five servants could hardly prevent him from tearing out his own eyeball, and when the agony had passed he was left a lunatic. But was he? Occasionally, in spite of the strange aphasia by which he was afflicted, he would be heard to mutter words which to the awe of those who loved him seemed to denote that even yet, in some obscure way, he retained a ghastly and incredible consciousness.

More years passed by and still up and down the wide staircase and through the silent rooms of the deanery the figure that had been Jonathan Swift paced to and fro. Like a caged animal he ate his food—little chopped up pieces of meat—as he walked, and once he was found, with horrible contorted face, threatening his own image in one of the tall mirrors. Once his cousin called to see him. “Go, go,” he shrieked, and then pointing significantly to his head, “My best understanding.” Once there escaped from him the simple tragic words, “I am a fool”; and this from the lips of the man whom Addison had not hesitated to call the greatest genius of his age! Once more the devoted populace, as his birthday came round, lit bonfires, and paraded the streets, and rang the Dublin bells. The noise of their rejoicing came in through the open window and, to the dismay of the attendants, the idiot inmate uttered the words, “’Tis folly, better let it alone.” At another time a knife was left within his reach, and he who removed it was shocked to hear as though in rebuke for his own prudent action, the ambiguous and impressive utterance, “I am what I am.”

He died in his seventy-eighth year, October 19, 1745. He lies buried in his own cathedral near the grave of Esther Johnson. Amongst the letters that he left, as though he wished even after death to bewilder the over-curious concerning the true significance of the deepest emotions of his life, was found an envelope containing one of Stella’s tresses, “black as a raven’s wing,” with the four words, “only a woman’s hair” inscribed upon it.

His worldly goods were left by his will for the construction of a mad house.