Then there is the ballad, always quoted when critics would show what John Gay could do, and which the Duchess of Queensberry (who greatly befriended him) thought charming; I give the two final verselets only:

I think I have shown the best side of him; and it is not very imposing. A man to be petted; one for confections and for valentines, rather than for those lifts of poetic thought which buoy us into the regions of enduring song.

Yet Swift says in a letter, “‘The Beggar’s Opera’ hath knocked down Gulliver!” This joyous poet lies in Westminster Abbey, with an epitaph by Alexander Pope. How, then, can we pass him by?

Jonathan Swift.

But Dean Swift[108] does not lie in Westminster Abbey. We must go to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, to find his tomb, and that bust of him which looks out upon the main aisle of the old church.

He was born in Dublin, at a house that might have been seen only a few years ago, in Hoey’s Court. His father, however, was English, dying before Swift was born; his mother, too, was English, and so poor that it was only through the charity of an uncle the lad came to have schooling and a place at Trinity College—the charity being so doled out that Swift groaned under it; and groaned under the memory of it all his life. He took his degree there, under difficulties; squabbling with the teachers of logic and metaphysics, and turning his back upon them and upon what they taught.

After some brief stay with his mother in Leicestershire, he goes, at her instance, and in recognition of certain remote kinship with the family of Sir William Temple, to seek that diplomat’s patronage. He was received charitably—to be cordial was not Temple’s manner—at the beautiful home of Sheen;[109] and thereafter, on Temple’s change of residence, was for many years an inmate of the house at Moor Park. There he eats the bread of dependence—sulkily at times, and grudgingly always. Another protégée of the house was a sparkling-eyed little girl, Hester Johnson—she scarce ten when he was twenty-three—and who, doubtless, looked admiringly upon the keen, growling, masculine graduate of Dublin, who taught her to write.

Swift becomes secretary to Sir William; through his influence secures a degree at Oxford (1692); pushes forward his studies, with the Moor Park library at his hand; takes his own measure—we may be sure—of the stately, fine diplomat; measures King William too—who, odd times, visits Temple at his country home, telling him how to cut his asparagus—measures him admiringly, yet scornfully; as hard-working, subtle-thoughted, ambitious, dependent students are apt to measure those whose consequence is inherited and factitious.

Then, with the bread of this Temple charity irking his lusty manhood, he swears (he is overfond of swearing) that he will do for himself. So he tempestuously quits Moor Park and goes back to Ireland, where he takes orders, and has a little parish with a stipend of £100 a year. It is in a dismal country—looking east on the turbid Irish Sea, and west on bog-lands—no friends, no scholars, no poets, no diplomats, no Moor-Park gardens. Tired of this waste, and with new and better proposals from Temple—who misses his labors—Swift throws up his curacy (or whatever it may be) and turns again toward England.

There is record of a certain early flurry of feeling at date of this departure from his first Irish parish—a tender, yet incisive, and tumultuous letter to one “Varina,”[110] for whom he promises to “forego all;” Varina, it would seem, discounted his imperious rapture, without wishing to cut off ulterior hopes. But ulteriors were never in the lexicon of Swift; and he broke away for his old cover at Moor Park. Sir William welcomes, almost with warmth, the returned secretary, who resumes old studies and duties, putting a fiercer appetite to his work, and a greater genius. Miss Hester is there to be guided, too; she sixteen, and he fairly turned among the thirties; she of an age to love moonlight in the Moor Park gardens, and he of an age—when do we have any other?—to love tender worship.

But The Battle of the Books[111] and The Tale of a Tub, are even then seething and sweltering in his thought. They are wonderful products both; young people cannot warm to them as they do to the men of Liliput and of Brobdingnag; but there are old folk who love yet, in odd hours, to get their faculties stirred by contact with the flashing wit and tremendous satire of the books named.

The Battle—rather a pamphlet than a book—deals with the antagonism, then noisy, between advocates of ancient and modern learning, to which Bentley, Wotton, and Temple were parties. Swift strikes off heads all round the arena, but inclines to the side of his patron, Temple; and in a wonderful figure, of wonderful pertinence, and with witty appointments, he likens the moderns to noisome spiders, spinning out of their own entrails the viscous “mathematical” net-work, which catches the vermin on which they feed; and contrasting these with the bees (ancients), who seek natural and purer sources of nutriment—storing “wax and honey,” which are the sources of the “light and sweetness of life.” There are horribly coarse streaks in this satire, as there are in The Tale of a Tub; but the wit is effulgent and trenchant.

In this latter book there is war on all pedantries again; but mostly on shams in ecclesiastic teachings and habitudes; Swift finding (as so many of us do) all the shams, in practices which are not his own. It is a mad, strange, often foul-mouthed book, with thrusts in it that go to the very marrow of all monstrous practices in all ecclesiasticisms; showing a love for what is honest and of good report, perhaps; but showing stronger love for thwacking the skulls of all sinners in high places; and the higher the place the harder is the thwack.

Not long after these things were a-brewing, Sir William Temple died (1699), bequeathing his papers to his secretary. Swift looked for more. So many wasted years! Want of money always irked him. But he goes to London to see after the publication of Temple’s papers. He has an interview with King William—then in his last days—to whom Temple had commended him, but no good comes of that. He does, however, get place as chaplain for Lord Berkeley; goes to Ireland with him; reads good books to Lady Berkeley—among them the Occasional Reflections of the Hon. Robert Boyle, of whose long sentences I gave a taste in an earlier chapter.

Some of these Boyle meditations were on the drollest of topics—as, for instance, “Upon the Sight of a Windmill Standing Still,” and again, “Upon the Paring of a rare Summer Apple.”

Swift had no great appetite for such “parings;” but Lady Berkeley being insatiate, he slips a meditation of his own, in manuscript, between the leaves of the great folio of the Hon. Mr. Boyle; and opening to the very place begins reading, for her edification, “Meditations on a Broomstick.” “Dear me!” says her ladyship, “what a strange subject! But there is no knowing what useful instructions this wonderful man may draw from topics the most trivial. Pray, read on, Mr. Swift.”

And he did. He was not a man given to smiles when a joke was smouldering; and he went through his meditation with as much unction as if the Hon. Robert had written it. The good lady kept her eyes reverently turned up, and never smacked the joke until it came out in full family conclave.

I have told this old story (which, like most good stories, some critics count apocryphal) because it is so like Swift; he had such keen sense of the ridiculous, that he ran like a hound in quest of it—having not only a hound’s scent but a hound’s teeth.

At Laracor, the little Irish parish which he came by shortly after, he had a glebe and a horse, and became in a way domesticated there, so far as such a man could be domesticated anywhere. He duplicated, after a fashion, some features of the Moor-Park gardens; he wrote sermons there which are surprisingly good.

One wonders, as he comes from toiling through the sweat and muck and irreverent satire of The Tale of a Tub, what could have possessed the man to write so piously. He was used to open his sermons with a little prayer that was devout enough and all-embracing enough for the prayer-book. Then there is a letter of his to a young clergyman, giving advice about the make-up of his sermons, which would serve for an excellent week-day discourse at Marquand Chapel.

Indeed he has somewhat to say against the use of “hard words—called by the better sort of vulgar, fine language”—that is worth repeating:

But let us not suppose from all this that Swift has settled down tamely, and month by month, into the jog-trot duties of a small Irish vicar; no, no! there is no quiet element in his nature. He has gone back and forth from Dublin to London—sometimes on a Berkeley errand—sometimes on his own. He has met Congreve, an old school-fellow, and Prior and Gay; he has found the way to Will’s Coffee-house and to Button’s;[112] has some day seen Dryden—just tottering to the grave; has certainly dined with Addison, and finished a bottle with Steele. They call him the mad parson at Button’s; they have seen The Tale of a Tub; his epigrams are floating from mouth to mouth; his irony cuts like a tiger’s claw; he feels the power of his genius tingling to his fingertips—he, a poor Irish parson! why, the whole atmosphere around him, whether at London or at Dublin, is charged and surcharged with Satan’s own lightning of worldly promises.

And Hester Johnson, and Moor Park? Well, she has not forgotten him; ah! no; and he has by no means forgotten her. For she, with a good womanly friend, Mrs. Dingley, has gone to live in Ireland; Swift thinks they can live more economically there. These two ladies set up their homestead near to Swift’s vicarage; he goes to see them; they come to see him. He is thirty-three, and past; and she twenty, and described as beautiful. Is there any scandalous talking? Scarce one word, it would seem. He is as considerate as ice; and she as coy as summer clouds.

It does not appear that Swift had literary ambition, as commonly reckoned. That Tale of a Tub lay by him six or seven years before it came to print. He wrote for Steele’s Tatler, and for the Spectator—not with any understanding that his name was to appear, or that he was to be spoken admiringly of. Many of his best things were addressed to friends or acquaintances, and never saw the light through any instigation or privity of his own.

When there was some purpose to effect—some wrong to lash—some puppet to knock down—some tow-head to set on fire—some public drowsiness to wake—he rushed into print with a vengeance. Was it benevolence that provoked him to this? was it public spirit? Who can tell? I think there were many times when he thought as much; but I believe that never a man more often deceived himself than did Swift; and that over and over he mistook the incentives of his own fiery and smarting spirit for the leadings of an angel of light.

When we think of the infrequency and awkwardness of travel in that day, we are not a little amazed to find him going back and forth as he did from Ireland to London. The journey was not, as now, a mere skip over to Holyhead, and then a five hours’ whirl to town, but a long, uncertain sail in some lugger of a vessel—blown as the winds blew—till a landing was made at Bristol or Swansea; and then the four to seven days of coaching (as the roads might be) through Bath to London. Sometimes it is some interest of the poor Irish Church that takes him over, for which we must give him due credit; but oftener it is his own unrest. His energies and his unsatisfied mind starve if not roused and bolstered and chafed by contact with minds as keen and hard, from which will come the fiery disputation that he loves. Great cities, where great interests are astir and great schemes fomenting, are magnets whose drawing power such intellects cannot resist. He is in London five or six months in 1701, six or eight the next year, six or eight the next, and so on.

Swift’s Politics.

He is in politics, too, which ran at high tide all through Anne’s time and the previous reign; you will read no history or biography stretching into that period but you may be confounded (at least I am) with talk of Whigs and Tories; and of what Somers did, and of what Harley did, and of what Ormond might do; and it is worth sparing a few moments to say something of the great parties. In a large way Whiggism represented progress and the new impulses which had come in with William III., and Toryism represented what we call conservatism. Thus, in Old Mortality, young Henry Morton is the Whig, and her ladyship of Tillietudlem is a starched embodiment of Toryism. Those who favored the Stuart family, and made a martyr of Charles I.—those who leaned to Romanism and rituals, or faith in tradition, were, in general, Tories; and those who brought over William of Orange, or who were dissenters or freethinkers, were apt to be Whigs. So the scars which came of sword-cuts by Cromwellian soldiers were apt to mark an excellent Tory; and the cropped ears of Puritans, that told of the savageness of Prince Rupert’s dragoons, were pretty sure to brand a man a Whig for life. But these distinctions were not steady and constant; thus, the elegant and fastidious Sir William Temple was a Whig; and old Dryden, clinking mugs with good fellows at Will’s coffee-house, was a Tory. Again, the courtly and quiet Mr. Addison, with his De Coverley reverences, was a good Whig; and Pope, with his Essay on Man, and fellowship with freethinkers, was Toryish. Swift began with being a Whig, to which side his slapdash wilfulness, his fellowship with Temple, and his scorn of tradition drew him; but he ended with veering over to the Tory ranks, where his hate of Presbyterianism and his eager thrusts at canting radicals gave him credit and vogue.

Addison and others counted him a turncoat, and grew cold to him; for party hates were most hot in those days; Swift himself says—the politicians wrangle like cats. He was tired, too, of waiting on Whig promises; perhaps he had larger hope of preferment with the Tories; Steele alleged this with bitterness; and there can be no doubt that Swift had an eye on preferment. Why not? Can he, so alert in mind, so loving of dignity, so conscious of power, see Mr. Addison coming to place as Secretary of State, and Steele with his fat commissions, without a tingling and irritating sense of dissatisfaction? Can he see good, amiable, pious dunces getting planted year after year in fat bishoprics, without a torturing remembrance of that poor little parish of Laracor, with a following so feeble that he is fain to open service some days (his factotum being the only auditor) with—“My dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places——”

How these contrasts must have grated on the mind of a man who looked down on all their lordships; who looked down on Steele; and who could count on his finger-ends the personages whom he scanned eye to eye—and who were upon a level with his commanding height.

He did service, too—this master of the pen and master of causticity—that to most would have brought quick reward; but he was too strong and too proud and too independent to come by reward easily. Such a man is bowed to reverently; is invited to dine hither and yon; is flattered, is humored, is conciliated; but as for office—ah! that is another matter. He is unsafe; he will kick over the traces; he will take the bit in his mouth; he will be his own man and not our man. What court, what cabinet, what clique could trust to the moderation, to the docility, to the reticence of a person capable of writing Gulliver’s Travels, and of turning all court scandals, all political intrigues, all ecclesiastic decorum, into a penny-show?

He is, indeed, urged for Bishop of Hereford—seems to have excellent chance there; but some brother Bishop (I think ’tis the Archbishop of York), who is much afraid, as he deserves to be, of The Tale of a Tub—says to the hesitating Queen,—“Better inquire first if this man be really a Christian;” and this frights the good Queen and the rest. So Swift is let off with the poor sop of the Deanery of St. Patrick’s.

His London Journal.

We know all about those days of his in London—days of expectancy. He has told us:

And to whom does he talk so confidentially, and tell all the story of those days? Why, to Hester Johnson. It is all down in Stella’s journal—written for her eye only; and we have it by purest accident. It was begun in 1710—he then in his forty-third year, and she in her thirtieth.

She has kept her home over in Ireland with Mrs. Dingley—seeing him on every visit there, and on every day, almost, of such visits; and, as her sweetest pasturage, feeding on letters he writes other times, and lastly on this Stella journal, “for her dear eyes,” at the rate of a page, or even two pages a day, for some three years.

All his London day’s life comes into it. Let us listen:

Again:

’Tis a strange journal; such a mingling of court gossip, sharp political thrusts, lover-like, childish prattle, and personal details. If he is sick, he scores down symptoms and curatives as boldly as a hospital nurse; if he lunches at a chop-house, he tells cost; if he takes in his waistcoat, he tells Stella of it; if he dines with Addison, he tells how much wine they drank; if a street beggar or the Queen shed tears, they slop down into that Stella journal; if she wants eggs and bacon, he tells where to buy and what to give; if Lady Dalkeith paints, he sees it with those great, protuberant eyes of his, and tells Stella.

There is coarseness in it, homeliness, indelicacies, wit, sharp hits, dreary twaddle, and repeated good-nights to his beloved M. D.’s, and—to take care of themselves, and eat the apples at Laracor, and wait for him. No—I mistake; I don’t think he ever says with definiteness Stella must wait for him. I should say (without looking critically over the journal to that end) that he cautiously avoided so positive a committal. And she?—ah! she, poor girl, waits without the asking. And those indelicacies and that coarseness? Well, this strange, great man can do nothing wrong in her eyes.

But she does see that those dinings at a certain Mrs. Vanhomrigh’s come in oftener and oftener. ’Tis a delightfully near neighbor, and her instinct scents something in the wind. She ventures a question, and gets a stormy frown glowering over a page of the journal that puts her to silence. The truth is, Mrs. Vanhomrigh[113] has a daughter—young, clever, romantic, not without personal charms, who is captivated by the intellect of Mr. Swift; all the more when he volunteers direction of her studies, and leads her down the flowery walks of poetry under his stalwart guidance.

Then the suspicious entries appear more thickly in the journal. “Dined with Mrs. Vanhomrigh”—and again: “Stormy, dined with a neighbor”—“couldn’t go to court, so went to the Vans.” And thus this romance went on ripening to the proportions that are set down in the poem of “Cadenus and Vanessa.” He is old, she is young.

But this wit has made conquest of her; she

This is part of his story of it, which he put in her hands for her reading;[114] and which, like the Stella journal, only saw the light after the woman most interested in it was in the ground.

In Ireland Again.

Well, Swift at last goes back to Ireland—all his larger designs having miscarried—a saddened and disappointed man; full of growlings and impatience; taking with him from that wreck of London life and political forgatherings, only the poor flotsam of an Irish deanery.

He has some few friends to welcome him there: Miss Hester and Mrs. Dingley among the rest. How gladly would Stella have put all her woman’s art and her womanly affection to the work of cheering and making glad the embittered and disappointed Dean: but no; he has no notion of being handicapped by marriage; he is sterner, narrower, more misanthropic than ever. All the old severe proprieties and distance govern their intercourse. He visits them betimes and listens to their adulatory prattle; they, too, come up to the deanery when there are friends to entertain; often take possession when the Dean is away.

The church dignitaries are not open-handed in their advances; the Tale of a Tub, and stories of that London life (not much of it amongst churches) have put a wall between them and the Dean. But he interests himself in certain questions of taxation and of currency, which seem of vital importance to the common people; and he wins, by an influence due to his sharp pamphleteering, what they count a great relief from their dangers or burdens. Thus he becomes a street idol, and crowds throw up their caps for this doctor militant, whom they call the good Dean. He has his private large charities, too; there are old women, decrepit and infirm, whom he supports year after year; does this—Swift-like—when he will haggle a half hour about the difference of a few pennies in the price for a bottle of wine, and will serve his clerical friends with the lees of the last dinner: strange, and only himself in everything.

Then Miss Vanhomrigh—after the death of her mother—must needs come over—to the great perplexity of the Doctor—to a little country place which she has inherited in the pretty valley of the Liffey—a short drive away from Dublin; she has a fine house there, and beautiful gardens (Swift never outgrew his old Moor-Park love for gardens); there she receives him, and honors his visits. An old gardener, who was alive in Scott’s time, told how they planted a laurel bush whenever the Dean came. Perhaps the Dean was too blinded for fine reading in the garden alleys then; certainly his fierce headaches were shaking him year by year nearer to the grave.

Miss Hester comes to a knowledge of these visits, and is tortured, but silent. Has she a right to nurse torture? Some biographers say that at her urgence a form of marriage was solemnized between them (1716); but if so, it was undeclared and unregarded. Vanessa, too, has her tortures; she has knowledge of Stella and her friend, and of their attitude with respect to the deanery; so, in a moment of high, impetuous daring, she writes off to Mistress Hester Johnson asking what rights she has over her friend the Dean? Poor Stella wilts at this blow; but is stirred to an angry woman’s reply, making (it is said) avowal of the secret marriage. To the Dean, who is away, she encloses Vanessa’s letter; and the Dean comes storming back; rages across the country, carrying to Miss Vanhomrigh her own letter—flings it upon the table before her, with that look of blackness that has made duchesses tremble—turns upon his heel, and sees her no more.

In a fortnight, or thereabout, Poor Vanessa was dead. It was a fever they said; may be; certainly, if a fever, there were no hopes in her life now which could make great head against it. She changed her will before her death, cutting off Swift, who was sole legatee, and leaving one-half to Bishop Berkeley; through whom, strangely enough, Yale College may be said to inherit a part of poor Vanessa’s fortune.[115]

Such a blow, by its side bruises, must needs scathe somewhat the wretched Hester Johnson; but time brought a little healing in its wings. The old kindliness and friendship that dated from the pleasant walks in Moor Park, came back—as rosy twilights will sometimes shoot kindly gleams between stormy days, and the blackness of night. And Swift, I think, never came nearer to insupportable grief than when he heard—on an absence in London, a few years thereafter—that Stella was dying week by week.

“Poor Stella,” “dear Stella,” “poor soul,” break into his letters—break, doubtless, into his speech on solitary walks; but in others’ presence his dignity and coldness are all assured. There is rarely breakdown where man or woman can see him. Old Dr. Sheridan[116] says that at the last she appealed to him to declare and make public their private marriage; whereat he “turned short away.” A more probable story is that in those last days Swift himself proposed public declaration, to which the dying woman could only wave a reply—“too late!”

She died in 1728: he in the sixty-second year of his age, and she forty-eight.

He would have written about her the night she died; had the curtains drawn that he might not see the light where her body lay; but he broke down in the writing. They brought a lock of her hair to him. It was found many years after in an old envelope, worn with handling, with this inscription on it—in his hand—Only a woman’s hair.

I have not much more to say of Dean Swift, whose long story has kept us away from gentler characters, and from verses more shining than his. Indeed, I do not think the poems of Swift are much read nowadays; surely none but a strong man and a witty one could have written them; but they do not allure us. Everybody, however, remembers with interest the little people that Lemuel Gulliver saw, and will always associate them with the name of Swift. But if the stormy Dean had known that his Gulliver book would be mostly relished by young folks, only for its story, and that its tremendous satire—which he intended should cut and draw blood—would have only rarest appreciation, how he would have raved and sworn!

They tell us he had private prayers for his household, and in secluded places; and there are those who sneer at this—“as if a Dean should say prayers in a crypt!” But shall we utterly condemn the poor Publican who—though he sells drams and keeps selling them—smites his bosom afar off and cries, God be merciful!—as if there were a bottom somewhere that might be reached, and stirred, and sparkle up with effervescence of hope and truth and purity? He was a man, I think, who would have infinitely scorned and revolted at many of the apologies that have been made for him. To most of these he would have said, in his stentorian way, “I am what I am; no rosy after-lights can alter this shape of imperfect manhood; wrong, God knows; who is not? But a prevaricator—pretending feeling that is not real—offering friendship that means nothing—proffering gentle words, for hire; never, never!”

And in that great Court of Justice—which I am old-fashioned enough to believe will one day be held—where juries will not be packed, and where truth will shine by its own light, withstanding all perversion—and where opportunities and accomplishment will be weighed in even scales against possible hindrances of moral or of physical make-up—there will show, I am inclined to think, in the strange individuality of Swift, a glimmer of some finer and higher traits of Character than we are accustomed to assign him.

After Stella’s death he wrote little:[117] perhaps he furbished up the closing parts of Gulliver; there were letters to John Gay, light and gossipy; and to Pope, weightier and spicier.

But the great tree was dying at the top. He grew stingier and sterner, and broke into wild spasms of impatience, such as only a diseased brain could excuse and explain. His loneliness became a more and more fearful thing to be borne; but who shall live with this half-mad man of gloom?

At length it is only a hired keeper who can abide with him: yet still he is reckless, proud, defiant, merciless, with no words coming to his fagged brain whereby he may express his thought; having thoughts, but they were bitter ones; having penitences maybe, but very vain ones; having remorses—ah, what abounding ones!

Finally he has no longer the power, if the grace were in him, to ask pardon of the humanity he has wronged; or to tell of the laments—if at that stage he entertained them—over the grave of thwarted purposes and of shattered hopes; condemned to that imbecile silence which overtook him at last, and held him four weary years in fool’s grasp, suffering and making blundering unintelligible moans.

He died in 1745—twenty-two years after Vanessa’s death—seventeen years after the death of Stella.