by Leo Damrosch
With the possible exception of Mr. Green, these were all real people, and many of them will appear in this volume.
Swift often stayed with the Berkeleys at one of their four homes, notably Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Betty, now known by her married name as Lady Betty Germaine, remained a special favorite. A close friend of the Berkeleys was a celebrated beauty called Biddy Floyd, who was, Swift told Stella, “the handsomest woman that ever I saw” apart from herself. In a charming poem he wrote for Biddy, Venus and Cupid construct a brand-new type of beauty by discarding the defects normally found in society ladies, retaining only the good qualities. Since she came from far-off Chester, she is equipped from the outset with virtues seldom found in London, as Cupid discovers when Jove sends him on a quest:
Jove sent and found, far in a country scene,
Truth, innocence, good nature, look serene;
From which ingredients, first the dext’rous boy
Picked the demure, the awkward, and the coy.
The Graces from the court did next provide
Breeding, and wit, and air, and decent pride;
These Venus cleansed from ev’ry spurious grain
Of nice, coquette, affected, pert, and vain.
Jove mixed up all, and his best clay employed;
Then called the happy composition Floyd.
“Nice” in this context is defined by Johnson as “fastidious; squeamish.” As Ehrenpreis observes, the poem says nothing about the lady’s looks, only her mind and character.8 Swift was a warm admirer of beautiful women, but he liked to compliment them by implying that their looks were the least of their charms.
For an extended period during 1707 and 1708, Stella was in England, apparently the only visit she made there after she moved to Ireland. Nothing is known about how often she and Swift saw each other. The sole trace is a casual remark he made in a letter to their Dublin friend John Stearne: “Pug is very well, and likes London wonderfully, but Greenwich better, where we could hardly keep him from hunting down the deer.” Pug belonged to Stella’s companion, Rebecca Dingley, who had a great fondness for dogs. Swift once composed a couplet for her pet’s collar:
Pray steal me not, I’m Mrs. Dingley’s,
Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
It seems unlikely, however, that Swift cared much for her dogs:
May Bec have many an evening nap
With Tyger slabbering in her lap.9
It may be that the ladies were not in England on Swift’s account, but because Lady Giffard had requested their help. A niece of hers had just died, leaving a distraught husband with seven young children to care for. Lady Giffard suggested that they move from London to Moor Park, which belonged to her but was currently the residence of her nephew Jack Temple, and that she would find someone to look after the children. “If I were younger and had better health I would offer myself and Bridget,” Lady Giffard said. Bridget was Stella’s mother, still in Lady Giffard’s employ; it would certainly have made sense to think of Stella and Rebecca for this task.10
One of Swift’s longest-lasting friendships was formed in London at this time. This new friend was Charles Ford, a graduate of Trinity College fifteen years his junior, who had an estate near Dublin but mostly lived in London. Over the years he and Swift corresponded often, and his letters show him to have been intelligent, well read, and politically astute. He struck Laetitia Pilkington, though, as “one of the oddest little mortals I ever met with,” and she was surprised that Swift let him dominate conversation and relate “a whole string of improbabilities.”11 As with many of Swift’s friends, indeed, it’s hard today to get Ford into clear focus; the very real attachment rested on qualities of personality that don’t come through in documents.
In addition to friends like these, Swift was taken up by the leading writers of the day. William Congreve he already knew, of course, and they were rivals no longer, for Congreve had stopped writing. His last play was the sparkling The Way of the World, produced in 1700 when he was just thirty years old. His remaining twenty-nine years would be devoted to politics and pleasure, not in that order.
More important to Swift than Congreve was another Irishman, Richard Steele. Like Swift, Steele chose to think of himself as only accidentally Irish—“I am an Englishman born in the city of Dublin,” he said.12 Actually, his family had been in Ireland much longer than Swift’s, settling near Kilkenny in the 1630s and enjoying a close connection there with the great Duke of Ormonde. But whereas Swift was educated at Kilkenny and Trinity, Steele’s mother took him to England (his father had died when he was five) and he went to the distinguished Charterhouse School and then to Oxford.
39. William Congreve.
Steele’s temperament was very different from Swift’s. He was boisterous, impulsive, a heavy drinker, and addicted to living far beyond his means. “He knew the town,” Macaulay said, “and paid dear for his knowledge. He was a rake among scholars and a scholar among rakes.” A literary antagonist of Steele’s thought he had a distinctively Irish temperament: “God has stamped his native country upon his face, his understanding, his writings, his actions, his passions, and above all his vanity. The Hibernian brogue is still upon all these, though long habitude and length of days have worn it from off his tongue.”13 Comments like this were by no means rare at the time, and they illustrate the ethnic prejudice that Swift and his countrymen had to contend with.
When Steele left Oxford, he became a cavalry officer in the Life Guards and fought in Flanders under the Duke of Marlborough, to whom he remained deeply loyal. He nearly killed a man in a duel, and then became a spokesman for abolishing dueling. He was an occasional playwright, edited a political journal, and scored a big success with a new kind of periodical essay called the Tatler. He was also constantly on the lookout for employment. At various times he was gentleman-waiter to Prince George of Denmark (Queen Anne’s consort), commissioner of the Stamp Office, surveyor of the royal stables at Hampton Court, governor of the Royal Company of Comedians, and commissioner of forfeited estates in Scotland.
40. Richard Steele.
41. Joseph Addison.
Valued most of all by Swift was Joseph Addison, Steele’s collaborator on the Tatler and afterward on the hugely popular Spectator. Five years younger than Swift, Addison was a clergyman’s son who had seemed destined for an academic career until he decided to try his luck in London; he had spent twelve years at Oxford, where he excelled in writing Latin verse. It was he who celebrated rivers of blood in his poem on the Duke of Marlborough, but he was far from bloodthirsty in reality, and his view of humanity was far more benign than Swift’s. As an example of malicious writers who “give mean interpretations and base motives to the worthiest actions,” Addison instanced the duc de la Rochefoucauld, author of the celebrated Maximes. Swift, in contrast, called Rochefoucauld his favorite writer, “because I found my whole character in him.” Years later he began a poem by invoking him:
As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature, I believe ’em true;
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind.
Steele was as sanguine as Addison. “The sense of shame and honour,” he said, “is enough to keep the world itself in order.” Swift did not agree. In his Thoughts on Various Subjects he observed, “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”14
Close though Addison and Steele were, Swift seldom saw them together. As he told another friend, “The triumvirate of Mr. Addison, Steele and me come together as seldom as the sun, moon and earth. I often see each of them, and each of them me and each other.” Perhaps Swift preferred it like that, for in later years he told his friends that he and Addison enjoyed their evenings together so much that “neither of them ever wished for a third person to support or enliven their conversation.” Swift’s relatives preserved a copy of Addison’s Travels in Italy with this inscription: “To Doctor Jonathan Swift, the most agr
eeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age, this book is presented by his most humble servant, the author.” “Genius” was a less exalted term then than now, but even so, it suggests that Addison knew that Swift was the author of A Tale of a Tub, in which Lord Somers is addressed as “the sublimest genius of the age.”15
LONDON WRITER
Swift’s writing was now branching out in many directions. In 1709 he wrote A Description of the Morning, and the next year A Description of a City Shower, both published for the first time in the Tatler. And he made a playful invention in The Story of Baucis and Philemon. Dryden had translated one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Jupiter and Mercury, disguised as beggars, are turned away at house after house. Finally, an impoverished couple shows them hospitality, and the two are rewarded when their cottage turns into a magnificent shrine.
The pavement polished marble they behold,
The gates with sculptures graced, the spires and tiles of gold.16
Swift’s version of the Ovid story is a sustained piece of deflation, but also an experiment in fantasy, stranger and more uncanny than the narrative in Dryden. The gear-driven chimney jack, used for turning meat on a spit, becomes a church clock. The bedstead is transformed into pews, still suitable for “folks disposed to sleep.” And the walls and furniture come alive, with a hallucinatory vividness like that of Alice in Wonderland. Swift’s pleasure is infectious as he creates detail after detail:
Aloft rose every beam and rafter,
The heavy wall went climbing after;
The chimney widened and grew higher,
Became a steeple with a spire.
The kettle to the top was hoist,
And there stood fastened to a joist,
But with the upside down, to show
Its inclination for below;
In vain, for a superior force
Applied at bottom, stops its course,
Doomed ever in suspense to dwell,
’Tis now no kettle, but a bell.
The groaning chair began to crawl
Like a huge insect up the wall;
There stuck, and to a pulpit grew,
But kept its matter and its hue.17
The element of fantasy keeps surfacing throughout Swift’s writing, and will do so unforgettably in Gulliver’s Travels.
Swift was always willing to let friends advise him about revision. They might well be right, he thought, and it really didn’t matter that much. He showed this poem to Addison and was advised to make some drastic changes. In later years Swift told friends cheerfully that “in a poem of not two hundred lines Mr. Addison made him blot out fourscore, add fourscore, and alter fourscore.”18
It’s worth noting that although he loved literature, Swift had surprisingly little interest in what would nowadays be called “the arts.” He was bored by music, didn’t care for paintings unless they were portraits of people he knew, and may have gone to a play only once in his life. He did read plays, but as literature, not as living drama. The sole occasion on which he is known to have seen a play was an act of friendship, since it was a tragedy by Addison—and even then Swift went to a rehearsal, not a public performance. As for the vogue of Italian opera that was then at its height, he told Archbishop King, “I design to set up a party among the wits, to run them down [that is, to ridicule them] by next winter.” Eventually his friend John Gay would do exactly that in The Beggar’s Opera. Meanwhile, Swift reported with amusement that an old lady “asked me t’other day what these uproars were that her daughter was always going to.”19
SWIFT IN CONVERSATION
Swift never had a Boswell to transcribe his conversation, so we can only guess at what it was like, but there are plenty of tributes to his genial good humor. Steele called Swift “a friend of mine who has an inexhaustible fund of discourse, and never fails to entertain his company with a variety of thoughts and hints that are altogether new and uncommon.” The elder Sheridan described him as an engaging storyteller “who speaks not a word too much or too little; who can, in a very careless manner, give a great deal of pleasure to others, and desires rather to divert than be applauded; who shows good understanding and a delicate turn of wit in everything that comes from him . . . and everything requisite not only to please the hearer, but to gain his favour and affection.”20
Swift was fond of “raillery,” which was, he explained, “to say something that at first appeared a reproach or reflection [criticism]; but by some turn of wit unexpected and surprising, ended always in a compliment, and to the advantage of the person it was addressed to.” His sallies in this mode could seem aggressive, and sometimes they were, but in his mind raillery was the opposite of a sarcastic put-down. “It now passeth for raillery to run a man down in discourse, to put him out of countenance, and make him ridiculous, sometimes to expose the defects of his person or understanding; on all which occasions he is obliged not to be angry, to avoid the imputation of not being able to take a jest.”21
Addison once wrote, “I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as an habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.” Swift valued both. Mirth for him was an essential relief, and Charles Ford called him one of “those who are formed for mirth and society.”22 In a poem he distinguished between two styles of amusement:
For wit and humor differ quite;
That gives surprise, and this delight.
Even when deploying verbal wit, Swift rode the wave of conversation, contributing shared enjoyment rather than quotable bon mots. You had to be there, for as he said himself, “Some things are extremely witty today, or fasting, or in this place, or at eight o’clock, or over a bottle, or spoke by Mr. What d’y’call’m, or in a summer’s morning: any of which, by the smallest transposal or misapplication, is utterly annihilate.”23
Johnson missed the point when he complained that Swift’s expression was “seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety; he stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter.” Johnson himself laughed like a booming ogre—Boswell remembered an occasion when “he burst into such a fit of laughter that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch.” But Swift’s style was deliberately deadpan, and that was a point of affinity with Addison. “True Humour,” Addison said, “generally looks serious, whilst everybody laughs about him; False Humour is always laughing, whilst everybody about him looks serious.”24
PRACTICAL JOKES
The younger Sheridan heard of an incident that occurred soon after Swift became friends with his father. An old classmate who hadn’t seen Swift for a long time paid a visit to the school Sheridan ran, and Swift pretended to be a hopeless dullard named Jodrel, applying for a job there. “As he was an excellent mimic, he personated the character of an awkward country parson to the life.” The former classmate was deputed to interview him, and got such inept responses that he exclaimed, “Was there ever such a blockhead? Who the devil put you in [holy] orders?”25
Swift also put on his awkward-parson act at a London coffeehouse where writers gathered, at a time when he was a new arrival and they had no idea who he was. He would lay his hat on a table and walk up and down in silence for half an hour, and then pay for his coffee and leave. “They concluded him to be out of his senses,” Sheridan says, “and the name that he went by among them was that of the mad parson.” On one occasion Swift unexpectedly accosted a gentleman who had just come to town from the country.
They were all eager to hear what this dumb, mad parson had to say, and immediately quitted their seats to get near him. Swift went up to the country gentleman, and in a very abrupt manner, without any previous salute [salutation], asked him, “Pray, sir, do you remember any good weather in the world?” The country gentleman, after staring a little at
the singularity of his manner and the oddity of the question, answered, “Yes, sir, I thank God, I remember a great deal of good weather in my time.” “That is more,” said Swift, “than I can say; I never remember any weather that was not too hot, or too cold, too wet, or too dry; but however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.” Upon saying this, he took up his hat, and without uttering a syllable more, or taking the least notice of anyone, walked out of the coffee house, leaving all those who had been spectators of this odd scene staring after him, and still more confirmed in the opinion of his being mad.26
We know that Swift had a hobby of collecting trite conversational gambits. Commenting on the weather has to be the tritest of them all.
Another coffeehouse encounter was the start of a long and warm friendship. After hastily scribbling a letter, Dr. John Arbuthnot noticed that it was blotted and needed some sand to absorb the excess ink, a common practice at the time. “Pray, sir,” he said to Swift, “have you any sand about you?” “No,” Swift answered, “but I have the gravel, and if you will give me your letter I’ll piss upon it.” Johnson defines “gravel” as “sandy matter concreted in the kidneys; if the stone is brittle it will often crumble, and pass in the form of gravel.” Arbuthnot was a humorist himself, and thought that this was funny.27
Swift had a special fondness for April Fool’s jokes. Among the documents in his collected works is an advertisement that appeared in the London Post-Boy on March 31, 1709: “Tomorrow, being Friday, between the hours of 3 and 5, afternoon, will be sold by auction, at Mr. Doily’s in the Strand, a small collection of about a hundred books of the choicest kinds and editions, . . . a porphyry urn, two bronze lamps, and a small parcel of medals, some very rare.” The next day the paper grimly reported, “This is to give notice that there was no such auction designed, and that the said advertisement was taken in and inserted by the printer’s boy’s inadvertency.”28 No doubt Swift showed up in person to enjoy his victims’ bafflement.