Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Rationis capax—“capable of reason,” but rarely exercising it.

  And why horses? Swift knew them well and liked them, of course, but it turns out that there was another reason too. The symbolism of the horse as irrational passion goes back to Plato’s Republic, and when R. S. Crane looked at the logic textbooks that Swift studied at Trinity College, he discovered something even more specific. Not only is “man” defined as animal rationale, but the irrational opposite, the horse, is animal hinnibile. “The whinnying animal!” So that’s where the Houyhnhnms got their name; and by putting them on top, Swift brought our own irrationality into sharp focus. Crane also found that while the textbooks distinguished between mankind in general and individuals, only one of them listed Joannes, Petrus, Thomas, etc.—the same names and sequence that Swift mentioned to Pope. That textbook was written by Narcissus Marsh, provost of Trinity College when Swift was there.49

  Are we supposed to be like the Houyhnhnms, then? We’re not, because we can’t, and Gulliver’s attempt to do so is hopeless. “The Houyhnhnms are not a statement of what man ought to be,” Rawson says, “so much as a statement of what he is not.”50

  The Fourth Voyage will always be controversial, because it forces us to question our deep, self-flattering assumptions about that animal called man. “I am not in the least provoked,” Gulliver says, “at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things. But when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such an animal and such a vice could tally together.” A central Christian tenet is that pride is the fundamental sin; a being consumed by pride has no right to flatter itself as the “rational animal.” Wesley quoted this passage too with approval.51

  Gulliver’s Travels ends with these words: “I hereby entreat those who have any tincture of this absurd vice that they will not presume to appear in my sight.” That’s an extreme reaction, of course, and Gulliver isn’t Swift. But in Swift’s own opinion, even the best people fell far below the unattainable standard, and it’s good to remember that. “I hate Yahoos of both sexes,” he told Ford, adding that even the best, Stella included, were only tolerable “for want of Houyhnhnms.”52

  CHAPTER 25

  Gulliver in England

  GETTING GULLIVER INTO PRINT

  In March of 1726, Swift set out for England, after an absence of twelve years. He had a triple motive for the trip. One was to arrange for the publication of Gulliver’s Travels, which he wanted to come out in the center of the book trade, not in provincial Dublin. This would have to be accomplished in extreme secrecy in case of political reprisals. Another motive was the long-awaited reunion with English friends. And a third was an attempt, fruitless as it turned out, to angle yet again for a Church appointment in England. There would be, in fact, two successive stays in England, of six months apiece—March through August 1726, and April through September 1727.

  The boat Swift took landed at Chester, and he left two inscriptions there, one on arrival and the other on his return journey. He scratched these verses on the window of an inn, presumably using a diamond, as it occasionally amused him to do. The first was satirical:

  The church and clergy here, no doubt,

  Are very near a-kin:

  Both weather-beaten are without,

  And empty both within.

  The second inscription was bitter:

  J.S.D.S.P.D. hospes ignotus,

  Patriae (ut nunc est) plusquam vellet notus,

  Tempestate pulsus,

  His pernoctavit,

  A.D. 1726

  “Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, an unknown stranger, but in his own country (such as it now is) better known than he would wish, driven by a storm, spent the night here in the year 1726.”1 A stranger indeed, in the England where he always yearned to live. The initials “J.S.D.S.P.D.”—Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin”—would have been understood in Ireland, but not here.

  During his second visit the next summer, Swift stopped off at Goodrich in Herefordshire, where the Reverend Thomas Swift had suffered persecution from the Puritans. He ordered a plaque to be inscribed in his grandfather’s memory, and presented the church of St. Giles with a pocket chalice that his grandfather had once used there. On the chalice he had a Latin text engraved: “Thomas Swift, vicar of this church, well known in history for what he did and suffered for King Charles I, administered out of this same chalice to the sick. Jonathan Swift, S.T.D., Dean of the Church of Saint Patrick, Dublin, grandson of the aforesaid Thomas, dedicates this cup to this church in perpetuity, 1726.”2 The chalice still exists, kept at Hereford Cathedral.

  Swift was interested to discover that his grandfather’s house was still standing, “which by the architecture,” as he later described it, “denotes the builder to have been somewhat whimsical and singular.” When Deane Swift printed Swift’s account he added, “The whole seems to be three single houses all joining in one central point. Undoubtedly there never was, nor ever will be, such another building to the end of the world. However, it is a very good house, and perhaps calculated to stand as long as any house in England.”3

  Gulliver’s Travels didn’t yet have that title, and Gulliver’s name never appears in the book itself. The title was Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and only on the first page is the author identified as Lemuel Gulliver, “first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships.” It may be that Swift picked up the name on his way from Chester, since he passed through a town whose innkeeper was Samuel Gulliver.4

  In Dublin, meanwhile, there were rumors that some new satire by Swift was about to come out, and the authorities sent out feelers about it. Thomas Tickell, an old acquaintance, wrote a friendly inquiry asking to see it. Tickell was secretary to Carteret, the lord lieutenant, and Swift replied pointedly, “As to what you mention of an imaginary treatise, I can only answer that I have a great quantity of papers somewhere or other, of which none would please you, partly because they are very uncorrect, but chiefly because they wholly disagree with your notions of persons and things. Neither do I believe it would be possible for you to find out my treasury of waste papers without searching nine houses and then sending to me for the key.”5

  Swift liked Tickell and admired Carteret, but he wasn’t about to give them proof that he was the author of Gulliver’s Travels. This letter warns Tickell that it would be a waste of time to have the deanery searched, and suggests that any incriminating papers were being moved from one hiding place to the next. It was like being in the underground in occupied territory, which Ireland in effect was. The next day Swift wrote to Sheridan and asked him and “the ladies” to spread the story about the nine houses, “and laugh at my humour in it, etc.”6

  Swift was in no hurry to get Gulliver into print, no doubt thinking that his wisest plan would be to leave England before it came out. In due course he made a secretive approach to a publisher named Benjamin Motte, with whose father he had had some dealings in the past, and who was about to publish a three-volume Pope-Swift Miscellanies that Pope had put together. Pope reported gleefully that the manuscript was delivered with an appropriate air of mystery. “Motte received the copy (he tells me) he knew not from whence, nor from whom, dropped at his house in the dark from a hackney coach.”7

  The package contained the first of the four voyages of Gulliver’s Travels, with a promise to send the rest if Motte would give ₤200 to the anonymous messenger, “who will come in the same manner exactly at 9 o’clock at night on Thursday.” In his cover letter Swift adopted the alias of a cousin of Gulliver’s named Richard Sympson, promising solemnly that the money would be devoted to “the use of us poor seamen.” Motte replied that he couldn’t get his hands on that much cash
at short notice, but that if Mr. Sympson would accept payment in six months, “I shall thankfully embrace the offer.” It was the wisest decision Motte ever made.8

  FRIENDSHIPS RENEWED

  Swift made extended stays at various country estates, including grand ones belonging to Lord Cobham and Lord Bathurst, both of whom were correspondents of his and had poems by Pope dedicated to them. But the place Swift liked best was Pope’s own villa at Twickenham on the Thames, ten miles west of London and three miles beyond Sheen. Pope had gotten rich from his translation of Homer, but as a Catholic he had to fear confiscation of his property, so he rented the estate rather than owning it. Swift, incidentally, had no quarrel with Pope’s Catholicism, though he teasingly offered a bribe if he would convert to Anglicanism.9

  Pope described his estate deprecatingly as “three inches of gardening,” and added, “I have a theatre, an arcade, a bowling green, a grove, and what not, in a bit of ground that would have been but a plate of salad to Nebuchadnezzar, the first day he was turned to graze.” Pope’s biographer says sympathetically that he was “a species of country ‘squire,’ occupant and improver of a small ‘estate,’ living off annuities, investments, a small inheritance, and other revenues not gained by shopkeeping.” Shopkeeping, presumably, was beneath him. But it’s hard to see why “squire” and “estate” are put between ironic quotation marks. Nebuchadnezzar would have had to be a voracious feeder, since the theater, arcade, bowling green, and gardens occupied five acres.10

  78. Pope’s villa at Twickenham.

  Pope liked to paint an idealized picture of his cozy retreat, secure in an artificial grotto that joined his house to the garden on the other side of the main road. During this period he was creating a personal mythology in which no virtuous person could possibly succeed in the corrupt public arena. To withdraw from the fray was therefore proof of virtue:

  Know, all the distant din that world can keep

  Rolls o’er my grotto, and but soothes my sleep.

  There my retreat the best companions grace,

  Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place;

  There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl

  The feast of reason and the flow of soul.11

  They didn’t drink from bowls, of course; Pope was being classical.

  Swift never bought into this complacent pose, and when Pope wrote him a letter expressing similar thoughts, he replied, “I have no very strong faith in you pretenders to retirement. You are not of an age for it, nor have gone through either good or bad fortune enough.”12

  St. John was Bolingbroke, who was still addressed by that name although he had been deprived of his title (Oxford, who died in 1724, had been allowed to retain his). Bolingbroke’s protestations of contented retirement were even less convincing than Pope’s. He received a royal pardon in 1723, nine years after his flight to France, and in 1725 was granted the right to own property once again, at which point he purchased an estate at Dawley near Uxbridge, fifteen miles northwest of London. But far from retreating into obscurity, he immersed himself in anti-Walpole journalism and became the de facto leader of the opposition, which had almost no hope of regaining power.

  Pope worshiped Bolingbroke, dedicating the Essay on Man to him and calling him “my guide, philosopher, and friend.” Swift’s feelings were more measured. The letters he and Bolingbroke exchanged show mutual respect, but nothing like the affection that fills Swift’s correspondence with Pope or Arbuthnot. Bolingbroke’s lament that he had been battered financially seemed especially hollow. “The fall from a million to an hundred thousand pounds,” Swift remarked to Pope, “is not so great as from eight hundred pounds a year to one. . . . Such mortals have resources that others are not able to comprehend.”13

  Meanwhile, Bolingbroke went on taking crazy risks, as he always did. In 1733, needing funds to promote his political program, he would secretly accept a pension of ₤3,000 a year from the French government, plus an initial payment of ₤11,000 up front. As his biographer says, “Such reckless conduct almost defies belief.”14 Rumors of what he was doing reached Walpole, of course, and in 1735 Bolingbroke would be forced to leave England|forever.

  79. Bolingbroke in middle age. Bolingbroke as he would have appeared in 1727, considerably aged, with a receding hairline and no wig.

  A frequent companion during Swift’s English visits was John Gay, who hadn’t done much since writing his poem on the London streets except to get extremely fat. Gay had made a lot of money with his writing, and then lost every bit of it in the South Sea Bubble. Johnson is probably right to say that Pope and Swift condescended to him: “Gay was the general favourite of the whole association of wits, but they regarded him as a play-fellow rather than a partner, and treated him with more fondness than respect.”15

  Gay’s playfulness, though, was precisely what Swift appreciated. His New Song of New Similes, which Pope included in a volume of the Miscellanies, mingles clichés with preposterous analogies in a very Swiftian way.

  As smooth as glass, as white as curds,

  Her pretty hand invites;

  Sharp as a needle are her words;

  Her wit, like pepper, bites.

  Brisk as a body-louse she trips,

  Clean as a penny dressed;

  Sweet as a rose her breath and lips,

  Round as the globe her breast.16

  Just at this time, Gay revived an idea that Swift had given him years before. Swift once suggested “a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there.” Instead of a mock pastoral, Gay ended up creating a mock opera, and at Twickenham in 1726, with Pope and Swift offering suggestions, he wrote The Beggar’s Opera. Pope said afterward that neither he nor Swift “did any more than alter an expression here and there.” Gay’s theme, a highly congenial one for Swift, was that there was no real difference between politicians and criminals. His Beggar says mordantly that he intended to show “that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich, and that they are punished for them.”17 The difference is not in the vices, but in who gets punished.

  80. John Gay. The genial Gay affects an oddly skeptical expression, but has not required the artist to disguise his immense bulk.

  Swift’s most valued friend was Pope. It helped that they weren’t really competing in the same arena, for as Scott says, Pope was obsessed with literary reputation and Swift with political—“His writings he only valued insofar as they accomplished the purpose for which they were written . . . and in almost every instance he sent them into the world without his name.” Pope made this trenchant comment on his friend’s anonymity: “Your method of concealing yourself puts me in mind of the bird I have read of in India, who hides his head in a hole while all his feathers and tail stick out.”18

  POETRY AND CULTURE

  Though Swift was an accomplished poet, he never aspired to the polished grandeur of Pope’s verse. He honored Pope’s condensed eloquence:

  In Pope, I cannot read a line

  But with a sigh, I wish it mine:

  When he can in one couplet fix

  More sense than I can do in six,

  It gives me such a jealous fit

  I cry, “Pox take him, and his wit!”

  Single lines from Pope have in fact acquired proverbial status. In An Essay on Criticism, published in 1711 when he was only twenty-three, familiar expressions repeatedly startle by turning up in their original contexts: “To err is human, to forgive, divine”; “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”; “A little learning is a dang’rous thing”; “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”19

  Swift’s gift was for relaxed, colloquial freedom. It’s especially interesting that he had a wonderful ear for rhyming, and made it seem natural rather than forced. Sir Walter Scott said of Swift, “Rhyme, which is a handcuff to an inferior poet, he who is master of his art wears as a bracelet.” A greater poet than Scott, Lord Byron, told Percy Shelley, “If you are curious in these matters, look in Swift.
I will send you a volume; he beats us all hollow, his rhymes are wonderful.”20

  At their best, Swift’s poems seem effortless, but of course that’s an illusion. He sometimes acknowledged as much:

  How oft am I for rhyme to seek?

  To dress a thought, may toil a week.

  Or as he put it still more frankly, in another poem:

  Blot out, correct, insert, refine,

  Enlarge, diminish, interline;

  Be mindful, when invention fails,

  To scratch your head, and bite your nails.21

  It was during Swift’s stay at Twickenham that Pope began a major satire, the Dunciad. He later claimed that it seemed so trifling to him that he tried to burn it, but it was “snatched from the fire by Dr. Swift, who persuaded his friend to proceed in it.”22 It isn’t likely that Pope needed any persuading, since he labored obsessively on this mock epic for fifteen years, publishing the first installment in 1728 and a final version in 1743. By then it had swollen to seventeen hundred lines denouncing modern culture. Pope named names in a relentless catalogue of Grub Street writers, and ended with a nightmarish vision of the death of civilization.

  Swift, who often made use of Grub Street himself, was more sympathetic. He saw the so-called dunces not as villains, but as victims of the cynical consumerism of modern publishing.

  Poor starveling bard, how small thy gains!

  How unproportioned to thy pains!

  And here a simile comes pat in:

  Though chickens take a month to fatten,

  The guests in less than half an hour

  Will more than half a score devour.

  So, after toiling twenty days

  To earn a stock of pence and praise,

  Thy labours, grown the critic’s prey,

  Are swallowed o’er a dish of tea;

  Gone to be never heard of more,

  Gone, where the chickens went before.

  When Swift describes bad writing, it is with playful glee, not revulsion: