by Will Durant
Lonely in Laracor, Swift made frequent visits to Dublin. There, in 1701, he took his degree as a doctor of divinity. Later in that year he invited Esther Johnson and her companion, Mrs. Robert Dingley, to come and live in Laracor. They came, took lodgings near him, and during his absences in England they occupied the apartment he had rented in Dublin. “Stella” expected him to marry her, but he kept her waiting for fifteen years. She accepted her situation fretfully, but the force of his character and the sharpness of his intellect held her hypnotized to the end.
The quality of his mind showed alarmingly when, in 1704, he published in one volume The Battle of the Books and The Tale of a Tub. The former is a brief and negligible contribution to the controversy as to the relative merits of ancient and modern literature; but The Tale of a Tub is a major exposition of Swift’s religious, or irreligious, philosophy. Rereading this work in later life, he exclaimed, “Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!” 85 He loved it so much that in later editions he caressed it with fifty pages of nonsense in the form of prefaces and apologies. He prided himself on its complete originality; and though the Church had long since spoken of Christianity as the once “seamless robe of Christ” torn to pieces by the Reformation, no one—least of all the Carlyle of Sartor Resartus—has impugned the unprecedented force with which Swift here reduced all philosophies and religions to diverse garments used to clothe our shivering ignorance or conceal our naked desires.
What is man himself but a micro-coat, or rather a complete set of clothes with all its trimmings? . . . Is not religion a cloak; honesty a pair of shoes worn out in the dirt; self-love a surtout; vanity a shirt; and conscience a pair of breeches which, though a cover for lewdness as well as for nastiness, is easily slipped down for the service of both? If certain ermines and furs be placed in a certain position, we style a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop. 86
The garment allegory is carried out with thoroughness and finesse. Peter (Catholicism), Martin (Lutheranism and Anglicanism) and Jack (Calvinism) received from their dying father three new and identical coats (Bibles), and a will directing them how to wear these, and forbidding them ever to alter, add to, or diminish them by even a single thread. The sons fall in love with three ladies: the Duchess d’Argent (wealth), Mme. de Grands Titres (ambition), and the Countess d’Orgueil (pride). To please these ladies the brothers make certain changes in their inherited coats; and when the alterations seem to contradict their father’s will, they reinterpret it by scholarly exegesis. Peter wished to add some silver fringes (papal luxury); it was readily shown, on the most learned authority, that the word fringe in the will meant broomstick; so Peter adopted silver fringes, but denied himself broomsticks (witchcraft?). Protestants were delighted to find the keenest edge of satire falling upon Peter: upon his purchase of a large continent (purgatory), which he sold in various parcels (indulgences) over and over again; upon his sovereign and usually painless remedies (penances) for worms (gnawings of conscience)—for example, “to eat nothing after supper for three nights . . . and by no means to break wind at both ends together without manifest occasion”; 87 upon the invention of “a whispering office” (the confessional) “for the public good and ease of all such as are hypochondriacs or troubled with the colic”; upon “an office of insurance” (more indulgences); upon the “famous universal [Catholic] pickle” (holy water) as a preventive of decay. Enriched by these wise expedients, Peter sets himself up as the representative of God. He claps three high-crowned hats upon his head, and holds an angling rod in his hand; and when anyone wishes to shake his hand, he, “like a well-educated spaniel,” offers them his foot. 88 He invites his brothers to dinner, gives them nothing but bread, assures them that it is not bread but meat, and refutes their objections: “To convince you what a couple of blind, positive, ignorant, willful puppies you are, I will use but this simple argument. By G——, it is true, good, natural mutton as any in Leadenhall Market, and G——confound you both eternally if you offer to believe otherwise.” 89 The brothers rebel, make “true copies” of the will (vernacular translations of the Bible), and denounce Peter as an impostor; whereupon he “kicked them out of doors, and would never let them come under his roof from that day to this.” 90 Soon thereafter the brothers quarrel as to how much of their inherited coats they may discard or change. Martin, after his first anger, resolves on moderation, and recalls that Peter is his brother; Jack, however, tears his coat to shreds (Calvinist sects), and falls into fits of madness and zeal. Swift proceeds to describe the strange operations of wind (inspiration) in the “Aeolists” (Calvinist preachers); and has much fun—some quite unprintable—with their nasal speech, predestination theories, and idolatry of the Scriptural word. 91
So far the author’s own creed, Anglicanism, had come off with only minor scars. But as the tale proceeds Swift, changing coats for winds, apparently reduces not only the Dissenting theologies but all religions and philosophies to vaporous delusions:
If we take a survey of the greatest actions that have been performed in the world . . . , which are the establishment of new empires by conquest, the advance and progress of new schemes in philosophy, and the contriving, as well as the propagating, of new religions, we shall find the authors of them all to have been persons whose natural reason had admitted great revolutions, from their diet, their education, the prevalency of some certain temper, together with the particular influence of air and climate . . . For the human understanding, seated in the brain, must be troubled and overspread by vapors ascending from the lower faculties to water the invention and render it fruitful. 92
Swift gives, in unquotable physiological detail, what seemed to him a fine example of internal secretions generating mighty ideas, even Henry IV’s “Grand Design”: the French King had been inspired to war against the Hapsburgs by the thought of capturing on the way a woman (Charlotte de Montmorency) whose beauty had stirred up in him sundry juices, “which ascended to the brain.” 93 It was likewise with the great philosophers, who were rightly judged by their contemporaries to be “out of their wits.”
Of this kind were Epicurus, Diogenes, Apollonius, Lucretius, Paracelsus, Descartes, and others; who, if they were now in the world, . . . would, in this understanding age, incur manifest danger of phlebotomy [medical bleeding], and whips, and chains, and dark chambers, and straw. . . . Now I would gladly be informed how it is possible to account for such imaginations . . . without reference to . . . vapors ascending from the lower faculties to overshadow the brain, and there distilling into conceptions for which the narrowness of our mother-tongue has not yet assigned any other name beside that of madness or frenzy. 94
To similar “disturbance or transposition of the brain by force of certain vapors issuing up from the lower faculties,” Swift ascribes “all those mighty revolutions that have happened in empire, philosophy, and religion.” 95 He concludes that all systems of thought are winds of words, and that the wise man will not attempt to pierce to the inner reality of things, but will content himself with the surface; whereupon Swift uses one of the pleasant similes to which he had a turn: “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.” 96
This scandalous little book, blown up to 130 pages, established Swift at once as a master of satire—a Rabelais perfectionné, Voltaire was to call him. The allegory was verbally consistent with Swift’s profession of Anglican orthodoxy, but many readers felt that the author was a skeptic, if not an atheist. Archbishop Sharp told Queen Anne that Swift was little better than an infidel, 97 and Anne’s confidante, the Duchess of Marlborough, was of opinion that Swift
had long ago turned all religion into a Tale of a Tub and sold it for a jest. But he had taken it ill that the [Whig] ministry had not promoted him in the Church for the great zeal he had shown for religion by his profane drollery; and so [he] carried his atheism and his humor into service of their enemies. 98
Steele too
called Swift an infidel, and Nottingham, in the House of Commons, described him as a divine “who is hardly suspected of being a Christian.” 99 Swift had read Hobbes, an experience not easily forgotten. Hobbes had begun with fear, passed to materialism, and ended as a Tory supporting the Established Church. It was small consolation to the men of religion that Swift made short work of philosophy:
The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora’s box did those of the body, only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom . . . Truth is as hidden as the source of the Nile, and can be found only in Utopia. 100
Perhaps because he felt that truth was not meant for man, he resented with special warmth those religious sects that professed to have the “true religion,” and he scorned men who, like Bunyan and some Quakers, claimed to have seen or talked with God. He concluded, with Hobbes, that it was social suicide to let every man make his own religion; the result would be such a maelstrom of absurdities that society would be a madhouse. So he opposed free thought, on the ground that “the bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as thinking.” 101 He repudiated toleration. To the end of his life he supported the Test Act, which excluded from political or military office all but adherents of the Established Church. 102 He agreed with Catholic and Lutheran rulers that a nation should have only one religion; and, having been born into an England with an Established Anglican Church, he thought that a general and unified acceptance of that Church was indispensable to the process of civilizing Englishmen. These were the Sentiments of a Church of England Man, this the Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England May . . . Be Attended with Some Inconveniences—tracts which he published in 1708 on his way from the Whigs to the Tories.
His first political associations after leaving Temple were with the Whigs, for these seemed to be the more progressive party, and the likelier to find a place for a man with more brains than money. In 1701 he published a Whiggish pamphlet hopefully. Halifax, Sunderland, and other Whig leaders welcomed him to the party, and promised him some preferment should they come to power. The promises were not fulfilled; perhaps these men feared Swift’s temper as unmanageable, and his pen as a double-edged sword. On an extended visit from Ireland to London in 1705 Swift won the friendship of Congreve, Addison, and Steele. Addison inscribed to him a copy of Travels in Italy with the words: “To Jonathan Swift, the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age, this work is presented by his most humble servant the author”; 103 but this friendship, like those of Jonathan with Steele and Pope, withered in Swift’s rising fire.
On another visit to London he amused himself by destroying a pretentious astrologer. John Partridge, a cobbler, sent forth each year an almanac rich in predictions based on the progress of the stars. In 1708 Swift issued a rival almanac under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff. One of Isaac’s predictions was that at 11 P.M. on March 29 Partridge would die. On March 30 “Bickerstaff” published a letter triumphantly announcing that Partridge had died within a few hours of the predicted time, and stating in convincing detail the arrangements for the funeral. Partridge assured London that he was still alive, but Isaac retorted that this assurance was a forgery. The wits of the city took up the hoax; the Stationer’s Office struck Partridge’s name from its rolls; and Steele, inaugurating The Tatler in the following year, adopted Isaac Bickerstaff as its imaginary editor.
In 1710 Swift again left Laracor, this time as an emissary of the Irish bishops to ask that “Queen Anne’s Bounty” be extended to the Anglican clergy of Ireland. Godolphin and Somers, Whig members of the Queen’s Council, refused to grant this unless the clergy agreed to relax the Test Act. Swift strongly objected to such relaxation. The Whigs discovered that he was a Tory in religion, and Swift practically confessed himself a Tory in politics when he wrote: “I ever abominated that scheme of politics . . . of setting up a moneyed interest in opposition to the landed.” 104 He applied to the Tory leaders, Harley and Bolingbroke, received a hearty welcome, and became overnight a confirmed Tory. Made editor of the Tory Examiner, Swift signalized his style by describing the Whig Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, whose secretary was Swift’s friend Addison:
Thomas, Earl of Wharton, . . . by the force of a wonderful constitution, has some years passed his grand climacteric without any visible effects of old age, either in his body or his mind; and in spite of a continual prostitution to those vices which usually wear out both. . . . He goes constantly to prayers . . . and will talk bawdy and blasphemy at the chapel door. He is a Presbyterian in politics, an atheist in religion; but he chooses at present to whore withra papist. 105
Delighted with this assassination, the Tory ministers commissioned Swift to write a tract, The Conduct of the Allies (November, 1711), as part of their campaign to depose Marlborough and end the War of the Spanish Succession. Swift argued that the unpopular taxes levied to finance the long conflict with Louis XIV could be reduced by confining England’s share in it to the sea; and he stated with force the complaint of the landholders that the cost of the war fell too much upon the land, too little upon the merchants and manufacturers, who were doing quite well out of the war. As to Marlborough: “Whether this war was prudently begun or not, it is plain that the true spring or motive of it was the aggrandizing a particular family, and in short a war of the General and the [Whig] ministry, and not of the Prince or people.” 106 He summed up Marlborough’s emoluments at £ 540,000—“and the figure was not inaccurate.” 107 A month later Marlborough was condemned. His candid Duchess, who had the only tongue in England as sharp as Swift’s, viewed the matter from the Whig point of view in her memoirs:
The Rev. Mr. Swift and Mr. Prior quickly offered themselves to sale, . . . both men of wit and parts, ready to prostitute all they had in the service of well-rewarded scandal, being both of a composition past the weakness of blushing or of stumbling at anything for the interest of their new masters. 108
These rewarded their new servants. Matthew Prior was sent as a diplomat to France, where he acquitted himself well. Swift received no office, but was now so intimate with the Tory ministers that he was able to secure many a sinecure for his friends. He was the genius of generosity to those who did not cross him. He claimed later that he had done fifty times more for fifty people than Temple had ever done for him. 109 He persuaded Bolingbroke to help the poet Gay. He saw to it that the Tory ministry should continue the pension that Congreve had received from the Whigs. When Pope asked for subscriptions to finance him while translating Homer, Swift commanded all his friends and place-seekers to subscribe, and vowed that “the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.” 110 He outshone Addison at the clubs. Almost every evening now he dined with the great, and brooked no superior airs from any of them. “I am so proud,” he wrote to Stella, “that I make all the lords come up to me . . . I was to have supped at Lady Ashburnham’s, but the drab did not call for us in her coach as she promised, but sent for us, and so I sent my excuses.” 111
It was during these three years (1710–13) in England that he wrote the strange letters published in 1766–68 as the Journal to Stella. He needed someone as the confidante of his ducal dinners and political victories; besides, he loved the patient woman, now approaching thirty, but still waiting for him to make up his mind. He must have loved her, for sometimes he wrote to her twice a day, and he showed his interest in everything about her except marriage. We should never have expected, from so overbearing a man, such playful delicacies and fanciful nicknames, such jokes and puns and baby talk as Swift, not expecting their publication, poured into these letters. They are rich in caresses but poor in proposals, unless Stella could have read a promise of marriage in his letter of May 23, 1711: “I will say no more, but beg you to be easy till Fortune takes her course, and to believe that M.D.’s [Stella’s] felicity is the greatest goal I aim at in all my pursuits.” 112 Yet even in this corresp
ondence he calls her “brat,” “fool,” “quean,” “jade,” “slut,” “agreeable bitch,” and other such terms of endearment. We catch the spirit of the man when he tells Stella:
I was this forenoon with Mr. Secretary at his office, and helped to hinder a man of his pardon, who is condemned for a rape. The Under Secretary was willing to save him, upon an old notion that a woman cannot be ravished; but I told the Secretary that he could not pardon him without a favorable report from the judge; besides, he is a fiddler, and consequently a rogue, and deserved hanging for something else; and so he shall swing. What; I must stand up for the honor of the fair sex! ’Tis true, the fellow had lain with her a hundred times before; but what care I for that? What? Must a woman be ravished because she is a whore? 113
Swift’s physical ailments may help us to understand his ill-humor. As early as 1694, aged twenty-seven, he had begun to suffer from vertigo in the labyrinth of the ear; occasionally and incalculably he experienced fits of dizziness and deafness. A famous Dr. Radcliffe recommended a complex liquid to be held in a bag inside Swift’s wig. The malady became worse with the years, and may have caused his insanity. Probably in 1717 he said to the poet Edward Young, pointing to a withering tree, “I shall be like that tree: I shall die at the top.” 114 This alone was enough to make him question the value of life, and certainly to doubt the wisdom of marriage. Probably he was impotent, but of this we have no certainty. He took to much walking to fend off physical decay; once he walked from Farnham to London—thirty-eight miles.