by Will Durant
His malaise was heightened by a painful keenness of the senses, which often goes with sharpness of mind. He was especially sensitive to odors, in city streets and in human beings; he could tell at a smell the hygiene of the men and women whom he met; and he concluded that the human race stank. 115 His conception of a lovable woman was partly that
No noisome Whiffs or sweating Streams
Before, behind, above, below
Could from her taintless body flow. 116
He describes “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” and then the same lady on arising:
Corinna in the morning dizen’d
Who sees, will spew, who smells, be poison’d.
And his conception of a nice young woman is olfactory:
Her dearest comrades never caught her
Squat on her hams to make Maid’s water;
You’d swear that so divine a creature
Felt no necessities of nature.
In summer, had she walked the town,
Her armpits would not stain her gown;
At country dances not a nose
Could in the dog days smell her toes. 117
He himself was finically clean. And yet the writings of this Anglican divine are among the coarsest in English literature. His anger at life made him fling his faults into the face of his time. He made no effort to please, and every effort to dominate, for domination comforted his secret uncertainty of himself. He said that he hated (feared) all those whom he could not command; 118 this, however, was not true of his affection for Harley. He was angry in adversity, and arrogant in success. He loved power more than money; when Harley sent him fifty pounds for his articles he returned the bank note, demanded an apology, received it, and wrote to Stella, “I have taken Mr. Harley into favor again.” 119 He resented formality, and despised cant. The world seemed bent on defeating him, and he frankly returned its hostility. He wrote to Pope:
The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it; and if I could compass that design without hurting my own person or fortune, I would be the most indefatigable writer you have ever seen . . . When you think of the world, give it one lash the more at my request. 1 have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is towards individuals . . . I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Councillor Such-a-one and Judge Such-a-one; so with physicians (I will not speak of my own trade), soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man—although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. 120
He appears at this distance the least lovable of men, and yet two women loved him to their deaths. During these years in London he lived near a Mrs. Vanhomrigh, a rich widow with two sons and two daughters. When he could not secure an invitation to titled tables he dined with the “Vans.” The eldest daughter, Hester, then (1711) twenty-four, fell in love with him, forty-three, and told him so. He tried to pass this off as a transient humor, and explained that he was too old for her; she replied, hopefully, that he had in his books taught her to love great men (she read Montaigne at her toilet), and why should she not love a great man when she found him in the flesh? He was half melted. He composed a poem, intended for her eyes only, Cadenus and Vanessa, humorous and tragical. Vanessa was his name for her; Cadenus was an anagram for decanus, dean.
For in April, 1713, the Queen had reluctantly appointed him dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. In June he went to Ireland to be installed. He saw Stella, and wrote to Vanessa that he was dying of melancholy and discontent. 121 He returned to London (October, 1713), and shared in the debacle of the Tories in 1714. Politically powerless now that the Whigs whom he had attacked were triumphant under George I, he went back to hated Ireland and his deanery. He was unpopular in Dublin, for the Whigs who now ruled it hated him for his diatribes, and the Dissenters hated him for his insistence on excluding them from office. People hissed and booed him in the streets, and pelted him with gutter filth. 122 An Anglican clergyman expressed the view of his cloth in a poem which was nailed to the cathedral door:
Today this temple gets a Dean,
Of parts and fame uncommon;
Used both to pray and to profane,
To serve both God and Mammon . . .
The place he got by wit and rhyme,
And many ways most odd,
And might a bishop be in time
Did he believe in God. 123
He stood his ground bravely, continued to support the Tories, and offered to share Harley’s imprisonment in the Tower. He attended to his religious duties, preached regularly, administered the sacraments, lived simply, and gave a third of his income in charity. On Sundays he held open house; Stella then came to play hostess for him. Soon his unpopularity waned. In 1724 he published, under the pseudonym of M. B. Drapier, six letters denouncing the attempt of William Wood to make a large profit out of supplying Ireland with a copper currency. The Irish resented the proposal, and when “Drapier” was discovered to be Swift, the gloomy Dean became almost popular.
He might have had some moments of happiness had he been able to keep the Irish Channel between the two women who loved him. In 1714 Mrs. Vanhomrigh died, and “Vanessa” moved to Ireland to occupy a small property bequeathed to her by her father at Celbridge, eleven miles west of the capital. To be nearer the Dean, she took a lodging in Turnstile Alley, Dublin, a short distance from where Stella lived. She wrote to Swift, begging him to visit her, and warned him that if he failed to come she would die of grief. He could not resist her appeal, and now (1714–23) he went repeatedly and clandestinely to see her. When his visits became less frequent, her letters became more ardent. She had been born, she told him, with “violent passions, which terminate all in one, that inexpressible passion I have for you.” It would be useless, she told him, to try to turn her love to God; for “was I an enthusiast, still you’d be the deity I should worship.” 124
Perhaps he thought to break through this imprisoning triangle by marrying; perhaps Stella, conscious of a rival, demanded it as simple justice; and the balance of the evidence is that he did marry Stella in 1716. 125 Apparently he required her to keep the marriage secret; she continued to live apart; and probably the union was never consummated. Swift resumed his visits to Vanessa; not that he was merely a philanderer or altogether a brute, but presumably because he had not the heart to leave her hopeless, or he feared her suicide. His letters assured Vanessa that he loved and valued her above all things, and would do so to the end of his life. So the affair went on till 1723; then Vanessa wrote to Stella asking her point blank what was her connection with the Dean. Stella took the letter to Swift. He rode to Vanessa’s lodging, flung the letter down upon her table, terrified her with his angry looks, and, without a word, left her, never to see her again.
When Vanessa recovered from her fright she realized at last that he had been deceiving her. Hopelessness combined with a consumptive tendency to destroy what was left of her health; and within two months of that last interview she died (June 2, 1723), aged thirty-four. She took revenge in her will: she revoked an earlier testament that had made Swift her heir; she bequeathed her goods to Robert Marshall and George Berkeley, the philosopher; and she bade them publish, without comment, Swift’s letters to her, and his poem Cadenus and Vanessa. Swift fled on an obscure “southern journey” in Ireland, and did not reappear in his cathedral until four months after Vanessa’s death.
When he returned he gave his leisure to composing the most famous and savage satire ever directed against mankind. He wrote to Charles Ford that he was engaged upon a book that would “wonderfully rend the world.” 126 A year later it was complete, and he took the manuscript in person to London, arranged for its anonymous publication, accepted two hundred pounds for it, and went to Pope’s house in Twickenham to enjoy the expected storm. So in October, 1726, England received the Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver. The first public reaction was one
of delight with the circumstantial realism of the narrative. Many readers took it as history, though one Irish bishop (said Swift) thought it full of improbabilities. Most readers went no further than the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, which were jolly narratives usefully illustrating the relativity of judgments. The Lilliputians were only six inches tall, and gave Gulliver a swelling sense of superiority. Political parties there were distinguished from each other by wearing high heels or low heels, and the religious factions were Big-Endians or Little-Endians as they believed in breaking eggs at the big end or the small end. The Brobdingnagians were sixty feet tall, giving Gulliver a new perspective of humanity. Their king mistook him for an insect, Europe for an anthill; and from Gulliver’s description of human ways he concluded that “the bulk of your natives [are] the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” 127 For his part Gulliver (suggesting the relativity of beauty) was repelled by the “monstrous breasts” of the Brobdingnagian belles.
The story weakens in Gulliver’s third voyage. He is pulled up by chain and bucket to Laputa, an island floating in the air and inhabited and governed by scientists, scholars, inventors, professors, and philosophers; here the details that elsewhere lent verisimilitude to the narrative are a bit silly, like the little bladders with which servants tap the ears and mouths of the profound thinkers to rouse them from dangerous absent-mindedness in their cogitations. The Academy of Lagado, with its fanciful inventions and decrees, is a feeble satire on Bacon’s New Atlantis and the Royal Society of London. Swift had no faith in the reform or rule of states by scientists; he laughed at their theories, and the early mortality thereof; and he predicted the overthrow of the Newtonian cosmology: “New systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; and even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles [Principia Mathematica, 1687] would flourish but a short period of time.” 128
So Gulliver moves on to the land of Luggnaggians, who condemn their greatest criminals not to death but to immortality. When these “Struldbrugs”
came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in their country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more, which arose from the dreadful prospects of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative; but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. . . . Whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others are gone to an harbor of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. . . . They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women more horrible than the men. . . . From what I had heard and seen, my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated. 129
In Part IV Swift discarded humor for a sardonic excoriation of humanity. The land of the Houyhnhnms is governed by clean, handsome, genial horses, who speak, reason, and have all the marks of civilization, while their menial servants, the Yahoos, are men dirty, odorous, greedy, drunken, irrational, and deformed. Among these degenerates (wrote Swift in the days of George I)
there was a . . . ruling Yahoo [king] who was always more deformed in body, and mischievous in disposition, than any of the rest. . . . This leader had usually a favorite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master’s feet. . . and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass’s flesh [title of nobility?]. . . . He usually continues in office till a worse can be found. 130
By contrast the Houyhnhnms, being reasonable, are happy and virtuous; therefore they need no physicians, lawyers, clergymen, or generals. These gentlemanly horses are shocked by Gulliver’s account of Europe’s wars, and still more by the disputes that generated them—as “whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh [in the Eucharist]; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine”; 131 and they cut Gulliver short when he boasts how many human beings could now be blown up by the marvelous inventions which his race has invented.
When Gulliver returns to Europe he can hardly bear the smell of the streets and the people, who now all seem to be Yahoos.
My wife and family received me with great surprise and joy, because they [had] concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess that the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust, and contempt . . . As soon as I entered the house my wife took me in her arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal [man] for so many years, I fell in a swoon for almost an hour. . . . During the first year I could not endure my wife or children in my presence, the very smell of them was intolerable . . . The first money I laid out was to buy two young . . . horses, which I keep in a good stable; and next to them the groom is my greatest favorite, for I feel my spirit revived by the smell he contracts in the stable. 132
The success of Gulliver exceeded the author’s dreams, and might have mollified his olfactory misanthropy. Readers enjoyed the spare and limpid English, the circumstantial details, the hilarious obscenities. Arbuthnot predicted for the book “as great a run as John Bunyan”—i.e., as for Pilgrim’s Progress. Doubtless Swift owed something to that book, more to Robinson Crusoe, something, perhaps, to Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoires comiques des états et empire de la lune. What was quite new was the awful cynicism of the later parts, and even this found admirers. Marlborough’s Duchess, now in her rasping old age, forgave Swift his attacks upon her husband in consideration of his attacks upon mankind. Swift, she declared, had given “the most accurate account of kings, ministers, bishops, and courts of justice that is possible to be writ.” Gay reported that she “is in raptures with the book, and can dream of nothing else.” 133
Swift’s triumph was soured by the publication, in the same year as Gulliver, of his poem Cadenus and Vanessa. Hester Vanhomrigh’s executors had obeyed her injunction to print it, and had not asked the author’s permission. It appeared in separate editions in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh. It was a cruel blow to Stella, for she saw how many of the loving phrases once addressed to her had been repeated to Vanessa. Shortly after that revelation she took sick. Swift crossed to Ireland to comfort her; she improved, and he returned to England (1727). Soon news came to him that she was dying. He sent hurried instructions to his cathedral aides that “Stella must not die in the Deanery.” 134 He came back to Dublin, and once more she rallied; but on January 28, 1728, she died, aged forty-seven. Swift broke down, and was too ill to attend her funeral.
Thereafter he lived in Dublin (as he wrote to Bolingbroke) “like a poisoned rat in a hole.” 135 He extended his charities, gave a pension to Mrs. Dingley, and helped Richard Sheridan in his youthful scrapes. Apparently a cruel man, he was touched to bitter wrath by the poverty of the Irish people, and was shocked by the number of child beggars in Dublin’s streets. In 1729 he issued the most ferocious of his ironies: A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country.
I have been assured . . . that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout. I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males . . . That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune throughout the Kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and, seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good . . .
Those who are more thrifty . . . may
flay the carcass, the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen. . . .
Some persons of desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of poor people who are aged, diseased, or maimed; and I have been desired to employ my thoughts, what course may be taken to ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance. But I am not in the least pain upon that matter; because it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting, by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. . . .
I think the advantages [of] the proposal which I have made are obvious and many . . . For first, . . . it would greatly lessen the number of Papists with whom we are yearly overrun, being the principal breeders of the nation, as well as our most dangerous enemies . . . Thirdly, whereas the maintenance of an hundred thousand children, from two years old and upward, cannot be computed at less than ten shillings a piece per annum, the nation’s stock will be thereby increased fifty thousand pounds per annum, besides the profit of a new dish introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune . . . who have any refinement in taste . . .
The strange and sometimes revolting productions of Swift’s pen, especially after Stella’s death, suggest the germs of insanity. “A person of great honor in Ireland (who was pleased to stoop so low as to look into my mind) used to tell me that my mind was like a conjured spirit, that would do mischief if I would not give it employment.” 136 This unhappy misanthrope, whose visible faults left him in a glass house while he pelted humanity with vengeful satire, asked a friend, “Do not the corruptions and villainies of men eat your flesh and exhaust your spirit?” 137 His anger at the world was an extension of his anger at himself; he knew that despite his genius he was diseased in body and soul, and he could not forgive life for having denied him health, normal organs, peace of mind, and advancement proportionate to his mental power.