DEPENDENT

1

Swift’s prospects when he arrived at Leicester were not encouraging. He could hope for little from Ireland, and his mother lived on twenty pounds a year. She might be “of an easy, contented spirit,” rising early and devoting her pious days to needle and book. Her son was of another temper. He chafed in the unexciting town, where he thought the inhabitants “a parcel of very wretched fools,” given to lying and gossiping “above all parts that I was ever in.” His energy would not let him rest. If he busied himself at all it was with the pastime most likely to engage a young man during restless leisure.

He philandered with Betty Jones, a cousin of his mother’s. He philandered with other girls, then or at later visits, not so much out of interest in them as out of his need to exercise his powers upon whoever came within range of them. “It is this humour which makes me so busy when I am in company, to turn all that way; and since it commonly ends in talk, whether it be love or common conversation, it is all alike. This is so common that I could remember twenty women in my life”--he was writing early in 1692--“to whom I behaved myself just the same way; and I profess without any other design than that of entertaining myself when I am very idle, or when something goes amiss in my affairs.”

To divert himself or to ease his frustration: these were the instincts which had already begun to involve Swift with women. His ruling instinct was towards action among stubborn men. In relaxed intervals he found it soothing to let his powers play over natures which seemed yielding and responsive. In frustrate intervals he turned greedily, even cruelly, to the same sport, to assure himself that he still had the faculty of dominion.

His flirtation with Betty Jones, troubling to his mother, came to an end, and the girl married an innkeeper. Swift before the close of 1689 joined the household of Sir William Temple as something less than secretary for twenty pounds a year. This connection again he owed to his uncles, who had been associated in Ireland with Temple’s father and with Temple himself. “His whole family having been long known to me,” Temple explained, “obliged me ... to take care of him.”

Swift went to Temple hoping to learn the ways of the world from a man, also from Ireland, who had risen to influence and very near to power. For Temple Ireland had been but a springboard. His career had led him to more impressive quarters of Europe. Having turned to England shortly after the Restoration, he had made friends at Court, had been sent to the Continent to safeguard British interests, and had twice been ambassador at the Hague, where he had helped bring about the hopeful marriage of William of Orange to the niece of the English king. Charles II, valuing his ambassador’s astuteness and dexterity, had more than once offered to make him Secretary of State. He had each time refused, perceiving that Charles and his ministers had little use for other qualities which Temple valued in himself, and had taken to a serene retirement. Not even the accession of William and Mary, or their grateful offer of the post which he had refused at the hand of Charles, had been able to bring him back. He preferred to live at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey, remembering the large actions in which he had taken part, and being a philosopher among the gardens, in the Dutch manner, which reminded him of the country where he had had his triumphs.

Swift found Temple a man looking at the world as in a mirror. No actual affairs now concerned him so much as those of his own past, of which he was writing his memoirs. Reminiscence had not made his judgment less firm and level than it had been while it was constantly being tested by the intrigues of disingenuous, unscrupulous men. He was enlightened, responsible, benevolent. But, never having been ambitious, he had remained an amateur. “When I was young and in some idle company, it was proposed that every one should tell what their wishes should be, if they were sure to be granted; some were very pleasant, and some very extravagant; mine were health and peace and fair weather.” Such desires had allowed Temple to cherish as a virtue what included a touch of weakness and vanity. His retirement had been, in part, surrender. Disgusted by the conduct of men less virtuous than he, but also weak and vain, he had retreated to a happy vacuum where he had gone on cherishing his virtue till it now glowed with the colours of a philosophic heroism.

Swift, a conjured spirit aching for employment, was employed as Temple’s amanuensis while the master composed mellifluous essays on gardens, on health and long life, on popular discontents, on poetry, and on heroic virtue. Swift, starving for the world, might sometimes be allowed to keep pace with Temple when, leaving off his moral considerations, he walked in his gardens, along his trim canal, perhaps despising the new sciences which had lately come to the notice of gentlemen, and perhaps wondering from what herbs he could concoct more potent doses for his household and even for his hopeless, hereditary gout.

Between Swift and Temple there was enough difference to make a war, but there was no war. Neither of them entirely realized that they were wrong pupil and wrong teacher. Temple never realized it. Though he was kind enough, he was not, as he could not have been, enough concerned to see deeply into the vexed spirit forced to bend itself to his placid will. Recommending his dependent to Sir Robert Southwell in May 1690, he said of Swift only that “he has lived in my house, read to me, writ for me, and kept all accounts so far as my small occasions required. He has Latin and Greek, some French, writes a good and current hand, is very honest and diligent, and has good friends, though they have for the present lost their fortunes, in Ireland.” Any later conflicts between them Temple overlooked or forgave with calm magnanimity. At his death, after a decade of this service of talent by genius, “that great man,” as Swift precisely put it, “beside a legacy left him the care and trust and advantage of publishing his posthumous writings.” And on that same occasion the greater man wrote in his journal that with Temple had died “all that was good and amiable among men.”

Swift may have been often bored by Temple’s heroic virtue and by his amateur erudition. He may have felt bewildered when Temple “would look cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons.” But the dependent judged his patron rather by his actions than by his poses. He had gone to Temple to better fortunes which were desperately low. He had lived nearer to the world than if he had become a fellow of Trinity. He had learned everything Temple had to teach.

What fretted Swift at Moor Park was not so much the character of his patron, or even the mere fact of his own dependence, as the unsatisfying uses to which he had to put his still undetermined powers. With all his pride, he could only serve, never command. With all his acuteness, he could not name his own gifts even to himself. When, after his first brief stay with Temple, he went to Ireland with a recommendation to Southwell in the summer of 1690, he could still consider a fellowship in the college which he hated. Failing to obtain that, or the degree which he had missed, he continued in Ireland for another restless year, further broken by ill health, returned to his mother, and visited his cousin Thomas, who was now at Oxford reading for his degree at Balliol. Jonathan Swift, again at Moor Park by Christmas, may already have decided to turn from Trinity to Oxford, but it was the only decision he had reached before he settled back into his lowering dependence.

He helped his patron with other of his dilettante labours and copied the translations from Spanish poetry with which Lady Giffard, Temple’s sister, embellished the leisure which she could spare from being Temple’s chief of staff.

Between Lady Giffard and Swift there was, at least in time, a sharp hostility. If he was bored by the brother he was angered by the sister, whose record of long devotion was not enough to reconcile him to her present influence in the household. She, virtual chatelaine by reason of Lady Temple’s illness, resented the secretary’s unconcern. Lady Temple--“Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great”--Swift apparently liked. There was little to bring them into opposition. Nor was there manifest opposition between him and the other members of the family or the numerous dependents who had drifted to this patriarchal shelter. Among them all, however, he found no equal, no congenial friend. Urged by his pride to passions if not to frenzies, he could pour himself out neither in activity nor in confidences. Whatever refuge he had from his idleness and his secrecy was in the society of a child.

The child was Esther Johnson, whom Swift eventually called Stella. Her father, younger son of a good family in Nottinghamshire, had probably been a dependent of Temple who served as steward. But by 1689 he was dead, and his widow was companion to Lady Giffard. Bridget Johnson and her daughter, or daughters, lived at the edge of the Park in a cottage where Swift, after he had made friends there, could sometimes forget his subordination. Stella was eight years old when the young man, then twenty-two, arrived from Leicester. “Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection,” he said. “I ... had some share in her education, by directing what books she should read, and perpetually instructing her in the principles of honour and virtue.” He taught her to write, taught her so well that her handwriting could later be mistaken for his own. He taught himself to depend upon comforts which only she could give him during those restive years: admiration without analysis, affection without exigence, a child’s obedience, a child’s worship.

2

But Stella was for the present at most only an episode, a casual breathing-spell between battles. Not that Swift was overworked by Temple. He had too much time on his hands. “There is something in me which must be employed,” he wrote in February of this second winter at Moor Park, “and when I am alone turns all, for want of practice, into speculation and thought; insomuch that in these seven weeks I have been here, I have writ, and burnt and writ again, upon almost all manner of subjects, more perhaps than any man in England.” What he wrote could hardly have been history. He had enough of that with Temple. It was not philosophy. Writing to his cousin Thomas in May he said he was getting up his Greek and Latin for the Oxford degree, “but to enter upon the causes of philosophy is what I protest I will rather die in a ditch than go about.” It was probably poetry. Some of his poetry has survived.

That his poetry was bad means less than that it was Pindaric. For that Temple shares the blame. He advised Swift to write like Cowley, and Swift for a year or so fiercely beat imagined wings to raise himself to an alien elevation. Flight was not in him.

“It makes me mad,” he wrote to his cousin, “to hear you talk of making ... next morning ... what I could not do under two or three days, nor does it enter into my head to make anything of a sudden but what I find to be exceeding silly stuff except by great chance. I esteem the time of studying poetry to be two hours in the morning, and that only when the humour sits, which I esteem for the flower of the whole day, and truly I make bold to employ them that way, and yet I seldom write above two stanzas in a week--I mean such as are to any Pindaric ode--and yet I have known myself in so good a humour as to make two in a day, but it may be no more in a week after, and when all is done I alter them a hundred times, and yet I do not believe myself to be a laborious dry writer, because if the fit comes not immediately I never heed it, but think of something else.”

About this bad poetry he wrote bad prose, but the straggling clauses make clear what he did not know he said. Lacking the nature for poetry, he lacked the full desire; lacking the full desire, he lacked both the ease with which some true poets write and the passion which keeps the others from caring whether they write with ease or not. Swift was writing because he was raging. He wanted to be heard if he could not be felt. Poetry was a kind of power.

Being Swift, he could not take his struggles lightly. “I am over-fond of my own writings,” he confided. “I would not have the world think so, for a million, but it is so, and I find when I write what pleases me I am Cowley to myself and can read it a hundred times over. I know it is a desperate weakness, and has nothing to defend it but its secrecy, and I know farther that I am wholly in the wrong, but have the same pretence the baboon had to praise her children.” The image is pleasant but incomplete. Though he might then set the baboon’s value on his strophes, and might all his life hate his cousin John Dryden for telling him the truth about them, Swift within another year or so had come to hate them, with that hate which was twin to his love. Or rather, he had come to hate whatever it was that had fascinated and then disappointed him.

When he found his hope falling off with his delusion, Swift turned furious and accusatory. In the last of his early poems he angrily renounced his Muse:

“_Malignant Goddess! bane to my repose, Thou universal cause of all my woes; Say whence it comes that thou art grown of late A poor amusement of my scorn and hate.... To thee I owe that fatal bent of mind, Still to unhappy restless thoughts inclined; To thee, what oft I vainly strive to hide, That scorn of fools, by fools mistook for pride.... Madness like this no fancy ever seized, Still to be cheated, never to be pleased. ... From this hour I here renounce thy visionary power; And since thy essence on my breath depends, Thus with a breath the whole delusion ends._”

Poetry had failed him. As soon as he had learned to be honest he said a bitter farewell. Then he went on to prose.

The second stay with Temple was not continually midnight. In July 1692, after a brief residence at Oxford, Swift received from Hart Hall, now Hertford College, the degree of master of arts. “I never was more satisfied,” he wrote his uncle, “than in the behaviour of the University of Oxford to me. I had all the civilities I could wish for, and so many favours that I am ashamed to have been more obliged in a few weeks to strangers than ever I was in seven years to Dublin College.” At Moor Park, too, his rank became more gratifying. Temple not only treated his secretary with confidence at home, among his memoirs and his gardens, but even trusted him abroad.

Once in the spring of 1693, when King William had sent the Earl of Portland to consult Temple about a proposed bill for triennial parliaments, Temple, who did not feel sure the Earl would carry his full message, sent Swift after him to Kensington. There the secretary talked with both Portland and the King. “But,” as Swift himself related it, “all in vain. For the King by ill advisers was prevailed upon to refuse passing the bill. This was the first time that Mr. Swift had ever any converse with courts, and he told his friends it was the first incident that helped to cure him of vanity.” But not, plainly, of pride, which had made him expect that his country counsel would naturally be taken.

These successes, however, were too small to quiet his fierce restlessness, which with the decline of his Pindaric hopes began to clarify itself into satiric hatred. Just before he said his farewell to poetry he wrote some complimentary verses to Congreve, who had risen to a sudden fame in London with his first comedy. The compliments were confused. The lines in which Swift spoke of his own slow fortunes and his savage plans were as unmistakable as lightning. His “old unvanquish’d pride,” he wrote, looked with scorn on half mankind, which must beware of impending maledictions. He wondered that the world could be so clumsy in the face of

“_My hate, whose lash just Heaven has long decreed Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed._”

Did the world not know that his wrath was its ruin?

This was language above the capacity of a disappointed minor poet. It was fury, not peevishness, that lay behind Swift’s threat. His fury, so long wasted in aimless blows at phantoms, had become confident. Such confidence, in a man who was not a fool, was a sign of dangerous powers gathering to attack. They might be in their present mood because they had so long been checked in their impulses towards action. They may have sullenly decided upon words because they saw no opportunity for deeds. But all their hatred was not the consequence of frustration. Hatred was native to Swift, as love was to St. Francis. If Swift has been more frequently misunderstood than St. Francis, it is because men are allowed to love without giving reasons for it, but not to hate.

The growth of Swift’s purpose was of course not obvious to him, and it was not regular. No doubt he was often at peace in his occupations at Moor Park or in his relaxed intervals with Stella. His anger rose or fell with contrary or prosperous days. He could, like many men, be busy whether he was happy or unhappy. But by nature he was always restless. His energy drove him to violent exercise, particularly to walking, which he thought his health required. He liked to walk from Farnham to London, nearly forty miles away, and even to Leicester, stopping at dubious inns and amusing himself with the speech and customs of the people. Nor would his restlessness permit him to regard his dependence, outwardly comfortable, as more than a starting-point. His temper demanded independence.

With the help of his uncles he might possibly have become a lawyer. With the help of the King it is said that he might have become a captain of dragoons. With the help of Temple he might have become a clerk in the Rolls office at Dublin, and he was indeed offered such a post. But none of these careers suited his tastes or promised what he was looking for. Instead, he decided to take orders and enter the Church. When Temple had failed to obtain for him, through the favour of the King, a prebend of Westminster or Canterbury, Swift chose to take his own steps.

He went to Ireland in May 1694, leaving Temple angry. But as soon as Swift humbly applied, in October of that year, for a certificate of “morals and learning” which would satisfy the Irish bishops that he had properly conducted himself since he left Trinity, Temple, relenting, furnished it. Swift was ordained deacon the same month and priest in the following January. Almost immediately he was appointed to the prebend of Kilroot, a rural parish near Belfast.

Though Swift had had scruples about entering the Church solely as a livelihood, there was no mystery in his position. “I look upon myself, in the capacity of clergyman,” he said, “to be one appointed by Providence for defending a post assigned to me, and for gaining over as many enemies as I can. Although I think my cause is just, yet one great motive is my submitting to the pleasure of Providence, and to the laws of my country.” As to belief: “To say a man is bound to believe is neither truth nor sense”; “I am in all opinions to believe according to my own impartial reason; which I am bound to inform and improve, as far as my capacity and opportunities will permit.” Yet Swift had no urge towards any heresy. “Violent zeal for truth,” he thought, “hath an hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride.” Order was more important than zeal. “Liberty of conscience, properly speaking, is no more than the liberty of possessing our own thoughts and opinions, which every man enjoys without fear of the magistrate: but how far he shall publicly act in pursuance of those opinions is to be regulated by the laws of the country.” “Every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private, without perplexing his neighbour or disturbing the public.” So a soldier might reason, or a magistrate, or a prime minister. Swift was not a philosopher full of ideas, not a prospector for truths still to be found. Although, in spite of this rational attitude towards his calling, he later became jealously devoted to the Church, that was because they were his calling and his Church.

If he had any illusions as to what it might mean to rule in a parish, he lost them. Kilroot was dreary and remote, and Swift was no more contented in his uncomfortable independence than he was rich on his hundred pounds a year. One such year was as much as he could stand. He surrendered his prebend to a fellow-clergyman whom he had known at Oxford, and was back again at Moor Park two years after he had left it.

How idle and frustrate he had been appears from a letter he wrote just before his willing departure. The letter was to Jane Waring of Belfast, a cousin to two men who had been students at Trinity when Swift was there. With her, by Swift poetically called Varina, he had carried on another of his flirtations. He had even been involved to the point of a proposal. Cured of poetry, he had not yet been cured of philandering. He could still use, in writing to her, a language which comes strangely from a pen assigned to the cause of wrath.

“Impatience,” he began, speaking of himself, “is the most inseparable quality of a lover,” and he explained, what none knew better than he, that “every one who hunts after pleasure or fame or fortune is still restless and uneasy till he has hunted down his game; and all this is not only very natural but something reasonable too, for a violent desire is little better than a distemper, and therefore men are not to blame in looking after a cure.”

When he began to speak of Varina he once more flapped almost Pindaric wings. “That dearest object upon which all my prospect of happiness entirely depends is in perpetual danger to be removed for ever from my sight. Varina’s life is daily wasting ... yet some power that repines at human felicity has that influence to hold her continually doating on her cruelty, and me upon the cause of it.... Why was I so foolish to put my hopes and fears into the power or management of another?” Having, however, subdued his independence to his longing for her, he was eager to forgo all other prospects. For her he would stay in Ireland, even in Kilroot. “But listen to what I here solemnly protest, by all that can be witness to an oath, that if I leave this kingdom before you are mine, I will endure the utmost indignities of fortune rather than ever return again, though the King would send me back his deputy.”

In the midst of his passion Swift still seemed to be counting on a refusal, not, possibly, without a bearable sense of safety no matter how he might forecast his despair. “It was your pity opened the first way to my misfortune; and now your love is finishing my ruin. And is it so then? In one fortnight I must take eternal farewell of Varina, and I wonder will she weep at parting a little to justify her poor pretences of affection to me?” The certainty of this eternal farewell made Swift free to bring up his reproaches. “The only felicity permitted to human life we clog with tedious circumstances and barbarous formality. By Heaven, Varina, you are more experienced, and have less virgin innocence than I. Would not your conduct make one think you were hugely skilled in all the little politic methods of intrigue?”

Swift himself had been, he said, completely without craft, as without limits. Such a passion as his had “a property peculiar to itself, to be most commendable in its extremes.” It was no more capable than piety of any blameworthy excess. Now he would withhold from her the full reality of his anguish. “O Varina, how imagination leads me beyond myself and all my sorrows! It is sunk, and a thousand graves lie open! No, Madam, I will give you no more of my unhappy temper, though I derive it all from you.... Only remember, that if you still refuse to be mine, you will quickly lose, for ever lose, him that is resolved to die as he has lived, all yours.”

Protest as he might, Swift was in this letter surely as crafty as he was mawkish. He contrived to put Varina in the wrong so that she might seem to blame for the end of their provincial interlude. He had been playing at love because he had had nothing to work at. Now that he had something better to do, no doubt he meant to do it. But he preferred to take his leave with his broken heart in his hand. He could at once pay a generous tribute to the lady’s charms and call attention to his own sad, proud, faithful carriage at the moment of defeat. His farewell, however, was not that of a lover who would grieve long. And Swift, soon back with Temple, quickly found exercise for his powers in concerns much nearer his heart than any possible Varina.

3

There was now little in his situation at Moor Park to fret his pride. He knew that if at any time his post became tedious or humiliating he could again turn for independence, at least, to the Church. He was a clergyman on leave, as he might have been a soldier temporarily out of active service. He was a man of learning, already entered upon a profession, who had consented to be of use to Temple in tasks which interested them both. Lady Temple had died. Temple, lonely, infirm, depended probably as much upon Swift’s youth and strength as Swift upon Temple’s wealth and influence.

Moreover, Stella, fifteen when Swift returned from Kilroot, was an old comfort and a new delight. “She was sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen; but then grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London”--and here Swift, writing on the night of Stella’s death, added his touch of ice--“only a little too fat.” But at fifteen she could hardly yet have outgrown her design, or have come to stir in him the affection which he later felt. To her, or to her mother in the knowledge that it would reach Stella’s eyes, he wrote cheerfully during one of their visits to London with Temple and Lady Giffard: “I desire your absence heartily, for now I live in great state, and the cook comes in to know what I please to have for dinner. I ask very gravely what is in the house, and accordingly give orders for a dish of pigeons.... You shall have no more ale unless you send us a letter. Here is a great bundle and a letter for you; both came together from London. We all keep home like so many cats.”

That Swift at thirty was at last learning to be easy in his letters is a sign, possibly that he was happier, certainly that he was busier. “I myself was never miserable while my thoughts were in a ferment, for I imagine a dead calm is the troublesomest part of our voyage through the world.” His calling chosen, Swift could read and write without the sense, like eating without hunger, that beyond his pleasure lay no purpose. Reading, he now knew better what to look for. Writing, he now knew better what to aim at.

For if reading to Swift was experience, writing was action. He later declared to Pope that “all my endeavours from a boy to distinguish myself were only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts: whether right or wrong it is no great matter; and so the reputation of wit or great learning does the office of a blue ribbon or of a coach and six horses.” He wrote to gain influence and to exert it. For literary reputation he cared almost as little as some gentlemen of letters say they care. He never took money for his writings except what “Mr. Pope’s prudent management” got him for _Gulliver_. Swift might be fated by his gifts to captivate men’s tastes and entertain their imaginations, but he wanted to master their wills and direct their conduct.

As a preacher he set himself to tell his congregations so clearly what their duty was that they could have no doubt and no excuse. As a journalist he used all his skill to move public opinion to political action. And by his satires he intended to clear the paths of mankind of the affectations, follies, and vices which tangled what he thought the straight course of virtue and order. For Swift the words he used were as bayonets to a soldier, verdicts to a magistrate, laws to a minister. When at thirty he turned to words in his campaign against fortune, he meant them to be more than words.

The character of his first satires was determined by his circumstances. Living a little out of the world, in Temple’s walled, heroic realm, he had come to despise the buzzing wits and upstart scientists who, he thought, infested the moral and intellectual life of the times. Though Dryden was one of the wits and Newton one of the scientists, Swift did not bother to distinguish among them. His hatred was no more disposed to scrupulous justice than another man’s love.

As Swift’s cause was partly unjust, so was his ground for this attack partly accidental. Temple, stalking in virtue, had taken sides in the controversy, then disturbing France, over the relative merits of the ancients and the moderns. He had pronounced like a gentleman for the ancients. “I know of no new philosophers,” Temple said, “that have made entries upon that noble stage for fifteen hundred years past, unless Descartes and Hobbes should pretend to it.... There is nothing new in astronomy to vie with the ancients, unless it be the Copernican system; nor in physic, unless Harvey’s circulation of the blood.... ’Tis agreed by the learned that the science of music so admired by the ancients is wholly lost in the world.... So as those two divine excellencies of music and poetry are grown, in a manner, but the one fiddling and the other rhyming.... What traces have we left of that admirable science or skill in architecture, by which such stupendous fabrics have been raised of old ... that they hardly fall within our imagination?... The arts of painting and statuary began to revive with learning in Europe, and made a great but short flight; so as, for these last hundred years, we have not had one master, in either of them, who deserved a rank with those that flourished in that short period.”

Temple could not know that Bach was then alive. Having refused the embassy to Spain, he had missed a possible chance to hear about Velasquez. But he might, except for his rank and preoccupations, have met Rembrandt in Holland or Molière in France or Milton in England. He had not. He could with a peaceful conscience, plausibly, courteously, and only now and then ironically, dismiss the moderns.

Perhaps the chief fault of modern learning, he concluded, was that so many of the learned were not quite men of the world. “The shallow, the superficial, and the sufficient among scholars” had attracted ridicule, “and very justly, by pretending to more than they had, or to more esteem than what they had could deserve, by broaching it in all places, at all times, upon all occasions, and by living so much among themselves, or in their closets and cells, as to make them unfit for all other business and ridiculous in all other conversations.” From this it had come about that true learning was confused with pedantry and that both suffered from the present mode of ridicule. “’Tis the itch of our age and climate, and has overrun both the Court and the stage; enters a House of Lords and Commons as boldly as a coffee house, debates of Council as well as private conversation; and I have known in my life more than one or two ministers of state that would rather have said a witty thing than done a wise one; and made the company laugh rather than the kingdom rejoice.”

This was Temple’s attitude, but so was it Swift’s. Though the _Battle of the Books_ and the _Tale of a Tub_ may have been planned at Kilroot and subsequently revised in London, they were the fruits, however unexpected, of that suave garden at Moor Park. Swift took the superiority of the ancients for granted, with nothing but ridicule for any modern who doubted it. The contemporary world of learning he assumed to be made up almost altogether of mean, starved, envious, strident, stingless fools and fops, ignorant and arrogant, who swarmed about their betters with a fly’s equal appetite for dung or honey.

Where Swift differed from Temple was where genius differs from talent, not in mere attitude but in art and passion. Temple had been content to survey the world in a smooth, stately exposition. Swift brought his arguments to England, and put them into stories which, in spite of their humorous allegory, slashed his victims with all the edges of realism. His ancients and moderns were actual warriors, brawling “on Friday last” in the King’s library. His criticism was comedy.

“Virgil appeared in shining armour completely fitted to his body. He was mounted on a dapple-grey steed, the slowness of whose pace was an effect of the highest mettle and vigour. He cast his eye on the adverse wing, with a desire to find an object worthy of his valour, when, behold, upon a sorrel gelding of a monstrous size, appeared a foe issuing from among the thickest of the enemy’s squadrons; but his speed was less than his noise; for his horse, old and lean, spent the dregs of his strength in a high trot which, though it made slow advances, yet caused a loud clashing of his armour, terrible to hear. The two cavaliers had now approached within the throw of a lance, when the stranger desired a parley, and, lifting up the vizard of his helmet, a face hardly appeared from within, which, after a pause, was known for that of the renowned Dryden. The brave Ancient suddenly started, as one possessed with surprise and disappointment together; for the helmet was nine times too large for the head, which appeared situate far in the hinder part, even like the lady in a lobster, or like a mouse under a canopy of state, or like a shrivelled beau from within the penthouse of a modern periwig; and the voice was suited to the visage, sounding weak and remote.”

Nor did the genius of Swift surpass the talent of Temple only by the reach of drama over debate. Temple, speaking of the wits, had said: “But the last maim given to learning has been by the scorn of pedantry, which the shallow, the superficial, and the sufficient among scholars first drew to themselves, and very justly” ... and then he had gone on to a mild simile of an infection in a town from which everybody stayed away. Swift, starting at the same point, with the compliment of imitation, made Temple look like the moon in the same sky with the sun: “But the greatest maim given to that general reception which the writings of our society have formerly received (next to the transitory state of all sublunary things) has been a superficial vein among many readers of the present age, who will by no means be persuaded to inspect beyond the surface and the rind of things; whereas, wisdom is a fox, who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out. It is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the coarser coat; and whereof, to a judicious palate, the maggots are the best. It is a sack-posset, wherein the deeper you go you will find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider because it is attended with an egg. But then lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth and pay you with nothing but a worm.”

Temple, reflective over “the vein of ridiculing all that is serious and good, all honour and virtue, as well as learning and piety,” had written a polite essay. Swift actively declared a war. His satires were like a tub thrown by seamen to a whale to keep it off the ship. Let the yelping wits and empty scholars butt and tumble the satires instead of harming the commonwealth.

The _Battle of the Books_ was a bagatelle, humorously secret about the outcome of the skirmish. So, too, the _Tale of a Tub_ did not trouble to complete the story of Peter and Martin and Jack, the three brothers who stood for the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the Dissenting churches. Swift still lacked, or was too unconcerned to use, the art which insists upon thorough and finished structure. Broken meats, he might have said, were fit enough for dogs. The tale itself, satirizing the abuses of religion, made up no more than a third of the whole book. The digressions, on the abuses of learning, were the larger and more varied part. Swift had been a scholar longer than he had been a clergyman.

It was his duty to defend his Church by cutting down its enemies. He was ruthless with the quibbles of theology, fanaticism, superstition, priestly greed and imposture. But he felt a more seasoned malice when he turned aside to prune and lop among the charlatans of wit whom he regarded as his own enemies. The strutting poets, the confident blind critics, the mercenary adulators and detractors, the treatise-mongers, the multipliers of dedications and prefaces and compendiums and commentaries and annotations and indexes, the proudly obscure writers: all these he ridiculed by the contemptuous device of praising them. Yet they were for him, at most, annoying creatures that he studied briefly before he trod on them. They had roused only his irritation. His hate, which after years of brooding had finally found the language natural to it, was for human life at large.

Temple had said, with a melancholy cadence: “When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and best, but like a froward child that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.”

Swift saw mankind with a colder eye. “If we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find that all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. And, first, with relation to the mind or understanding, ’tis manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can build nobler scenes and produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or nature will be at expense to furnish.... Again, if we take this definition of happiness and examine it with reference to the senses, it will be acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How fading and insipid do all objects accost us that are not conveyed in the vehicle of delusion! How shrunk is everything as it appears in the glass of nature! So that if it were not for the assistance of artificial mediums, false lights, refracted angles, varnish, and tinsel, there would be a mighty level in the felicity and enjoyments of mortal men.” Credulity, he argued, is better than curiosity, and it is better to accept the surfaces of life with the senses than to inquire deeper with the reason. “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.... He that can, with Epicurus, content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superficies of things; such a man, truly wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.”

To this judgment Swift had arrived at thirty in the shadow of Temple at Moor Park. The neat aim and witty sting of his sentences had less to do with his effects than the mind and passion which showed through his clear, hard words. What he said he meant, not partly but wholly; not with the momentary earnestness of a gesture but with the deep sincerity of a belief rooted in his constitution by his nature and his experience.

If ever Temple noticed the tiger in his garden he must have wondered. He might have asked whether it would not be wiser for Swift to smile at the childish world, and humour it till it slept. And Swift might have answered that it was beyond a tiger to look like a lamb with its soft wool, or sound like a lamb with its timid bleat, or skip like a lamb with its happy legs. Those were the lamb’s gifts. If the lamb was able to lead a cheerful life in a world of butchers, then it had the gift of being well deceived. But a tiger’s gifts were stripes and roars and claws angrier than swords. They did not carry with them the other gift of being deceived by butchers. The lamb could be caged, and would grow tame; it could be starved, and would die pitifully. But if the tiger were caged or starved it would strike back with all its deadly sinews. To ask a tiger to be serene in its trap and peaceful towards its captors was simply to ask it to be a lamb. It must be a tiger still.

The dry years of Swift’s dependence upon Temple came to an end with Temple’s death in January 1699. The satires had not yet been published, and Swift left Farnham for London with none of the reputation which they were to bring him. At Farnham, or soon in London, he wrote out a set of resolutions to warn him when he should be old, as he had lately seen his patron. Most of the resolutions were civil enough. He would not, he resolved, be severe with young people or force his company on them, as he would force on no one his advice or anecdotes. He would not be peevish, morose, suspicious, covetous, untidy, garrulous, boastful, positive, opinionative, or open to gossip or flattery. He would not be scornful of current ways or wits or fashions or men. He would not marry a young woman. In all these he might have been any young man taking prudent notes.

But in one of the resolutions he suddenly became Swift. “Not to be fond of children, or let them come near me hardly.” Stella had been a child. Had she, coming near him as a child, grown to be what made him feel that other children might also trouble him? Or was his resolution only a symptom of his general misanthropy, now so wary that it would not let mankind approach, even in its least hostile form, for fear of a weakening influence on the integrity of his hate? At least he had learned, however he loved the one, to hate the many. His whole history lay in the seed of that antithesis.