13 HE LOVES HIS FRIENDS JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745) s the seventeenth century nears its end, the great age of English letter writing is Abeginning. Practitioners of the art who are the peers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger enrich the literature of the century that follows. Shortly after Lady Temple, formerly Dorothy Osborne, loses her last surviving child to suicide, a young scholar of genius who is to become the author of Gulliver’s Travels comes to serve as her husband’s resident assistant. In this man, Jonathan Swift, there is a fundamental unhappi- ness. He laments rather than celebrates his birthday and marks it by read- ing the third chapter of Job: “Let the day perish wherein I was born ... ” The savage indignation that lacerates, as he says, his heart, predominates over the merriment that his friend Dr. Arbuthnot perceptively sees in Gulliver’s Travels and that finds expression in The Bickerstaff Papers and in A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation. Yet while relaxing, dining and exchanging puns with friends, riding his horse, and enjoying the lov- ing companionship of Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, he is often happy. These twin facets of his life give him an affinity with another great letter-writer, William Cowper, who finds temporary relief from his fear of eternal damnation in pleasant and innocent occupations like gardening and keeping pets. It is much to be regretted that Swift is not able to have a normal mar- ried life with Esther Johnson, whom he calls Stella and who is, he writes, “as welcome as my blood to every farthing I have in the world.” Perhaps at first he prudently fears marrying without an adequate income, but ulti- mately his abnormal horror of the body’s need to excrete and its subjection to decay may be responsible. In his Journal to Stella, he mentions his hatred of the word “bowels” and how his visit to a woman who has just given birth and was “pale, dead, old and yellow, for want of her paint” turned his stomach. This is of a piece with the poems such as “Cassinus and Peter” FROM FAMILY TO PHILOSOPHY and “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” that were once called his unprintables as well as with Gulliver’s disgust at the bodies of the maids of honour in the land of the giants. Although at the end of the poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” he seems to be trying to argue himself out of his paralyzing obsession, he does not succeed. A learned young Anglo-Irishman, Swift serves in England as secretary to the retired diplomat Sir William Temple, whom he comes to venerate. At the same time he acts as tutor to Esther Johnson, who is the daughter of Temple’s housekeeper; his pupil is eight years old. This child grows up to become a highly intelligent, well-read woman and the great love of Swift’s life, though he will only be in her company when her older companion, the unmarried Rebecca Dingley, is also present. After Temple’s death in 1699, Swift, who has taken holy orders in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland, follows a clerical career. In 1707, he is com- missioned to negotiate with the Whig Government in London for the re- mission of the First Fruits, a tax on the Irish clergy. He shares the firm Whig commitment to a Protestant succession to the throne, but finds that as the price of remission the Government wants the Irish Church’s support for the repeal of the Test Acts, which exclude non-Anglicans from public ser- vice, the English universities, and political life. To Swift, whose unsigned book A Tale of a Tub presents a vigorous argument for the reasonableness of the Anglican Middle Way, this is totally unacceptable and a recipe for a re- lapse into social conflict akin to that of the Civil War. He returns to Ireland without success, but in 1710, he goes back to London for a second attempt just before an election which brings a Tory ministry to power. Though the Tories may waver in their commitment to a Protestant succession, they are resolute in their support of the national church. Moreover, their leaders, the Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley, and the Secretary of State, Henry St. John, are eager to recruit a writer as gifted as Swift to win over public opin- ion in their campaign to end the War of the Spanish Succession against Louis XIV’s France. During the three and three-quarter years before he returns to Ireland, Swift conducts a remarkable correspondence. In the tradition of the journal letter that goes back to Roger Ascham, Swift sends to Stella and Dingley, who are now living in Dublin, sixty-four instalments of a daily diary com- bined with answers to the letters they send him in reply. Living before the invention of the telephone, he feels he is talking to them as he writes and will even wish them goodnight or good morrow when he lays down his pen: I think I am bewitched to write so much in a morning to you, little MD. Let me go, will you? and I’ll come again to-night in a 60 JONATHAN SWIFT fine clean sheet of paper; but I can nor will stay no longer now; no, I won’t, for all your wheedling: no, no, look off, don’t smile at me, and say, Pray, pray, Presto, write a little more. The Journal to Stella, as the printed book is called, shows how, amidst all the excitements of the metropolis, he does not forget Irish pleasures. He feels some nostalgia for his grounds in his country parish of Laracor with their willows, fruit trees and canal, and he remembers social evenings in Dublin even as he is part of a society—“it must not be called a Club”—of eminent, witty men who dine together and also promote the careers of the deserving. His straitened circumstances figure as he seeks dinner invita- tions to eke out his meagre resources and complains about the rain and snow that put him to the expense of hiring a coach or chair. His troubles in- clude his bouts of giddiness, which he mentions alongside his anxiety about Stella’s eyesight, and the way he offends some and is offended by others, as well as his difficulties with his drunken servant Patrick. Literature figures as he discloses his authorship of unsigned poems and talks of his project for an academy to guard against the corruption of the language. The regu- lar sequence of events is occasionally interrupted by a startling occurrence. Swift and his servant separate a drunken parson and a sailor who are fight- ing in the street. The aged Bishop of Worcester announces to Queen Anne that in four years Louis XIV will turn Protestant and the Popedom will be overthrown. At the peril of his life, Swift spots and dismantles the booby trap—two pistols set to discharge—in a parcel delivered to Harley and in retrospect wonders at his unaccustomed presence of mind. The Journal reveals much about Swift’s pride. When Harley offers him a fifty pound bank note, he returns it and refuses to see that Minister for three days. On 29 September 1711, he is at court, where, he admits, “I am so proud I make all the lords come up to me.” But in spite of his prick- liness and his harsh judgments—Sir Andrew Fountaine’s brother is “an ignorant, worthless, scoundrel rake” and the Bishop of Raphoe “an old, doting, perverse coxcomb”—he is far from heartless. For all Dr. Johnson’s denunciation of him as one who “relieved without pity, and assisted with- out kindness,” Swift is capable of admirable compassion for the unfortu- nate. After the Duke of Hamilton is treacherously stabbed, he spends two hours with the bereaved Duchess and confides in his journal-letter, “She has moved my very soul.” When his servant disrupts his plan for an early meeting with the Secretary of State by admitting a petitioner, he observes, “I think indeed his case is hard; but Gd knows whether I shall be able to do him any service.” Swift’s judgments of people are apt to run to extremes. Sometimes, having built them up in his imagination, he suffers when his illusion is 61 FROM FAMILY TO PHILOSOPHY cracked or even shattered. The fictional bookseller—in modern terms, pub- lisher—who in 1704 appends a dedication to A Tale of a Tub is made to praise the unmatched virtues of the Whig Lord Somers. Seven years later Swift denounces him to Stella and Dingley as “a false deceitful rascal.” Dazzled in 1710 by the political brilliance and personal amiability of Lord Treasurer Harley and Secretary of State St. John and their early admission of him to their inner circle, he writes, “indeed it is hard to see these great men use me like one who was their betters, and the puppies with you in Ireland hardly regarding me.” In time he finds that though the restoration of peace in Europe depends on their efforts, both men can be distracted from their duty. “The Devil’s in this secretary,” he exclaims, and laments that Harley is “the greatest procrastinator in the world” and that his “great fault” is that he “cannot do all himself; and will not employ others.” At times Swift does not scruple to lie: he promises Lord Shelburn to receive him when he calls knowing that he will do no such thing, and he tells Lord Radnor he is devoted to him when in truth he would “not care if he were hanged.” Otherwise, however, he is a strict moralist: ”I give no man liberty to swear or talk b—dy,” he writes, explaining why he made an early departure from the company at St.