Swift's Servant Problem: Livery and Hypocrisy in the Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Directions to Servants

Swift's Servant Problem: Livery and Hypocrisy in the Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Directions to Servants JENNY DAVIDSON Very few people are willing to speak up for hypocrisy. As a rule, to use the word at all is to position oneself against it.11 am no more likely to identify myself as a hypocrite than I am to call myself a cannibal, although I may do either so long as I invoke a rhetoric of confession or conversion to separate my present identity from the past one I name and thereby disavow . Many defenses of hypocrisy begin by giving it an attractive alias: manners, civility, decorum, self-control, politeness. To defend hypocrisy under its own name means breaking a taboo, and a strong incentive is required to risk the outrage such a defense is likely to provoke. Not the least remarkable aspect of Jonathan Swift's defense of hypocrisy, the Project for the Advancement of Religion (1709), is the extent to which Swift foregrounds the very word hypocrisy.2 The success of Swift's Project depends in a sense on his careful management of two words. One of these words is hypocrisy. The other is livery, a term whose signification in eighteenthcentury discourse is curiously divided: used metaphorically, it offers a conventional analogy for surfaces or appearances, while its literal meaning is associated with an explosive set of arguments about the rights and duties of the servant class. As Swift puts it in the Project, "Hypocrisy is much more eligible than open Infidelity and Vice: It wears the Livery of Religion, it acknowledgeth her Authority, and is cautious of giving Scandal" (2:59-60). The phrase 105 106 / DAVIDSON "the Livery of Religion" momentarily undermines Swift's positive argument for hypocrisy as the best approximation of virtue, introducing into his metaphor a key word in contemporary attacks on the behavior and morals of servants in livery. Indeed, it is not just the extensive pamphlet literature on servants but Swift's own Directions to Servants (1745) that directs a battery of satire against servants in livery, identifying livery with not-sosecret insolence in a manner that would seem to subvert the Project's case for wearing "the Livery of Religion." Yet once the Project and the Directions are situated in the context of early-eighteenth-century attacks on bad servants by Locke, Defoe, Mandeville and others, the structural underpinnings of Swift's argument in favor of hypocrisy become clear. The presence of bad servants in arguments about virtue turns out to be not accidental but essential, and the evidence suggests that successful defenses of hypocrisy depend on a strategy of exclusion. Swift is finally able to promote certain kinds of hypocrisy because he rejects what he identifies as the destructive and self-interested hypocrisy of the servant class. On the surface, the Directions to Servants has little in common with the Project. The Project is difficult to identify generically, though it has been described on occasion as an unsuccessful prose satire, a political polemic or a radical moral treatise. The satire of the Directions is far more straightforward . Published posthumously, this compilation of mock-advice is formally related not to Swift's moral writings but to his other major compilation on manners, A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation (1738). Their mutual interest in livery, however, works as a hinge to connect the Directions to the Project. Johnson's Dictionary provides an eighteenth -century precedent for this cross-referencing of the word livery across Swift's career. To illustrate the word hypocrisy (defined as "dissimulation with regard to the moral or religious character"), Johnson cites Swift's Project: "Hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity and vice: it wears the livery of religion, and is cautious of giving scandal: nay, continued disguises are too great a constraint: men would leave off their vices, rather than undergo the toil of practising them in private."3 And though the term livery appears in this passage, Johnson chooses to illustrate the word "livery" under its own heading not by the metaphorical usage of the Project but by a literal example from the Directions to Servants: "If your dinner...