Chapter IV: Part 4

Though he learned better, he remained, to the end of his great episode, somewhat at the mercy of his love. It was, of course, the corollary of his hate. Hitherto alone with his pride in what seemed to him a prison, he had been able to hate all those whose neglect had kept him there. Such companions as Stella and Addison had been only alleviating visitors. But now half the circle of his enemies had turned friends, and had entreated him to help them. They had taken him, apparently, to their hearts. They had let him, apparently, into their minds. They had given him a tiger’s share not only in the battle but in the command. Swift, all of whose emotions were profound, responded with emotions which were simple: gratitude, fidelity, delight in effort, ardent comradeship. He was so exultant at being delivered from his prison that he did not notice that he had been brought out to be harnessed.

Oxford and Bolingbroke must have smiled at his generous tribute to their virtues. Others did. When Swift wrote to Peterborough, then in Vienna, that the ministers seemed “heartily to love one another” and that they loved him too, Peterborough, who had been sent on an embassy to get him out of the way of the intriguing pair, sceptically wondered how Swift had come “to frame a system--in the times we live in--to govern the world by love.” Oxford and Bolingbroke did not trouble themselves over the excess of Swift’s affection, any more than they minded his arrogance. They were men of the stormy world, determined to get places and keep them. They worked for profit. If Swift worked for love or hate, that was his business. He was not, perhaps, as indispensable as the backstairs Mrs. Masham, but he could hurt the Whigs. They gave him all the room they could spare and applauded his blows.

Loving too much, Swift hated too much, as in his attack on the Earl of Wharton. “He is,” Swift said, “without the sense of shame or glory as some men are without the sense of smelling; and therefore a good name to him is no more than a precious ointment would be to those....

“He seems to be but an ill dissembler and an ill liar, though they are the two talents he most practises and most values himself upon. The ends he has gained by lying appear to be more owing to the frequency than the art of them; his lies being sometimes detected in an hour, often in a day, and always in a week.... He swears solemnly he loves and will serve you, and your back is no sooner turned but he tells those about him you are a dog and a rascal. He goes constantly to prayers in the forms of his place, and will talk bawdy and blasphemy at the chapel door. He is a Presbyterian in politics and an atheist in religion, but he chooses at present to whore with a Papist. In his commerce with mankind his general rule is to endeavour imposing on their understandings, for which he has but one receipt, a composition of lies and oaths; and this he applies indifferently to a freeholder of forty shillings and a privy councillor, by which the honest are often either deceived or amused; and either way he gains his point.... With a good natural understanding, a great fluency in speaking, and no ill taste of wit, he is generally the worst companion in the world; his thoughts being wholly taken up between vice and politics so that bawdy, profaneness, and business fill up his whole conversation.... As some vain young fellows, to make a gallantry appear of consequence, will choose to venture their necks by climbing up a wall or window at midnight to a common wench, where they might as freely have gone at the door and at noonday; so his Excellency, either to keep himself in practice or to advance the fame of his politics, affects the most obscure, troublesome, and winding paths, even in the commonest affairs, those which would as well be brought about in the ordinary forms or which would proceed of course whether he intervened or no.

“He bears the gallantries of his lady with the indifference of a stoic, and thinks them well recompensed by a return of children to support his family, without the fatigues of being a father.

“He has three predominant passions which you will seldom observe united in the same man, as arising from different dispositions of mind, and naturally thwarting each other; these are love of power, love of money, and love of pleasure. They ride him sometimes by turns and sometimes all together.... He was never known to refuse or keep a promise.... But here I desire to distinguish between a promise and a bargain; for he will be sure to keep the latter, when he has had the fairest offer.”

There was, Swift insisted, nothing personal in his remarks. “Whoever were to describe the nature of a serpent, a wolf, a crocodile, or a fox must be understood to do it for the sake of others, without any personal love or hatred of the animals themselves.” Nor would Wharton take it personally. “When these papers are public ’tis odds but he will tell me, as he once did upon a like occasion, that ‘he is damnably mauled,’ and then with the easiest transition in the world ask about the weather or time of the day.” And in fact, when Swift encountered Wharton at White’s chocolate house after the character was published, “Lord Wharton saw me at the door, and I saw him but took no notice and was going away, but he came through the crowd, called after me, and asked me how I did.”

This was, as Swift said, “not a humour put on to serve a turn or keep a countenance, not arising from the consciousness of his innocence or any grandeur of mind, but the mere unaffected bent of his nature.” Yet few moralists could have carried themselves more justly under such abuse. Wharton needed no philosophy in the circumstances. Experience was enough to tell him that Swift, accusing him of so finished, so universal a villainy, had blamed him for what was remarkably near a virtue. The victim himself looked brilliant in this glare of wrath. Swift’s hate, in its white-hot excess, had grown creative and had shaped a monster which had an insolent animal beauty along with its human vices.

But not all of Swift’s victims had Wharton’s whistling unconcern. There was the Duchess of Somerset, the red-haired Mistress of the Robes after the Marlboroughs had gone from Court. She had disliked Swift before he joined the Tories. With Lady Giffard, Temple’s sister, she had resented the final volume of Temple’s memoirs in 1709. It contained reflections on certain of the Whig lords, and Swift had published it. The Duchess, friend to Whigs, decided that he was “a man of no principle, either of honour or religion.” Swift, knowing this, perversely circulated a lampoon in which he called her “Carrots” and brought up the old charge that she had connived in the assassination of her second husband. The Duchess, who though she had reached a third husband at fifteen had had no other for nearly thirty years, never forgave Swift. More than any of his enemies, more than the Archbishop of York, who inflexibly held the _Tale of a Tub_ against him, she stood between him and the favour of the Queen. He might serve the ministers as only he could, but he could not become a bishop without the Queen’s approval. That, while the angry Duchess lived, he could not get. And the Duchess outlived the Queen.

More love than he needed, more hate than he needed: these were what hampered Swift in politics. He was impatient of craft, of what he called “refinements.” “Whatever may be thought or practised by profound politicians, they will hardly be able to convince the reasonable part of mankind that the most plain, short, easy, safe, and lawful way to any good end is not more eligible than one directly contrary in some or all of these qualities. I have been frequently assured by great ministers that politics were nothing but common sense; which, as it was the only true thing they spoke, so it was the only thing they could have wished I should not believe.” Swift did believe it. His whole instinct was to frame clear policies and go the straight way to work with them. In this he resembled statesmen of the first rank. But he lacked, what statesmen of the first rank have, the touch of dispassion in his passion. He trusted his friends more than they deserved, because they were his friends. He worried and tore his enemies, even when nothing was to be gained by it, because they were his enemies. Zealous for order in the state, he could not keep order in himself. He had the excess and disproportion of genius.

Nor did his defects reduce him merely to the second rank of statesmen. They reduced him to the third. In the second were Oxford and Bolingbroke. They were neither clear in their policies nor straightforward in their methods, but they had the patience of guile, the persistence of selfishness, the pliability of talent. Moreover, they were men of rank and fortune, and they were in office. If at first they were afraid of Swift, and then came to treasure his virtues, they also found that they could, by dividing his love and hate, rule him. After his hate had sent him out against their enemies, his love brought him back to their leash. Let him hold himself to be their conscience. They knew how to deal with consciences.

There is a record, written about October 1713, which painfully, almost shockingly, places Swift in his true relations with the Ministry. The scene is the Queen’s antechamber at Windsor.

“Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business and acted as master of requests. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak to his brother the Duke of Ormond to get a chaplain’s place established in the garrison of Hull for Mr. Fiddes, a clergyman in that neighbourhood who had lately been in gaol and published sermons to pay fees. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake with my Lord Treasurer that according to his petition he should obtain a salary of two hundred pounds per annum, as minister of the English Church at Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going in with the red bag to the Queen, and told him aloud he had something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He talked with the son of Dr. Davenant to be sent abroad, and took out his pocket-book and wrote down several things as memoranda to do for him. He turned to the fire and took out his gold watch, and telling him the time of day, complained it was very late. A gentleman said he was too fast. ‘How can I help it,’ says the Doctor, ‘if the courtiers give me a watch that won’t go right?’ Then he instructed a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which, he said, he must have them all subscribe. ‘For,’ says he, ‘the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.’ Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him. Both went off just before prayers.”

Painful and shocking to see a genius so happy in his business, when it was such small business to be happy in. This was not the carriage of a man who, for all his sporadic arrogance, would force great rewards from his patrons.

Throughout 1711 and most of 1712 Swift worked too hard and too exultantly to have much time for hopes. He wrote often to Stella of his return to Ireland. Ormond might give him an addition to Laracor. He might get a Dublin parish. When Peterborough talked of bishops and deans Swift said his highest ambition was “to live in England, and with a competency to support me with honour.” It was nearly enough to be able to advance his friends. The ministers declared that Swift never came to them without a Whig in his sleeve.

But by the third winter of his power he had begun to starve on his diet of promises. The rumour that he had been made dean of Wells, when he had not, fretted him. The deaneries of Ely and Lichfield were vacant to no advantage of his. The Ministry must, he grumbled through the winter, do something for him or he would go back to Laracor. In January 1713 he wrote to Oxford: “I most humbly beg leave to inform your Lordship that the dean of Wells died this morning at one o’clock. I entirely submit my poor fortunes to your Lordship.” And Bolingbroke wrote to Swift with a rhythmic unction: “Though I have not seen you I did not fail to write to Lord Treasurer. _Non tua res agitur_, dear Jonathan. It is the Treasurer’s cause; it is my cause; it is every man’s cause who is embarked in our bottom. Depend upon it that I never will neglect any opportunity of showing that true esteem, that sincere affection and honest friendship for you which fill the breast of your faithful servant.”

It was a ministerial vow. That same month the bishopric of Hereford was filled, but not by Swift. In April, when the treaty of Utrecht had at last been signed and Swift considered his work done, there were vacant preferments on every tree: in England the deaneries of Wells, Ely, and Lichfield and the canonry of Windsor; in Ireland the bishoprics of Raphoe and Dromore. Not one of them fell to Swift. Oxford shuffled. Bolingbroke had Swift to dinner. The Archbishop of York shook his head. The Duchess of Somerset hissed. The Queen held out. She would not have Swift a dean or canon in England, or a bishop anywhere. Help came from the Duke of Ormond. If the present dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin might be made Bishop of Dromore, Swift could have that deanery. The Queen consented.

Oxford suddenly became eager to keep Swift in England. Let him be prebendary of Windsor. “Thus,” wrote Swift, “he perplexes things. I expect neither. But I confess, as much as I love England, I am so angry at this treatment that if I had my choice I would rather have St. Patrick’s.” Did he remember that his old friend Robert Hunter, now governor of New York, had lately written that he wished Swift could come to be bishop there? No matter. The appointment was patched up, and Swift became, as he was to be for the rest of his life, the Dean of St. Patrick’s.

“All that the Court or Ministry did for me was to let me choose my station in the country where I am banished.” He was not even allowed to become Historiographer, to chronicle the reign which he no longer influenced.

This was the career and this the climax of Swift’s life among the great. After a summer in Ireland he was, it is true, called back to London for the fourth and last winter of the Ministry, but his own future was settled, and his time was chiefly taken up with keeping the peace between Oxford and Bolingbroke. They were, it seemed to Swift, “a ship’s crew quarrelling in a storm, or while their enemies are within gunshot.” The fellowship of love had ceased to exist even for Swift’s loyal eyes.

The victors were wrangling over the spoils. What about their futures? The Queen would not live for ever. The Elector of Hanover, upon whom the Succession had been fixed, was certain to be favourable to the Whigs. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke, both secretly, were dealing with the Pretender, willing to ruin the Succession if they could bring in a prince favourable to Tories. Meanwhile the mutinous Bolingbroke had determined to be first minister himself. Out-intriguing Oxford, he won Oxford’s cousin, now Lady Masham, to another allegiance. London and Windsor buzzed and rumbled. All winter and all spring Swift struggled to divert or pacify the wranglers. Their war went on. Swift, despairing, took to a dull, angry retreat in Berkshire. In July 1714 Oxford was forced to break the white staff of his office. Bolingbroke, however, did not supplant him. In five days the Queen died. The Whiggish Elector was to become George I. Marlborough, returning from the Continent, entered London with two hundred men on horseback, drums, and fifty coaches.

Swift, in a letter to Oxford, said farewell to such power as he had had. “In your public capacity,” he told him, “you have often angered me to the heart, but as a private man, never once.... I will never write to you, if I can help it, otherwise than as to a private person, nor allow myself to have been obliged by you in any other capacity. The memory of one great instance of your candour and justice I will carry to my grave: that having been in a manner domestic with you for almost four years, it was never in the power of any public or concealed enemy to make you think ill of me, though malice and envy were often employed to that end. If I live, posterity shall know that and more, which ... is all the return I can make you. Will you give me leave to say how I would desire to stand in your memory: as one who was truly sensible of the honour you did him, though he was too proud to be vain upon it; as one who was neither assuming, officious, nor teasing, who never wilfully misrepresented persons or facts to you, nor consulted his passions when he gave a character; and lastly, as one whose indiscretions proceeded altogether from a weak head, and not an ill heart? I will add one thing more, which is the highest compliment I can make: that I was never afraid of offending you, nor am I now in any pain for the manner I write to you in. I have said enough; and, like one at your levee, having made my bow, I shrink back into the crowd.”

3

Hardly had Swift reached London in 1710 when he sat four hours one morning to the fashionable Charles Jervas, who, having begun a portrait on Swift’s previous visit to England, now gave the picture “quite another turn.” Perhaps he put the gleam of higher prospects into those eyes which in their extreme moods ranged from fire to stone. Full-lidded, bold even under the dark and heavy brows, humorously but not secretively averted, they seemed in the portrait to glance at something and to stare at everything. Swift’s periwig did not conceal his proud, arched forehead. His clerical bands plumped out his well-nourished, worldly chin, double and dimpled. His nose was both inquiring and commanding, ready to be contemptuous at the first excuse. But about his mouth there were the signs of another nature, sensitive, nervous, never calm. The corners would twitch easily, the lips tremble: the lower disciplined to a counterfeit of straightness, but the upper, short and friendly, indisciplinably sweet.

This was the face of a man whom nothing on earth could over-awe, yet who would assert himself too much out of mere touchiness. He would frighten others yet would hold them, fascinated, dangerously near him. He would give and receive much love and little happiness. This was the face that was to be among the best known in London for four years, this stout body somewhat taller than most men’s, this mind more restless than any man’s.

_During the Oxford Ministry_]

The Jervas portrait was but the notation of a few hours. The true likeness of Swift in his days of power he drew himself, in the journal-letters to Stella which he posted whenever his sheet of paper was full. Before he left his bed in the morning, after he got into it at night, at any time during the day, Swift set down, with minor interruptions, a continuous account of all, or almost all, he did. He took it for granted that Stella was interested in whatever concerned him. His journal was partly news sent from the great world to a friend waiting in a small one, but it was partly, also, a detailed memorandum written as for his other self. He could be confiding, indiscreet, coarse, boastful, hilarious, tender, admonitory, savage, absurd, pouring out what came to him as it came. He wrote now as if this were a letter to Stella and Rebecca Dingley both, or to either of them; now as if it were a conversation with himself, in the knowledge that they, and only they, would hear.

The journal was so intimate that he fell often into a foolish “little language,” like a giant talking to a baby with what he imagined was the baby’s vocabulary and pronunciation--or like a lover using silly words in despair of finding any that were serious enough. Swift’s baby-talk was a joke kept up between him and Stella, a note of tenderness struck in this way for want of a chance to sound it with a voice. But he did not talk down to her. He told her his life.

“I was this morning at ten at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison’s play, called _Cato_, which is to be acted on Friday. There were not above half-a-score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them; and the drab that acts Cato’s daughter out in the midst of a passionate part and then calling out ‘What’s next?’ The Bishop of Clogher was there too, but he stood privately in a gallery. I went to dine with Lord Treasurer, but he was gone to Wimbledon, his daughter Carmarthen’s country seat, seven miles off. So I went back and dined privately with Mr. Addison, whom I had left to go to Lord Treasurer. I keep fires yet; I am very extravagant. I sat this evening with Sir Andrew Fountaine.... It is rainy weather again; nevle saw ze rike [never saw the like]. This letter shall go tomorrow. Remember, ung oomens, it is seven weeks since your last, and I allow oo but five weeks. But oo have been galloping in the country.”

The variety of Swift’s days was in the persons he met and talked with. His habits had the regularity which goes with being virtuous and poor. He made, however, no virtue of his poverty. “I love these shabby difficulties when they are over; but I hate them, because they arise from not having a thousand pounds a year.”

Though he liked best to make his own meal of a single dish, he despised a skimpy table. Though he liked to walk, and took a chair or coach only in bad weather, he minded the expense when he had to ride, not his loss of an opportunity to trudge like a hero. He thought he was extravagant about fires, but when he shivered in his lodgings it was because coal cost money, not because shivering exalted his spirit. He avoided fruit, he more or less gave up snuff, he put water in his wine. All these asceticisms were for the sake of his treacherous health, as was the brandy that he drank, as were the pills and purges, the drops and ointments with which he fought his many attacks of giddiness. But never once did he rejoice in the endurance of a saint or the glory of a martyr. He did not relish even the fasts of his Church. “I hate Lent. I hate different diets, and furmity and butter, and herb porridge, and sour devout faces of people who only put on religion for seven weeks.”

Swift was a man of his world in his frank admiration for power, station, wealth, comfort, elegance, urbanity, learning, wit, manners. He had come to England to seek a better society than there was in Laracor or Dublin. His natural handicaps--passion, intensity, genius--were enough. He would not pretend that his lack of fortune was a merit. He complained of it, desired to mend it, and kept the best company he could.

Each morning in his various London lodgings Patrick, the servant whom Swift had brought over from Ireland, woke his master early, not always the first time he called. Swift’s sleep was heavy but disturbed. “I was dreaming the most melancholy things of poor Ppt [Poppet], and was grieving and crying all night.” Awake, he was likely to stay in bed till the room was warm, writing, often still by candlelight, as if Stella and Dingley were beside him. “Morning. I am going this morning to see Prior, who dines with me at Mr. Harley’s; so I can’t stay fiddling and talking with dear little brats in a morning, and ’tis terribly cold. I wish my cold hand was in the warmest place about you, young women. I’d give ten guineas upon that account with all my heart, faith. Oh, it starves my thigh. So I’ll rise and bid you good morrow, my ladies both, good morrow. Come, stand away, let me rise. Patrick, take away the candle. Is there a good fire? So--up adazy.”

Shaving, every second or third day; brandy, on days when he was giddy; breakfast of milk porridge or a cake Stella’s mother had made him: these got Swift ready for his day. He might write at home, all day when he was busiest, sending out for a chop and a pot of ale for his dinner. But usually he put on periwig, boots, and black gown with pudding-sleeves, and left the house, walking, about his pleasure or his affairs. Perhaps he had morning tea or chocolate with some of the ladies who delighted in his fame and insolence. Perhaps he conferred with his printers in the City. Perhaps he waited on one of the lords of his political fellowship. There were many amusements in London. “Lady Kerry, Mrs. Pratt, Mrs. Cadogan, and I in one coach, Lady Kerry’s son and his governor and two gentlemen in another, maids and misses and little master (Lord Shelburne’s children) in a third, all hackneys, set out at ten o’clock this morning from Lord Shelburne’s house in Piccadilly to the Tower, and saw all the sights, lions, etc., then to Bedlam; then dined at the chop-house behind the Exchange; then to Gresham College (but the keeper was not at home); and concluded the night at the puppet-show, whence we came home safe at eight.”

The pivot of Swift’s day was dinner, usually at three. First with Whigs, then with Tories, he dined through the town and out of it. “That’s something charms me mightily about London, that you go dine a dozen miles off in October, stay all day, and return so quickly. You cannot do anything like this in Dublin.” Within a month after the Whigs clutched at him he had more invitations than he had afternoons. He was a wit and scholar; he was a man of influence with the Ministry. Noblemen with axes to grind begged him to come to their tables. Men less interested in his power no less eagerly took up the fashion. Obliging hosts urged him to make his own terms.

“I dined today with a lady of my acquaintance, who was sick, in her bedchamber, upon three herrings and a chicken; the dinner was my bespeaking.” “Dr. Arbuthnot ... yesterday gave me my choice of place, persons, and victuals for today. So I chose to dine with Mrs. Hill ... Mrs. Masham’s sister; no company but us three, and to have a shoulder of mutton, a small one; which was exactly, only there was too much victuals besides, and the Doctor’s wife was of the company.” Nor did Swift make terms only with friends of his own level. Bolingbroke “showed me his bill of fare to tempt me to dine with him. Poh, said I, I value not your bill of fare. Give me your bill of company.” About both the food and the other diners Swift was firm. At the Earl of Abingdon’s “we had nothing but fish.... Our wine was poison.... His carps were raw, and his candles tallow. He shall not catch me in haste again.” And again: “I left a friend’s house today where I was invited, just when dinner was setting on, and pretended I was engaged, because I saw some fellows I did not know.”

Better a slice of mutton in his lodgings than indifferent or too numerous dishes; better his own company than that of “persons unknown, as bad, for aught I know, as your deans, parsons, and curates.” Swift rode high, and all Tory London encouraged him.

At many houses where he dined the guests stayed on for the evening. Swift chose generally to leave at six, to walk in Hyde Park, to visit other friends, to sit in a coffee house--though after a few months of his influence with Oxford he gave up coffee houses as too public. Many of his evenings he went home to write, at first an occasional _Tatler_, then his weekly _Examiner_, afterwards his pamphlets, at any time his stinging verses. In his lodgings he might find that Patrick had forgotten the fire or had neglected to buy coal or had gone off with the key with which Swift’s papers were locked up. There would be abuse and apology, neither of which meant anything. The most regular interruptions of Swift’s evenings came from Oxford, who kept “cursed hours,” sometimes did not dine till five, and liked Swift to be with him at supper. “I hate these suppers mortally, but I seldom eat anything.” Such evenings with Oxford were likely to be long and convivial, and wearing to Swift, who drank little, ate less, liked as well to sit beside card-players as to play himself, and was soon bored by ordinary conversation.

Yet when he had reached his bed and had put on his nightgown and velvet nightcap--the fur-trimmed one which Dingley sent was “too little and too hot”--he remembered, no matter how late it was, the journal. “Pshaw, I must be writing to those dear saucy brats every night, whether I will or no, let me have what business I will, or come home ever so late, or be ever so sleepy; but an old saying and a true one,

“‘_Be you lords or be you earls,
You must write to naughty girls._’”

Widely as Swift dined, three days a week were for much of the year given to his special friends. On Sunday, after going to Court, which he said served him “as a coffee house,” he usually dined with Bolingbroke. “Mr. Secretary had too much company with him today; so I came away soon after dinner. I give no man liberty to swear or talk bawdy, and I found some of them were in constraint, so I left them to themselves.” On Saturday Swift dined with Oxford for what the first minister called his “whipping day”--the day, that is, when the informal cabinet reviewed the past week and designed the next. “This company, at first, consisted only of the Lord Keeper Harcourt, the Earl Rivers, the Earl of Peterborough, Mr. Secretary St. John, and myself; and here, after dinner, they used to discourse and settle matters of great importance. Several lords were afterwards, by degrees, admitted.... These meetings were always continued except when the Queen was at Windsor; but, as they grew more numerous, became of less consequence, and ended only in drinking and general conversation.” The matters of great importance were the Ministry’s policies and intrigues. The general conversation has been lost.

Swift told Stella only that he and his friends had talked, seldom what they had said. Once, not on a Saturday, when he had opposed the appointment of a certain commissioner to Spain because he was a “most covetous cur,” Swift reported the argument with Oxford. “I went on and said it was a shame to send him; to which he agreed, but desired I would name some who understood business and do not love money, for he could not find them. I said there was something in a treasurer different from other men; that we ought not to make a man a bishop who does not love divinity, or a general who does not love war; and I wondered why the Queen would make a man lord treasurer who does not love money.... Is it not silly to write all this? But it gives you an idea what our conversation is with mixed company.” When the Earl of Nottingham had deserted to the Whig side “Lord Treasurer was hinting as if he wished a ballad was made on him, and I will get up one against tomorrow.... I was this morning making the ballad, two degrees above Grub Street ... and then went to dine with our Society.... The printer came before we parted, and brought the ballad, which made them laugh very heartily a dozen times.”

The Society which laughed at the ballad claimed the third fixed dinner of Swift’s week, Thursday, though only during the session of Parliament. Bolingbroke seems to have planned the club in June 1711, when Swift was in the country with Lord Shelburne. It was to be small, weighty, and decent, without the extravagance of the Kit-Cat or the drunkenness of the Beef-Steak, was to be made up of men of wit and men of influence, and was to have for its two great ends “the improvement of friendship and the encouragement of letters.” Swift, back in town, found himself among the original twelve members and at once the eagerest. “If we go on as we begin,” he wrote to Stella, “no other club in this town will be worth talking of.” The men of wit were Swift, Prior, and John Arbuthnot, the Queen’s physician. There were three times as many men of influence. Oxford and Harcourt were excluded, since the club meant to appeal to them for patronage. But their sons were chosen, and Oxford’s son-in-law, Viscount Dupplin, and Samuel Masham, the husband of Oxford’s whispering cousin. There were, also, Bolingbroke, Sir Robert Raymond, Solicitor General, Allen Bathurst, George Granville, Secretary at War, and Sir William Wyndham.

The members, putting off their titles when they dined, called each other “Brother.” Each in turn was president of the dinner and paid the bill until all had had turns, after which the charges of each dinner were divided among them. They dined sometimes at the houses of the members, more often at taverns. The dozen or so brothers added after the first twelve were all on the side of influence rather than of wit. The richer members, who were men of influence, ran up the cost of their dinners so that the poorer, who were men of wit, could not afford it. Yet Swift, though he winced at his bill for seven guineas, for a year and a half was happy. Power and learning had sat down in an equal brotherhood. When the Duke of Ormond brought his brother the Earl of Arran, who was not a member, to a meeting against all order, Swift opposed his election to the face of the Earl and the Duke. But Swift was exultant when four of his brothers were among the twelve peers whom Oxford packed into the House of Lords: the son-in-law Dupplin, the cousin-in-law Masham, Bathurst, and Granville.

_In Ireland_]

It took Swift a year and a half to realize how much more skill than he the men of influence had at getting what they wanted. Having odd wells of enthusiasm in him, he had imagined that a club of politicians could be as much interested in the encouragement of letters as in the improvement of friendship.

The day after the first meeting in June 1711 he urged Oxford to leave Congreve, though a Whig, in his post. Oxford said he would. Swift hurried off to Congreve with the news. “So I have made a worthy man happy, and that is a good day’s work.” And Swift that same day had larger plans. “I am proposing to my Lord to erect a society or academy for correcting and settling our language, that we may not perpetually be changing as we do. He enters mightily into it.” The pamphlet on “correcting, ascertaining, and improving the English tongue” was the only piece of writing Swift ever published with his name. He wrote again like a governor, demanding that the language be orderly and stable, regulated by a lawful academy. He wrote, no less, like a brother of the Society, appealing to Oxford to become the patron of worthy, needy men of letters. Nothing came of these proposals, though Oxford brimmed with promises.

Swift undertook to raise money among the members. In February 1713 he had collected sixty guineas and was “to give them away to two authors tomorrow; and Lord Treasurer has promised us a hundred pounds to reward some others.” The sixty pounds went to the two authors, but there was another in worse need. That was “little Harrison,” a young Oxford poet for whom Swift had one of his profound, inexplicable tendernesses. “I went in the morning, and found him mighty ill, and got ... an order for a hundred pounds from the Treasury to be paid him tomorrow; and I have got him removed to Knightsbridge for air.” The next day: “I ... desired a friend to receive the hundred pounds for poor Harrison, and will carry it to him tomorrow morning.” The day after that: “I took Parnell this morning, and we walked to see poor Harrison. I had the hundred pounds in my pocket. I told Parnell I was afraid to knock at the door; my mind misgave me. I knocked, and his man in tears told me his master was dead an hour before.... Lord Treasurer was much concerned when I told him. I could not dine with Lord Treasurer nor anywhere else, but got a bit of meat toward evening.”

This pathetic episode, hardly more than a touch of melodrama in the general drama of Swift’s venture, cut him more sharply than his own mounting disappointment. He had thought that though he might not help himself he might at least help others. Now it seemed he could not do even that. He had only kept a few Whig poets in their places. His scheme for an academy which was to honour and establish letters among the English was still a mere scheme somewhere on the wind. The Ministry which he had served was not, after all, to be renowned for its patronage to learning. The man of wit had looked vainly to the men of influence.

What Swift, whose pride played tricks with his vision, did not see was that he had exploited his wit much as Oxford had exploited all the wit at his command. Oxford had used such men of letters as could be bent to his political concerns. Swift had bent his talents to pamphlets and lampoons about the most temporary matters. From Prior he had learned to write verse more lightly as from Addison he had learned to write more smoothly. Swift had poured his tremendous prose on the ground, careless what became of it. Obsessed with the desire for power, he had tried to win it by such force as politicians use, not by the art natural to him; among his pretended brothers the Dupplins and Mashams, not among his true friends the Arbuthnots and Popes.

4

During his final winter in England Swift turned to his true friends. It was not because he had found where he belonged. It was because he knew he had failed to belong elsewhere. He was not a bishop. He was not even an English dean. He was only a great writer, author of a great satire, making his first plans for the greatest of satires, meditating a revenge. But his revenge hardly went, that year, beyond a prospectus. He and Arbuthnot had taken up the rising young poets Parnell, Gay, and Pope. All five met Saturday evenings at Arbuthnot’s rooms in St. James’s Palace, where the Scriblerus Club, as they called themselves, plotted a burlesque biography which was to ridicule false learning.

Oxford had called Swift Dr. Martin, “because martin is a sort of a swallow, and so is a swift.” From that had come the name of Martinus Scriblerus, a phantom pedant whose career the Club was to trace through all his foolish blunders. The leader seems to have been Arbuthnot. “To talk of Martin in any hands but yours,” Swift wrote to him, “is a folly. You every day give better hints than all of us together could do in a twelvemonth.... Pope, who first thought of the hint, has no genius at all to it, in my mind. Gay is too young. Parnell has some ideas of it, but is idle. I could put together, and lard, and strike out well enough. But all that relates to the sciences must be from you.” Arbuthnot wrote the history of Martin’s youth and education so wittily that Sterne later pilfered from it for his history of Tristram Shandy. Pope, hunting among contemporary poets for examples of bathos, “the art of sinking in poetry,” took the first steps in his war upon the dunces. Swift was to exhibit Martin on his travels, and had already thought of taking him among pigmies, among giants, among fantastic scientists.

The break in the Ministry and the death of the Queen scattered the Scriblerus Club. Though the members often spoke of it in their letters, the treatise remained fragments. “I must be a little easy in my mind before I can think of Scriblerus,” Swift wrote to Pope. It was not merely an uneasy mind which kept Swift from going on with the project. Whether or not he was yet aware of it, the scheme was too small for him. He could no longer be content, as he might have been in the days of the _Tale of a Tub_, to ridicule pedants.

Swift certainly was not aware, at the Saturday meetings of the Club, that his friends had by nature a better art than he could ever learn: the art of valuing their best gifts most, the art of being satisfied to be themselves. What he did with them he thought of as play. His work, he thought, was his efforts, vain as they were, in behalf of Oxford and Bolingbroke. He stood between the ministers and the poets, eager to be generous. “Of all the world,” Pope wrote, “you are the man, without flattery, who serve your friends with the least ostentation. It is almost ingratitude to thank you, considering your temper.” Swift introduced Parnell to the ministers and interested Bolingbroke in Parnell’s poetry. Swift helped Gay to his post as secretary with the envoy to Hanover. Swift got for Pope’s translation of Homer such a list of subscribers as no book had ever had in England. Swift struck the vein which in Arbuthnot “lay like a mine in the earth, which the owner for a long time never knew of.” But Swift did not take a benefit from their examples.

How could he? Parnell was humble and drifting. Gay was sensual and lazy, ready to be any man’s dependent, troubled only because patrons were too few. Pope was first and last a poet who schemed, fought, and lived for his art, as Swift for action. Arbuthnot was a man of learning and judgment, of whom Swift said that he had “more wit than we all have” and Pope said that in wit and humour he was “superior to all mankind”; but Arbuthnot was not ambitious or misanthropic. He might scorn the world, but he amply took it as it came. Of all the patterns by which these others shaped their lives, not a single pattern fitted Swift.

When, after a summer spent in dejected, furious retirement at Letcombe in Berkshire, writing various apologias for the fallen Ministry, Swift went back to Ireland in September 1714, he was beaten but not reconciled. His impulse was still towards the central fountains of honour and profit and power. His obsessive desire to master and direct had not, after all his disappointments, left him in even a sullen peace. Having been beaten, and not reconciled, he could not study his failure in a clear light. He did not understand that with his gifts, wit and learning, passion and intensity and genius, he had been at a disadvantage with men who had wealth and office, and that though he could pass them in the long run, he could not be immediately equal with them. The fault, as he explained it to himself, did not lie in his passion to do what he was not chiefly designed to do, nor in the incompetence and deviousness of his political associates, nor in the catastrophe of the Queen’s death. It lay, he somehow concluded, in the very constitution of human life.

Let virtue work and sweat as it would to bring order out of the dirty chaos, nothing permanent could come of it. For a time a few resolute men might hold up the dreadful weight with their shoulders. But if there should be one tremor, the momentary pattern would collapse and the parts of it return to their obstinate disorder. There was no hope. Scorn and hate were all that any virtuous or reasonable man could feel towards mankind.

V

DEAN AND PATRIOT

1

Jeers followed Swift out of England, and jeers greeted him in Ireland. Dublin was full of Whigs. Laracor, which he had kept along with his deanery, was desolate. “I would retire too, if I could,” he wrote after a month to Bolingbroke, “but my country seat, where I have an acre of ground, is gone to ruin. The wall of my own apartment is fallen down, and I want mud to rebuild it and straw to thatch it. Besides, a spiteful neighbour has seized on six feet of ground, carried off my trees, and spoiled my grove.... I have not fortitude enough to go and see those devastations. But, in return, I live a country life in town, see nobody, and go every day once to prayers; and hope, in a few months, to grow as stupid as the present situation of affairs will require. Well, after all, parsons are not such bad company, especially when they are under subjection; and I let none but such come near me.” So a banished general might have said it was not so bad to spend his time drilling a squad of militia in a distant province.

“You are to understand,” Swift wrote after ten months to Pope, “that I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house. My family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in the stables, a footman, and an old maid who are all at board wages, and when I do not dine abroad or make an entertainment, which last is very rare, I eat a mutton pie and drink half a pint of wine. My amusements are defending my small dominions against the archbishop and endeavouring to reduce my rebellious choir.” So a deposed prime minister might have turned his hand to the government of a village.

Swift did not neglect his chores. He set to work to subdue the “three and twenty dignitaries and prebendaries” who made up his chapter at St. Patrick’s. The chapter yielded. He began to resist his superiors, particularly the bishops who had deprived him of credit for the grant of the First Fruits. The bishops became wary. Even in Laracor, where Swift was only vicar, he demanded better manners from the Welsh bishop of the diocese, and, somewhat later, wrote to him as vicars seldom write to bishops: “I am only sorry that you, who are of a country famed for good nature, have found a way to unite the hasty passion of your own countrymen with the long, sedate resentment of a Spaniard; but I have an honourable hope that this proceeding has been more owing to party than complexion.” Though Swift refused for half a dozen years to mix in the business of the world which had defeated him, he was, from the first, gigantic and ominous in his exile.

There was need of caution. During his stay in England he had got out of touch with Irish affairs, as well as out of sympathy. London had run him into debt. As dean and vicar he was to have about six or seven hundred pounds a year when he could get them: an income which made him, he said, the poorest man in Ireland who dined off plate and the richest who did not drive his carriage. But the installation at St. Patrick’s cost a thousand pounds and several stringent years. The Whigs suspected Swift, like the late ministers, of disloyalty to George I. The suspicion was absurd. “I look upon the coming of the Pretender,” Swift said, “as a greater evil than any we are likely to suffer under the worst Whig ministry that can be found.” Yet when Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Ormond--“three persons from among the rest of mankind on whose friendship and protection I might depend, whose conversation I most valued and chiefly confined myself to”--were charged with the treason of plotting to bring the Pretender in, when Ormond and Bolingbroke escaped to France and Oxford went to the Tower, Swift shared their odium.

The authorities, intercepting letters sent to him, had a chance to read nothing more treasonable than these words from Ormond: “We have no new favourite, nor never can. You have left so sweet a relish by your conversation upon all our pleasures that we cannot bear the thoughts of intimacy with any person.” With the wives of Bolingbroke and Ormond Swift carried on a guarded correspondence. To Oxford, in the Tower, he wrote without reserve, making him “the humblest offers of my poor service and attendance”--attendance, that is, in prison if Oxford would permit it. “It is the first time I ever solicited you in my own behalf, and if I am refused I think it will be the first request you ever refused me. I do not conceive myself obliged to regulate my opinions by the proceedings of a House of Lords or Commons; and therefore, however they may acquit themselves in your Lordship’s case, I shall take the liberty of thinking and calling you the ablest and faithfulest minister, the truest lover of your country, that this age hath produced.” Oxford’s son kept the letter “as a family monument.” Oxford himself acknowledged it two years later.

While the Jacobite odium hung over Swift he declared, not quite in earnest, that he would hide himself away in Guernsey or Wales for the rest of his life. The world was too hateful to live in. Yet what most distressed him was his grief over the friends with whom he could no longer be “familiar and customary.” “When I leave a country without a probability of returning,” he wrote to Pope, “I think as seldom as I can of what I loved or esteemed in it, to avoid the _desiderium_ which of all things makes life most uneasy.” And to Arbuthnot he wrote: “Writing to you would make me stark mad. Judge his condition who has nothing to keep him from being miserable but endeavouring to forget those for whom he has the greatest value, love, and friendship.”

His friends would not let him sink into such a gulf. “Never,” Arbuthnot answered him, “repeat that melancholy, tender word, that you will endeavour to forget me. I am sure I never can forget you till I meet with, what is impossible, another whose conversation I can delight so much in as Dr. Swift’s.... That hearty, sincere friendship, that plain and open ingenuity in all your commerce, is what I am sure I can never find in another man. I shall want often a faithful monitor, one that would vindicate me behind my back and tell me my faults to my face.” Pope wrote to him of “the constant esteem and affection I am both obliged and inclined to have for you,” and said he regarded him “as a friend in another world,” much as he regarded his patron saint. Bolingbroke wrote that for a half hour’s conversation with Swift he would “barter whole hours of life.” For a year or more Swift could hardly bring himself to reply. Then, however, the rigour of his despair began to leave him, his wit to come out of the lair where it had sulked.