A DIALOGUE OF SENTIMENT SUCCEEDED BY THE SKETCH OF A CHARACTER, IN WHOSE
EYES SENTIMENT WAS TO WISE MEN WHAT RELIGION IS TO FOOLS; NAMELY, A
SUBJECT OF RIDICULE.
ST. JOHN was now in power, and in the full flush of his many ambitious
and restless schemes. I saw as much of him as the high rank he held in
the state, and the consequent business with which he was oppressed,
would suffer me,--me, who was prevented by religion from actively
embracing any political party, and who, therefore, though inclined to
Toryism, associated pretty equally with all. St. John and myself formed
a great friendship for each other, a friendship which no after change or
chance could efface, but which exists, strengthened and mellowed by
time, at the very hour in which I write.
One evening he sent to tell me he should be alone, if I would sup with
him; accordingly I repaired to his house. He was walking up and down
the room with uneven and rapid steps, and his countenance was flushed
with an expression of joy and triumph, very rare to the thoughtful and
earnest calm which it usually wore. "Congratulate me, Devereux," said
he, seizing me eagerly by the hand, "congratulate me!"
"For what?"
"Ay, true: you are not yet a politician; you cannot yet tell how
dear--how inexpressibly dear to a politician--is a momentary and petty
victory,--but--if I were Prime Minister of this country, what would you
say?"
"That you could bear the duty better than any man living; but remember
Harley is in the way."
"Ah, there's the rub," said St. John, slowly, and the expression of his
face again changed from triumph to thoughtfulness; "but this is a
subject not to your taste: let us choose another." And flinging himself
into a chair, this singular man, who prided himself on suiting his
conversation to every one, began conversing with me upon the lighter
topics of the day; these we soon exhausted, and at last we settled upon
that of love and women.
"I own," said I, "that, in this respect, pleasure has disappointed as
well as wearied me. I have longed for some better object of worship
than the trifler of fashion, or the yet more ignoble minion of the
senses. I ask a vent for enthusiasm, for devotion, for romance, for a
thousand subtle and secret streams of unuttered and unutterable feeling.
I often think that I bear within me the desire and the sentiment of
poetry, though I enjoy not its faculty of expression; and that that
desire and that sentiment, denied legitimate egress, centre and shrink
into one absorbing passion,--which is the want of love. Where am I to
satisfy this want? I look round these great circles of gayety which we
term the world; I send forth my heart as a wanderer over their regions
and recesses, and it returns, sated and palled and languid, to myself
again."
"You express a common want in every less worldly or more morbid nature,"
said St. John; "a want which I myself have experienced, and if I had
never felt it, I should never, perhaps, have turned to ambition to
console or to engross me. But do not flatter yourself that the want
will ever be fulfilled. Nature places us alone in this hospitable
world, and no heart is cast in a similar mould to that which we bear
within us. We pine for sympathy; we make to ourselves a creation of
ideal beauties, in which we expect to find it: but the creation has no
reality; it is the mind's phantasma which the mind adores; and it is
because the phantasma can have no actual being that the mind despairs.
Throughout life, from the cradle to the grave, it is no real living
thing which we demand; it is the realization of the idea we have formed
within us, and which, as we are not gods, we can never call into
existence. We are enamoured of the statue ourselves have graven; but,
unlike the statue of the Cyprian, it kindles not to our homage nor melts
to our embraces."
"I believe you," said I; "but it is hard to undeceive ourselves. The
heart is the most credulous of all fanatics, and its ruling passion the
most enduring of all superstitions. Oh! what can tear from us, to the
last, the hope, the desire, the yearning for some bosom which, while it
mirrors our own, parts not with the reflection! I have read that, in
the very hour and instant of our birth, one exactly similar to
ourselves, in spirit and form, is born also, and that a secret and
unintelligible sympathy preserves that likeness, even through the
vicissitudes of fortune and circumstance, until, in the same point of
time, the two beings are resolved once more into the elements of earth:
confess that there is something welcome, though unfounded in the fancy,
and that there are few of the substances of worldly honour which one
would not renounce, to possess, in the closest and fondest of all
relations, this shadow of ourselves!"
"Alas!" said St. John, "the possession, like all earthly blessings,
carries within it its own principle of corruption. The deadliest foe to
love is not change nor misfortune nor jealousy nor wrath, nor anything
that flows from passion or emanates from fortune; the deadliest foe to
it is custom! With custom die away the delusions and the mysteries
which encircle it; leaf after leaf, in the green poetry on which its
beauty depends, droops and withers, till nothing but the bare and rude
trunk is left. With all passion the soul demands something unexpressed,
some vague recess to explore or to marvel upon,--some veil upon the
mental as well as the corporeal deity. Custom leaves nothing to
romance, and often but little to respect. The whole character is bared
before us like a plain, and the heart's eye grows wearied with the
sameness of the survey. And to weariness succeeds distaste, and to
distaste one of the myriad shapes of the Proteus Aversion; so that the
passion we would make the rarest of treasures fritters down to a very
instance of the commonest of proverbs,--and out of familiarity cometh
indeed contempt!"
"And are we, then," said I, "forever to forego the most delicious of our
dreams? Are we to consider love as an entire delusion, and to reconcile
ourselves to an eternal solitude of heart? What, then, shall fill the
crying and unappeasable void of our souls? What shall become of those
mighty sources of tenderness which, refused all channel in the rocky
soil of the world, must have an outlet elsewhere or stagnate into
torpor?"
"Our passions," said St. John, "are restless, and will make each
experiment in their power, though vanity be the result of all.
Disappointed in love, they yearn towards ambition; /and the object of
ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is
the more durable passion of the two/. But sooner or later even that and
all passions are sated at last; and when wearied of too wide a flight we
limit our excursions, and looking round us discover the narrow bounds of
our proper end, we grow satisfied with the loss of rapture if we can
partake of enjoyment; and the experience which seemed at first so
bitterly to betray us becomes our most real benefactor, and ultimately
leads us to content. For it is the excess and not the nature of our
passions which is perishable. Like the trees which grew by the tomb of
Protesilaus, the passions flourish till they reach a certain height, but
no sooner is that height attained than they wither away."
Before I could reply, our conversation received an abrupt and complete
interruption for the night. The door was thrown open, and a man,
pushing aside the servant with a rude and yet a dignified air, entered
the room unannounced, and with the most perfect disregard to ceremony--
"How d'ye do, Mr. St. John," said he,--"how d'ye do?--Pretty sort of a
day we've had. Lucky to find you at home,--that is to say if you will
give me some broiled oysters and champagne for supper."
"With all my heart, Doctor," said St. John, changing his manner at once
from the pensive to an easy and somewhat brusque familiarity,--"with all
my heart; but I am glad to hear you are a convert to champagne: you
spent a whole evening last week in endeavouring to dissuade me from the
sparkling sin."
"Pish! I had suffered the day before from it; so, like a true Old
Bailey penitent, I preached up conversion to others, not from a desire
of their welfare, but a plaguy sore feeling for my own misfortune.
Where did you dine to-day? At home! Oh! the devil! I starved on three
courses at the Duke of Ormond's."
"Aha! Honest Matt was there?"
"Yes, to my cost. He borrowed a shilling of me for a chair. Hang this
weather, it costs me seven shillings a day for coach-fare, besides my
paying the fares of all my poor brother parsons, who come over from
Ireland to solicit my patronage for a bishopric, and end by borrowing
half-a-crown in the meanwhile. But Matt Prior will pay me again, I
suppose, out of the public money?"
"To be sure, if Chloe does not ruin him first."
"Hang the slut: don't talk of her. How Prior rails against his place!*
He says the excise spoils his wit, and that the only rhymes he ever
dreams of now-a-days are 'docket and cocket.'"
* In the Customs.
"Ha, ha! we must do something better for Matt,--make him a bishop or an
ambassador. But pardon me, Count, I have not yet made known to you the
most courted, authoritative, impertinent, clever, independent, haughty,
delightful, troublesome parson of the age: do homage to Dr. Swift.
Doctor, be merciful to my particular friend, Count Devereux."
Drawing himself up, with a manner which contrasted his previous one
strongly enough, Dr. Swift saluted me with a dignity which might even be
called polished, and which certainly showed that however he might
prefer, as his usual demeanour, an air of negligence and semi-rudeness,
be had profited sufficiently by his acquaintance with the great to equal
them in the external graces, supposed to be peculiar to their order,
whenever it suited his inclination. In person Swift is much above the
middle height, strongly built, and with a remarkably fine outline of
throat and chest; his front face is certainly displeasing, though far
from uncomely; but the clear chiselling of the nose, the curved upper
lip, the full, round Roman chin, the hanging brow, and the resolute
decision, stamped upon the whole expression of the large forehead, and
the clear blue eye, make his profile one of the most striking I ever
saw. He honoured me, to my great surprise, with a fine speech and a
compliment; and then, with a look, which menaced to St. John the retort
that ensued, he added: "And I shall always be glad to think that I owe
your acquaintance to Mr. Secretary St. John, who, if he talked less
about operas and singers,--thought less about Alcibiades and
Pericles,--if he never complained of the load of business not being
suited to his temper, at the very moment he had been working, like
Gumdragon, to get the said load upon his shoulders; and if he persuaded
one of his sincerity being as great as his genius,--would appear to all
time as adorned with the choicest gifts that Heaven has yet thought fit
to bestow on the children of men. Prithee now, Mr. Sec., when shall we
have the oysters? Will you be merry to-night, Count?"
"Certainly; if one may find absolution for the champagne."
"I'll absolve you, with a vengeance, on condition that you'll walk home
with me, and protect the poor parson from the Mohawks. Faith, they ran
young Davenant's chair through with a sword, t' other night. I hear
they have sworn to make daylight through my Tory cassock,--all Whigs you
know, Count Devereux, nasty, dangerous animals, how I hate them! they
cost me five-and-sixpence a week in chairs to avoid them."
"Never mind, Doctor, I'll send my servants home with you," said St.
John.
"Ay, a nice way of mending the matter--that's curing the itch by
scratching the skin off. I could not give your tall fellows less than a
crown a-piece, and I could buy off the bloodiest Mohawk in the kingdom,
if he's a Whig, for half that sum. But, thank Heaven, the supper is
ready."
And to supper we went. The oysters and champagne seemed to exhilarate,
if it did not refine, the Doctor's wit. St. John was unusually
brilliant. I myself caught the infection of their humour, and
contributed my quota to the common stock of jest and repartee; and that
evening, spent with the two most extraordinary men of the age, had in it
more of broad and familiar mirth than any I have ever wasted in the
company of the youngest and noisiest disciples of the bowl and its
concomitants. Even amidst all the coarse ore of Swift's conversation,
the diamond perpetually broke out; his vulgarity was never that of a
vulgar mind. Pity that, while he condemned St. John's over affectation
of the grace of life, he never perceived that his own affectation of
coarseness and brutality was to the full as unworthy of the simplicity
of intellect;* and that the aversion to cant, which was the strongest
characteristic of his mind, led him into the very faults he despised,
only through a more displeasing and offensive road. That same aversion
to cant is, by the way, the greatest and most prevalent enemy to the
reputation of high and of strong minds; and in judging Swift's character
in especial, we should always bear it in recollection. This
aversion--the very antipodes to hypocrisy--leads men not only to
disclaim the virtues they have, but to pretend to the vices they have
not. Foolish trick of disguised vanity! the world, alas, readily
believes them! Like Justice Overdo, in the garb of poor Arthur of
Bradley, they may deem it a virtue to have assumed the disguise; but
they must not wonder if the sham Arthur is taken for the real, beaten as
a vagabond, and set in the stocks as a rogue!
* It has been said that Swift was only coarse in his later years, and,
with a curious ignorance both of fact and of character, that Pope was
the cause of the Dean's grossness of taste. There is no doubt that he
grew coarser with age; but there is also no doubt that, graceful and
dignified as that great genius could be when he pleased, he affected at
a period earlier than the one in which he is now introduced, to be
coarse both in speech and manner. I seize upon this opportunity, /mal a
propos/ as it is, to observe that Swift's preference of Harley to St.
John is by no means so certain as writers have been pleased generally to
assert. Warton has already noted a passage in one of Swift's letters to
Bolingbroke, to which I will beg to call the reader's attention.
"It is /you were/ my hero, but the other (Lord Oxford) /never was/; yet
if he were, it was your own fault, who taught me to love him, and often
vindicated him, in the beginning of your ministry, from my accusations.
But I granted he had the greatest inequalities of any man alive; and his
whole scene was fifty times more a what-d'ye-call-it than yours; for I
declare yours was /unie/, and I wish you would so order it that the
world may be as wise as I upon that article."
I have to apologize for introducing this quotation, which I have done
because (and I entreat the reader to remember this) I observe that Count
Devereux always speaks of Lord Bolingbroke as he was spoken of by the
eminent men of that day,--not as he is now rated by the judgment of
posterity.--ED.