to think of himself as first of all a churchman, not a statesman but
the driving conscience of statesmen. Having delivered his warning in
his pamphlet, written in London, he left it with the printer and went
back to Ireland, to establish himself in Laracor. “The book was,” he
says, “greedily bought and read; and charged sometimes upon my Lord
Somers and some time upon the Bishop of Salisbury.” Associated at a
distance with men so powerful, Swift, returning to England for the
summer of 1702, and owning the authorship, came closer to the seats
of power than he had ever come before. “My Lords Somers and Halifax,
as well as the Bishop ... desired my acquaintance, with great marks
of esteem and professions of kindness--not to mention the Earl of
Sunderland, who had been of my old acquaintance. They lamented that
they were not able to serve me since the death of the King; and were
very liberal in promising me the greatest preferments I could hope for,
if ever it came in their power. I soon grew domestic with Lord Halifax,
and was as often with Lord Somers as the formality of his nature (the
only unconversable fault he has) made it agreeable to me.”
Swift was, in his relations with the great, no country parson tickled
with a dinner. He stood before them like a man there in his own right.
“It was then I first began to trouble myself with the difference
between the principles of Whig and Tory; having formerly employed
myself in other and, I think much better, speculations. I talked often
upon this subject with Lord Somers; told him that, having been long
conversant with the Greek and Roman authors, and therefore a lover of
liberty, I found myself much inclined to be what they called a Whig in
politics; and that, besides, I thought it impossible, upon any other
principle, to defend or submit to the Revolution. But as to religion
I confessed myself to be a high churchman, and that I did not conceive
how any one who wore the habit of clergyman could be otherwise.” A high
churchman, and a haughty one. Though he might then prefer the Whigs to
the Tories, his real allegiance was to the Church. He served it when he
served whatever party favoured it. He was above the battle in which he
fought. He looked for large rewards with the assurance of his calling
as well as with the arrogance of his temper.
But Somers and Halifax were not in office. Swift went back to Ireland,
unrewarded, for another year of rueful banishment.
When he once more returned to England late in 1703, he seemed, to his
own pride, to have done nothing in the world. Yet he had an honourable
profession. He had an income for life. He had a mistress, of a kind,
who was young, beautiful, witty, and devoted. He had ruling friends
in Ireland and was beginning to have others in England. He was the
author of the most brilliant prose satire so far written in English,
and the master of the best prose of his age. Something boundless in
him, however, or something perverse, kept him from more than brief
satisfactions. Content to be a clergyman, he could not wait to be
a bishop. Untroubled by debts, he longed for a fortune. Happy with
Stella for a friend, he would not commit himself to her in marriage.
A scholar, a clergyman, and a wit, he cared little for the company of
his fellows. He thought the scholars pedantic, the clergymen dull and
tattling--
“_And deal in vices of the graver sort,
Tobacco, censure, coffee, pride, and port_”--
the wits frivolous and feeble. His satires had remained for half a
dozen years unpublished. He could be at ease only among the great,
and even there he did not lend himself wholly to their purposes. He
stood solitary on the peak of his own nature, his scornful eyes raking
mankind.
From this height he flung down his _Tale of a Tub_ early in 1704.
Mankind at large took no notice. Mankind at large has no eyes to
read with, no skin to feel a lash with. As Swift himself said in his
preface, “Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an
offence by any, since every individual person makes bold to understand
it of others, and very wisely removes his particular part of the burden
upon the shoulders of the world, which are broad enough, and able to
bear it.” Nor did the pedants and wits flinch at his thrusts much more
sharply, since he named few of them, than the nameless run of men. The
pedants might grumble, but the wits, who also liked to sting, could
take a craftsman’s pleasure in the accurate rapture of his stinging.
Swift of course pricked no active folly and stabbed no active vice
by his satires. Fools did not read him. Wise men were only confirmed
in their wisdom. His hatred caused less reformation than delight. The
delight which men felt in his arguments and allegories, so cutting,
so copious, so downright, so fanciful, was the delight which men feel
when one of them uses words as most of them have not the gift to do,
only the bursting desire. Swift, who scorned to be a man of words, was
accepted for his words. Somers, to whom the book was dedicated, and
Halifax, who knew how to put such skill as Swift’s to use, repeated
their promises. They did not tell him it was not his counsel that they
needed.
Yet while he was making friends he was also making enemies. Mankind was
not a sensitive body, able to feel in any of its parts any indignity to
the whole. The pedants or the wits were not. The Church was. It thought
of itself as marked off from the world, like its consecrated altars, to
be approached with reverence. There were, as Swift contended, abuses
of religion which called for satire, and which could be satirized
without any hurt to true religion. But the line between the uses and
the abuses of religion was often faint. One man’s devotion could be
another man’s fanaticism. Firmness could become stoniness and never
know it. Laughter, even when aimed at what was false, could wound in
two directions. Swift, high on his peak of scorn, let his laughter fall
with a harsh inclusiveness.
When, for instance, he touched the doctrine of transubstantiation,
he traced its origin to a noisy episode in the career of the Catholic
among the three brothers of the allegory. Peter, having no mutton for
his dinner, served up a brown loaf to Martin and Jack. He told them
it was mutton. They refused, at first politely and then heatedly, to
believe him. “‘Look ye, gentlemen,’ cries Peter in a rage, ‘to convince
you what a couple of blind, positive, ignorant, wilful puppies you
are, I will use but this plain argument: By G----, it is true, good,
natural mutton as any in Leadenhall market; and G---- condemn you both
eternally if you believe otherwise.’ Such a thundering proof as this
left no farther room for objection.”
Here was rough language to use so near the communion table, no matter
what the precise beliefs of the bystanders regarding the disputed
miracle. A total unbeliever could not have spoken more gratingly. Even
in that vigorous age a clergyman had to watch his voice if he was
to become a bishop. Swift might please the lords temporal with his
originality and force, but he could not please the lords spiritual
without orthodoxy and decorum. Within the Church he was always, from
the time _A Tale of a Tub_ was understood to be by him, a churchman
suspected of irreverence--or, as he phrased it, “the sin of wit.”
This dangerous book, published with mystifying stealth, Swift never
acknowledged, though after a scuffle of ascriptions it settled down at
his door. The authorship was first his humorous and afterwards his
cautious secret. When, having published the satires, he followed his
letter to Tisdall back to Ireland, he was still barely known in London
for his genius. There are almost no records of where he had lodged, of
how he had spent his days and nights. A dim figure, flashing seldom out
of the dark.
One anecdote, of the many which have gathered about his magnetic
reputation, may tell something like the truth. For days after his
earliest appearance at the St. James’s coffee house, the story goes,
he did not speak. He would come in, lay his hat on a table, walk
conspicuously up and down the room for an hour, take up his hat, pay
his money at the bar, and leave without a word. At last, one evening,
he looked several times at a man in boots, who seemed to have just come
from the country. The mad parson, as he was already called, went up
to the booted stranger and said abruptly: “Pray, Sir, do you remember
any good weather in the world?” The man stared but said he thanked
God he could remember a great deal of good weather. “That is more,”
said Swift, “than I can say. I never remember any weather that was not
too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. But, however God Almighty
contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.” Then again he
took his hat and left.
The next three and a half years in Ireland saw him more at ease with
more companions. At Laracor he planted, besides willows, holly, apple,
cherry trees. He fished for eel and pike and trout. “I carry double the
flesh that you saw about me at London,” he wrote to John Temple, who
had invited him to revisit Moor Park in 1706; though Swift insisted
that he had, to such a sign of fortune, “no manner of title, having
neither purchased it by luxury nor good humour.” His congregation might
be no more than fifteen persons, “most of them gentle and all simple,”
but he had numerous friends in the region of Laracor.
In Dublin he could talk clerical politics with the Primate of Ireland
and the Archbishop of Dublin, both Swift’s friends, and secular
politics with the Lord Lieutenants to whom he was chaplain. At the
Castle he was cheerful with the successive households of Ormond and
Pembroke. With a small circle of Pembroke’s intimate guests he punned
tumultuously and infectiously. He drank wine, took snuff, and gambled
for trifling stakes. He was often at the house of the dean of St.
Patrick’s, who gave good dinners to bishops and to clergymen willing to
become bishops. There was also a sort of club with which various women,
Stella among them, met on Saturday evenings, for dinner and ombre or
picquet. Stella was liked and admired by Swift’s friends. If he was
lonely and restless he had his genius to blame.
4
He was lonely and steadily more restless. The idyl of Laracor was too
mild to hold him. The work and play of Dublin were too small. Just
before his fortieth birthday he left Ireland, in the party of Lord
Pembroke, again to try at fortune on fortune’s own ground. He had at
least the advantage, now, of being on an official errand to the great
men whose favour he personally needed. Commissioned by his Archbishop,
he was to act as lobbyist in the matter of the First Fruits. Queen
Anne, devoted to the interests of the Church, had given up her right to
the first year’s income of every ecclesiastical benefice in England.
The Irish Church hoped she would extend the same bounty to Ireland.
The whole sum at issue was not above a thousand pounds a year.
Swift, proud as a mountain, took up the little cause. It brought him
a new experience of the delaying, forgetting, bargaining habits of
politicians.
He had to move softly to avoid the jealousy of Pembroke, who as viceroy
of Ireland was the proper channel for any such appeal to the Crown. At
first Somers, though influential with the Ministry, was still out of
office. He referred Swift to Sunderland, son of Swift’s former friend,
son-in-law of Marlborough, and a Secretary of State. Sunderland said he
would go with Swift to Godolphin, Lord Treasurer, but ended by merely
making an appointment. Godolphin declared “he was passive in this
business,” which was really Pembroke’s responsibility. Swift consulted
Pembroke, and was told that everything depended on the Queen. Passed
shiftily from hand to hand, Swift saw that none of the great men was
interested, though none of them would take the trouble to tell the
truth. After a year he heard from Pembroke that the grant had been
made, and a little later learned that Pembroke had lied. But the Earl
of Wharton had been appointed Lord Lieutenant. Swift went to Wharton,
“which was the first attendance I ever paid him.” Wharton had nothing
for him but cloudy excuses and windy promises. “I took the boldness to
begin answering those objections, and designed to offer some reasons;
but he rose suddenly, turned off the discourse, and seemed in haste;
so I was forced to take my leave.” At a subsequent meeting at Somers’s
house Wharton “received me as dryly as before.”
Thereafter Swift hated Wharton as he never hated another man. All the
exasperations of a wasted year came together into a single fury which,
when Swift had a chance, poured itself out into the abuse which has
made Wharton better known for it than for all he ever did himself.
Lobbying for the First Fruits, Swift looked out also for his own
advancement. But he went through his visit to England always in
suspense and never satisfied. First he hoped to be chosen Bishop of
Waterford. He believed he had the favour of Somers and possibly of
the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen. Another clergyman of the
Pembroke circle was preferred. “Now I must retire to my morals,” Swift
wrote a friend, “and pretend to be wholly without ambition and to
resign with patience.... And after this if you will not allow me to
be a good courtier, I will pretend to it no more. But let us talk no
further on this subject. I am stomach-sick of it already.” Then he
hoped to be sent as secretary to Vienna, if Lord Berkeley should go
as ambassador. “I shall be out of the way of parties until it shall
please God I have some place to retire to a little above contempt.” The
Ministry promised Swift the post, but Berkeley’s age and ill health
kept him in England. Swift would have accepted a Dublin parish which
had been proposed to him; the living did not fall vacant. He might have
been expected to be chaplain to Wharton, as he had been to Ormond and
Pembroke; he was not chosen. He was urged by the Archbishop of Dublin
to try for the deanery of Down; Wharton’s chaplain became dean. On
the day, after Swift’s return to Ireland, when the Bishop of Cork was
dying of spotted fever Swift wrote to Halifax asking for his interest
with Somers, now Lord President, for this bishopric. Wharton, according
to Swift, engaged his credit to get the place for a clergyman who
had married a “cast wench” of Wharton’s--although the Queen, indeed,
prevented such a scandal. To make the story as complete as a farce,
the clergyman in question may have been that junior dean of Trinity
College before whom, on his knees, Swift on his twenty-first birthday
may have had to beg pardon for being contemptuous and contumacious.
Yet towards the close of his cycle of anxiety Swift could write
ingratiatingly to Halifax: “I must take leave to reproach your Lordship
for a most inhuman piece of cruelty, for I can call your extreme good
usage of me no better, since it has taught me to hate the place where I
am banished, and raised my thoughts to an imagination that I might live
to be some way useful or entertaining if I were permitted to live in
town.... I have been studying how to be revenged of your Lordship, and
have found out the way. They have in Ireland the same idea with us, of
your Lordship’s generosity, magnificence, wit, judgment, and knowledge
in the enjoyment of life. But I shall quickly undeceive them by letting
them plainly know that you have neither interest nor fortune which you
can call your own; both having been long made over to the corporation
of deserving men in want, who have appointed you their advocate and
steward, which the world is pleased to call patron and protector. I
shall inform them that myself and about a dozen others kept the best
table in England, to which because we admitted your Lordship in common
with us, made you our manager, and sometimes allowed you to bring
a friend, therefore ignorant people would needs take you to be the
owner.... Pray, my Lord, desire Dr. South to die about the fall of
the leaf, for he has a prebend of Westminster which will make me your
neighbour, and a sinecure in the country, both in the Queen’s gift,
which my friends have often told me would fit me extremely.”
And Halifax could magniloquently answer: “I am quite ashamed for myself
and my friends to see you left in a place so incapable of tasting you;
and to see so much merit and so great qualities unrewarded by those
who are sensible of them. Mr. Addison and I are entered into a new
confederacy, never to give over the pursuit, nor to cease reminding
those who can serve you, till your worth is placed in that light
where it ought to shine. Dr. South holds out still, but he cannot
be immortal. The situation of his prebendary would make me doubly
concerned in serving you, and upon all occasions that shall offer
I will be your constant solicitor, your sincere admirer, and your
unalterable friend.”
Handsome compliment, handsome acknowledgment, and no real confidence
between the writers. What Swift actually thought of Halifax was that
he gave deserving men “only good words and dinners; I never heard him
say one good thing, or seem to taste what was said by another.” What
Halifax actually thought of Swift must be guessed at. But no patron
used to “soft dedication all day long” could quite relish a follower so
bound to lead. Swift would never be as remote from politics as Newton,
whom Halifax had made Warden and then Master of the Mint, nor as
obliging and grateful in the midst of politics as Addison, who through
Halifax had entered the busy circle where few men went long without
places. Halifax and Somers and Pembroke no more than Godolphin and
Sunderland and Wharton by this time could imagine in Swift’s hand the
supple, obedient pen which they required.
There was proof to support their doubts. They had been willing to
bargain with him, or through him with the Irish Church, about the
First Fruits. Let the Church consent to the repeal of the Sacramental
Test which excluded Dissenters from office. The Whigs, standing to
gain votes from the pleased Dissenters, would then be better able to
persuade the Queen to widen her bounty. The repeal would mean only the
surrender of a principle, and it would save the Irish clergy a thousand
pounds a year. Swift, without a thought of accommodating the ministers
or even of earning their possible rewards, had instead written too
vigorously, and not surreptitiously enough, against the repeal. He saw
it as a selfish experiment which England wanted to try first on Ireland
before trying it nearer home. “If your little finger be sore,” he said
to England with a snarling humility, “and you think a poultice made of
our vitals will give it any ease, speak the word and it shall be done.”
Somers, Lord President, and Wharton, Lord Lieutenant, from that moment
must have known that Swift was not their man. The sin of wit they could
forgive, and indeed encourage. They could neither encourage nor forgive
the sin of such independence. Braver statesmen than they might have
hesitated to keep a tiger on the hearth.
Swift, learning on this visit to England that the great are not always
to be trusted by the proud and truthful, should have become finally
aware that he was not a Whig, perhaps that he was not a Tory. As a
churchman he stood not so much between the parties as above them both.
“I should think,” he said in one of the pamphlets in which he stretched
the muscles which the ministers would not let him use, “that ... to
preserve the constitution entire in Church and State, whoever has a
true value for both would be sure to avoid the extremes of Whig for the
sake of the former and the extremes of Tory on account of the latter.”
Arbitrary power he still hated and looked upon “as a greater evil than
anarchy itself; as much as a savage is in a happier state of life
than a slave at the oar.” Yet his passion was, as always, for order.
The legislature, he thought, could not be placed in too many hands;
the administration, however, not in too few. Sects might indeed be
tolerated in a state, but “a government cannot give them too much ease
nor trust them with too little power.” Order, as he understood it,
was the consequence of virtue among the people, and therefore a higher
concern than politics could reach to. It was the natural concern of the
Church.
Like a churchman, like a magistrate, Swift proposed that manners be
reformed by the advancement of religion. If the Queen should make
stricter demands upon all who came near her, “morality and religion
would soon become fashionable court virtues, and be taken up as the
only methods to get or keep employments there; which alone would have
mighty influence upon many of the nobility and principal gentry.” The
example of the Court would go far to reform the town, and the town
the rest of the kingdom. “How ready ... would most men be to step
into the paths of virtue and piety if they infallibly led to favour
and fortune!” Swift could even contemplate “something parallel to the
office of censors anciently in Rome,” which in England he believed
“could be easily limited from running into any exorbitances.” British
Catos could reduce the vices of the army, the universities, the law
courts, the public service, the press, the taverns. And the Church
could provide the Catos if clergymen, ceasing to live so largely to
themselves and with each other, would “make themselves as agreeable as
they can in the conversations of the world.”
Nor did Swift stop with arguing soberly like a parson. He went on to
irony, like a wit. He could not feel sure, he said, that Christianity
had to be abolished, as the world thought. He meant, of course,
“nominal Christianity, the other having been for some time wholly laid
aside by general consent.” Nominal Christianity had its uses. It gave
men a God to revile, when otherwise they might abuse the government.
It furnished each parish with at least one person who could read and
write. It kept ten thousand men so poor that they were healthy, and
good for the breed. It set one day in seven aside for pleasure, extra
business, gallantry, and sleep. It made certain kinds of behaviour,
because they were forbidden, more enticing. It gave the vulgar various
pleasant superstitions with which to amuse the children and to shorten
tiresome winter nights. It sustained the spirit of opposition, of
eccentricity, of fanaticism. However, Swift ended, if Christianity was
to be abolished, so ought every vestige of religion for fear there
might still be some restraint laid on human nature. Let freedom come,
even though bank stocks might fall one per cent.
5
No matter what grave words he used, Swift had to set them to witty
tunes. They came, it seems, so effortlessly that he undervalued them,
overlooking them in the thunder of his will. He valued only what he did
not have: influence at a Court he despised, power over men he hated.
Addison could call him, for his wit, “the greatest genius of his age.”
Swift wanted, as Addison had elsewhere rhetorically put it, to ride in
the whirlwind and direct the storm. There was no help for his charging
desire. His will was as truly his nature as his wit was.