effective with the voters. Oxford and Bolingbroke might work out of
sight with their intrigues. Swift never ceased to keep the eyes of
the world upon their main purposes. British purposes, for the sake
of British interests, through the exercise of British virtues. The
Revolution was achieved. The Succession was established. It was time
now to make peace with the Continent and to settle down to a British
destiny. The change must not be too precipitate. Swift wrote as firmly
against the ferocious Tories, demanding all places instantly for their
party, as against the ousted Whigs. His variety was in his art, not in
his argument. He could abuse, ridicule, hoax, lampoon, in grim prose
or easy verse. He could parade the accomplishments of the Ministry in
sober pamphlets or could raise clouds of bright dust to hoodwink the
opposition. But always he was Swift, looking down from his peak at the
whole race of mankind, only incidentally and temporarily supporting
Oxford and Bolingbroke.
Throughout the Oxford administration Swift was loyal, less out of need
than out of love. When his associates, disregarding the Grand Alliance,
made a stealthy treaty of peace with France; when, insecure in the
House of Lords, Oxford got the Queen to create a dozen Tory peers who
would know why they were peers; when England, at the treaty of Utrecht,
took the largest share of the spoils though she had tricked and
abandoned the allies: even then Swift loved his friends. Passionately
loyal, he could be affectionately blind.
In Oxford’s thick skin Swift saw a stoic dignity, and in Oxford’s
procrastination something not too far from a noble patience. “Regular
in life,” Swift described the Lord Treasurer to the Archbishop of
Dublin, “with a true sense of religion, an excellent scholar and a
good divine, of a very mild and affable disposition, intrepid in his
notions and indefatigable in business, an utter despiser of money for
himself yet frugal, perhaps to an extremity, for the public.” Nor about
Bolingbroke, libertine in thought and habit, would Swift be squeamish.
He admired that “graceful, amiable person” and that mind “which was
adorned with the choicest gifts that God hath yet thought fit to bestow
upon the children of men.” It was true that the Secretary had been “too
great and criminal a pursuer” of pleasures which could “by no means
be reconciled to religion or morals.” But, Swift explained, “he was
fond of mixing pleasure with business, and of being esteemed excellent
at both; upon which account he had a great respect for the characters
of Alcibiades and Petronius.” Could Socrates resist the charm of
Alcibiades, or Seneca the charm of Petronius?
Swift, moralist that he was, was little less susceptible to the
dissolute Secretary than to the decorous Treasurer. His affection
covered them with its flood. Bolingbroke hated Oxford, and Oxford
suspected Bolingbroke. There was harmony between them only for a few
months, if so long as that. Yet Swift, by nature so misanthropic,
by experience so wary, set out with them in what he thought was a
fellowship of love.
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.
[Illustration: Jonathan Swift
_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.”