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.
[Illustration: Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa)
_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.