to England, where the Earl of Peterborough thought the Dean ran the
risk of becoming a bishop. The second visit was an anticlimax. Swift
made no progress with the life of Oxford. He was completely out of
favour with Walpole. Twickenham, happily as Pope welcomed Swift there,
was not what it had seemed before. It was pleasant to talk with Pope
about his dunces. It was pleasant to read the verses of the opera
which Gay, to whom Swift had said that “a Newgate pastoral might make
an odd, pretty sort of thing,” was writing about rogues and beggars.
It was pleasant to concoct their miscellanies, in which the poems to
Stella were to appear. But it was unpleasant for Swift to be so deaf
that he could hardly hear Pope’s feeble voice or have a share in the
conversation of the friends who came to see them. Swift began to feel
that he was a burden. He would go to London.
He would go to France. Voltaire gave him letters of introduction. Swift
exchanged opinions with his French translator, telling him, in his
French, that if the Travels were calculated only for the British Isles
then the traveller was a pitiable writer. The same vices and the same
follies, he said, reigned everywhere, at least in all the civilized
countries of Europe; and the author who wrote only for one city,
one province, one kingdom, or even one age so little deserved to be
translated that he did not deserve to be read.
The death of George I and the accession to the throne of the Prince and
Princess of Wales, who were the only royal friends Swift ever had, held
him in England. Once more, and for the last time, he was disappointed.
Walpole, after a fluttering interval, retained his power. Wit alone
could not make a man a bishop.
Stella, it turned out, could not be well without Swift. He had left
her settled in the deanery for the summer. In August Sheridan wrote
that she was once more in danger. Swift, at the house of a kinsman in
London, was helpless with his own malady.
“I walk like a drunken man, and am deafer than ever you knew me. If I
had any tolerable health I would go this moment to Ireland. Yet I think
I would not, considering the news I daily expect to hear from you.... I
kept it [Sheridan’s letter] an hour in my pocket with all the suspense
of a man who expected to hear the worst news that fortune could give
him, and at the same time was not able to hold up my head.... I know
not whether it be an addition to my grief or not, that I am now
extremely ill; for it would have been a reproach to me to be in perfect
health when such a friend is desperate. I do profess upon my salvation
that the distressed and desperate condition of our friend makes life
so indifferent to me, who by course of nature have so little left,
that I do not think it worth the time to struggle. Yet I should think,
according to what hath been formerly, that I may happen to overcome
this present disorder. And to what advantage? Why, to see the loss of
that person for whose sake only life was worth preserving.... What have
I to do in the world? I never was in such agonies as when I received
your letter and had it in my pocket. I am able to hold up my head no
longer.”
Still Swift would not tell his English friends about Stella. His secret
had been buried in him too long to be dug up now. Too much of his
heart would have come with it. Suddenly leaving London in September he
lurched across England to Chester. Offered a passage from Parkgate in
the official yacht, he refused, thinking he would be in Ireland sooner
if he rode through Wales and shipped from Holyhead. There the winds
delayed him for a week, spent in the smoky rooms of an inn which had no
decent wine to drink, no books to read, no customers who could speak
English.
Morning and afternoon he walked in the wind on the rocks. “I was so
cunning these three last days that whenever I began to rage and storm
at the weather I took special care to turn my face towards Ireland, in
hopes by my breath to push the wind forward. But now I give up.” Every
night he dined alone, and had five dreary hours ahead of him before
he went to bed. Sleep was no relief. He had fantastic dreams, such as
that Bolingbroke was preaching in St. Patrick’s and quoting Wycherley
in his sermon. Morning was no restoration. Swift looked for the wind
to change, and it would not change. “I live in suspense, which is
the worst circumstance of human nature.” There was nothing to do but
“scribble or sit humdrum.” He scribbled prose and verse.
“_I never was in haste before
To reach that slavish hateful shore.
Before I always found the wind
To me was most malicious kind.
But now the danger of a friend
On whom my fears and hopes depend,
Absent from whom all climes are curst,
With whom I’m happy in the worst,
With rage impatient makes me wait
A passage to the land I hate._”
And when he finally got away the wind was so near a tempest that he was
forced to land at Carlingford, sixty miles from Dublin, and complete
his journey with “lazy dull horses.”
This time Stella, though comforted by his return, was dying. Swift
would not say so to Pope, to whom Sheridan had secretly written the
truth. Again Pope hinted his sympathy. “To your bad health I fear there
was added some disagreeable news from Ireland which might occasion
your so sudden departure.” Swift met the sympathy with a shield. His
health, he said, had driven him home. “Here is my maintenance, and here
my convenience.” He invited Pope to Dublin. “I have a race of orderly
elderly people of both sexes at command who are of no consequence and
have gifts proper for attending us, who can bawl when I am deaf and
tread softly when I am only giddy and would sleep.” Six weeks later he
repeated his invitation. “You may find about six rational, good, civil,
learned, easy companions of the males; fewer of the females, but many
civil, hospitable, and ready to admire and adore.”
Nothing about Stella, who had admired and adored beyond almost any
woman who ever lived. Nothing about Stella to any man during the four
months left to her. But Swift in October and November wrote three
prayers which he used in her last sickness.
“Give her grace to continue sincerely thankful to Thee for the many
favours Thou hast bestowed upon her: the ability and inclination and
practice to do good, and those virtues which have procured the esteem
and love of her friends and a most unspotted name in the world.... We
beseech Thee likewise to compose her thoughts and preserve to her the
use of her memory and reason during the course of her sickness. Give
her a true conception of the vanity, folly, and insignificancy of all
human things.... Let not our grief afflict her mind and thereby have an
effect on her present distempers. Forgive the sorrow and weakness of
those among us who sink under the grief and terror of losing so dear
and useful a friend.”
On a Sunday in January, when Swift had guests at his house, “about
eight o’clock at night a servant brought me a note with an account of
the death of the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I,
or perhaps any other person, ever was blessed with.... As soon as I
am left alone, which is about eleven at night, I resolve, for my own
satisfaction, to say something of her life and character.” He wrote of
her parentage and girlhood, her intelligence and beauty (“only a little
too fat”), her reasons for leaving England for Ireland. “Thus far I
writ the same night between eleven and twelve.”
The next day he wrote of her memory and judgment and gracefulness,
“somewhat more than human,” of her “civility, freedom, easiness, and
sincerity.” “All of us who had the happiness of her friendship agreed
unanimously that in an afternoon or evening’s conversation she never
failed, before we parted, of delivering the best thing that was said in
the company.” He wrote of the love her servants felt for her. “My head
aches, and I can write no more.”
Tuesday was the day of the funeral at St. Patrick’s. “My sickness will
not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am removed into
another apartment that I may not see the light in the church, which
is just over against the window of my bed-chamber.” He wrote of her
courage. She had once shot a burglar, trying to enter her house, and
had killed him. She was never known to cry out with fear or weakness or
affectation. He wrote of her manners, her reading in history, books of
travel, the philosophers. “She had a true taste of wit and good sense,
both in poetry and prose, and was a perfect good critic of style.” He
wrote of her fortune and her management of it.
Afterwards he wrote as he found time. He wrote of her charity, her
tact, her modesty. “She rather chose men for her companions, the usual
topics of ladies’ discourse being such as she had little knowledge of,
and less relish. Yet no man was upon the rack to entertain her, for
she easily descended to anything that was innocent and diverting.” She
loved Ireland more than most natives, and detested “the tyranny and
injustice of England in their treatment of this kingdom. She had indeed
reason to love a country where she had the esteem and friendship of all
who knew her, and the universal good report of all who ever heard of
her.”
This is as strange a language as love ever used, but it is a language
of love, Swift’s language, Swift’s love. After he had written this he
set down some of her sayings, which only a lover could have found as
witty as Swift found them. After that he wrote not a word about her
in any letter that survives. He is said never again to have spoken
her name. He destroyed all her letters to him and all his letters to
her except the journal which he had sent home from London. He would
be as silent as Stella, the most silent of all famous lovers. But he
could not quite equal her silence. On a paper containing some of her
hair he wrote, it is said, the words “Only a woman’s hair.” A giant’s
sentimentality and a devil’s contempt for it. Fire and ice.
VII
KING OF TRIFLERS
1
On the day after Stella died the _Beggar’s Opera_ was first given in
London, the Duke of Argyll starting the applause which in the end
became a delighted clamour. Swift, who had been doubtful about the
dramatic form which Gay had chosen, said the opera would do “more
public service than all the ministers of state from Adam to Walpole.”
When it came to Dublin, and the Lord Lieutenant approved of it, so did
the Dean of St. Patrick’s. Though Swift, who never went to the theatre,
seems now to have made no exception, he spoke as from the Cathedral.
Such humour would probably, he said with another moral comparison, “do
more good than a thousand sermons of so stupid, so injudicious, and
so prostitute a divine” as the court chaplain, later Archbishop of
Canterbury, who had preached against the opera in London. Humour, Swift
explained, was a “happy talent,” “fixed to the very nature of man.”
Satire was public spirit “prompting men of genius and virtue to mend
the world as far as they are able.”
The defence of Gay became a defence of Swift. “I demand whether I have
not as good a title to laugh as men have to be ridiculous, and to
expose vice as another hath to be vicious. If I ridicule the follies
and corruptions of a court, a ministry, or a senate, are they not amply
paid by pensions, titles, and power, while I expect and desire no other
reward than that of laughing with a few friends in a corner?” Surely
the objects of satire were as well off as the satirist. “If those who
take offence think me in the wrong I am ready to change the scene with
them whenever they please.”
In March 1728 Swift impartially observed that “the _Beggar’s Opera_
has knocked down Gulliver; I hope to see Pope’s Dulness knock down the
_Beggar’s Opera_.” The _Dunciad_ appeared in May. It was then without
the inscription to Swift which, included the next year, made him feel
“abstracted from everybody in the happiness of being recorded your
friend while wit and humour and politeness shall have any memorial
among us.” But Swift had already seen the brilliant lines in which
Pope named his friend with the greatest wits and complimented him with
having driven Dulness out of Ireland, to settle, safe from him, in
England.
“_O thou! whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!
Whether thou choose Cervantes’ serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais’ easy chair,
Or praise the Court, or magnify Mankind,
Or thy grieved country’s copper chains unbind;
From thy Bœotia though her power retires,
Mourn not, my Swift, at aught our realm acquires.
Here pleased behold her mighty wings outspread
To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead._”
Swift’s Travels, Gay’s Opera, Pope’s Dunces: Twickenham had borne its
satiric fruits. “Pope, Gay, and I,” Swift later wrote, had done their
best “to make folks merry and wise,” acknowledging “no enemies except
knaves and fools.” But that episode had ended. Swift was never to see
his friends again. Year after year they urged him to come back, and
for a few years he often planned to go. Sickness and pride kept him
in Ireland. The Court had no favours for him. Walpole was hopelessly
in power. Bolingbroke, spinning out a slipshod philosophy for Pope
to versify in his moral essays, tried to entice Swift to a living in
Berkshire, half a day’s journey from Uxbridge and Twickenham. Swift,
relatively a rich man in Ireland, declined to become relatively a poor
man in England. Letters would have to keep their friendship alive.
Half his life he lived in his letters to and from his English friends.
Yet he wrote fitfully, fewer letters than he received. Much as he loved
Arbuthnot, Swift was slow in writing to him. Gay might have to write
twice or three times to draw an answer. When he could, Swift wrote to
two of his friends at once: Bolingbroke and Pope, Arbuthnot and Pope,
Pope and Gay, Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry, Gay’s lively patron.
“It is a very cold scent to continue a correspondence with one whom we
never expect to see.... Mr. Pope and my Lord Bolingbroke themselves,”
Swift wrote in 1734, “begin to fail me.”
The fellowship was mortal. Gay died in 1732. When the news came in a
letter from Arbuthnot and Pope, Swift did not open it for five days,
“by an impulse foreboding some misfortune.” Arbuthnot died in 1735.
“The death of Mr. Gay and the Doctor,” Swift wrote to Pope, “have been
terrible wounds near my heart. Their living would have been a great
comfort to me, although I should never have seen them, like a sum of
money in a bank from which I should at least receive annual interest,
as I do from you and have done from my Lord Bolingbroke.” Bolingbroke
after 1735 spent most of his time in France. Only Pope and Swift were
left, Pope’s mind to outlast Swift’s, Swift’s body to outlast Pope’s.
There was no change in the affection which Swift felt for his friends,
but he could not help getting out of touch with them. England was
soon years away. Despairing of English politics, in the interminable
hands of Walpole, Swift gave up his old concern for government, except
where Ireland was touched. He saw London as the stage of a political
melodrama, with countless Whigs as the villain, and with no hero
except Pulteney and his Patriots. Swift ceased to follow, even as much
as he had done before, the turns and changes of wit. London had Pope,
and London had dunces. In Ireland it was impossible to tell whom Pope
was slashing unless he spelled out the names of his victims. When Swift
read such writers, he was “out of all patience to the present set of
whifflers.” England, London, the Court might still be visible enough to
Swift’s memory, but they no longer stirred with the life which had been
his passion and his magnet. They had stiffened to a picture, and the
years had set them in a frame.
2
It was time for Swift to learn, if he could learn, how to live in
Ireland without raging. For a year or so after Stella’s death he tried
to learn. “Except absence from friends,” he wrote to Pope in May 1728,
“I confess freely that I have no discontent at living here, beside
what arises from a silly spirit of liberty, which as it neither sours
my drink nor hurts my meat nor spoils my stomach farther than in
imagination, so I resolve to throw it off.”
Sheridan, who of Swift’s Irish friends had known Stella best, plotted
diversions. He took Swift south to Wexford about Easter of that year.
Together they began in May to write the _Intelligencer_. This was meant
to be a weekly paper “to inform or divert or correct or vex the town”
of Dublin. The two contributors, who had no editor to keep them going,
did not lose interest till after a dozen issues and did not stop till
after twenty. Sheridan got Swift invited in June to the house of Sir
Arthur Acheson at Market Hill near Armagh. There from June to the next
January, and during the summers of 1729 and 1730, Swift lived with
friends, away from Dublin and the solitude of his deanery.
“I lived very easily in the country,” he wrote to Pope after the
first visit. “Sir Arthur is a man of sense, has a good voice, and my
Lady a better. She is perfectly well bred and desirous to improve her
understanding, which is very good, but cultivated too much like a fine
lady. She was my pupil there, and severely chid when she read wrong.
With that, and walking and making twenty little amusing improvements,
and writing family verses of mirth by way of libels on my Lady, my time
passed very well and in very good order.”
Swift might have said more. Though his host was a member of the Irish
Parliament and high sheriff of his county, and his wife was daughter
of a man who had been for twenty years Chancellor of the Exchequer in
Ireland, Swift with them was like an emperor on a friendly visit. They
seem hardly to have questioned his imperial attitudes. The Dean might
cut down one of the baronet’s favourite trees or have his own way with
such “little amusing improvements” as “zigzags and walks,” “cradles and
caves,” “grottos and seats”--
“_A hole where a rabbit
Would scorn to inhabit,
Dug out in an hour:
He calls it a bower._”
The Dean might tease the lady for her lack of flesh, calling her
Skinnybonia, or for her lack of learning--
“_He loves to be bitter at
A lady illiterate._”
The Dean might condemn her to “dull Bacon’s Essays” or “poor Milton”
while he, not at study or at prayer, amused himself with grooms and
labourers. The Dean might insist that he, not the dairymaid, should
shake cream in a bottle till, after three hours, there was butter for
breakfast. The Dean might take it upon himself to build “two temples
of magnific size” for the “gentle goddess Cloacine.” The Dean might
come down to dinner when he chose, no matter who the guests. But he was
still the Dean, the greatest man in Ireland, great politician, great
wit. To say nothing of his company, his verses, spirited and various,
were ten times a return for his entertainment. They would, Swift
declared, make Market Hill as famous as Penshurst.
[Illustration: Jonathan Swift
_As Dean of St. Patrick’s_]
Swift was king enough in Ireland, if he wanted to be king. When he
went back to Dublin in October 1729 after his second visit to Market
Hill, he was received, a newspaper said, “with great joy by many of our
principal citizens, who also on the same occasion caused the bells
to ring in our cathedrals and had bonfires and other illuminations.”
Both candidates in an election then being held claimed the support of
the Drapier, though it is not certain that either had it. One of them
to win needed only to give out a letter which he said Swift had written
to him. Early the next year the Dean, because he had been, as he now
admitted, the Drapier, was given the freedom of the city in a gold box
brought to him by the Lord Mayor and some of the aldermen. It was an
honour usually reserved for “chief governors or persons in very high
employment.”
It was an honour, and Swift was gratified. Yet in a few weeks he was
writing to Bolingbroke: “I ought to think that it is time for me to
have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better
before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a
poisoned rat in a hole.” His resolve to throw off his discontent had
not been kept. Such cheerfulness as he had felt at Market Hill had not
survived his return to his solitary house. No sooner was he back than
he wrote, or at least published, the most savage of all his pamphlets,
the most terrible outcry of his misanthropy.
It was, he called it, a modest proposal. Everybody knew that Ireland
was starving and nobody knew what to do about it. The problem was not
so difficult. Put simply, it came to this: too little food, too many
mouths. Swift had thought of a way to make more food and fewer mouths.
“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in
London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most
delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted,
baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in
a fricassee or a ragout.” Of the children annually born in Ireland
perhaps thirty thousand could be taken care of by their parents.
Twenty thousand others might be kept “for breed, whereof only one
fourth part to be males, which is more than we allow to sheep, black
cattle, or swine.” That would leave, he calculated, about a hundred
thousand every year “to be offered in sale to the persons of quality
and fortune through the kingdom.... A child will make two dishes in an
entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone the fore or
hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little
pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially
in winter.” Such food would be expensive, but within the reach of
landlords, who, “as they have already devoured most of the parents,
seem to have the best title to the children.”
One of his friends, Swift said, argued that in the present want of
venison it might be well to supply it with boys and girls of twelve
to fourteen. He himself could not agree. The boys of that age from
much exercise would be thin and tough. The girls were too near the
age when they might bear children themselves. “And besides, it is
not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure
such a practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering
upon cruelty, which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest
objection against any project, however well intended.” It would be
enough to limit the proposal to children a year old. The older poor
were already “dying and rotting, by cold and famine and filth and
vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.”
Plausibly, statistically, Swift went over the advantages and
disadvantages of his scheme. The only real objection he could think of
was that it would reduce the number of people in the kingdom. The best
thing that could happen. It was Ireland he was writing about, not any
other country “that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon earth.”
Let no man talk of taxing absentees, or using Irish manufactures only,
or going without luxuries, or forcing landlords to be generous and
shopkeepers honest--as Swift himself had so long and often talked.
None of those expedients had worked, or been tried. They were “vain,
idle, visionary.” This new proposal was “solid and real, of no expense
and little trouble, full in our power.” It would not even disoblige
England. Ireland had hit upon a foodstuff which could not be exported
because it could not stand much salt. Perhaps, however, “I could name a
country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.”
Few of Swift’s readers seem to have shuddered at his proposal. Lord
Bathurst wrote from England that he had almost brought his wife round
to the opinion that the youngest of their children should help provide
for the eldest. After all, any sensible reader knew that the Irish
children would not be eaten, at least in this forthright, economical
way, just as he knew that there were no Houyhnhnms and no Yahoos.
Swift, sensible readers said, was only joking, as the Irish bishop had
said that Gulliver was only lying. Once more the misanthrope had run
against mankind in the abstract.