DECLINE.
Swift survived his final settlement in Ireland for more than thirty years,
though during the last five or six it was but the outside shell of him
that lived. During every day in all those years Swift must have eaten and
drunk, and somehow or other got through the twenty-four hours. The war
against Wood's halfpence employed at most a few months in 1724, and all
his other political writings would scarcely fill a volume of this size. A
modern journalist who could prove that he had written as little in six
months would deserve a testimonial. _Gulliver's Travels_ appeared in 1727;
and ten years were to pass before his intellect became hopelessly clouded.
How was the remainder of his time filled?
The death of Stella marks a critical point. Swift told Gay in 1723 that it
had taken three years to reconcile him to the country to which he was
condemned for ever. He came back "with an ill head and an aching
heart."[78] He was separated from the friends he had loved, and too old to
make new friends. A man, as he says elsewhere,[79] who had been bred in a
coal-pit might pass his time in it well enough; but if sent back to it
after a few months in upper air, he would find content less easy. Swift,
in fact, never became resigned to the "coal-pit," or, to use another of
his phrases, the "wretched, dirty dog-hole and prison," of which he could
only say that it was a "place good enough to die in." Yet he became so far
acclimatized as to shape a tolerable existence out of the fragments left
to him. Intelligent and cultivated men in Dublin, especially amongst the
clergy and the fellows of Trinity College, gathered round their famous
countryman. Swift formed a little court; he rubbed up his classics to the
academical standard, read a good deal of history, and even amused himself
with mathematics. He received on Sundays at the deanery, though his
entertainments seem to have been rather too economical for the taste of
his guests. "The ladies," Stella and Mrs. Dingley, were recognized as more
or less domesticated with him. Stella helped to receive his guests, though
not ostensibly as mistress of the household; and, if we may accept Swift's
estimate of her social talents, must have been a very charming hostess. If
some of Swift's guests were ill at ease in presence of the imperious and
moody exile, we may believe that during Stella's life there was more than
a mere semblance of agreeable society at the deanery. Her death, as Delany
tells us,[80] led to a painful change. Swift's temper became sour and
ungovernable; his avarice grew into a monomania; at times he grudged even
a single bottle of wine to his friends; the giddiness and deafness which
had tormented him by fits, now became a part of his life. Reading came to
be impossible, because (as Delany thinks) his obstinate refusal to wear
spectacles had injured his sight. He still struggled hard against disease;
he rode energetically, though two servants had to accompany him in case
of accidents from giddiness; he took regular "constitutionals" up and down
stairs when he could not go out. His friends thought that he injured
himself by over-exercise; and the battle was necessarily a losing one.
Gradually the gloom deepened; friends dropped off by death, and were
alienated by his moody temper; he was surrounded, as they thought, by
designing sycophants. His cousin, Mrs. Whiteway, who took care of him in
his last years, seems to have been both kindly and sensible; but he became
unconscious of kindness, and in 1741 had to be put under restraint. We may
briefly fill up some details in the picture.
Swift at Dublin recalls Napoleon at Elba. The duties of a deanery are not
supposed, I believe, to give absorbing employment for all the faculties of
the incumbent; but an empire, however small, may be governed; and Swift at
an early period set about establishing his supremacy within his small
domains. He maintained his prerogatives against the archbishop, and
subdued his chapter. His inferiors submitted, and could not fail to
recognize his zeal for the honour of the body. But his superiors found him
less amenable. He encountered episcopal authority with his old
haughtiness. He bade an encroaching bishop remember that he was speaking
"to a clergyman, and not to a footman."[81] He fell upon an old friend,
Sterne, the Bishop of Clogher, for granting a lease to some "old fanatic
knight." He takes the opportunity of reviling the bishops for favouring
"two abominable bills for beggaring and enslaving the clergy (which took
their birth from hell)," and says that he had thereupon resolved to have
"no more commerce with persons of such prodigious grandeur, who, I
feared, in a little time, would expect me to kiss their slipper."[82] He
would not even look into a coach, lest he should see such a thing as a
bishop--a sight that would strike him with terror. In a bitter satire he
describes Satan as the bishop to whom the rest of the Irish bench are
suffragans. His theory was that the English Government always appointed
admirable divines, but that unluckily all the new bishops were murdered on
Hounslow Heath by highwaymen, who took their robes and patents, and so
usurped the Irish sees. It is not surprising that Swift's episcopal
acquaintance was limited.
In his deanery Swift discharged his duties with despotic benevolence. He
performed the services, carefully criticized young preachers, got his
musical friends to help him in regulating his choir, looked carefully
after the cathedral repairs, and improved the revenues at the cost of his
own interests. His pugnacity broke out repeatedly even in such apparently
safe directions. He erected a monument to the Duke of Schomberg after an
attempt to make the duke's descendants pay for it themselves. He said that
if they tried to avoid the duty by reclaiming the body, he would take up
the bones, and put the skeleton "in his register office, to be a memorial
of their baseness to all posterity."[83] He finally relieved his feelings
by an epitaph, which is a bitter taunt against the duke's relations.
Happily he gave less equivocal proofs of the energy which he could put
into his duties. His charity was unsurpassed both for amount and judicious
distribution. Delany declares that in spite of his avarice he would give
five pounds more easily than richer men would give as many shillings. "I
never," says this good authority, "saw poor so carefully and
conscientiously attended to in my life as those of his cathedral." He
introduced and carried out within his own domains a plan for
distinguishing the deserving poor by badges--in anticipation of modern
schemes for "organization of charity." With the first five hundred pounds
which he possessed he formed a fund for granting loans to industrious
tradesmen and citizens, to be repaid by weekly instalments. It was said
that by this scheme he had been the means of putting more than 200
families in a comfortable way of living.[84] He had, says Delany, a whole
"seraglio" of distressed old women in Dublin; there was scarcely a lane in
the whole city where he had not such a "mistress." He saluted them kindly,
inquired into their affairs, bought trifles from them, and gave them such
titles as Pullagowna, Stumpa-Nympha, and so forth. The phrase "seraglio"
may remind us of Johnson's establishment, who has shown his prejudice
against Swift in nothing more than in misjudging a charity akin to his
own, though apparently directed with more discretion. The "rabble," it is
clear, might be grateful for other than political services. To personal
dependents he was equally liberal. He supported his widowed sister, who
had married a scapegrace in opposition to his wishes. He allowed an
annuity of 52_l._ a year to Stella's companion, Mrs. Dingley, and made her
suppose that the money was not a gift, but the produce of a fund for which
he was trustee. He showed the same liberality to Mrs. Ridgway, daughter of
his old housekeeper, Mrs. Brent; paying her an annuity of 20_l._, and
giving her a bond to secure the payment in case of accidents. Considering
the narrowness of Swift's income, and that he seems also to have had
considerable trouble about obtaining his rents and securing his invested
savings, we may say that his so-called "avarice" was not inconsistent with
unusual munificence. He pared his personal expenditure to the quick, not
that he might be rich, but that he might be liberal.
Though for one reason or other Swift was at open war with a good many of
the higher classes, his court was not without distinguished favourites.
The most conspicuous amongst them were Delany and Sheridan. Delany
(1685-1768), when Swift first knew him, was a Fellow of Trinity College.
He was a scholar, and a man of much good feeling and intelligence, and
eminently agreeable in society; his theological treatises seem to have
been fanciful, but he could write pleasant verses, and had great
reputation as a college tutor. He married two rich wives, and Swift
testifies that his good qualities were not the worse for his wealth, nor
his purse generally fuller. He was so much given to hospitality as to be
always rather in difficulties. He was a man of too much amiability and
social suavity not to be a little shocked at some of Swift's savage
outbursts, and scandalized by his occasional improprieties. Yet he
appreciated the nobler qualities of the staunch, if rather alarming,
friend. It is curious to remember that his second wife, who was one of
Swift's later correspondents, survived to be the venerated friend of Fanny
Burney (1752-1840), and that many living people may thus remember one who
was familiar with the latest of Swift's female favourites. Swift's closest
friend and crony, however, was the elder Sheridan, the ancestor of a race
fertile in genius, though unluckily his son, Swift's biographer, seems to
have transmitted without possessing any share of it. Thomas Sheridan, the
elder, was the typical Irishman--kindly, witty, blundering, full of
talents and imprudences, careless of dignity, and a child in the ways of
the world. He was a prosperous schoolmaster in Dublin when Swift first
made his acquaintance (about 1718), so prosperous as to decline a less
precarious post, of which Swift got him the offer.
After the war of Wood's halfpence Swift became friendly with Carteret,
whom he respected as a man of genuine ability, and who had besides the
virtue of being thoroughly distrusted by Walpole. When Carteret was asked
how he had succeeded in Ireland, he replied that he had pleased Dr. Swift.
Swift took advantage of the mutual goodwill to recommend several promising
clergymen to Carteret's notice. He was specially warm in behalf of
Sheridan, who received the first vacant living and a chaplaincy. Sheridan
characteristically spoilt his own chances by preaching a sermon upon the
day of the accession of the Hanoverian family, from the text, "Sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof." The sermon was not political, and the
selection of the text a pure accident; but Sheridan was accused of
Jacobitism, and lost his chaplaincy in consequence. Though generously
compensated by the friend in whose pulpit he had committed this
"Sheridanism," he got into difficulties. His school fell off; he exchanged
his preferments for others less preferable; he failed in a school at
Cavan, and ultimately the poor man came back to die at Dublin, in 1738, in
distressed circumstances. Swift's relations with him were thoroughly
characteristic. He defended his cause energetically; gave him most
admirably good advice in rather dictatorial terms; admitted him to the
closest familiarity, and sometimes lost his temper when Sheridan took a
liberty at the wrong moment, or resented the liberties taken by himself.
A queer character of the "Second Solomon," written, it seems, in 1729,
shows the severity with which Swift could sometimes judge his shiftless
and impulsive friend, and the irritability with which he could resent
occasional assertions of independence. "He is extremely proud and
captious," says Swift, and "apt to resent as an affront or indignity what
was never intended for either," but what, we must add, had a strong
likeness to both. One cause of poor Sheridan's troubles was doubtless that
assigned by Swift. Mrs. Sheridan, says this frank critic, is "the most
disagreeable beast in Europe," a "most filthy slut, lazy, and slothful,
luxurious, ill-natured, envious, suspicious," and yet managing to govern
Sheridan. This estimate was apparently shared by her husband, who makes
various references to her detestation of Swift. In spite of all jars,
Swift was not only intimate with Sheridan and energetic in helping him,
but to all appearance really loved him. Swift came to Sheridan's house
when the workmen were moving the furniture, preparatory to his departure
for Cavan. Swift burst into tears, and hid himself in a dark closet before
he could regain his self-possession. He paid a visit to his old friend
afterwards; but was now in that painful and morbid state in which violent
outbreaks of passion made him frequently intolerable. Poor Sheridan rashly
ventured to fulfil an old engagement that he would tell Swift frankly of a
growing infirmity, and said something about avarice. "Doctor," replied
Swift, significantly, "did you never read _Gil Blas_?" When Sheridan soon
afterwards sold his school to return to Dublin, Swift received his old
friend so inhospitably that Sheridan left him, never again to enter the
house. Swift indeed had ceased to be Swift; and Sheridan died soon
afterwards.
Swift often sought relief from the dreariness of the deanery by retiring
to, or rather by taking possession of, his friends' country-houses. In
1725 he stayed for some months, together with "the ladies," at Quilca, a
small country-house of Sheridan's, and compiled an account of the
deficiencies of the establishment--meant to be continued weekly. Broken
tables, doors without locks, a chimney stuffed with the dean's great-coat,
a solitary pair of tongs forced to attend all the fireplaces and also to
take the meat from the pot, holes in the floors, spikes protruding from
the bedsteads, are some of the items; whilst the servants are all thieves,
and act upon the proverb, "The worse their sty, the longer they lie."
Swift amused himself here and elsewhere by indulging his taste in
landscape gardening, without the consent and often to the annoyance of the
proprietor. In 1728--the year of Stella's death--he passed eight months at
Sir Arthur Acheson's, near Market Hill. He was sickly, languid, and
anxious to escape from Dublin, where he had no company but that of his
"old presbyterian housekeeper, Mrs. Brent." He had, however, energy enough
to take the household in hand after his usual fashion. He superintended
Lady Acheson's studies, made her read to him, gave her plenty of good
advice; bullied the butler; looked after the dairy and the garden, and
annoyed Sir Arthur by summarily cutting down an old thorn-tree. He liked
the place so much that he thought of building a house there, which was to
be called Drapier's Hall, but abandoned the project for reasons which,
after his fashion, he expressed with great frankness in a poem. Probably
the chief reason was the very obvious one which strikes all people who
are tempted to build; but that upon which he chiefly dwells is Sir
Arthur's defects as an entertainer. The knight used, it seems, to lose
himself in metaphysical moonings when he should have been talking to Swift
and attending to his gardens and farms. Swift entered a house less as a
guest than a conqueror. His dominion, it is clear, must have become
burdensome in his later years, when his temper was becoming savage and his
fancies more imperious.
Such a man was the natural prey of sycophants, who would bear his humours
for interested motives. Amongst Swift's numerous clients some doubtless
belonged to this class. The old need of patronizing and protecting still
displays itself; and there is something very touching in the zeal for his
friends which survived breaking health and mental decay. His
correspondence is full of eager advocacy. Poor Miss Kelly, neglected by an
unnatural parent, comes to Swift as her natural adviser. He intercedes on
behalf of the prodigal son of a Mr. FitzHerbert in a letter which is a
model of judicious and delicate advocacy. His old friend, Barber, had
prospered in business; he was Lord Mayor of London in 1733, and looked
upon Swift as the founder of his fortunes. To him, "my dear good old
friend in the best and worst times," Swift writes a series of letters,
full of pathetic utterances of his regrets for old friends amidst
increasing infirmities, and full also of appeals on behalf of others. He
induced Barber to give a chaplaincy to Pilkington, a young clergyman of
whose talent and modesty Swift was thoroughly convinced. Mrs. Pilkington
was a small poetess, and the pair had crept into some intimacy at the
deanery. Unluckily Swift had reasons to repent his patronage. The pair
were equally worthless. The husband tried to get a divorce; and the wife
sank into misery. One of her last experiments was to publish by
subscription certain "Memoirs," which contain some interesting but
untrustworthy anecdotes of Swift's later years.[85] He had rather better
luck with Mrs. Barber, wife of a Dublin woollendraper, who, as Swift says,
was "poetically given, and, for a woman, had a sort of genius that way."
He pressed her claims not only upon her namesake, the Mayor, but upon Lord
Carteret, Lady Betty Germaine, and Gay and his duchess. A forged letter to
Queen Caroline in Swift's name on behalf of this poetess naturally raised
some suspicions. Swift, however, must have been convinced of her
innocence. He continued his interest in her for years, during which we are
glad to find that she gave up poetry for selling Irish linens and letting
lodgings at Bath; and one of Swift's last acts before his decay was to
present her, at her own request, with the copyright of his _Polite
Conversations_. Everybody, she said, would subscribe for a work of
Swift's, and it would put her in easy circumstances. Mrs. Barber clearly
had no delicacy in turning Swift's liberality to account; but she was a
respectable and sensible woman, and managed to bring up two sons to
professions. Liberality of this kind came naturally to Swift. He provided
for a broken-down old officer, Captain Creichton, by compiling his memoirs
for him, to be published by subscription. "I never," he says in 1735, "got
a farthing by anything I wrote--except once by Pope's prudent management."
This probably refers to _Gulliver_, for which he seems to have received
200_l._ He apparently gave his share in the profits of the _Miscellanies_
to the widow of a Dublin printer.
A few words may now be said about these last writings. In reading some of
them, we must remember his later mode of life. He generally dined alone,
or with old Mrs. Brent, then sat alone in his closet till he went to bed
at eleven. The best company in Dublin, he said, was barely tolerable, and
those who had been tolerable were now unsupportable. He could no longer
read by candle-light, and his only resource was to write rubbish, most of
which he burnt. The merest trifles that he ever wrote, he says in 1731,
"are serious philosophical lucubrations in comparison to what I now busy
myself about." This, however, was but the development of a lifelong
practice. His favourite maxim, _Vive la bagatelle_, is often quoted by
Pope and Bolingbroke. As he had punned in his youth with Lord Berkeley, so
he amused himself in later years by a constant interchange of trifles with
his friends, and above all with Sheridan. Many of these trifles have been
preserved; they range from really good specimens of Swift's rather
sardonic humour down to bad riddles and a peculiar kind of playing upon
words. A brief specimen of one variety will be amply sufficient. Sheridan
writes to Swift. _Times a re veri de ad nota do it oras hi lingat almi e
state._ The words separately are Latin, and are to be read into the
English: "Times are very dead; not a doit or a shilling at all my estate."
Swift writes to Sheridan in English, which reads into Latin, "Am I say
vain a rabble is," means, _Amice venerabilis_--and so forth. Whole
manuscript books are still in existence filled with jargon of this kind.
Charles Fox declared that Swift must be a goodnatured man to have had such
a love of nonsense. We may admit some of it to be a proof of good-humour
in the same sense as a love of the backgammon in which he sometimes
indulged. It shows, that is, a willingness to kill time in company. But it
must be admitted that the impression becomes different when we think of
Swift in his solitude wasting the most vigorous intellect in the country
upon ingenuities beneath that of the composer of double acrostics. Delany
declares that the habit helped to weaken his intellect. Rather it showed
that his intellect was preying upon itself. Once more we have to think of
the "conjured spirit," and the ropes of sand. Nothing can well be more
lamentable. Books full of this stuff impress us like products of the
painful ingenuity by which some prisoner for life has tried to relieve
himself of the intolerable burden of solitary confinement. Swift seems to
betray the secret when he tells Bolingbroke that at his age "I often
thought of death; but now it is never out of my mind." He repeats this
more than once. He does not fear death, he says; indeed he longed for it.
His regular farewell to a friend was, "Good night; I hope I shall never
see you again." He had long been in the habit of "lamenting" his birthday,
though, in earlier days, Stella and other friends had celebrated the
anniversary. Now it became a day of unmixed gloom, and the chapter in
which Job curses the hour of his birth lay open all day on his table. "And
yet," he says, "I love _la bagatelle_ better than ever." Rather we should
say, "and therefore," for in truth the only excuse for such trifling was
the impossibility of finding any other escape from settled gloom. Friends
indeed seem to have adopted at times the theory that a humourist must
always be on the broad grin. They called him the "laughter-loving" dean,
and thought Gulliver a "merry book." A strange effect is produced when
between two of the letters in which Swift utters the bitterest agonies of
his soul during Stella's illness, we have a letter from Bolingbroke to the
"three Yahoos of Twickenham" (Pope, Gay, and Swift), referring to Swift's
"divine science, _la bagatelle_" and ending with the benediction, "Mirth
be with you!" From such mirth we can only say, may heaven protect us; for
it would remind us of nothing but the mirth of Redgauntlet's companions
when they sat dead (and damned) at their ghastly revelry, and their
laughter passed into such wild sounds as made the daring piper's "very
nails turn blue."
It is not, however, to be inferred that all Swift's recreations were so
dreary as this Anglo-Latin, or that his facetiousness always covered an
aching heart. There is real humour, and not all of bitter flavour, in some
of the trifles which passed between Swift and his friends. The most famous
is the poem called _The Grand Question Debated_, the question being
whether an old building called Hamilton's Bawn, belonging to Sir A.
Acheson, should be turned into a malthouse or a barrack. Swift takes the
opportunity of caricaturing the special object of his aversion, the
blustering and illiterate soldier, though he indignantly denies that he
had said anything disagreeable to his hospitable entertainer. Lady Acheson
encouraged him in writing such "lampoons." Her taste cannot have been very
delicate,[86] and she perhaps did not perceive how a rudeness which
affects to be only playful may be really offensive. If the poem shows that
Swift took liberties with his friends, it also shows that he still
possessed the strange power of reproducing the strain of thought of a
vulgar mind which he exhibited in Mr. Harris's petition. Two other works
which appeared in these last years are more remarkable proofs of the same
power. _The Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation_ and
the _Directions to Servants_, are most singular performances, and
curiously illustrative of Swift's habits of thought and composition. He
seems to have begun them during some of his early visits to England. He
kept them by him and amused himself by working upon them, though they were
never quite finished. The _Polite Conversation_ was given, as we have
seen, to Mrs. Barber in his later years, and the _Directions to Servants_
came into the printer's hands when he was already imbecile. They show how
closely Swift's sarcastic attention was fixed through life upon the ways
of his inferiors. They are a mass of materials for a natural history of
social absurdities such as Mr. Darwin was in the habit of bestowing upon
the manners and customs of worms. The difference is that Darwin had none
but kindly feelings for worms, whereas Swift's inspection of social vermin
is always edged with contempt. The conversations are a marvellous
collection of the set of cant phrases which at best have supplied the
absence of thought in society. Incidentally there are some curious
illustrations of the customs of the day; though one cannot suppose that
any human beings had ever the marvellous flow of pointless proverbs with
which Lord Sparkish, Mr. Neverout, Miss Notable and the rest manage to
keep the ball incessantly rolling. The talk is nonsensical, as most
small-talk would be, if taken down by a reporter, and, according to modern
standard, hideously vulgar, and yet it flows on with such vivacity that it
is perversely amusing.
_Lady Answerall._ But, Mr. Neverout, I wonder why such a handsome,
straight young gentleman as you don't get some rich widow?
_Lord Sparkish._ Straight! Ay, straight as my leg, and that's crooked
at the knee.
_Neverout._ Truth, madam, if it rained rich widows, none would fall
upon me. Egad, I was born under a threepenny planet, never to be worth
a groat.
And so the talk flows on, and to all appearance might flow for ever.
Swift professes in his preface to have sat many hundred times with his
table-book ready, without catching a single phrase for his book in eight
hours. Truly he is a kind of Boswell of inanities; and one is amazed at
the quantity of thought which must have gone into this elaborate trifling
upon trifles. A similar vein of satire upon the emptiness of writers is
given in his _Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Human Mind_; but
that is a mere skit compared with this strange performance. The
_Directions to Servants_ shows an equal amount of thought exerted upon the
various misdoings of the class assailed. Some one has said that it is
painful to read so minute and remorseless an exposure of one variety of
human folly. Undoubtedly it suggests that Swift must have appeared to be
an omniscient master. Delany, as I have said, testifies to his excellence
in that capacity. Many anecdotes attest the close attention which he
bestowed upon every detail of his servants' lives, and the humorous
reproofs which he administered. "Sweetheart," he said to an ugly cookmaid
who had overdone a joint, "take this down to the kitchen and do it less."
"That is impossible," she replied. "Then," he said, "if you must commit
faults, commit faults that can be mended." Another story tells how when a
servant had excused himself for not cleaning boots on the ground that
they would soon be dirty again, Swift made him apply the same principle to
eating breakfast, which would be only a temporary remedy for hunger. In
this, as in every relation of life, Swift was under a kind of necessity of
imposing himself upon every one in contact with him, and followed out his
commands into the minutest details. In the _Directions to Servants_ he has
accumulated the results of his experience in one department; and the
reading may not be without edification to the people who every now and
then announce as a new discovery that servants are apt to be selfish,
indolent, and slatternly, and to prefer their own interests to their
master's. Probably no fault could be found with the modern successors of
eighteenth-century servants, which has not already been exemplified in
Swift's presentment of that golden age of domestic comfort. The details
are not altogether pleasant; but, admitting such satire to be legitimate,
Swift's performance is a masterpiece.
Swift, however, left work of a more dignified kind. Many of the letters in
his correspondence are admirable specimens of a perishing art. The most
interesting are those which passed between him, Pope, and Bolingbroke, and
which were published by Pope's contrivance during Swift's last period. "I
look upon us three," says Swift, "as a peculiar triumvirate, who have
nothing to expect or fear, and so far fittest to converse with one
another." We may perhaps believe Swift when he says that he "never leaned
on his elbow to consider what he should write" (except to fools, lawyers,
and ministers), though we certainly cannot say the same of his friends.
Pope and Bolingbroke are full of affectations, now transparent enough; but
Swift in a few trenchant, outspoken phrases, dashes out a portrait of
himself as impressive as it is in some ways painful. We must, indeed,
remember in reading his inverse hypocrisy, his tendency to call his own
motives by their ugliest names--a tendency which is specially pronounced
in writing letters to the old friends whose very names recall the memories
of past happiness, and lead him to dwell upon the gloomiest side of the
present. There is too a characteristic reserve upon some points. In his
last visit to Pope, Swift left his friend's house after hearing the bad
accounts of Stella's health, and hid himself in London lodgings. He never
mentioned his anxieties to his friend, who heard of them first from
Sheridan; and in writing afterwards from Dublin, Swift excuses himself for
the desertion by referring to his own ill-health--doubtless a true cause
("two sick friends never did well together")--and his anxiety about his
affairs, without a word about Stella. A phrase of Bolingbroke's in the
previous year about "the present Stella, whoever she may be," seems to
prove that he too had no knowledge of Stella except from the poems
addressed to the name. There were depths of feeling which Swift could not
lay bare to the friend in whose affection he seems most thoroughly to have
trusted. Meanwhile he gives full vent to the scorn of mankind and himself,
the bitter and unavailing hatred of oppression, and above all for that
strange mingling of pride and remorse which is always characteristic of
his turn of mind. When he leaves Arbuthnot and Pope he expresses the
warmth of his feelings by declaring that he will try to forget them. He is
deeply grieved by the death of Congreve, and the grief makes him almost
regret that he ever had a friend. He would give half his fortune for the
temper of an easy-going acquaintance who could take up or lose a friend as
easily as a cat. "Is not this the true happy man?" The loss of Gay cuts
him to the heart; he notes on the letter announcing it that he had kept
the letter by him five days "by an impulse foreboding some misfortune." He
cannot speak of it except to say that he regrets that long living has not
hardened him; and that he expects to die poor and friendless. Pope's
ill-health "hangs on his spirits." His moral is that if he were to begin
the world again, he would never run the risk of a friendship with a poor
or sickly man--for he cannot harden himself. "Therefore I argue that
avarice and hardness of heart are the two happiest qualities a man can
acquire who is late in his life, because by living long we must lessen our
friends or may increase our fortunes." This bitterness is equally apparent
in regard to the virtues on which he most prided himself. His patriotism
was owing to "perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of
slavery, folly, and baseness;" in which, as he says, he is the direct
contrary of Pope, who can despise folly and hate vice without losing his
temper or thinking the worse of individuals. "Oppression tortures him,"
and means bitter hatred of the concrete oppressor. He tells Barber in 1738
that for three years he has been but the shadow of his former self, and
has entirely lost his memory, "except when it is roused by perpetual
subjects of vexation." Commentators have been at pains to show that such
sentiments are not philanthropic; yet they are the morbid utterance of a
noble and affectionate nature soured by long misery and disappointment.
They brought their own punishment. The unhappy man was fretting himself
into melancholy and was losing all sources of consolation. "I have nobody
now left but you," he writes to Pope in 1736; his invention is gone; he
makes projects which end in the manufacture of waste paper; and what vexes
him most is that his "female friends have now forsaken him." "Years and
infirmities," he says in the end of the same year (about the date of the
_Legion Club_), "have quite broke me; I can neither read, nor write, nor
remember, nor converse. All I have left is to walk and ride." A few
letters are preserved in the next two years--melancholy wails over his
loss of health and spirit--pathetic expressions of continual affection for
his "dearest and almost only constant friend," and a warm request or two
for services to some of his acquaintance.
The last stage was rapidly approaching. Swift who had always been thinking
of death in these later years, had anticipated the end in the remarkable
verses _On the Death of Dr. Swift_. This and two or three other
performances of about the same period, especially the _Rhapsody on Poetry_
(1733) and the _Verses to a Lady_ are Swift's chief title to be called a
poet. How far that name can be conceded to him is a question of
classification. Swift's originality appears in the very fact that he
requires a new class to be made for him. He justified Dryden's remark in
so far as he was never a poet in the sense in which Milton or Wordsworth
or Shelley or even Dryden himself were poets. His poetry may be called
rhymed prose, and should perhaps be put at about the same level in the
scale of poetry as _Hudibras_. It differs from prose not simply in being
rhymed, but in that the metrical form seems to be the natural and
appropriate mode of utterance. Some of the purely sarcastic and humorous
phrases recall _Hudibras_ more nearly than anything else; as, for example,
the often-quoted verses upon small critics in the _Rhapsody_.
The vermin only tease and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed _ad infinitum_.
In the verses on his own death, the suppressed passion, the glow and force
of feeling which we perceive behind the merely moral and prosaic phrases
seem to elevate the work to a higher level. It is a mere running of
every-day language into easy-going verse; and yet the strangely mingled
pathos and bitterness, the peculiar irony of which he was the great
master, affect us with a sentiment which may be called poetical in
substance, more forcibly than far more dignified and in some sense
imaginative performances. Whatever name we may please to give to such
work, Swift has certainly struck home and makes an impression which it is
difficult to compress into a few phrases. It is the essence of all that is
given at greater length in the correspondence; and starts from a comment
upon Rochefoucauld's congenial maxim about the misfortunes of our friends.
He tells how his acquaintance watch his decay, tacitly congratulating
themselves that "it is not yet so bad with us;" how, when he dies, they
laugh at the absurdity of his will.
To public uses! there's a whim!
What had the public done for him?
Mere envy, avarice, and pride,
He gave it all--but first he died.
Then we have the comments of Queen Caroline and Sir Robert and the
rejoicings of Grub Street at the chance of passing off rubbish by calling
it his. His friends are really touched.
Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day,
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen and drop a tear,
The rest will give a shrug and cry,
"'Tis pity, but we all must die!"
The ladies talk over it at their cards. They have learnt to show their
tenderness, and
Receive the news in doleful dumps.
The dean is dead (pray what is trumps?);
Then, Lord have mercy on his soul!
(Ladies, I'll venture for the _vole_).
The poem concludes, as usual, with an impartial character of the dean. He
claims, with a pride not unjustifiable, the power of independence, love of
his friends, hatred of corruption and so forth; admits that he may have
had "too much satire in his vein," though adding the very questionable
assertion that he "lashed the vice but spared the name." Marlborough,
Wharton, Burnet, Steele, Walpole and a good many more might have had
something to say upon that head. The last phrase is significant,--
He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad;
And showed by one satiric touch
No nation needed it so much,
That kingdom he hath left his debtor,
I wish it soon may have a better!
For some years, in fact, Swift had spent much thought and time in
arranging the details of this bequest. He ultimately left about
12,000_l._, with which, and some other contributions, St. Patrick's
Hospital was opened for fifty patients in the year 1757.
The last few years of Swift's life were passed in an almost total eclipse
of intellect. One pathetic letter to Mrs. Whiteway gives almost the last
touch. "I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf
and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the
mortification I am under both of body and mind. All I can say is that I am
not in torture; but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how
your health is and your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am
sure my days will be very few, for miserable they must be. If I do not
blunder, it is Saturday, July 26, 1740. If I live till Monday, I shall
hope to see you, perhaps for the last time." Even after this he
occasionally showed gleams of his former intelligence, and is said to have
written a well-known epigram during an outing with his attendants:--
Behold a proof of Irish sense!
Here Irish wit is seen!
When nothing's left that's worth defence
They build a magazine.
Occasionally he gave way to furious outbursts of violent temper; and once
suffered great torture from a swelling in the eye. But his general state
seems to have been apathetic; sometimes he tried to speak, but was unable
to find words. A few sentences have been recorded. On hearing that
preparations were being made for celebrating his birthday, he said, "It is
all folly; they had better let it alone." Another time he was heard to
mutter, "I am what I am; I am what I am." Few details have been given of
this sad period of mental eclipse; nor can we regret their absence. It is
enough to say that he suffered occasional tortures from the development of
the brain-disease; though as a rule he enjoyed the painlessness of torpor.
The unhappy man lingered till the 19th of October, 1745, when he died
quietly at three in the afternoon, after a night of convulsions. He was
buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and over his grave was placed an
epitaph, containing the last of those terrible phrases which cling to our
memory whenever his name is mentioned. Swift lies, in his own words,--
Ubi sæva indignatio
Cor ulterius lacerare nequit.
What more can be added?
THE END.
LONDON:
GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LIMITED,
ST. JOHN'S SQUARE.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Deane Swift_, p. 15.
[2] Readers may remember a clever adaptation of this incident in Lord
Lytton's _My Novel_.
[3] Possibly this was his cousin Thomas, but the probabilities are clearly
in favour of Jonathan.
[4] In the _Short Character of Thomas, Earl of Wharton_.
[5] It will be seen that I accept Dr. Barrett's statements, _Earlier Part
of the Life of Swift_, pp. 13, 14. His arguments seem to me sufficiently
clear and conclusive, and they are accepted by Monck Mason, though treated
contemptuously by Mr. Forster, p. 34. On the other hand, I agree with Mr.
Forster that Swift's complicity in the _Terræ Filius_ oration is not
proved, though it is not altogether improbable.
[6] Temple had the reversion of his father's office.
[7] It may be noticed in illustration of the growth of the Swift legend,
that two demonstrably false anecdotes--one imputing a monstrous crime, the
other a romantic piece of benevolence to Swift--refer to this period.
[8] M. Maralt. See appendix to Courtenay's _Life of Temple_.
[9] The publichouse at the point thus named on the ordnance map is now (I
regret to say) called the Jolly Farmer.
[10] The most direct statement to this effect was made in an article in
the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1757. It professes to speak with authority,
but includes such palpable blunders as to carry little weight.
[11] I am not certain whether this means 1681 or 1681-82. I have assumed
the former date in mentioning Stella's age; but the other is equally
possible.
[12] Wotton first accused Swift of borrowing the idea of the battle from a
French book, by one Coutray, called _Histoire Poétique de la Guerre
nouvellement declarée entre les Anciens et Modernes_. Swift declared (I
have no doubt truly) that he had never seen or heard of this book. But
Coutray, like Swift, uses the scheme of a mock Homeric battle. The book is
prose, but begins with a poem. The resemblance is much closer than Mr.
Forster's language would imply; but I agree with him that it does not
justify Johnson and Scott in regarding it as more than a natural
coincidence. Every detail is different.
[13] This was a treatise by Thomas, twin brother of Henry Vaughan, the
"Silurist." It led to a controversy with Henry More. Vaughan was a
Rosicrucian. Swift's contempt for mysteries is characteristic. Sendivogus
was a famous alchemist (1566-1646).
[14] See Forster, p. 117.
[15] He was in England from April to September in 1701, from April to
November in 1702, from November 1703 till May 1704, for an uncertain part
of 1705, and again for over fifteen months from the end of 1707 till the
beginning of 1709.
[16] Mr. Forster found the original MS., and gives us the exact numbers:
96 omitted, 44 added, 22 altered. The whole was 178 lines _after_ the
omissions.
[17] See letter to _Peterborough_, May 6, 1711.
[18] In most of their principles the two parties seem to have shifted
opinions since their institution in the reign of Charles II. _Examiner_,
No. 43. May 31, 1711.
[19] Delany, p. 211.
[20] Letter to King, Jan. 6th, 1709.
[21] Swift to King, July 12, 1711.
[22] These dinners, it may be noticed, seem to have been held on Thursdays
when Harley had to attend the court at Windsor. This may lead to some
confusion with the Brothers' Club, which met on Thursdays during the
parliamentary session.
[23] _Letter to a Whig Lord_, 1712.
[24] _Journal to Stella_, Feb. 6th, 1712, and Jan. 8th and 25th, 1712.
[25] _Ib._ Jan. 7th, 1711.
[26] _Ib._ Jan. 21st, 1712.
[27] _Ib._ Dec. 31st, 1710.
[28] _Conduct of the Allies._
[29] _Advice to October Club._
[30] _Behaviour of Queen's Ministry._
[31] There was enough plausibility in this scandal to give it a sting. The
duchess had left her second husband, a Mr. Thynne, immediately after the
marriage ceremony, and fled to Holland. There Count Coningsmark paid her
his addresses, and, coming to England, had Mr. Thynne shot by ruffians in
Pall Mall. See the curious case in the _State Trials_, vol. ix.
[32] Letters from Smalridge and Dr. Davenant in 1713.
[33] Letter to Lord Palmerston, Jan. 29th, 1726.
[34] June 22nd, 1711.
[35] The list, so far as I can make it out from references in the journal,
appears to include more names. One or two had probably retired. The peers
are as follows:--The Dukes of Shrewsbury (perhaps only suggested), Ormond
and Beaufort; Lords Orrery, Rivers, Dartmouth, Dupplin, Masham, Bathurst,
and Lansdowne (the last three were of the famous twelve); and the
commoners are Swift, Sir R. Raymond, Jack Hill, Disney, Sir W. Wyndham,
St. John, Prior, Friend, Arbuthnot, Harley (son of Lord Oxford), and
Harcourt (son of Lord Harcourt).
[36] Feb. 28th, 1712.
[37] Its authenticity was doubted, but, as I think, quite gratuitously, by
Johnson, by Lord Stanhope, and, as Stanhope says, by Macaulay. The dulness
is easily explicable by the circumstances of the composition.
[38] April 13, 1713.
[39] Letter to King, Dec. 16th, 1716.
[40] _Inquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen's last Ministry._
[41] _Autobiography_, i. 407.
[42] _Foster_, p. 108.
[43] Oct. 20th, 1711. The last use I have observed of this word is in a
letter of Carlyle's, Nov. 7th, 1824. "Strange pilgarlic-looking figures."
Froude's _Life of Carlyle_, i. 247.
[44] Lord Orrery instructs us to pronounce this name Vanummery.
[45] This simply repeats what he says in his first published letters about
his flirtations at Leicester.
[46] The passage which contains this line was said by Orrery to cast an
unmanly insinuation against Vanessa's virtue. As the accusation has been
repeated, it is perhaps right to say that one fact sufficiently disproves
its possibility. The poem was intended for Vanessa alone; and would never
have appeared had it not been published after her death by her own
direction.
[47] Compare Pope's _Eloisa_ to _Abelard_ which appeared in 1717. If
Vanessa had read it, she might almost be suspected of borrowing; but her
phrases seem to be too genuine to justify the hypothesis.
[48] Scott appropriately quotes Hotspur. The phrase is apparently a hint
at Swift's usual recipe of exercise.
[49] I cannot here discuss the evidence. The original statements are in
_Orrery_, p. 22 &c.; _Delany_, p. 52; _Dean Swift_, p. 93; _Sheridan_, p.
282; _Monck Berkeley_, p. xxxvi. Scott accepted the marriage, and the
evidence upon which he relied was criticized by Monck Mason, p. 297, &c.
Monck Mason makes some good points, and especially diminishes the value of
the testimony of Bishop Berkeley, showing by dates that he could not have
heard the story, as his grandson affirms, from Bishop Ashe, who is said to
have performed the ceremony. It probably came, however, from Berkeley,
who, we may add, was tutor to Ashe's son, and had special reasons for
interest in the story. On the whole, the argument for the marriage comes
to this: that it was commonly reported by the end of Swift's life, that it
was certainly believed by his intimate friend Delany, in all probability
by the elder Sheridan and by Mrs. Whiteway. Mrs. Sican, who told the story
to Sheridan, seems also to be a good witness. On the other hand, Dr. Lyon,
a clergyman who was one of Swift's guardians in his imbecility, says that
it was denied by Mrs. Dingley and by Mrs. Brent, Swift's old housekeeper,
and by Stella's executors. The evidence seems to me very indecisive. Much
of it may be dismissed as mere gossip, but a certain probability remains.
[50] _Monck Mason_, p. 310, note.
[51] This is Sheridan's story. Orrery speaks of the letter as written to
Swift himself.
[52] Scott heard this from Mrs. Whiteway's grandson. Sheridan tells the
story as though Stella had begged for publicity, and Swift cruelly
refused. Delany's statement (p. 56), which agrees with Mrs. Whiteway's,
appears to be on good authority, and, if true, proves the reality of the
marriage.
[53] Besides Scott's remarks (see v. of his life) see Orrery, _Letter_ 10;
_Deane Swift_, p. 93, _Sheridan_, p. 297.
[54] _Letter to Pope_, July 16th, 1728.
[55] _Sheridan_, p. 23.
[56] _Brain_ for Jan., 1882.
[57] _Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life._
[58] Letter to Pope, July 13th, 1737.
[59] _Catholic Reasons for Repealing the Test._
[60] _Letters on Sacramental Test in 1738._
[61] To Sir Charles Wigan, July, 1732.
[62] To Lord Peterborough, April 21st, 1726.
[63] The ton of bronze, I am informed, is coined into 108,000 pence, that
is 450_l._ The metal is worth about 74_l._
[64] Simon, in his work on the Irish coinage, makes the profit 60,000_l._;
but he reckons the copper at 1_s._ a lb., whereas from the Report of the
Privy Council it would seem to be properly 1_s._ 6_d._ a lb. Swift and
most later writers say 108,000_l._, but the right sum is 100,800_l._ 360
tons coined into 2_s._ 6_d._ a lb.
[65] Monck Mason says only 300_l._ a year, but this is the sum mentioned
in the Report and by Swift.
[66] Letter I.
[67] Letter II.
[68] See for example Lord Stanhope's account. For the other view see Mr.
Lecky's _History of the Eighteenth Century_, and Mr. Froude's _English in
Ireland_.
[69] Letter IV.
[70] "On the words Brother Protestants, &c."
[71] To Lord Stafford, Nov. 26, 1725.
[72] _Maxims Controuled in Ireland._
[73] _Delany_, p. 148.
[74] It is in the Forster library, and, I believe, unpublished, in answer
to Arbuthnot's letter mentioned in the text.
[75] Letter to Pope, Sept. 29th, 1725.
[76] Letter to Sheridan, Sept. 11th, 1725.
[77] _Lectures on the English Poets._
[78] To Bolingbroke, May, 1719.
[79] To Pope and Gay, Oct. 15th, 1726.
[80] _Delany_, p. 144.
[81] Bishop of Meath, May 22nd, 1719.
[82] To Bishop of Clogher, July, 1733.
[83] To Carteret, May 10th, 1728.
[84] Substance of a speech to the Mayor of Dublin. Franklin left a sum of
money to be employed in a similar way.
[85] See also the curious letters from Mrs. Pilkington in Richardson's
Correspondence.
[86] Or she would hardly have written the _Panegyric_.
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