Part 3 (1/2)

CHAPTER V.

THE HARLEY ADMINISTRATION.

In the autumn of 1710 Swift was approaching the end of his forty-third year. A man may well feel at forty-two that it is high time that a post should have been a.s.signed to him. Should an opportunity be then, and not till then, put in his way, he feels that he is throwing for heavy stakes; and that failure, if failure should follow, would be irretrievable. Swift had been longing vainly for an opening. In the remarkable letter (of April, 1722) from which I have quoted the anecdote of the lost fish, he says that, ”all my endeavours from a boy to distinguish myself were only for want of a great t.i.tle and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts; whether right or wrong is no great matter; and so the reputation of wit or great learning does the office of a blue riband or of a coach and six horses.” The phrase betrays Swift's scornful self-mockery; that inverted hypocrisy which led him to call his motives by their worst names, and to disavow what he might have been sorry to see denied by others. But, like all that Swift says of himself, it also expresses a genuine conviction. Swift was ambitious, and his ambition meant an absolute need of imposing his will upon others. He was a man born to rule; not to affect thought, but to control conduct. He was therefore unable to find full occupation, though he might seek occasional distraction, in literary pursuits. Archbishop King, who had a strange knack of irritating his correspondent--not, it seems, without intention--annoyed Swift intensely in 1711 by advising him (most superfluously) to get preferment, and with that view to write a serious treatise upon some theological question. Swift, who was in the thick of his great political struggle, answered that it was absurd to ask a man floating at sea what he meant to do when he got ash.o.r.e. ”Let him get there first and rest and dry himself, and then look about him.” To find firm footing amidst the welter of political intrigues, was Swift's first object. Once landed in a deanery he might begin to think about writing; but he never attempted, like many men in his position, to win preferment through literary achievements. To a man of such a temperament, his career must so far have been cruelly vexatious. We are generally forced to judge of a man's life by a few leading incidents; and we may be disposed to infer too hastily that the pa.s.sions roused on those critical occasions coloured the whole tenor of every-day existence. Doubtless Swift was not always fretting over fruitless prospects. He was often eating his dinner in peace and quiet, and even amusing himself with watching the Moor Park rooks or the Laracor trout. Yet it is true that so far as a man's happiness depends upon the consciousness of a satisfactory employment of his faculties, whether with a view to glory or solid comfort, Swift had abundant causes of discontent. The ”conjured spirit” was still weaving ropes of sand. For ten years he had been dependent upon Temple, and his struggles to get upon his own legs had been fruitless: on Temple's death he managed when past thirty to wring from fortune a position of bare independence, not of satisfying activity, he had not gained a fulcrum from which to move the world, but only a bare starting-point whence he might continue to work. The promises from great men had come to nothing. He might perhaps have realized them, could he have consented to be faithless to his dearest convictions; the consciousness that he had so far sacrificed his position to his principles gave him no comfort, though it nourished his pride. His enforced reticence produced an irritation against the ministers whom it had been intended to conciliate, which deepened into bitter resentment for their neglect. The year and a half pa.s.sed in Ireland during 1709-10 was a period in which his day-dreams must have had a background of disappointed hopes. ”I stayed above half the time,” he says, ”in one scurvy acre of ground, and I always left it with regret.” He shut himself up at Laracor, and nourished a growing indignation against the party represented by Wharton.

Yet events were moving rapidly in England, and opening a new path for his ambition. The Whigs were in full possession of power, though at the price of a growing alienation of all who were weary of a never-ending war, or hostile to the Whig policy in Church and State. The leaders, though warned by Somers, fancied that they would strengthen their position by attacking the defeated enemy. The prosecution of Sacheverell in the winter of 1709-10, if not directed by personal spite, was meant to intimidate the high-flying Tories. It enabled the Whig leaders to indulge in a vast quant.i.ty of admirable const.i.tutional rhetoric; but it supplied the High Church party with a martyr and a cry, and gave the needed impetus to the growing discontent. The queen took heart to revolt against the Marlboroughs; the Whig Ministry were turned out of office; Harley became Chancellor of the Exchequer in August; and the parliament was dissolved in September, 1710, to be replaced in November by one in which the Tories had an overwhelming majority.

We are left to guess at the feelings with which Swift contemplated these changes. Their effect upon his personal prospects was still problematical.

In spite of his wrathful retirement, there was no open breach between him and the Whigs. He had no personal relations with the new possessors of power. Harley and St. John, the two chiefs, were unknown to him. And, according to his own statement, he started for England once more with great reluctance in order again to take up the weary Firstfruits negociation. Wharton, whose hostility had intercepted the proposed bounty, went with his party, and was succeeded by the High Church Duke of Ormond.

The political aspects were propitious for a renewed application, and Swift's previous employment pointed him out as the most desirable agent.

And now Swift suddenly comes into full light. For two or three years we can trace his movements day by day; follow the development of his hopes and fears; and see him more clearly than he could be seen by almost any of his contemporaries. The famous _Journal to Stella_, a series of letters written to Esther Johnson and Mrs. Dingley, from September, 1710, till April, 1713, is the main and central source of information. Before telling the story, a word or two may be said of the nature of this doc.u.ment, one of the most interesting that ever threw light upon the history of a man of genius. The _Journal_ is one of the very few that were clearly written without the faintest thought of publication. There is no indication of any such intention in the _Journal to Stella_. It never occurred to Swift that it could ever be seen by any but the persons primarily interested.

The journal rather shuns politics; they will not interest his correspondent, and he is afraid of the post-office clerks--then and long afterwards often employed as spies. Interviews with ministers have scarcely more prominence than the petty incidents of his daily life. We are told that he discussed business, but the discussion is not reported.

Much more is omitted which might have been of the highest interest. We hear of meetings with Addison; not a phrase of Addison's is vouchsafed to us; we go to the door of Harley or St. John; we get no distinct vision of the men who were the centres of all observation. Nor, again, are there any of those introspective pa.s.sages which give to some journals the interest of a confession. What, then, is the interest of the _Journal to Stella_?

One element of strange and singular fascination, to be considered hereafter, is the prattle with his correspondent. For the rest, our interest depends in great measure upon the reflections with which we must ourselves clothe the bare skeleton of facts. In reading the _Journal to Stella_ we may fancy ourselves waiting in a parliamentary lobby during an excited debate. One of the chief actors hurries out at intervals; pours out a kind of hasty bulletin; tells of some thrilling incident, or indicates some threatening symptom; more frequently he seeks to relieve his anxieties by indulging in a little personal gossip, and only interjects such comments upon politics as can be compressed into a hasty e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, often, as may be supposed, of the imprecatory kind. Yet he unconsciously betrays his hopes and fears; he is fresh from the thick of the fight, and we perceive that his nerves are still quivering, and that his phrases are glowing with the ardour of the struggle. Hopes and fears are long since faded, and the struggle itself is now but a war of phantoms. Yet with the help of the _Journal_ and contemporary doc.u.ments, we can revive for the moment the decaying images, and cheat ourselves into the momentary persuasion that the fate of the world depends upon Harley's success, as we now hold it to depend upon Mr. Gladstone's.

Swift reached London on September 7th, 1710; the political revolution was in full action, though Parliament was not yet dissolved. The Whigs were ”ravished to see him;” they clutched at him, he says, like drowning men at a twig, and the great men made him their ”clumsy apologies.” G.o.dolphin was ”short, dry and morose;” Somers tried to make explanations, which Swift received with studied coldness. The ever-courteous Halifax gave him dinners; and asked him to drink to the resurrection of the Whigs, which Swift refused unless he would add ”to their reformation.” Halifax persevered in his attentions, and was always entreating him to go down to Hampton Court; ”which will cost me a guinea to his servants, and twelve s.h.i.+llings coach hire, and I will see him hanged first.” Swift, however, retained his old friends.h.i.+p with the wits of the party; dined with Addison at his retreat in Chelsea, and sent a trifle or two to the _Tatler_. The elections began in October; Swift had to drive through a rabble of Westminster electors, judiciously agreeing with their sentiments to avoid dead cats and broken gla.s.ses; and though Addison was elected (”I believe,”

says Swift, ”if he had a mind to be chosen king, he would hardly be refused”), the Tories were triumphant in every direction. And meanwhile, the Tory leaders were delightfully civil.

On the 4th of October Swift was introduced to Harley, getting himself described (with undeniable truth) ”as a discontented person, who was ill used for not being Whig enough.” The poor Whigs lamentably confess, he says, their ill usage of him, ”but I mind them not.” Their confession came too late. Harley had received him with open arms, and won not only Swift's adhesion, but his warm personal attachment. The fact is indisputable, though rather curious. Harley appears to us as a s.h.i.+fty and feeble politician, an inarticulate orator, wanting in principles and resolution, who made it his avowed and almost only rule of conduct that a politician should live from hand to mouth.[21] Yet his prolonged influence in Parliament seems to indicate some personal attraction, which was perceptible to his contemporaries, though rather puzzling to us. All Swift's panegyrics leave the secret in obscurity. Harley seems indeed to have been eminently respectable and decorously religious, amiable in personal intercourse, and able to say nothing in such a way as to suggest profundity instead of emptiness. His reputation as a party manager was immense; and is partly justified by his quick recognition of Swift's extraordinary qualifications. He had inferior scribblers in his pay, including, as we remember with regret, the s.h.i.+fty Defoe. But he wanted a man of genuine ability and character. Some months later the ministers told Swift that they had been afraid of none but him; and resolved to have him.

They got him. Harley had received him ”with the greatest kindness and respect imaginable.” Three days later (Oct. 7th) the firstfruits business is discussed, and Harley received the proposals as warmly as became a friend of the Church, besides overwhelming Swift with civilities. Swift is to be introduced to St. John; to dine with Harley next Tuesday; and after an interview of four hours, the minister sets him down at St James's Coffee-house in a hackney coach. ”All this is odd and comical!” exclaims Swift; ”he knew my Christian name very well,” and, as we hear next day, begged Swift to come to him often, but not to his levee: ”that was not a place for friends to meet.” On the 10th of October, within a week from the first introduction, Harley promises to get the firstfruits business, over which the Whigs had haggled for years, settled by the following Sunday.

Swift's exultation breaks out. On the 14th he declares that he stands ten times better with the new people than ever he did with the old, and is forty times more caressed. The triumph is sharpened by revenge. Nothing, he says of the sort was ever compa.s.sed so soon; ”and purely done by my personal credit with Mr. Harley, who is so excessively obliging, that I know not what to make of it, unless to show the rascals of the other side that they used a man unworthily who deserved better.” A pa.s.sage on Nov.

8th sums up his sentiments. ”Why,” he says in answer to something from Stella, ”should the Whigs think I came from Ireland to leave them? Sure my journey was no secret! I protest sincerely, I did all I could to hinder it, as the dean can tell you, though now I do not repent it. But who the devil cares what they think? Am I under obligations in the least to any of them all? Rot them for ungrateful dogs; I will make them repent their usage before I leave this place.” The thirst for vengeance may not be edifying; the political zeal was clearly not of the purest; but in truth, Swift's party prejudices and his personal resentments are fused into indissoluble unity. Hatred of Whig principles and resentment of Whig ”ill-usage” of himself, are one and the same thing. Meanwhile, Swift was able (on Nov. 4) to announce his triumph to the Archbishop. He was greatly annoyed by an incident, of which he must also have seen the humorous side.

The Irish bishops had bethought themselves after Swift's departure that he was too much of a Whig to be an effective solicitor. They proposed therefore to take the matter out of his hands and apply to Ormond, the new Lord Lieutenant. Swift replied indignantly; the thing was done, however, and he took care to let it be known that the whole credit belonged to Harley, and of course, in a subordinate sense, to himself. Official formalities were protracted for months longer, and formed one excuse for Swift's continued absence from Ireland; but we need not trouble ourselves with the matter further.

Swift's unprecedented leap into favour meant more than a temporary success. The intimacy with Harley and with St. John rapidly developed.

Within a few months, Swift had forced his way into the very innermost circle of official authority. A notable quarrel seems to have given the final impulse to his career. In February, 1711, Harley offered him a fifty-pound note. This was virtually to treat him as a hireling instead of an ally. Swift resented the offer as an intolerable affront. He refused to be reconciled without ample apology, and after long entreaties. His pride was not appeased for ten days, when the reconciliation was sealed by an invitation from Harley to a Sat.u.r.day dinner.[22] On Sat.u.r.days, the Lord Keeper (Harcourt) and the Secretary of State (St. John) dined alone with Harley: ”and at last,” says Swift, in reporting the event, ”they have consented to let me among them on that day.” He goes next day, and already chides Lord Rivers for presuming to intrude into the sacred circle. ”They call me nothing but Jonathan,” he adds; ”and I said I believed they would leave me Jonathan, as they found me.” These dinners were continued, though they became less select. Harley called Sat.u.r.day his ”whipping-day;” and Swift was the heartiest wielder of the lash. From the same February, Swift began to dine regularly with St. John every Sunday; and we may note it as some indication of the causes of his later preference of Harley, that on one occasion he has to leave St. John early. The company, he says, were in constraint, because he would suffer no man to swear or talk indecently in his presence.

Swift had thus conquered the ministry at a blow. What services did he render in exchange? His extraordinary influence seems to have been due in a measure to sheer force of personal ascendency. No man could come into contact with Swift without feeling that magnetic influence. But he was also doing a more tangible service. In thus admitting Swift to their intimacy, Harley and St. John were in fact paying homage to the rising power of the pen. Political writers had hitherto been hirelings, and often little better than spies. No preceding, and, we may add, no succeeding writer ever achieved such a position by such means. The press has become more powerful as a whole: but no particular representative of the press has made such a leap into power. Swift came at the time when the influence of political writing was already great: and when the personal favour of a prominent minister could still work miracles. Harley made him a favourite of the old stamp, to reward his supremacy in the use of the new weapon.

Swift had begun in October by avenging himself upon G.o.dolphin's coldness, in a copy of Hudibrastic verses about the virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician's Rod--that is, the treasurer's staff of office--which had a wonderful success. He fell savagely upon the hated Wharton not long after, in what he calls ”a d.a.m.ned libellous pamphlet,” of which 2000 copies were sold in two days. Libellous, indeed, is a faint epithet to describe a production which, if its statements be true, proves that Wharton deserved to be hunted from society. Charges of lying, treachery, atheism, Presbyterianism, debauchery, indecency, shameless indifference to his own reputation and his wife's, the vilest corruption and tyranny in his government are piled upon his victim as thickly as they will stand. Swift does not expect to sting Wharton. ”I neither love nor hate him,” he says.

”If I see him after this is published, he will tell me 'that he is d.a.m.nably mauled;' and then, with the easiest transition in the world, ask about the weather, or the time of day.” Wharton might possibly think that abuse of this kind might almost defeat itself by its own virulence. But Swift had already begun writings of a more statesmanlike and effective kind.

A paper war was already raging when Swift came to London. The _Examiner_ had been started by St. John, with the help of Atterbury, Prior, and others; and, opposed for a short time by Addison, in the _Whig Examiner_.

Harley, after granting the first-fruits, had told Swift, that the great want of the ministry was ”some good pen,” to keep up the spirits of the party. The _Examiner_, however, was in need of a firmer and more regular manager; and Swift took it in hand, his first weekly article appearing November 2nd, 1710, his last on June 14th, 1711. His _Examiners_ achieved an immediate and unprecedented success. And yet to say the truth, a modern reader is apt to find them decidedly heavy. No one, indeed, can fail to perceive the masculine sense, the terseness and precision of the utterance. And yet many writings which produced less effect are far more readable now. The explanation is simple, and applies to most of Swift's political writings. They are all rather acts than words. They are blows struck in a party-contest: and their merit is to be gauged by their effect. Swift cares nothing for eloquence, or logic, or invective--and little, it must be added, for veracity--so long as he hits his mark. To judge him by a merely literary standard, is to judge a fencer by the grace of his att.i.tudes. Some high literary merits are implied in efficiency, as real grace is necessary to efficient fencing: but in either case, a clumsy blow which reaches the heart is better than the most dexterous flourish in the air. Swift's eye is always on the end, as a good marksman looks at nothing but the target.

What, then, is Swift's aim in the _Examiner_? Mr. Kinglake has told us how a great journal throve by discovering what was the remark that was on every one's lips, and making the remark its own. Swift had the more dignified task of really striking the keynote for his party. He was to put the ministerial theory into that form in which it might seem to be the inevitable utterance of strong common-sense. Harley's supporters were to see in Swift's phrases just what they would themselves have said--if they had been able. The shrewd, st.u.r.dy, narrow prejudices of the average Englishman were to be pressed into the service of the ministry, by showing how admirably they could be clothed in the ministerial formulas.

The real question, again, as Swift saw, was the question of peace. Whig and Tory, as he said afterwards,[23] were really obsolete words. The true point at issue was peace or war. The purpose, therefore, was to take up his ground so that peace might be represented as the natural policy of the church or Tory party; and war as the natural fruit of the selfish Whigs.

It was necessary, at the same time, to show that this was not the utterance of high-flying Toryism or downright Jacobitism, but the plain dictate of a cool and impartial judgment. He was not to prove but to take for granted that the war had become intolerably burdensome; and to express the growing wish for peace in terms likely to conciliate the greatest number of supporters. He was to lay down the platform which could attract as many as possible, both of the zealous Tories and of the lukewarm Whigs.

Measured by their fitness for this end, the _Examiners_ are admirable.

Their very fitness for the end implies the absence of some qualities which would have been more attractive to posterity. Stirring appeals to patriotic sentiment may suit a Chatham rousing a nation to action; but Swift's aim is to check the extravagance in the name of selfish prosaic prudence. The philosophic reflections of Burke, had Swift been capable of such reflection, would have flown above the heads of his hearers. Even the polished and elaborate invective of Junius would have been out of place.

No man, indeed, was a greater master of invective than Swift. He shows it in the _Examiners_ by onslaughts upon the detested Wharton. He shows, too, that he is not restrained by any scruples when it comes in his way to attack his old patrons, and he adopts the current imputations upon their private character. He could roundly accuse Cowper of bigamy, and Somers--the Somers whom he had elaborately praised some years before in the dedication to the _Tale of a Tub_--of the most abominable perversion of justice. But these are taunts thrown out by the way. The substance of the articles is not invective, but profession of political faith. One great name, indeed, is of necessity a.s.sailed. Marlborough's fame was a tower of strength for the Whigs. His d.u.c.h.ess and his colleagues had fallen; but whilst war was still raging, it seemed impossible to dismiss the greatest living commander. Yet whilst Marlborough was still in power, his influence might be used to bring back his party. Swift's treatment of this great adversary is significant. He constantly took credit for having suppressed many attacks[24] upon Marlborough. He was convinced that it would be dangerous for the country to dismiss a general whose very name carried victory.[25] He felt that it was dangerous for the party to make an unreserved attack upon the popular hero. Lord Rivers, he says, cursed the _Examiner_ to him for speaking civilly of Marlborough; and St. John, upon hearing of this, replied that if the counsels of such men as Rivers were taken, the ministry ”would be blown up in twenty-four hours.” Yet Marlborough was the war personified; and the way to victory lay over Marlborough's body. Nor had Swift any regard for the man himself, who, he says,[26] is certainly a vile man, and has no sort of merit except the military--as ”covetous as h.e.l.l, and as ambitious as the prince of it.”[27] The whole case of the ministry implied the condemnation of Marlborough. Most modern historians would admit that continuance of the war could at this time be desired only by fanatics or interested persons.

A psychologist might amuse himself by inquiring what were the actual motives of its advocates; in what degrees personal ambition, a misguided patriotism, or some more sordid pa.s.sions were blended. But in the ordinary dialect of political warfare there is no room for such refinements. The theory of Swift and Swift's patrons was simple. The war was the creation of the Whig ”ring;” it was carried on for their own purposes by the stock-jobbers and ”monied men,” whose rise was a new political phenomenon, and who had introduced the diabolical contrivance of public debts. The landed interest and the church had been hoodwinked too long by the union of corrupt interests supported by Dutchmen, Scotchmen, dissenters, freethinkers, and other manifestations of the evil principle. Marlborough was the head and patron of the whole. And what was Marlborough's motive?

The answer was simple. It was that which has been a.s.signed, with even more emphasis, by Macaulay--Avarice. The twenty-seventh _Examiner_ (Feb. 8th, 1711) probably contains the compliments to which Rivers objected. Swift, in fact, admits that Marlborough had all the great qualities generally attributed to him; but all are spoilt by this fatal blemish. How far the accusation was true matters little. It is put at least with force and dignity; and it expressed in the pithiest shape Swift's genuine conviction, that the war now meant corrupt self-interest. Invective, as Swift knew well enough in his cooler moments, is a dangerous weapon, apt to recoil on the a.s.sailant unless it carries conviction. The attack on Marlborough does not betray personal animosity; but the deliberate and the highly plausible judgment of a man determined to call things by their right names, and not to be blinded by military glory.

This, indeed, is one of the points upon which Swift's Toryism was unlike that of some later periods. He always disliked and despised soldiers and their trade. ”It will no doubt be a mighty comfort to our grandchildren,”

he says in another pamphlet,[28] ”when they see a few rags hung up in Westminster Hall which cost a hundred millions, whereof they are paying the arrears, to boast as beggars do that their grandfathers were rich and great.” And in other respects he has some right to claim the adhesion of thorough Whigs. His personal attacks, indeed, upon the party have a questionable sound. In his zeal he constantly forgets that the corrupt ring which he denounces were the very men from whom he expected preferment. ”I well remember,” he says[29] elsewhere, ”the clamours often raised during the late reign of that party (the Whigs) against the leaders by those who thought their merits were not rewarded; and they had, no doubt, reason on their side, because it is, no doubt, a misfortune to forfeit honour and conscience for nothing”--rather an awkward remark from a man who was calling Somers ”a false, deceitful rascal” for not giving him a bishopric! His eager desire to make the ”ungrateful dogs” repent their ill-usage of him prompts attacks which injure his own character with that of his former a.s.sociates. But he has some ground for saying that Whigs have changed their principles, in the sense that their dislike of prerogative and of standing armies had curiously declined when the Crown and the army came to be on their side. Their enjoyment of power had made them soften some of the prejudices learnt in days of depression. Swift's dislike of what we now call ”militarism” really went deeper than any party sentiment; and in that sense, as we shall hereafter see, it had really most affinity with a radicalism which would have shocked Whigs and Tories alike. But in this particular case it fell in with the Tory sentiment. The masculine vigour of the _Examiners_ served the ministry, who were scarcely less in danger from the excessive zeal of their more bigoted followers than from the resistance of the Whig minority. The pig-headed country squires had formed an October Club, to muddle themselves with beer and politics, and hoped--good honest souls--to drive ministers into a genuine attack on the corrupt practices of their predecessors. All Harley's skill in intriguing and wire-pulling would be needed. The ministry, said Swift (on March 4th), ”stood like an isthmus” between Whigs and violent Tories.

He trembled for the result. They are able seamen, but the tempest ”is too great, the s.h.i.+p too rotten, and the crew all against them.” Somers had been twice in the queen's closet. The d.u.c.h.ess of Somerset, who had succeeded the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, might be trying to play Mrs.