Part 4 (1/2)

More of your lining And less of your dining.”

At last Swift, hearing that he was again to be pa.s.sed over, gave a positive intimation that he would retire if nothing was done; adding that he should complain of Harley for nothing but neglecting to inform him sooner of the hopelessness of his position.[38] The dean of St. Patrick's was at last promoted to a bishopric, and Swift appointed to the vacant deanery. The warrant was signed on April 23, and in June Swift set out to take possession of his deanery. It was no great prize; he would have to pay 1000_l._ for the house and fees, and thus, he says, it would be three years before he would be the richer for it; and, moreover, it involved what he already described as ”banishment” to a country which he hated.

His state of mind when entering upon his preferment was painfully depressed. ”At my first coming,” he writes to Miss Vanhomrigh, ”I thought I should have died with discontent; and was horribly melancholy while they were installing me; but it begins to wear off, and change to dulness.”

This depression is singular, when we remember that Swift was returning to the woman for whom he had the strongest affection, and from whom he had been separated for nearly three years; and moreover, that he was returning as a famous and a successful man. He seems to have been received with some disfavour by a society of Whig proclivities; he was suffering from a fresh return of ill-health; and besides the absence from the political struggles in which he was so keenly interested, he could not think of them without deep anxiety. He returned to London in October at the earnest request of political friends. Matters were looking serious; and though the journal to Stella was not again taken up, we can pretty well trace the events of the following period.

There can rarely have been a less congenial pair of colleagues than Harley and St. John. Their union was that of a still more brilliant, daring, and self-confident Disraeli with a very inferior edition of Sir Robert Peel, with smaller intellect and exaggerated infirmities. The timidity, procrastination, and ”refinement” of the Treasurer were calculated to exasperate his audacious colleague. From the earliest period Swift had declared that everything depended upon the good mutual understanding of the two; he was frightened by every symptom of discord, and declares (in August, 1711) that he has ventured all his credit with the Ministers to remove their differences. He knew, as he afterwards said (October 20, 1711), that this was the way to be sent back to his willows at Laracor, but everything must be risked in such a case. When difficulties revived next year he hoped that he had made a reconciliation. But the discord was too vital. The victory of the Tories brought on a serious danger. They had come into power to make peace. They had made it. The next question was that of the succession of the crown. Here they neither reflected the general opinion of the nation nor were agreed amongst themselves. Harley, as we now know, had flirted with the Jacobites; and Bolingbroke was deep in treasonable plots. The existence of such plots was a secret to Swift, who indignantly denied their existence. When King hinted at a possible danger to Swift from the discovery of St. John's treason, he indignantly replied that he must have been ”a most false and vile man” to join in anything of the kind.[39] He professes elsewhere his conviction that there were not at this period 500 Jacobites in England; and ”amongst these not six of any quality or consequence.”[40] Swift's sincerity, here as everywhere, is beyond all suspicion; but his conviction proves incidentally that he was in the dark as to the ”wheels within wheels”--the backstairs plots, by which the administration of his friends was hampered and distracted. With so many causes for jealousy and discord, it is no wonder that the political world became a ma.s.s of complex intrigue and dispute. The queen, meanwhile, might die at any moment, and some decided course of action become imperatively necessary. Whenever the queen was ill, said Harley, people were at their wits' end; as soon as she recovered they acted as if she were immortal. Yet, though he complained of the general indecision, his own conduct was most hopelessly undecided.

It was in the hopes of pacifying these intrigues that Swift was recalled from Ireland. He plunged into the fight, but not with his old success. Two pamphlets which he published at the end of 1713 are indications of his state of mind. One was an attack upon a wild no-popery shriek emitted by Bishop Burnet, whom he treats, says Johnson, ”like one whom he is glad of an opportunity to insult.” A man who, like Burnet, is on friendly terms with those who a.s.sail the privileges of his order must often expect such treatment from its zealous adherents. Yet the scornful a.s.sault, which finds out weak places enough in Burnet's mental rhetoric, is in painful contrast to the dignified argument of earlier pamphlets. The other pamphlet was an incident in a more painful contest. Swift had tried to keep on good terms with Addison and Steele. He had prevented Steele's dismissal from a Commissioners.h.i.+p of Stamps. Steele, however, had lost his place of Gazetteer for an attack upon Harley. Swift persuaded Harley to be reconciled to Steele, on condition that Steele should apologize. Addison prevented Steele from making the required submission, ”out of mere spite,”

says Swift, at the thought that Steele should require other help; rather, we guess, because Addison thought that the submission would savour of party infidelity. A coldness followed; ”all our friends.h.i.+p is over,” says Swift of Addison (March 6th, 1711); and though good feeling revived between the princ.i.p.als, their intimacy ceased. Swift, swept into the ministerial vortex, pretty well lost sight of Addison; though they now and then met on civil terms. Addison dined with Swift and St. John upon April 3rd, 1713, and Swift attended a rehearsal of _Cato_--the only time when we see him at a theatre. Meanwhile the ill feeling to Steele remained, and bore bitter fruit.

Steele and Addison had to a great extent retired from politics, and during the eventful years 1711-12 were chiefly occupied in the politically harmless _Spectator_. But Steele was always ready to find vent for his zeal; and in 1713 he fell foul of the _Examiner_ in the _Guardian_. Swift had long ceased to write _Examiners_ or to be responsible for the conduct of the paper, though he still occasionally inspired the writers. Steele, naturally enough, supposed Swift to be still at work; and in defending a daughter of Steele's enemy, Nottingham, not only suggested that Swift was her a.s.sailant, but added an insinuation that Swift was an infidel. The imputation stung Swift to the quick. He had a sensibility to personal attacks, not rare with those who most freely indulge in them, which was ridiculed by the easy-going Harley. An attack from an old friend--from a friend whose good opinion he still valued, though their intimacy had ceased; from a friend, moreover, whom in spite of their separation he had tried to protect; and, finally, an attack upon the tenderest part of his character, irritated him beyond measure. Some angry letters pa.s.sed, Steele evidently regarding Swift as a traitor, and disbelieving his professions of innocence and his claims to active kindness; whilst Swift felt Steele's ingrat.i.tude the more deeply from the apparent plausibility of the accusation. If Steele was really unjust and ungenerous, we may admit as a partial excuse that in such cases the less prosperous combatant has a kind of right to bitterness. The quarrel broke out at the time of Swift's appointment to the deanery. Soon after the new dean's return to England, Steele was elected member for Stockbridge, and rushed into political controversy. His most conspicuous performance was a frothy and pompous pamphlet called the _Crisis_, intended to rouse alarms as to French invasion and Jacobite intrigues. Swift took the opportunity to revenge himself upon Steele. Two pamphlets--_The importance of the ”Guardian”

considered_, and _The Public Spirit of the Whigs_ (the latter in answer to the _Crisis_)--are fierce attacks upon Steele personally and politically.

Swift's feeling comes out sufficiently in a remark in the first. He reverses the saying about Cranmer, and says that he may affirm of Steele, ”Do him a good turn, and he is your enemy for ever.” There is vigorous writing enough, and effective ridicule of Steele's literary style and political alarmism. But it is painfully obvious, as in the attack upon Burnet, that personal animosity is now the predominant instead of an auxiliary feeling. Swift is anxious beyond all things to mortify and humiliate an antagonist. And he is in proportion less efficient as a partizan, though more amusing. He has, moreover, the disadvantage of being politically on the defensive. He is no longer proclaiming a policy, but endeavouring to disavow the policy attributed to his party. The wrath which breaks forth, and the bitter personality with which it is edged, were far more calculated to irritate his opponents than to disarm the lookers-on of their suspicions.

Part of the fury was no doubt due to the growing unsoundness of his political position. Steele in the beginning of 1714 was expelled from the House for the _Crisis_; and an attack made upon Swift in the House of Lords for an incidental outburst against the hated Scots in his reply to the _Crisis_, was only staved off by a manoeuvre of the ministry.

Meanwhile Swift was urging the necessity of union upon men who hated each other more than they regarded any public cause whatever. Swift at last brought his two patrons together in Lady Masham's lodgings, and entreated them to be reconciled. If, he said, they would agree, all existing mischiefs could be remedied in two minutes. If they would not, the ministry would be ruined in two months. Bolingbroke a.s.sented: Oxford characteristically shuffled, said ”all would be well,” and asked Swift to dine with him next day. Swift, however, said that he would not stay to see the inevitable catastrophe. It was his natural instinct to hide his head in such moments; his intensely proud and sensitive nature could not bear to witness the triumph of his enemies, and he accordingly retired at the end of May, 1714, to the quiet parsonage of Upper Letcombe in Berks.h.i.+re.

The public wondered and speculated; friends wrote letters describing the scenes which followed, and desiring Swift's help; and he read, and walked, and chewed the cud of melancholy reflection, and thought of stealing away to Ireland. He wrote, however, a very remarkable pamphlet, giving his view of the situation, which was not published at the time; events went too fast.

Swift's conduct at this critical point is most noteworthy. The pamphlet (_Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs_) exactly coincides with all his private and public utterances. His theory was simple and straightforward. The existing situation was the culminating result of Harley's policy of refinement and procrastination. Swift two years before had written a very able remonstrance with the October Club, who had sought to push Harley into decisive measures; but though he preached patience, he really sympathized with their motives. Instead of making a clean sweep of his opponents, Harley had left many of them in office, either from ”refinement”--that over-subtlety of calculation which Swift thought inferior to plain common sense, and which, to use his favourite ill.u.s.tration, is like the sharp knife that mangles the paper, when a plain, blunt paper-knife cuts it properly--or else from inability to move the Queen, which he had foolishly allowed to pa.s.s for unwillingness, in order to keep up the appearance of power. Two things were now to be done; first, a clean sweep should be made of all Whigs and dissenters from office and from the army; secondly, the Court of Hanover should be required to break off all intercourse with the Opposition, on which condition the heir-presumptive (the infant Prince Frederick) might be sent over to reside in England. Briefly, Swift's policy was a policy of ”thorough.” Oxford's vacillations were the great obstacle, and Oxford was falling before the alliance of Bolingbroke with Lady Masham. Bolingbroke might have turned Swift's policy to the account of the Jacobites; but Swift did not take this into account, and in the _Free Thoughts_ he declares his utter disbelief in any danger to the succession. What side, then, should he take? He sympathized with Bolingbroke's avowed principles.

Bolingbroke was eager for his help, and even hoped to reconcile him to the red-haired d.u.c.h.ess. But Swift was bound to Oxford by strong personal affection; by an affection which was not diminished even by the fact that Oxford had procrastinated in the matter of Swift's own preferment; and was, at this very moment, annoying him by delaying to pay the 1000_l._ incurred by his installation in the deanery. To Oxford he had addressed (Nov. 21, 1713) a letter of consolation upon the death of a daughter, possessing the charm which is given to such letters only by the most genuine sympathy with the feelings of the loser, and by a spontaneous selection of the only safe topic--praise of the lost, equally tender and sincere. Every reference to Oxford is affectionate. When, at the beginning of July, Oxford was hastening to his fall, Swift wrote to him another manly and dignified letter, professing an attachment beyond the reach of external accidents of power and rank. The end came soon. Swift heard that Oxford was about to resign. He wrote at once (July 25, 1714) to propose to accompany him to his country house. Oxford replied two days later in a letter oddly characteristic. He begs Swift to come with him; ”If I have not tired you _tete-a-tete_, fling away so much of your time upon one who loves you;” and then rather spoils the pathos by a bit of hopeless doggerel. Swift wrote to Miss Vanhomrigh on August 1. ”I have been asked,”

he says, ”to join with those people now in power; but I will not do it. I told Lord Oxford I would go with him, when he was out; and now he begs it of me, and I cannot refuse him. I meddle not with his faults, as he was a Minister of State; but you know his personal kindness to me was excessive; he distinguished and chose me above all other men, while he was great, and his letter to me the other day was the most moving imaginable.”

An intimacy which bore such fruit in time of trial was not one founded upon a servility varnished by self-a.s.sertion. No stauncher friend than Swift ever lived. But his fidelity was not to be put to further proof. The day of the letter just quoted was the day of Queen Anne's death. The crash which followed ruined the ”people now in power” as effectually as Oxford.

The party with which Swift had identified himself, in whose success all his hopes and ambitions were bound up, was not so much ruined as annihilated. ”The Earl of Oxford,” wrote Bolingbroke to Swift, ”was removed on Tuesday. The Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and how does fortune banter us!”

CHAPTER VI.

STELLA AND VANESSA.

The final crash of the Tory administration found Swift approaching the end of his forty-seventh year. It found him in his own opinion prematurely aged both in mind and body. His personal prospects and political hopes were crushed. ”I have a letter from Dean Swift,” says Arbuthnot in September; ”he keeps up his n.o.ble spirit, and though like a man knocked down, you may behold him still with a stern countenance and aiming a blow at his adversaries.” Yet his adversaries knew, and he knew only too well, that such blows as he could now deliver could at most show his wrath without gratifying his revenge. He was disarmed as well as ”knocked down.”

He writes to Bolingbroke from Dublin in despair. ”I live a country life in town,” he says, ”see n.o.body, and go every day once to prayers, and hope in a few months to grow as stupid as the present situation of affairs will require. Well, after all, parsons are not such bad company, especially when they are under subjection; and I let none but such come near me.”

Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Ormond were soon in exile or the tower; and a letter to Pope next year gives a sufficient picture of Swift's feelings.

”You know,” he said, ”how well I loved both Lord Oxford and Bolingbroke, and how dear the Duke of Ormond is to me; do you imagine I can be easy while their enemies are endeavouring to take off their heads?--_I nunc et versus tec.u.m meditare canoros!_” ”You are to understand,” he says in conclusion, ”that I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house; my family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in the stable, a footman, and an old maid, who are all at board wages, and when I do not dine abroad or make an entertainment (which last is very rare), I eat a mutton pie and drink half a pint of wine; my amus.e.m.e.nts are defending my small dominions against the archbishop, and endeavouring to reduce my rebellious choir.

_Perditur haec inter misero lux._” In another of the dignified letters which show the finest side of his nature, he offered to join Oxford, whose intrepid behaviour, he says, ”has astonished every one but me, who know you so well.” But he could do nothing beyond showing sympathy; and he remained alone a.s.serting his authority in his ecclesiastical domains, brooding over the past, and for the time unable to divert his thoughts into any less distressing channel. Some verses written in October ”in sickness” give a remarkable expression of his melancholy,--

'Tis true--then why should I repine To see my life so fast decline?

But why obscurely here alone Where I am neither loved nor known?

My state of health none care to learn, My life is here no soul's concern, And those with whom I now converse Without a tear will tend my hea.r.s.e.

Yet we might have fancied that his lot would not be so unbearable. After all, a fall which ends in a deanery should break no bones. His friends, though hard pressed, survived; and, lastly, was any one so likely to shed tears upon his hea.r.s.e as the woman to whom he was finally returning? The answer to this question brings us to a story imperfectly known to us, but of vital importance in Swift's history.

We have seen in what masterful fas.h.i.+on Swift took possession of great men.

The same imperious temper shows itself in his relations to women. He required absolute submission. Entrance into the inner circle of his affections could only be achieved by something like abas.e.m.e.nt; but all within it became as a part of himself, to be both cherished and protected without stint. His affectation of brutality was part of a system. On first meeting Lady Burlington at her husband's house, he ordered her to sing.

She declined. He replied, ”Sing, or I will make you. Why, madam, I suppose you take me for one of your English hedge-parsons; sing when I tell you.”

She burst into tears and retired. The next time he met her he began, ”Pray, madam, are you as proud and ill-natured as when I saw you last?”

She good-humouredly gave in, and Swift became her warm friend. Another lady to whom he was deeply attached was a famous beauty, Anne Long. A whimsical treaty was drawn up, setting forth that ”the said Dr. Swift, upon the score of his merit and extraordinary qualities, doth claim the sole and undoubted right that all persons whatever shall make such advance to him as he pleases to demand, any law, claim, custom, privilege of s.e.x, beauty, fortune or quality to the contrary notwithstanding;” and providing that Miss Long shall cease the contumacy in which she has been abetted by the Vanhomrighs, but be allowed in return, in consideration of her being ”a Lady of the Toast,” to give herself the reputation of being one of Swift's acquaintance. Swift's affection for Miss Long is touchingly expressed in private papers, and in a letter written upon her death in retirement and poverty. He intends to put up a monument to her memory, and wrote a notice of her, ”to serve her memory,” and also, as he characteristically adds, to spite the brother who had neglected her. Years afterwards he often refers to the ”edict” which he annually issued in England, commanding all ladies to make him the first advances. He graciously makes an exception in favour of the d.u.c.h.ess of Queensberry, though he observes incidentally that he now hates all people whom he cannot command. This humorous a.s.sumption, like all Swift's humour, has a strong element of downright earnest. He gives whimsical prominence to a genuine feeling. He is always acting the part of despot, and acting it very gravely. When he stays at Sir Arthur Acheson's, Lady Acheson becomes his pupil, and is ”severely chid” when she reads wrong. Mrs. Pendarves, afterwards Mrs. Delany, says in the same way that Swift calls himself ”her master,” and corrects her when she speaks bad English.[41] He behaved in the same way to his servants. Delany tells us that he was ”one of the best masters in the world,” paid his servants the highest rate of wages known, and took great pains to encourage and help them to save. But, on engaging them, he always tested their humility. One of their duties, he told them, would be to take turns in cleaning the scullion's shoes, and if they objected, he sent them about their business. He is said to have tested a curate's docility in the same way by offering him sour wine. His dominion was most easily extended over women; and a long list might be easily made out of the feminine favourites who at all periods of his life were in more or less intimate relations with this self-appointed sultan. From the wives of peers and the daughters of lord-lieutenants down to Dublin tradeswomen with a taste for rhyming, and even scullerymaids with no tastes at all, a whole hierarchy of female slaves bowed to his rule, and were admitted into higher and lower degrees of favour.