Part 6 (1/2)
Carteret, upon landing, began by trying to suppress his adversary. A reward of 300_l._ was offered for the discovery of the author of the fourth letter. A prosecution was ordered against the printer. Swift went to the levee of the Lord Lieutenant, and reproached him bitterly for his severity against a poor tradesman who had published papers for the good of his country. Carteret answered in a happy quotation from Virgil, a feat which always seems to have brought consolation to the statesman of that day.
Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri.
Another story is more characteristic. Swift's butler had acted as his amanuensis, and absented himself one night whilst the proclamation was running. Swift thought that the butler was either treacherous or presuming upon his knowledge of the secret. As soon as the man returned he ordered him to strip off his livery and begone. ”I am in your power,” he said, ”and for that very reason I will not stand your insolence.” The poor butler departed, but preserved his fidelity; and Swift, when the tempest had blown over, rewarded him by appointing him verger in the cathedral.
The grand jury threw out the bill against the printer in spite of all Whitshed's efforts; they were discharged; and the next grand jury presented Wood's halfpence as a nuisance. Carteret gave way, the patent was surrendered, and Swift might congratulate himself upon a complete victory.
The conclusion is in one respect rather absurd. The Irish succeeded in rejecting a real benefit at the cost of paying Wood the profit which he would have made, had he been allowed to confer it. Another point must be admitted. Swift's audacious misstatements were successful for the time in rousing the spirit of the people. They have led, however, to a very erroneous estimate of the whole case. English statesmen and historians[68]
have found it so easy to expose his errors that they have thought his whole case absurd. The grievance was not what it was represented, therefore it is argued that there was no grievance. The very essence of the case was that the Irish people were to be plundered by the German mistress; and such plunder was possible because the English people, as Swift says, never thought of Ireland except when there was nothing else to be talked of in the coffee-houses.[69] Owing to the conditions of the controversy, this grievance only came out gradually, and could never be fully stated. Swift could never do more than hint at the transaction. His letters (including three which appeared after the last mentioned, enforcing the same case) have often been cited as models of eloquence, and compared to Demosthenes. We must make some deduction from this, as in the case of his former political pamphlets. The intensity of his absorption in the immediate end, deprives them of some literary merits; and we, to whom the sophistries are palpable enough, are apt to resent them. Anybody can be effective in a way, if he chooses to lie boldly. Yet, in another sense, it is hard to over-praise the letters. They have in a high degree the peculiar stamp of Swift's genius; the vein of the most nervous common-sense and pithy a.s.sertion with an undercurrent of intense pa.s.sion, the more impressive because it is never allowed to exhale in mere rhetoric.
Swift's success, the dauntless front which he had shown to the oppressor, made him the idol of his countrymen. A drapier's club was formed in his honour, which collected the letters and drank toasts and sang songs to celebrate their hero. In a sad letter to Pope, in 1737, he complains that none of his equals care for him; but adds that as he walks the streets he has ”a thousand hats and blessings upon old scores which those we call the gentry have forgot.” The people received him as their champion. When he returned from England in 1726, bells were rung, bonfires lighted and a guard of honour escorted him to the deanery. Towns voted him their freedom and received him like a prince. When Walpole spoke of arresting him, a prudent friend told the minister that the messenger would require a guard of 10,000 soldiers. Corporations asked his advice in elections, and the weavers appealed to him on questions about their trade. In one of his satires,[70] Swift had attacked a certain Serjeant Bettesworth--
Thus at the bar the b.o.o.by Bettesworth Though half-a-crown o'erpays his sweat's worth.
Bettesworth called upon him with, as Swift reports, a knife in his pocket, and complained in such terms as to imply some intention of personal violence. The neighbours instantly sent a deputation to the dean, proposing to take vengeance upon Bettesworth, and though he induced them to disperse peaceably, they formed a guard to watch the house; and Bettesworth complained that his attack upon the dean had lowered his professional income by 1200_l._ a year. A quaint example of his popularity is given by Sheridan. A great crowd had collected to see an eclipse. Swift thereupon sent out the bellman to give notice that the eclipse had been postponed by the dean's orders; and the crowd dispersed.
Influence with the people, however, could not bring Swift back to power.
At one time there seemed to be a gleam of hope. Swift visited England twice in 1726 and 1727. He paid long visits to his old friend Pope, and again met Bolingbroke, now returned from exile, and trying to make a place in English politics. Peterborough introduced the dean to Walpole, to whom Swift detailed his views upon Irish politics. Walpole was the last man to set about a great reform from mere considerations of justice and philanthropy, and was not likely to trust a confidant of Bolingbroke. He was civil but indifferent. Swift, however, was introduced by his friends to Mrs. Howard, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, soon to become George II. The princess, afterwards Queen Caroline, ordered Swift to come and see her, and he complied, as he says, after nine commands. He told her that she had lately seen a wild boy from Germany, and now he supposed she wanted to see a wild dean from Ireland. Some civilities pa.s.sed; Swift offered some plaids of Irish manufacture, and the princess promised some medals in return. When, in the next year, George I. died, the Opposition hoped great things from the change. Pulteney had tried to get Swift's powerful help for the _Craftsman_, the Opposition organ; and the Opposition hoped to upset Walpole. Swift, who had thought of going to France for his health, asked Mrs. Howard's advice. She recommended him to stay; and he took the recommendation as amounting to a promise of support.
He had some hopes of obtaining English preferment in exchange for his deanery in what he calls (in the date to one of his letters[71]) ”wretched Dublin in miserable Ireland.” It soon appeared, however, that the mistress was powerless; and that Walpole was to be as firm as ever in his seat.
Swift returned to Ireland, never again to leave it: to lose soon afterwards his beloved Stella, and nurse an additional grudge against courts and favourites.
The bitterness with which he resented Mrs. Howard's supposed faithlessness is painfully ill.u.s.trative in truth of the morbid state of mind which was growing upon him. ”You think,” he says to Bolingbroke in 1729, ”as I ought to think, that it is time for me to have done with the world; and so I would, if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.” That terrible phrase expresses but too vividly the state of mind which was now becoming familiar to him. Separated by death and absence from his best friends, and tormented by increasing illness, he looked out upon a state of things in which he could see no ground for hope. The resistance to Wood's halfpence had staved off immediate ruin; but had not cured the fundamental evil.
Some tracts upon Irish affairs, written after the Drapier's Letters, sufficiently indicate his despairing vein. ”I am,” he says in 1737, when proposing some remedy for the swarms of beggars in Dublin, ”a desponder by nature,” and he has found out that the people will never stir themselves to remove a single grievance. His old prejudices were as keen as ever, and could dictate personal outbursts. He attacked the bishops bitterly for offering certain measures which in his view sacrificed the permanent interests of the Church to that of the actual occupants. He showed his own sincerity by refusing to take fines for leases which would have benefited himself at the expense of his successors. With equal earnestness he still clung to the Test Acts, and a.s.sailed the Protestant dissenters with all his old bitterness, and ridiculed their claims to brotherhood with Churchmen. To the end he was a Churchman before everything. One of the last of his poetical performances was prompted by the sanction given by the Irish Parliament to an opposition to certain ”t.i.tles of ejectment.” He had defended the right of the Irish Parliament against English rulers; but when it attacked the interests of his Church his fury showed itself in the most savage satire that he ever wrote, the _Legion Club_. It is an explosion of wrath tinged with madness.
Could I from the building's top Hear the rattling thunder drop, While the devil upon the roof (If the devil be thunder-proof) Should with poker fiery red Crack the stones and melt the lead, Drive them down on every skull When the den of thieves is full; Quite destroy the harpies' nest, How might this our isle be blest!
What follows fully keeps up to this level. Swift flings filth like a maniac, plunges into ferocious personalities, and ends fitly with the execration,--
May their G.o.d, the devil, confound them.
He was seized with one of his fits whilst writing the poem and was never afterwards capable of sustained composition.
Some further pamphlets--especially one on the State of Ireland--repeat and enforce his views. One of them requires special mention. The _Modest Proposal_ (written in 1729) _for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country_--the proposal being that they should be turned into articles of food--gives the very essence of Swift's feeling, and is one of the most tremendous pieces of satire in existence. It shows the quality already noticed. Swift is burning with a pa.s.sion, the glow of which makes other pa.s.sions look cold, as it is said that some bright lights cause other illuminating objects to cast a shadow. Yet his face is absolutely grave, and he details his plan as calmly as a modern projector suggesting the importation of Australian meat. The superficial coolness may be revolting to tender-hearted people, and has indeed led to condemnation of the supposed ferocity of the author almost as surprising as the criticisms which can see in it nothing but an exquisite piece of humour. It is, in truth, fearful to read even now. Yet we can forgive and even sympathize when we take it for what it really is--the most complete expression of burning indignation against intolerable wrongs. It utters, indeed, a serious conviction. ”I confess myself,” says Swift in a remarkable paper,[72] ”to be touched with a very sensible pleasure when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes treble the worth; brought up to steal and beg for want of work; to whom death would be the best thing to be wished for, on account both of themselves and the public.” He remarks in the same place on the lamentable contradiction presented in Ireland to the maxim that the ”people are the riches of a nation,” and the _Modest Proposal_ is the fullest comment on this melancholy reflection. After many visionary proposals, he has at last hit upon the plan, which has at least the advantage that by adopting it ”we can incur no danger of disobliging England. For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country which would be glad to eat up a whole nation without it.”
Swift once asked Delany[73] whether the ”corruptions and villanies of men in power did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?” ”No,” said Delany. ”Why, how can you help it?” said Swift. ”Because,” replied Delany, ”I am commanded to the contrary--_fret not thyself because of the unG.o.dly_.” That, like other wise maxims, is capable of an ambiguous application. As Delany took it, Swift might perhaps have replied that it was a very comfortable maxim--for the unG.o.dly. His own application of Scripture is different. It tells us, he says, in his proposal for using Irish manufactures, that ”oppression makes a wise man mad.” If, therefore, some men are not mad, it must be because they are not wise. In truth, it is characteristic of Swift that he could never learn the great lesson of submission even to the inevitable. He could not, like an easy-going Delany, submit to oppression which might possibly be resisted with success; but as little could he submit when all resistance was hopeless.
His rage, which could find no better outlet, burnt inwardly and drove him mad. It is very interesting to compare Swift's wrathful denunciations with Berkeley's treatment of the same before in the _Querist_ (1735-7).
Berkeley is full of luminous suggestions upon economical questions which are entirely beyond Swift's mark. He is in a region quite above the sophistries of the _Drapier's Letters_. He sees equally the terrible grievance that no people in the world is so beggarly, wretched, and dest.i.tute as the common Irish. But he thinks all complaints against the English rule useless and therefore foolish. If the English restrain our trade ill-advisedly, is it not, he asks, plainly our interest to accommodate ourselves to them (No. 136)? Have we not the advantage of English protection without sharing English responsibilities? He asks, ”whether England doth not really love us and wish well to us as bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh? and whether it be not our part to cultivate this love and affection all manner of ways?” (Nos. 322, 323.) One can fancy how Swift must have received this characteristic suggestion of the admirable Berkeley, who could not bring himself to think ill of any one. Berkeley's main contention is no doubt sound in itself, namely, that the welfare of the country really depended on the industry and economy of its inhabitants, and that such qualities would have made the Irish comfortable in spite of all English restrictions and Government abuses.
But, then, Swift might well have answered that such general maxims are idle. It is all very well for divines to tell people to become good and to find out that then they will be happy. But how are they to be made good?
Are the Irish intrinsically worse than other men, or is their laziness and restlessness due to special and removable circ.u.mstances? In the latter case is there not more real value in attacking tangible evils than in propounding general maxims and calling upon all men to submit to oppression, and even to believe in the oppressor's good-will in the name of Christian charity? To answer those questions would be to plunge into interminable and hopeless controversies. Meanwhile Swift's fierce indignation against English oppression might almost as well have been directed against a law of nature for any immediate result. Whether the rousing of the national spirit was any benefit is a question which I must leave to others. In any case, the work, however darkened by personal feeling or love of cla.s.s-privilege, expressed as hearty a hatred of oppression as ever animated a human being.
CHAPTER VIII.
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.
The winter of 1713-14 pa.s.sed by Swift in England was full of anxiety and vexation. He found time, however, to join in a remarkable literary a.s.sociation. The so-called Scriblerus Club does not appear, indeed, to have had any definite organization. The rising young wits, Pope and Gay, both of them born in 1688, were already becoming famous, and were taken up by Swift, still in the zenith of his political power. Parnell, a few years their senior, had been introduced by Swift to Oxford as a convert from Whiggism. All three became intimate with Swift and Arbuthnot, the most learned and amiable of the whole circle of Swift's friends. Swift declared him to have every quality that could make a man amiable and useful with but one defect--he had ”a sort of slouch in his walk;” he was loved and respected by every one, and was one of the most distinguished of the Brothers. Swift and Arbuthnot and their three juniors discussed literary plans in the midst of the growing political excitement. Even Oxford used, as Pope tells us, to amuse himself during the very crisis of his fate by scribbling verses and talking nonsense with the members of this informal Club, and some doggerel lines exchanged with him remain as a specimen--a poor one it is to be hoped--of their intercourse. The familiarity thus begun continued through the life of the members. Swift can have seen very little of Pope. He hardly made his acquaintance till the latter part of 1713; they parted in the summer of 1714; and never met again except in Swift's two visits to England in 1726-27. Yet their correspondence shows an affection which was no doubt heightened by the consciousness of each that the friends.h.i.+p of his most famous contemporary author was creditable; but which, upon Swift's side at least, was thoroughly sincere and cordial, and strengthened with advancing years.
The final cause of the Club was supposed to be the composition of a joint-stock satire. We learn from an interesting letter[74] that Pope formed the original design; though Swift thought that Arbuthnot was the only one capable of carrying it out. The scheme was to write the memoirs of an imaginary pedant, who had dabbled with equal wrong-headedness in all kinds of knowledge; and thus recalls Swift's early performances--the _Battle of the Books_ and the _Tale of a Tub_. Arbuthnot begs Swift to work upon it during his melancholy retirement at Letcombe. Swift had other things to occupy his mind; and upon the dispersion of the party the Club fell into abeyance. Fragments of the original plan were carried out by Pope and Arbuthnot, and form part of the _Miscellanies_, to which Swift contributed a number of poetical sc.r.a.ps, published under Pope's direction in 1726-27. It seems probable that _Gulliver_ originated in Swift's mind in the course of his meditations upon Scriblerus. The composition of _Gulliver_ was one of the occupations by which he amused himself after recovering from the great shock of his ”exile.” He worked, as he seems always to have done, slowly and intermittently. Part of Brobdingnag at least, as we learn from a letter of Vanessa's, was in existence by 1722.
Swift brought the whole ma.n.u.script to England in 1726, and it was published anonymously in the following winter. The success was instantaneous and overwhelming. ”I will make over all my profits” (in a work then being published) ”to you,” writes Arbuthnot, ”for the property of _Gulliver's Travels_, which, I believe, will have as great a run as John Bunyan.” The antic.i.p.ation was amply fulfilled. _Gulliver's Travels_ is one of the very few books some knowledge of which may be fairly a.s.sumed in any one who reads anything. Yet something must be said of the secret of the astonis.h.i.+ng success of this unique performance.