Part 11

On the Catholic majority, those “savage old Irish,” he spent little sympathy. They might be above the vermin of the island but they were below the voters. He had no patience with the Dissenters. They were outside the Church and to that extent outside his Ireland. Ireland for him was the English settled there, the noblemen, the landlords, the clergy, the lawyers, the merchants. Their ancestors had come to rule the conquered province. They themselves ought now to rule it. Instead, they were called Irish, which they were not, and in turn were ruled by the newest English, a changing garrison of place-men. Men born in Ireland could not hope for posts at home. They had either to rot on their estates or to go abroad while their tenants were racked to support them in a dingy splendour. The Irish Parliament had no power. The laws, all made in England, condemned Ireland to poverty. Cattle could not be shipped to England, woollen goods could not be shipped anywhere. Without a free hand in agriculture, manufacture, or trade, Ireland from being so long bound was numb or sodden.

Mortified by finding himself in exile among slaves, Swift first despised them and then hated their tyrants. The tyrants were the Whigs who had driven him out of power. He could not become a slave. He could not endure a tyrant. Everything in his nature urged him to rouse the slaves and resist the tyrants. But he had the advantage, when he turned his fury loose, of a long experience in hating the party to which his enemies belonged.

Where his whole cause was so good Swift did not need to be fastidious about his particular occasion for attack. William Wood, an English ironmonger, in 1722 obtained a patent from the King to coin halfpence and farthings for Ireland for fourteen years. The Irish were not agreed that they needed new copper coins, certainly not to the amount of a hundred thousand pounds. The Irish were not consulted, nor even the Lord Lieutenant. Higher interests were involved. The patent had really been granted to the Duchess of Kendal, the King’s mistress, who sold it to Wood for ten thousand pounds. Walpole, Lord Treasurer, did not object. The Duchess had been loyal. The King was grateful. Through the method of the patent she could be rewarded, not by the King directly but indirectly by his Irish subjects, who already, if they had known it, contributed three thousand annually in pensions to the loyal lady. Since there was some risk, Wood deserved a profit for his trouble. The necessary copper would cost him sixty thousand pounds. When he had satisfied the Duchess he would still have thirty thousand, of which perhaps one-fifth would pay for the coinage and about one-seventh go to fees required by the patent. As jobs went in the government of Ireland under Walpole, the profit was not unheard of.

But the failure to consult the Irish had angered them. Their Parliament protested to the Treasury. Lord Carteret, a friend of Swift and now Secretary of State, was at odds with Walpole. Walpole, persisting, got Carteret appointed Lord Lieutenant early in 1724, to get rid of him in London. By the time he reached Dublin the whole country was in a passion.

The passion was led and guided by Swift. Walpole’s scheme, shabby, cynical, insulting, brought the satirist with a roar out of his long silence. He was as crafty as he was furious. Pretending to be a small tradesman named Drapier, he addressed, between April and November 1724, a series of letters to the shopkeepers, tradesmen, farmers, and common people, to his printer, to the nobility and gentry, to the whole people of Ireland. He was as furious as he was crafty. Wood was a “single, diminutive, insignificant mechanic.” He and his agents, trying to force upon the Irish the coins which the patent did not oblige them to accept, were “enemies to God and this kingdom.” “I will shoot Mr. Wood and his deputies through the head, like highwaymen or housebreakers, if they dare to force one farthing of their coin upon me in the payment of an hundred pounds. It is no loss of honour to submit to the lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat.” “I entreat you, my dear countrymen, not to be under the least concern upon these and the like rumours, which are no more than the last howls of a dog dissected alive, as I hope he hath sufficiently been.”

Swift did not dare to accuse the King, and he only hinted at the honorarium to the Duchess. It was the ministers who had planned this contemptuous oppression. It was Wood who was to his own advantage carrying it out at the expense of Ireland. If Wood’s copper became current every Irishman who received a coin, even in the smallest transaction, would get less than he gave, and every Irishman who paid out a coin would give less than he got. While Wood prospered “we should live together as merry and sociable as beggars, only with this one abatement, that we should have neither meat to feed nor manufactures to clothe us, unless we could be content to prance about in coats of mail or eat brass as ostriches do iron.”

Swift must have known that his arguments were false, must have known that the intrinsic value of such small coins did not matter and that they would be as good as any if they were used. He who gave and he who got could not be equally losers. But Swift did not boggle over economic niceties. Here was a principle. To accept the coins would be to surrender to tyrants and become slaves. As soon as he had stirred the public to a fear of losing money and had assured them they could lawfully refuse the new halfpence and farthings, he moved towards a general position.

“Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England? How have they forfeited their freedom? Is not their Parliament as fair a representative of the people as that of England?... Are they not subjects of the same king? Does not the same sun shine upon them? And have they not the same God for their protector? Am I a freeman in England, and do I become a slave in six hours by crossing the channel?” “I have looked over all the English and Irish statutes without finding any law that makes Ireland depend upon England any more than England does upon Ireland. We have indeed obliged ourselves to have the same king with them, and consequently they are obliged to have the same king with us. For the law was made by our own ancestors, and our ancestors then were not such fools (whatever they were in the preceding reign) to bring themselves under I know not what dependence which is now talked of without any ground of law, reason, or common sense.” “All government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.” “The remedy is wholly in your own hands.... By the laws of God, of Nature, of nations, and of your own country you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.”

No voice like this had ever been raised by an Englishman in Ireland. All the Irish heard it. Never again were its echoes to be long silent in that country. “Money,” Swift said, “the great divider of the world, hath by a strange revolution been the great uniter of a most divided people.”

On the day Carteret landed in October the fourth and most thorough-going of the Drapier letters was issued. Hawkers crying it through the streets met the Lord Lieutenant when he arrived in Dublin. Much as Carteret admired “that genius which has outshone most of this age and when you will display it again can convince us that its lustre and strength are still the same,” he could not, in his station, overlook the Drapier. He offered a reward of three hundred pounds for information leading to the discovery of the author within six months. All Dublin, including the Lord Lieutenant, knew that Swift had written the dangerous letters. But there was no legal proof, even if there was anywhere an informer. During the six months Swift dined at the Castle and entertained Lady Carteret at a party in his garden. When Carteret heard that Swift had “some thoughts of declaring himself” he advised against it. Their friendship, however, was not tested to the utmost. Walpole, seeing that the case was hopeless in such a tumult, gave it up. The patent was withdrawn in 1725 as an instance of royal favour and condescension. Wood was compensated with a pension of three thousand pounds a year for twelve years. Carteret later summed up his administration: “The people ask me how I governed Ireland. I say that I pleased Dr. Swift.”

Swift, writing to Oxford’s son, apologized for his mention of the Irish brawl. “This is just of as much consequence to your Lordship as the news of a skirmish between two petty states in Greece was to Alexander while he was conquering Persia, but even a knot of beggars are of importance among themselves.” Yet Swift was too much a soldier not to enjoy a battle after a stupid peace. Though there were others in the field, he unmistakably commanded. The Grand Jury and the Liberty of St. Patrick’s, that part of Dublin over which he as Dean had civil jurisdiction, formally resolved against the hated coins, as did the butchers, the brewers, the newsboys or “flying stationers,” and the Black Guard. There were broadsheets on every corner, songs in every tavern, some of them written by Swift, all of them in support of the Drapier. While the furor lasted no jury would find anything seditious in any pamphlet or lampoon if Wood were mentioned. After the victory medals were struck in the Drapier’s honour, shops and taverns were named for him, women carried handkerchiefs with his picture woven on them. Something legendary began to enlarge Swift’s fame.

Irishmen who could barely spell out his arguments and knew only by hearsay that he was a man of learning who had been great in London were roused to veneration. They had thought of him as one of their rulers sent from England, yet he had joined their cause against the English. He was not a tyrant but a patriot. Standing superbly against the dread, incalculable ministers, he had defended men and women to whom halfpence and farthings were important. They stood uncovered when he passed in the streets.

They could not know that he had acted, at least at first, out of hate for their slavery and folly and baseness, out of a fierce unwillingness to be slavish and foolish and base along with them. He who had had a hand in ruling an empire would not submit to being counted among the docile subjects of the province to which he had been banished. Private resentment had stirred him to public rebellion. He could not help it if what he had done for hate was the same as if he had done it for love. Such an outcome was only another proof that the world was wrong. Like Gulliver in Lilliput, wading home with the Blefuscudian fleet at the end of a packthread, Swift decently exulted. But he would not let himself forget that the adventure had taken place among the pigmies. Whatever he accomplished was a small affair. Great affairs were always maddeningly beyond him, or, he remembered his days with Oxford, behind him.

VI

TRAVELLER

1

Swift never set a foot outside Ireland or England except when he hurried across Wales on his restless journeys between London, the bright centre of his world, and Dublin, the dreary margin. Though he constantly diverted himself with books of travel, he found in them nothing which convinced him that he would anywhere meet more wisdom or less folly than he everywhere observed. The Scotch were a “poor, fierce northern people,” the Dutch grasping and shifty, the French frivolous and Catholic. If he had some liking for the Swedes it was because he was fascinated by Charles XII, that sudden, terrific king who had burst upon Europe from his cold peninsula and stirred philosophers to admiration by such a career as Swift would have chosen for himself. But dividing mankind into nations was little more than drawing lines on a map. The whole earth was inhabited by the human race.

Once Swift had hopes of going to Austria, once to Sweden, once to France. Each time prevented, he hardly grumbled. If he thought of other countries it was for their better climate, which might, he said, have kept his wit and humour lively, as Ireland’s had not. “I imagine,” he wrote in 1724, “France would be proper for me now, and Italy ten years hence.” But he could not rouse himself from thinking about the world to travel far to look at it. There was his giddiness, which might at any time make him reel and fall. There was his deafness, which forced him to live “among those whom I can govern and make them comply with my infirmities.” There was the prospect of blindness. “My eyes will not suffer me to read small prints, nor anything by candlelight, and if I grow blind, as well as deaf, I must needs become very grave and wise and insignificant.” He was caged in Ireland, with nothing to do but pace his cage.

In Ireland, however, Swift was not confined to the cramped cottage at Laracor or to the hollow deanery in Dublin. During the twelve unbroken years of his banishment after 1714 he often visited other houses. His hosts could never have enough of him. Near Laracor were the houses of Peter Ludlow, George Rochfort, and Knightley Chetwoode. Near Dublin were the houses of the Grattans and Patrick Delaney and Charles Ford, with whom Stella spent a summer. Forty miles from Dublin was Thomas Sheridan’s ramshackle house which Swift could sometimes have to himself. He is said to have visited an ancestor of the Earls of Llandaff in Tipperary. He visited the Ashes--St. George Ashe had been Swift’s college tutor--at Clogher in Tyrone, Robert Cope in Armagh, the Bishop of Dromore in Down. And during the summers of 1722 and 1723, when banishment had become almost unendurable, Swift made long, lonely journeys to the north and to the south. “I have shifted scenes,” he told Vanessa in July 1722, “oftener than I ever did in my life, and I believe I have lain in thirty beds since I left the town.”

Six hundred miles in the north, five hundred in the south the year following, all solitary and speculative. But these were not merely random travels in search of change and health. Though Swift was still incorrigibly Swift, he was also Gulliver, now with a purpose studying the despicable ways of men.

Gulliver’s travels were Swift’s travels, disguised with Swift’s wit, loaded with Swift’s hate. He gave years to them, as to nothing else he ever wrote about, five or six years thinking of them as Martin Scriblerus’s travels, nearly as long thinking of them as Gulliver’s or his own. “I am now writing a History of my Travels,” Swift told Ford in April 1721, “which will be a large volume, and gives account of countries hitherto unknown; but they go on slowly for want of health and humour.” By December of that year Bolingbroke knew about them. “I long to see your Travels; for, take it as you will, I do not retract what I said, and will undertake to find in two pages of your bagatelles more good sense, useful knowledge, and true religion than you can show me in the works of nineteen in twenty of the profound divines and philosophers of the age.” In June 1722 Vanessa had read something about the giants. In January 1724 Swift was near the end. “I have left the Country of Horses,” he wrote to Ford, “and am in the Flying Island, where I shall not stay long, and my two last journeys will soon be over.” In July 1725 Bolingbroke referred to the pigmies and giants of which he had heard. In August, Swift wrote to Ford: “I have finished my Travels, and am now transcribing them. They are admirable things, and will wonderfully mend the world.”

In September, after a summer at Sheridan’s house in the country, Swift wrote to Pope: “I have employed my time, besides ditching, in finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing my Travels, in four parts complete, newly augmented, and intended for the press when the world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be found brave enough to venture his ears.” Thereafter all Swift’s friends waited to see how he would, as he said, “vex the world rather than divert it.” They could be sure he had written more than a story of imaginary voyages in a book. This would be Swift’s revenge.

In the days of the Scriblerus Club it had been planned that Martin on his first voyage should be carried “by a prosperous storm to a discovery of the ancient Pygmean empire”; on his second should be “happily shipwrecked on the land of the giants, the most humane people in the world”; on his third should reach a “kingdom of philosophers who govern by the mathematics”; and on his fourth should, among beings not yet named, “display a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust of his species.” These plans had broken up with the Club. Returning to this theme, Swift saw that the bungling Martin would no longer serve. If he were to be the traveller, much of the folly of the narrative would have to appear in his misadventures. Better to let the traveller be a plain, reasonable, unimaginative man who would report what he had seen in the language of common sense.

Swift’s nature included such a Gulliver. It included, too, an observer as alien to what went on around him as Gulliver could be on his most distant, most surprising island. “My disaffection to the world ... has never varied from the twenty-first ... year of my life.” Disaffection, singularity, had driven Swift, no less than most men, to think of himself as playing various rôles. At Kilkenny and Trinity he had been a tragic hero, neglected and abused by fortune. At Moor Park he had been a scholar in a garden, despising the rabble of wits and pedants. At Laracor he had been a soldier in a garrison, when there were wars elsewhere. In London he had been the conscience and voice of ministers, insisting upon order and virtue in the state. In Dublin, exiled, he had turned from governing to resisting and had made himself the hammer of tyrants. Now he was a creature of a different race, thrown among men, full of antipathy for them, but full also of a scornful curiosity.

It was the best rôle he ever found. Without once taking ship to the corners of the earth as Gulliver did, Swift had moved about at home too large for the pigmies, too small for the giants, too sensible for the philosophers, too human for the animals. He had never been able quite to adjust himself to the scale of life as other men lived it. Other men, even when they had the pride of distinction, could submit. Swift could not. As if he were really an alien to the race, he had been obliged, whether he chose or not, to feel and act alien. Only once in more than fifty years had he found an occupation which truly involved him, and that only while a short delusion lasted. He had been unwilling to take a wife, though women desired and loved him. He had compromised so far as to have friends, but he was always conscious of the exceptions he was making. “I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is towards individuals.... But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years.... Upon this great foundation of misanthropy ... the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I will never have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion.”

If he had been fully alien he would not have troubled himself to be a missionary. He was a man to the extent that he was a moralist as well as a misanthrope. He would cure if he could. If not, he would punish. “Drown the world! I am not content with despising it, but I would anger it if I could with safety.” Here was the flaw in his misanthropy. Here was the strain of humanity through which he could be fretted and hurt. Here was the deep source of his fury. But he was alien enough to feel, dramatically, that he was only a traveller in strange lands.

Yet Swift was not a Timon, bawling and railing. Swift’s misanthropy was in his constitution, not in his disposition. His friends spoke always of his sweetness, his charm, his delightful temper, his hearty affections, his honest generosity. He had about him a magic almost like beauty’s magic. Nor did they think of him as morose and surly, whatever he said about himself. “Gulliver is a happy man,” said the experienced Arbuthnot, “that at his age can write such a merry work.” Swift on his travels could no more help the wit on his tongue than he could help the detestation in his heart.

He was as ingenious as he was grave. He took pains, with a few slips, to draw his pigmies and giants to scale, the pigmies an inch to a human foot, the giants a foot to a human inch. He deftly commandeered the inventions of earlier writers: Philostratus, Lucian, Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac, Perrot d’Ablancourt, Tom Brown. The nautical terms paraded in the voyage to Brobdingnag were copied almost word for word from a mariner’s handbook. Swift did not disdain to parody contemporary travellers. Whereas a mere misanthrope would have clamoured, a mere moralist would have scolded, Swift, being a wit, was satisfied to tell a story, pretending that he was a spectator who had no share in what he told. There were the characters, there were the incidents. They could be understood by anybody who had an understanding.

Consider the insectile people of Lilliput. Swift, in the guise of Gulliver, was at first received with dread, then with wonder, then with hospitality. Though they kept him a prisoner, they let him into the secrets of the Court and of the government, which were preposterously like England’s. The Lilliputian ministers to commend themselves to the king capered before him on a tight-rope. Gulliver, whose mind was part of Swift’s, remembered larger ministers. Flimnap, who could caper an inch higher than any other lord in the empire, seemed remarkably like Walpole. The great men of Lilliput who sought honours from their king competed, by jumping over a stick held in his hand, for silken threads six inches long, one blue, one red, one green, which reminded Gulliver of the Order of the Garter, of the Bath, and of the Thistle.

Lilliput and the neighbouring Blefuscu had long been at war. A Lilliputian schism was the cause. Formerly all the people had broken their eggs at the larger end. One of their kings, having cut his finger on the larger end of one of his eggs, had by royal edict made the smaller end orthodox. There had been a civil war. Some of the defeated conservatives had fled to Blefuscu and had there found refuge and favour at the court. England, Gulliver reflected, had been entirely Catholic before Henry VIII. The Catholic Pretender had fled to France, and France had long been at war with England.

Grateful for the kindness shown him, Gulliver aided Lilliput in its war by capturing the Blefuscudian fleet and bringing it as a gift to his royal host. But the Lilliputians were no more grateful in return than the English had been to the Oxford ministry for ending the war with France. One party among the pigmies insisted that Blefuscu be subjugated to a province with a viceroy, as some of the Whigs had insisted France might be. The sourest of the tiny ministers became Gulliver’s enemy, as the dismal Nottingham had become Swift’s.

Gulliver’s chief offence was that, when a fire broke out in the queen’s apartment at the palace, he extinguished it in a manner more natural to him than agreeable to the queen. Had not Queen Anne implacably resented the spattering ridicule which Swift had let fall upon what he thought was menacing the Church and State? Thereafter the position of Gulliver in Lilliput was hopeless. The cabinet decided he must die. The friendly minister Reldresal, who may have stood for Carteret, thought it would be enough to blind Gulliver and allow him to starve to death.