Part 14

Swift’s Travels, Gay’s Opera, Pope’s Dunces: Twickenham had borne its satiric fruits. “Pope, Gay, and I,” Swift later wrote, had done their best “to make folks merry and wise,” acknowledging “no enemies except knaves and fools.” But that episode had ended. Swift was never to see his friends again. Year after year they urged him to come back, and for a few years he often planned to go. Sickness and pride kept him in Ireland. The Court had no favours for him. Walpole was hopelessly in power. Bolingbroke, spinning out a slipshod philosophy for Pope to versify in his moral essays, tried to entice Swift to a living in Berkshire, half a day’s journey from Uxbridge and Twickenham. Swift, relatively a rich man in Ireland, declined to become relatively a poor man in England. Letters would have to keep their friendship alive.

Half his life he lived in his letters to and from his English friends. Yet he wrote fitfully, fewer letters than he received. Much as he loved Arbuthnot, Swift was slow in writing to him. Gay might have to write twice or three times to draw an answer. When he could, Swift wrote to two of his friends at once: Bolingbroke and Pope, Arbuthnot and Pope, Pope and Gay, Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry, Gay’s lively patron. “It is a very cold scent to continue a correspondence with one whom we never expect to see.... Mr. Pope and my Lord Bolingbroke themselves,” Swift wrote in 1734, “begin to fail me.”

The fellowship was mortal. Gay died in 1732. When the news came in a letter from Arbuthnot and Pope, Swift did not open it for five days, “by an impulse foreboding some misfortune.” Arbuthnot died in 1735. “The death of Mr. Gay and the Doctor,” Swift wrote to Pope, “have been terrible wounds near my heart. Their living would have been a great comfort to me, although I should never have seen them, like a sum of money in a bank from which I should at least receive annual interest, as I do from you and have done from my Lord Bolingbroke.” Bolingbroke after 1735 spent most of his time in France. Only Pope and Swift were left, Pope’s mind to outlast Swift’s, Swift’s body to outlast Pope’s.

There was no change in the affection which Swift felt for his friends, but he could not help getting out of touch with them. England was soon years away. Despairing of English politics, in the interminable hands of Walpole, Swift gave up his old concern for government, except where Ireland was touched. He saw London as the stage of a political melodrama, with countless Whigs as the villain, and with no hero except Pulteney and his Patriots. Swift ceased to follow, even as much as he had done before, the turns and changes of wit. London had Pope, and London had dunces. In Ireland it was impossible to tell whom Pope was slashing unless he spelled out the names of his victims. When Swift read such writers, he was “out of all patience to the present set of whifflers.” England, London, the Court might still be visible enough to Swift’s memory, but they no longer stirred with the life which had been his passion and his magnet. They had stiffened to a picture, and the years had set them in a frame.

2

It was time for Swift to learn, if he could learn, how to live in Ireland without raging. For a year or so after Stella’s death he tried to learn. “Except absence from friends,” he wrote to Pope in May 1728, “I confess freely that I have no discontent at living here, beside what arises from a silly spirit of liberty, which as it neither sours my drink nor hurts my meat nor spoils my stomach farther than in imagination, so I resolve to throw it off.”

Sheridan, who of Swift’s Irish friends had known Stella best, plotted diversions. He took Swift south to Wexford about Easter of that year. Together they began in May to write the _Intelligencer_. This was meant to be a weekly paper “to inform or divert or correct or vex the town” of Dublin. The two contributors, who had no editor to keep them going, did not lose interest till after a dozen issues and did not stop till after twenty. Sheridan got Swift invited in June to the house of Sir Arthur Acheson at Market Hill near Armagh. There from June to the next January, and during the summers of 1729 and 1730, Swift lived with friends, away from Dublin and the solitude of his deanery.

“I lived very easily in the country,” he wrote to Pope after the first visit. “Sir Arthur is a man of sense, has a good voice, and my Lady a better. She is perfectly well bred and desirous to improve her understanding, which is very good, but cultivated too much like a fine lady. She was my pupil there, and severely chid when she read wrong. With that, and walking and making twenty little amusing improvements, and writing family verses of mirth by way of libels on my Lady, my time passed very well and in very good order.”

Swift might have said more. Though his host was a member of the Irish Parliament and high sheriff of his county, and his wife was daughter of a man who had been for twenty years Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ireland, Swift with them was like an emperor on a friendly visit. They seem hardly to have questioned his imperial attitudes. The Dean might cut down one of the baronet’s favourite trees or have his own way with such “little amusing improvements” as “zigzags and walks,” “cradles and caves,” “grottos and seats”--

“_A hole where a rabbit Would scorn to inhabit, Dug out in an hour: He calls it a bower._”

The Dean might tease the lady for her lack of flesh, calling her Skinnybonia, or for her lack of learning--

“_He loves to be bitter at A lady illiterate._”

The Dean might condemn her to “dull Bacon’s Essays” or “poor Milton” while he, not at study or at prayer, amused himself with grooms and labourers. The Dean might insist that he, not the dairymaid, should shake cream in a bottle till, after three hours, there was butter for breakfast. The Dean might take it upon himself to build “two temples of magnific size” for the “gentle goddess Cloacine.” The Dean might come down to dinner when he chose, no matter who the guests. But he was still the Dean, the greatest man in Ireland, great politician, great wit. To say nothing of his company, his verses, spirited and various, were ten times a return for his entertainment. They would, Swift declared, make Market Hill as famous as Penshurst.

Swift was king enough in Ireland, if he wanted to be king. When he went back to Dublin in October 1729 after his second visit to Market Hill, he was received, a newspaper said, “with great joy by many of our principal citizens, who also on the same occasion caused the bells to ring in our cathedrals and had bonfires and other illuminations.” Both candidates in an election then being held claimed the support of the Drapier, though it is not certain that either had it. One of them to win needed only to give out a letter which he said Swift had written to him. Early the next year the Dean, because he had been, as he now admitted, the Drapier, was given the freedom of the city in a gold box brought to him by the Lord Mayor and some of the aldermen. It was an honour usually reserved for “chief governors or persons in very high employment.”

It was an honour, and Swift was gratified. Yet in a few weeks he was writing to Bolingbroke: “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.” His resolve to throw off his discontent had not been kept. Such cheerfulness as he had felt at Market Hill had not survived his return to his solitary house. No sooner was he back than he wrote, or at least published, the most savage of all his pamphlets, the most terrible outcry of his misanthropy.

It was, he called it, a modest proposal. Everybody knew that Ireland was starving and nobody knew what to do about it. The problem was not so difficult. Put simply, it came to this: too little food, too many mouths. Swift had thought of a way to make more food and fewer mouths.

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.” Of the children annually born in Ireland perhaps thirty thousand could be taken care of by their parents. Twenty thousand others might be kept “for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males, which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine.” That would leave, he calculated, about a hundred thousand every year “to be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom.... A child will make two dishes in an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.” Such food would be expensive, but within the reach of landlords, who, “as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”

One of his friends, Swift said, argued that in the present want of venison it might be well to supply it with boys and girls of twelve to fourteen. He himself could not agree. The boys of that age from much exercise would be thin and tough. The girls were too near the age when they might bear children themselves. “And besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty, which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however well intended.” It would be enough to limit the proposal to children a year old. The older poor were already “dying and rotting, by cold and famine and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.”

Plausibly, statistically, Swift went over the advantages and disadvantages of his scheme. The only real objection he could think of was that it would reduce the number of people in the kingdom. The best thing that could happen. It was Ireland he was writing about, not any other country “that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon earth.” Let no man talk of taxing absentees, or using Irish manufactures only, or going without luxuries, or forcing landlords to be generous and shopkeepers honest--as Swift himself had so long and often talked. None of those expedients had worked, or been tried. They were “vain, idle, visionary.” This new proposal was “solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our power.” It would not even disoblige England. Ireland had hit upon a foodstuff which could not be exported because it could not stand much salt. Perhaps, however, “I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.”

Few of Swift’s readers seem to have shuddered at his proposal. Lord Bathurst wrote from England that he had almost brought his wife round to the opinion that the youngest of their children should help provide for the eldest. After all, any sensible reader knew that the Irish children would not be eaten, at least in this forthright, economical way, just as he knew that there were no Houyhnhnms and no Yahoos. Swift, sensible readers said, was only joking, as the Irish bishop had said that Gulliver was only lying. Once more the misanthrope had run against mankind in the abstract.

For Swift there was nothing abstract about it. There was the actual disease. Here was the only sufficient cure. What if his flesh did creep when he recommended “buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife”? What if his nerves did rage when he advised that the mothers of the children “let them suck plentifully in the last month so as to render them plump and fat for a good table”? So had his flesh crept and his nerves raged all over Ireland at the starved desert that England had made of it. If his cure violated the profoundest human instincts, so did the disease. Ask the parents if they would not have been better off if they had been sold for food at a year old instead of growing up to life in Ireland. Of course the proposal would not be carried out. Nothing so logical, nothing so mad and merciful, would ever be carried out. That was mankind. That was mankind.

Except for a few hints, a few urgings, a few arguments, a few accusations, all scattered and occasional, Swift after his modest proposal wrote no more prose about Ireland. “Looking upon this kingdom as absolutely desperate,” he said in 1731, “I would not prescribe a dose to the dead.”

3

All his life Swift had been alien, but he had never been so solitary as he now became. His misanthropy, however rooted in his constitution, however confirmed by his experience, however fortified by his blunt metaphysics, was not complete. He had had to be perverse to be so thorough. He had had to deny himself things that he wanted in order to round out his desolation. Even in his desolation, perverse but not altogether voluntary, he had needed habitual friends. He was not a man who could do without women. Stella, in his worst hours, had been friends and women. After her death he lacked what only a friend who was also a woman could give him. Without her to consider he settled into a dark preoccupation with himself. Without her to stir him to variety he sank into a tedious, disheartening, cold routine, hard and harder to break through.

At first he dined alone, or with his housekeeper, five nights out of seven. By 1736 he could say, with a grim flash, “nine days every week I dine at home.”

“I awake so indifferent to anything which may pass either in the world or my own little domestic,” he wrote in 1731, “that I hardly think it worth my time to rise, and would certainly lie all day a-bed if decency and dread of sickness did not drive me thence.” His breakfast was dull gruel. “I am wholly a stranger to tea and coffee, the companions of bread and butter.” When his health allowed him he was “constantly at morning prayers by nine.” But in 1735: “I very seldom go to church for fear of being seized with a fit of giddiness in the midst of the service.” “In a morning I am so pestered by impertinent people and impertinent business which my station exposes me to that the former part of the day is wholly lost.” As Dean of St. Patrick’s, as civil governor of the Cathedral neighbourhood, Swift had duties which he would not shirk, even to the least detail. Yet they were all minor duties, too easy to be interesting. And of course he would not think them important.

Much of Swift’s day was given to walking and riding, “at which, however, I repine, and would not do it merely to lengthen life, because it would be ill husbandry, for I should save time by sitting still though I should die seven years sooner. But the dread of pain and torture makes me toil to preserve health from hand to mouth as much as a labourer to support life.” Swift’s exercise, however, was not wholly deliberate. He had still a fierce energy which kept his body restless as well as his mind. Writing to Pope, younger by twenty years, and referring to Bolingbroke, younger by ten, Swift said: “At your or his time of life I could have leaped over the moon.” And in 1730 he was, he told Gay, “reputed the best walker in this town and five miles around.” “Twice a day in fair weather and once in foul” was the remedy Swift prescribed himself--“I mean exercise ... the cheapest of all drugs.”

This treatment he varied but would not give up. In 1731: “I can walk eight or ten miles a day and ride thirty Irish ones.” In 1733: “I am almost every second day on horseback for about a dozen miles.” In 1735: “I ride a dozen miles as often as I can, and always walk the streets except in the night, which my head will not suffer me to do.” In 1736: “I have not an ounce of flesh about me, and cannot ride above a dozen miles in a day without being sore and bruised and spent.” Later that same year: “I can neither read nor write nor remember nor converse. All I have left is to walk and ride.” In 1738: “I seldom walk less than four miles, sometimes six, eight, ten, or more, never beyond my own limits; or, if it rains, I walk as much through the house, up and down stairs.” By 1740, though Swift’s energy was chiefly in his nerves, they would not let him stop walking back and forth at home for hours a day.

Swift might look eccentric on horseback, with his short gown and his gambadoes, large boots fastened to the saddle to protect his legs from wet and cold, but he rode out with a touch of state. Two servants, “for fear of accidents,” always went with him. Street and road were his. “I am one of the governors of all the hackney coaches, carts, and carriages round this town, who dare not insult me like your [English] rascally wagoners or coachmen, but give me the way; nor is there one lord or squire for a hundred of yours, to turn me out of the road or run over me with their coaches and six.” When, once, as he rode on the strand, some careless hunter fired his gun and frightened the Dean’s horse, it got into the newspapers.

It was Swift’s habit to take with him, whenever he meant to stop for dinner with anybody on his ride, his own wine, bread, and chicken in a basket which one of the servants carried. It was his habit to send word of his coming with commands. Humorously and arrogantly he announced to one of his prebendaries, who lived at Wicklow and was almost unknown to Swift, that the Dean would like to spend Christmas there.

“There is an inhabitant of this city,” Swift wrote, “of whom I suppose you have often heard. I remember him from my very infancy, but confess I am not so well acquainted with him as in prudence I ought to be, yet I constantly pretend to converse with him, being seldom out of his company, but I do not find that our conversation is very pleasing to either of us.” This person, to shorten Swift’s account of himself, had been recommended to Wicklow for its nearness to Dublin and the fine riding thereabouts.

“By these incitements he seems determined to quarter himself upon you for three weeks at least, if he can have your consent, or rather that of your lady, although I find he never had the honour to see her. He travels with two servants, and consequently three horses; but these latter are at hack and the former at board-wages, so that neither of them will trouble you. As to the person himself, he every day drinks a pint of wine at noon and another at night, and for the trouble he gives the house he will allow one bottle more every day for the table, but not one drop for foreigners, who are to drink on your account. He will further allow one shilling and sixpence English for his commons, ale and small beer included. But you are to direct how the wine can be found, and whether he must send it by a Wicklow carrier. But the bottles, when empty, he must be paid for. These are the conditions, only adding that the family, during his residence, must be regulated by his own model, and you are to answer the very next post. He travels with his own sheets, so that he makes no allowance for that article. Whether you do or do not approve of these proposals, you are to give me an account, directed to the D---- of St. P----’s house. And the D----, after conferring with your future guest, will either return you an answer or send the gentleman.”

The threatened host saw the humour behind the arrogance, and at once sent a “kind friendly letter” with a “generous invitation.” When a fit of giddiness kept Swift from going, he wrote in another tone. “Pray God protect you and your family. I know not whether you have children, nor did I ever see your lady or your house; so that I never did beg an invitation so much against the rules of common good manners, to one so much a stranger as you have been, against my will, to me. I am therefore bound in gratitude and by inclination to assure [you] that I am with much esteem and truth, Sir, your most obedient humble servant.”

In Dublin, on the two evenings a week when Swift did not dine alone, he limited himself to friends with whom he could use this same insolence, with or without apology. “I am hated mortally by every creature in power,” he wrote to Oxford’s son, “and by all their followers.... I do not visit one lord either temporal or spiritual, nor am acquainted with above three squires and half-a-dozen parsons.” “There is another race which I prefer before them, as beef and mutton for constant diet before partridges. I mean a middle kind both for understanding and fortune, who are perfectly easy, never impertinent, complying in everything, ready to do a hundred little offices that ... I may often want, who dine and sit with me five times for once that I go with them, and whom I can tell without offence that I am otherwise engaged at present.”

Writing, as in these instances, to his English friends, Swift exaggerated his isolation, at least for the first few years after Stella’s death. He saw more friends than he acknowledged. There was Patrick Delaney, fellow and then professor at Trinity College, whose marriage to a rich widow--“See,” Swift wrote to Gay, “what it is to write godly books!”--enabled the lucky man even in destitute Ireland to have seven or eight guests to dinner once a week. The guests were so often the same that they were thought of as a kind of club. Swift was one of them. But he remembered the Society of Brothers and the Scriblerus Club. There was Thomas Sheridan, perhaps Swift’s closest friend, “the best scholar in both kingdoms” Swift called him: schoolmaster, parson, friend of Stella, blunderer, wit.

“_The Dean and Sheridan, I hope, Will half supply a Gay and Pope_,”

Swift said. But he knew that Delaney’s house, with no matter how many Sheridans, was a long way from Pope’s villa at Twickenham. There were Richard Helsham, Swift’s Dublin physician, and George Faulkner, Swift’s Dublin printer. There were such older friends as Charles Ford and the brothers Grattan. There were the little poets and wits who rose from time to time in Ireland and asked for Swift’s encouragement: Matthew and Letitia Pilkington, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Grierson, Mrs. Sican, William Dunkin. All eager, and none good. Swift had to be too kind to them to be kind at all. Dublin was less like London than like Lilliput.

He would not admit that the little people who swarmed to his house on Sunday evenings came for anything but his wine. Yet, in spite of his growing avarice, he permitted himself and them the luxury of six, seven, eight hogsheads of wine a year, and gave dinners, when he gave dinners, off one of the finest services of plate in Dublin. In 1736, inviting Lord Castle-Durrow to dine with him, Swift told about his household economy.

“When I would have a friend eat with me I direct him in general to send in the morning and inquire whether I dine at home, and alone. I add a fowl to my commons, and something else if the company be more, but I never mingle company, nor multiply dishes. I give a reasonable price for my wine.... I am seldom without eight or nine hogsheads.... If your Lordship will do me the honour when you come to town, you must submit to the same method. Only perhaps I will order the butler to see whether, by chance, he can find out an odd bottle of a particular choice wine which is all spent, although there may be a dozen or two remaining.... As to puddings, my Lord, I am not only the best but the sole perfect maker of them in this kingdom. They are universally known and esteemed under the name of the deanery puddings. Suet and plumbs are three-fourth of the ingredients. I had them from my ‘Aunt Giffard’ [Lady Giffard, Castle-Durrow’s aunt] who preserved the succession from the time of Sir W. Temple.”