Part 5

But he wrote less like a philosopher than like a governor, contemptuous of political metaphysics. No doubt there ought to be a proper balance of power among the forces in a state; “although I should think that the saying _vox populi vox dei_ ought to be understood of the universal bent and current of a people, not of the bare majority of a few representatives, which is often procured by little arts and great industry and application; wherein those who engage in the pursuits of malice and revenge are much more sedulous than such as would prevent them.” How the universal bent and current of a people was to be recognized and encouraged Swift did not make plain. “Some physicians have thought that if it were practicable to keep the several humours of the body in an exact and equal balance of each with the opposite, it might be immortal; and so perhaps would a political body if the balance of power could be always held exactly even. But, I doubt, this is as impossible in practice as the other.”

In practice he found the populace always greedy and slippery. “When a child grows easy and content by being humoured; and when a lover becomes satisfied by small compliances, without farther pursuits; then expect to find popular assemblies content with small concessions.” “I think it is an universal truth that the people are much more dexterous at pulling down and setting up than at preserving what is fixed; and they are not fonder of seizing more than their own than they are of delivering it up again to the worst bidder, with their own into the bargain. For, although in their corrupt notions of divine worship they are apt to multiply their gods, yet their earthly devotion is seldom paid to above one idol at a time, of their own creation; whose oar they pull with less murmuring, and much more skill, than when they share the lading or even hold the helm.”

There was, Swift thought, no mysterious virtue in any gathering of men. “It is hard to recollect one folly, infirmity, or vice to which a single man is subjected and from which a body of commons, either collective or represented, can be wholly exempt. For, beside that they are composed of men with all their infirmities about them, they have also the ill fortune to be generally led and influenced by the very worst among themselves, I mean popular orators, tribunes, or, as they are now styled, great speakers, leading men, and the like. Whence it comes to pass that in their results we have sometimes found the same spirit of cruelty and revenge, of malice and pride, the same blindness and obstinacy and unsteadiness, the same ungovernable rage and anger, the same injustice, sophistry, and fraud that ever lodged in the breast of any individual.”

The evil to be avoided, Swift held, was the tyranny equally of the one, of the few, or of the many. But when the many are tyrants the tyranny of the one is not far off. “A usurping populace is its own dupe, a mere underworker, and a purchaser in trust for some single tyrant whose state and power they advance to their own ruin, with as blind an instinct as those worms that die with weaving magnificent habits for beings of a superior nature to their own.”

Any governor, reading Swift’s discourse, must have felt behind it a congenial mind and will. Swift might dread the tyranny of a king. He might even, as he later wrote, “prefer a well-instituted commonwealth before a monarchy.” But what he really dreaded was disorder. “If,” he said, “I should insist upon liberty of conscience, form conventicles of republicans, and print books preferring that government and condemning what is established, the magistrate would, with great justice, hang me and my disciples.” Better the certain magistrate than the uncertain mob. Swift was no less on the side of power because he wanted power himself. He regarded the demand for popular rights as a king might regard it: that is, as a mode of usurpation. He regarded the prospect of revolution as a general might regard it: that is, as a threat of mutiny. Let theorists be hanged. Though the end of government was liberty, the way to it did not lead through unrest. Unrest was itself the tyranny of the many, and it might at any time become the tyranny of the one. Liberty lay between these extremes. Mankind, unless it gave itself to dictatorship or to confusion, had to be governed by the few.

Not, however, by the casual few of birth or wealth. By the chosen few of knowledge, skill, and virtue. Swift did not say, at first or ever, how these few were to be chosen. Like all the men, in all the ages, who have held to this appealing doctrine, he assumed that the choice of governors ought to be as natural as it was logical. And, like most of them, he assumed that he belonged among the governors.

Rather, he assumed that he belonged beside them. Swift had already come to think of himself as first of all a churchman, not a statesman but the driving conscience of statesmen. Having delivered his warning in his pamphlet, written in London, he left it with the printer and went back to Ireland, to establish himself in Laracor. “The book was,” he says, “greedily bought and read; and charged sometimes upon my Lord Somers and some time upon the Bishop of Salisbury.” Associated at a distance with men so powerful, Swift, returning to England for the summer of 1702, and owning the authorship, came closer to the seats of power than he had ever come before. “My Lords Somers and Halifax, as well as the Bishop ... desired my acquaintance, with great marks of esteem and professions of kindness--not to mention the Earl of Sunderland, who had been of my old acquaintance. They lamented that they were not able to serve me since the death of the King; and were very liberal in promising me the greatest preferments I could hope for, if ever it came in their power. I soon grew domestic with Lord Halifax, and was as often with Lord Somers as the formality of his nature (the only unconversable fault he has) made it agreeable to me.”

Swift was, in his relations with the great, no country parson tickled with a dinner. He stood before them like a man there in his own right. “It was then I first began to trouble myself with the difference between the principles of Whig and Tory; having formerly employed myself in other and, I think much better, speculations. I talked often upon this subject with Lord Somers; told him that, having been long conversant with the Greek and Roman authors, and therefore a lover of liberty, I found myself much inclined to be what they called a Whig in politics; and that, besides, I thought it impossible, upon any other principle, to defend or submit to the Revolution. But as to religion I confessed myself to be a high churchman, and that I did not conceive how any one who wore the habit of clergyman could be otherwise.” A high churchman, and a haughty one. Though he might then prefer the Whigs to the Tories, his real allegiance was to the Church. He served it when he served whatever party favoured it. He was above the battle in which he fought. He looked for large rewards with the assurance of his calling as well as with the arrogance of his temper.

But Somers and Halifax were not in office. Swift went back to Ireland, unrewarded, for another year of rueful banishment.

When he once more returned to England late in 1703, he seemed, to his own pride, to have done nothing in the world. Yet he had an honourable profession. He had an income for life. He had a mistress, of a kind, who was young, beautiful, witty, and devoted. He had ruling friends in Ireland and was beginning to have others in England. He was the author of the most brilliant prose satire so far written in English, and the master of the best prose of his age. Something boundless in him, however, or something perverse, kept him from more than brief satisfactions. Content to be a clergyman, he could not wait to be a bishop. Untroubled by debts, he longed for a fortune. Happy with Stella for a friend, he would not commit himself to her in marriage. A scholar, a clergyman, and a wit, he cared little for the company of his fellows. He thought the scholars pedantic, the clergymen dull and tattling--

“_And deal in vices of the graver sort, Tobacco, censure, coffee, pride, and port_”--

the wits frivolous and feeble. His satires had remained for half a dozen years unpublished. He could be at ease only among the great, and even there he did not lend himself wholly to their purposes. He stood solitary on the peak of his own nature, his scornful eyes raking mankind.

From this height he flung down his _Tale of a Tub_ early in 1704. Mankind at large took no notice. Mankind at large has no eyes to read with, no skin to feel a lash with. As Swift himself said in his preface, “Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any, since every individual person makes bold to understand it of others, and very wisely removes his particular part of the burden upon the shoulders of the world, which are broad enough, and able to bear it.” Nor did the pedants and wits flinch at his thrusts much more sharply, since he named few of them, than the nameless run of men. The pedants might grumble, but the wits, who also liked to sting, could take a craftsman’s pleasure in the accurate rapture of his stinging.

Swift of course pricked no active folly and stabbed no active vice by his satires. Fools did not read him. Wise men were only confirmed in their wisdom. His hatred caused less reformation than delight. The delight which men felt in his arguments and allegories, so cutting, so copious, so downright, so fanciful, was the delight which men feel when one of them uses words as most of them have not the gift to do, only the bursting desire. Swift, who scorned to be a man of words, was accepted for his words. Somers, to whom the book was dedicated, and Halifax, who knew how to put such skill as Swift’s to use, repeated their promises. They did not tell him it was not his counsel that they needed.

Yet while he was making friends he was also making enemies. Mankind was not a sensitive body, able to feel in any of its parts any indignity to the whole. The pedants or the wits were not. The Church was. It thought of itself as marked off from the world, like its consecrated altars, to be approached with reverence. There were, as Swift contended, abuses of religion which called for satire, and which could be satirized without any hurt to true religion. But the line between the uses and the abuses of religion was often faint. One man’s devotion could be another man’s fanaticism. Firmness could become stoniness and never know it. Laughter, even when aimed at what was false, could wound in two directions. Swift, high on his peak of scorn, let his laughter fall with a harsh inclusiveness.

When, for instance, he touched the doctrine of transubstantiation, he traced its origin to a noisy episode in the career of the Catholic among the three brothers of the allegory. Peter, having no mutton for his dinner, served up a brown loaf to Martin and Jack. He told them it was mutton. They refused, at first politely and then heatedly, to believe him. “‘Look ye, gentlemen,’ cries Peter in a rage, ‘to convince you what a couple of blind, positive, ignorant, wilful puppies you are, I will use but this plain argument: By G----, it is true, good, natural mutton as any in Leadenhall market; and G---- condemn you both eternally if you believe otherwise.’ Such a thundering proof as this left no farther room for objection.”

Here was rough language to use so near the communion table, no matter what the precise beliefs of the bystanders regarding the disputed miracle. A total unbeliever could not have spoken more gratingly. Even in that vigorous age a clergyman had to watch his voice if he was to become a bishop. Swift might please the lords temporal with his originality and force, but he could not please the lords spiritual without orthodoxy and decorum. Within the Church he was always, from the time _A Tale of a Tub_ was understood to be by him, a churchman suspected of irreverence--or, as he phrased it, “the sin of wit.”

This dangerous book, published with mystifying stealth, Swift never acknowledged, though after a scuffle of ascriptions it settled down at his door. The authorship was first his humorous and afterwards his cautious secret. When, having published the satires, he followed his letter to Tisdall back to Ireland, he was still barely known in London for his genius. There are almost no records of where he had lodged, of how he had spent his days and nights. A dim figure, flashing seldom out of the dark.

One anecdote, of the many which have gathered about his magnetic reputation, may tell something like the truth. For days after his earliest appearance at the St. James’s coffee house, the story goes, he did not speak. He would come in, lay his hat on a table, walk conspicuously up and down the room for an hour, take up his hat, pay his money at the bar, and leave without a word. At last, one evening, he looked several times at a man in boots, who seemed to have just come from the country. The mad parson, as he was already called, went up to the booted stranger and said abruptly: “Pray, Sir, do you remember any good weather in the world?” The man stared but said he thanked God he could remember a great deal of good weather. “That is more,” said Swift, “than I can say. I never remember any weather that was not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. But, however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.” Then again he took his hat and left.

The next three and a half years in Ireland saw him more at ease with more companions. At Laracor he planted, besides willows, holly, apple, cherry trees. He fished for eel and pike and trout. “I carry double the flesh that you saw about me at London,” he wrote to John Temple, who had invited him to revisit Moor Park in 1706; though Swift insisted that he had, to such a sign of fortune, “no manner of title, having neither purchased it by luxury nor good humour.” His congregation might be no more than fifteen persons, “most of them gentle and all simple,” but he had numerous friends in the region of Laracor.

In Dublin he could talk clerical politics with the Primate of Ireland and the Archbishop of Dublin, both Swift’s friends, and secular politics with the Lord Lieutenants to whom he was chaplain. At the Castle he was cheerful with the successive households of Ormond and Pembroke. With a small circle of Pembroke’s intimate guests he punned tumultuously and infectiously. He drank wine, took snuff, and gambled for trifling stakes. He was often at the house of the dean of St. Patrick’s, who gave good dinners to bishops and to clergymen willing to become bishops. There was also a sort of club with which various women, Stella among them, met on Saturday evenings, for dinner and ombre or picquet. Stella was liked and admired by Swift’s friends. If he was lonely and restless he had his genius to blame.

4

He was lonely and steadily more restless. The idyl of Laracor was too mild to hold him. The work and play of Dublin were too small. Just before his fortieth birthday he left Ireland, in the party of Lord Pembroke, again to try at fortune on fortune’s own ground. He had at least the advantage, now, of being on an official errand to the great men whose favour he personally needed. Commissioned by his Archbishop, he was to act as lobbyist in the matter of the First Fruits. Queen Anne, devoted to the interests of the Church, had given up her right to the first year’s income of every ecclesiastical benefice in England. The Irish Church hoped she would extend the same bounty to Ireland. The whole sum at issue was not above a thousand pounds a year. Swift, proud as a mountain, took up the little cause. It brought him a new experience of the delaying, forgetting, bargaining habits of politicians.

He had to move softly to avoid the jealousy of Pembroke, who as viceroy of Ireland was the proper channel for any such appeal to the Crown. At first Somers, though influential with the Ministry, was still out of office. He referred Swift to Sunderland, son of Swift’s former friend, son-in-law of Marlborough, and a Secretary of State. Sunderland said he would go with Swift to Godolphin, Lord Treasurer, but ended by merely making an appointment. Godolphin declared “he was passive in this business,” which was really Pembroke’s responsibility. Swift consulted Pembroke, and was told that everything depended on the Queen. Passed shiftily from hand to hand, Swift saw that none of the great men was interested, though none of them would take the trouble to tell the truth. After a year he heard from Pembroke that the grant had been made, and a little later learned that Pembroke had lied. But the Earl of Wharton had been appointed Lord Lieutenant. Swift went to Wharton, “which was the first attendance I ever paid him.” Wharton had nothing for him but cloudy excuses and windy promises. “I took the boldness to begin answering those objections, and designed to offer some reasons; but he rose suddenly, turned off the discourse, and seemed in haste; so I was forced to take my leave.” At a subsequent meeting at Somers’s house Wharton “received me as dryly as before.”

Thereafter Swift hated Wharton as he never hated another man. All the exasperations of a wasted year came together into a single fury which, when Swift had a chance, poured itself out into the abuse which has made Wharton better known for it than for all he ever did himself.

Lobbying for the First Fruits, Swift looked out also for his own advancement. But he went through his visit to England always in suspense and never satisfied. First he hoped to be chosen Bishop of Waterford. He believed he had the favour of Somers and possibly of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen. Another clergyman of the Pembroke circle was preferred. “Now I must retire to my morals,” Swift wrote a friend, “and pretend to be wholly without ambition and to resign with patience.... And after this if you will not allow me to be a good courtier, I will pretend to it no more. But let us talk no further on this subject. I am stomach-sick of it already.” Then he hoped to be sent as secretary to Vienna, if Lord Berkeley should go as ambassador. “I shall be out of the way of parties until it shall please God I have some place to retire to a little above contempt.” The Ministry promised Swift the post, but Berkeley’s age and ill health kept him in England. Swift would have accepted a Dublin parish which had been proposed to him; the living did not fall vacant. He might have been expected to be chaplain to Wharton, as he had been to Ormond and Pembroke; he was not chosen. He was urged by the Archbishop of Dublin to try for the deanery of Down; Wharton’s chaplain became dean. On the day, after Swift’s return to Ireland, when the Bishop of Cork was dying of spotted fever Swift wrote to Halifax asking for his interest with Somers, now Lord President, for this bishopric. Wharton, according to Swift, engaged his credit to get the place for a clergyman who had married a “cast wench” of Wharton’s--although the Queen, indeed, prevented such a scandal. To make the story as complete as a farce, the clergyman in question may have been that junior dean of Trinity College before whom, on his knees, Swift on his twenty-first birthday may have had to beg pardon for being contemptuous and contumacious.

Yet towards the close of his cycle of anxiety Swift could write ingratiatingly to Halifax: “I must take leave to reproach your Lordship for a most inhuman piece of cruelty, for I can call your extreme good usage of me no better, since it has taught me to hate the place where I am banished, and raised my thoughts to an imagination that I might live to be some way useful or entertaining if I were permitted to live in town.... I have been studying how to be revenged of your Lordship, and have found out the way. They have in Ireland the same idea with us, of your Lordship’s generosity, magnificence, wit, judgment, and knowledge in the enjoyment of life. But I shall quickly undeceive them by letting them plainly know that you have neither interest nor fortune which you can call your own; both having been long made over to the corporation of deserving men in want, who have appointed you their advocate and steward, which the world is pleased to call patron and protector. I shall inform them that myself and about a dozen others kept the best table in England, to which because we admitted your Lordship in common with us, made you our manager, and sometimes allowed you to bring a friend, therefore ignorant people would needs take you to be the owner.... Pray, my Lord, desire Dr. South to die about the fall of the leaf, for he has a prebend of Westminster which will make me your neighbour, and a sinecure in the country, both in the Queen’s gift, which my friends have often told me would fit me extremely.”

And Halifax could magniloquently answer: “I am quite ashamed for myself and my friends to see you left in a place so incapable of tasting you; and to see so much merit and so great qualities unrewarded by those who are sensible of them. Mr. Addison and I are entered into a new confederacy, never to give over the pursuit, nor to cease reminding those who can serve you, till your worth is placed in that light where it ought to shine. Dr. South holds out still, but he cannot be immortal. The situation of his prebendary would make me doubly concerned in serving you, and upon all occasions that shall offer I will be your constant solicitor, your sincere admirer, and your unalterable friend.”

Handsome compliment, handsome acknowledgment, and no real confidence between the writers. What Swift actually thought of Halifax was that he gave deserving men “only good words and dinners; I never heard him say one good thing, or seem to taste what was said by another.” What Halifax actually thought of Swift must be guessed at. But no patron used to “soft dedication all day long” could quite relish a follower so bound to lead. Swift would never be as remote from politics as Newton, whom Halifax had made Warden and then Master of the Mint, nor as obliging and grateful in the midst of politics as Addison, who through Halifax had entered the busy circle where few men went long without places. Halifax and Somers and Pembroke no more than Godolphin and Sunderland and Wharton by this time could imagine in Swift’s hand the supple, obedient pen which they required.

There was proof to support their doubts. They had been willing to bargain with him, or through him with the Irish Church, about the First Fruits. Let the Church consent to the repeal of the Sacramental Test which excluded Dissenters from office. The Whigs, standing to gain votes from the pleased Dissenters, would then be better able to persuade the Queen to widen her bounty. The repeal would mean only the surrender of a principle, and it would save the Irish clergy a thousand pounds a year. Swift, without a thought of accommodating the ministers or even of earning their possible rewards, had instead written too vigorously, and not surreptitiously enough, against the repeal. He saw it as a selfish experiment which England wanted to try first on Ireland before trying it nearer home. “If your little finger be sore,” he said to England with a snarling humility, “and you think a poultice made of our vitals will give it any ease, speak the word and it shall be done.” Somers, Lord President, and Wharton, Lord Lieutenant, from that moment must have known that Swift was not their man. The sin of wit they could forgive, and indeed encourage. They could neither encourage nor forgive the sin of such independence. Braver statesmen than they might have hesitated to keep a tiger on the hearth.