Part 8

This was the career and this the climax of Swift’s life among the great. After a summer in Ireland he was, it is true, called back to London for the fourth and last winter of the Ministry, but his own future was settled, and his time was chiefly taken up with keeping the peace between Oxford and Bolingbroke. They were, it seemed to Swift, “a ship’s crew quarrelling in a storm, or while their enemies are within gunshot.” The fellowship of love had ceased to exist even for Swift’s loyal eyes.

The victors were wrangling over the spoils. What about their futures? The Queen would not live for ever. The Elector of Hanover, upon whom the Succession had been fixed, was certain to be favourable to the Whigs. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke, both secretly, were dealing with the Pretender, willing to ruin the Succession if they could bring in a prince favourable to Tories. Meanwhile the mutinous Bolingbroke had determined to be first minister himself. Out-intriguing Oxford, he won Oxford’s cousin, now Lady Masham, to another allegiance. London and Windsor buzzed and rumbled. All winter and all spring Swift struggled to divert or pacify the wranglers. Their war went on. Swift, despairing, took to a dull, angry retreat in Berkshire. In July 1714 Oxford was forced to break the white staff of his office. Bolingbroke, however, did not supplant him. In five days the Queen died. The Whiggish Elector was to become George I. Marlborough, returning from the Continent, entered London with two hundred men on horseback, drums, and fifty coaches.

Swift, in a letter to Oxford, said farewell to such power as he had had. “In your public capacity,” he told him, “you have often angered me to the heart, but as a private man, never once.... I will never write to you, if I can help it, otherwise than as to a private person, nor allow myself to have been obliged by you in any other capacity. The memory of one great instance of your candour and justice I will carry to my grave: that having been in a manner domestic with you for almost four years, it was never in the power of any public or concealed enemy to make you think ill of me, though malice and envy were often employed to that end. If I live, posterity shall know that and more, which ... is all the return I can make you. Will you give me leave to say how I would desire to stand in your memory: as one who was truly sensible of the honour you did him, though he was too proud to be vain upon it; as one who was neither assuming, officious, nor teasing, who never wilfully misrepresented persons or facts to you, nor consulted his passions when he gave a character; and lastly, as one whose indiscretions proceeded altogether from a weak head, and not an ill heart? I will add one thing more, which is the highest compliment I can make: that I was never afraid of offending you, nor am I now in any pain for the manner I write to you in. I have said enough; and, like one at your levee, having made my bow, I shrink back into the crowd.”

3

Hardly had Swift reached London in 1710 when he sat four hours one morning to the fashionable Charles Jervas, who, having begun a portrait on Swift’s previous visit to England, now gave the picture “quite another turn.” Perhaps he put the gleam of higher prospects into those eyes which in their extreme moods ranged from fire to stone. Full-lidded, bold even under the dark and heavy brows, humorously but not secretively averted, they seemed in the portrait to glance at something and to stare at everything. Swift’s periwig did not conceal his proud, arched forehead. His clerical bands plumped out his well-nourished, worldly chin, double and dimpled. His nose was both inquiring and commanding, ready to be contemptuous at the first excuse. But about his mouth there were the signs of another nature, sensitive, nervous, never calm. The corners would twitch easily, the lips tremble: the lower disciplined to a counterfeit of straightness, but the upper, short and friendly, indisciplinably sweet.

This was the face of a man whom nothing on earth could over-awe, yet who would assert himself too much out of mere touchiness. He would frighten others yet would hold them, fascinated, dangerously near him. He would give and receive much love and little happiness. This was the face that was to be among the best known in London for four years, this stout body somewhat taller than most men’s, this mind more restless than any man’s.

The Jervas portrait was but the notation of a few hours. The true likeness of Swift in his days of power he drew himself, in the journal-letters to Stella which he posted whenever his sheet of paper was full. Before he left his bed in the morning, after he got into it at night, at any time during the day, Swift set down, with minor interruptions, a continuous account of all, or almost all, he did. He took it for granted that Stella was interested in whatever concerned him. His journal was partly news sent from the great world to a friend waiting in a small one, but it was partly, also, a detailed memorandum written as for his other self. He could be confiding, indiscreet, coarse, boastful, hilarious, tender, admonitory, savage, absurd, pouring out what came to him as it came. He wrote now as if this were a letter to Stella and Rebecca Dingley both, or to either of them; now as if it were a conversation with himself, in the knowledge that they, and only they, would hear.

The journal was so intimate that he fell often into a foolish “little language,” like a giant talking to a baby with what he imagined was the baby’s vocabulary and pronunciation--or like a lover using silly words in despair of finding any that were serious enough. Swift’s baby-talk was a joke kept up between him and Stella, a note of tenderness struck in this way for want of a chance to sound it with a voice. But he did not talk down to her. He told her his life.

“I was this morning at ten at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison’s play, called _Cato_, which is to be acted on Friday. There were not above half-a-score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them; and the drab that acts Cato’s daughter out in the midst of a passionate part and then calling out ‘What’s next?’ The Bishop of Clogher was there too, but he stood privately in a gallery. I went to dine with Lord Treasurer, but he was gone to Wimbledon, his daughter Carmarthen’s country seat, seven miles off. So I went back and dined privately with Mr. Addison, whom I had left to go to Lord Treasurer. I keep fires yet; I am very extravagant. I sat this evening with Sir Andrew Fountaine.... It is rainy weather again; nevle saw ze rike [never saw the like]. This letter shall go tomorrow. Remember, ung oomens, it is seven weeks since your last, and I allow oo but five weeks. But oo have been galloping in the country.”

The variety of Swift’s days was in the persons he met and talked with. His habits had the regularity which goes with being virtuous and poor. He made, however, no virtue of his poverty. “I love these shabby difficulties when they are over; but I hate them, because they arise from not having a thousand pounds a year.”

Though he liked best to make his own meal of a single dish, he despised a skimpy table. Though he liked to walk, and took a chair or coach only in bad weather, he minded the expense when he had to ride, not his loss of an opportunity to trudge like a hero. He thought he was extravagant about fires, but when he shivered in his lodgings it was because coal cost money, not because shivering exalted his spirit. He avoided fruit, he more or less gave up snuff, he put water in his wine. All these asceticisms were for the sake of his treacherous health, as was the brandy that he drank, as were the pills and purges, the drops and ointments with which he fought his many attacks of giddiness. But never once did he rejoice in the endurance of a saint or the glory of a martyr. He did not relish even the fasts of his Church. “I hate Lent. I hate different diets, and furmity and butter, and herb porridge, and sour devout faces of people who only put on religion for seven weeks.”

Swift was a man of his world in his frank admiration for power, station, wealth, comfort, elegance, urbanity, learning, wit, manners. He had come to England to seek a better society than there was in Laracor or Dublin. His natural handicaps--passion, intensity, genius--were enough. He would not pretend that his lack of fortune was a merit. He complained of it, desired to mend it, and kept the best company he could.

Each morning in his various London lodgings Patrick, the servant whom Swift had brought over from Ireland, woke his master early, not always the first time he called. Swift’s sleep was heavy but disturbed. “I was dreaming the most melancholy things of poor Ppt [Poppet], and was grieving and crying all night.” Awake, he was likely to stay in bed till the room was warm, writing, often still by candlelight, as if Stella and Dingley were beside him. “Morning. I am going this morning to see Prior, who dines with me at Mr. Harley’s; so I can’t stay fiddling and talking with dear little brats in a morning, and ’tis terribly cold. I wish my cold hand was in the warmest place about you, young women. I’d give ten guineas upon that account with all my heart, faith. Oh, it starves my thigh. So I’ll rise and bid you good morrow, my ladies both, good morrow. Come, stand away, let me rise. Patrick, take away the candle. Is there a good fire? So--up adazy.”

Shaving, every second or third day; brandy, on days when he was giddy; breakfast of milk porridge or a cake Stella’s mother had made him: these got Swift ready for his day. He might write at home, all day when he was busiest, sending out for a chop and a pot of ale for his dinner. But usually he put on periwig, boots, and black gown with pudding-sleeves, and left the house, walking, about his pleasure or his affairs. Perhaps he had morning tea or chocolate with some of the ladies who delighted in his fame and insolence. Perhaps he conferred with his printers in the City. Perhaps he waited on one of the lords of his political fellowship. There were many amusements in London. “Lady Kerry, Mrs. Pratt, Mrs. Cadogan, and I in one coach, Lady Kerry’s son and his governor and two gentlemen in another, maids and misses and little master (Lord Shelburne’s children) in a third, all hackneys, set out at ten o’clock this morning from Lord Shelburne’s house in Piccadilly to the Tower, and saw all the sights, lions, etc., then to Bedlam; then dined at the chop-house behind the Exchange; then to Gresham College (but the keeper was not at home); and concluded the night at the puppet-show, whence we came home safe at eight.”

The pivot of Swift’s day was dinner, usually at three. First with Whigs, then with Tories, he dined through the town and out of it. “That’s something charms me mightily about London, that you go dine a dozen miles off in October, stay all day, and return so quickly. You cannot do anything like this in Dublin.” Within a month after the Whigs clutched at him he had more invitations than he had afternoons. He was a wit and scholar; he was a man of influence with the Ministry. Noblemen with axes to grind begged him to come to their tables. Men less interested in his power no less eagerly took up the fashion. Obliging hosts urged him to make his own terms.

“I dined today with a lady of my acquaintance, who was sick, in her bedchamber, upon three herrings and a chicken; the dinner was my bespeaking.” “Dr. Arbuthnot ... yesterday gave me my choice of place, persons, and victuals for today. So I chose to dine with Mrs. Hill ... Mrs. Masham’s sister; no company but us three, and to have a shoulder of mutton, a small one; which was exactly, only there was too much victuals besides, and the Doctor’s wife was of the company.” Nor did Swift make terms only with friends of his own level. Bolingbroke “showed me his bill of fare to tempt me to dine with him. Poh, said I, I value not your bill of fare. Give me your bill of company.” About both the food and the other diners Swift was firm. At the Earl of Abingdon’s “we had nothing but fish.... Our wine was poison.... His carps were raw, and his candles tallow. He shall not catch me in haste again.” And again: “I left a friend’s house today where I was invited, just when dinner was setting on, and pretended I was engaged, because I saw some fellows I did not know.”

Better a slice of mutton in his lodgings than indifferent or too numerous dishes; better his own company than that of “persons unknown, as bad, for aught I know, as your deans, parsons, and curates.” Swift rode high, and all Tory London encouraged him.

At many houses where he dined the guests stayed on for the evening. Swift chose generally to leave at six, to walk in Hyde Park, to visit other friends, to sit in a coffee house--though after a few months of his influence with Oxford he gave up coffee houses as too public. Many of his evenings he went home to write, at first an occasional _Tatler_, then his weekly _Examiner_, afterwards his pamphlets, at any time his stinging verses. In his lodgings he might find that Patrick had forgotten the fire or had neglected to buy coal or had gone off with the key with which Swift’s papers were locked up. There would be abuse and apology, neither of which meant anything. The most regular interruptions of Swift’s evenings came from Oxford, who kept “cursed hours,” sometimes did not dine till five, and liked Swift to be with him at supper. “I hate these suppers mortally, but I seldom eat anything.” Such evenings with Oxford were likely to be long and convivial, and wearing to Swift, who drank little, ate less, liked as well to sit beside card-players as to play himself, and was soon bored by ordinary conversation.

Yet when he had reached his bed and had put on his nightgown and velvet nightcap--the fur-trimmed one which Dingley sent was “too little and too hot”--he remembered, no matter how late it was, the journal. “Pshaw, I must be writing to those dear saucy brats every night, whether I will or no, let me have what business I will, or come home ever so late, or be ever so sleepy; but an old saying and a true one,

“‘_Be you lords or be you earls, You must write to naughty girls._’”

Widely as Swift dined, three days a week were for much of the year given to his special friends. On Sunday, after going to Court, which he said served him “as a coffee house,” he usually dined with Bolingbroke. “Mr. Secretary had too much company with him today; so I came away soon after dinner. I give no man liberty to swear or talk bawdy, and I found some of them were in constraint, so I left them to themselves.” On Saturday Swift dined with Oxford for what the first minister called his “whipping day”--the day, that is, when the informal cabinet reviewed the past week and designed the next. “This company, at first, consisted only of the Lord Keeper Harcourt, the Earl Rivers, the Earl of Peterborough, Mr. Secretary St. John, and myself; and here, after dinner, they used to discourse and settle matters of great importance. Several lords were afterwards, by degrees, admitted.... These meetings were always continued except when the Queen was at Windsor; but, as they grew more numerous, became of less consequence, and ended only in drinking and general conversation.” The matters of great importance were the Ministry’s policies and intrigues. The general conversation has been lost.

Swift told Stella only that he and his friends had talked, seldom what they had said. Once, not on a Saturday, when he had opposed the appointment of a certain commissioner to Spain because he was a “most covetous cur,” Swift reported the argument with Oxford. “I went on and said it was a shame to send him; to which he agreed, but desired I would name some who understood business and do not love money, for he could not find them. I said there was something in a treasurer different from other men; that we ought not to make a man a bishop who does not love divinity, or a general who does not love war; and I wondered why the Queen would make a man lord treasurer who does not love money.... Is it not silly to write all this? But it gives you an idea what our conversation is with mixed company.” When the Earl of Nottingham had deserted to the Whig side “Lord Treasurer was hinting as if he wished a ballad was made on him, and I will get up one against tomorrow.... I was this morning making the ballad, two degrees above Grub Street ... and then went to dine with our Society.... The printer came before we parted, and brought the ballad, which made them laugh very heartily a dozen times.”

The Society which laughed at the ballad claimed the third fixed dinner of Swift’s week, Thursday, though only during the session of Parliament. Bolingbroke seems to have planned the club in June 1711, when Swift was in the country with Lord Shelburne. It was to be small, weighty, and decent, without the extravagance of the Kit-Cat or the drunkenness of the Beef-Steak, was to be made up of men of wit and men of influence, and was to have for its two great ends “the improvement of friendship and the encouragement of letters.” Swift, back in town, found himself among the original twelve members and at once the eagerest. “If we go on as we begin,” he wrote to Stella, “no other club in this town will be worth talking of.” The men of wit were Swift, Prior, and John Arbuthnot, the Queen’s physician. There were three times as many men of influence. Oxford and Harcourt were excluded, since the club meant to appeal to them for patronage. But their sons were chosen, and Oxford’s son-in-law, Viscount Dupplin, and Samuel Masham, the husband of Oxford’s whispering cousin. There were, also, Bolingbroke, Sir Robert Raymond, Solicitor General, Allen Bathurst, George Granville, Secretary at War, and Sir William Wyndham.

The members, putting off their titles when they dined, called each other “Brother.” Each in turn was president of the dinner and paid the bill until all had had turns, after which the charges of each dinner were divided among them. They dined sometimes at the houses of the members, more often at taverns. The dozen or so brothers added after the first twelve were all on the side of influence rather than of wit. The richer members, who were men of influence, ran up the cost of their dinners so that the poorer, who were men of wit, could not afford it. Yet Swift, though he winced at his bill for seven guineas, for a year and a half was happy. Power and learning had sat down in an equal brotherhood. When the Duke of Ormond brought his brother the Earl of Arran, who was not a member, to a meeting against all order, Swift opposed his election to the face of the Earl and the Duke. But Swift was exultant when four of his brothers were among the twelve peers whom Oxford packed into the House of Lords: the son-in-law Dupplin, the cousin-in-law Masham, Bathurst, and Granville.

It took Swift a year and a half to realize how much more skill than he the men of influence had at getting what they wanted. Having odd wells of enthusiasm in him, he had imagined that a club of politicians could be as much interested in the encouragement of letters as in the improvement of friendship.

The day after the first meeting in June 1711 he urged Oxford to leave Congreve, though a Whig, in his post. Oxford said he would. Swift hurried off to Congreve with the news. “So I have made a worthy man happy, and that is a good day’s work.” And Swift that same day had larger plans. “I am proposing to my Lord to erect a society or academy for correcting and settling our language, that we may not perpetually be changing as we do. He enters mightily into it.” The pamphlet on “correcting, ascertaining, and improving the English tongue” was the only piece of writing Swift ever published with his name. He wrote again like a governor, demanding that the language be orderly and stable, regulated by a lawful academy. He wrote, no less, like a brother of the Society, appealing to Oxford to become the patron of worthy, needy men of letters. Nothing came of these proposals, though Oxford brimmed with promises.

Swift undertook to raise money among the members. In February 1713 he had collected sixty guineas and was “to give them away to two authors tomorrow; and Lord Treasurer has promised us a hundred pounds to reward some others.” The sixty pounds went to the two authors, but there was another in worse need. That was “little Harrison,” a young Oxford poet for whom Swift had one of his profound, inexplicable tendernesses. “I went in the morning, and found him mighty ill, and got ... an order for a hundred pounds from the Treasury to be paid him tomorrow; and I have got him removed to Knightsbridge for air.” The next day: “I ... desired a friend to receive the hundred pounds for poor Harrison, and will carry it to him tomorrow morning.” The day after that: “I took Parnell this morning, and we walked to see poor Harrison. I had the hundred pounds in my pocket. I told Parnell I was afraid to knock at the door; my mind misgave me. I knocked, and his man in tears told me his master was dead an hour before.... Lord Treasurer was much concerned when I told him. I could not dine with Lord Treasurer nor anywhere else, but got a bit of meat toward evening.”

This pathetic episode, hardly more than a touch of melodrama in the general drama of Swift’s venture, cut him more sharply than his own mounting disappointment. He had thought that though he might not help himself he might at least help others. Now it seemed he could not do even that. He had only kept a few Whig poets in their places. His scheme for an academy which was to honour and establish letters among the English was still a mere scheme somewhere on the wind. The Ministry which he had served was not, after all, to be renowned for its patronage to learning. The man of wit had looked vainly to the men of influence.

What Swift, whose pride played tricks with his vision, did not see was that he had exploited his wit much as Oxford had exploited all the wit at his command. Oxford had used such men of letters as could be bent to his political concerns. Swift had bent his talents to pamphlets and lampoons about the most temporary matters. From Prior he had learned to write verse more lightly as from Addison he had learned to write more smoothly. Swift had poured his tremendous prose on the ground, careless what became of it. Obsessed with the desire for power, he had tried to win it by such force as politicians use, not by the art natural to him; among his pretended brothers the Dupplins and Mashams, not among his true friends the Arbuthnots and Popes.

4

During his final winter in England Swift turned to his true friends. It was not because he had found where he belonged. It was because he knew he had failed to belong elsewhere. He was not a bishop. He was not even an English dean. He was only a great writer, author of a great satire, making his first plans for the greatest of satires, meditating a revenge. But his revenge hardly went, that year, beyond a prospectus. He and Arbuthnot had taken up the rising young poets Parnell, Gay, and Pope. All five met Saturday evenings at Arbuthnot’s rooms in St. James’s Palace, where the Scriblerus Club, as they called themselves, plotted a burlesque biography which was to ridicule false learning.