Part 9

Oxford had called Swift Dr. Martin, “because martin is a sort of a swallow, and so is a swift.” From that had come the name of Martinus Scriblerus, a phantom pedant whose career the Club was to trace through all his foolish blunders. The leader seems to have been Arbuthnot. “To talk of Martin in any hands but yours,” Swift wrote to him, “is a folly. You every day give better hints than all of us together could do in a twelvemonth.... Pope, who first thought of the hint, has no genius at all to it, in my mind. Gay is too young. Parnell has some ideas of it, but is idle. I could put together, and lard, and strike out well enough. But all that relates to the sciences must be from you.” Arbuthnot wrote the history of Martin’s youth and education so wittily that Sterne later pilfered from it for his history of Tristram Shandy. Pope, hunting among contemporary poets for examples of bathos, “the art of sinking in poetry,” took the first steps in his war upon the dunces. Swift was to exhibit Martin on his travels, and had already thought of taking him among pigmies, among giants, among fantastic scientists.

The break in the Ministry and the death of the Queen scattered the Scriblerus Club. Though the members often spoke of it in their letters, the treatise remained fragments. “I must be a little easy in my mind before I can think of Scriblerus,” Swift wrote to Pope. It was not merely an uneasy mind which kept Swift from going on with the project. Whether or not he was yet aware of it, the scheme was too small for him. He could no longer be content, as he might have been in the days of the _Tale of a Tub_, to ridicule pedants.

Swift certainly was not aware, at the Saturday meetings of the Club, that his friends had by nature a better art than he could ever learn: the art of valuing their best gifts most, the art of being satisfied to be themselves. What he did with them he thought of as play. His work, he thought, was his efforts, vain as they were, in behalf of Oxford and Bolingbroke. He stood between the ministers and the poets, eager to be generous. “Of all the world,” Pope wrote, “you are the man, without flattery, who serve your friends with the least ostentation. It is almost ingratitude to thank you, considering your temper.” Swift introduced Parnell to the ministers and interested Bolingbroke in Parnell’s poetry. Swift helped Gay to his post as secretary with the envoy to Hanover. Swift got for Pope’s translation of Homer such a list of subscribers as no book had ever had in England. Swift struck the vein which in Arbuthnot “lay like a mine in the earth, which the owner for a long time never knew of.” But Swift did not take a benefit from their examples.

How could he? Parnell was humble and drifting. Gay was sensual and lazy, ready to be any man’s dependent, troubled only because patrons were too few. Pope was first and last a poet who schemed, fought, and lived for his art, as Swift for action. Arbuthnot was a man of learning and judgment, of whom Swift said that he had “more wit than we all have” and Pope said that in wit and humour he was “superior to all mankind”; but Arbuthnot was not ambitious or misanthropic. He might scorn the world, but he amply took it as it came. Of all the patterns by which these others shaped their lives, not a single pattern fitted Swift.

When, after a summer spent in dejected, furious retirement at Letcombe in Berkshire, writing various apologias for the fallen Ministry, Swift went back to Ireland in September 1714, he was beaten but not reconciled. His impulse was still towards the central fountains of honour and profit and power. His obsessive desire to master and direct had not, after all his disappointments, left him in even a sullen peace. Having been beaten, and not reconciled, he could not study his failure in a clear light. He did not understand that with his gifts, wit and learning, passion and intensity and genius, he had been at a disadvantage with men who had wealth and office, and that though he could pass them in the long run, he could not be immediately equal with them. The fault, as he explained it to himself, did not lie in his passion to do what he was not chiefly designed to do, nor in the incompetence and deviousness of his political associates, nor in the catastrophe of the Queen’s death. It lay, he somehow concluded, in the very constitution of human life.

Let virtue work and sweat as it would to bring order out of the dirty chaos, nothing permanent could come of it. For a time a few resolute men might hold up the dreadful weight with their shoulders. But if there should be one tremor, the momentary pattern would collapse and the parts of it return to their obstinate disorder. There was no hope. Scorn and hate were all that any virtuous or reasonable man could feel towards mankind.

V

DEAN AND PATRIOT

1

Jeers followed Swift out of England, and jeers greeted him in Ireland. Dublin was full of Whigs. Laracor, which he had kept along with his deanery, was desolate. “I would retire too, if I could,” he wrote after a month to Bolingbroke, “but my country seat, where I have an acre of ground, is gone to ruin. The wall of my own apartment is fallen down, and I want mud to rebuild it and straw to thatch it. Besides, a spiteful neighbour has seized on six feet of ground, carried off my trees, and spoiled my grove.... I have not fortitude enough to go and see those devastations. But, in return, I live a country life in town, see nobody, and go every day once to prayers; and hope, in a few months, to grow as stupid as the present situation of affairs will require. Well, after all, parsons are not such bad company, especially when they are under subjection; and I let none but such come near me.” So a banished general might have said it was not so bad to spend his time drilling a squad of militia in a distant province.

“You are to understand,” Swift wrote after ten months to Pope, “that I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house. My family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in the stables, a footman, and an old maid who are all at board wages, and when I do not dine abroad or make an entertainment, which last is very rare, I eat a mutton pie and drink half a pint of wine. My amusements are defending my small dominions against the archbishop and endeavouring to reduce my rebellious choir.” So a deposed prime minister might have turned his hand to the government of a village.

Swift did not neglect his chores. He set to work to subdue the “three and twenty dignitaries and prebendaries” who made up his chapter at St. Patrick’s. The chapter yielded. He began to resist his superiors, particularly the bishops who had deprived him of credit for the grant of the First Fruits. The bishops became wary. Even in Laracor, where Swift was only vicar, he demanded better manners from the Welsh bishop of the diocese, and, somewhat later, wrote to him as vicars seldom write to bishops: “I am only sorry that you, who are of a country famed for good nature, have found a way to unite the hasty passion of your own countrymen with the long, sedate resentment of a Spaniard; but I have an honourable hope that this proceeding has been more owing to party than complexion.” Though Swift refused for half a dozen years to mix in the business of the world which had defeated him, he was, from the first, gigantic and ominous in his exile.

There was need of caution. During his stay in England he had got out of touch with Irish affairs, as well as out of sympathy. London had run him into debt. As dean and vicar he was to have about six or seven hundred pounds a year when he could get them: an income which made him, he said, the poorest man in Ireland who dined off plate and the richest who did not drive his carriage. But the installation at St. Patrick’s cost a thousand pounds and several stringent years. The Whigs suspected Swift, like the late ministers, of disloyalty to George I. The suspicion was absurd. “I look upon the coming of the Pretender,” Swift said, “as a greater evil than any we are likely to suffer under the worst Whig ministry that can be found.” Yet when Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Ormond--“three persons from among the rest of mankind on whose friendship and protection I might depend, whose conversation I most valued and chiefly confined myself to”--were charged with the treason of plotting to bring the Pretender in, when Ormond and Bolingbroke escaped to France and Oxford went to the Tower, Swift shared their odium.

The authorities, intercepting letters sent to him, had a chance to read nothing more treasonable than these words from Ormond: “We have no new favourite, nor never can. You have left so sweet a relish by your conversation upon all our pleasures that we cannot bear the thoughts of intimacy with any person.” With the wives of Bolingbroke and Ormond Swift carried on a guarded correspondence. To Oxford, in the Tower, he wrote without reserve, making him “the humblest offers of my poor service and attendance”--attendance, that is, in prison if Oxford would permit it. “It is the first time I ever solicited you in my own behalf, and if I am refused I think it will be the first request you ever refused me. I do not conceive myself obliged to regulate my opinions by the proceedings of a House of Lords or Commons; and therefore, however they may acquit themselves in your Lordship’s case, I shall take the liberty of thinking and calling you the ablest and faithfulest minister, the truest lover of your country, that this age hath produced.” Oxford’s son kept the letter “as a family monument.” Oxford himself acknowledged it two years later.

While the Jacobite odium hung over Swift he declared, not quite in earnest, that he would hide himself away in Guernsey or Wales for the rest of his life. The world was too hateful to live in. Yet what most distressed him was his grief over the friends with whom he could no longer be “familiar and customary.” “When I leave a country without a probability of returning,” he wrote to Pope, “I think as seldom as I can of what I loved or esteemed in it, to avoid the _desiderium_ which of all things makes life most uneasy.” And to Arbuthnot he wrote: “Writing to you would make me stark mad. Judge his condition who has nothing to keep him from being miserable but endeavouring to forget those for whom he has the greatest value, love, and friendship.”

His friends would not let him sink into such a gulf. “Never,” Arbuthnot answered him, “repeat that melancholy, tender word, that you will endeavour to forget me. I am sure I never can forget you till I meet with, what is impossible, another whose conversation I can delight so much in as Dr. Swift’s.... That hearty, sincere friendship, that plain and open ingenuity in all your commerce, is what I am sure I can never find in another man. I shall want often a faithful monitor, one that would vindicate me behind my back and tell me my faults to my face.” Pope wrote to him of “the constant esteem and affection I am both obliged and inclined to have for you,” and said he regarded him “as a friend in another world,” much as he regarded his patron saint. Bolingbroke wrote that for a half hour’s conversation with Swift he would “barter whole hours of life.” For a year or more Swift could hardly bring himself to reply. Then, however, the rigour of his despair began to leave him, his wit to come out of the lair where it had sulked.

To Pope, in 1716, Swift pointed out the use of fools, who, in his opinion, were “as necessary for a good writer as pen, ink, and paper.” He could take enough interest in wit to propose to Gay the subject of another pastoral. “What think you of a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there?” In 1717 he wrote once more to Addison, now Secretary of State, congratulating Addison upon his post and the Whigs for having chosen one man on his merits. In 1718 Swift wrote to Oxford’s son that time had sweetened him. “My servants tell all our neighbourhood that I grow gentler every day, and am content only to call my footman a fool for that which when you knew me first I would have broke his head.” And in December 1719 Swift wrote to Bolingbroke a letter in which his humour played again over his passion.

“I can now express in a hundred words what would formerly have cost me ten. I can write epigrams of fifty distichs which might be squeezed into one. I have gone the round of all my stories three or four times with the younger people, and begin them again. I give hints how significant a person I have been, and nobody believes me. I pretend to pity them, but am inwardly angry.... If I boast of having been valued three hundred miles off, it is of no more use than if I told how handsome I was when I was young.... If I can prevail on any one to personate a hearer and admirer, you would wonder what a favourite he grows. He is sure to have the first glass out of the bottle and the best bit I can carve. Nothing has convinced me so much that I am of a little subaltern spirit, _inopis atque pusilli animi_, as to reflect how I am forced into the most trifling amusements to divert the vexation of former thoughts and present objects.”

In another man this might have sounded like humility. In Swift it has, somehow, the imagined sound of a searchlight falling into a dark corner.

He was now almost Swift again. Looking back over his career as a wit he wrote an ironic letter of advice to a young poet, assuring him that poetry did not demand religion or learning or even sense of those who practised it. Ireland, he argued, must have a Grub Street. Ireland must have a poet laureate, a professor of poetry, a city bard for Dublin, a poet in fee for every parish. It might have more. “What if every one so qualified were obliged to add one more than usual to the number of his domestics, and besides a fool and a chaplain (which are often united in one person) would retain a poet in his family?” Looking back over his career as a parson Swift wrote a sober letter of advice to a young clergyman. To him, not to the poet, Swift said that “proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.”

Both these letters dealt with what for Swift was play. He resumed his work in a pamphlet urging all the Irish, as a protest against the ruinous export laws, to make a “universal use of Irish manufacture,” “utterly rejecting and renouncing everything wearable that comes from England.” Officials fumed. He was, they claimed, trying to divide the two kingdoms. The printer was brought to trial. When the jury acquitted him the Lord Chief Justice sent them back nine times, till they were willing to leave the verdict to the mercy of the judge. Though the case was dropped when the next Lord Lieutenant came over, the damage was done. Swift, having once more tasted Whig blood, was on his way to becoming an Irish patriot.

2

But before he gathered all his forces he had to go through his final conflict with Stella’s rival. The drama reaching its climax was already much too long.

He had met Vanessa (Esther Vanhomrigh) early in 1708 in London, where her mother was living with her children. It pleased the mother to call the daughter younger than she was, and it did not displease the daughter. She was a sleepy girl, still, at twenty, undecided between the nursery and the drawing-room, moody, idle, intelligent. Swift, at first considering her a child, discovered in her a mind, and was irresistibly, humorously impelled to shape it. “She had good principles,” he wrote three years later, “and I have corrected all her faults.” She had, however, the passion of sleepy women, not the obedience of Stella.

To that passion Swift was blind, first carelessly, then deliberately. No doubt he felt it. He had put his entire energy into his pride. His senses, no matter how cold towards women, must have learned that the relationship with Stella, no matter how close and kind, was sometimes dry and mild. She was nearly a wife, and some routine had got into their companionship. Vanessa was younger. Vanessa was new. Swift, for all his prudence, enjoyed the tumult in her disposition. Because he held her, as he seems always to have done, at a safe arm’s-length, he was obtuse to her eagerness. Obtuse and insufficiently concerned. Being forty, he could not quite resist such warmth from a girl, did not have quite the courage to put out such a fire or leave it. Too scrupulous or too temperate to make the full use of Vanessa’s passion, he went on idling within its perilous range. He was surprised when he found that he had on his hands a mistress as extraordinary as the wife he had in Ireland.

Stella the extraordinary wife. Vanessa the extraordinary mistress. Swift the extraordinary husband and lover. No other terms will bound the extraordinary triangle. Gossip then and gossip since has wasted its strength in trying to find out whether Swift was technically lover or husband to either of the women. What if he was? What if he was not? The drama remains the same.

Stella was for nearly forty years, child and woman, “the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I,” Swift said, “or perhaps any other person, ever was blessed with.” Call Stella his wife or be pedantic. Vanessa was for fifteen years his occasional companion, his delight, his torment, to whom he wrote--in bad French--that there was no merit nor any proof of his good taste in his finding in her all that nature had given any mortal in the way of honour, virtue, sense, wit, tenderness, agreeableness, and firmness of spirit. Call Vanessa his mistress or be pedantic. One side of Swift looked towards a wife, one towards a mistress. He maintained between them a singular course, but it was no more singular than his character. He was, after all, only one man loved by two women.

The friendship begun in 1708 between Swift and Vanessa, anxious to be possessed but willing to be taught, was kept up during that stay in England and, by letters, during his next absence in Ireland. When he returned to become a Tory in 1710 he had so lavish a welcome from the Vanhomrighs that their house became almost his. He lived near them, dined with them often and then more often, and had a small room there in which to read and write.

Stella, hearing about them, seems to have sniffed. “You say they are of no consequence,” he answered her. “Why, they keep as good female company as I do male. I see all the drabs of quality at this end of the town with them.” He spoke in his journal rather of the mother or of the whole family than of Vanessa.

When, having taken to Chelsea in the spring of 1711, he walked more or less daily to London and back, he kept his best gown and periwig at the Vanhomrigh house, and called twice a day to change. Vanessa, with the family, possibly visited him in Chelsea, as she probably did at Kensington in the summer of the year after. The Vanhomrighs certainly visited Swift at Windsor in September 1712, and Vanessa was on some score disappointed. “Why then,” he wrote, “you should not have come, and I knew that as well as you.”

So far any strong feelings there may have been in either of them had not risen into words. He teased her for her dawdling, for her chiding, for her jealousy of her younger sister, for her habit of coaxing him for political secrets. She complained, rather childishly, of his neglect of her when he was out of London. Their letters might have been between Swift and any young woman of his acquaintance.

But when he went to Ireland in June 1713, sick of England, Vanessa could not endure the stern break which suited him. The four letters she wrote before she got an answer were disconsolate. “I find no conversation on earth comparable but yours.” She had heard of his illness. “Oh! what would I give to know how you do at this instant. My fortune is too hard. Your absence was enough, without this cruel addition.” “How could you be so cruel, to defer telling me the thing of the world I wished most to know? If you think I write too much, your only way is to tell me so, or at least to write to me again, that I may know you don’t quite forget me; for I very much fear that I never employ a thought of yours now, except when you are reading my letters, which makes me ply you with them.... If you are very happy it is ill-natured of you not to tell me, except ’tis what is inconsistent with mine.”

Swift could not mistake this last clause. In seven words Vanessa made plain that she was wondering whether he could be happy without her, asking whether he was by any dreadful chance happy with some one else, announcing that she thought of him and her as having their happiness in common. His answer put cold oceans between them.

“I had your last spleenatic letter. I told you when I left England I would endeavour to forget everything there, and would write as seldom as I could. I did indeed design one general round of letters to my friends, but my health has not yet suffered me. I design to pass the greatest part of the time I stay in Ireland here in the cabin where I am now writing; neither will I leave the kingdom till I am called for; and if they have no further service for me I will never see England again. At my first coming I thought I should have died with discontent, and was horribly melancholy while they were installing me. But it begins to wear off and change to dulness. My river walk is extremely pretty, and my canal in great beauty, and I see trouts playing in it.”

Her ardour, that is, he saw as spleen. He meant to forget her along with all the others. If he were to go back it would be to politics. He was dull but not melancholy. Vanessa would be glad to know that there were fish in his canal.

Politics called Swift back in September, to London and to Vanessa. There are no letters belonging to that winter, but there is the poem, apparently written then, in which Swift told the story of Cadenus (that is _Decanus_, dean) and Vanessa.

He began lightly, with the graces of a contemporary wit. The shepherds and the nymphs, he said, had gone to law before the court of Venus, the nymphs accusing the shepherds of resisting love, the shepherds defending themselves by the counter-accusation that, thanks to the nymphs, “modern love” was no longer

“_A fire celestial, chaste, refined, Conceived and kindled in the mind,_”

but had become a “gross desire,” moving through caprice and folly. Venus, unable to decide the suit, had undertaken an experiment, and had endowed Vanessa, happily new-born, with all the virtues which the Queen of Love--or Swift--thought most “lovely in the female kind”: “a sweetness above all perfumes,” a cleanliness “incapable of outward stains,” a mind as modest as “the speech of prudes,” and a “gentle, soft, engaging air.” Not yet satisfied, Venus had fooled Pallas into thinking that the baby was a boy, and had obtained for her the other virtues “for manly bosoms chiefly fit”: “knowledge, judgment, wit,” “justice, truth, and fortitude,” “honour which no breath can stain,” “open heart and bounteous hand,” and, since “meat must be with money bought,” as Pallas knew, “some small regard for state and wealth” and a useful fortune of five thousand pounds.

The romantic Venus, when all this was done, had looked for the restoration of her power. The realistic Pallas--

“_For how can heavenly wisdom prove An instrument to earthly love?_”--

had, though enraged by the deceit, left “all things to their natural course.” And Pallas was justified. The beaux, when Vanessa came to town, listened to her hermaphroditic discourses--

“_Through nature and through art she ranged, And gracefully her subject changed_”--

and thought her tiresome. The belles, disgusted by her lack of interest in clothes and gossip, thought her old-fashioned.

“_To copy her few nymphs aspired; Her virtues fewer swains admired._”

Vanessa hardened her heart and turned her back on the world.