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Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne
reader to whom they are most abhorrent. And the standard of taste was different in the reign of Anne, and critics were not easily alarmed. To some readers the most desperate satire that was ever written appeared a delightful piece of wit.
William Penn sent to the author from America a gammon of bacon on the score of having been “often greatly amused by thy Tale,” and a hundred years later it “delighted beyond description” at the robust mind of William Cobbett, so that he forgot that he had not supped, and preferred the book to a bed. The effect upon the general mind of his contemporaries was equally great; and notwithstanding the immense difference of taste and public feeling it has never lost its place among English classics. Many indeed were horrified by its audacious treatment of the most sacred things, and the objection of Queen Anne to give its author a bishopric would probably have been shared by nine tenths of her subjects. The “Tale of a Tub” is one of those books which furnish a test of literary character. Like the man who was bound to hear the Ancient Mariner, and whom that mystic personage knew whenever he saw him, the reader of Swift’s great work must be born with the faculty necessary for due appreciation and understanding. It is not a power communicable, any more than it is possible to explain the story of the albatross, and the curse that fell upon its slayer. The greater part of the public take both for granted, and remain in a respectful ignorance. To such Swift’s work is little better than a dust-heap of genius, in which there are diamonds and precious things imbedded, which flash at every turning over; but the broken bits of treasure are mixed up with choking dust and dreary rubbish, as well as the offensive garbage which revolts the searcher. The dedication of the work to Prince Posterity is thus wholly justified, and at the same time a failure. It stands in the highest rank of classic satire, and yet to the mass of readers it is nothing but a name.
It is characteristic, however, of the man that he should have tossed into the world without a name a book which made a greater impression than any contemporary publication, enjoying no doubt the wonders and queries, yet scorning to make himself dependent upon so small a thing as a book for his reputation and influence. He was no more disposed than the most sensitive of authors to let another man claim the credit of it, yet proud enough in native arrogance to hold himself independent of such aids to advancement, and thus to prove his scorn of the world’s opinion, even when he sought its applauses most. Whether this work had anything to do with his introduction to the society of the coffee-houses, and the wits of London, we are not told. He was addressed by Addison as “the most Agreeable Companion, the Truest Friend, and the Greatest Genius of his age,” very shortly after the publication of his great satire; so that it is probable he already enjoyed the advantage of its fame, without seeming to do so. The friendship of Addison was a better thing than the admiration of the crowd, and notwithstanding Swift’s imperious temper and arrogant ways, it is just to add that he always numbered among his friends the best and greatest of his time.
On a first accost, it would not seem that his manners were ingratiating. This story, which is told of Swift’s appearance at the St. James coffee-house is amusing, and may be true.
They had for several successive days observed a strange clergyman come into the house who seemed entirely unacquainted with any of those who frequented it, and whose custom was to lay down his hat on a table and walk backward and forward at a good pace, for half an hour or an hour, without speaking to any mortal, or seeming in the least to attend to anything that was going forward there. He then used to take up his hat, pay his money at the bar, and walk away without opening his lips. On one particular evening, as Mr. Addison and the rest were observing him, they saw him cast his eyes several times on a gentleman in boots who seemed to be just come out of the country, and at last advance, as if intending to address him. Eager to hear what this dumb, mad parson had to say, they all quitted their seats to get near him. Swift went up to the country gentleman, and in a very abrupt manner, without any previous salute, asked him, “Pray, sir, do you remember any good weather in the world?” The country gentleman, after staring a little at the peculiarity of his manner, answered, “Yes, sir, I remember a great deal of good weather in my time.” “That is more,” rejoined Swift, “than I can say. I never remember any weather that was not too hot or too cold, or too wet or too dry; but however God Almighty contrives at the end of the year it is all very well.” With which remark he took up his hat, and without uttering a syllable more, or taking the least notice of any one, walked out of the coffee-house.
His whimsical humor, and love of making the spectators stare, remained a characteristic of Swift all his life.
These beginnings of social life were, however, past, and no one was better known or more warmly welcomed, when he appeared with his wig new curled, and his azure eyes aglow, than the Irish parson, waiting upon Providence and the Whigs, whose political pamphlets, and papers in the “Tatler,” and malicious practical joking with poor Partridge, the astrologer, made him, at each appearance, a more notable figure to all the lookers-on. His eyes must have been on fire under those expressive brows when he came to London in 1710, resolved this time to be put off by Whig blandishments no longer, but to try what the other side would do. The other side received him with open arms, and the most instant appreciation of what he was worth to them and what he could do. Harley was not great in any sense of the word, but if he had shown as much insight in the conduct of public affairs as he did in his perception of the workmen best adapted to his purpose, in the struggle upon which he had entered, he would have been the most successful of ministers. He told Swift that his colleagues and himself had been afraid of none but him in the ranks of their enemies, and that they had resolved to have him. And in proof that they were ready to do anything to secure his services, they pushed on and decided as soon as might be his suit for the church, which had hung in the balance so long, was as good as granted, now as far off as ever. It was settled at once, to Swift’s great triumph. And to crown all, the new minister, the greatest man in England, called him Jonathan!—of all wonderful things, what could be more wonderful than that this great wit, this powerful and pitiless satirist, this ambitious man, should be altogether overcome with pleasure when Harley called him by his Christian name! Was it mere servility, vanity, the flattered weakness of a hanger-on in a great man’s familiarity, as everybody says? It is hard to believe this, though it is taken for granted on all sides. Swift seems, at all events, to have had a real affection for the shifty minister, who received him in so different a fashion from that of his former masters. He flung himself into all the backstair intrigues, and collogued with Abigail Masham, and took his share in every plot. When Harley was stabbed, Swift felt for him all the anxiety of a brother. He threw himself into the “Examiner,” the new Tory organ, with fervor and enthusiasm, and expounded the principles of his party and set their plans before the public with a force and clearness which nobody but he, his patrons declared, possessed. The two statesmen, Harley and Bolingbroke, who were so little like each other, so ill calculated to draw together, were alike in this: that neither could be flattering enough or kind enough to the great vassal whom they had secured. He seems to have thought of himself that he was a sort of third consul, an unofficial sharer of their power.
This extraordinary episode in the life of a man of Swift’s profession, and so little likely to come to such promotion, lasted three years; and the history of it is not less remarkable than the fact. It was a period of the greatest intellectual
activity and brilliancy in Swift’s career, and besides his hard political work in the “Examiner” and elsewhere, he flung from him, amid the exhilarating appreciation of the great world and his patrons, a number of the best of his lighter productions. But nothing that he ever wrote can be compared to the letters in which the story of this period is told, since nowhere else do we find the charm of humanity, which is more great and attractive even than genius. As if the rule of paradox was to prevail in his life as well as in his wit, this cynic, misanthrope, and satirist, ignoring love and every softer thought, exhibits himself once to us in an abandon and melting of the heart such as common men are as little capable of as they are of his fierce laughter and bitter jests. If it is the true man whom we see in these unpremeditated and careless pages, written before he got up of a morning, or in the evening when he came home from his entertainments, with the chairmen still wrangling over their sixpences outside, how different is that man from the other who storms and laughs and mocks humanity, and sees through all its miserable pretenses without a thought of pardon or excuse! The “Journal” letters addressed to the ladies in Dublin, Madam P. P. T. and Madam Elderby, the two women who shared his every thought, now so well known as the “Journal to Stella,” are, of all Swift’s works, the only productions that touch the heart. They are not to be numbered among his “works” at all: publication of any kind never seems to have occurred to him, while writing: they are as frank as Pepy’s[spelling per original], and far more simple and true. They are English history and London life, and the eighteenth century, with its mannerisms and quaintness, all in one; and beyond and above every circumstance, they are Swift as he was in his deepest soul,—not as he appeared to men,—a human being full of tenderness, full of fun and innocent humor, full of genius and individual nature, but, above all, of true affection, the warmest domestic love. Passion is not in those delightful pages; but the endearing playfulness, the absolute freedom of self-revelation, the tender intimacy and confidence of members of the same family, whose interests and subjects of thought and talk and merry jests and delusions are one. They describe every day—nay, hour—of his life, every little expedition, all the ups and downs of his occupations and progress, with the boundless freedom and sportive extravagance, the unimpassioned, unabashed adoration of something warmer than a father, more indulgent, more admiring than a brother, yet brother, father, lover, and friend all in one.
Only to a woman could such letters have been addressed, and few women reading them will be disposed to pity Stella or think her life one of blight or injury. Without these the life of the dean would not have touched our human sympathies at all, but now that time has let us thus fully into his confidence, and opened to our sight what was never intended for any but hers and those of her shadow, her guardian, the humble third in this profound and perfect union, it is with moistened eyes that we read the ever living record. There is nothing in the coarse and struggling potency of those books which critics applaud, that comes within a hundred miles of the delightful life and ease of these outpourings of Swift’s innermost soul. The “Tale of a Tub,” the “Battle of the Books,” retain a sort of galvanic existence, but are for the greater part insupportable to the honest readers who have no tradition of superior acumen and perception to maintain. But when we turn to the “Journal,” the clean and wholesome pages smile with a cordial life and reality. If there is here and there a phrase too broad for modern ears, it is nothing more than the language of the time, and has not a ghost of evil meaning in it. The big arrogant wit—not unused to bluster and brag, to act like a tyrant and speak like a bully—meets us there defenseless, with the tenderest light upon his face, in his nightcap and without his wig, smiling over little M. D.’s letter in the wintry mornings, snatching a moment at bedtime when he is already “seepy,” and can do nothing but bid “nite deelest dea M. D. nite deelest loques,” making his mouth, he says, as if he were saying the broken, childish words, retiring into the sanctuary of the little language with an infinite sense of consolation and repose. Outside it may be he swaggered and defied all men, even his patrons; but here an exquisite softness comes over him. However he may be judged or mistaken in the world, he is always understood by the women in that secret world where they make their comments on whatever happens, and merrily answer back again with their criticisms, their strictures, no more afraid of that impetuous, angry genius than if he had been the meekest of rural priests. It is this that has got Swift his hold upon many a reader, who, beginning by hating him, the coarse and bitter wit, the scorner of men and crusher of women’s hearts, has suddenly found his own heart melt in his breast to see the giant lay by his thunders and prattle like an old gossip, like a tender mother, father, all in one, in the baby-talk that first had opened to him the knowledge of all that is sweetest in life. We do not understand the man, much less the woman, who can read without forgiving to Swift all his brutalities, as indeed most women who encountered him seem to have done without that argument. He would treat the fine ladies with the most imperious rudeness, giving forth his rule that it was they who should make advances to him, not he to them, yet captivating even those who resisted in the end.
The little language which this fierce satirist and cynic dared to put in writing, the only man ever so bold as to pay such homage to affection, puzzled beyond measure his first editors and expositors, who, with a horrified prudery, seem to have done their best to interpret and restore it to decorum and dignity; but it has now become the point in his story which is most tenderly recollected, his sacred reconciliation with mankind. A homeless boy, with none of the traditions of a family, finding his unlovely life not less but more unpromising in his first experiences of Temple’s luxurious English home, what a sudden fountain of sweetness must have opened to him in the prattle of the delightful child, which was a new revelation to his heart—revelation of all that kindred meant, and delightful intimacy and familiar love. His little star of life never waned to Swift: Stella grew old, but never outgrew the little language, and every young woman had something in her of the sprightly creature that loved to do his bidding, the P. P. T. who held her own, and put him upon his best behavior often, yet never was other than the “deelest little loque” whom he bantered and laughed at with soft tears of tenderness in his eyes. “Better, thank God, and M. D.’s prayers,” he says among the private scribbles of his daily diary, which neither she nor any one was ever meant to see. Nevertheless, even while he was writing this “Journal,” which is the record of a tender intimacy so remarkable, Swift was meddling with the education of another girl, incautiously, foolishly, who was not of the uninflammable nature of Stella, but a hot-headed, passionate creature who did not at all imagine that the mere
… delight he took
To see the virgin mind her book
was all Dr. Swift meant by his talk and attention. Swift says nothing of this pupil in the “Journal.” He mentions his dinners at Mrs. Vanhomrigh’s, and her handsome daughter, but he does not tell Madam P. P. T. that he had given one of his usual caressing names to this girl, whose early beauty and frank devotion had pleased him. There is, indeed, no shadow
of Vanessa anywhere visible, though the brief mention of her name shows that the second story, which was to be so fatally and painfully mingled with the first, had already begun.
The three years of Swift’s stay in England were the climax of his life. They raised him higher than ever a simple parson had been raised before, and made of him (or so, at least, he believed) a power in the state. It has been doubted whether he was really so highly trusted, so much built upon, as he thought. The great lords who delighted in Swift’s talk, and called him Jonathan, did not, perhaps, follow his advice and accept his guidance, as he supposed. He says, jestingly,—yet half, perhaps, with an uneasy meaning,—that everything that was said between himself and Harley as they traveled sociably in my Lord Treasurer’s coach to Windsor, might have been told at Charing Cross; but this was a rare admission, and generally he was very full of the schemes of the ministers and their consultations, and his own important share in them. He seems to have constituted himself the patron of everybody he knew, really providing for a considerable number, and largely undertaking for others, though it was long before he got anything for himself. The following anecdote gives an unpleasant view from outside of his demeanor and habits. It is from Bishop Kennett’s diary during the year 1713, the last of Swift’s importance:
Swift came into the coffee-room, and had a bow from everybody save me. When I came to the antechamber to wait before prayers, Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business, and acted as minister of requests. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak to his brother the Duke of Ormond to get a chaplain’s place established in the garrison of Hull for Mr. Fiddes, a clergyman in that neighborhood, who had lately been in jail and published sermons to pay fees. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake with my Lord Treasurer that according to his position he should obtain a salary of £200 per annum as minister of the English Church in Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going in with the red bag to the Queen, and told him aloud he had something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He talked with the son of Dr. Davenant, to be sent abroad, and took out his pocket-book, and wrote down several things as memoranda to do for him. He turned to the fire, and took out his gold watch, and, telling them the time of day, complained it was very late. A gentleman said, “It goes too fast.” “How can I help it,” says the Doctor, “if the courtiers give me a watch that won’t go right?” Then he instructed a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which, he said, he must have them all subscribe. “For,” says he, “the author shall not begin to print it till I have a thousand guineas for him.” Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him; both went off just before prayers.
But the account of the patronage which he exercised, and the brag and general “swagger” of his demeanor, though it is by no means invisible in the “Journal,” has a different aspect there, where he tells all about his favor and power, to please his correspondents, with a good excuse in this tender reason for magnifying all that happens to him. It was, indeed, a position to turn even the soundest head, and Swift had thirsted all his life for power, for notability, for that buoyant sense of being on the top of the wave which was so contrary to all his previous experience. His own satirical account of himself, as desiring literary eminence only to make up for the mistake of not being born a lord, is a self-contemptuous way of stating the thirst he had to be foremost, to be doing, to be capable of moving the world. And he may very well be excused for thinking now that he had done so.
Amid the many disappointments of his life he had these three years of triumph, which are much for a man to have. If there was a certain vulgarity in his enjoyment of them, there was at the same time a great deal of active kindness, and though he might brag of the services he did, he yet did service and remembered his friends, and helped as he could those hangers-on and waiters upon Providence who, in those days, were always about a minister’s antechamber. It is unnecessary to attempt to go over again the story of the politics of the time, in which he was so powerful an agent. To see Swift moving about in his gown and wig, with his eyes, “azure as the heavens,” glowing keen from underneath his deep brows, sometimes full of sport and laughter and tender kindness, sometimes with something “awful” in their look, sometimes dazzling with humorous tyranny and command, is more interesting than to fathom over again for the hundredth time the confusing intrigues of the age. One thing is evident, that while he served others he got nothing for himself: the bishopric so long longed for did not come, nor even a fat English deanery, which would have been worth the having and kept him near the center of affairs. Was Harley, too, disposed to flatter rather than promote his Jonathan? or was it the queen’s determined prejudice, and conviction that the “Tale of a Tub” was no fit foundation for a miter? The latter would have been little wonderful, for Swift had taken pains to embroil himself with the court, by a coarse and ineffective satire called the “Windsor Prophecy,” which no doubt amused the hostile coteries, yet could not but do the rash writer harm.
At last, just before the fall of Harley, preferment was found for the champion who had served him so well. It was the last that Swift would have chosen for himself—a kind of dignified banishment and exile from all he loved best. There was a question between the deanery of St. Patrick’s and that of Windsor, he himself says. Had he gone to the royal borough, what a curious change might have come to all his after life! Would Stella, one wonders, have found a red-roofed house under the cloister walls? and the dean lived, perhaps, to get the confidence of Queen Caroline, a queen worth pleasing? and looked upon the world with azure eyes softened by prosperity from the storied slopes, and worn his ribbon of the Garter with a proud inflation of the bosom which had always sighed for greatness? How many differences, how much softening, expanding, almost elevation, might not the kind hand of Fortune work in such great but troubled natures were it allowed to smooth and caress the roughness away!
When the issue of the conflict between Harley and Bolingbroke became too evident to be doubted, Swift showed the softer side of his character in a very unexpected way. He ran away from the catastrophe like a nervous woman, hiding himself in a country parsonage till the blow should be struck and the calamity be overpast, a very curious piece of moral timidity or nervous over-sensitiveness, for which we are entirely unprepared. It was less extraordinary that he should write to offer himself to Harley as a companion in his solitude when the minister was fairly ousted, although even then Bolingbroke was bidding eagerly for his services. But whether Swift would have accepted these offers, or would have carried his evidently genuine attachment to Harley so far as permanently to withdraw with him from public life, was never known. For the victory of St. John was short indeed. “The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday, the Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and how does Fortune banter us!” writes Bolingbroke. It was such a stroke of the irony of fate as Swift himself might have invented, and St. John applauded with the laughter of the philosopher. There was an end of political power for both, and the triumph and greatness of Swift’s reflected glory was over without hope of renewal.
He had now nothing to do but to return to Ireland, so long neglected, the country of his disappointments, which did not love him, and which he did not love, where his big genius (he thought) had not room enough to breathe, where society was small and provincial, and life flat and bare, and only a few familiar friends appreciated him or knew what he was. How he was to make himself the idol of that country, a kind of king in it, and gain power of a different kind from any he had yet wielded, was as yet a secret hidden in the mists of the future to Swift and everybody around. His account of himself when he got home to his dull deanery, “a vast unfurnished house,” with a few servants in it, “all on board wages,” is melancholy enough. “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,” but he consoles himself: “after all, parsons are not such bad company, especially when they are under subjection; and I let none but such come near me,” a curious statement, in which the great satirist, as often before, gives a stroke of his idle sword at himself.
But Swift was not long left in this stagnation. Extreme quiet is in many cases but a cover for brewing mischief, and the dean had not long returned to Ireland when that handsome daughter of Mrs. Vanhomrigh, of whom he had said so little in his letters, found herself, on her mother’s death, drawn to Ireland, and the neighborhood of her tutor and correspondent. It is curious to find so many links to Ireland in this little company. Stella had a farm in Meath left to her by Sir William Temple, Vanessa, “a small property at Celbridge,” to which it suited her to retire. And thus there were gathered together within a short distance the dean himself in his dull house, the assured and quiet possessor of his tenderest affections in Dublin near him, and the impassioned girl who had declared for him love of a very different kind, at Marley Abbey, within the reach of a ride. That Swift had a heart large enough to admit on his own terms many women is very evident, and that he had a fondness for Vanessa among the rest; but how far he was to blame for her fatal passion, it is scarcely possible to decide. The story of their connection, as told from his side of the question in the poem of “Cadenus and Vanessa,” shows an unconsciousness and innocence of purpose which takes all the responsibility of her infatuation from the dean, and shows him in a light all too artless.
The innocent delight he took,
To see the virgin mind her book,
Was but the master’s secret joy
In school to hear the finest boy.
But this was not the light in which the headstrong young woman, who made no secret of her love, and filled him with “shame, disappointment, guilt, remorse,” by the revelation, regarded his attentions. Their correspondence went on for nearly ten years. It is a painful correspondence, as the outpouring of a woman’s passion for a man who does not respond to it must always be; but Swift never seems to have fostered that passion, nor to have done anything but discourage and subdue a love so embarrassing and troublesome.
And now comes in the mystery which everybody has discussed, but which none have brought to any certain conclusion. In 1716, two years after Swift’s return to Ireland, it is said that he married Stella, thus putting himself at once out of all possibility of marrying Miss Vanhomrigh (which might have been a motive) and satisfying Stella, as the notion goes. Scott receives the statement as proved; so does Mr. Craik, Swift’s last, and a most conscientious and careful biographer. The evidence for it is that Lord Orrery and Dr. Delany, the earliest writers on the subject, both assert it (“if my informations are right,” as the former says) as a supposition universally believed in society; and that the fact was told by the Bishop of Clogher, who performed the ceremony, to Bishop Berkeley, who told it to his wife, who told it after her husband’s death, and long after the event, to George Monck Berkeley, who tells the story. But Bishop Berkeley was in Italy at the time and could not have been told, though he might have heard it at second-hand from his pupil, the Bishop of Clogher’s son. We wonder if an inheritance or the legitimacy of a child would be considered proved by such evidence, or whether the prevailing sense of society that such a thing ought to have taken place has not a large share in the common belief. At all times, as at the present moment, wherever a close friendship between man and woman exists (and the very fact of such rumors makes it extremely rare), suggestions of the same description float in the air. Nobody supposes, if the marriage took place at all, that it was anything more than a mere form. It was performed, if performed at all, in the garden without any formal or legal preliminaries. Supposing such a fictitious rite to have any justification in Irish law, we wonder what the authorities of the church would have had to say to two high dignitaries who united to perform an act so disorderly and contrary to ecclesiastical decorum, if to nothing else. It is totally unlike Swift, whose feeling for the church was strong, to have used her ordinances so disrespectfully, and most unlike all we know of Stella that she should have consented to so utterly false a relationship. However, the question is one which the reader will decide according to his own judgment, and upon which no one can speak with authority. Mr. Forster, of all Swift’s biographers the most elaborate and anxious, did not get so far in his work as to examine the evidence, yet intimates his disbelief of the story. We do not need, however, to have recourse to the expedient of a marriage to explain how the story of Vanessa might have been a pain and offense to Stella. Swift had not in this particular been frank with his friends, and the discovery, so near them, of a woman making so passionate a claim upon his affections must have conveyed the shock at once of a deception and an unpardonable intrusion to one who was proudly conscious of being his most trusted confidant and closest companion. Whatever were the rights of the case, however, nobody can now know. Whether Vanessa had heard the rumor of the private marriage, whether she conceived that a desperate appeal to his dearest friend might help her own claim, or whether mere suspicion and misery, boiling over, found expression in the hasty letter to Stella which she wrote at the crisis of her career, is equally unessential. She did write, and Stella, surprised and offended, showed the letter to Swift. Nothing can be more tragic than the events that follow. Swift, in one of those wild bursts of passion which were beyond the control of reason, rode out at once to the unfortunate young woman’s house. He burst in without a word, threw her own letter on the table before her, and rode off again like a whirlwind. Vanessa came of a short-lived race, and was then, at thirty-four, the last of her family. She never recovered the blow, but, dying soon after, directed her letters and the poem which contained the story of her love and his coldness to be published. This was not done for nearly a century; and now more than half of another has gone, but the story is as full of passion and misery, as unexplained, as ever. This was one of the occupations of Swift’s stagnant time. He fled, as he had done at the moment of Harley’s fall, that, at least, he might not see what was going to happen.
