Swift’s conduct at this critical point is most noteworthy. The pamphlet (Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs) exactly coincides with all his private and public utterances. His theory was simple and straightforward. The existing situation was the culminating result of Harley’s policy of refinement and procrastination. Swift two years before had written a very able remonstrance with the October Club, who had sought to push Harley into decisive measures; but though he preached patience, he really sympathized with their motives. Instead of making a clean sweep of his opponents, Harley had left many of them in office, either from “refinement”—that over-subtlety of calculation which Swift thought inferior to plain common sense, and which, to use his favourite illustration, is like the sharp knife that mangles the paper, when a plain, blunt paper-knife cuts it properly—or else from inability to move the Queen, which he had foolishly allowed to pass for unwillingness, in order to keep up the appearance of power. Two things were now to be done; first, a clean sweep should be made of all Whigs and dissenters from office and from the army; secondly, the Court of Hanover should be required to break off all intercourse with the Opposition, on which condition the heir-presumptive (the infant Prince Frederick) might be sent over to reside in England. Briefly, Swift’s policy was a policy of “thorough.” Oxford’s vacillations were the great obstacle, and Oxford was falling before the alliance of Bolingbroke with Lady Masham. Bolingbroke might have turned Swift’s policy to the account of the Jacobites; but Swift did not take this into account, and in the Free Thoughts he declares his utter disbelief in any danger to the succession. What side, then, should he take? He sympathized with Bolingbroke’s avowed principles. Bolingbroke was eager for his help, and even hoped to reconcile him to the red-haired duchess. But Swift was bound to Oxford by strong personal affection; by an affection which was not diminished even by the fact that Oxford had procrastinated in the matter of Swift’s own preferment; and was, at this very moment, annoying him by delaying to pay the 1000l. incurred by his installation in the deanery. To Oxford he had addressed (Nov. 21, 1713) a letter of consolation upon the death of a daughter, possessing the charm which is given to such letters only by the most genuine sympathy with the feelings of the loser, and by a spontaneous selection of the only safe topic—praise of the lost, equally tender and sincere. Every reference to Oxford is affectionate. When, at the beginning of July, Oxford was hastening to his fall, Swift wrote to him another manly and dignified letter, professing an attachment beyond the reach of external accidents of power and rank. The end came soon. Swift heard that Oxford was about to resign. He wrote at once (July 25, 1714) to propose to accompany him to his country house. Oxford replied two days later in a letter oddly characteristic. He begs Swift to come with him; “If I have not tired you tête-à-tête, fling away so much of your time upon one who loves you;” and then rather spoils the pathos by a bit of hopeless doggerel. Swift wrote to Miss Vanhomrigh on August 1. “I have been asked,” he says, “to join with those people now in power; but I will not do it. I told Lord Oxford I would go with him, when he was out; and now he begs it of me, and I cannot refuse him. I meddle not with his faults, as he was a Minister of State; but you know his personal kindness to me was excessive; he distinguished and chose me above all other men, while he was great, and his letter to me the other day was the most moving imaginable.”
An intimacy which bore such fruit in time of trial was not one founded upon a servility varnished by self-assertion. No stauncher friend than Swift ever lived. But his fidelity was not to be put to further proof. The day of the letter just quoted was the day of Queen Anne’s death. The crash which followed ruined the “people now in power” as effectually as Oxford. The party with which Swift had identified himself, in whose success all his hopes and ambitions were bound up, was not so much ruined as annihilated. “The Earl of Oxford,” wrote Bolingbroke to Swift, “was removed on Tuesday. The Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and how does fortune banter us!”
CHAPTER VI.
STELLA AND VANESSA.
The final crash of the Tory administration found Swift approaching the end of his forty-seventh year. It found him in his own opinion prematurely aged both in mind and body. His personal prospects and political hopes were crushed. “I have a letter from Dean Swift,” says Arbuthnot in September; “he keeps up his noble spirit, and though like a man knocked down, you may behold him still with a stern countenance and aiming a blow at his adversaries.” Yet his adversaries knew, and he knew only too well, that such blows as he could now deliver could at most show his wrath without gratifying his revenge. He was disarmed as well as “knocked down.” He writes to Bolingbroke from Dublin in despair. “I live a country life in town,” he says, “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.” Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Ormond were soon in exile or the tower; and a letter to Pope next year gives a sufficient picture of Swift’s feelings. “You know,” he said, “how well I loved both Lord Oxford and Bolingbroke, and how dear the Duke of Ormond is to me; do you imagine I can be easy while their enemies are endeavouring to take off their heads?—I nunc et versus tecum meditare canoros!” “You are to understand,” he says in conclusion, “that I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house; my family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in the stable, 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. Perditur hæc inter misero lux.” In another of the dignified letters which show the finest side of his nature, he offered to join Oxford, whose intrepid behaviour, he says, “has astonished every one but me, who know you so well.” But he could do nothing beyond showing sympathy; and he remained alone asserting his authority in his ecclesiastical domains, brooding over the past, and for the time unable to divert his thoughts into any less distressing channel. Some verses written in October “in sickness” give a remarkable expression of his melancholy,—
’Tis true—then why should I repine
To see my life so fast decline?
But why obscurely here alone
Where I am neither loved nor known?
My state of health none care to learn,
My life is here no soul’s concern,
And those with whom I now converse
Without a tear will tend my hearse.
Yet we might have fancied that his lot would not be so unbearable. After all, a fall which ends in a deanery should break no bones. His friends, though hard pressed, survived; and, lastly, was any one so likely to shed tears upon his hearse as the woman to whom he was finally returning? The answer to this question brings us to a story imperfectly known to us, but of vital importance in Swift’s history.
We have seen in what masterful fashion Swift took possession of great men. The same imperious temper shows itself in his relations to women. He required absolute submission. Entrance into the inner circle of his affections could only be achieved by something like abasement; but all within it became as a part of himself, to be both cherished and protected without stint. His affectation of brutality was part of a system. On first meeting Lady Burlington at her husband’s house, he ordered her to sing. She declined. He replied, “Sing, or I will make you. Why, madam, I suppose you take me for one of your English hedge-parsons; sing when I tell you.” She burst into tears and retired. The next time he met her he began, “Pray, madam, are you as proud and ill-natured as when I saw you last?” She good-humouredly gave in, and Swift became her warm friend. Another lady to whom he was deeply attached was a famous beauty, Anne Long. A whimsical treaty was drawn up, setting forth that “the said Dr. Swift, upon the score of his merit and extraordinary qualities, doth claim the sole and undoubted right that all persons whatever shall make such advance to him as he pleases to demand, any law, claim, custom, privilege of sex, beauty, fortune or quality to the contrary notwithstanding;” and providing that Miss Long shall cease the contumacy in which she has been abetted by the Vanhomrighs, but be allowed in return, in consideration of her being “a Lady of the Toast,” to give herself the reputation of being one of Swift’s acquaintance. Swift’s affection for Miss Long is touchingly expressed in private papers, and in a letter written upon her death in retirement and poverty. He intends to put up a monument to her memory, and wrote a notice of her, “to serve her memory,” and also, as he characteristically adds, to spite the brother who had neglected her. Years afterwards he often refers to the “edict” which he annually issued in England, commanding all ladies to make him the first advances. He graciously makes an exception in favour of the Duchess of Queensberry, though he observes incidentally that he now hates all people whom he cannot command. This humorous assumption, like all Swift’s humour, has a strong element of downright earnest. He gives whimsical prominence to a genuine feeling. He is always acting the part of despot, and acting it very gravely. When he stays at Sir Arthur Acheson’s, Lady Acheson becomes his pupil, and is “severely chid” when she reads wrong. Mrs. Pendarves, afterwards Mrs. Delany, says in the same way that Swift calls himself “her master,” and corrects her when she speaks bad English.[41] He behaved in the same way to his servants. Delany tells us that he was “one of the best masters in the world,” paid his servants the highest rate of wages known, and took great pains to encourage and help them to save. But, on engaging them, he always tested their humility. One of their duties, he told them, would be to take turns in cleaning the scullion’s shoes, and if they objected, he sent them about their business. He is said to have tested a curate’s docility in the same way by offering him sour wine. His dominion was most easily extended over women; and a long list might be easily made out of the feminine favourites who at all periods of his life were in more or less intimate relations with this self-appointed sultan. From the wives of peers and the daughters of lord-lieutenants down to Dublin tradeswomen with a taste for rhyming, and even scullerymaids with no tastes at all, a whole hierarchy of female slaves bowed to his rule, and were admitted into higher and lower degrees of favour.