Swift survived his final settlement in Ireland for more than thirty years, though during the last five or six it was but the outside shell of him that lived. During every day in all those years Swift must have eaten and drunk, and somehow or other got through the twenty-four hours. The war against Wood’s halfpence employed at most a few months in 1724, and all his other political writings would scarcely fill a volume of this size. A modern journalist who could prove that he had written as little in six months would deserve a testimonial. Gulliver’s Travels appeared in 1727; and ten years were to pass before his intellect became hopelessly clouded. How was the remainder of his time filled?
The death of Stella marks a critical point. Swift told Gay in 1723 that it had taken three years to reconcile him to the country to which he was condemned for ever. He came back “with an ill head and an aching heart.”[78] He was separated from the friends he had loved, and too old to make new friends. A man, as he says elsewhere,[79] who had been bred in a coal-pit might pass his time in it well enough; but if sent back to it after a few months in upper air, he would find content less easy. Swift, in fact, never became resigned to the “coal-pit,” or, to use another of his phrases, the “wretched, dirty dog-hole and prison,” of which he could only say that it was a “place good enough to die in.” Yet he became so far acclimatized as to shape a tolerable existence out of the fragments left to him. Intelligent and cultivated men in Dublin, especially amongst the clergy and the fellows of Trinity College, gathered round their famous countryman. Swift formed a little court; he rubbed up his classics to the academical standard, read a good deal of history, and even amused himself with mathematics. He received on Sundays at the deanery, though his entertainments seem to have been rather too economical for the taste of his guests. “The ladies,” Stella and Mrs. Dingley, were recognized as more or less domesticated with him. Stella helped to receive his guests, though not ostensibly as mistress of the household; and, if we may accept Swift’s estimate of her social talents, must have been a very charming hostess. If some of Swift’s guests were ill at ease in presence of the imperious and moody exile, we may believe that during Stella’s life there was more than a mere semblance of agreeable society at the deanery. Her death, as Delany tells us,[80] led to a painful change. Swift’s temper became sour and ungovernable; his avarice grew into a monomania; at times he grudged even a single bottle of wine to his friends; the giddiness and deafness which had tormented him by fits, now became a part of his life. Reading came to be impossible, because (as Delany thinks) his obstinate refusal to wear spectacles had injured his sight. He still struggled hard against disease; he rode energetically, though two servants had to accompany him in case of accidents from giddiness; he took regular “constitutionals” up and down stairs when he could not go out. His friends thought that he injured himself by over-exercise; and the battle was necessarily a losing one. Gradually the gloom deepened; friends dropped off by death, and were alienated by his moody temper; he was surrounded, as they thought, by designing sycophants. His cousin, Mrs. Whiteway, who took care of him in his last years, seems to have been both kindly and sensible; but he became unconscious of kindness, and in 1741 had to be put under restraint. We may briefly fill up some details in the picture.
Swift at Dublin recalls Napoleon at Elba. The duties of a deanery are not supposed, I believe, to give absorbing employment for all the faculties of the incumbent; but an empire, however small, may be governed; and Swift at an early period set about establishing his supremacy within his small domains. He maintained his prerogatives against the archbishop, and subdued his chapter. His inferiors submitted, and could not fail to recognize his zeal for the honour of the body. But his superiors found him less amenable. He encountered episcopal authority with his old haughtiness. He bade an encroaching bishop remember that he was speaking “to a clergyman, and not to a footman.”[81] He fell upon an old friend, Sterne, the Bishop of Clogher, for granting a lease to some “old fanatic knight.” He takes the opportunity of reviling the bishops for favouring “two abominable bills for beggaring and enslaving the clergy (which took their birth from hell),” and says that he had thereupon resolved to have “no more commerce with persons of such prodigious grandeur, who, I feared, in a little time, would expect me to kiss their slipper.”[82] He would not even look into a coach, lest he should see such a thing as a bishop—a sight that would strike him with terror. In a bitter satire he describes Satan as the bishop to whom the rest of the Irish bench are suffragans. His theory was that the English Government always appointed admirable divines, but that unluckily all the new bishops were murdered on Hounslow Heath by highwaymen, who took their robes and patents, and so usurped the Irish sees. It is not surprising that Swift’s episcopal acquaintance was limited.
In his deanery Swift discharged his duties with despotic benevolence. He performed the services, carefully criticized young preachers, got his musical friends to help him in regulating his choir, looked carefully after the cathedral repairs, and improved the revenues at the cost of his own interests. His pugnacity broke out repeatedly even in such apparently safe directions. He erected a monument to the Duke of Schomberg after an attempt to make the duke’s descendants pay for it themselves. He said that if they tried to avoid the duty by reclaiming the body, he would take up the bones, and put the skeleton “in his register office, to be a memorial of their baseness to all posterity.”[83] He finally relieved his feelings by an epitaph, which is a bitter taunt against the duke’s relations.
Happily he gave less equivocal proofs of the energy which he could put into his duties. His charity was unsurpassed both for amount and judicious distribution. Delany declares that in spite of his avarice he would give five pounds more easily than richer men would give as many shillings. “I never,” says this good authority, “saw poor so carefully and conscientiously attended to in my life as those of his cathedral.” He introduced and carried out within his own domains a plan for distinguishing the deserving poor by badges—in anticipation of modern schemes for “organization of charity.” With the first five hundred pounds which he possessed he formed a fund for granting loans to industrious tradesmen and citizens, to be repaid by weekly instalments. It was said that by this scheme he had been the means of putting more than 200 families in a comfortable way of living.[84] He had, says Delany, a whole “seraglio” of distressed old women in Dublin; there was scarcely a lane in the whole city where he had not such a “mistress.” He saluted them kindly, inquired into their affairs, bought trifles from them, and gave them such titles as Pullagowna, Stumpa-Nympha, and so forth. The phrase “seraglio” may remind us of Johnson’s establishment, who has shown his prejudice against Swift in nothing more than in misjudging a charity akin to his own, though apparently directed with more discretion. The “rabble,” it is clear, might be grateful for other than political services. To personal dependents he was equally liberal. He supported his widowed sister, who had married a scapegrace in opposition to his wishes. He allowed an annuity of 52l. a year to Stella’s companion, Mrs. Dingley, and made her suppose that the money was not a gift, but the produce of a fund for which he was trustee. He showed the same liberality to Mrs. Ridgway, daughter of his old housekeeper, Mrs. Brent; paying her an annuity of 20l., and giving her a bond to secure the payment in case of accidents. Considering the narrowness of Swift’s income, and that he seems also to have had considerable trouble about obtaining his rents and securing his invested savings, we may say that his so-called “avarice” was not inconsistent with unusual munificence. He pared his personal expenditure to the quick, not that he might be rich, but that he might be liberal.
Though for one reason or other Swift was at open war with a good many of the higher classes, his court was not without distinguished favourites. The most conspicuous amongst them were Delany and Sheridan. Delany (1685-1768), when Swift first knew him, was a Fellow of Trinity College. He was a scholar, and a man of much good feeling and intelligence, and eminently agreeable in society; his theological treatises seem to have been fanciful, but he could write pleasant verses, and had great reputation as a college tutor. He married two rich wives, and Swift testifies that his good qualities were not the worse for his wealth, nor his purse generally fuller. He was so much given to hospitality as to be always rather in difficulties. He was a man of too much amiability and social suavity not to be a little shocked at some of Swift’s savage outbursts, and scandalized by his occasional improprieties. Yet he appreciated the nobler qualities of the staunch, if rather alarming, friend. It is curious to remember that his second wife, who was one of Swift’s later correspondents, survived to be the venerated friend of Fanny Burney (1752-1840), and that many living people may thus remember one who was familiar with the latest of Swift’s female favourites. Swift’s closest friend and crony, however, was the elder Sheridan, the ancestor of a race fertile in genius, though unluckily his son, Swift’s biographer, seems to have transmitted without possessing any share of it. Thomas Sheridan, the elder, was the typical Irishman—kindly, witty, blundering, full of talents and imprudences, careless of dignity, and a child in the ways of the world. He was a prosperous schoolmaster in Dublin when Swift first made his acquaintance (about 1718), so prosperous as to decline a less precarious post, of which Swift got him the offer.
After the war of Wood’s halfpence Swift became friendly with Carteret, whom he respected as a man of genuine ability, and who had besides the virtue of being thoroughly distrusted by Walpole. When Carteret was asked how he had succeeded in Ireland, he replied that he had pleased Dr. Swift. Swift took advantage of the mutual goodwill to recommend several promising clergymen to Carteret’s notice. He was specially warm in behalf of Sheridan, who received the first vacant living and a chaplaincy. Sheridan characteristically spoilt his own chances by preaching a sermon upon the day of the accession of the Hanoverian family, from the text, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The sermon was not political, and the selection of the text a pure accident; but Sheridan was accused of Jacobitism, and lost his chaplaincy in consequence. Though generously compensated by the friend in whose pulpit he had committed this “Sheridanism,” he got into difficulties. His school fell off; he exchanged his preferments for others less preferable; he failed in a school at Cavan, and ultimately the poor man came back to die at Dublin, in 1738, in distressed circumstances. Swift’s relations with him were thoroughly characteristic. He defended his cause energetically; gave him most admirably good advice in rather dictatorial terms; admitted him to the closest familiarity, and sometimes lost his temper when Sheridan took a liberty at the wrong moment, or resented the liberties taken by himself. A queer character of the “Second Solomon,” written, it seems, in 1729, shows the severity with which Swift could sometimes judge his shiftless and impulsive friend, and the irritability with which he could resent occasional assertions of independence. “He is extremely proud and captious,” says Swift, and “apt to resent as an affront or indignity what was never intended for either,” but what, we must add, had a strong likeness to both. One cause of poor Sheridan’s troubles was doubtless that assigned by Swift. Mrs. Sheridan, says this frank critic, is “the most disagreeable beast in Europe,” a “most filthy slut, lazy, and slothful, luxurious, ill-natured, envious, suspicious,” and yet managing to govern Sheridan. This estimate was apparently shared by her husband, who makes various references to her detestation of Swift. In spite of all jars, Swift was not only intimate with Sheridan and energetic in helping him, but to all appearance really loved him. Swift came to Sheridan’s house when the workmen were moving the furniture, preparatory to his departure for Cavan. Swift burst into tears, and hid himself in a dark closet before he could regain his self-possession. He paid a visit to his old friend afterwards; but was now in that painful and morbid state in which violent outbreaks of passion made him frequently intolerable. Poor Sheridan rashly ventured to fulfil an old engagement that he would tell Swift frankly of a growing infirmity, and said something about avarice. “Doctor,” replied Swift, significantly, “did you never read Gil Blas?” When Sheridan soon afterwards sold his school to return to Dublin, Swift received his old friend so inhospitably that Sheridan left him, never again to enter the house. Swift indeed had ceased to be Swift; and Sheridan died soon afterwards.
Swift often sought relief from the dreariness of the deanery by retiring to, or rather by taking possession of, his friends’ country-houses. In 1725 he stayed for some months, together with “the ladies,” at Quilca, a small country-house of Sheridan’s, and compiled an account of the deficiencies of the establishment—meant to be continued weekly. Broken tables, doors without locks, a chimney stuffed with the dean’s great-coat, a solitary pair of tongs forced to attend all the fireplaces and also to take the meat from the pot, holes in the floors, spikes protruding from the bedsteads, are some of the items; whilst the servants are all thieves, and act upon the proverb, “The worse their sty, the longer they lie.” Swift amused himself here and elsewhere by indulging his taste in landscape gardening, without the consent and often to the annoyance of the proprietor. In 1728—the year of Stella’s death—he passed eight months at Sir Arthur Acheson’s, near Market Hill. He was sickly, languid, and anxious to escape from Dublin, where he had no company but that of his “old presbyterian housekeeper, Mrs. Brent.” He had, however, energy enough to take the household in hand after his usual fashion. He superintended Lady Acheson’s studies, made her read to him, gave her plenty of good advice; bullied the butler; looked after the dairy and the garden, and annoyed Sir Arthur by summarily cutting down an old thorn-tree. He liked the place so much that he thought of building a house there, which was to be called Drapier’s Hall, but abandoned the project for reasons which, after his fashion, he expressed with great frankness in a poem. Probably the chief reason was the very obvious one which strikes all people who are tempted to build; but that upon which he chiefly dwells is Sir Arthur’s defects as an entertainer. The knight used, it seems, to lose himself in metaphysical moonings when he should have been talking to Swift and attending to his gardens and farms. Swift entered a house less as a guest than a conqueror. His dominion, it is clear, must have become burdensome in his later years, when his temper was becoming savage and his fancies more imperious.
Such a man was the natural prey of sycophants, who would bear his humours for interested motives. Amongst Swift’s numerous clients some doubtless belonged to this class. The old need of patronizing and protecting still displays itself; and there is something very touching in the zeal for his friends which survived breaking health and mental decay. His correspondence is full of eager advocacy. Poor Miss Kelly, neglected by an unnatural parent, comes to Swift as her natural adviser. He intercedes on behalf of the prodigal son of a Mr. FitzHerbert in a letter which is a model of judicious and delicate advocacy. His old friend, Barber, had prospered in business; he was Lord Mayor of London in 1733, and looked upon Swift as the founder of his fortunes. To him, “my dear good old friend in the best and worst times,” Swift writes a series of letters, full of pathetic utterances of his regrets for old friends amidst increasing infirmities, and full also of appeals on behalf of others. He induced Barber to give a chaplaincy to Pilkington, a young clergyman of whose talent and modesty Swift was thoroughly convinced. Mrs. Pilkington was a small poetess, and the pair had crept into some intimacy at the deanery. Unluckily Swift had reasons to repent his patronage. The pair were equally worthless. The husband tried to get a divorce; and the wife sank into misery. One of her last experiments was to publish by subscription certain “Memoirs,” which contain some interesting but untrustworthy anecdotes of Swift’s later years.[85] He had rather better luck with Mrs. Barber, wife of a Dublin woollendraper, who, as Swift says, was “poetically given, and, for a woman, had a sort of genius that way.” He pressed her claims not only upon her namesake, the Mayor, but upon Lord Carteret, Lady Betty Germaine, and Gay and his duchess. A forged letter to Queen Caroline in Swift’s name on behalf of this poetess naturally raised some suspicions. Swift, however, must have been convinced of her innocence. He continued his interest in her for years, during which we are glad to find that she gave up poetry for selling Irish linens and letting lodgings at Bath; and one of Swift’s last acts before his decay was to present her, at her own request, with the copyright of his Polite Conversations. Everybody, she said, would subscribe for a work of Swift’s, and it would put her in easy circumstances. Mrs. Barber clearly had no delicacy in turning Swift’s liberality to account; but she was a respectable and sensible woman, and managed to bring up two sons to professions. Liberality of this kind came naturally to Swift. He provided for a broken-down old officer, Captain Creichton, by compiling his memoirs for him, to be published by subscription. “I never,” he says in 1735, “got a farthing by anything I wrote—except once by Pope’s prudent management.” This probably refers to Gulliver, for which he seems to have received 200l. He apparently gave his share in the profits of the Miscellanies to the widow of a Dublin printer.
A few words may now be said about these last writings. In reading some of them, we must remember his later mode of life. He generally dined alone, or with old Mrs. Brent, then sat alone in his closet till he went to bed at eleven. The best company in Dublin, he said, was barely tolerable, and those who had been tolerable were now unsupportable. He could no longer read by candle-light, and his only resource was to write rubbish, most of which he burnt. The merest trifles that he ever wrote, he says in 1731, “are serious philosophical lucubrations in comparison to what I now busy myself about.” This, however, was but the development of a lifelong practice. His favourite maxim, Vive la bagatelle, is often quoted by Pope and Bolingbroke. As he had punned in his youth with Lord Berkeley, so he amused himself in later years by a constant interchange of trifles with his friends, and above all with Sheridan. Many of these trifles have been preserved; they range from really good specimens of Swift’s rather sardonic humour down to bad riddles and a peculiar kind of playing upon words. A brief specimen of one variety will be amply sufficient. Sheridan writes to Swift. Times a re veri de ad nota do it oras hi lingat almi e state. The words separately are Latin, and are to be read into the English: “Times are very dead; not a doit or a shilling at all my estate.” Swift writes to Sheridan in English, which reads into Latin, “Am I say vain a rabble is,” means, Amice venerabilis—and so forth. Whole manuscript books are still in existence filled with jargon of this kind. Charles Fox declared that Swift must be a goodnatured man to have had such a love of nonsense. We may admit some of it to be a proof of good-humour in the same sense as a love of the backgammon in which he sometimes indulged. It shows, that is, a willingness to kill time in company. But it must be admitted that the impression becomes different when we think of Swift in his solitude wasting the most vigorous intellect in the country upon ingenuities beneath that of the composer of double acrostics. Delany declares that the habit helped to weaken his intellect. Rather it showed that his intellect was preying upon itself. Once more we have to think of the “conjured spirit,” and the ropes of sand. Nothing can well be more lamentable. Books full of this stuff impress us like products of the painful ingenuity by which some prisoner for life has tried to relieve himself of the intolerable burden of solitary confinement. Swift seems to betray the secret when he tells Bolingbroke that at his age “I often thought of death; but now it is never out of my mind.” He repeats this more than once. He does not fear death, he says; indeed he longed for it. His regular farewell to a friend was, “Good night; I hope I shall never see you again.” He had long been in the habit of “lamenting” his birthday, though, in earlier days, Stella and other friends had celebrated the anniversary. Now it became a day of unmixed gloom, and the chapter in which Job curses the hour of his birth lay open all day on his table. “And yet,” he says, “I love la bagatelle better than ever.” Rather we should say, “and therefore,” for in truth the only excuse for such trifling was the impossibility of finding any other escape from settled gloom. Friends indeed seem to have adopted at times the theory that a humourist must always be on the broad grin. They called him the “laughter-loving” dean, and thought Gulliver a “merry book.” A strange effect is produced when between two of the letters in which Swift utters the bitterest agonies of his soul during Stella’s illness, we have a letter from Bolingbroke to the “three Yahoos of Twickenham” (Pope, Gay, and Swift), referring to Swift’s “divine science, la bagatelle” and ending with the benediction, “Mirth be with you!” From such mirth we can only say, may heaven protect us; for it would remind us of nothing but the mirth of Redgauntlet’s companions when they sat dead (and damned) at their ghastly revelry, and their laughter passed into such wild sounds as made the daring piper’s “very nails turn blue.”