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
MARLEY ABBEY, THE RESIDENCE OF VANESSA,
NOW CALLED SELBRIDGE ABBEY.
DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY R. C. COLLINS.
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!