MAN IN POWER

1

Fortune prefers to turn its wheel to the advantage of men with the talent for success, but now and then the geniuses, uncompromising, wilful, audacious, swing upward in the sun. A revolution of the wheel in London called Swift back in September 1710.

He did not know when he went what he was going to. He was almost resigned to Laracor and Dublin. “I never went to England with so little desire in my life,” he wrote to Stella the day after he landed. “I am perfectly resolved to return as soon as I have done my commission, whether it succeeds or no.” He had less hope as to the success of his errand, which again was the First Fruits, than the Irish bishops who this time had authorized him. Still, there was a chance. Sunderland and Godolphin had been shaken from their posts by an upheaval among the Whigs, and Wharton had hurried over to serve his party with his gift for wheedling and rounding up the voters. Other ministers might be more favourable to Swift’s embassy. Other friends might help him to promotion.

At London he found everything “turning upside down; every Whig in great office will, to a man, be infallibly put out; and we shall have such a winter as has not been seen in England.” It was already such a September as Swift had never seen. “The Whigs were ravished to see me,” he wrote within two days of his arrival, “and would lay hold on me as a twig while they are drowning, and the great men making me their clumsy apologies” for their former negligence.

But Swift had come into a new world of new men. Somers was about to be dismissed. Halifax had only his sinecure. Pembroke was in retirement. Wharton was to lose his place to the Duke of Ormond. Sunderland had given way to Henry St. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) as principal Secretary of State. Godolphin had yielded the rank of first minister to Robert Harley (later Earl of Oxford), Chancellor of the Exchequer though not yet Lord Treasurer. The men of Swift’s old world were now able to do for him as little as they had been willing to do before. Only the hated Wharton “affected very much to caress” him. Somers was merely plausible. Halifax moved too slowly. Godolphin, whom Swift saw at once, was so “short, dry, and morose” that the suitor was enraged. On his third day in London Swift spent the evening at the St. James’s coffee house with a friend. “For an hour and a half we talked treason heartily against the Whigs, their baseness and ingratitude. And I am come home rolling resentments in my mind and framing schemes of revenge.”

In spite of the drowning Whigs, and in spite even of Addison, again in England and at first as affectionate as ever, Swift began to look towards the Tories. A week, and he was dining with his old friend of Kilkenny and Trinity, Francis Stratford, a merchant who, “worth a plumb,” was “lending the government forty thousand pounds.” Two weeks later, and Swift expected any day to be taken to Harley by one of Stratford’s friends, Erasmus Lewis, who was one of Harley’s favourites. “I am already represented to Harley,” Swift told Stella, “as a discontented person that was ill used for not being Whig enough; and I hope for good usage from him. The Tories dryly tell me I may make my fortune if I please; but I do not understand them, or rather, I do understand them.”

Halifax asked Swift to dinner at Hampton Court and “would have kept me tomorrow to show me his house and park.... Lord Halifax began a health to me today. It was the resurrection of the Whigs, which I refused unless he would add their reformation too.” The next night “after I had put out my candle ... my landlady came into my room with a servant of Lord Halifax, to desire I would go dine with him” the following day. “But I sent him word I had business of great importance that hindered me.... And today I was brought privately to Mr. Harley, who received me with the greatest respect and kindness imaginable. He has appointed me an hour on Saturday at four, afternoon, when I will open my business to him.”

Exactly a month after Swift reached London he handed Harley his memorial regarding the First Fruits. “Mr. Harley came out to meet me, brought me in, and presented me to his son-in-law ... and his own son and, among others, Will Penn the Quaker. We sat two hours, drinking ... good wine ... and two hours more he and I alone.” Harley read Swift’s memorial “and put it in his pocket to show the Queen; ... told me he must bring Mr. St. John ... and me acquainted; and spoke so many things of personal kindness and esteem for me that I am inclined half to believe what some friends have told me, that he would do everything to bring me over.... He has desired me to dine with him on Tuesday, and after four hours being with him set me down at St. James’s coffee house in a hackney coach. All this is odd and comical if you consider him and me. He knew my Christian name very well.... And now I am going in charity to send Steele a _Tatler_, who is very low of late.”

Swift, writing that night to Stella, thought that even the _Tale of a Tub_ might no longer be held against him, as he guessed it had been. “They may talk of the _you know what_; but, gad, if it had not been for that I should never have been able to get the access I have had; and if that helps me to succeed, then that same thing will be serviceable to the Church.”

Odd and comical, Harley, no more concerned about the bounty of the First Fruits than about the orthodoxy of the _Tale_, had set out to seduce the most lively and deadly wit in England. At the price of a thousand pounds a year, cut out of the Queen’s income, Swift would be a bargain for her minister.

The minister did not lag in his pursuit. On Tuesday, presenting Swift to Sir Simon Harcourt, the Attorney-General, Harley said he had broached the matter of the First Fruits to the Queen, and asked Swift to dinner on Sunday. On Sunday Harley said the Queen had consented to the grant. Matthew Prior, a better poet than Addison, dined with them. After dinner, when Lord Peterborough had come in, the talk shifted to “a paper of verses” on Godolphin which had just been printed. “Lord Peterborough would let nobody read them but himself; so he did; and Mr. Harley bobbed me at every line to take notice of the beauties. Prior rallied Lord Peterborough for author of them; and Lord Peterborough said he knew them to be his; and Prior then turned it upon me, and I on him. I am not guessed at all in town to be the author.” Lucky Tories, to blunder into such a moving compliment? Or wily Tories, used to poets?

There was some formal delay in the execution of the grant, but Harley was still, Swift wrote, “so excessively obliging that I know not what to make of it, unless to show the rascals of the other party that they used a man unworthily who had deserved better.” St. John, using Swift “with all the kindness in the world,” said he had never read anything so good as certain verses by the Tories’ new poet which Swift himself did not “reckon so very good neither”; and pleased Swift further by telling him that “Mr. Harley complained he could keep nothing from me, I had the way so much of getting into him.” Erasmus Lewis tactfully hinted that Swift, not quite comfortable at leaving his old friends, might save Steele his post as commissioner of stamps. Swift went to Addison, as the discreeter person, but “party had so possessed him that he talked as if he suspected me, and would not fall in with anything I said. So I stopped short in my overture, and we parted very dryly.... When shall I grow wise? I endeavour to act in the most exact points of honour and conscience, and my nearest friends will not understand it so.”

It was not in Swift to be patient. Two weeks later he inquired of Stella: “Why should the Whigs think I came to England to leave them? Sure my journey was no secret. I protest sincerely I did all I could to hinder it ... although now I do not repent it. But who the devil cares what they think?... Rot ’em for ungrateful dogs. I will make them repent their usage before I leave this place.” He had already begun to punish them. Before the end of October he had accepted the secret editorship of the _Examiner_, the Tory weekly which he edited, and wrote, until the following June, when, “my style being soon discovered, and having contracted a great number of enemies, I let it fall into other hands.”

The step cost Swift his Whig friends. In six weeks: “Mr. Addison and I hardly meet once a fortnight.” In another month: “I called at the coffee house, where I had not been in a week, and talked coldly a while with Mr. Addison. All our friendship and dearness are off. We are civil acquaintances, talk words of course, of when we shall meet, and that’s all.” Not even the great affection between the two could hold Swift to the Whigs. He had never been entirely a Whig, as he was not now entirely a Tory. He was a churchman, and the Tories had done for his Church what the Whigs had not done. He was hot for power, and the Tories had taken him into their councils, as the Whigs had not. At last he had found something better for him than hopes: work that seemed to him important, recognition that seemed to him his due. For the first time in his life his pride was asked to what he considered fit company.

Harley’s dinners were for Swift a sign that his fortunes finally stood beside his ambition. Nor was he required to argue for principles he did not believe in. The Tories were, it was easy for him to think, more truly than the Whigs the party of order in Church and State. When he had spoken his mind about the Sacramental Test a year before, the Whigs had turned away from him, as if he were a Tory, and the Archbishop of Dublin had written to ask “by what artifice did you contrive to pass for a Whig.” Perhaps he had been a Tory. He would be a Tory. It was enough for Swift, as it had been enough when he took orders, that he was assigned a post in a cause which he thought good. He gave to his cause all his passion, intensity, genius.

2

When Swift closed with Harley there commenced a chapter singular in history. No other man of affairs has ever made such use of a man of letters. At the outset Harley so misgauged his pamphleteer that after three months he could send him a banknote for fifty pounds. It was as if the squire had tipped the bishop. Swift was furious at “both the thing and the manner.” He returned the money, refused to dine with Harley the next day, and demanded satisfaction. “If we let these great ministers pretend too much,” he wrote to Stella, “there will be no governing them.” A week later, still unreconciled, he went to the lobby of the House of Commons, found Harley, and sent him into the House to call St. John, “to let him know I would not dine with him if he dined late.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer, soon to be Lord Treasurer, ran the errand to the Secretary of State for the vicar of Laracor. The next day Swift told Stella he had “taken Mr. Harley into favour again.”

On Saturday of that week Swift was asked to dine with Harley in the company of St. John and Harcourt, now Lord Keeper, and became a member of the group which, meeting every Saturday except when the Queen was at Windsor, informally concerted the government of the realm. Swift did not come humbly to this cabinet. “Lord Rivers was got there before me, and I chid him for presuming to come on a day when only Lord Keeper, the Secretary, and I were to be there; but he regarded me not. So we all dined together, and sat down at four; and the Secretary has invited me to dine with him tomorrow. I told them I had no hopes they could ever keep in but that I saw they loved each other so well, as indeed they seem to do. They call me nothing but Jonathan; and I said I believed they would leave me Jonathan, as they found me.”

Bullying, rallying, Swift took and kept his seat in their councils. Together they planned the steps that were to be taken to oust the Whigs, to get rid of the Duke of Marlborough, to bring about the peace. The ministers devised the necessary intrigues. It was left to Swift to master and direct public opinion with the _Examiner_ and with the pamphlets and lampoons with which he entertained, infuriated, aroused, and reassured the public.

The political situation was intricate in detail but simple in outline. King William, Prince of Orange, had involved his adoptive England with his native Holland in the Grand Alliance with Austria against France. There had for years been a war and there was still a war, of which some of the English were very tired. The victories of Marlborough abroad, though gratifying, were hardly as regular as the taxes at home. The landowners, who tended to be Tories, had begun to wonder whether they were not paying taxes to help the bankers and jobbers, who tended to be Whigs, reap enviable profits. Glory was something, but it cost money. Men muttered in country houses that the Duke had been riding his whirlwind a long time. They had noted that Godolphin, who as Lord Treasurer had furnished the war chest, was father to one of Marlborough’s sons-in-law; and that Sunderland, Secretary of State, was a son-in-law himself. They had noted, also, that the Duchess, Mistress of the Robes and, it was said, mistress of Godolphin, did more than anybody else to make up the Queen’s mind for her. Civil affairs, hardly less than military, were in the hands of Marlborough, who notoriously wanted to be Captain-General for life. A little more, and England would be mortgaged to the Marlboroughs.

Such a prospect ruffled and alarmed the Tories. Marlborough, veering like Godolphin with the Parliamentary wind, had formerly called himself a Tory, but now called himself a Whig. The Whigs must share the blame for the prolongation of the war, for the increase in taxes and prices. All that was insular in England resisted this burden laid upon it for the possible benefit of the Continent. The Whigs had been kind to the Dissenters to gain their support in Marlborough’s enterprises. All that was orthodox in England resented this comfort given to the sects which threatened the unity and authority of the Church. Finding itself on the dizzy brink of altruism and liberalism, England had shrunk back in a passion for its good old virtues, its stout old order.

The change had not come of itself or from the disinterested conclusions of philosophers, but had been contrived and forwarded by Harley and St. John. Both of them had owed much to Marlborough, who in 1704 had approved of Harley for Secretary of State and of St. John for Secretary at War. Under the wings of that eagle they had plotted against his feathers. St. John had gifts of eloquence and manipulation which made him incomparable in the House of Commons. Harley, enough duller than his colleague to be more widely trusted, was adroit on the backstairs. Through his cousin Abigail Hill (Mrs. Masham), for whom the Duchess of Marlborough, also a cousin to the lady, had obtained a post in the Queen’s bed-chamber, his whispers reached his sovereign. Marlborough and Godolphin, becoming aware of a secret influence against them, had in 1708 traced it to Harley and had forced him out of the cabinet, along with St. John. Harley had continued to whisper. The Queen, resenting the constant pressure from the Duke and Duchess, observing the popular unrest, and still listening to the whispers, had been convinced that the Whigs threatened the peace of the State and the safety of the Church. From this had come the overthrow of the Godolphin ministry and the sudden rise to power of the Tories under the whispering Harley and the glittering St. John. It was policy to win to their side the wit whom they most desired to have with them and most feared to have against them.

The arguments put forth may have been suggested by any of the three men. Of the three, however, only Swift can be credited with the high scorn, the grave ingenuity of this polemic. It was he who, though he thought Marlborough “as covetous as hell and ambitious as the prince of it,” kept his friends from pressing the Duke too hard. Swift had the tact to be content with pointing out how much it was to the interest of the commander-in-chief to have the war go on. Public cynicism might be trusted to do the rest.

Nor did Swift use only arguments. He hit upon the most insidious illustrations, such as his contrast between the rewards of a Roman conqueror and those of the Duke. British ingratitude, Swift figured out, had already been worth something over half a million pounds to the British general. Roman gratitude, “which a victorious general received after his return from the most glorious expedition, conquered some great kingdom, brought the king himself, his family, and nobles to adorn the triumph in chains, and made the kingdom either a Roman province or at best a poor depending state in humble alliance to that empire,” would have amounted to less than a thousand pounds: incense, a sacrificial bull, an embroidered garment, a statue, a trophy, copper medals, a triumphal arch and car, and a laurel crown worth twopence.

Ingenious and insistent, Swift continued to pluck the same string until the public could hear no other note when it heard of Marlborough. After a year Marlborough fell, and the Duke of Ormond, whom Swift ranked next to Oxford (lately Harley) and Bolingbroke (lately St. John) among his friends, was put in command of the armies.

Towards the Whigs at large Swift turned an attention which was no less masterly. They were, for him, only a brawling faction, hungry for profits, and not more than a tenth of England. The Whigs, having made their fortunes at the expense of the majority, meant to go on making other fortunes, and would stop at no lying, no plotting, no uprising, no overthrowing which might serve their factious ends. At the same time, Swift would not admit that he was partisan. “We are unhappily divided into two parties,” he said, “both which pretend a mighty zeal for our religion and government, only they disagree about the means. The evils we must fence against are, on one side, fanaticism and infidelity in religion, and anarchy, under the name of a commonwealth, in government; on the other side, popery, slavery, and the Pretender from France.” Between these two extremes of Whig and Tory Swift seemed to take his stand. Or rather, again, above both. He was still a clergyman, who put religion first among his concerns. He was not a politician, but the conscience of politicians. He was the conscience of England, tight in its island, deep in its prejudices, contemptuous of ideals and metaphysics, plain, sturdy, obstinate.

No position was so natural for Swift to take, as no position was so effective with the voters. Oxford and Bolingbroke might work out of sight with their intrigues. Swift never ceased to keep the eyes of the world upon their main purposes. British purposes, for the sake of British interests, through the exercise of British virtues. The Revolution was achieved. The Succession was established. It was time now to make peace with the Continent and to settle down to a British destiny. The change must not be too precipitate. Swift wrote as firmly against the ferocious Tories, demanding all places instantly for their party, as against the ousted Whigs. His variety was in his art, not in his argument. He could abuse, ridicule, hoax, lampoon, in grim prose or easy verse. He could parade the accomplishments of the Ministry in sober pamphlets or could raise clouds of bright dust to hoodwink the opposition. But always he was Swift, looking down from his peak at the whole race of mankind, only incidentally and temporarily supporting Oxford and Bolingbroke.

Throughout the Oxford administration Swift was loyal, less out of need than out of love. When his associates, disregarding the Grand Alliance, made a stealthy treaty of peace with France; when, insecure in the House of Lords, Oxford got the Queen to create a dozen Tory peers who would know why they were peers; when England, at the treaty of Utrecht, took the largest share of the spoils though she had tricked and abandoned the allies: even then Swift loved his friends. Passionately loyal, he could be affectionately blind.

In Oxford’s thick skin Swift saw a stoic dignity, and in Oxford’s procrastination something not too far from a noble patience. “Regular in life,” Swift described the Lord Treasurer to the Archbishop of Dublin, “with a true sense of religion, an excellent scholar and a good divine, of a very mild and affable disposition, intrepid in his notions and indefatigable in business, an utter despiser of money for himself yet frugal, perhaps to an extremity, for the public.” Nor about Bolingbroke, libertine in thought and habit, would Swift be squeamish. He admired that “graceful, amiable person” and that mind “which was adorned with the choicest gifts that God hath yet thought fit to bestow upon the children of men.” It was true that the Secretary had been “too great and criminal a pursuer” of pleasures which could “by no means be reconciled to religion or morals.” But, Swift explained, “he was fond of mixing pleasure with business, and of being esteemed excellent at both; upon which account he had a great respect for the characters of Alcibiades and Petronius.” Could Socrates resist the charm of Alcibiades, or Seneca the charm of Petronius?

Swift, moralist that he was, was little less susceptible to the dissolute Secretary than to the decorous Treasurer. His affection covered them with its flood. Bolingbroke hated Oxford, and Oxford suspected Bolingbroke. There was harmony between them only for a few months, if so long as that. Yet Swift, by nature so misanthropic, by experience so wary, set out with them in what he thought was a fellowship of love.

Though he learned better, he remained, to the end of his great episode, somewhat at the mercy of his love. It was, of course, the corollary of his hate. Hitherto alone with his pride in what seemed to him a prison, he had been able to hate all those whose neglect had kept him there. Such companions as Stella and Addison had been only alleviating visitors. But now half the circle of his enemies had turned friends, and had entreated him to help them. They had taken him, apparently, to their hearts. They had let him, apparently, into their minds. They had given him a tiger’s share not only in the battle but in the command. Swift, all of whose emotions were profound, responded with emotions which were simple: gratitude, fidelity, delight in effort, ardent comradeship. He was so exultant at being delivered from his prison that he did not notice that he had been brought out to be harnessed.

Oxford and Bolingbroke must have smiled at his generous tribute to their virtues. Others did. When Swift wrote to Peterborough, then in Vienna, that the ministers seemed “heartily to love one another” and that they loved him too, Peterborough, who had been sent on an embassy to get him out of the way of the intriguing pair, sceptically wondered how Swift had come “to frame a system--in the times we live in--to govern the world by love.” Oxford and Bolingbroke did not trouble themselves over the excess of Swift’s affection, any more than they minded his arrogance. They were men of the stormy world, determined to get places and keep them. They worked for profit. If Swift worked for love or hate, that was his business. He was not, perhaps, as indispensable as the backstairs Mrs. Masham, but he could hurt the Whigs. They gave him all the room they could spare and applauded his blows.

Loving too much, Swift hated too much, as in his attack on the Earl of Wharton. “He is,” Swift said, “without the sense of shame or glory as some men are without the sense of smelling; and therefore a good name to him is no more than a precious ointment would be to those....

“He seems to be but an ill dissembler and an ill liar, though they are the two talents he most practises and most values himself upon. The ends he has gained by lying appear to be more owing to the frequency than the art of them; his lies being sometimes detected in an hour, often in a day, and always in a week.... He swears solemnly he loves and will serve you, and your back is no sooner turned but he tells those about him you are a dog and a rascal. He goes constantly to prayers in the forms of his place, and will talk bawdy and blasphemy at the chapel door. He is a Presbyterian in politics and an atheist in religion, but he chooses at present to whore with a Papist. In his commerce with mankind his general rule is to endeavour imposing on their understandings, for which he has but one receipt, a composition of lies and oaths; and this he applies indifferently to a freeholder of forty shillings and a privy councillor, by which the honest are often either deceived or amused; and either way he gains his point.... With a good natural understanding, a great fluency in speaking, and no ill taste of wit, he is generally the worst companion in the world; his thoughts being wholly taken up between vice and politics so that bawdy, profaneness, and business fill up his whole conversation.... As some vain young fellows, to make a gallantry appear of consequence, will choose to venture their necks by climbing up a wall or window at midnight to a common wench, where they might as freely have gone at the door and at noonday; so his Excellency, either to keep himself in practice or to advance the fame of his politics, affects the most obscure, troublesome, and winding paths, even in the commonest affairs, those which would as well be brought about in the ordinary forms or which would proceed of course whether he intervened or no.

“He bears the gallantries of his lady with the indifference of a stoic, and thinks them well recompensed by a return of children to support his family, without the fatigues of being a father.

“He has three predominant passions which you will seldom observe united in the same man, as arising from different dispositions of mind, and naturally thwarting each other; these are love of power, love of money, and love of pleasure. They ride him sometimes by turns and sometimes all together.... He was never known to refuse or keep a promise.... But here I desire to distinguish between a promise and a bargain; for he will be sure to keep the latter, when he has had the fairest offer.”

There was, Swift insisted, nothing personal in his remarks. “Whoever were to describe the nature of a serpent, a wolf, a crocodile, or a fox must be understood to do it for the sake of others, without any personal love or hatred of the animals themselves.” Nor would Wharton take it personally. “When these papers are public ’tis odds but he will tell me, as he once did upon a like occasion, that ‘he is damnably mauled,’ and then with the easiest transition in the world ask about the weather or time of the day.” And in fact, when Swift encountered Wharton at White’s chocolate house after the character was published, “Lord Wharton saw me at the door, and I saw him but took no notice and was going away, but he came through the crowd, called after me, and asked me how I did.”

This was, as Swift said, “not a humour put on to serve a turn or keep a countenance, not arising from the consciousness of his innocence or any grandeur of mind, but the mere unaffected bent of his nature.” Yet few moralists could have carried themselves more justly under such abuse. Wharton needed no philosophy in the circumstances. Experience was enough to tell him that Swift, accusing him of so finished, so universal a villainy, had blamed him for what was remarkably near a virtue. The victim himself looked brilliant in this glare of wrath. Swift’s hate, in its white-hot excess, had grown creative and had shaped a monster which had an insolent animal beauty along with its human vices.

But not all of Swift’s victims had Wharton’s whistling unconcern. There was the Duchess of Somerset, the red-haired Mistress of the Robes after the Marlboroughs had gone from Court. She had disliked Swift before he joined the Tories. With Lady Giffard, Temple’s sister, she had resented the final volume of Temple’s memoirs in 1709. It contained reflections on certain of the Whig lords, and Swift had published it. The Duchess, friend to Whigs, decided that he was “a man of no principle, either of honour or religion.” Swift, knowing this, perversely circulated a lampoon in which he called her “Carrots” and brought up the old charge that she had connived in the assassination of her second husband. The Duchess, who though she had reached a third husband at fifteen had had no other for nearly thirty years, never forgave Swift. More than any of his enemies, more than the Archbishop of York, who inflexibly held the _Tale of a Tub_ against him, she stood between him and the favour of the Queen. He might serve the ministers as only he could, but he could not become a bishop without the Queen’s approval. That, while the angry Duchess lived, he could not get. And the Duchess outlived the Queen.

More love than he needed, more hate than he needed: these were what hampered Swift in politics. He was impatient of craft, of what he called “refinements.” “Whatever may be thought or practised by profound politicians, they will hardly be able to convince the reasonable part of mankind that the most plain, short, easy, safe, and lawful way to any good end is not more eligible than one directly contrary in some or all of these qualities. I have been frequently assured by great ministers that politics were nothing but common sense; which, as it was the only true thing they spoke, so it was the only thing they could have wished I should not believe.” Swift did believe it. His whole instinct was to frame clear policies and go the straight way to work with them. In this he resembled statesmen of the first rank. But he lacked, what statesmen of the first rank have, the touch of dispassion in his passion. He trusted his friends more than they deserved, because they were his friends. He worried and tore his enemies, even when nothing was to be gained by it, because they were his enemies. Zealous for order in the state, he could not keep order in himself. He had the excess and disproportion of genius.

Nor did his defects reduce him merely to the second rank of statesmen. They reduced him to the third. In the second were Oxford and Bolingbroke. They were neither clear in their policies nor straightforward in their methods, but they had the patience of guile, the persistence of selfishness, the pliability of talent. Moreover, they were men of rank and fortune, and they were in office. If at first they were afraid of Swift, and then came to treasure his virtues, they also found that they could, by dividing his love and hate, rule him. After his hate had sent him out against their enemies, his love brought him back to their leash. Let him hold himself to be their conscience. They knew how to deal with consciences.

There is a record, written about October 1713, which painfully, almost shockingly, places Swift in his true relations with the Ministry. The scene is the Queen’s antechamber at Windsor.

“Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business and acted as master 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 neighbourhood who had lately been in gaol and published sermons to pay fees. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake with my Lord Treasurer that according to his petition he should obtain a salary of two hundred pounds per annum, as minister of the English Church at 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 him the time of day, complained it was very late. A gentleman said he was 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 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.”

Painful and shocking to see a genius so happy in his business, when it was such small business to be happy in. This was not the carriage of a man who, for all his sporadic arrogance, would force great rewards from his patrons.

Throughout 1711 and most of 1712 Swift worked too hard and too exultantly to have much time for hopes. He wrote often to Stella of his return to Ireland. Ormond might give him an addition to Laracor. He might get a Dublin parish. When Peterborough talked of bishops and deans Swift said his highest ambition was “to live in England, and with a competency to support me with honour.” It was nearly enough to be able to advance his friends. The ministers declared that Swift never came to them without a Whig in his sleeve.

But by the third winter of his power he had begun to starve on his diet of promises. The rumour that he had been made dean of Wells, when he had not, fretted him. The deaneries of Ely and Lichfield were vacant to no advantage of his. The Ministry must, he grumbled through the winter, do something for him or he would go back to Laracor. In January 1713 he wrote to Oxford: “I most humbly beg leave to inform your Lordship that the dean of Wells died this morning at one o’clock. I entirely submit my poor fortunes to your Lordship.” And Bolingbroke wrote to Swift with a rhythmic unction: “Though I have not seen you I did not fail to write to Lord Treasurer. _Non tua res agitur_, dear Jonathan. It is the Treasurer’s cause; it is my cause; it is every man’s cause who is embarked in our bottom. Depend upon it that I never will neglect any opportunity of showing that true esteem, that sincere affection and honest friendship for you which fill the breast of your faithful servant.”

It was a ministerial vow. That same month the bishopric of Hereford was filled, but not by Swift. In April, when the treaty of Utrecht had at last been signed and Swift considered his work done, there were vacant preferments on every tree: in England the deaneries of Wells, Ely, and Lichfield and the canonry of Windsor; in Ireland the bishoprics of Raphoe and Dromore. Not one of them fell to Swift. Oxford shuffled. Bolingbroke had Swift to dinner. The Archbishop of York shook his head. The Duchess of Somerset hissed. The Queen held out. She would not have Swift a dean or canon in England, or a bishop anywhere. Help came from the Duke of Ormond. If the present dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin might be made Bishop of Dromore, Swift could have that deanery. The Queen consented.

Oxford suddenly became eager to keep Swift in England. Let him be prebendary of Windsor. “Thus,” wrote Swift, “he perplexes things. I expect neither. But I confess, as much as I love England, I am so angry at this treatment that if I had my choice I would rather have St. Patrick’s.” Did he remember that his old friend Robert Hunter, now governor of New York, had lately written that he wished Swift could come to be bishop there? No matter. The appointment was patched up, and Swift became, as he was to be for the rest of his life, the Dean of St. Patrick’s.

“All that the Court or Ministry did for me was to let me choose my station in the country where I am banished.” He was not even allowed to become Historiographer, to chronicle the reign which he no longer influenced.

This was the career and this the climax of Swift’s life among the great. After a summer in Ireland he was, it is true, called back to London for the fourth and last winter of the Ministry, but his own future was settled, and his time was chiefly taken up with keeping the peace between Oxford and Bolingbroke. They were, it seemed to Swift, “a ship’s crew quarrelling in a storm, or while their enemies are within gunshot.” The fellowship of love had ceased to exist even for Swift’s loyal eyes.

The victors were wrangling over the spoils. What about their futures? The Queen would not live for ever. The Elector of Hanover, upon whom the Succession had been fixed, was certain to be favourable to the Whigs. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke, both secretly, were dealing with the Pretender, willing to ruin the Succession if they could bring in a prince favourable to Tories. Meanwhile the mutinous Bolingbroke had determined to be first minister himself. Out-intriguing Oxford, he won Oxford’s cousin, now Lady Masham, to another allegiance. London and Windsor buzzed and rumbled. All winter and all spring Swift struggled to divert or pacify the wranglers. Their war went on. Swift, despairing, took to a dull, angry retreat in Berkshire. In July 1714 Oxford was forced to break the white staff of his office. Bolingbroke, however, did not supplant him. In five days the Queen died. The Whiggish Elector was to become George I. Marlborough, returning from the Continent, entered London with two hundred men on horseback, drums, and fifty coaches.

Swift, in a letter to Oxford, said farewell to such power as he had had. “In your public capacity,” he told him, “you have often angered me to the heart, but as a private man, never once.... I will never write to you, if I can help it, otherwise than as to a private person, nor allow myself to have been obliged by you in any other capacity. The memory of one great instance of your candour and justice I will carry to my grave: that having been in a manner domestic with you for almost four years, it was never in the power of any public or concealed enemy to make you think ill of me, though malice and envy were often employed to that end. If I live, posterity shall know that and more, which ... is all the return I can make you. Will you give me leave to say how I would desire to stand in your memory: as one who was truly sensible of the honour you did him, though he was too proud to be vain upon it; as one who was neither assuming, officious, nor teasing, who never wilfully misrepresented persons or facts to you, nor consulted his passions when he gave a character; and lastly, as one whose indiscretions proceeded altogether from a weak head, and not an ill heart? I will add one thing more, which is the highest compliment I can make: that I was never afraid of offending you, nor am I now in any pain for the manner I write to you in. I have said enough; and, like one at your levee, having made my bow, I shrink back into the crowd.”

3

Hardly had Swift reached London in 1710 when he sat four hours one morning to the fashionable Charles Jervas, who, having begun a portrait on Swift’s previous visit to England, now gave the picture “quite another turn.” Perhaps he put the gleam of higher prospects into those eyes which in their extreme moods ranged from fire to stone. Full-lidded, bold even under the dark and heavy brows, humorously but not secretively averted, they seemed in the portrait to glance at something and to stare at everything. Swift’s periwig did not conceal his proud, arched forehead. His clerical bands plumped out his well-nourished, worldly chin, double and dimpled. His nose was both inquiring and commanding, ready to be contemptuous at the first excuse. But about his mouth there were the signs of another nature, sensitive, nervous, never calm. The corners would twitch easily, the lips tremble: the lower disciplined to a counterfeit of straightness, but the upper, short and friendly, indisciplinably sweet.

This was the face of a man whom nothing on earth could over-awe, yet who would assert himself too much out of mere touchiness. He would frighten others yet would hold them, fascinated, dangerously near him. He would give and receive much love and little happiness. This was the face that was to be among the best known in London for four years, this stout body somewhat taller than most men’s, this mind more restless than any man’s.

_During the Oxford Ministry_]

The Jervas portrait was but the notation of a few hours. The true likeness of Swift in his days of power he drew himself, in the journal-letters to Stella which he posted whenever his sheet of paper was full. Before he left his bed in the morning, after he got into it at night, at any time during the day, Swift set down, with minor interruptions, a continuous account of all, or almost all, he did. He took it for granted that Stella was interested in whatever concerned him. His journal was partly news sent from the great world to a friend waiting in a small one, but it was partly, also, a detailed memorandum written as for his other self. He could be confiding, indiscreet, coarse, boastful, hilarious, tender, admonitory, savage, absurd, pouring out what came to him as it came. He wrote now as if this were a letter to Stella and Rebecca Dingley both, or to either of them; now as if it were a conversation with himself, in the knowledge that they, and only they, would hear.

The journal was so intimate that he fell often into a foolish “little language,” like a giant talking to a baby with what he imagined was the baby’s vocabulary and pronunciation--or like a lover using silly words in despair of finding any that were serious enough. Swift’s baby-talk was a joke kept up between him and Stella, a note of tenderness struck in this way for want of a chance to sound it with a voice. But he did not talk down to her. He told her his life.

“I was this morning at ten at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison’s play, called _Cato_, which is to be acted on Friday. There were not above half-a-score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them; and the drab that acts Cato’s daughter out in the midst of a passionate part and then calling out ‘What’s next?’ The Bishop of Clogher was there too, but he stood privately in a gallery. I went to dine with Lord Treasurer, but he was gone to Wimbledon, his daughter Carmarthen’s country seat, seven miles off. So I went back and dined privately with Mr. Addison, whom I had left to go to Lord Treasurer. I keep fires yet; I am very extravagant. I sat this evening with Sir Andrew Fountaine.... It is rainy weather again; nevle saw ze rike [never saw the like]. This letter shall go tomorrow. Remember, ung oomens, it is seven weeks since your last, and I allow oo but five weeks. But oo have been galloping in the country.”

The variety of Swift’s days was in the persons he met and talked with. His habits had the regularity which goes with being virtuous and poor. He made, however, no virtue of his poverty. “I love these shabby difficulties when they are over; but I hate them, because they arise from not having a thousand pounds a year.”

Though he liked best to make his own meal of a single dish, he despised a skimpy table. Though he liked to walk, and took a chair or coach only in bad weather, he minded the expense when he had to ride, not his loss of an opportunity to trudge like a hero. He thought he was extravagant about fires, but when he shivered in his lodgings it was because coal cost money, not because shivering exalted his spirit. He avoided fruit, he more or less gave up snuff, he put water in his wine. All these asceticisms were for the sake of his treacherous health, as was the brandy that he drank, as were the pills and purges, the drops and ointments with which he fought his many attacks of giddiness. But never once did he rejoice in the endurance of a saint or the glory of a martyr. He did not relish even the fasts of his Church. “I hate Lent. I hate different diets, and furmity and butter, and herb porridge, and sour devout faces of people who only put on religion for seven weeks.”

Swift was a man of his world in his frank admiration for power, station, wealth, comfort, elegance, urbanity, learning, wit, manners. He had come to England to seek a better society than there was in Laracor or Dublin. His natural handicaps--passion, intensity, genius--were enough. He would not pretend that his lack of fortune was a merit. He complained of it, desired to mend it, and kept the best company he could.

Each morning in his various London lodgings Patrick, the servant whom Swift had brought over from Ireland, woke his master early, not always the first time he called. Swift’s sleep was heavy but disturbed. “I was dreaming the most melancholy things of poor Ppt [Poppet], and was grieving and crying all night.” Awake, he was likely to stay in bed till the room was warm, writing, often still by candlelight, as if Stella and Dingley were beside him. “Morning. I am going this morning to see Prior, who dines with me at Mr. Harley’s; so I can’t stay fiddling and talking with dear little brats in a morning, and ’tis terribly cold. I wish my cold hand was in the warmest place about you, young women. I’d give ten guineas upon that account with all my heart, faith. Oh, it starves my thigh. So I’ll rise and bid you good morrow, my ladies both, good morrow. Come, stand away, let me rise. Patrick, take away the candle. Is there a good fire? So--up adazy.”

Shaving, every second or third day; brandy, on days when he was giddy; breakfast of milk porridge or a cake Stella’s mother had made him: these got Swift ready for his day. He might write at home, all day when he was busiest, sending out for a chop and a pot of ale for his dinner. But usually he put on periwig, boots, and black gown with pudding-sleeves, and left the house, walking, about his pleasure or his affairs. Perhaps he had morning tea or chocolate with some of the ladies who delighted in his fame and insolence. Perhaps he conferred with his printers in the City. Perhaps he waited on one of the lords of his political fellowship. There were many amusements in London. “Lady Kerry, Mrs. Pratt, Mrs. Cadogan, and I in one coach, Lady Kerry’s son and his governor and two gentlemen in another, maids and misses and little master (Lord Shelburne’s children) in a third, all hackneys, set out at ten o’clock this morning from Lord Shelburne’s house in Piccadilly to the Tower, and saw all the sights, lions, etc., then to Bedlam; then dined at the chop-house behind the Exchange; then to Gresham College (but the keeper was not at home); and concluded the night at the puppet-show, whence we came home safe at eight.”

The pivot of Swift’s day was dinner, usually at three. First with Whigs, then with Tories, he dined through the town and out of it. “That’s something charms me mightily about London, that you go dine a dozen miles off in October, stay all day, and return so quickly. You cannot do anything like this in Dublin.” Within a month after the Whigs clutched at him he had more invitations than he had afternoons. He was a wit and scholar; he was a man of influence with the Ministry. Noblemen with axes to grind begged him to come to their tables. Men less interested in his power no less eagerly took up the fashion. Obliging hosts urged him to make his own terms.

“I dined today with a lady of my acquaintance, who was sick, in her bedchamber, upon three herrings and a chicken; the dinner was my bespeaking.” “Dr. Arbuthnot ... yesterday gave me my choice of place, persons, and victuals for today. So I chose to dine with Mrs. Hill ... Mrs. Masham’s sister; no company but us three, and to have a shoulder of mutton, a small one; which was exactly, only there was too much victuals besides, and the Doctor’s wife was of the company.” Nor did Swift make terms only with friends of his own level. Bolingbroke “showed me his bill of fare to tempt me to dine with him. Poh, said I, I value not your bill of fare. Give me your bill of company.” About both the food and the other diners Swift was firm. At the Earl of Abingdon’s “we had nothing but fish.... Our wine was poison.... His carps were raw, and his candles tallow. He shall not catch me in haste again.” And again: “I left a friend’s house today where I was invited, just when dinner was setting on, and pretended I was engaged, because I saw some fellows I did not know.”

Better a slice of mutton in his lodgings than indifferent or too numerous dishes; better his own company than that of “persons unknown, as bad, for aught I know, as your deans, parsons, and curates.” Swift rode high, and all Tory London encouraged him.

At many houses where he dined the guests stayed on for the evening. Swift chose generally to leave at six, to walk in Hyde Park, to visit other friends, to sit in a coffee house--though after a few months of his influence with Oxford he gave up coffee houses as too public. Many of his evenings he went home to write, at first an occasional _Tatler_, then his weekly _Examiner_, afterwards his pamphlets, at any time his stinging verses. In his lodgings he might find that Patrick had forgotten the fire or had neglected to buy coal or had gone off with the key with which Swift’s papers were locked up. There would be abuse and apology, neither of which meant anything. The most regular interruptions of Swift’s evenings came from Oxford, who kept “cursed hours,” sometimes did not dine till five, and liked Swift to be with him at supper. “I hate these suppers mortally, but I seldom eat anything.” Such evenings with Oxford were likely to be long and convivial, and wearing to Swift, who drank little, ate less, liked as well to sit beside card-players as to play himself, and was soon bored by ordinary conversation.

Yet when he had reached his bed and had put on his nightgown and velvet nightcap--the fur-trimmed one which Dingley sent was “too little and too hot”--he remembered, no matter how late it was, the journal. “Pshaw, I must be writing to those dear saucy brats every night, whether I will or no, let me have what business I will, or come home ever so late, or be ever so sleepy; but an old saying and a true one,

“‘_Be you lords or be you earls, You must write to naughty girls._’”

Widely as Swift dined, three days a week were for much of the year given to his special friends. On Sunday, after going to Court, which he said served him “as a coffee house,” he usually dined with Bolingbroke. “Mr. Secretary had too much company with him today; so I came away soon after dinner. I give no man liberty to swear or talk bawdy, and I found some of them were in constraint, so I left them to themselves.” On Saturday Swift dined with Oxford for what the first minister called his “whipping day”--the day, that is, when the informal cabinet reviewed the past week and designed the next. “This company, at first, consisted only of the Lord Keeper Harcourt, the Earl Rivers, the Earl of Peterborough, Mr. Secretary St. John, and myself; and here, after dinner, they used to discourse and settle matters of great importance. Several lords were afterwards, by degrees, admitted.... These meetings were always continued except when the Queen was at Windsor; but, as they grew more numerous, became of less consequence, and ended only in drinking and general conversation.” The matters of great importance were the Ministry’s policies and intrigues. The general conversation has been lost.

Swift told Stella only that he and his friends had talked, seldom what they had said. Once, not on a Saturday, when he had opposed the appointment of a certain commissioner to Spain because he was a “most covetous cur,” Swift reported the argument with Oxford. “I went on and said it was a shame to send him; to which he agreed, but desired I would name some who understood business and do not love money, for he could not find them. I said there was something in a treasurer different from other men; that we ought not to make a man a bishop who does not love divinity, or a general who does not love war; and I wondered why the Queen would make a man lord treasurer who does not love money.... Is it not silly to write all this? But it gives you an idea what our conversation is with mixed company.” When the Earl of Nottingham had deserted to the Whig side “Lord Treasurer was hinting as if he wished a ballad was made on him, and I will get up one against tomorrow.... I was this morning making the ballad, two degrees above Grub Street ... and then went to dine with our Society.... The printer came before we parted, and brought the ballad, which made them laugh very heartily a dozen times.”

The Society which laughed at the ballad claimed the third fixed dinner of Swift’s week, Thursday, though only during the session of Parliament. Bolingbroke seems to have planned the club in June 1711, when Swift was in the country with Lord Shelburne. It was to be small, weighty, and decent, without the extravagance of the Kit-Cat or the drunkenness of the Beef-Steak, was to be made up of men of wit and men of influence, and was to have for its two great ends “the improvement of friendship and the encouragement of letters.” Swift, back in town, found himself among the original twelve members and at once the eagerest. “If we go on as we begin,” he wrote to Stella, “no other club in this town will be worth talking of.” The men of wit were Swift, Prior, and John Arbuthnot, the Queen’s physician. There were three times as many men of influence. Oxford and Harcourt were excluded, since the club meant to appeal to them for patronage. But their sons were chosen, and Oxford’s son-in-law, Viscount Dupplin, and Samuel Masham, the husband of Oxford’s whispering cousin. There were, also, Bolingbroke, Sir Robert Raymond, Solicitor General, Allen Bathurst, George Granville, Secretary at War, and Sir William Wyndham.

The members, putting off their titles when they dined, called each other “Brother.” Each in turn was president of the dinner and paid the bill until all had had turns, after which the charges of each dinner were divided among them. They dined sometimes at the houses of the members, more often at taverns. The dozen or so brothers added after the first twelve were all on the side of influence rather than of wit. The richer members, who were men of influence, ran up the cost of their dinners so that the poorer, who were men of wit, could not afford it. Yet Swift, though he winced at his bill for seven guineas, for a year and a half was happy. Power and learning had sat down in an equal brotherhood. When the Duke of Ormond brought his brother the Earl of Arran, who was not a member, to a meeting against all order, Swift opposed his election to the face of the Earl and the Duke. But Swift was exultant when four of his brothers were among the twelve peers whom Oxford packed into the House of Lords: the son-in-law Dupplin, the cousin-in-law Masham, Bathurst, and Granville.

_In Ireland_]

It took Swift a year and a half to realize how much more skill than he the men of influence had at getting what they wanted. Having odd wells of enthusiasm in him, he had imagined that a club of politicians could be as much interested in the encouragement of letters as in the improvement of friendship.

The day after the first meeting in June 1711 he urged Oxford to leave Congreve, though a Whig, in his post. Oxford said he would. Swift hurried off to Congreve with the news. “So I have made a worthy man happy, and that is a good day’s work.” And Swift that same day had larger plans. “I am proposing to my Lord to erect a society or academy for correcting and settling our language, that we may not perpetually be changing as we do. He enters mightily into it.” The pamphlet on “correcting, ascertaining, and improving the English tongue” was the only piece of writing Swift ever published with his name. He wrote again like a governor, demanding that the language be orderly and stable, regulated by a lawful academy. He wrote, no less, like a brother of the Society, appealing to Oxford to become the patron of worthy, needy men of letters. Nothing came of these proposals, though Oxford brimmed with promises.

Swift undertook to raise money among the members. In February 1713 he had collected sixty guineas and was “to give them away to two authors tomorrow; and Lord Treasurer has promised us a hundred pounds to reward some others.” The sixty pounds went to the two authors, but there was another in worse need. That was “little Harrison,” a young Oxford poet for whom Swift had one of his profound, inexplicable tendernesses. “I went in the morning, and found him mighty ill, and got ... an order for a hundred pounds from the Treasury to be paid him tomorrow; and I have got him removed to Knightsbridge for air.” The next day: “I ... desired a friend to receive the hundred pounds for poor Harrison, and will carry it to him tomorrow morning.” The day after that: “I took Parnell this morning, and we walked to see poor Harrison. I had the hundred pounds in my pocket. I told Parnell I was afraid to knock at the door; my mind misgave me. I knocked, and his man in tears told me his master was dead an hour before.... Lord Treasurer was much concerned when I told him. I could not dine with Lord Treasurer nor anywhere else, but got a bit of meat toward evening.”

This pathetic episode, hardly more than a touch of melodrama in the general drama of Swift’s venture, cut him more sharply than his own mounting disappointment. He had thought that though he might not help himself he might at least help others. Now it seemed he could not do even that. He had only kept a few Whig poets in their places. His scheme for an academy which was to honour and establish letters among the English was still a mere scheme somewhere on the wind. The Ministry which he had served was not, after all, to be renowned for its patronage to learning. The man of wit had looked vainly to the men of influence.

What Swift, whose pride played tricks with his vision, did not see was that he had exploited his wit much as Oxford had exploited all the wit at his command. Oxford had used such men of letters as could be bent to his political concerns. Swift had bent his talents to pamphlets and lampoons about the most temporary matters. From Prior he had learned to write verse more lightly as from Addison he had learned to write more smoothly. Swift had poured his tremendous prose on the ground, careless what became of it. Obsessed with the desire for power, he had tried to win it by such force as politicians use, not by the art natural to him; among his pretended brothers the Dupplins and Mashams, not among his true friends the Arbuthnots and Popes.

4

During his final winter in England Swift turned to his true friends. It was not because he had found where he belonged. It was because he knew he had failed to belong elsewhere. He was not a bishop. He was not even an English dean. He was only a great writer, author of a great satire, making his first plans for the greatest of satires, meditating a revenge. But his revenge hardly went, that year, beyond a prospectus. He and Arbuthnot had taken up the rising young poets Parnell, Gay, and Pope. All five met Saturday evenings at Arbuthnot’s rooms in St. James’s Palace, where the Scriblerus Club, as they called themselves, plotted a burlesque biography which was to ridicule false learning.

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.