Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

tinguished contemporaries, must have been gathered from sources of very imperfect or very untrustworthy information, had he not himself put on record, for sympathetic eyes, in the minutest detail, his daily life in London at an epoch of intense interest as well for himself as the public. The curious thing is, that Mr. Forster has made the discovery that the Journal to Stella has no right to be called the Journal to Stella, though it be so entitled in every edition of Swift hitherto published. 'At the time when the letters composing that journal were addressed to Esther Johnson and her companion, the name which eternally connects her with Swift had not been applied to her. Most certainly it was not used in any part of the letters themselves, nor had been previously in any known piece of writing concerning her.'

Another meritorious feat of Mr. Forster is the discovery of the origin of the little language' which forms so large and whimsical an ingredient in Swift's letters to Esther Johnson, and the restoration, in his Appendix, of the passages written in that language, so far as recoverable from the partially preserved original MSS. of those letters in the British Museum. There can be no doubt,' says Mr. Forster, 'that what he called "our own little language," hitherto all but suppressed by those who have supplied the materials for his biography existing in his journals, began at Moor Park, and began in the man's imitation of a child's imperfect speech. The loving playfulness expressed by the "little language" had dated from Esther Johnson's childhood; it in some way satisfied wants of his own nature, or he would not have continued so lavishly to indulge it.'

[ocr errors]

Amongst the earlier entries in what we must crave leave still to call the Journal to Stella,' we find the following minute item to satisfy the curiosity of his correspondent about his London lodgings:

'I lodge in Bury Street, where I removed a week ago. I have the first floor, a dining-room and bed-chamber, at eight shillings a week; plaguy deep, but I spend nothing for eating, never go to a tavern, and very seldom in a coach; yet, after all, it will be expensive.'

Presently he writes:-
:-

'You must know it is fatal to me [I am fated] to be a scoundrel and a prince the same day: for being to see him [Harley] at four, I could not engage myself to dine at any friend's; so I went to Tooke [his publisher], to give him a ballad and dine with him; but he was not at home: so I was forced to go to a blind chophouse, and dine for ten pence upon gill ale, bad broth, and three chops of mutton; and then go reeking from thence to the First Minister of State.'

Another

Another specimen of the small economies of Swift's Life in London:

'I have gotten half a bushel of coals, and Patrick, the extravagant whelp, had a fire ready for me; but I picked off the coals before I went to bed.'

It is only due to Swift to say that he was not less minutely attentive to prudential calculation for others than he was for himself:

To-day I was all about St. Paul's, and up at top, like a fool, with Sir Andrew Fountaine and two more; and spent seven shillings for my dinner like a puppy: this is the second time he has served me so; but I will never do it again, though all mankind should persuade me; unconsidering puppies! There is a young fellow here in town we are all fond of, about a year or two come from the University,-one Harrison, a pretty little fellow, with a great deal of wit, good sense, and good nature; has written some mighty pretty things. He has nothing to live on but being governor of one of the Duke of Queensberry's sons for forty pounds a-year. The fine fellows are always inviting him to the tavern, and make him pay his club. A colonel and a lord were at him and me the same way to-night. I absolutely refused, and made Harrison lag behind, and persuaded him not to go to them. I tell you this, because I find all rich fellows have that humour of using all people without any consideration of their fortunes; but I will see them rot before they shall serve me so. Lord Halifax is always teasing me to go down to his country house, which will cost me a guinea to his servants, and twelve shillings coach-hire; and he shall be hanged first. Is not this a plaguy silly story? But I am vexed at the heart; for I love the young fellow, and am resolved to stir up people to do something for him: he is a Whig, and I will put him upon some of my cast Whigs; for I have done with them, and they have, I hope, done with this kingdom for our time.'

O cæcas hominum mentes! In little more than three years the Whigs were back again in power, and the Tories the proscribed party under a new dynasty.

The little language' of infantine and affectionate jargon in Swift's Journal to Stella contrasts rather piquantly with what we may call the large language, also to be found in that Journal, of opprobrious epithets on all who thwarted his humour or crossed his personal purposes. 'Grave mistakes,' says Mr. Forster, 'have been made by giving importance to such chance words as these, which are as frequent as they are meaningless in the speech of Swift.' Mr. Forster instances Swift's description of the Duke of Ormond's daughters, when he met them in London in 1710, as insolent drabs, coming up to his very mouth to salute him'-the epithet of course meaning nothing

[blocks in formation]

but that, being fond of them, he was free to call them what he pleased.' In like manner, he writes to Stella that he had 'supped with "the ramblingest lying rogue on earth," as with a not unloving familiarity he calls Lord Peterborough.' We cannot, however, go along with Mr. Forster in saying that when Swift calls the Irish bishops insolent, ungrateful rascals, and Lord Somers himself a rascal, the words ought not to be credited with meanings such as would be given them in present ordinary use.' We are, for our part, of opinion that when Swift called Lord Somers a false, deceitful rascal,' and said of the Whigs collectively, 'Rot them for ungrateful dogs!'—he quite meant what he said. He meant to express a bitter sense of having been ill-used by them, and put off with fair words instead of buttered parsnips. In his age of unpublished debates in Parliament, literary services were more indispensable to public men and political parties than they are at present, and Swift had seen Addison paid for his, not with empty praise, but with the solid pudding of an Under-Secretaryship. But Swift had made the mistake of entering a profession whose graver members were scandalised by the satires he penned in its cause. A priest without vocation, a politician loaded with clerical odium, what can be said but Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?'

6

That Swift was in earnest in abusing all who failed to help him forward, we cannot ourselves doubt. But perhaps it is hardly enough remembered that his large language about them chiefly occurs in his confidential letters to Stella, and in his marginal notes to his copy of Burnet's History of his Own Time.' Those of his readers who are most disposed to inveigh against Swift's invectives may take blame to themselves as parties to the publicity of those invectives-so far as participating in that insatiable curiosity for everything that dropped from that prolific and careless pen, which his successive editors, from Mr. Deane Swift to Mr. Forster, have done their utmost to satisfy. But for that curiosity, Swift's most exorbitant epithets on foes and false friends might have met no other eyes than those they were meant to meet, or, at most, no others than of those who might come into possession of his copy of Burnet.

Much less easily excusable than Swift's conduct to parties was his conduct to women. Upon the general judgment to be passed on that conduct we shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile we may remark, in closing the chapter of his connection with English politics, that as Swift sinned most signally against two women poor Stella and Vanessa so by two women-the Queen and the Duchess of Somerset-he was most signally punished. The same wayward temper which marked

his personal relations with the sex prompted his public attack, in the interest of his Tory patrons, on the one woman in England of whom he himself said, in a lucid interval, that she had more personal credit than all the Queen's servants put together. In the Windsor Prophecy,' which Lady Masham's prudence just withheld him from publishing, but which his own prudence did not withhold him from distributing printed copies of among the sixteen symposiac members of the October Club, Swift, in the coarsest terms the language would afford him, charged the Duchess of Somerset, the Queen's new Whig favourite (whom she seems to have chosen, with the policy of conscious weakness, to maintain a balance of power in her closet against her Tory one), with two crimes the having been privy to the murder of her second husband, and the having red hair. The first charge was the mere reckless fabrication of party malice; the second must have sunk deeper, because it was true. The consequences to Swift are recorded in rhyme by himself as follows:

'Now angry Somerset her vengeance vows

On Swift's reproaches for her murder'd spouse:
From her red locks her mouth with venom fills,
And thence into the royal ear distils.'

It is certain that Harley and Bolingbroke, if agreed in nothing else, were agreed in the desire to keep Swift in England, and therefore to make his position in England tenable in point of personal dignity. Not less certainly some superior power or influence withstood their wishes, so that Swift's patrons, in an age when Cabinets were compelled to bow submissively to Court influences, found themselves unable to provide, even by a prebend at Windsor, for their most politically effective and most personally valued partisan. To the very last, he confesses, he thought the ministry would not have parted with him, and could only conclude that they had not the option of making a suitable provision for him in England. In order to vacate the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin, for Swift, the Prime Minister, who had now been raised to the peerage by the title of Earl of Oxford, with the concurrence of the Duke of Ormond, then LordLieutenant of Ireland, procured the removal of Swift's friend Dr. Sterne from that deanery by appointment to the bishopric of Dromore. 'Sterne,' says Sir Walter Scott, had no apparent interest of his own, and was rather obnoxious to the Duke of Ormond. The circumstance, therefore, of his being promoted to the higher dignity, while Swift, with all his influence, only gained that from which Sterne was removed, indicates a sort of compromise

compromise between the Queen and her ministers;' the former remaining resolute not to put a mitre-even an Irish mitre-on the head of Swift. This affair,' he says in one of his last letters to Stella, 'was carried with great difficulty, which vexes me. But they say here [in London] it is much to my reputation that I have made a bishop, in spite of all the world, to get the best deanery in Ireland.'

In Jeffrey's Essay on Swift, republished from the Edinburgh Review, some good indignation is expended on the monstrous greed of the new Dean of St. Patrick's, importuning a Ministry whom his writings had first floated, and kept afloat for years, in English public opinion, to pay the expenses (which he found would amount to about 10007.) incurred on his induction into his Irish deanery-the discharge of which, if thrown (as they were) on Swift himself, must involve him in debt, of which he had always a wise horror. We are reminded of the impeachment of the Ass, in the fable, before the High Court of Beasts, for having indulged-not, like the Beasts of high degree, in wholesale ovicide, but in a single sacrilegious nibble at the parson's glebe-grass.

It is a pleasing trait in the character of Addison, and a strong testimony to the personal qualities of Swift, that at the epoch of definitive Tory prostration and Whig triumph, on the accession of George I., Addison, whom that sudden shifting of the political scene replaced in office, hastened to intimate, through the Bishop of Derry, to Swift his wish to renew with him those former friendly relations which had been cooled to some considerable degree by party warfare. Swift met his old friend's overture in the spirit in which it was made, and, congratulating Addison on his new-fledged honours as Secretary of State, added, 'Three or four more such choices would gain more hearts in three weeks than the harsher measures of government in as many years.' Had Swift's change of party-colours under the Tory Ministry dishonoured him personally in the eyes of contemporaries, can it appear probable to candid readers that Addison, of all men, would have volunteered renewing their old habits of friendly correspondence?*

The unfortunate manner in which the opposite fates of Swift and Addison put and kept, in each instance, the wrong man in the wrong place was well hit off in the following few words

*The death of Addison,' says Sir W. Scott, in his Memoir of Swift, 'broke off their renewed correspondence, after some kind letters had been exchanged. Swift found a valuable successor in Tickell, the poet, surviving friend and literary executor of Addison. He was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland, an office of high trust, and he often employed the interest which it gave him in compliance with Swift's recommendations."

(referred

« AnteriorContinua »