CHAPTER IX.
DECLINE.
Swift survived his final settlement in Ireland for more than thirty years, though during the last five or six it was but the outside sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.sics 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 "const.i.tutionals" 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 inc.u.mbent; 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 h.e.l.l)," 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 t.i.tles 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 52_l._ 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 20_l._, 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 cla.s.ses, 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 n.o.bler 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 a.s.sertions 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 a.s.signed by Swift. Mrs. Sheridan, says this frank critic, is "the most disagreeable beast in Europe," a "most filthy s.l.u.t, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s. 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 d.u.c.h.ess. 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 200_l._ 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 ma.n.u.script 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 d.a.m.ned) at their ghastly revelry, and their laughter pa.s.sed into such wild sounds as made the daring piper"s "very nails turn blue."
It is not, however, to be inferred that all Swift"s recreations were so dreary as this Anglo-Latin, or that his facetiousness always covered an aching heart. There is real humour, and not all of bitter flavour, in some of the trifles which pa.s.sed between Swift and his friends. The most famous is the poem called _The Grand Question Debated_, the question being whether an old building called Hamilton"s Bawn, belonging to Sir A.
Acheson, should be turned into a malthouse or a barrack. Swift takes the opportunity of caricaturing the special object of his aversion, the bl.u.s.tering and illiterate soldier, though he indignantly denies that he had said anything disagreeable to his hospitable entertainer. Lady Acheson encouraged him in writing such "lampoons." Her taste cannot have been very delicate,[86] and she perhaps did not perceive how a rudeness which affects to be only playful may be really offensive. If the poem shows that Swift took liberties with his friends, it also shows that he still possessed the strange power of reproducing the strain of thought of a vulgar mind which he exhibited in Mr. Harris"s pet.i.tion. Two other works which appeared in these last years are more remarkable proofs of the same power. _The Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation_ and the _Directions to Servants_, are most singular performances, and curiously ill.u.s.trative of Swift"s habits of thought and composition. He seems to have begun them during some of his early visits to England. He kept them by him and amused himself by working upon them, though they were never quite finished. The _Polite Conversation_ was given, as we have seen, to Mrs. Barber in his later years, and the _Directions to Servants_ came into the printer"s hands when he was already imbecile. They show how closely Swift"s sarcastic attention was fixed through life upon the ways of his inferiors. They are a ma.s.s of materials for a natural history of social absurdities such as Mr. Darwin was in the habit of bestowing upon the manners and customs of worms. The difference is that Darwin had none but kindly feelings for worms, whereas Swift"s inspection of social vermin is always edged with contempt. The conversations are a marvellous collection of the set of cant phrases which at best have supplied the absence of thought in society. Incidentally there are some curious ill.u.s.trations of the customs of the day; though one cannot suppose that any human beings had ever the marvellous flow of pointless proverbs with which Lord Sparkish, Mr. Neverout, Miss Notable and the rest manage to keep the ball incessantly rolling. The talk is nonsensical, as most small-talk would be, if taken down by a reporter, and, according to modern standard, hideously vulgar, and yet it flows on with such vivacity that it is perversely amusing.
_Lady Answerall._ But, Mr. Neverout, I wonder why such a handsome, straight young gentleman as you don"t get some rich widow?
_Lord Sparkish._ Straight! Ay, straight as my leg, and that"s crooked at the knee.
_Neverout._ Truth, madam, if it rained rich widows, none would fall upon me. Egad, I was born under a threepenny planet, never to be worth a groat.
And so the talk flows on, and to all appearance might flow for ever.
Swift professes in his preface to have sat many hundred times with his table-book ready, without catching a single phrase for his book in eight hours. Truly he is a kind of Boswell of inanities; and one is amazed at the quant.i.ty of thought which must have gone into this elaborate trifling upon trifles. A similar vein of satire upon the emptiness of writers is given in his _Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Human Mind_; but that is a mere skit compared with this strange performance. The _Directions to Servants_ shows an equal amount of thought exerted upon the various misdoings of the cla.s.s a.s.sailed. Some one has said that it is painful to read so minute and remorseless an exposure of one variety of human folly. Undoubtedly it suggests that Swift must have appeared to be an omniscient master. Delany, as I have said, testifies to his excellence in that capacity. Many anecdotes attest the close attention which he bestowed upon every detail of his servants" lives, and the humorous reproofs which he administered. "Sweetheart," he said to an ugly cookmaid who had overdone a joint, "take this down to the kitchen and do it less."
"That is impossible," she replied. "Then," he said, "if you must commit faults, commit faults that can be mended." Another story tells how when a servant had excused himself for not cleaning boots on the ground that they would soon be dirty again, Swift made him apply the same principle to eating breakfast, which would be only a temporary remedy for hunger. In this, as in every relation of life, Swift was under a kind of necessity of imposing himself upon every one in contact with him, and followed out his commands into the minutest details. In the _Directions to Servants_ he has acc.u.mulated the results of his experience in one department; and the reading may not be without edification to the people who every now and then announce as a new discovery that servants are apt to be selfish, indolent, and slatternly, and to prefer their own interests to their master"s. Probably no fault could be found with the modern successors of eighteenth-century servants, which has not already been exemplified in Swift"s presentment of that golden age of domestic comfort. The details are not altogether pleasant; but, admitting such satire to be legitimate, Swift"s performance is a masterpiece.
Swift, however, left work of a more dignified kind. Many of the letters in his correspondence are admirable specimens of a perishing art. The most interesting are those which pa.s.sed between him, Pope, and Bolingbroke, and which were published by Pope"s contrivance during Swift"s last period. "I look upon us three," says Swift, "as a peculiar triumvirate, who have nothing to expect or fear, and so far fittest to converse with one another." We may perhaps believe Swift when he says that he "never leaned on his elbow to consider what he should write" (except to fools, lawyers, and ministers), though we certainly cannot say the same of his friends.
Pope and Bolingbroke are full of affectations, now transparent enough; but Swift in a few trenchant, outspoken phrases, dashes out a portrait of himself as impressive as it is in some ways painful. We must, indeed, remember in reading his inverse hypocrisy, his tendency to call his own motives by their ugliest names--a tendency which is specially p.r.o.nounced in writing letters to the old friends whose very names recall the memories of past happiness, and lead him to dwell upon the gloomiest side of the present. There is too a characteristic reserve upon some points. In his last visit to Pope, Swift left his friend"s house after hearing the bad accounts of Stella"s health, and hid himself in London lodgings. He never mentioned his anxieties to his friend, who heard of them first from Sheridan; and in writing afterwards from Dublin, Swift excuses himself for the desertion by referring to his own ill-health--doubtless a true cause ("two sick friends never did well together")--and his anxiety about his affairs, without a word about Stella. A phrase of Bolingbroke"s in the previous year about "the present Stella, whoever she may be," seems to prove that he too had no knowledge of Stella except from the poems addressed to the name. There were depths of feeling which Swift could not lay bare to the friend in whose affection he seems most thoroughly to have trusted. Meanwhile he gives full vent to the scorn of mankind and himself, the bitter and unavailing hatred of oppression, and above all for that strange mingling of pride and remorse which is always characteristic of his turn of mind. When he leaves Arbuthnot and Pope he expresses the warmth of his feelings by declaring that he will try to forget them. He is deeply grieved by the death of Congreve, and the grief makes him almost regret that he ever had a friend. He would give half his fortune for the temper of an easy-going acquaintance who could take up or lose a friend as easily as a cat. "Is not this the true happy man?" The loss of Gay cuts him to the heart; he notes on the letter announcing it that he had kept the letter by him five days "by an impulse foreboding some misfortune." He cannot speak of it except to say that he regrets that long living has not hardened him; and that he expects to die poor and friendless. Pope"s ill-health "hangs on his spirits." His moral is that if he were to begin the world again, he would never run the risk of a friendship with a poor or sickly man--for he cannot harden himself. "Therefore I argue that avarice and hardness of heart are the two happiest qualities a man can acquire who is late in his life, because by living long we must lessen our friends or may increase our fortunes." This bitterness is equally apparent in regard to the virtues on which he most prided himself. His patriotism was owing to "perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness;" in which, as he says, he is the direct contrary of Pope, who can despise folly and hate vice without losing his temper or thinking the worse of individuals. "Oppression tortures him,"
and means bitter hatred of the concrete oppressor. He tells Barber in 1738 that for three years he has been but the shadow of his former self, and has entirely lost his memory, "except when it is roused by perpetual subjects of vexation." Commentators have been at pains to show that such sentiments are not philanthropic; yet they are the morbid utterance of a n.o.ble and affectionate nature soured by long misery and disappointment.
They brought their own punishment. The unhappy man was fretting himself into melancholy and was losing all sources of consolation. "I have n.o.body now left but you," he writes to Pope in 1736; his invention is gone; he makes projects which end in the manufacture of waste paper; and what vexes him most is that his "female friends have now forsaken him." "Years and infirmities," he says in the end of the same year (about the date of the _Legion Club_), "have quite broke me; I can neither read, nor write, nor remember, nor converse. All I have left is to walk and ride." A few letters are preserved in the next two years--melancholy wails over his loss of health and spirit--pathetic expressions of continual affection for his "dearest and almost only constant friend," and a warm request or two for services to some of his acquaintance.
The last stage was rapidly approaching. Swift who had always been thinking of death in these later years, had antic.i.p.ated the end in the remarkable verses _On the Death of Dr. Swift_. This and two or three other performances of about the same period, especially the _Rhapsody on Poetry_ (1733) and the _Verses to a Lady_ are Swift"s chief t.i.tle to be called a poet. How far that name can be conceded to him is a question of cla.s.sification. Swift"s originality appears in the very fact that he requires a new cla.s.s to be made for him. He justified Dryden"s remark in so far as he was never a poet in the sense in which Milton or Wordsworth or Sh.e.l.ley or even Dryden himself were poets. His poetry may be called rhymed prose, and should perhaps be put at about the same level in the scale of poetry as _Hudibras_. It differs from prose not simply in being rhymed, but in that the metrical form seems to be the natural and appropriate mode of utterance. Some of the purely sarcastic and humorous phrases recall _Hudibras_ more nearly than anything else; as, for example, the often-quoted verses upon small critics in the _Rhapsody_.
The vermin only tease and pinch Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey, And these have smaller still to bite "em, And so proceed _ad infinitum_.
In the verses on his own death, the suppressed pa.s.sion, the glow and force of feeling which we perceive behind the merely moral and prosaic phrases seem to elevate the work to a higher level. It is a mere running of every-day language into easy-going verse; and yet the strangely mingled pathos and bitterness, the peculiar irony of which he was the great master, affect us with a sentiment which may be called poetical in substance, more forcibly than far more dignified and in some sense imaginative performances. Whatever name we may please to give to such work, Swift has certainly struck home and makes an impression which it is difficult to compress into a few phrases. It is the essence of all that is given at greater length in the correspondence; and starts from a comment upon Rochefoucauld"s congenial maxim about the misfortunes of our friends.
He tells how his acquaintance watch his decay, tacitly congratulating themselves that "it is not yet so bad with us;" how, when he dies, they laugh at the absurdity of his will.
To public uses! there"s a whim!
What had the public done for him?
Mere envy, avarice, and pride, He gave it all--but first he died.
Then we have the comments of Queen Caroline and Sir Robert and the rejoicings of Grub Street at the chance of pa.s.sing off rubbish by calling it his. His friends are really touched.
Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay A week, and Arbuthnot a day, St. John himself will scarce forbear To bite his pen and drop a tear, The rest will give a shrug and cry, ""Tis pity, but we all must die!"
The ladies talk over it at their cards. They have learnt to show their tenderness, and
Receive the news in doleful dumps.
The dean is dead (pray what is trumps?); Then, Lord have mercy on his soul!
(Ladies, I"ll venture for the _vole_).
The poem concludes, as usual, with an impartial character of the dean. He claims, with a pride not unjustifiable, the power of independence, love of his friends, hatred of corruption and so forth; admits that he may have had "too much satire in his vein," though adding the very questionable a.s.sertion that he "lashed the vice but spared the name." Marlborough, Wharton, Burnet, Steele, Walpole and a good many more might have had something to say upon that head. The last phrase is significant,--
He gave the little wealth he had To build a house for fools and mad; And showed by one satiric touch No nation needed it so much, That kingdom he hath left his debtor, I wish it soon may have a better!
For some years, in fact, Swift had spent much thought and time in arranging the details of this bequest. He ultimately left about 12,000_l._, with which, and some other contributions, St. Patrick"s Hospital was opened for fifty patients in the year 1757.
The last few years of Swift"s life were pa.s.sed in an almost total eclipse of intellect. One pathetic letter to Mrs. Whiteway gives almost the last touch. "I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am under both of body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture; but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is and your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few, for miserable they must be. If I do not blunder, it is Sat.u.r.day, July 26, 1740. If I live till Monday, I shall hope to see you, perhaps for the last time." Even after this he occasionally showed gleams of his former intelligence, and is said to have written a well-known epigram during an outing with his attendants:--
Behold a proof of Irish sense!
Here Irish wit is seen!
When nothing"s left that"s worth defence They build a magazine.
Occasionally he gave way to furious outbursts of violent temper; and once suffered great torture from a swelling in the eye. But his general state seems to have been apathetic; sometimes he tried to speak, but was unable to find words. A few sentences have been recorded. On hearing that preparations were being made for celebrating his birthday, he said, "It is all folly; they had better let it alone." Another time he was heard to mutter, "I am what I am; I am what I am." Few details have been given of this sad period of mental eclipse; nor can we regret their absence. It is enough to say that he suffered occasional tortures from the development of the brain-disease; though as a rule he enjoyed the painlessness of torpor.
The unhappy man lingered till the 19th of October, 1745, when he died quietly at three in the afternoon, after a night of convulsions. He was buried in St. Patrick"s Cathedral, and over his grave was placed an epitaph, containing the last of those terrible phrases which cling to our memory whenever his name is mentioned. Swift lies, in his own words,--
Ubi saeva indignatio Cor ulterius lacerare nequit.
What more can be added?
THE END.