by Leo Damrosch
Or oft, when epithets you link
In gaping lines to fill a chink,
Like stepping-stones to save a stride
In streets where kennels are too wide;
Or like a heel-piece to support
A cripple with one foot too short;
Or like a bridge that joins a marish
To moorlands of a different parish.23
Feeble poets fill gaps with empty epithets; Swift fills them with exuberant analogies.
To some extent, however, Swift went along with the Pope circle’s vision of impending doom. When their correspondence was published long afterward, Walpole’s son Horace was outraged: “Last night I took up, to divert my thoughts, a volume of letters to Swift from Bolingbroke, Bathurst, and Gay; and what was there but lamentations on the ruin of England, in that era of prosperity and peace, from wretches who thought their own want of power a proof that their country was undone!” Johnson too was offended by their air of superiority. “In the letters both of Swift and Pope there appears such narrowness of mind as makes them insensible of any excellence that has not some affinity with their own, and confines their esteem and approbation to so small a number, that whoever should form his opinion of the age from their representation would suppose them to have lived amidst ignorance and barbarity, unable to find among their contemporaries either virtue or intelligence, and persecuted by those that could not understand them.”24
There was certainly posturing on Pope’s side, and no doubt some on Swift’s too, but that’s not surprising. In any case, Swift’s attitude was more complicated and painful than Johnson’s comment would suggest. When Pope plumed himself on constantly acquiring new friends, Swift asserted a deeper standard of friendship: “I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another.” For Swift the ideal was a close relationship among gifted and like-minded individuals. “I have often endeavoured to establish a friendship among all men of genius, and would fain have it done. They are seldom above three or four contemporaries, and if they could be united would drive the world before them. I think it was so among the poets in the time of Augustus, but envy and party and pride have hindered it among us.” Stuck in Dublin, Swift knew he was settling for undemanding sociability rather than connection with kindred spirits: “I choose my companions among those of least consequence and most compliance.”25 Admittedly, “drive the world before them” is a highly aggressive way of describing a writer’s stance toward his world.
IN ENGLAND AGAIN, FOR THE LAST TIME
In 1727 Swift was back at Twickenham again. Gulliver was in print by then, and the dream of an appointment in England was fading, but he wanted very much to stay close to his friends. During this visit, however, there were signs that he and Pope were beginning to wear on each other. In part they found each other’s disabilities frustrating. The tubercular condition that was eroding Pope’s bones made him alarmingly infirm. He needed help to get dressed and undressed, and was barely able to stand up until he had been laced into a stiff corset. Almost inevitably, he was a demanding companion.
81. Alexander Pope. The portrait was sketched by an artist named William Hoare while Pope was in conversation with a friend at the other end of a large gallery. Joseph Warton, who reproduced it in a 1797 edition of Pope’s Works, said that Pope “would never have forgiven the painter had he known it—he was too sensible of the deformity of his person to allow the whole of it to be represented.”
Swift still had his remarkable energy. When he stopped off at Oxford, a clergyman who had known him years before commented, “He is as little altered, I think, of any man I ever saw, in so many years’ time.” But vertigo and deafness continued to plague him, as he acknowledged in Dr. Swift to Mr. Pope, While He Was Writing the Dunciad:
Pope has the talent well to speak,
But not to reach the ear;
His loudest voice is low and weak,
The Dean too deaf to hear.
So Pope would walk about, jotting down lines of verse, while Swift would wear out the day reading when he would rather have been conversing.
A while they on each other look,
Then different studies choose:
The Dean sits plodding on a book,
Pope walks, and courts the Muse.26
This little poem gives a vivid impression of the way Pope would play around with poetic fragments until they came together in a finished whole.
Now backs of letters, though designed
For those who more will need ’em,
Are filled with hints, and interlined,
Himself can hardly read ’em.
Each atom by some other struck
All turns and motion tries,
Till in a lump together stuck,
Behold a poem rise!27
After some months, Swift could no longer stand trying to be sociable, and abruptly departed. Pope reported to the Earl of Oxford (the son of Swift’s deceased friend), “The Dean is so much out of order, and withal so deaf, that he has conversed with nobody and fled all company.” It was a sad parting, and they both felt it. Swift wrote to Pope from London, “I love and esteem you for reasons that most others have little to do with, and would be the same although you had never touched a pen, further than with writing to me.” Pope replied, “Besides my natural memory of you, you have made a local one, which presents you to me in every place I frequent . . . nor see one seat in my own garden, or one room in my own house, without a phantom of you sitting or walking before me.”28
In the opinion of Lady Orrery, who knew them both well, “Swift certainly loved Pope from his soul; Pope rather feared than loved Swift.” She also distinguished perceptively between Swift’s brusqueness and Pope’s sinuous politeness: “Pope’s mind and conversation was like his gardens, full of windings neatly trimmed. . . . The nettles and thorns were all hid behind the hedges.” Johnson said that Pope “hardly drank tea without a stratagem,” whereas in Orrery’s experience Swift, for all his ironical teasing, “was undisguised and perfectly sincere.”29
Pope once told a story to illustrate Swift’s “odd, blunt way that is mistaken by strangers for ill-nature.” When he and Gay dropped in one evening—it’s not clear when or where this took place—Swift demanded to know why they had left “all the great lords that you are so fond of to come hither to see a poor Dean.” When they assured him that the only hospitality they wanted was his conversation, he proceeded to calculate what he would have had to spend if they had dined with him.
“Let me see, what should I have had? A couple of lobsters? Aye, that would have done very well—two shillings. Tarts—a shilling. But you will drink a glass of wine with me, though you supped so much before your usual time, only to spare my pocket?”
“No, we had rather talk with you than drink with you.”
“But if you had supped with me, as in all reason you ought to have done, you must then have drank with me: a bottle of wine—two shillings. Two and two is four, and one is five: just two and sixpence apiece. There, Pope, there’s half a crown for you, and there’s another for you, sir, for I won’t save anything by you. I am determined.”
This was all said and done with his usual seriousness on such occasions, and in spite of everything we could say to the contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money.30
Very likely Pope was missing the point. Sheridan thought that Swift felt insulted by his friends’ attempt not to put him to expense, with the implausible claim that they had already eaten and didn’t even care for wine. “It was clear therefore to him that they had given credit to the common report of his covetousness; and in order to show that he was above such sordid thrift, and to punish them for supposing it, by this practical rebuke, he made them undergo the shame of putting into their pockets what would otherwise have been spent in good fellowship.”31
There were odd irritations at Pope’s table. After Swift was back in Ireland, Gay wrote to say teasingly that Gay’s patron, the Duchess of Queensberry, had been
shocked when she dined with Swift—“Never more despise a fork with three prongs. I wish too you would not eat from the point of your knife.” Swift wrote back indignantly, “Pray tell her Grace that the fault was in Mr. Pope’s poetical forks, and not in my want of manners.” In a follow-up letter he elaborated: “A knife was absolutely necessary at Mr. Pope’s, where it was morally impossible with a bidential fork to convey a morsel of beef with the encumbrance of mustard and turnips into your mouth at once.” It seems that Pope liked to use old-fashioned utensils that he had inherited; by this time three-pronged forks had largely replaced two-pronged ones.32
When Pope brought out a fourth volume of Pope-Swift Miscellanies in 1728, there was further exasperation for Swift. Pope’s goal was to get some of his odds and ends into print and to make a bit of money doing so. Swift assumed that each collaborator was going to offer his best work, as equal partners in a major achievement. He had been led to believe that the Dunciad would appear in the Miscellanies, and was shocked when it didn’t. As it turned out, the volume was almost entirely filled by some of Swift’s best poems, balanced inadequately by some very minor ones of Pope’s.
Pope also left out, without warning that he would, A Libel on Dr. Delany, of which Swift was especially proud. The reason was that it praised Pope warmly for his independence:
Hail! happy Pope, whose gen’rous mind
Detesting all the statesmen kind. . . .
His heart too great, though fortune little,
To lick a rascal statesman’s spittle.
Among friends Pope talked big about his independence from court and politics, but in reality he was angling for favor and had no intention of seeing this compliment in print.33
In the end, Swift’s friendship with Pope was best conducted by mail, not in person, which doesn’t make it any less real. Swift wrote from Dublin, “You are the best and kindest friend in the world, and I know nobody alive or dead to whom I am so much obliged; and if ever you made me angry, it was for your too much care about me.” In his will he left a portrait of himself “to my dearest friend Alexander Pope of Twittenham, Esq.”34
CHAPTER 26
Disillusionment and Loss
RENEWED HOPES FOR A LIFE IN ENGLAND
During his 1726 visit to England, Swift made an appointment to see Sir Robert Walpole, intending to make the Irish case for relief in a time of economic crisis. Before he left Dublin he and Archbishop King had worked up a full set of facts and figures. What they didn’t know was that Hugh Boulter, the recently appointed archbishop of Armagh and head of the Church of Ireland, had already warned the prime minister to be on guard. Boulter wrote to Walpole: “The general report is that Dean Swift designs for England in a little time, and we do not question his endeavours to misrepresent his Majesty’s friends here wherever he finds an opportunity; but he is so well known, as well as the disturbances he has been the fomenter of in this kingdom, that we are under no fear of his being able to disserve any of his Majesty’s faithful servants by anything that is known to come from him. But we could wish some eye were had to what he shall be attempting on your side of the water.”1 It was not likely, anyway, that Walpole would have much patience with the Drapier.
When the meeting took place, Walpole did most of the talking, for over an hour. “I failed very much in my design,” Swift admitted to the Earl of Peterborough, who had arranged the interview. “Sir Robert Walpole was pleased to enlarge very much upon the subject of Ireland, in a manner so alien from what I conceived to be rights and privileges of a subject of England, that I did not think proper to debate the matter with him as much as I otherwise might, because I found it would be in vain.” There were rumors, then and later, that Swift offered concessions of some kind in return for appointment to a bishopric in England, but these were surely unfounded, since he declared that he had sought the meeting “without any view to myself,” and asked Peterborough to show the letter to Walpole, who would obviously have known if Swift wasn’t telling the truth.2
Still, Swift had never given up hope of an English bishopric. At this time he noted down the incomes of nearly fifty English bishops. The archbishop of Canterbury led the field with ₤6,000 per year. At the bottom were Hereford in England and St. Asaph’s in Wales, both at a relatively modest ₤1,000, which was still ₤400 more than what Swift received at St. Patrick’s.3
Giving up on Walpole, Swift pursued other contacts. Bishops were appointed by the Crown, and it was clear that the present king would never reward Swift. But what about the next one? The Prince of Wales, who would succeed his father as George II, was known to dislike the Whig ministry, and it was believed that when he came to the throne he might eject Walpole and bring back the Tories. That would be the chance Swift was waiting for.
Dr. Arbuthnot was a regular visitor to Caroline of Anspach, the prince’s wife, and through Arbuthnot she invited Swift to visit at Richmond Lodge, her villa on the Thames near Twickenham. With his usual pride Swift neglected “at least nine times” to respond, or so he later claimed, but eventually he went and was graciously received. He took the occasion to make a joke: “I told her the first time that I was informed she loved to see odd persons, and that having sent for a wild boy from Germany, she had a curiosity to see a wild Dean from Ireland.”4 Princess Caroline promised to give Swift some valuable medals that were soon to be struck, which he took as a great compliment, and she gave the impression that he could expect a splendid promotion when she came to the throne.
In addition, Swift grew close to Henrietta Howard, Caroline’s personal servant or “dresser” who was also—in a remarkable ménage à trois—the acknowledged mistress of the prince. She was separated from her disagreeable husband, whom the prince had bought out with a financial settlement. The prince also provided her with Marble Hill, a Thames-side villa not far from Richmond Lodge. Attractive and intelligent, Mrs. Howard was a valued member of the Pope-Arbuthnot-Bolingbroke circle, and Pope paid her a tribute in verse:
I know the thing that’s most uncommon,
(Envy be silent and attend!)
I know a reasonable woman,
Handsome and witty, yet a friend.5
At this stage Swift’s relationship with both ladies seemed highly promising. After he returned to Ireland in 1726, Arbuthnot wrote to say, “I had a great deal of discourse with your friend her Royal Highness. She insisted upon your wit and good conversation.” Those were of course qualities that Arbuthnot himself appreciated, and he went on to say, “I told her Royal Highness, that was not what I valued you for, but for being a sincere honest man, and speaking truth where others were afraid to speak it.”6
As Swift recalled the relationship later on, the princess enjoyed his teasing bluntness. As he described his own behavior,
And to her Majesty, God bless her,
Would speak as free as to her dresser.
She thought it his peculiar whim,
Nor took it ill, as come from him.7
The dresser was Mrs. Howard, and the expectation was that when her lover became king, she would enjoy the same kind of backstage influence that Abigail Masham once had. As an earnest of friendship, and as a hint to remember needy Ireland, Swift made Mrs. Howard a present of expensive Irish plaid. The princess admired it and had it made into dresses for herself and her children, exactly as Swift hoped would happen.
Delighted at the progress he was making, Swift sent Mrs. Howard a letter signed “Lemuel Gulliver,” along with a toy crown. “I beg leave to lay the crown of Lilliput at your feet, as a small acknowledgement of your favours to my book and person. I found it in the corner of my waistcoat pocket, into which I thrust most of the valuable furniture of the royal apartment when the palace was on fire.” Swift permitted himself a sly innuendo, recalling that the fire had started when a maid of honor fell asleep while reading a book of romances, and that Gulliver resourcefully put it out by urinating on it. “Did I make use of an improper engine to extinguish a fire that was kindled by a maid of honour?”8
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br /> In April of 1727 Swift was back in England, and by then it was obvious that the king didn’t have long to live. The likelihood of imminent change at the top thwarted an opportunity that Swift would have loved to take advantage of, for Bolingbroke invited him to travel to France. He spoke French reasonably well and was thrilled at the possibility; it would have been the only trip outside the British Isles in his whole life. But just before it was time to depart, Bolingbroke sent an urgent warning: “Much less ought you to think of such an unmeaning journey, when the opportunity of quitting Ireland for England is, I believe, fairly before you.” Mrs. Howard herself, in a letter that Swift described but that no longer exists, advised him “by all means not to go; it would look singular, and perhaps disaffected. And to my friends, she enlarged upon the good intentions of the Court towards me. I stayed.”9 There was a new attack of vertigo as well.
“PUT NO TRUST IN PRINCES”
A few days later George I did indeed die, and Swift soon had the opportunity to call upon the new king and queen and to kiss their hands. He also wrote a playful poem called A Pastoral Dialogue between Richmond Lodge and Marble Hill, reminding them of their friendship with him:
Here wont the Dean, when he’s to seek,
To sponge a breakfast once a week;
To cry the bread was stale, and mutter
Complaints against the royal butter.10
That was Swift’s favored posture of cocky independence, criticizing his hosts even while acknowledging that he was sponging off them. This probably felt pleasantly fresh to people who were accustomed to being flattered all the time.
Despite his hopes, Swift had too much experience of the great to be entirely confident, and he began to suspect that Caroline and Henrietta had been leading him on. In this poem, he makes Richmond Lodge quote King David to George II and Queen Caroline:
The kingly Prophet well evinces
That we should put no trust in princes.
My royal master promised me
To raise me to a high degree,
