Swift Part 5

But what success Vanessa met Is to the world a secret yet.[46]

Vanessa loved Swift; and Swift, it seems, allowed himself to be loved. One phrase in a letter written to him during his stay at Dublin, in 1713, suggests the only hint of jealousy. If you are happy, she says, "it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except 'tis what is inconsistent with mine." Soon after Swift's final retirement to Ireland, Mrs.

Vanhomrigh died; her husband had left a small property at Celbridge. One son was dead; the other behaved badly to his sisters; the daughters were for a time in money difficulties, and it became convenient for them to retire to Ireland, where Vanessa ultimately settled at Celbridge. The two women who wors.h.i.+pped Swift were thus almost in presence of each other. The situation almost suggests comedy; but unfortunately it was to take a most tragical and still partly mysterious development.

The fragmentary correspondence between Swift and Vanessa establishes certain facts. Their intercourse was subject to restraints. He begs her, when he is starting for Dublin, to get her letters directed by some other hand, and to write nothing that may not be seen, for fear of "inconveniences." The post-office clerk surely would not be more attracted by Vanessa's hand than by that of such a man as Lewis, a subordinate of Harley's who had formerly forwarded her letters. He adds that if she comes to Ireland, he will see her very seldom. "It is not a place for freedom, but everything is known in a week and magnified a hundred times." Poor Vanessa soon finds the truth of this. She complains that she is amongst "strange prying deceitful people;" that he flies her and will give no reason except that they are amongst fools and must submit. His reproofs are terrible to her. "If you continue to treat me as you do," she says soon after, "you will not be made uneasy by me long." She would rather have borne the rack than those "killing, killing words" of his. She writes instead of speaking, because when she ventures to complain in person "you are angry, and there is something in your look so awful that it shakes me dumb"--a memorable phrase in days soon to come. She protests that she says as little as she can. If he knew what she thought, he must be moved. The letter containing these phrases is dated 1714, and there are but a few sc.r.a.ps till 1720; we gather that Vanessa submitted partly to the necessities of the situation: and that this extreme tension was often relaxed. Yet she plainly could not resign herself or suppress her pa.s.sion.

Two letters in 1720 are painfully vehement. He has not seen her for ten long weeks, she says in her first, and she has only had one letter and one little note with an excuse. She will sink under his "prodigious neglect."

Time or accident cannot lessen her inexpressible pa.s.sion. "Put my pa.s.sion under the utmost restraint; send me as distant from you as the earth will allow, yet you cannot banish those charming ideas which will stick by me, whilst I have the use of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul, for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it." She thinks him changed, and entreats him not to suffer her to "live a life like a languis.h.i.+ng death, which is the only life I can lead, if you have lost any of your tenderness for me." The following letter is even more pa.s.sionate. She pa.s.ses days in sighing and nights in watching and thinking of one who thinks not of her. She was born with "violent pa.s.sions, which terminate all in one, that inexpressible pa.s.sion I have for you." If she could guess at his thoughts, which is impossible ("for never any one living thought like you") she would guess that he wishes her "religious"--that she might pay her devotions to heaven. "But that should not spare you, for was I an enthusiast, still you'd be the deity I should wors.h.i.+p." "What marks are there of a deity but what you are to be known by--you are (at?) present everywhere; your dear image is always before my eyes. Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe, I tremble with fear; at other times a charming compa.s.sion s.h.i.+nes through your countenance, which moves my soul. Is it not more reasonable to adore a radiant form one has seen, than one only described?"[47]

The man who received such letters from a woman whom he at least admired and esteemed, who felt that to respond was to administer poison, and to fail to respond was to inflict the severest pangs, must have been in the cruellest of dilemmas. Swift, we cannot doubt, was grieved and perplexed.

His letters imply embarra.s.sment; and, for the most part, take a lighter tone; he suggests his universal panacea of exercise; tells her to fly from the spleen instead of courting it; to read diverting books, and so forth; advice more judicious probably than comforting. There are, however, some pa.s.sages of a different tendency. There is a mutual understanding to use certain catch-words, which recall the "little language." He wishes that her letters were as hard to read as his, in case of accident. "A stroke thus ... signifies everything that may be said to _Cad_, at the beginning and conclusion." And she uses this written caress, and signs herself--his own "Skinage." There are certain "questions," to which reference is occasionally made; a kind of catechism, it seems, which he was expected to address to himself at intervals, and the nature of which must be conjectured. He proposes to continue the _Cadenus and Vanessa_--a proposal which makes her happy beyond "expression,"--and delights her by recalling a number of available incidents. He recurs to them in his last letter, and bids her "go over the scenes of Windsor, Cleveland Row, Rider Street, St.

James's Street, Kensington, the Shrubbery, the Colonel in France, &c. Cad thinks often of these, especially on horseback,[48] as I am a.s.sured." This prosaic list of names recall, as we find, various old meetings. And, finally, one letter contains an avowal of a singular kind. "Soyez a.s.suree," he says, after advising her "to quit this scoundrel island,"

"que jamais personne du monde a ete aimee, honoree, estimee, adoree par votre ami que vous." It seems as though he were compelled to throw her just a crumb of comfort here: but, in the same breath, he has begged her to leave him for ever.

If Vanessa was ready to accept a "gown of forty-four," to overlook his infirmities in consideration of his fame, why should Swift have refused?

Why condemn her to undergo this "languis.h.i.+ng death,"--a long agony of unrequited pa.s.sion? One answer is suggested by the report that Swift was secretly married to Stella in 1716. The fact is not proved, nor disproved:[49] nor, to my mind, is the question of its truth of much importance. The ceremony, if performed, was nothing but a ceremony. The only rational explanation of the fact, if it be taken for a fact, must be that Swift, having resolved not to marry, gave Stella this security that he would, at least, marry no one else. Though his anxiety to hide the connexion with Vanessa may only mean a dread of idle tongues, it is at least highly probable that Stella was the person from whom he specially desired to keep it. Yet his poetical addresses to Stella upon her birthday (of which the first is dated 1719, and the last 1727) are clearly not the addresses of a lover. Both in form and substance they are even pointedly intended to express friends.h.i.+p instead of love. They read like an expansion of his avowal to Tisdall, that her charms for him, though for no one else, could not be diminished by her growing old without marriage. He addresses her with blunt affection, and tells her plainly of her growing size and waning beauty; comments even upon her defects of temper, and seems expressly to deny that he loved her in the usual way.

Thou, Stella, wert no longer young When first for thee my harp I strung, Without one word of Cupid's darts Of killing eyes and bleeding hearts; With friends.h.i.+p and esteem possess'd I ne'er admitted love a guest.

We may almost say that he harps upon the theme of "friends.h.i.+p and esteem."

His grat.i.tude for her care of him is pathetically expressed; he admires her with the devotion of a brother for the kindest of sisters; his plain prosaic lines become poetical, or perhaps something better; but there is an absence of the lover's strain which is only not, if not, ostentatious.

The connexion with Stella, whatever its nature, gives the most intelligible explanation of his keeping Vanessa at a distance. A collision between his two slaves might be disastrous. And, as the story goes (for we are everywhere upon uncertain ground), it came. In 1721 poor Vanessa had lost her only sister,[50] and companion: her brothers were already dead, and, in her solitude, she would naturally be more than ever eager for Swift's kindness. At last, in 1723, she wrote (it is said) a letter to Stella, and asked whether she was Swift's wife.[51] Stella replied that she was, and forwarded Vanessa's letter to Swift. How Swift could resent an attempt to force his wishes, has been seen in the letter to Varina. He rode in a fury to Celbridge. His countenance, says Orrery, could be terribly expressive of the sterner pa.s.sions. Prominent eyes--"azure as the heavens" (says Pope)--arched by bushy black eyebrows, could glare, we can believe from his portraits, with the green fury of a cat's. Vanessa had spoken of the "something awful in his looks," and of his killing words. He now entered her room, silent with rage, threw down her letter on the table and rode off. He had struck Vanessa's death-blow. She died soon afterwards, but lived long enough to revoke a will made in favour of Swift, and leave her money between Judge Marshal and the famous Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley, it seems, had only seen her once in his life.

The story of the last fatal interview has been denied. Vanessa's death, though she was under thirty-five, is less surprising when we remember that her younger sister and both her brothers had died before her; and that her health had always been weak, and her life for some time a languis.h.i.+ng death. That there was in any case a terribly tragic climax to the half-written romance of _Cadenus and Vanessa_ is certain. Vanessa requested that the poem and the letters might be published by her executors. Berkeley suppressed the letters for the time; and they were not published in full until Scott's edition of Swift's works.

Whatever the facts, Swift had reasons enough for bitter regret if not for deep remorse. He retired to hide his head in some unknown retreat; absolute seclusion was the only solace to his gloomy, wounded spirit.

After two months he returned to resume his retired habits. A period followed, as we shall see in the next chapter, of fierce political excitement. For a time too he had a vague hope of escaping from his exile.

An astonis.h.i.+ng literary success increased his reputation. But another misfortune approached which crushed all hope of happiness in life.

In 1726 Swift at last revisited England. He writes in July that he has for two months been anxious about Stella's health, and as usual feared the worst. He has seen through the disguises of a letter from Mrs. Dingley.

His heart is so sunk that he will never be the same man again, but drag on a wretched life till it pleases G.o.d to call him away. Then in an agony of distress he contemplates her death; he says that he could not bear to be present; he should be a trouble to her, and the greatest torment to himself. He forces himself to add that her death must not take place at the deanery. He will not return to find her just dead or dying. "Nothing but extremity could make me so familiar with those terrible words applied to so dear a friend." "I think," he says in another letter, "that there is not a greater folly than that of entering into too strict a partners.h.i.+p or friends.h.i.+p with the loss of which a man must be absolutely miserable; but especially [when the loss occurs] at an age when it is too late to engage in a new friends.h.i.+p." The morbid feeling which could withhold a man from attending a friend's deathbed, or allow him to regret the affection to which his pain was due, is but too characteristic of Swift's egoistic attachments. Yet we forgive the rash phrase, when we read his pa.s.sionate expressions of agony. Swift returned to Ireland in the autumn, and Stella struggled through the winter. He was again in England in the following summer; and for a time in better spirits. But once more the news comes that Stella is probably on her deathbed; and he replies in letters which we read as we listen to groans of a man in sorest agony. He keeps one letter for an hour before daring to open it. He does not wish to live to see the loss of the person for whose sake alone life was worth preserving.

"What have I to do in the world? I never was in such agonies as when I received your letter, and had it in my pocket. I am able to hold up my sorry head no longer." In another distracted letter, he repeats in Latin the desire that Stella shall not die in the deanery, for fear of malignant misinterpretations. If any marriage had taken place, the desire to conceal it had become a rooted pa.s.sion.

Swift returned to Ireland to find Stella still living. It is said that in the last period of her life Swift offered to make the marriage public, and that she declined, saying that it was now too late.[52] She lingered till January 28, 1728. He sat down the same night to write a few scattered reminiscences. He breaks down; and writes again during the funeral, which he is too ill to attend. The fragmentary notes give us the most authentic account of Stella, and show, at least, what she appeared in the eyes of her lifelong friend and protector. We may believe that she was intelligent and charming; as we can be certain that Swift loved her in every sense but one. A lock of her hair was preserved in an envelope in which he had written one of those vivid phrases by which he still lives in our memory: "_Only a woman's hair_." What does it mean? Our interpretation will depend partly upon what we can see ourselves in a lock of hair. But I think that any one who judges Swift fairly will read in those four words the most intense utterance of tender affection, and of pathetic yearning for the irrevocable past strangely blended with a bitterness springing not from remorse, but indignation at the cruel tragi-comedy of life. The destinies laugh at us whilst they torture us; they make cruel scourges of trifles, and extract the bitterest pa.s.sion from our best affections.

Swift was left alone. Before we pa.s.s on we must briefly touch the problems of this strange history. It was a natural guess that some mysterious cause condemned Swift to his loneliness. A story is told by Scott (on poor evidence) that Delany went to Archbishop King's library about the time of the supposed marriage. As he entered Swift rushed out with a distracted countenance. King was in tears, and said to Delany, "You have just met the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question." This has been connected with a guess made by somebody that Swift had discovered Stella to be his natural sister. It can be shown conclusively that this is impossible; and the story must be left as picturesque but too hopelessly vague to gratify any inference whatever.

We know without it that Swift was unhappy; but we know nothing of any definite cause.

Another view is that there is no mystery. Swift, it is said, retained through life the position of Stella's "guide, philosopher and friend," and was never anything more. Stella's address to Swift (on his birthday, 1721), may be taken to confirm this theory. It says with a plainness like his own that he had taught her to despise beauty and hold her empire by virtue and sense. Yet the theory is in itself strange. The less love entered into Swift's relations to Stella, the more difficult to explain his behaviour to Vanessa. If he regarded Stella only as a daughter or a younger sister, and she returned the same feeling, he had no reason for making any mystery about the woman who would not in that case be a rival.

If, again, we accept this view, we naturally ask why Swift "never admitted love a guest." He simply continued, it is suggested, to behave as teacher to pupil. He thought of her when she was a woman as he had thought of her when she was a child of eight years old. But it is singular that a man should be able to preserve such a relation. It is quite true that a connexion of this kind may blind a man to its probable consequences; but it is contrary to ordinary experience that it should render the consequences less probable. The relation might explain why Swift should be off his guard; but could hardly act as a safeguard. An ordinary man who was on such terms with a beautiful girl as are revealed in the _Journal to Stella_ would have ended by falling in love with her. Why did not Swift?

We can only reply by remembering the "coldness" of temper to which he refers in his first letter: and his a.s.sertion that he did not understand love, and that his frequent flirtations never meant more than a desire for distraction. The affair with Varina is an exception: but there are grounds for holding that Swift was const.i.tutionally indisposed to the pa.s.sion of love. The absence of any traces of such a pa.s.sion from writings conspicuous for their amazing sincerity, and (it is added) for their freedoms of another kind, has been often noticed as a confirmation of this hypothesis. Yet it must be said that Swift could be strictly reticent about his strongest feelings--and was specially cautious, for whatever reason, in regard to his relation with Stella.[53]

If Swift const.i.tutionally differed from other men, we have some explanation of his strange conduct. But we must take into account other circ.u.mstances. Swift had very obvious motives for not marrying. In the first place, he gradually became almost a monomaniac upon the question of money. His hatred of wasting a penny unnecessarily began at Trinity College, and is prominent in all his letters and journals. It coloured even his politics, for a conviction that the nation was hopelessly ruined is one of his strongest prejudices. He kept accounts down to halfpence, and rejoices at every saving of a s.h.i.+lling. The pa.s.sion was not the vulgar desire for wealth of the ordinary miser. It sprang from the conviction stored up in all his aspirations that money meant independence.

"Wealth," he says, "is liberty; and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher--and Gay is a slave just by two thousand pounds too little."[54] Gay was a d.u.c.h.ess's lapdog: Swift, with all his troubles, at least a free man. Like all Swift's prejudices, this became a fixed idea which was always gathering strength. He did not love money for its own sake. He was even magnificent in his generosity. He scorned to receive money for his writings; he abandoned the profit to his printers in compensation for the risks they ran, or gave it to his friends. His charity was splendid relatively to his means. In later years he lived on a third of his income, gave away a third, and saved the remaining third for his posthumous charity,[55]--and posthumous charity which involves present saving is charity of the most unquestionable kind. His principle was that by reducing his expenditure to the lowest possible point, he secured his independence and could then make a generous use of the remainder. Until he had received his deanery, however, he could only make both ends meet.

Marriage would therefore have meant poverty, probably dependence, and the complete sacrifice of his ambition.

If under these circ.u.mstances Swift had become engaged to Stella upon Temple's death, he would have been doing what was regularly done by fellows of colleges under the old system. There is, however, no trace of such an engagement. It would be in keeping with Swift's character, if we should suppose that he shrank from the bondage of an engagement; that he designed to marry Stella as soon as he should achieve a satisfactory position, and meanwhile trusted to his influence over her, and thought that he was doing her justice by leaving her at liberty to marry if she chose. The close connexion must have been injurious to Stella's prospects of a match; but it continued only by her choice. If this were in fact the case, it is still easy to understand why Swift did not marry upon becoming dean. He felt himself, I have said, to be a broken man. His prospects were ruined, and his health precarious. This last fact requires to be remembered in every estimate of Swift's character. His life was pa.s.sed under a Damocles' sword. He suffered from a distressing illness which he attributed to an indigestion produced by an over-consumption of fruit at Temple's when he was a little over twenty-one. The main symptoms were a giddiness, which frequently attacked him, and was accompanied by deafness.

It is quite recently that the true nature of the complaint has been identified. Dr. Bucknill[56] seems to prove that the symptoms are those of "Labyrinthine vertigo," or Meniere's disease, so called because discovered by Meniere in 1861. The references to his sufferings, brought together by Sir William Wilde in 1849,[57] are frequent in all his writings. It tormented him for days, weeks, and months, gradually becoming more permanent in later years. In 1731 he tells Gay that his giddiness attacks him constantly, though it is less violent than of old; and in 1736 he says that it is continual. From a much earlier period it had alarmed and distressed him. Some pathetic entries are given by Mr. Forster from one of his note-books:--"Dec. 5 (1708).--Horribly sick. 12th.--Much better, thank G.o.d and M.D.'s prayers.... April 2nd (1709).--Small giddy fit and swimming in the head. M.D. and G.o.d help me.... July, 1710.--Terrible fit.

G.o.d knows what may be the event. Better towards the end." The terrible anxiety, always in the background, must count for much in Swift's gloomy despondency. Though he seems always to have spoken of the fruit as the cause, he must have had misgivings as to the nature and result. Dr.

Bucknill tells us that it was not necessarily connected with the disease of the brain, which ultimately came upon him; but he may well have thought that this disorder of the head was prophetic of such an end. It was probably in 1717 that he said to Young of the _Night Thoughts_, "I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top." A man haunted perpetually by such forebodings might well think that marriage was not for him. In _Cadenus and Vanessa_ he insists upon his declining years with an emphasis which seems excessive even from a man of forty-four (in 1713 he was really forty-five) to a girl of twenty. In a singular poem called the _Progress of Marriage_ he treats the supposed case of a divine of fifty-two marrying a lively girl of fas.h.i.+on, and speaks with his usual plainness of the probable consequences of such folly. We cannot doubt that here as elsewhere he is thinking of himself. He was fifty-two when receiving the pa.s.sionate love-letters of Vanessa; and the poem seems to be specially significant.

This is one of those cases in which we feel that even biographers are not omniscient; and I must leave it to my readers to choose their own theory, only suggesting that readers too are fallible. But we may still ask what judgment is to be pa.s.sed upon Swift's conduct. Both Stella and Vanessa suffered from coming within the sphere of Swift's imperious attraction.

Stella enjoyed his friends.h.i.+p through her life at the cost of a partial isolation from ordinary domestic happiness. She might and probably did regard his friends.h.i.+p as a full equivalent for the sacrifice. It is one of the cases in which, if the actors be our contemporaries, we hold that outsiders are incompetent to form a judgment, as none but the princ.i.p.als can really know the facts. Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace Tisdall? If Stella chose, and chose freely, it is hard to say that she was mistaken, or to blame Swift for a fascination which he could not but exercise. The tragedy of Vanessa suggests rather different reflections. Swift's duty was plain. Granting what seems to be probable, that Vanessa's pa.s.sion took him by surprise, and that he thought himself disqualified for marriage by infirmity and weariness of life, he should have made his decision perfectly plain. He should have forbidden any clandestine relations. Furtive caresses--even on paper, understandings to carry on a private correspondence, fond references to old meetings, were obviously calculated to encourage her pa.s.sion. He should not only have p.r.o.nounced it to be hopeless, but made her, at whatever cost, recognize the hopelessness. This is where Swift's strength seems to have failed him. He was not intentionally cruel; he could not foresee the fatal event; he tried to put her aside, and he felt the "shame, disappointment, grief, surprise," of which he speaks on the avowal of her love. He gave her the most judicious advice, and tried to persuade her to accept it. But he did not make it effectual. He shrank from inflicting pain upon her and upon himself. He could not deprive himself of the sympathy which soothed his gloomy melancholy. His affection was never free from the egoistic element which prevented him from acting unequivocally as an impartial spectator would have advised him to act, or as he would have advised another to act in a similar case. And therefore when the crisis came the very strength of his affection produced an explosion of selfish wrath; and he escaped from the intolerable position by striking down the woman whom he loved, and whose love for him had become a burden. The wrath was not the less fatal because it was half composed of remorse, and the energy of the explosion proportioned to the strength of the feeling which had held it in check.

CHAPTER VII.

WOOD'S HALFPENCE.

In one of Scott's finest novels, the old Cameronian preacher, who had been left for dead by Claverhouse's troopers, suddenly rises to confront his conquerors, and spends his last breath in denouncing the oppressors of the saints. Even such an apparition was Jonathan Swift to comfortable Whigs who were flouris.h.i.+ng in the place of Harley and St. John, when, after ten years' quiescence, he suddenly stepped into the political arena. After the first crus.h.i.+ng fall he had abandoned partial hope, and contented himself with establis.h.i.+ng supremacy in his chapter. But undying wrath smouldered in his breast till time came for an outburst.

No man had ever learnt more thoroughly the lesson, "put not your faith in princes;" or had been impressed with a lower estimate of the wisdom displayed by the rulers of the world. He had been behind the scenes, and knew that the wisdom of great ministers meant just enough cunning to court the ruin which a little common sense would have avoided. Corruption was at the prow and folly at the helm. The selfish ring which he had denounced so fiercely had triumphed. It had triumphed, as he held, by flattering the new dynasty, hoodwinking the nation, and maligning its antagonists. The cynical theory of politics was not for him, as for some comfortable cynics, an abstract proposition, which mattered very little to a sensible man; but was embodied in the bitter wrath with which he regarded his triumphant adversaries. Pessimism is perfectly compatible with bland enjoyment of the good things in a bad world; but Swift's pessimism was not of this type. It meant energetic hatred of definite things and people who were always before him.

With this feeling, he had come to Ireland; and Ireland--I am speaking of a century and a half ago--was the opprobrium of English statesmans.h.i.+p. There Swift had (or thought he had) always before him a concrete example of the basest form of tyranny. By Ireland, I have said, Swift meant, in the first place, the English in Ireland. In the last years of his sanity he protested indignantly against the confusion between the "savage old Irish," and the English gentry who, he said, were much better bred, spoke better English, and were more civilized than the inhabitants of many English counties.[58] He retained to the end of his life his antipathy to the Scotch colonists. He opposed their demand for political equality as fiercely in the last as in his first political utterances. He contrasted them unfavourably[59] with the Catholics, who had indeed been driven to revolt by ma.s.sacre and confiscation under Puritan rule, but who were now, he declared, "true Whigs, in the best and most proper sense of the word,"

and thoroughly loyal to the house of Hanover. Had there been a danger of a Catholic revolt, Swift's feelings might have been different; but he always held, that they were "as inconsiderable as the women and children," mere "hewers of wood and drawers of water," "out of all capacity of doing any mischief, if they were ever so well inclined."[60] Looking at them in this way, he felt a sincere compa.s.sion for their misery and a bitter resentment against their oppressors. The English, he said, in a remarkable letter,[61] should be ashamed of their reproaches of Irish dulness, ignorance and cowardice. Those defects were the products of slavery. He declared that the poor cottagers had "a much better natural taste for good sense, humour and raillery, than ever I observed among people of the like sort in England. But the millions of oppressions they lie under, the tyranny of their landlords, the ridiculous zeal of their priests, and the misery of the whole nation have been enough to damp the best spirits under the sun." Such a view is now commonplace enough. It was then a heresy to English statesmen, who thought that n.o.body but a Papist or a Jacobite could object to the tyranny of Whigs.

Swift's diagnosis of the chronic Irish disease was thoroughly political.

He considered that Irish misery sprang from the subjection to a government not intentionally cruel, but absolutely selfish; to which the Irish revenue meant so much convenient political plunder, and which acted on the principle quoted from Cowley, that the happiness of Ireland should not weigh against the "least conveniency" of England. He summed up his views in a remarkable letter,[62] to be presently mentioned, the substance of which had been orally communicated to Walpole. He said to Walpole, as he said in every published utterance:--first, that the colonists were still Englishmen and ent.i.tled to English rights; secondly, that their trade was deliberately crushed, purely for the benefit of the English of England; thirdly, that all valuable preferments were bestowed upon men born in England, as a matter of course; and finally, that in consequence of this, the upper cla.s.ses, deprived of all other openings, were forced to rack-rent their tenants to such a degree that not one farmer in the kingdom out of a hundred "could afford shoes or stockings to his children, or to eat flesh or drink anything better than sour milk and water twice in a year: so that the whole country, except the Scotch plantation in the north, is a scene of misery and desolation hardly to be matched on this side Lapland." A modern reformer would give the first and chief place to this social misery. It is characteristic that Swift comes to it as a consequence from the injustice to his own cla.s.s:--as, again, that he appeals to Walpole not on the simple ground that the people are wretched, but on the ground that they will be soon unable to pay the tribute to England, which he reckons at a million a year. But his conclusion might be accepted by any Irish patriot. Whatever, he says, can make a country poor and despicable, concurs in the case of Ireland. The nation is controlled by laws to which it does not consent; disowned by its brethren and countrymen; refused the liberty of trading even in its natural commodities; forced to seek for justice many hundred miles by sea and land; rendered in a manner incapable of serving the king and country in any place of honour, trust, or profit; whilst the governors have no sympathy with the governed, except what may occasionally arise from the sense of justice and philanthropy.

I am not to ask how far Swift was right in his judgments. Every line which he wrote shows that he was thoroughly sincere and profoundly stirred by his convictions. A remarkable pamphlet, published in 1720, contained his first utterance upon the subject. It is an exhortation to the Irish to use only Irish manufactures. He applies to Ireland the fable of _Arachne and Pallas_. The G.o.ddess, indignant at being equalled in spinning, turned her rival into a spider, to spin for ever out of her own bowels in a narrow compa.s.s. He always, he says, pitied poor Arachne for so cruel and unjust a sentence, "which, however, is fully executed upon us by England with further additions of rigour and severity; for the greatest part of our bowels and vitals is extracted, without allowing us the liberty of spinning and weaving them." Swift of course accepts the economic fallacy equally taken for granted by his opponents, and fails to see that England and Ireland injured themselves as well as each other by refusing to interchange their productions. But he utters forcibly his righteous indignation against the contemptuous injustice of the English rulers, in consequence of which the "miserable people" are being reduced "to a worse condition than the peasants in France, or the va.s.sals in Germany and Poland." Slaves, he says, have a natural disposition to be tyrants; and he himself, when his betters give him a kick, is apt to revenge it with six upon his footman. That is how the landlords treat their tenantry.

The printer of this pamphlet was prosecuted. The chief justice (Whitshed) sent back the jury nine times and kept them eleven hours before they would consent to bring in a "special verdict." The unpopularity of the prosecution became so great that it was at last dropped. Four years afterwards a more violent agitation broke out. A patent had been given to a certain William Wood for supplying Ireland with a copper coinage. Many complaints had been made, and in September, 1723, addresses were voted by the Irish Houses of Parliament, declaring that the patent had been obtained by clandestine and false representations: that it was mischievous to the country: and that Wood had been guilty of frauds in his coinage.

They were pacified by vague promises; but Walpole went on with the scheme on the strength of a favourable report of a committee of the Privy Council; and the excitement was already serious when (in 1724) Swift published the _Drapier's Letters_, which give him his chief t.i.tle to eminence as a patriotic agitator.

Swift either shared or took advantage of the general belief that the mysteries of the currency are unfathomable to the human intelligence. They have to do with that world of financial magic in which wealth may be made out of paper, and all ordinary relations of cause and effect are suspended. There is, however, no real mystery about the halfpence. The small coins which do not form part of the legal tender may be considered primarily as counters. A penny is a penny, so long as twelve are change for a s.h.i.+lling. It is not in the least necessary for this purpose that the copper contained in the twelve penny pieces should be worth or nearly worth a s.h.i.+lling. A sovereign can never be worth much more than the gold of which it is made. But at the present day bronze worth only twopence is coined into twelve penny pieces.[63] The coined bronze is worth six times as much as the uncoined. The small coins must have some intrinsic value to deter forgery, and must be made of good materials to stand wear and tear.

If these conditions be observed, and a proper number be issued, the value of the penny will be no more affected by the value of the copper than the value of the banknote by that of the paper on which it is written. This opinion a.s.sumes that the copper coins cannot be offered or demanded in payment of any but trifling debts. The halfpence coined by Wood seem to have fulfilled these conditions, and as copper worth twopence (on the lowest computation) was coined into ten halfpence, worth fivepence, their intrinsic value was more than double that of modern halfpence.

The halfpence, then, were not objectionable upon this ground. Nay, it would have been wasteful to make them more valuable. It would have been as foolish to use more copper for the pence as to make the works of a watch of gold if bra.s.s is equally durable and convenient. But another consequence is equally clear. The effect of Wood's patent was that a ma.s.s of copper worth about 60,000_l._,[64] became worth 100,800_l._ in the shape of halfpenny pieces. There was therefore a balance of about 40,000_l._ to pay for the expenses of coinage. It would have been waste to get rid of this by putting more copper in the coins; but if so large a profit arose from the transaction, it would go to somebody. At the present day it would be brought into the national treasury. This was not the way in which business was done in Ireland. Wood was to pay 1000_l._ a year for fourteen years to the Crown.[65] But 14,000_l._ still leaves a large margin for profit. What was to become of it? According to the admiring biographer of Sir R. Walpole, the patent had been originally given by Lord Sunderland to the d.u.c.h.ess of Kendal, a lady whom the king delighted to honour. She already received 3000_l._ a year in pensions upon the Irish establishment, and she sold this patent to Wood for 10,000_l._ Enough was still left to give Wood a handsome profit; as in transactions of this kind, every accomplice in a dirty business expects to be well paid. So handsome, indeed, was the profit that Wood received ultimately a pension of 3000_l._ for eight years, 24,000_l._, that is, in consideration of abandoning the patent. It was right and proper that a profit should be made on the transaction, but shameful that it should be divided between the king's mistress and William Wood, and that the bargain should be struck without consulting the Irish representatives, and maintained in spite of their protests. The d.u.c.h.ess of Kendal was to be allowed to take a share of the wretched halfpence in the pocket of every Irish beggar. A more disgraceful transaction could hardly be imagined, or one more calculated to justify Swift's view of the selfishness and corruption of the English rulers.

Swift saw his chance, and went to work in characteristic fas.h.i.+on, with unscrupulous audacity of statement, guided by the keenest strategical instinct. He struck at the heart as vigorously as he had done in the _Examiner_, but with resentment sharpened by ten years of exile. It was not safe to speak of the d.u.c.h.ess of Kendal's share in the transaction, though the story, as poor Archdeacon c.o.xe pathetically declares, was industriously propagated. But the case against Wood was all the stronger.

Is he so wicked, asks Swift, as to suppose that a nation is to be ruined that he may gain three or fourscore thousand pounds? Hampden went to prison, he says, rather than pay a few s.h.i.+llings wrongfully; I, says Swift, would rather be hanged than have all my "property taxed at seventeen s.h.i.+llings in the pound at the arbitrary will and pleasure of the venerable Mr. Wood." A simple const.i.tutional precedent might rouse a Hampden; but to stir a popular agitation, it is as well to show that the evil actually inflicted is gigantic, independently of possible results. It requires, indeed, some audacity to prove that debas.e.m.e.nt of the copper currency can amount to a tax of seventeen s.h.i.+llings in the pound on all property. Here, however, Swift might simply throw the reins upon the neck of his fancy. Anybody may make any inferences he pleases in the mysterious regions of currency; and no inferences, it seems, were too audacious for his hearers, though we are left to doubt how far Swift's wrath had generated delusions in his own mind, and how far he perceived that other minds were ready to be deluded. He revels in prophesying the most extravagant consequences. The country will be undone; the tenants will not be able to pay their rents; "the farmers must rob, or beg, or leave the country; the shopkeepers in this and every other town must break or starve; the squire will h.o.a.rd up all his good money to send to England and keep some poor tailor or weaver in his house, who will be glad to get bread at any rate."[66] Concrete facts are given to help the imagination.

Squire Conolly must have 250 horses to bring his half-yearly rents to town; and the poor man will have to pay thirty-six of Wood's halfpence to get a quart of twopenny ale.

How is this proved? One argument is a sufficient specimen. n.o.body, according to the patent, was to be forced to take Wood's halfpence; nor could any one be obliged to receive more than fivepence halfpenny in any one payment. This, of course, meant that the halfpence could only be used as change, and a man must pay his debts in silver or gold whenever it was possible to use a sixpence. It upsets Swift's statement about Squire Connolly's rents. But Swift is equal to the emergency. The rule means, he says, that every man must take fivepence halfpenny in every payment, _if it be offered_; which, on the next page, becomes simply in every payment; therefore making an easy a.s.sumption or two, he reckons that you will receive 160_l._ a year in these halfpence; and therefore (by other a.s.sumptions) lose 140_l._ a year.[67] It might have occurred to Swift, one would think, that both parties to the transaction could not possibly be losers. But he calmly a.s.sumes that the man who pays will lose in proportion to the increased number of coins; and the man who receives, in proportion to the depreciated value of each coin. He does not see, or think it worth notice, that the two losses obviously counterbalance each other; and he has an easy road to prophesying absolute ruin for everybody.

It would be almost as great a compliment to call this sophistry, as to dignify with the name of satire a round a.s.sertion that an honest man is a cheat or a rogue.

The real grievance, however, shows through the sham argument. "It is no loss of honour," thought Swift, "to submit to the lion; but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat?" Why should Wood have this profit (even if more reasonably estimated) in defiance of the wishes of the nation? It is, says Swift, because he is an Englishman and has great friends. He proposes to meet the attempt by a general agreement not to take the halfpence. Briefly, the halfpence were to be "Boycotted."

Before this second letter was written the English ministers had become alarmed. A Report of the Privy Council (July 24, 1724) defended the patent, but ended by recommending that the amount to be coined should be reduced to 40,000_l._ Carteret was sent out as Lord Lieutenant to get this compromise accepted. Swift replied by a third letter, arguing the question of the patent, which he can "never suppose," or in other words, which everybody knew, to have been granted as a "job for the interest of some particular person." He vigorously a.s.serts that the patent can never make it obligatory to accept the halfpence, and tells a story much to the purpose from old Leicester experience. The justices had reduced the price of ale to three-halfpence a quart. One of them therefore requested that they would make another order to appoint who should drink it, "for by G.o.d," said he, "I will not."

The argument thus naturally led to a further and more important question.

The discussion as to the patent brought forward the question of right.

Wood and his friends, according to Swift, had begun to declare that the resistance meant Jacobitism and rebellion; they a.s.serted that the Irish were ready to shake off their dependence upon the crown of England. Swift took up the challenge and answered resolutely and eloquently. He took up the broadest ground. Ireland, he declared, depended upon England in no other sense than that in which England depended upon Ireland. Whoever thinks otherwise, he said, "I, M. B. despair, desire to be excepted; for I declare, next under G.o.d, I depend only on the king my sovereign, and the laws of my own country. I am so far," he added, "from depending upon the people of England, that if they should rebel, I would take arms and lose every drop of my blood, to hinder the Pretender from being king of Ireland."

It had been reported that somebody (Walpole presumably) had sworn to thrust the halfpence down the throats of the Irish. The remedy, replied Swift, is totally in your own hands, "and therefore I have digressed a little ... to let you see that by the laws of G.o.d, of Nature, of Nations, and of your own country, you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England." As Swift had already said in the third letter, no one could believe that any English patent would stand half an hour after an address from the English houses of Parliament such as that which had been pa.s.sed against Wood's by the Irish Parliament. Whatever const.i.tutional doubts might be raised, it was therefore come to be the plain question whether or not the English ministers should simply override the wishes of the Irish nation.