Complete Works of Samuel Johnson

by Samuel Johnson

  “If christianity were once abolished, how could the freethinkers, the strong reasoners, and the men of profound learning, be able to find another subject so calculated, in all points, whereon to display their abilities? What wonderful productions of wit should we be deprived of from those, whose genius, by continual practice, hath been wholly turned upon raillery and invectives against religion, and would, therefore, never be able to shine, or distinguish themselves, upon any other subject! We are daily complaining of the great decline of wit among us, and would take away the greatest, perhaps the only, topick we have left. Who would ever have suspected Asgill for a wit, or Toland for a philosopher, if the inexhaustible stock of christianity had not been at hand to provide them with materials? What other subject, through all art or nature, could have produced Tindal for a profound author, or furnished him with readers? It is the wise choice of the subject that alone adorns and distinguishes the writer. For, had an hundred such pens as these been employed on the side of religion, they would have immediately sunk into silence and oblivion.”

  The reasonableness of a test is not hard to be proved; but, perhaps, it must be allowed, that the proper test has not been chosen.

  The attention paid to the papers published under the name of Bickerstaff, induced Steele, when he projected the Tatler, to assume an appellation which had already gained possession of the reader’s notice.

  In the year following he wrote a Project for the Advancement of Religion, addressed to lady Berkeley; by whose kindness it is not unlikely that he was advanced to his benefices. To this project, which is formed with great purity of intention, and displayed with sprightliness and elegance, it can only be objected, that, like many projects, it is, if not generally impracticable, yet evidently hopeless, as it supposes more zeal, concord, and perseverance, than a view of mankind gives reason for expecting.

  He wrote, likewise, this year, a Vindication of Bickerstaff; and an explanation of an ancient Prophecy; part written after the facts, and the rest never completed, but well planned to excite amazement.

  Soon after began the busy and important part of Swift’s life. He was employed, 1710, by the primate of Ireland, to solicit the queen for a remission of the first fruits and twentieth parts to the Irish clergy. With this purpose he had recourse to Mr. Harley, to whom he was mentioned as a man neglected and oppressed by the last ministry, because he had refused to coöperate with some of their schemes. What he had refused has never been told; what he had suffered was, I suppose, the exclusion from a bishoprick by the remonstrances of Sharpe, whom he describes as “the harmless tool of others’ hate,” and whom he represents as afterwards “suing for pardon.”

  Harley’s designs and situation were such as made him glad of an auxiliary so well qualified for his service; he, therefore, soon admitted him to familiarity, whether ever to confidence, some have made a doubt; but it would have been difficult to excite his zeal, without persuading him that he was trusted, and not very easy to delude him by false persuasions.

  He was certainly admitted to those meetings in which the first hints and original plan of action are supposed to have been formed; and was one of the sixteen ministers, or agents of the ministry, who met weekly at each other’s houses, and were united by the name of brother.

  Being not immediately considered as an obdurate tory, he conversed indiscriminately with all the wits, and was yet the friend of Steele; who, in the Tatler, which began in April, 1709, confesses the advantages of his conversation, and mentions something contributed by him to his paper. But he was now immerging into political controversy; for the year 1710 produced the Examiner, of which Swift wrote thirty-three papers. In argument he may be allowed to have the advantage; for where a wide system of conduct, and the whole of a publick character, is laid open to inquiry, the accuser having the choice of facts, must be very unskilful if he does not prevail; but, with regard to wit, I am afraid none of Swift’s papers will be found equal to those by which Addison opposed him.

  He wrote, in the year 1711, a Letter to the October Club, a number of tory gentlemen sent from the country to parliament, who formed themselves into a club, to the number of about a hundred, and met to animate the zeal and raise the expectations of each other. They thought, with great reason, that the ministers were losing opportunities; that sufficient use was not made of the ardour of the nation; they called loudly for more changes, and stronger efforts; and demanded the punishment of part, and the dismission of the rest, of those whom they considered as publick robbers.

  Their eagerness was not gratified by the queen, or by Harley. The queen was probably slow because she was afraid; and Harley was slow because he was doubtful: he was a tory only by necessity, or for convenience; and, when he had power in his hands, had no settled purpose for which he should employ it; forced to gratify, to a certain degree, the tories who supported him, but unwilling to make his reconcilement to the whigs utterly desperate, he corresponded at once with the two expectants of the crown, and kept, as has been observed, the succession undetermined. Not knowing what to do, he did nothing; and, with the fate of a double-dealer, at last he lost his power, but kept his enemies.

  Swift seems to have concurred in opinion with the October Club; but it was not in his power to quicken the tardiness of Harley, whom he stimulated as much as he could, but with little effect. He that knows not whither to go, is in no haste to move. Harley, who was perhaps not quick by nature, became yet more slow by irresolution; and was content to hear that dilatoriness lamented as natural, which he applauded in himself as politick.

  Without the tories, however, nothing could be done; and, as they were not to be gratified, they must be appeased; and the conduct of the minister, if it could not be vindicated, was to be plausibly excused.

  Early in the next year he published a Proposal for correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English Tongue, in a letter to the earl of Oxford; written without much knowledge of the general nature of language, and without any accurate inquiry into the history of other tongues. The certainty and stability which, contrary to all experience, he thinks attainable, he proposes to secure by instituting an academy; the decrees of which every man would have been willing, and many would have been proud to disobey, and which, being renewed by successive elections, would, in a short time, have differed from itself.

  Swift now attained the zenith of his political importance: he published, 1712, the Conduct of the Allies, ten days before the parliament assembled. The purpose was to persuade the nation to a peace; and never had any writer more success. The people, who had been amused with bonfires and triumphal processions, and looked with idolatry on the general and his friends, who, as they thought, had made England the arbitress of nations, were confounded between shame and rage, when they found that “mines had been exhausted, and millions destroyed,” to secure the Dutch, or aggrandize the emperour, without any advantage to ourselves; that we had been bribing our neighbours to fight their own quarrel; and that amongst our enemies, we might number our allies.

  That is now no longer doubted, of which the nation was then first informed, that the war was unnecessarily protracted to fill the pockets of Marlborough; and that it would have been continued without end, if he could have continued his annual plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not yet know what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which would have appointed him general for life, had it not become ineffectual by the resolution of lord Cowper, who refused the seal.

  “Whatever is received,” say the schools, “is received in proportion to the recipient.” The power of a political treatise depends much upon the disposition of the people; the nation was then combustible, and a spark set it on fire. It is boasted, that between November and January eleven thousand were sold; a great number at that time, when we were not yet a nation of readers. To its propagation certainly no agency of power or influence was wanting. It furnished arguments for conversation, speeches for debate, and materials for parliamentary resolutions.

  Yet, sur
ely, whoever surveys this wonder-working pamphlet with cool perusal, will confess that its efficacy was supplied by the passions of its readers; that it operates by the mere weight of facts, with very little assistance from the hand that produced them.

  This year, 1712, he published his Reflections on the Barrier Treaty, which carries on the design of his Conduct of the Allies, and shows how little regard in that negotiation had been shown to the interest of England, and how much of the conquered country had been demanded by the Dutch.

  This was followed by Remarks on the Bishop of Sarum’s Introduction to his third volume of the History of the Reformation; a pamphlet which Burnet published as an alarm, to warn the nation of the approach of popery. Swift, who seems to have disliked the bishop with something more than political aversion, treats him like one whom he is glad of an opportunity to insult.

  Swift, being now the declared favourite and supposed confidant of the tory ministry, was treated by all that depended on the court with the respect which dependants know how to pay. He soon began to feel part of the misery of greatness; he that could say he knew him, considered himself as having fortune in his power. Commissions, solicitations, remonstrances crowded about him; he was expected to do every man’s business, to procure employment for one, and to retain it for another. In assisting those who addressed him, he represents himself as sufficiently diligent; and desires to have others believe, what he probably believed himself, that by his interposition many whigs of merit, and among them Addison and Congreve, were continued in their places. But every man of known influence has so many petitions which he cannot grant, that he must necessarily offend more than he gratifies, because the preference given to one affords all the rest a reason for complaint. “When I give away a place,” said Lewis the fourteenth, “I make a hundred discontented, and one ungrateful.”

  Much has been said of the equality and independence which he preserved in his conversation with the ministers, of the frankness of his remonstrances, and the familiarity of his friendship. In accounts of this kind a few single incidents are set against the general tenour of behaviour. No man, however, can pay a more servile tribute to the great, than by suffering his liberty in their presence to aggrandize him in his own esteem. Between different ranks of the community there is necessarily some distance; he who is called by his superiour to pass the interval, may properly accept the invitation; but petulance and obtrusion are rarely produced by magnanimity; nor have often any nobler cause than the pride of importance, and the malice of inferiority. He who knows himself necessary may set, while that necessity lasts, a high value upon himself; as, in a lower condition, a servant eminently skilful may be saucy; but he is saucy only because he is servile. Swift appears to have preserved the kindness of the great when they wanted him no longer; and, therefore, it must be allowed, that the childish freedom, to which he seems enough inclined, was overpowered by his better qualities.

  His disinterestedness has been likewise mentioned; a strain of heroism, which would have been in his condition romantick and superfluous. Ecclesiastical benefices, when they become vacant, must be given away; and the friends of power may, if there be no inherent disqualification, easonably expect them. Swift accepted, 1713, the deanery of St. Patrick, the best preferment that his friends could venture to give him. That ministry was, in a great degree, supported by the clergy, who were not yet reconciled to the author of the Tale of a Tub, and would not, without much discontent and indignation, have borne to see him installed in an English cathedral.

  He refused, indeed, fifty pounds from lord Oxford; but he accepted, afterwards, a draught of a thousand upon the exchequer, which was intercepted by the queen’s death, and which he resigned, as he says himself, “multa gemens,” with many a groan.

  In the midst of his power and his politicks, he kept a journal of his visits, his walks, his interviews with ministers, and quarrels with his servant, and transmitted it to Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Dingley, to whom he knew that whatever befell him was interesting, and no accounts could be too minute. Whether these diurnal trifles were properly exposed to eyes which had never received any pleasure from the presence of the dean, may be reasonably doubted: they have, however, some odd attraction; the reader finding frequent mention of names which he has been used to consider as important, goes on in hope of information; and, as there is nothing to fatigue attention, if he is disappointed he can hardly complain. It is easy to perceive, from every page, that though ambition pressed Swift into a life of bustle, the wish for a life of ease was always returning.

  He went to take possession of his deanery as soon as he had obtained it; but he was not suffered to stay in Ireland more than a fortnight, before he was recalled to England, that he might reconcile lord Oxford and lord Bolingbroke, who began to look on one another with malevolence, which every day increased, and which Bolingbroke appeared to retain in his last years.

  Swift contrived an interview, from which they both departed discontented: he procured a second, which only convinced him that the feud was irreconcilable: he told them his opinion, that all was lost. This denunciation was contradicted by Oxford; but Bolingbroke whispered that he was right.

  Before this violent dissension had shattered the ministry, Swift had published, in the beginning of the year 1714, the publick Spirit of the Whigs, in answer to the Crisis, a pamphlet for which Steele was expelled from the house of commons. Swift was now so far alienated from Steele, as to think him no longer entitled to decency, and, therefore, treats him sometimes with contempt, and sometimes with abhorrence.

  In this pamphlet the Scotch were mentioned in terms so provoking to that irritable nation, that resolving “not to be offended with impunity,” the Scotch lords, in a body, demanded an audience of the queen, and solicited reparation. A proclamation was issued, in which three hundred pounds were offered for the discovery of the author. From this storm he was, as he relates, “secured by a sleight;” of what kind, or by whose prudence, is not known; and such was the increase of his reputation, that the Scottish “nation applied again that he would be their friend.”

  He was become so formidable to the whigs, that his familiarity with the ministers was clamoured at in parliament, particularly by two men, afterwards of great note, Aislabie and Walpole.

  But, by the disunion of his great friends, his importance and designs were now at an end; and seeing his services at last useless, he retired, about June, 1714, into Berkshire, where, in the house of a friend, he wrote what was then suppressed, but has since appeared under the title of Free Thoughts on the present State of Affairs.

  While he was waiting in this retirement for events which time or chance might bring to pass, the death of the queen broke down at once the whole system of tory politicks; and nothing remained but to withdraw from the implacability of triumphant whiggism, and shelter himself in unenvied obscurity.

  The accounts of his reception in Ireland, given by lord Orrery and Dr. Delany, are so different, that the credit of the writers, both undoubtedly veracious, cannot be saved, but by supposing, what I think is true, that they speak of different times. When Delany says, that he was received with respect, he means for the first fortnight, when he came to take legal possession; and when lord Orrery tells that he was pelted by the populace, he is to be understood of the time when, after the queen’s death, he became a settled resident.

  The archbishop of Dublin gave him at first some disturbance in the exercise of his jurisdiction; but it was soon discovered, that between prudence and integrity he was seldom in the wrong; and that, when he was right, his spirit did not easily yield to opposition.

  Having so lately quitted the tumults of a party, and the intrigues of a court, they still kept his thoughts in agitation, as the sea fluctuates awhile when the storm has ceased. He, therefore, filled his hours with some historical attempts, relating to the change of the ministers, and the conduct of the ministry. He, likewise, is said to have written a history of the four last years of queen Anne, which he began in her lifetim
e, and afterwards laboured with great attention, but never published. It was after his death in the hands of lord Orrery and Dr. King. A book under that title was published with Swift’s name, by Dr. Lucas; of which I can only say, that it seemed by no means to correspond with the notions that I had formed of it, from a conversation which I once heard between the earl of Orrery and old Mr. Lewis.

  Swift now, much against his will, commenced Irishman for life, and was to contrive how he might be best accommodated in a country where he considered himself as in a state of exile. It seems that his first recourse was to piety. The thoughts of death rushed upon him, at this time, with such incessant importunity, that they took possession of his mind, when he first waked, for many years together.

  He opened his house by a publick table two days a week, and found his entertainments gradually frequented by more and more visitants of learning among the men, and of elegance among the women. Mrs. Johnson had left the country, and lived in lodgings not far from the deanery. On his publick days she regulated the table, but appeared at it as a mere guest, like other ladies.

  On other days he often dined, at a stated price, with Mr. Worral, a clergyman of his cathedral, whose house was recommended by the peculiar neatness and pleasantry of his wife. To this frugal mode of living, he was first disposed by care to pay some debts which he had contracted, and he continued it for the pleasure of accumulating money. His avarice, however, was not suffered to obstruct the claims of his dignity; he was served in plate, and used to say, that he was the poorest gentleman in Ireland that ate upon plate, and the richest that lived without a coach.

  How he spent the rest of his time, and how he employed his hours of study, has been inquired with hopeless curiosity. For who can give an account of another’s studies? Swift was not likely to admit any to his privacies, or to impart a minute account of his business or his leisure.