by Leo Damrosch
To outsiders it probably did appear that Swift had a great deal of influence, and no doubt he liked them to think so. An unsympathetic clergyman named White Kennett preached a sermon before the queen “against Popery and profaneness,” and was gratified to notice that when he denounced “the prevailing foolishness of wit and humour so called,” everyone looked at Swift. The hint referred to the Tale of a Tub. At a coffeehouse the next day, Kennett saw Swift receive respectful bows “from everybody but me, who I confess could not but despise him.” According to Kennett, Swift put on something of a performance in the queen’s antechamber, making sure he was being overheard as he went from one gentleman to another:
Then he stopped Francis Gwynne, Esq., going in with his red bag to the Queen [the bag indicated a distinguished queen’s counsel], and told him aloud that he had somewhat to say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He talked with the son of Dr. Davenant to be sent abroad, and took out his pocketbook and wrote down several things, as memoranda, to do for him. He turned to the fire and took his gold watch, and telling the time of the day, complained it was very late. A gentleman said “he was too fast.” “How can I help it,” says the doctor, “if the courtiers give me a watch that won’t go right?” Then he instructed a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe, “for,” says he, “the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.” My Lord Treasurer (after leaving the Queen) went through the room, and beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him, they both went off just before prayers.
From Kennett’s perspective, not only was Swift guilty of wit and humor, he was officious and self-important as well, parading his access to Lord Oxford and not even bothering to stay for prayers. But Ehrenpreis plausibly suggests a different angle: Swift knew that Kennett was hostile and “was deliberately overplaying the part of an insider.”40
In a poem written after his London years were over, Swift had no illusions about the reality of his role.
Now Finch alarms the Lords: he hears for certain
This dangerous priest is got behind the curtain;
Finch, famed for tedious elocution, proves
That Swift oils many a spring which Harley moves. . . .
Now Delaware again familiar grows,
And in Swift’s ear thrusts half his powdered nose.41
In another poem, Swift confessed that his conversations with the great man were all too mundane:
Since Harley bid me first attend
And chose me for an humble friend,
Would take me in his coach to chat,
And question me of this and that,
As “What’s o’clock?” and “How’s the wind?
Whose chariot’s that we left behind?” . . .
Where all that passes inter nos
Might be proclaimed at Charing Cross.42
When Swift’s friend Patrick Delany began to believe that a lord lieutenant was going to reward him in some way, Swift warned that people in power might enjoy the company of wits and scholars, but they reward only political favors.
Suppose my Lord and you alone;
Hint the least interest of your own—
His visage drops, he knits his brow,
He cannot talk of business now.43
Oxford once tried to pay Swift ₤50 for a pamphlet, and he turned down the money with indignation. He wanted it understood that he was expressing his own convictions freely, not serving as a paid drudge like Daniel Defoe. If he accepted no pay, they couldn’t dictate what he wrote, and he could go back to Laracor at any time—as Sheridan said, “return to his willows at a day’s notice, on any ill treatment, without the least reluctance.”44
What Swift did want, as always, was a cushy appointment in the Church. That was still not forthcoming. The ministers, he told Stella, “call me nothing but Jonathan; and I said I believed they would leave me Jonathan as they found me; and that I never knew a ministry do anything for those whom they make companions of their pleasures.” From their point of view, there was nothing wrong with that. Appointments in both church and state were bargaining chips in the world of power. They were useful to confer obligations or to block rivals, and Swift’s colleagues had no reason to waste a bargaining chip on him. Besides, they needed his pen to defend their policies. Why would they give him an appointment that would mean losing him?45
Such power as Swift did exercise took the form of giving boosts to deserving people when he could. The boosting was even institutionalized in a club, known simply as the Club. “The end of our Club,” he told Stella, “is to advance conversation and friendship, and to reward deserving persons with our interest and recommendation. We take in none but men of wit or men of interest [that is, people in power], and if we go on as we begin, no other club in this town will be worth talking of.” In the beginning there were a dozen members, and eventually nearly twice as many, half of whom were peers.46 They may all have been men of wit, but the reason they were there was that they were players on the political scene; the only writers were Swift, Matthew Prior, and John Arbuthnot. Although Prior was a poet, he was best known as a diplomat, and Arbuthnot published only occasionally. The Club valued him because he was the queen’s physician, and an excellent source of information about her moods and intentions.
Swift liked to think of himself as disinterested, and he often put in a good word for writers on the other side of the political fence. “It was in those times,” he said later, “a usual subject of raillery towards me among the ministers that I never came to them without a Whig in my sleeve.” He recalled that he had been “officious to do good offices to many of that party, which was then out of power.”47
It was not always possible to help writers if they refused to help themselves. Swift grew friendly at this time with an Irish clergyman, Thomas Parnell. He was a poet of some elegance, and a poem of his called A Night-Piece on Death remained popular for a long time, though as Johnson noted, “The general character of Parnell is not great extent of comprehension or fertility of mind.” Unfortunately, Parnell was an alcoholic. Oxford had no prejudices in that direction, but there were limits to what he was prepared to tolerate. Johnson heard that Parnell “could not get through a sermon without turning his head, even in the pulpit, to drink a dram,” and Swift related to Delany an example of Oxford’s dry wit: “Parnell was miserably addicted to drinking. He could not refrain even in the morning that Swift introduced him to Lord Oxford. My Lord pressed through the crowd to get to Parnell, but he soon perceived his situation. He in a little said to Swift, ‘Your friend, I fear, is not very well.’ Swift answered, ‘He is troubled with a great shaking.’ ‘I am sorry,’ said the Earl, ‘that he should have such a distemper, but especially that it should attack him in the morning.’”48
There were times when Swift would also use his influence to secure justice for someone at the bottom of society. Bolingbroke’s undersecretary was urging him to pardon a rapist “upon the old notion that a woman cannot be ravished”—in other words, that she must have gone along with it instead of resisting. “’Tis true,” Swift told Stella, “the fellow had lain with her a hundred times before, but what care I for that? What! must a woman be ravished because she is a whore?” At that time an accusation of rape was almost never believed in court if the victim had a reputation for promiscuity.49
POLITICAL PRINCIPLES AND POLEMICAL COMBAT
What the Tories wanted the Examiner to do was to articulate their fundamental ideology. In the Tory political creed, the nation rested on twin supports, the land and the Church. Landowners had the nation’s interest at heart because it coincided with their own. And the established Church was the binding principle of shared community.
“Law in a free country,” Swift wrote, “is, or ought to be, the determination of the majority of those who have property in land.” That position was normal all over Europe. “Rule by a tiny group of privileged landowner
s,” a historian says, “was the basis of the social structure right across the continent, and the assumption that landed property translated into political power was universal.” Whigs differed from Tories only in wanting merchants and financiers to have a share in the spoils; there was no notion of extending the franchise to humble citizens. And in practice the merchants and financiers weren’t really distinct from the landowners, since they constantly intermarried with them and acquired estates of their own.50
As for the Church, it is crucial to grasp that whatever Swift’s private beliefs may have been, he saw its authority as essentially legal rather than spiritual. Having been officially “established,” it exercised authority simply because it was established. A loyal member of his Church, Swift said, “would defend it by arms against all the powers on earth, except our own legislature.” By this reasoning, in France and Italy the Catholic Church was likewise entitled to be obeyed. In Britain, Catholics and Dissenters were free to worship as they pleased, but not to enjoy the same civil rights as Anglicans. Bolingbroke the freethinker took exactly the same view: “There must be a religion; this religion must be national, and this national religion must be maintained in reputation and reverence; all other sects must be kept too low to become the rivals of it.”51
In Swift’s mind, therefore, it was entirely appropriate that he should go over to the Tories. He had worked with the Junto because, as he later said, he was “much inclined to be what they called a Whig in politics,” accepting William III’s right to the throne. “But as to religion, I confessed myself to be an high churchman, and that I did not conceive how anyone who wore the habit of a clergyman could be otherwise.”52 “High Churchmen” regarded Dissent as subversion and wanted the Test and Toleration acts rigidly enforced. “Low Churchmen,” also known as “latitudinarians,” wanted toleration of Dissenters to be extended. Whigs tended to be Low Churchmen and Tories High Churchmen.
Swift kept his authorship of the Examiner so secret that the Whigs were never sure whom they were arguing with. He was careful not to reveal that he was a clergyman, claiming at one point, “I understand not ecclesiastical affairs well enough” to comment on them. And he affected a pose of lofty objectivity that infuriated the Whigs. “An Examiner is a creature of power,” one of them wrote, “a spaniel that fetches and carries at the command of his master.”53
Swift often put a partisan spin on alleged facts, and he made it seem plausible because his writing was exceptionally clear and straightforward. As the editor of his prose observes, if an anonymous piece of writing is convoluted and wordy, you can be sure it’s by someone else. He had a special technique for making sure his writing was intelligible. It was his practice, a friend said, to read aloud to two servants (he didn’t say which ones). “When he had any doubt, he would ask them the meaning of what they heard; which, if they did not comprehend, he would alter and amend until they understood it perfectly well, and then would say, ‘This will do; for I write to the vulgar, more than to the learned.’”54
Although Swift’s style is deliberately “plain,” it is also muscular and compelling. Commenting on a history of the Church, he once rewrote an over-elaborate passage in order to bring it to life. Here is the original text, describing unworthy clergymen: “They are an insensible and degenerate race, who are thinking of nothing but their present advantages; and so that they may now support a luxurious and brutal course of irregular and voluptuous practices, they are easily hired to betray their religion, to sell their country, and to give up that liberty and those properties which are the present felicities and glories of this nation.” That’s barely readable. Swift’s version gets rid of the big words and abstractions, and leaps from the page: “The bulk of the clergy, and one third of the bishops, are stupid sons of whores, who think of nothing but getting money as soon as they can. If they may but procure enough to supply them in gluttony, drunkenness, and whoring, they are ready to turn traitors to God and their country, and make their fellow subjects slaves.”55
George Orwell once drew up a recipe for good prose:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.56
Swift was consciously committed to every one of these principles, and his writing embodies them brilliantly.
In all, Swift turned out thirty-three Examiner papers, from November of 1710 to June of the following year (it was then carried on for a while, not very well, by others). It had been a major achievement, and it fills close to two hundred pages in a modern edition.
POLITICAL LYING
Swift still had old scores to settle with the Whig grandees who had failed to reward him. He didn’t really hate Godolphin, though he pilloried him as Sid Hamet with his magician’s rod. There was one man he did hate—“like a toad,” he said—and that was Thomas, Earl of Wharton.57 Wharton had served a term as lord lieutenant of Ireland as well as being a leading member of the Junto, and he infuriated Swift in every way. He actively promoted the Dissenting cause and wanted the Test Act abolished; he used his immense fortune to install his own creatures in Parliament; and he was a shameless libertine.
Swift launched his campaign against Wharton in the second of his Examiner papers, on “the art of political lying.”
[Wharton] never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it; so that if you think to refine upon him by interpreting everything he says, as we do dreams, by the contrary, you are still to seek, and will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or no. The only remedy is to suppose that you have heard some inarticulate sounds without any meaning at all. . . . It often happens that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late.58
In later Examiners Swift kept up the attack, pretending to talk about a corrupt Roman governor called Verres but really referring to Wharton, and afterward retailing a scandalous anecdote about him:
That worthy patriot and true lover of the Church, whom a late Examiner is supposed to reflect on under the name of Verres, felt a pious impulse to be a benefactor to the Cathedral of Gloucester, but how to do it in the most decent, generous manner was the question. At last he thought of an expedient. One morning or night he stole into the church, mounted upon the altar, and there did that which in cleanly phrase is called disburthening of nature. He was discovered, prosecuted, and condemned to pay a thousand pounds, which sum was all employed to support the Church, as no doubt the benefactor meant it.
Apparently this actually happened, though the fine was reduced to ₤40.59
For a really thorough hatchet job, Swift needed more space than an Examiner paper, and after some months he brought out a pamphlet called A Short Character of His Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton. The character assassination was masterful. “He is without the sense of shame or glory, as some men are without the sense of smelling. . . . He is a Presbyterian in politics and an atheist in religion, but he chooseth at present to whore with a Papist.”60
Knowing that his letters to Ireland were likely to be opened by spies, Swift couldn’t tell Stella he had written the Short Character, but he made sure she knew about it. “Here’s a damned libelous pamphlet come out against Lord Wharton, giving the character first and then telling some of his actions. . . . I had one or two of them, but nobody knows the author or printer.”61 Two thousand copies were sold in two days.
Naturally, Wharton resen
ted Swift’s attacks, but when they ran into each other a year later he was as insouciant as ever. “I intended to dine with Mr. Masham today, and called at White’s chocolate house to see if he was there. Lord Wharton saw me at the door, and I saw him, but took no notice, and was going away; but he came through the crowd, called after me, and asked me how I did, etc. This was pretty; and I believe he wished every word he spoke was a halter to hang me.” Wharton never got back into power, and never had a chance to do further damage to Swift. For his part, Swift never forgave. Long afterward he encountered Wharton’s name in a book and wrote in the margin, “The most universal villain I ever knew.”62
TWO PECULIAR PUBLICATIONS
Producing political polemics was Swift’s job, but that wasn’t all he published. He brought out a volume called Miscellanies in Prose and Verse anonymously, as usual, that included a number of his short pieces, including An Argument against Abolishing Christianity and Sentiments of a Church of England Man. A prefatory note observes, “There are in every one of these pieces some particular beauties that discover this author’s vein, who excels too much not to be distinguished, since in all his writings such a surprising mixture of wit and learning, true humour and good sense, does everywhere appear, as sets him almost as far out of the reach of imitation, as it does beyond the power of censure.” We can be sure that Swift agreed with this description. He wrote it himself.63