Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges Part 45

It was at Bruxelles, whither we retreated after the failure of our plot-our Whig friends advising us to keep out of the way-that the great joy of my life was bestowed upon me, and that my dear mistress became my wife. We had been so accustomed to an extreme intimacy and confidence, and had lived so long and tenderly together, that we might have gone on to the end without thinking of a closer tie; but circ.u.mstances brought about that event which so prodigiously multiplied my happiness and hers (for which I humbly thank Heaven), although a calamity befell us, which, I blush to think, hath occurred more than once in our house. I know not what infatuation of ambition urged the beautiful and wayward woman, whose name hath occupied so many of these pages, and who was served by me with ten years of such a constant fidelity and pa.s.sion; but ever after that day at Castlewood, when we rescued her, she persisted in holding all her family as her enemies, and left us, and escaped to France, to what a fate I disdain to tell. Nor was her son's house a home for my dear mistress; my poor Frank was weak, as perhaps all our race hath been, and led by women.

Those around him were imperious, and in a terror of his mother's influence over him, lest he should recant, and deny the creed which he had adopted by their persuasion. The difference of their religion separated the son and the mother: my dearest mistress felt that she was severed from her children and alone in the world-alone but for one constant servant on whose fidelity, praised be Heaven, she could count. 'Twas after a scene of ign.o.ble quarrel on the part of Frank's wife and mother (for the poor lad had been made to marry the whole of that German family with whom he had connected himself), that I found my mistress one day in tears, and then besought her to confide herself to the care and devotion of one who, by G.o.d's help, would never forsake her. And then the tender matron, as beautiful in her autumn, and as pure as virgins in their spring, with blushes of love and "eyes of meek surrender", yielded to my respectful importunity, and consented to share my home. Let the last words I write thank her, and bless her who hath blessed it.

By the kindness of Mr. Addison, all danger of prosecution, and every obstacle against our return to England, was removed; and my son Frank's gallantry in Scotland made his peace with the king's Government. But we two cared no longer to live in England; and Frank formally and joyfully yielded over to us the possession of that estate which we now occupy, far away from Europe and its troubles, on the beautiful banks of the Potomac, where we have built a new Castlewood, and think with grateful hearts of our old home. In our Transatlantic country we have a season, the calmest and most delightful of the year, which we call the Indian summer: I often say the autumn of our life resembles that happy and serene weather, and am thankful for its rest and its sweet sunshine. Heaven hath blessed us with a child, which each parent loves for her resemblance to the other. Our diamonds are turned into ploughs and axes for our plantations; and into negroes, the happiest and merriest, I think, in all this country: and the only jewel by which my wife sets any store, and from which she hath never parted, is that gold b.u.t.ton she took from my arm on the day when she visited me in prison, and which she wore ever after, as she told me, on the tenderest heart in the world.

Appendix

Book I, chap, viii, p. 80, line 9: "mist" was wrongly altered in revised edition to "midst".

Book I, chap, xii, p. 130, line 2 from foot: "through" was wrongly altered in revised edition to "to".

Book II, chap, ii, p. 179, line 7 from foot: "guests," though never altered, should clearly be "hosts".

Book II, chap, xv, p. 307, line 8: the following pa.s.sage was omitted in the edition of 1858:-

"I always thought that paper was Mr. Congreve's," cries Mr. St.

John, showing that he knew more about the subject than he pretended to Mr. Steele, and who was the original Mr. Bickerstaffe drew.

"Tom Boxer said so in his _Observator_. But Tom's oracle is often making blunders," cries Steele.

"Mr. Boxer and my husband were friends once, and when the captain was ill with the fever, no man could be kinder than Mr. Boxer, who used to come to his bedside every day, and actually brought Dr.

Arbuthnot who cured him," whispered Mrs. Steele.

"Indeed, madam! How very interesting," says Mr. St. John.

"But when the captain's last comedy came out, Mr. Boxer took no notice of it-you know he is Mr. Congreve's man, and won't ever give a word to the other house-and this made my husband angry."

"Oh! Mr. Boxer is Mr. Congreve's man!" says Mr. St. John.

"Mr. Congreve has wit enough of his own," cries out Mr. Steele.

"No one ever heard me grudge him or any other man his share."

Book III, chap, i, p. 326, line 19: for "Frank", Thackeray by an interesting reminiscence of _Pendennis_ wrote "Arthur".

THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS

OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

A Series of Lectures

DELIVERED IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

[First edition, 1853; second edition, revised, 1853]

Lecture The First. Swift

In treating of the English humourists of the past age, it is of the men and of their lives, rather than of their books, that I ask permission to speak to you; and in doing so, you are aware that I cannot hope to entertain you with a merely humorous or facetious story. Harlequin without his mask is known to present a very sober countenance, and was himself, the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the Doctor advised to go and see Harlequin(21)-a man full of cares and perplexities like the rest of us, whose Self must always be serious to him, under whatever mask, or disguise, or uniform he presents it to the public. And as all of you here must needs be grave when you think of your own past and present, you will not look to find, in the histories of those whose lives and feelings I am going to try and describe to you, a story that is otherwise than serious, and often very sad. If Humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more interest about humorous writers than about the private life of poor Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule.

The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness-your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture-your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and pa.s.sions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him-sometimes love him. And, as his business is to mark other people's lives and peculiarities, we moralize upon _his_ life when he is gone-and yesterday's preacher becomes the text for to-day's sermon.

Of English parents, and of a good English family of clergymen,(22) Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, seven months after the death of his father, who had come to practise there as a lawyer. The boy went to school at Kilkenny, and afterwards to Trinity College, Dublin, where he got a degree with difficulty, and was wild, and witty, and poor. In 1688, by the recommendation of his mother, Swift was received into the family of Sir William Temple, who had known Mrs. Swift in Ireland. He left his patron in 1693, and the next year took orders in Dublin. But he threw up the small Irish preferment which he got and returned to Temple, in whose family he remained until Sir William's death in 1699. His hopes of advancement in England failing, Swift returned to Ireland, and took the living of Laracor. Hither he invited Hester Johnson,(23) Temple's natural daughter, with whom he had contracted a tender friendship, while they were both dependants of Temple's. And with an occasional visit to England, Swift now pa.s.sed nine years at home.

In 1709 he came to England, and, with a brief visit to Ireland, during which he took possession of his deanery of St. Patrick, he now pa.s.sed five years in England, taking the most distinguished part in the political transactions which terminated with the death of Queen Anne. After her death, his party disgraced, and his hopes of ambition over, Swift returned to Dublin, where he remained twelve years. In this time he wrote the famous _Drapier's Letters_ and _Gulliver's Travels_. He married Hester Johnson (Stella) and buried Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) who had followed him to Ireland from London, where she had contracted a violent pa.s.sion for him. In 1726 and 1727 Swift was in England, which he quitted for the last time on hearing of his wife's illness. Stella died in January, 1728, and Swift not until 1745, having pa.s.sed the last five of the seventy-eight years of his life with an impaired intellect and keepers to watch him.(24)

You know, of course, that Swift has had many biographers; his life has been told by the kindest and most good-natured of men, Scott, who admires but can't bring himself to love him; and by stout old Johnson,(25) who, forced to admit him into the company of poets, receives the famous Irishman, and takes off his hat to him with a bow of surly recognition, scans him from head to foot, and pa.s.ses over to the other side of the street. Dr. Wilde, of Dublin,(26) who has written a most interesting volume on the closing years of Swift's life, calls Johnson "the most malignant of his biographers": it is not easy for an English critic to please Irishmen-perhaps to try and please them. And yet Johnson truly admires Swift: Johnson does not quarrel with Swift's change of politics, or doubt his sincerity of religion: about the famous Stella and Vanessa controversy the Doctor does not bear very hardly on Swift. But he could not give the Dean that honest hand of his; the stout old man puts it into his breast, and moves off from him.(27)

Would we have liked to live with him? That is a question which, in dealing with these people's works, and thinking of their lives and peculiarities, every reader of biographies must put to himself. Would you have liked to be a friend of the great Dean? I should like to have been Shakespeare's s...o...b..ack-just to have lived in his house, just to have worshipped him-to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet serene face. I should like, as a young man, to have lived on Fielding's staircase in the Temple, and after helping him up to bed perhaps, and opening his door with his latchkey, to have shaken hands with him in the morning, and heard him talk and crack jokes over his breakfast and his mug of small beer. Who would not give something to pa.s.s a night at the club with Johnson, and Goldsmith, and James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck? The charm of Addison's companionship and conversation has pa.s.sed to us by fond tradition-but Swift? If you had been his inferior in parts (and that, with a great respect for all persons present, I fear is only very likely), his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you; if, undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would, have quailed before you,(28) and not had the pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram about you-watched for you in a sewer, and come out to a.s.sail you with a coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon. If you had been a lord with a blue ribbon, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world. He would have been so manly, so sarcastic, so bright, odd, and original, that you might think he had no object in view but the indulgence of his humour, and that he was the most reckless, simple creature in the world. How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you! and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it looked like independence;(29) he would have done your errands, but with the air of patronizing you, and after fighting your battles masked in the street or the press, would have kept on his hat before your wife and daughters in the drawing-room, content to take that sort of pay for his tremendous services as a bravo.(30)

He says as much himself in one of his letters to Bolingbroke:-"All my endeavours to distinguish myself were only for want of a great t.i.tle and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts; whether right or wrong is no great matter. And so the reputation of wit and great learning does the office of a blue ribbon or a coach-and-six."(31)

Could there be a greater candour? It is an outlaw, who says, "These are my brains; with these I'll win t.i.tles and compete with fortune. These are my bullets; these I'll turn into gold"; and he hears the sound of coaches-and-six, takes the road like Macheath, and makes society stand and deliver. They are all on their knees before him. Down go my lord bishop's ap.r.o.n, and his grace's blue ribbon, and my lady's brocade petticoat in the mud. He eases the one of a living, the other of a patent place, the third of a little snug post about the Court, and gives them over to followers of his own. The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and crosier in it, which he intends to have for _his_ share, has been delayed on the way from St. James's; and he waits and waits until nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road, and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and rides away into his own country.(32)

Swift's seems to me to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale of ambition, as any hero's that ever lived and failed. But we must remember that the morality was lax-that other gentlemen besides himself took the road in his day-that public society was in a strange disordered condition, and the State was ravaged by other condottieri. The Boyne was being fought and won, and lost-the bells rung in William's victory, in the very same tone with which they would have pealed for James's. Men were loose upon politics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well as old beliefs and inst.i.tutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift in the storm. As in the South Sea Bubble almost everybody gambled; as in the Railway mania-not many centuries ago-almost every one took his unlucky share; a man of that time, of the vast talents and ambition of Swift, could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his spring at his opportunity. His bitterness, his scorn, his rage, his subsequent misanthropy, are ascribed by some panegyrists to a deliberate conviction of mankind's unworthiness, and a desire to amend them by castigating. His youth was bitter, as that of a great genius bound down by ign.o.ble ties, and powerless in a mean dependence; his age was bitter,(33) like that of a great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it, and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile. A man may attribute to the G.o.ds, if he likes, what is caused by his own fury, or disappointment, or self-will. What public man-what statesman projecting a _coup_-what king determined on an invasion of his neighbour-what satirist meditating an onslaught on society or an individual, can't give a pretext for his move? There was a French general the other day who proposed to march into this country and put it to sack and pillage, in revenge for humanity outraged by our conduct at Copenhagen-there is always some excuse for men of the aggressive turn. They are of their nature warlike, predatory, eager for fight, plunder, dominion.(34)

As fierce a beak and talon as ever struck-as strong a wing as ever beat, belonged to Swift. I am glad, for one, that fate wrested the prey out of his claws, and cut his wings and chained him. One can gaze, and not without awe and pity, at the lonely eagle chained behind the bars.

That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, on the 30th November, 1667, is a certain fact, of which n.o.body will deny the sister island the honour and glory, but, it seems to me, he was no more an Irishman than a man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo.(35) Goldsmith was an Irishman, and always an Irishman: Steele was an Irishman, and always an Irishman: Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English, his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise thrift and economy, as he used his money; with which he could be generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his opinion before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness.(36) Dreading ridicule too, as a man of his humour-above all an Englishman of his humour-certainly would, he is afraid to use the poetical power which he really possessed; one often fancies in reading him that he dares not be eloquent when he might; that he does not speak above his voice, as if were, and the tone of society.

His initiation into politics, his knowledge of business, his knowledge of polite life, his acquaintance with literature even, which he could not have pursued very sedulously during that reckless career at Dublin, Swift got under the roof of Sir William Temple. He was fond of telling in after-life what quant.i.ties of books he devoured there, and how King William taught him to cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion. It was at Shene and at Moor Park, with a salary of twenty pounds and a dinner at the upper servants' table, that this great and lonely Swift pa.s.sed a ten years'

apprenticeship-wore a ca.s.sock that was only not a livery-bent down a knee as proud as Lucifer's to supplicate my lady's good graces, or run on his honour's errands.(37) It was here, as he was writing at Temple's table, or following his patron's walk, that he saw and heard the men who had governed the great world-measured himself with them, looking up from his silent corner, gauged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them, and tried them, and marked them. Ah, what plat.i.tudes he must have heard! what feeble jokes! what pompous commonplaces! what small men they must have seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth, silent Irish secretary. I wonder whether it ever struck Temple that that Irishman was his master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not present itself under the ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived with Swift.

Swift sickened, rebelled, left the service-ate humble pie and came back again; and so for ten years went on, gathering learning, swallowing scorn, and submitting with a stealthy rage to his fortune.

Temple's style is the perfection of practised and easy good-breeding. If he does not penetrate very deeply into a subject, he professes a very gentlemanly acquaintance with it; if he makes rather a parade of Latin, it was the custom of his day, as it was the custom for a gentleman to envelop his head in a periwig and his hands in lace ruffles. If he wears buckles and square-toed shoes, he steps in them with a consummate grace, and you never hear their creak, or find them treading upon any lady's train or any rival's heels in the Court crowd. When that grows too hot or too agitated for him, he politely leaves it. He retires to his retreat of Shene or Moor Park; and lets the King's party, and the Prince of Orange's party battle it out among themselves. He reveres the Sovereign (and no man perhaps ever testified to his loyalty by so elegant a bow); he admires the Prince of Orange; but there is one person whose ease and comfort he loves more than all the princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds,(38) clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,-the statesman, the amba.s.sador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where, in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with the ruddy nymph of gardens.

Temple seems to have received and exacted a prodigious deal of veneration from his household, and to have been coaxed, and warmed, and cuddled by the people round about him, as delicately as any of the plants which he loved. When he fell ill in 1693, the household was aghast at his indisposition; mild Dorothea, his wife, the best companion of the best of men-

Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great, Trembling beheld the doubtful hand of fate.

As for Dorinda, his sister,-