Part 2

From this letter it would appear that this remarkable poem was written in the summer of 1712; whereas the title-page of the pamphlet says it was “written at Windsor, 1713.” Swift visited Windsor in both years, but he had more leisure in 1712, and we know that Vanessa was also at Windsor in that year. In that year, too, he was forty-four, the age mentioned in the poem. Neither Swift nor Vanessa forgot this intercourse: years afterwards Swift wrote to her, “Go over the scenes of Windsor. . . . Cad thinks often of these”; and again, “Remember the indisposition at Windsor.” We know that this poem was revised in 1719, when in all probability Swift added the lines to which most exception can be taken. Cadenus was to be Vanessa’s instructor:—

“His conduct might have made him styled A father, and the nymph his child.”

He had “grown old in politics and wit,” and “in every scene had kept his heart,” so that he now “understood not what was love.” But he had written much, and Vanessa admired his wit. Cadenus found that her thoughts wandered—

“Though she seemed to listen more To all he spoke than e’er before.”

When she confessed her love, he was filled with “shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise.” He had aimed only at cultivating the mind, and had hardly known whether she was young or old. But he was flattered, and though he could not give her love, he offered her friendship, “with gratitude, respect, esteem.” Vanessa took him at his word, and said she would now be tutor, though he was not apt to learn:—

“But what success Vanessa met Is to the world a secret yet. Whether the nymph to please her swain Talks in a high romantic strain; Or whether he at last descends To act with less seraphic ends; Or, to compound the business, whether They temper love and books together, Must never to mankind be told, Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold.”

Such is the poem as we now have it, written, it must be remembered, for Vanessa’s private perusal. It is to be regretted, for her own sake, that she did not destroy it.

Swift received the reward of his services to the Government—the Deanery of St. Patrick’s, Dublin—in April 1713. Disappointed at what he regarded as exile, he left London in June. Vanessa immediately began to send him letters which brought home to him the extent of her passion; and she hinted at jealousy in the words, “If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except ’tis what is inconsistent with my own.” In his reply Swift dwelt upon the dreariness of his surroundings at Laracor, and reminded her that he had said he would endeavour to forget everything in England, and would write as seldom as he could.

Swift was back again in the political strife in London in September, taking Oxford’s part in the quarrel between that statesman and Bolingbroke. On the fall of the Tories at the death of Queen Anne, he saw that all was over, and retired to Ireland, not to return again for twelve years. In the meantime the intimacy with Vanessa had been renewed. Her mother had died, leaving debts, and she pressed Swift for advice in the management of her affairs. When she suggested coming to Ireland, where she had property, he told her that if she took this step he would “see her very seldom.” However, she took up her abode at Celbridge, only a few miles from Dublin. Swift gave her many cautions, out of “the perfect esteem and friendship” he felt for her, but he often visited her. She was dissatisfied, however, begging him to speak kindly, and at least to counterfeit his former indulgent friendship. “What can be wrong,” she wrote, “in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? You cannot but know that your frowns make my life unsupportable.” Sometimes he treated the matter lightly; sometimes he showed annoyance; sometimes he assured her of his esteem and love, but urged her not to make herself or him “unhappy by imaginations.” He was uniformly unsuccessful in stopping Vanessa’s importunity. He endeavoured, she said, by severities to force her from him; she knew she was the cause of uneasy reflections to him; but nothing would lessen her “inexpressible passion.”

Unfortunately he failed—partly no doubt from mistaken considerations of kindness, partly because he shrank from losing her affection—to take effective steps to put an end to Vanessa’s hopes. It would have been better if he had unhesitatingly made it clear to her that he could not return her passion, and that if she could not be satisfied with friendship the intimacy must cease. To quote Sir Henry Craik, “The friendship had begun in literary guidance: it was strengthened by flattery: it lived on a cold and almost stern repression, fed by confidences as to literary schemes, and by occasional literary compliments: but it never came to have a real hold over Swift’s heart.”

With 1716 we come to the alleged marriage with Stella. In 1752, seven years after Swift’s death, Lord Orrery, in his _Remarks_ on Swift, said that Stella was “the concealed, but undoubted, wife of Dr. Swift. . . . If my informations are right, she was married to Dr. Swift in the year 1716, by Dr. Ashe, then Bishop of Clogher.” Ten years earlier, in 1742, in a letter to Deane Swift which I have not seen quoted before, Orrery spoke of the advantage of a wife to a man in his declining years; “nor had the Dean felt a blow, or wanted a companion, had he been married, or, in other words, had Stella lived.” What this means is not at all clear. In 1754, Dr. Delany, an old friend of Swift’s, wrote, in comment upon Orrery’s _Remarks_, “Your account of his marriage is, I am satisfied, true.” In 1789, George Monck Berkeley, in his _Literary Relics_, said that Swift and Stella were married by Dr. Ashe, “who himself related the circumstances to Bishop Berkeley, by whose relict the story was communicated to me.” Dr. Ashe cannot have told Bishop Berkeley by word of mouth, because Ashe died in 1717, the year after the supposed marriage, and Berkeley was then still abroad. But Berkeley was at the time tutor to Ashe’s son, and may therefore have been informed by letter, though it is difficult to believe that Ashe would write about such a secret so soon after the event. Thomas Sheridan, on information received from his father, Dr. Sheridan, Swift’s friend, accepted the story of the marriage in his book (1784), adding particulars which are of very doubtful authenticity; and Johnson, in his _Lives of the Poets_, says that Dr. Madden told him that Stella had related her “melancholy story” to Dr. Sheridan before her death. On the other hand, Dr. Lyon, Swift’s attendant in his later years, disbelieved the story of the marriage, which was, he said, “founded only on hearsay”; and Mrs. Dingley “laughed at it as an idle tale,” founded on suspicion.

Sir Henry Craik is satisfied with the evidence for the marriage. Mr. Leslie Stephen is of opinion that it is inconclusive, and Forster could find no evidence that is at all reasonably sufficient; while Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, Mr. Churton Collins, and others are strongly of opinion that no such marriage ever took place. A full discussion of the evidence would involve the consideration of the reliability of the witnesses, and the probability of their having authentic information, and would be out of place here. My own opinion is that the evidence for the marriage is very far from convincing, and this view seems to be confirmed by all that we know from his own letters of Swift’s relations with Stella. It has been suggested that she was pained by reports of Swift’s intercourse with Vanessa, and felt that his feelings towards herself were growing colder; but this is surmise, and no satisfactory explanation has been given to account for a form of marriage being gone through after so many years of the closest friendship. There is no reason to suppose that there was at the time any gossip in circulation about Stella, and if her reputation was in question, a marriage of which the secret was carefully kept would obviously be of no benefit to her. Moreover, we are told that there was no change in their mode of life; if they were married, what reason could there be for keeping it a secret, or for denying themselves the closer relationship of marriage? The only possible benefit to Stella was that Swift would be prevented marrying anyone else. It is impossible, of course, to disprove a marriage which we are told was secretly performed, without banns or licence or witnesses; but we may reasonably require strong evidence for so startling a step. If we reject the tale, the story of Swift’s connection with Stella is at least intelligible; while the acceptance of this marriage introduces many puzzling circumstances, and makes it necessary to believe that during the remainder of Stella’s life Swift repeatedly spoke of his wife as a friend, and of himself as one who had never married. {0g} What right have we to put aside Swift’s plain and repeated statements? Moreover, his attitude towards Vanessa for the remaining years of her life becomes much more culpable if we are to believe that he had given Stella the claim of a wife upon him. {0h}

From 1719 onwards we have a series of poems to Stella, written chiefly in celebration of her birthday. She was now thirty-eight (Swift says, “Thirty-four—we shan’t dispute a year or more”), and the verses abound in laughing allusions to her advancing years and wasting form. Hers was “an angel’s face a little cracked,” but all men would crowd to her door when she was fourscore. His verses to her had always been

“Without one word of Cupid’s darts, Of killing eyes, or bleeding hearts; With friendship and esteem possessed, I ne’er admitted Love a guest.”

Her only fault was that she could not bear the lightest touch of blame. Her wit and sense, her loving care in illness—to which he owed that fact that he was alive to say it—made her the “best pattern of true friends.” She replied, in lines written on Swift’s birthday in 1721, that she was his pupil and humble friend. He had trained her judgment and refined her fancy and taste:—

“You taught how I might youth prolong By knowing what was right and wrong; How from my heart to bring supplies Of lustre to my fading eyes; How soon a beauteous mind repairs The loss of changed or falling hairs; How wit and virtue from within Send out a smoothness o’er the skin Your lectures could my fancy fix, And I can please at thirty-six.”

In 1723 Vanessa is said to have written to Stella or to Swift—there are discrepancies in the versions given by Sheridan and Lord Orrery, both of whom are unreliable—asking whether the report that they were married was true. Swift, we are told, rode to Celbridge, threw down Vanessa’s letter in a great rage, and left without speaking a word. {0i} Vanessa, whose health had been failing for some time, died shortly afterwards, having cancelled a will in Swift’s favour. She left “Cadenus and Vanessa” for publication, and when someone said that she must have been a remarkable woman to inspire such a poem, Stella replied that it was well known that the Dean could write finely upon a broomstick.

Soon after this tragedy Swift became engrossed in the Irish agitation which led to the publication of the _Drapier’s Letters_, and in 1726 he paid a long-deferred visit to London, taking with him the manuscript of _Gulliver’s Travels_. While in England he was harassed by bad news of Stella, who had been in continued ill-health for some years. His letters to friends in Dublin show how greatly he suffered. To the Rev. John Worrall he wrote, in a letter which he begged him to burn, “What you tell me of Mrs. Johnson I have long expected with great oppression and heaviness of heart. We have been perfect friends these thirty-five years. Upon my advice they both came to Ireland, and have been ever since my constant companions; and the remainder of my life will be a very melancholy scene, when one of them is gone, whom I most esteemed, upon the score of every good quality that can possibly recommend a human creature.” He would not for the world be present at her death: “I should be a trouble to her, and a torment to myself.” If Stella came to Dublin, he begged that she might be lodged in some airy, healthy part, and not in the Deanery, where too it would be improper for her to die. “There is not a greater folly,” he thinks, “than to contract too great and intimate a friendship, which must always leave the survivor miserable.” To Dr. Stopford he wrote in similar terms of the “younger of the two” “oldest and dearest friends I have in the world.” “This was a person of my own rearing and instructing from childhood, who excelled in every good quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature. . . . I know not what I am saying; but believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting and as much engaging as violent love.” To Dr. Sheridan he said, “I look upon this to be the greatest event that can ever happen to me; but all my preparation will not suffice to make me bear it like a philosopher nor altogether like a Christian. There hath been the most intimate friendship between us from our childhood, and the greatest merit on her side that ever was in one human creature towards another.” {0j} Pope alludes in a letter to Sheridan to the illness of Swift’s “particular friend,” but with the exception of another reference by Pope, and of a curiously flippant remark by Bolingbroke, the subject is nowhere mentioned in Swift’s correspondence with his literary and fashionable friends in London.

Swift crossed to Ireland in August, fearing the worst; but Stella rallied, and in the spring of 1727 he returned to London. In August, however, there came alarming news, when Swift was himself suffering from giddiness and deafness. To Dr. Sheridan he wrote that the last act of life was always a tragedy at best: “it is a bitter aggravation to have one’s best friend go before one.” Life was indifferent to him; if he recovered from his disorder it would only be to feel the loss of “that person for whose sake only life was worth preserving. I brought both those friends over that we might be happy together as long as God should please; the knot is broken, and the remaining person you know has ill answered the end; and the other, who is now to be lost, is all that was valuable.” To Worrall he again wrote (in Latin) that Stella ought not to be lodged at the Deanery; he had enemies who would place a bad interpretation upon it if she died there.

Swift left London for Dublin in September; he was detained some days at Holyhead by stress of weather, and in the private journal which he kept during that time he speaks of the suspense he was in about his “dearest friend.” {0k} In December Stella made a will—signed “Esther Johnson, spinster”—disposing of her property in the manner Swift had suggested. Her allusions to Swift are incompatible with any such feeling of resentment as is suggested by Sheridan. She died on January 28, 1728. Swift could not bear to be present, but on the night of her death he began to write his very interesting _Character of Mrs. Johnson_, from which passages have already been quoted. He there calls her “the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with.” Combined with excellent gifts of the mind, “she had a gracefulness, somewhat more than human, in every motion, word, and action. Never was so happy a conjunction of civility, freedom, easiness, and sincerity.” Everyone treated her with marked respect, yet everyone was at ease in her society. She preserved her wit, judgment, and vivacity to the last, but often complained of her memory. She chose men rather than women for her companions, “the usual topic of ladies’ discourse being such as she had little knowledge of and less relish.” “Honour, truth, liberality, good nature, and modesty were the virtues she chiefly possessed, and most valued in her acquaintance.” In some Prayers used by Swift during her last sickness, he begged for pity for “the mournful friends of Thy distressed servant, who sink under the weight of her present condition, and the fear of losing the most valuable of our friends.” He was too ill to be present at the funeral at St. Patrick’s. Afterwards, we are told, a lock of her hair was found in his desk, wrapped in a paper bearing the words, “Only a woman’s hair.”

Swift continued to produce pamphlets manifesting growing misanthropy, though he showed many kindnesses to people who stood in need of help. He seems to have given Mrs. Dingley fifty guineas a year, pretending that it came from a fund for which he was trustee. The mental decay which he had always feared—“I shall be like that tree,” he once said, “I shall die at the top”—became marked about 1738. Paralysis was followed by aphasia, and after acute pain, followed by a long period of apathy, death relieved him in October 1745. He was buried by Stella’s side, in accordance with his wishes. The bulk of his fortune was left to found a hospital for idiots and lunatics.

There has been much rather fruitless discussion respecting the reason or reasons why Swift did not marry Stella; for if there was any marriage, it was nothing more than a form. Some have supposed that Swift resolved to remain unmarried because the insanity of an uncle and the fits and giddiness to which he was always subject led him to fear insanity in his own case. Others, looking rather to physical causes, have dwelt upon his coldness of temperament and indisposition to love; upon the repugnance he often showed towards marriage, and the tone of some of the verses on the subject written in his later years. Others, again, have found a cause in his parsimonious habits, in his dread of poverty, the effects of which he had himself felt, and in the smallness of his income, at least until he was middle-aged. {0l} It may well be that one or all of these things influenced Swift’s action. We cannot say more. He himself, as we have seen, said, as early as 1704, that if his humour and means had permitted him to think of marriage, his choice would have been Stella. Perhaps, however, there is not much mystery in the matter. Swift seems to have been wanting in passion; probably he was satisfied with the affection which Stella gave him, and did not wish for more. Such an attachment as his usually results in marriage, but not necessarily. It is not sufficiently remembered that the affection began in Stella’s childhood. They were “perfect friends” for nearly forty years, and her advancing years in no way lessened his love, which was independent of beauty. Whether Stella was satisfied, who shall say? Mrs. Oliphant thought that few women would be disposed to pity Stella, or think her life one of blight or injury. Mr. Leslie Stephen says, “She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice. . . . Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace Tisdall?” Whatever we may surmise, there is nothing to prove that she was disappointed. She was the one star which brightened Swift’s storm-tossed course; it is well that she was spared seeing the wreck at the end.

* * * * *

The _Journal to Stella_ is interesting from many points of view: for its bearing upon Swift’s relations with Stella and upon his own character; for the light which it throws upon the history of the time and upon prominent men of the day; and for the illustrations it contains of the social life of people of various classes in London and elsewhere. The fact that it was written without any thought of publication is one of its greatest attractions. Swift jotted down his opinions, his hopes, his disappointments, without thought of their being seen by anybody but his correspondents. The letters are transparently natural. It has been said more than once that the _Journal_, by the nature of the case, contains no full-length portraits, and hardly any sketches. Swift mentions the people he met, but rarely stops to draw a picture of them. But though this is true, the casual remarks which he makes often give a vivid impression of what he thought of the person of whom he is speaking, and in many cases those few words form a chief part of our general estimate of the man. There are but few people of note at the time who are not mentioned in these pages. We see Queen Anne holding a Drawing-room in her bedroom: “she looked at us round with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her.” We see Harley, afterwards the Earl of Oxford, “a pure trifler,” who was always putting off important business; Bolingbroke, “a thorough rake”; the prudent Lord Dartmouth, the other Secretary of State, from whom Swift could never “work out a dinner.” There is Marlborough, “covetous as Hell, and ambitious as the prince of it,” yet a great general and unduly pressed by the Tories; and the volatile Earl of Peterborough, “above fifty, and as active as one of five-and-twenty”—“the ramblingest lying rogue on earth.” We meet poor Congreve, nearly blind, and in fear of losing his commissionership; the kindly Arbuthnot, the Queen’s physician; Addison, whom Swift met more and more rarely, busy with the preparation and production of _Cato_; Steele, careless as ever, neglecting important appointments, and “governed by his wife most abominably”; Prior, poet and diplomatist, with a “lean carcass”; and young Berkeley of Trinity College, Dublin, “a very ingenious man and great philosopher,” whom Swift determined to favour as much as he could. Mrs. Masham, the Duchess of Somerset, the Duchess of Shrewsbury, the Duchess of Hamilton, Lady Betty Germaine, and many other ladies appear with more or less distinctness; besides a host of people of less note, of whom we often know little but what Swift tells us.