no longer at any point in a man’s life where the odds are still on his
marrying. About marriage Swift was frequently explicit. At twenty-five
he declared that, to say nothing of his “cold temper and unconfined
humour,” “the very ordinary observations I made with going half a
mile beyond the University have taught me experience enough not to
think of marriage till I settle my fortune in the world, which I am
sure will not be in some years; and even then myself I am so hard to
please that I suppose I shall put it off to the other world.... Among
all the young gentlemen that I have known to have ruined themselves
by marrying, which I assure you is a great number, I have made this
general rule, that they are either young, raw, ignorant scholars who,
for want of knowing company, believe every silk petticoat includes an
angel, or else they have been a sort of honest young men who perhaps
are too literal in rather marrying than burning.... I think I am very
far excluded from listing under either of these heads. I confess I have
known one or two men of sense enough who, inclined to frolics, have
married and ruined themselves out of a maggot; but a thousand household
thoughts, which always drive matrimony out of my mind whenever it
chances to come there, will, I am sure, fright me from that; besides
that, I am naturally temperate, and never engaged in the contrary which
usually produces those effects.”
This may be taken to be the scorn of a young man who has not yet felt
much desire or loneliness. But there is the later belief, cut to an
axiom, that “no wise man ever married from the dictates of reason.”
What then could beguile Swift into marriage, when, for all his passion,
he had undertaken to live as faithfully under the dictates of reason as
under the orders of the Church?
Swift, speaking of himself, seldom spoke less than the exact truth,
though he often, by his harshness, said rather more. In the matter
of marriage his course was, from first to last, as straight as was
possible for a man fascinating to women and inclined to play with them
when his powers were relaxed or his will checked. He had decided that,
his fortunes being so much lower than his pride, and his health so
much less than his strength, he would not marry except on some such
extravagant terms as he proposed at thirty-three to Varina. He knew she
would not accept them. Whether he realized it or not, he preferred his
relationship with Stella to marriage with anybody else.
He turned out to prefer it to marriage with Stella. During the three or
four years after he closed accounts with Varina, Swift came no doubt
as near to marrying Stella as the great drive of his solitary ambition
would let him. But he did not marry her, and he apparently found, as
many men would find if they had the strength to test the principle,
that what seems to be the need to marry, even a woman truly loved, is
a panic impulse in a crisis. Swift, having survived the crisis which
might have made him a husband, did not have to pay the customary price
of losing the woman who might have become his wife. Stella was still
the willing focus of that immense affection which turned the stare or
scowl of hate to the rest of the world.
Only once more did he slip recklessly into his old amusement. Vanessa,
infatuated and unceasing, threatened his solitude. He could not
annihilate her with a letter or subdue her to friendship. He slackly
let the affair drag on to a dreary and then vehement end. But still
he did not break his straight course. He had not wanted to marry. He
had not had to marry. He did not mean to marry. He had said as much to
everybody whose business it could be.
Swift might have been believed if his course, no matter how straight,
had also been usual: if he had spent his days in a cell; if, having
failed to win some desired woman, he had desired no other; if he had
run from woman to woman stopping nowhere long. Instead, he lived in
the world, had as much of the women he wanted as he wanted of them,
and was in many ways faithful to Stella. Gossip, bothered by what is
unusual in the story, has tried to make it fit some more familiar
pattern by imagining hidden circumstances which, if known, would show
Swift to have been more like ordinary men. He may have been impotent,
gossip suggests, and so avoided marriage out of vanity. He may have
had syphilis, and so avoided marriage out of decency. He may, gossip
even during his life went so far as to guess, have married Stella
privately--without licence, witnesses, or record, when he was Dean of
St. Patrick’s! But all these arguments, some of which have been twisted
to coiling lengths, are still the hypotheses of gossip, one as good as
another. Not one of them is as simple and sufficient as the conclusion
that Swift, whom gossips could more easily think inadequate, dissolute,
or secretive, was only, in marriage as in other matters, extraordinary.
2
Writing to Varina in May 1700 he swore that he then had no thoughts of
another mistress or of another wife. As this was not a lover’s letter,
this was hardly a lover’s oath, and may have meant what it said. But,
as chaplain to Lord Berkeley, Swift was still, in a sense, a dependent;
and at Laracor he saw he would be lonely. Of his three livings, Laracor
and the incidental Agher and Rathbeggan, only Laracor had a church.
Swift, arriving dejected and resentful, found himself doubtfully
master of a scattered, monotonous territory with a dilapidated church
and a vicarage and glebe not then fit to live in. The one pleasant
thing about his post was that he could leave his duties in the hands
of curates and himself live much of the time in Dublin lodgings. In
April 1701 he went with Berkeley back to England, to remain there till
September. And there he visited Stella at Farnham.
Her mother had married, or was to marry, another steward of Moor Park,
and the daughter was living with another Temple dependent, Rebecca
Dingley, on the income of a Temple legacy. “Her fortune,” as Swift
told the story on the bitter, truthful night of Stella’s death, “at
that time was in all not above fifteen hundred pounds, the interest
of which was but a scanty maintenance, in so dear a country, for one
of her spirit. Upon this consideration, and indeed very much for my
own satisfaction, who had few friends or acquaintance in Ireland, I
prevailed with her and her dear friend and companion, the other lady,
to draw what money they had into Ireland, a great part of their
fortune being in annuities upon funds. Money was then ten per cent in
Ireland, besides the advantage of turning it, and all the necessaries
of life at half the price. They complied with my advice, and soon
after came over; but, I happening to continue some time longer in
England, they were much discouraged to live in Dublin, where they
were wholly strangers. She was at that time about nineteen years
old, and her person was soon distinguished. But the adventure looked
so like a frolic the censure held for some time, as if there were a
secret history in such a removal; which, however, soon blew off by her
excellent conduct.”
These are the known facts of Stella’s removal to Ireland. Nor was her
life there less prudent than her going. She and Mrs. (that is, Miss)
Dingley lived ordinarily in lodgings with their own servants. When
Swift was at Laracor they lived in a cottage not far away or lodged in
the neighbouring village of Trim. When he was in lodgings in Dublin
they lodged elsewhere in town. Only, it seems, during his absences did
they economize by living in the vicarage at Laracor or in his lodgings
in Dublin. The relations between Stella and Swift were unwaveringly
circumspect. No one knew that he made her an allowance of fifty pounds
a year. “I wonder,” he wrote to a friend in 1726, “how you could expect
to see Mrs. Johnson in a morning, which I, her oldest acquaintance,
have not done these dozen years, except once or twice in a journey.”
The afternoons or evenings which he spent with her are said never to
have been without at least a third person.
She seldom made visits. “But her own lodgings,” Swift said, “from
before twenty years old were frequented by many persons of the graver
sort, who all respected her highly, upon her good sense, good manners
and conversation.... And indeed the greatest number of her acquaintance
was among the clergy.” At first she was extravagant, “and so continued
till about two-and-twenty; when, by advice of some friends, and the
fright of paying large bills of tradesmen who enticed her into their
debt, she began to reflect upon her own folly.”
Did Stella, prudently setting out for Ireland at twenty, foresee so
many clergymen? Could she without flares of rebellion give up her
extravagance, even to “avoiding all expense in clothes (which she ever
despised) beyond what was merely decent”? Had she in her nature no
veins of natural folly waiting to be uncovered? Was there in her no
longing for unreasonable adventures?
So far as marriage was concerned she knew, before too long, where Swift
stood. Another of her clergymen, William Tisdall, himself began to
court Stella. Finding how much authority Swift had with her, Tisdall
wrote to him, then in London, hinting, it seems, that Swift had used
his power in behalf of his own designs. Swift’s answer, in April 1704,
left no doubt in Tisdall, nor in Stella, to whom Tisdall must have
shown it.
[Illustration: Esther Johnson (Stella)
_As a young woman_]
“I will, upon my conscience and honour, tell you the naked truth.
First, I think I have said to you before that, if my fortunes and
humour served me to think of that state, I should certainly, among all
persons on earth, make your choice, because I never saw that person
whose conversation I utterly valued but hers. This was the utmost I
ever gave way to. And, secondly, I must assure you sincerely that this
regard of mine never once entered into my head to be an impediment
to you; but I judged it would, perhaps, be a clog to your rising in
the world; and I did not conceive you were then rich enough to make
yourself and her happy and easy. But that objection is now quite
removed by what you have at present.... I declare I have no other; nor
shall any consideration of my own misfortune of losing so good a friend
and companion as her prevail on me against her interest and settlement
in the world, since it is held so necessary and convenient a thing for
ladies to marry; and that time takes off from the lustre of virgins in
all other eyes but mine.”
Swift insisted that he had done nothing to stand in Tisdall’s way, and
that he had indeed thought the affair too far along to be broken off;
“since I supposed the town had got it in their tongues, and therefore I
thought it could not miscarry without some disadvantage to the lady’s
credit. I ... must add that though it hath come in my way to converse
with persons of the first rank, and that sex, more than is usual to men
of my level and of our function, yet I have nowhere met with a humour,
a wit, or conversation so agreeable, a better portion of good sense,
or a truer judgment of men and things. I mean here in England, for as
to the ladies of Ireland I am a perfect stranger.... I give you joy of
your good fortunes, and envy very much your prudence and temper, and
love of peace and settlement; the reverse of which has been the great
uneasiness of my life, and is like to continue so. And what is the
result?... I find nothing but the good words and wishes of a decayed
Ministry, whose lives and mine will probably wear out before they can
serve either my little hopes or their own ambition. Therefore I am
resolved suddenly to retire, like a discontented courtier, and vent
myself in study and speculation, till my own humour or the scene here
shall change.”
This was the same language as that Swift used after Stella’s death,
when he called her “the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that
I or perhaps any other person ever was blessed with,” and said he could
not remember that he had “ever once heard her make a wrong judgment of
persons, books, or affairs.” He could then say also, out of his long
experience, that she was “the most disinterested mortal I ever knew
or heard of.” But his praise was for her intellectual, moral, and
social virtues, as it had always been. Not a surviving syllable about
her suggests desire. None comes nearer to it than his words that “she
had a gracefulness somewhat more than human in every motion, word, and
action.” And they were written for posterity when she was dead, not
when she was twenty-three and he faced a rival.
Stella, scrutinizing the letter to Tisdall, could no more find a
possible husband there than Varina had found in her letter four years
earlier. Tisdall, however, was rejected.
And not a surviving syllable from Stella tells whether she knew of any
barrier between her and Swift except the cold sword of his ambitious
pride, or whether she struggled against fitting herself to the place
he made for her, or whether she ever felt bitterness or regret. The
discretion as native to her as to Swift protected her almost entirely
from scandal, even in the mouths of his most loquacious enemies. He
alone was blamed, for leaving her alone. Stella seems not to have
blamed him. She preferred what she had of Swift to all she might have
had of Tisdall or any other possible husband.
She knew that Swift’s devotion was partly his pride admiring itself
in its glass. He trusted her judgment, which was a bright reflection
of his own. He took her advice, which was coloured by what she deftly
guessed to be his will. But she was no such replica in dough as might
have bored him or might have shamed him into guilt for using her as
he did. She was witty and lively, talked back to him, was charmingly
perverse when he convinced her of her errors, and would not allow him
to have a maid or housekeeper “with a tolerable face.” Stella gave
him, when he was resisted elsewhere, the comfort of feeling over her
that power without which his temper could not live. She saw, however,
that she was a need as well as a comfort. She could feel an occasional
thrill of power in her general peace of compliance.
For nearly a decade after Stella went to Ireland the record is so
silent about her that she has to be guessed at. Then for three years
during which Swift wrote his journal to her, his light brings her to
life. After that, silence and obscurity, seldom broken till the light
shines again in Swift’s grief over her last illness. She hardly lives
except in his words.
Once, however, Swift’s mirror answered him. It was in an exchange of
verses between them when she had been for twenty years his closest
friend. His verses showed how little time had taken from her lustre in
his eyes. He had never “admitted love a guest,” but he could imagine
nothing beyond what he had had from their friendship.
“_In all the habitudes of life,
The friend, the mistress, and the wife,
Variety we still pursue,
In pleasure seek for something new;
Or else, comparing with the rest,
Take comfort that our own is best....
But his pursuits are at an end
Whom Stella chooses for a friend._”
And Stella, with verses of her own on Swift’s birthday, answered him in
kind. It was “your pupil and your humble friend” who congratulated him.
The sum of her praise was that he had taught her to value her mind more
than her person.
“_When men began to call me fair,
You interposed your timely care.
You early taught me to despise
The ogling of a coxcomb’s eyes;
Showed where my judgment was misplaced;
Refined my fancy and my taste._”
Now, Stella gratefully assured him, she had a better fate than that of
women “with no endowments but a face.”
“_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._”
Yet in this reasonable tribute Stella let her rhyme coax her into
a favourable prevarication. She was not thirty-six, but forty. She
would still give herself a slight advantage when she pronounced her
judgment on the frailty of beauty, which she had to endure, Swift only
to observe. He had been, as she said, her early and her only guide.
After so many years her verses and her words were, as much as her
handwriting, like his. But with a betraying phrase she could still show
a tenderness for that person which her philosopher had taught her to
value less than her mind.
3
The conquest of Stella, absolute and lasting, gave Swift his only
relief from his ambition. His outward life during these ten years in
Ireland need not have been hateful to him if his pride had left him
free to enjoy it. The income from his livings was perhaps not much over
two hundred pounds a year, but it enabled him to rebuild the vicarage
at Laracor and to lay out a garden. He had a stream straightened to
resemble a canal and a willow-walk where he might remember Moor Park
as Temple had remembered Holland. The parish duties were so slight
that Swift could consider Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan as hardly
more than sinecures, of which he took the pay and left the work to
deputies. In Dublin, where besides being a prebendary of the Cathedral
he was, after Berkeley’s recall, chaplain to the Duke of Ormond and
the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Lieutenants, Swift was domestically allied
with the rulers of the kingdom. Moreover, he was only once long out of
England. He travelled back and forth over the anxious bridge of his
expectations. In London he published the letters, essays, and memoirs
which Temple had left to him. And there he soon took a commanding
though scornful rank among the wits he ridiculed.
Swift always valued conversation, “so useful and innocent a pleasure,
so fitted for every period and condition of life, and so much in all
men’s power.” He went to such coffee houses as the Whig St. James’s and
the more neutral Will’s. But he never thought of himself as belonging
with the general army of the wits. “The worst conversation I ever
remember to have heard in my life,” he said, “was that at Will’s coffee
house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble.
That is to say, five or six men who had writ plays, or at least
prologues, or had share in a miscellany, came thither and entertained
one another with their trifling composures, in so important an air
as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature or that the
fate of kingdoms depended on them. And they were usually attended
with an humble audience of young students from the inns of court or
the universities, who, at due distance, listened to these oracles and
returned home with great contempt for their law and philosophy, their
heads filled with trash, under the name of politeness, criticism, and
belles lettres.”
If now and then Swift unbent his powers and talked in clubs, played at
cold hoaxes, or wrote verse, no longer Pindaric, it was in the mood of
idleness which had formerly turned him to flirtations. His successes
came not from the pains he took but from the natural skill of his
strong mind set to work at trifles. He moved among the wits proudly,
somewhat gigantic, somewhat ominous.
His interests were in public affairs, in the government of the realm,
in the whole behaviour of mankind. He began to write about politics
while he was still chaplain to Berkeley. The Lords and Commons were in
abusive conflict. Large tracts of land in Ireland having been forfeited
to the Crown after the Revolution, the King had made grants of it to
his favourites and to a former mistress. In 1700 the Commons had voted
to annul these grants and to make other grants to other favourites.
The Lords had resisted, but had finally given way. Lord Somers, the
Whig leader of the Ministry, had been so displeasing to the Commons
that the King had forced him to resign. The majority in the Parliament
of 1701 was Tory, as was the Ministry. The Tories, blaming William
and his Whig advisers for their foreign policy, impeached Somers,
Portland, Orford, and Halifax (lately Addison’s Charles Montague). The
Lords supported the impeached peers. Swift, returning with Berkeley
to England in April, saw in the conflict a danger to the state, and
undertook a warning. He was still so near Moor Park that he came only
slyly into the open in his discourse, full of modern parallels, on the
dissensions between the nobles and commons in Athens and Rome.
But he wrote less like a philosopher than like a governor, contemptuous
of political metaphysics. No doubt there ought to be a proper balance
of power among the forces in a state; “although I should think
that the saying _vox populi vox dei_ ought to be understood of the
universal bent and current of a people, not of the bare majority of a
few representatives, which is often procured by little arts and great
industry and application; wherein those who engage in the pursuits of
malice and revenge are much more sedulous than such as would prevent
them.” How the universal bent and current of a people was to be
recognized and encouraged Swift did not make plain. “Some physicians
have thought that if it were practicable to keep the several humours
of the body in an exact and equal balance of each with the opposite,
it might be immortal; and so perhaps would a political body if the
balance of power could be always held exactly even. But, I doubt, this
is as impossible in practice as the other.”
In practice he found the populace always greedy and slippery. “When
a child grows easy and content by being humoured; and when a lover
becomes satisfied by small compliances, without farther pursuits; then
expect to find popular assemblies content with small concessions.” “I
think it is an universal truth that the people are much more dexterous
at pulling down and setting up than at preserving what is fixed; and
they are not fonder of seizing more than their own than they are of
delivering it up again to the worst bidder, with their own into the
bargain. For, although in their corrupt notions of divine worship they
are apt to multiply their gods, yet their earthly devotion is seldom
paid to above one idol at a time, of their own creation; whose oar they
pull with less murmuring, and much more skill, than when they share the
lading or even hold the helm.”
There was, Swift thought, no mysterious virtue in any gathering of
men. “It is hard to recollect one folly, infirmity, or vice to which
a single man is subjected and from which a body of commons, either
collective or represented, can be wholly exempt. For, beside that they
are composed of men with all their infirmities about them, they have
also the ill fortune to be generally led and influenced by the very
worst among themselves, I mean popular orators, tribunes, or, as they
are now styled, great speakers, leading men, and the like. Whence it
comes to pass that in their results we have sometimes found the same
spirit of cruelty and revenge, of malice and pride, the same blindness
and obstinacy and unsteadiness, the same ungovernable rage and anger,
the same injustice, sophistry, and fraud that ever lodged in the breast
of any individual.”
The evil to be avoided, Swift held, was the tyranny equally of the one,
of the few, or of the many. But when the many are tyrants the tyranny
of the one is not far off. “A usurping populace is its own dupe, a
mere underworker, and a purchaser in trust for some single tyrant
whose state and power they advance to their own ruin, with as blind an
instinct as those worms that die with weaving magnificent habits for
beings of a superior nature to their own.”
Any governor, reading Swift’s discourse, must have felt behind it a
congenial mind and will. Swift might dread the tyranny of a king. He
might even, as he later wrote, “prefer a well-instituted commonwealth
before a monarchy.” But what he really dreaded was disorder. “If,” he
said, “I should insist upon liberty of conscience, form conventicles of
republicans, and print books preferring that government and condemning
what is established, the magistrate would, with great justice, hang me
and my disciples.” Better the certain magistrate than the uncertain
mob. Swift was no less on the side of power because he wanted power
himself. He regarded the demand for popular rights as a king might
regard it: that is, as a mode of usurpation. He regarded the prospect
of revolution as a general might regard it: that is, as a threat of
mutiny. Let theorists be hanged. Though the end of government was
liberty, the way to it did not lead through unrest. Unrest was itself
the tyranny of the many, and it might at any time become the tyranny of
the one. Liberty lay between these extremes. Mankind, unless it gave
itself to dictatorship or to confusion, had to be governed by the few.
Not, however, by the casual few of birth or wealth. By the chosen few
of knowledge, skill, and virtue. Swift did not say, at first or ever,
how these few were to be chosen. Like all the men, in all the ages, who
have held to this appealing doctrine, he assumed that the choice of
governors ought to be as natural as it was logical. And, like most of
them, he assumed that he belonged among the governors.