of touch with Irish affairs, as well as out of sympathy. London had
run him into debt. As dean and vicar he was to have about six or seven
hundred pounds a year when he could get them: an income which made him,
he said, the poorest man in Ireland who dined off plate and the richest
who did not drive his carriage. But the installation at St. Patrick’s
cost a thousand pounds and several stringent years. The Whigs suspected
Swift, like the late ministers, of disloyalty to George I. The
suspicion was absurd. “I look upon the coming of the Pretender,” Swift
said, “as a greater evil than any we are likely to suffer under the
worst Whig ministry that can be found.” Yet when Oxford, Bolingbroke,
and Ormond--“three persons from among the rest of mankind on whose
friendship and protection I might depend, whose conversation I most
valued and chiefly confined myself to”--were charged with the treason
of plotting to bring the Pretender in, when Ormond and Bolingbroke
escaped to France and Oxford went to the Tower, Swift shared their
odium.
The authorities, intercepting letters sent to him, had a chance to
read nothing more treasonable than these words from Ormond: “We have
no new favourite, nor never can. You have left so sweet a relish
by your conversation upon all our pleasures that we cannot bear the
thoughts of intimacy with any person.” With the wives of Bolingbroke
and Ormond Swift carried on a guarded correspondence. To Oxford, in
the Tower, he wrote without reserve, making him “the humblest offers
of my poor service and attendance”--attendance, that is, in prison if
Oxford would permit it. “It is the first time I ever solicited you in
my own behalf, and if I am refused I think it will be the first request
you ever refused me. I do not conceive myself obliged to regulate
my opinions by the proceedings of a House of Lords or Commons; and
therefore, however they may acquit themselves in your Lordship’s case,
I shall take the liberty of thinking and calling you the ablest and
faithfulest minister, the truest lover of your country, that this age
hath produced.” Oxford’s son kept the letter “as a family monument.”
Oxford himself acknowledged it two years later.
While the Jacobite odium hung over Swift he declared, not quite in
earnest, that he would hide himself away in Guernsey or Wales for the
rest of his life. The world was too hateful to live in. Yet what most
distressed him was his grief over the friends with whom he could no
longer be “familiar and customary.” “When I leave a country without
a probability of returning,” he wrote to Pope, “I think as seldom as
I can of what I loved or esteemed in it, to avoid the _desiderium_
which of all things makes life most uneasy.” And to Arbuthnot he wrote:
“Writing to you would make me stark mad. Judge his condition who has
nothing to keep him from being miserable but endeavouring to forget
those for whom he has the greatest value, love, and friendship.”
His friends would not let him sink into such a gulf. “Never,” Arbuthnot
answered him, “repeat that melancholy, tender word, that you will
endeavour to forget me. I am sure I never can forget you till I meet
with, what is impossible, another whose conversation I can delight
so much in as Dr. Swift’s.... That hearty, sincere friendship, that
plain and open ingenuity in all your commerce, is what I am sure I can
never find in another man. I shall want often a faithful monitor, one
that would vindicate me behind my back and tell me my faults to my
face.” Pope wrote to him of “the constant esteem and affection I am
both obliged and inclined to have for you,” and said he regarded him
“as a friend in another world,” much as he regarded his patron saint.
Bolingbroke wrote that for a half hour’s conversation with Swift he
would “barter whole hours of life.” For a year or more Swift could
hardly bring himself to reply. Then, however, the rigour of his despair
began to leave him, his wit to come out of the lair where it had sulked.
To Pope, in 1716, Swift pointed out the use of fools, who, in his
opinion, were “as necessary for a good writer as pen, ink, and paper.”
He could take enough interest in wit to propose to Gay the subject of
another pastoral. “What think you of a Newgate pastoral, among the
whores and thieves there?” In 1717 he wrote once more to Addison,
now Secretary of State, congratulating Addison upon his post and the
Whigs for having chosen one man on his merits. In 1718 Swift wrote to
Oxford’s son that time had sweetened him. “My servants tell all our
neighbourhood that I grow gentler every day, and am content only to
call my footman a fool for that which when you knew me first I would
have broke his head.” And in December 1719 Swift wrote to Bolingbroke a
letter in which his humour played again over his passion.
“I can now express in a hundred words what would formerly have cost me
ten. I can write epigrams of fifty distichs which might be squeezed
into one. I have gone the round of all my stories three or four times
with the younger people, and begin them again. I give hints how
significant a person I have been, and nobody believes me. I pretend
to pity them, but am inwardly angry.... If I boast of having been
valued three hundred miles off, it is of no more use than if I told
how handsome I was when I was young.... If I can prevail on any one
to personate a hearer and admirer, you would wonder what a favourite
he grows. He is sure to have the first glass out of the bottle and
the best bit I can carve. Nothing has convinced me so much that I
am of a little subaltern spirit, _inopis atque pusilli animi_, as to
reflect how I am forced into the most trifling amusements to divert the
vexation of former thoughts and present objects.”
In another man this might have sounded like humility. In Swift it has,
somehow, the imagined sound of a searchlight falling into a dark corner.
He was now almost Swift again. Looking back over his career as a wit
he wrote an ironic letter of advice to a young poet, assuring him that
poetry did not demand religion or learning or even sense of those who
practised it. Ireland, he argued, must have a Grub Street. Ireland must
have a poet laureate, a professor of poetry, a city bard for Dublin, a
poet in fee for every parish. It might have more. “What if every one so
qualified were obliged to add one more than usual to the number of his
domestics, and besides a fool and a chaplain (which are often united
in one person) would retain a poet in his family?” Looking back over
his career as a parson Swift wrote a sober letter of advice to a young
clergyman. To him, not to the poet, Swift said that “proper words in
proper places make the true definition of a style.”
Both these letters dealt with what for Swift was play. He resumed his
work in a pamphlet urging all the Irish, as a protest against the
ruinous export laws, to make a “universal use of Irish manufacture,”
“utterly rejecting and renouncing everything wearable that comes from
England.” Officials fumed. He was, they claimed, trying to divide the
two kingdoms. The printer was brought to trial. When the jury acquitted
him the Lord Chief Justice sent them back nine times, till they were
willing to leave the verdict to the mercy of the judge. Though the
case was dropped when the next Lord Lieutenant came over, the damage
was done. Swift, having once more tasted Whig blood, was on his way to
becoming an Irish patriot.
2
But before he gathered all his forces he had to go through his final
conflict with Stella’s rival. The drama reaching its climax was already
much too long.
He had met Vanessa (Esther Vanhomrigh) early in 1708 in London, where
her mother was living with her children. It pleased the mother to
call the daughter younger than she was, and it did not displease
the daughter. She was a sleepy girl, still, at twenty, undecided
between the nursery and the drawing-room, moody, idle, intelligent.
Swift, at first considering her a child, discovered in her a mind,
and was irresistibly, humorously impelled to shape it. “She had good
principles,” he wrote three years later, “and I have corrected all
her faults.” She had, however, the passion of sleepy women, not the
obedience of Stella.
To that passion Swift was blind, first carelessly, then deliberately.
No doubt he felt it. He had put his entire energy into his pride. His
senses, no matter how cold towards women, must have learned that the
relationship with Stella, no matter how close and kind, was sometimes
dry and mild. She was nearly a wife, and some routine had got into
their companionship. Vanessa was younger. Vanessa was new. Swift, for
all his prudence, enjoyed the tumult in her disposition. Because he
held her, as he seems always to have done, at a safe arm’s-length, he
was obtuse to her eagerness. Obtuse and insufficiently concerned. Being
forty, he could not quite resist such warmth from a girl, did not have
quite the courage to put out such a fire or leave it. Too scrupulous
or too temperate to make the full use of Vanessa’s passion, he went on
idling within its perilous range. He was surprised when he found that
he had on his hands a mistress as extraordinary as the wife he had in
Ireland.
Stella the extraordinary wife. Vanessa the extraordinary mistress.
Swift the extraordinary husband and lover. No other terms will bound
the extraordinary triangle. Gossip then and gossip since has wasted its
strength in trying to find out whether Swift was technically lover or
husband to either of the women. What if he was? What if he was not? The
drama remains the same.
Stella was for nearly forty years, child and woman, “the truest, most
virtuous and valuable friend that I,” Swift said, “or perhaps any
other person, ever was blessed with.” Call Stella his wife or be
pedantic. Vanessa was for fifteen years his occasional companion, his
delight, his torment, to whom he wrote--in bad French--that there was
no merit nor any proof of his good taste in his finding in her all that
nature had given any mortal in the way of honour, virtue, sense, wit,
tenderness, agreeableness, and firmness of spirit. Call Vanessa his
mistress or be pedantic. One side of Swift looked towards a wife, one
towards a mistress. He maintained between them a singular course, but
it was no more singular than his character. He was, after all, only one
man loved by two women.
The friendship begun in 1708 between Swift and Vanessa, anxious to be
possessed but willing to be taught, was kept up during that stay in
England and, by letters, during his next absence in Ireland. When he
returned to become a Tory in 1710 he had so lavish a welcome from the
Vanhomrighs that their house became almost his. He lived near them,
dined with them often and then more often, and had a small room there
in which to read and write.
Stella, hearing about them, seems to have sniffed. “You say they are
of no consequence,” he answered her. “Why, they keep as good female
company as I do male. I see all the drabs of quality at this end of the
town with them.” He spoke in his journal rather of the mother or of the
whole family than of Vanessa.
When, having taken to Chelsea in the spring of 1711, he walked more
or less daily to London and back, he kept his best gown and periwig at
the Vanhomrigh house, and called twice a day to change. Vanessa, with
the family, possibly visited him in Chelsea, as she probably did at
Kensington in the summer of the year after. The Vanhomrighs certainly
visited Swift at Windsor in September 1712, and Vanessa was on some
score disappointed. “Why then,” he wrote, “you should not have come,
and I knew that as well as you.”
So far any strong feelings there may have been in either of them had
not risen into words. He teased her for her dawdling, for her chiding,
for her jealousy of her younger sister, for her habit of coaxing him
for political secrets. She complained, rather childishly, of his
neglect of her when he was out of London. Their letters might have been
between Swift and any young woman of his acquaintance.
But when he went to Ireland in June 1713, sick of England, Vanessa
could not endure the stern break which suited him. The four letters
she wrote before she got an answer were disconsolate. “I find no
conversation on earth comparable but yours.” She had heard of his
illness. “Oh! what would I give to know how you do at this instant.
My fortune is too hard. Your absence was enough, without this cruel
addition.” “How could you be so cruel, to defer telling me the thing
of the world I wished most to know? If you think I write too much,
your only way is to tell me so, or at least to write to me again,
that I may know you don’t quite forget me; for I very much fear that
I never employ a thought of yours now, except when you are reading my
letters, which makes me ply you with them.... If you are very happy it
is ill-natured of you not to tell me, except ’tis what is inconsistent
with mine.”
Swift could not mistake this last clause. In seven words Vanessa made
plain that she was wondering whether he could be happy without her,
asking whether he was by any dreadful chance happy with some one else,
announcing that she thought of him and her as having their happiness in
common. His answer put cold oceans between them.
“I had your last spleenatic letter. I told you when I left England I
would endeavour to forget everything there, and would write as seldom
as I could. I did indeed design one general round of letters to my
friends, but my health has not yet suffered me. I design to pass the
greatest part of the time I stay in Ireland here in the cabin where I
am now writing; neither will I leave the kingdom till I am called for;
and if they have no further service for me I will never see England
again. At my first coming I thought I should have died with discontent,
and was horribly melancholy while they were installing me. But it
begins to wear off and change to dulness. My river walk is extremely
pretty, and my canal in great beauty, and I see trouts playing in it.”
Her ardour, that is, he saw as spleen. He meant to forget her along
with all the others. If he were to go back it would be to politics. He
was dull but not melancholy. Vanessa would be glad to know that there
were fish in his canal.
Politics called Swift back in September, to London and to Vanessa.
There are no letters belonging to that winter, but there is the poem,
apparently written then, in which Swift told the story of Cadenus (that
is _Decanus_, dean) and Vanessa.
He began lightly, with the graces of a contemporary wit. The shepherds
and the nymphs, he said, had gone to law before the court of Venus,
the nymphs accusing the shepherds of resisting love, the shepherds
defending themselves by the counter-accusation that, thanks to the
nymphs, “modern love” was no longer
“_A fire celestial, chaste, refined,
Conceived and kindled in the mind,_”
but had become a “gross desire,” moving through caprice and folly.
Venus, unable to decide the suit, had undertaken an experiment, and
had endowed Vanessa, happily new-born, with all the virtues which the
Queen of Love--or Swift--thought most “lovely in the female kind”: “a
sweetness above all perfumes,” a cleanliness “incapable of outward
stains,” a mind as modest as “the speech of prudes,” and a “gentle,
soft, engaging air.” Not yet satisfied, Venus had fooled Pallas into
thinking that the baby was a boy, and had obtained for her the other
virtues “for manly bosoms chiefly fit”: “knowledge, judgment, wit,”
“justice, truth, and fortitude,” “honour which no breath can stain,”
“open heart and bounteous hand,” and, since “meat must be with money
bought,” as Pallas knew, “some small regard for state and wealth” and a
useful fortune of five thousand pounds.
The romantic Venus, when all this was done, had looked for the
restoration of her power. The realistic Pallas--
“_For how can heavenly wisdom prove
An instrument to earthly love?_”--
had, though enraged by the deceit, left “all things to their natural
course.” And Pallas was justified. The beaux, when Vanessa came to
town, listened to her hermaphroditic discourses--
“_Through nature and through art she ranged,
And gracefully her subject changed_”--
and thought her tiresome. The belles, disgusted by her lack of interest
in clothes and gossip, thought her old-fashioned.
“_To copy her few nymphs aspired;
Her virtues fewer swains admired._”
Vanessa hardened her heart and turned her back on the world.
Was the actual Vanessa, when she had read this far, pleased with the
figure she cut in the fable? Or did the actual Cadenus, if he read it
to her, notice that she twisted in her chair?
The verses went on. Cupid, zealous for his mother’s credit, resolved
to conquer the adamant Vanessa. At first he wasted shaft after shaft.
Cadenus, the girl’s tutor, protected her by “placing still some book
betwixt” her and the mischievous god. Cupid saw he must include the
tutor in his revenge. At a time when Cadenus--
“_Grown old in politics and wit,
Caressed by ministers of state,
Of half mankind the dread and hate_”--
was reading to her, on her demand, from his “poetic works,” Cupid shot
a dart of such length that it pierced the volume and, carrying with
it “some lines more moving than the rest,” reached Vanessa’s heart.
Unlucky Vanessa.
“_Cadenus, common forms apart,
In every scene had kept his heart,
Had sighed and languished, vowed and writ,
For pastime, or to shew his wit,
But books and time and state affairs
Had spoiled his fashionable airs.
He now could praise, esteem, approve,
But understood not what was love.
His conduct might have made him styled
A father, and the nymph his child.
That innocent delight he took
To see the virgin mind her book
Was but the master’s secret joy
In school to hear the finest boy._”
Not having seen the malevolent arrow, he was amazed at the sudden
change in his pupil. She seemed to listen more than ever but she could
not keep her mind on what he said. Modestly he conjectured that he
had bored her with studies too grave for her “tender sex and age.” He
should have known better. “Nature must be nature still.” If she would
excuse him, he would take his leave. But Vanessa, it soon appeared, had
learned what he had taught her.
“_Now, said the nymph, to let you see
My actions with your rules agree,
That I can vulgar forms despise,
And have no secrets to disguise ...
Your lessons found the weakest part,
Aimed at the head but reached the heart._”
Cadenus was overwhelmed with “shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise.”
He could not doubt her words, but he thought he must pretend to, out of
policy. The difference in their ages was too great. Love between them
would be a scandal. He told her she must not seem so tragic when, as he
knew, she was only joking.
Vanessa was too good a disputant to be put off. Reason, she insisted,
was her guide in love. In loving him she was only loving the virtues
and merits which she had observed in him and had made her own. Her love
was as strong as self-love, for it was that. She had seen him full of
“love, esteem, and awe” for dead geniuses. Surely he would have felt
the same emotions if he had lived when they did. Then consider her
case. She lived in the same age with a great genius. It was as much her
duty as her instinct to adore him.
“_Cadenus answers every end,
The book, the author, and the friend.
The utmost her desires will reach
Is but to learn what he can teach.
His converse is a system fit
Alone to fill up all her wit,
While every passion of her mind
In him is centred and confined._”
In that flood of reasons Cadenus wavered. They were his own reasons,
thrown back at him with his skill. He could not think them bad reasons.
He was proud of his pupil for her eloquence. His pride, called up
by her, stayed to caress him. If he had been preferred to all the
“colonels, lords, and beaux” by “so bright a nymph” whom he had never
thought of courting, he must have the qualities which she saw in him.
“_’Tis an old maxim in the schools
That flattery’s the food of fools,
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit._”
Cadenus could not withstand her tribute. Love, of course, was out of
the question.
“_Love why do we one passion call
When ’tis a compound of them all?
Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet,
In all their equipages meet,
Where pleasure mixed with pains appear,
Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear,
Wherein his dignity and age
Forbid Cadenus to engage._”
But he could offer friendship, “a constant, rational delight,” which
was rooted in virtue and so could last, as shifting love could not.
“Gratitude, respect, esteem”: those she could have to make up for his
want of passion. He talked high about friendship.
Vanessa brought him down. If he was to give her “devotion, duty, and
respect,” their rôles would be changed. She would, however, take him
at his word. He could be pupil and she be tutor, though she could see
already that he would have a hard time with the science she had in
mind for him. Any fool knew more than Cadenus about love.
The actual Vanessa, reading or listening, must have nodded, not with
sleep. Did she stamp when the poem broke off?
“_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._”
Did the reader or the listener follow the last lines of the fable,
in which, with another flourish of contemporary grace, Venus decided
against the shepherds, said her experiment had failed, left the world
in the hands of her son, “harnessed her doves, and flew to heaven”?
The tragedy of Vanessa was that Swift saw their drama as a comedy.
Experience had fortified him against this scene. With Stella--
“_When men began to call me fair
You interposed your timely care_”--
Swift had already played Cadenus. If his temper had ever inclined him
to love, or if his years had left him more audacity, or if he had
been less absorbed in the great campaign of his pride, he might have
responded to Vanessa--or if, of course, he had felt for her that kind
of passion which makes the sun, or the moon, of a fresh love seem to
shine on an earth just created. He met none of these conditions. He
had an impulse to regulate her mind, but not to possess her person. He
even believed that the desire he had was more important than the one
he lacked. Cold towards Vanessa as flesh and blood, he was warm only
towards the idea of being loved by her.
It was his pride which glowed. If, at the declaration, he had either
loved or hated Vanessa he would have known what to do. He would
have taken her or he would have gone from her, in the storm of any
consequences. As it was, he let his pride seduce him as she could not.
Its device was simple. It argued with him, as no doubt Vanessa did,
that her fiery need of him obliged him to be kind. He hesitated. She
was quick to snatch at her advantage. Give her the present, and she
would not worry about the future. Give her what he could give, and she
would not ask for more. These were promises which no shrewd man would
have trusted. He would have seen through them to what lay behind: the
hope that if he could be held he could be won: the assurance that
any kindness he might show would be more than kindness, would be the
selfishness which she longed to find in him. Swift was not shrewd.
Moved if not convinced, he agreed to do what he could to please her,
not realizing how much it was to indulge himself.
Then, almost as if to clear himself of a last annoying suspicion, he
told the story of Cadenus and Vanessa in the bold but humorous light in
which he saw it. Such lucidity as his would have overpowered a stronger
woman than Vanessa. Whether his version was at all points accurate or
not, she had to fall into the place which his comedy had assigned her.
But she could struggle. The rest of her life was largely taken up by
her efforts to get out of the poem and nearer to the poet. Swift,
having made the blunder of undertaking to meet love with kindness,
could never undo it. Vanessa pursued him like the ghost of his
blunder. In August 1714, when he had sullenly retired to Berkshire,
she surprised him with a visit. “You should not have come by Wantage
for a thousand pound. You used to brag you were very discreet. Where
is it gone?” As soon as he had settled in Ireland, Vanessa followed.
Her mother, having died, had left the daughters something of a fortune,
including a handsome house at Celbridge eleven miles out of Dublin.
From her house in the country or from occasional lodgings in town
Vanessa implored him.