what I did or advise me what to do, which banished all my uneasiness.
But now, when my misfortunes are increased by being in a disagreeable
place, amongst strange, prying, deceitful people, whose company is so
far from an amusement that it is a very great punishment, you fly me,
and give me no reason but that we are amongst fools and must submit. I
am very well satisfied that we are amongst such, but know no reason for
having my happiness sacrificed to their caprice. You once had a maxim,
which was to act what was right and not mind what the world said. I
wish you would keep to it now. Pray what can be wrong in seeing and
advising an unhappy young woman? I can’t imagine. You can’t but know
that your frowns make my life insupportable. You have taught me to
distinguish and then you leave me miserable.”
Swift answered only that he had “ever feared the tattle of this nasty
town, and told you so.” He begged her to be easy if he saw her still
less often. “These are accidents in life that are necessary and must be
submitted to.”
Vanessa was not so frantic that she could mistake disinclination for
discretion. “You bid me be easy, and you’d see me as often as you
could. You had better said as often as you could get the better of your
inclinations so much, or as often as you remembered that there was such
a one in the world. If you continue to treat me as you do you will not
be made uneasy by me long. ’Tis impossible to describe what I have
suffered since I saw you last. I am sure I could have bore the rack
better than those killing, killing words of yours. Sometimes I have
resolved to die without seeing you more; but those resolves, to your
misfortune, did not last long.... The reason I write to you is because
I cannot tell it you, should I see you. For when I begin to complain,
then you are angry, and there is something in your look so awful that
it strikes me dumb.... I say as little as ever I can. Did you but know
what I thought I am sure it would move you. Forgive me, and believe I
cannot help telling you this and live.”
There are ways to get rid of importunate Vanessas, but they are ways
unknown to men who can try to be kind to women desperately in love
with them. Swift, with his variations of temper, was the worst man in
the world for this Vanessa. In one letter he could write: “A fig for
your letters and messages”; and in another: “I cannot see you, I fear,
today, having affairs of my place to do; but pray think it not want of
friendship or tenderness, which I will always continue to the utmost.”
Vanessa, prying into every sentence to see what might be hidden in it,
turning every word over and over with a lover’s feverish research,
could arrive at the security neither of hope nor of despair.
The affair dragged on, irresistible passion matched with immovable
affection. Swift was Dean of St. Patrick’s, known to be the friend, and
by some gossips thought to be the husband, of Stella, who, though she
did not live at the deanery, was the centre of such life as it had. He
refused to give the world the least excuse for regarding Vanessa as
his mistress. He smothered her with discretion, hating it yet unable
to take a final stand at one extremity or another. When he had snubbed
her long enough to put an end to any ordinary suit, he would turn kind,
would insist upon his esteem and admiration, and so would once more
rouse her. He could or would not learn that her love and his kindness
were oil and water.
During the half-dozen dark years after he left the Court for Ireland
he perversely relished the secret drama, whatever form it took, and
let himself be drawn into various cautious meetings with Vanessa.
When, towards the end of that eclipse, he began to be more thoroughly
himself, he became less cautious. His whole nature, as if by some
rejuvenation, expanded. He took up the cause of Ireland against the
Whigs. He wrote verses, tender, intimate, teasing, to Stella. As if he
thought the conflict between him and Vanessa was settled, he tried to
get back to the old footing.
Instantly her desire flared up. “I here tell you,” she wrote to him,
“that I have determined to try all manner of human arts to reclaim
you.” He did what he could to laugh off her seriousness, even to
praising the art with which she wrote. Nothing would now quiet her. His
least kindness intoxicated her. When he told her to use assumed names
in her letters, which he was afraid might be opened, and dashes for
“everything that may be said to Cad---- at beginning or conclusion,”
she was suddenly in raptures over sharing secrets with him. “---- ----
---- ---- Cad----, you are good beyond expression, and I will never
quarrel again if I can help it.” Swift did not take warning.
“What would you give,” he asked her in August 1720, “to have the
history of Cad---- and ---- exactly written, through all its steps,
from the beginning to this time? I believe it would do well in verse,
and be as long as the other. I hope it will be done. It ought to be an
exact chronicle of twelve years, from the time of spilling the coffee
to drinking of coffee, from Dunstable to Dublin, with every single
passage since. There would be the chapter of the blister; the chapter
of Madam going to Kensington; the chapter of the Colonel’s going to
France; the chapter of the wedding, with the adventure of the lost key;
of the strain; of the joyful return; two hundred chapters of madness;
the chapter of long walks; the Berkshire surprise; fifty chapters
of little times; the chapter of Chelsea; the chapter of swallow and
cluster; a hundred whole books of myself and so low; the chapter of
hide and whisper; the chapter of Who made it so? My sister’s money.”
Vanessa, answering that “it would be too much once to hope for such a
history,” asked him “did those circumstances crowd on you, or did you
recollect them to make me happy?” But, though she might suspect that
he had meant to please her, she could not help exulting that he had
remembered. She was not sure friendship had such a memory. She knew
love had.
Swift had suggested that he might, for the first time, visit her at
Celbridge. “Is it possible you will come and see me? I beg for God sake
you will.” He did visit her. Back in Dublin he advised her to take more
exercise, be cheerful, “read pleasant things that will make you laugh,
and not sit moping with your elbows on your knees on a little stool by
the fire.”
Vanessa was out of hand. “I ... here declare that ’tis not in the power
of art, time, or accident to lessen the unexpressible passion which
I have for -- -- --. Put my passion under the utmost restraint, send
me as distant from you as the earth will allow, yet you cannot banish
those charming ideas which will ever stick by me whilst I have the use
of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul, for there
is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it.... For
heaven’s sake tell me what has caused this prodigious change in you
which I have found of late. If you have the least remains of pity for
me left, tell me tenderly. No, don’t tell it so that it may cause my
present death; and don’t suffer me to lead a life like a languishing
death, which is the only life I can lead if you have lost any of your
tenderness for me.”
Swift did not reply. The death of Vanessa’s sister revived the
correspondence, which went on with the same disparity. “The worst
thing in you and me,” he wrote, “is that we are too hard to please,
and whether we have not made ourselves is the question.... We differ
prodigiously in one point: I fly from the spleen to the world’s end,
you run out of your way to meet it.” He urged her--Swift of all men--to
accept what came and be pleased with it. She did her best to be the
kind of philosopher he specified, but “I find the more I think the more
unhappy I am.”
In his last surviving letter to her he reminded her of the pleasant
episodes “of Windsor, Cleveland Row, Ryder Street, St. James’s,
Kensington, the Sluttery, the Colonel in France.... Cad thinks often of
these, especially on horseback, as I am assured. What a foolish thing
is time, and how foolish is man who would be as angry if time stopped
as if it passed.” This was in August 1722. Vanessa died in June 1723.
The end of the story is all gossip. It says that Vanessa, unable to
endure her jealousy, wrote to Swift, or to Stella, asking if it were
true that Stella was Swift’s wife. It says in one account that Stella
answered that she was, in another that she sent the letter to Swift to
answer. It says that Swift took the letter from Vanessa to Stella, or
to him, and with it rode savagely to Celbridge, entered the room where
Vanessa was, threw down the letter, gave Vanessa a look which for the
last time struck her dumb and, without one of his “killing, killing
words,” left the house. It says that Vanessa thereupon changed her
will, leaving her fortune to strangers, not to Swift, and died.
All gossip, any of it true, or none. Vanessa did leave her fortune to
strangers and did not mention Swift among the friends to whom she gave
small legacies to buy mourning rings. Something had parted Cadenus and
Vanessa before she died. The parting was natural, but tragically late.
She had loved a man whose thoughts, she said, “no human creature is
capable of guessing at, because never any one living thought like you.”
She had spent her life trying to win him, and he had let her spend it.
Dying, she planned what revenge was left to her, the publication of his
poem about Cadenus and Vanessa and of the letters between them.
When the poem, though not the letters, appeared in 1726 to the comfort
of his enemies, Swift kept silence. It had been, he told a friend, a
“cavalier business,” “a private humoursome thing which by an accident
inevitable and the baseness of particular malice” had been made public.
“I never saw it since I writ it.” He refused to “use shifts or arts”
to justify himself, “let people think of me as they please.... I have
borne a great deal more.” He had gone through what was comedy for
him and tragedy for Vanessa. Others must make up their own minds, if
they had them, about who was to blame, if there must be blame, when a
universal Héloïse encountered a special Abélard.
3
With whatever remorse, with whatever relief, with whatever concern for
scandal, Swift the day after Vanessa’s death left Dublin for the south
of Ireland. Stella and Dingley were to spend the summer in the country
at a friend’s house. About Vanessa, so far as any record shows, Swift
was silent, except to refer in a letter to her “incontinence in keeping
secrets.” And Stella was silent, except to remark, when she heard her
rival praised, that the Dean could write finely about a broomstick. If
there was between Swift and Stella such silence about Vanessa as they
kept towards the world it was a silence beyond conjecture. The facts
are drama enough. Stella went noiselessly in one direction. Swift went
restlessly in another.
By the end of June he had made his way past Cork and had written a
Latin poem on the rocks at Carbery where the ocean tore at the cliffs.
By the beginning of August he had come up the west to Galway, still
a hundred miles from home and “half weary of the four hundred I have
rid.” Late in September he was back in Dublin. Stella returned to town.
Swift greeted her with his old raillery. She had been spoiled, he said,
by the “generous wines and costly cheer” of Wood Park, and tried to ape
them on her income.
“_Thus for a week the farce went on;
When, all her country savings gone,
She fell into her former scene,
Small beer, a herring, and the Dean._”
[Illustration: Esther Johnson (Stella)
_Painted probably after Vanessa’s death_]
It happened that during his absence from Dublin both Pope and
Bolingbroke, and a little later Arbuthnot, took up the correspondence
which they, and Swift more than they, had recently neglected. Fresh
memories of England stirred in him. He exchanged affectionate letters
with the Duchess of Ormond and Lady Masham. He wrote to Oxford
demanding the bribe of a letter and a picture, “for who else knows how
to deliver you down to posterity?” Bolingbroke had written: “I have
vowed to read no history of our own country till that body of it which
you promise to finish appears.” Swift thought often of making himself
the real historiographer of those buried, unforgotten years, in spite
of the dullard who had the title. But he was not yet ready for history.
He was still alive to the events passing under his bitter eyes.
Swift hated Ireland because it was his place of banishment: “the
whole kingdom a bare face of nature, without houses or plantations;
filthy cabins, miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in
human shape; one insolent, ignorant, oppressive squire to be found
in twenty miles riding; a parish church to be found only in a summer
day’s journey, in comparison with which an English farmer’s barn is
a cathedral; a bog of fifteen miles round; every meadow a slough,
and every hill a mixture of rock, heath, and marsh; and every male
and female, from the farmer inclusive to the day-labourer, infallibly
a thief and consequently a beggar, which in this island are terms
convertible.” “The old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins,
and no new ones in their stead.” “The wretched merchants, instead
of being dealers, are dwindled to pedlars and cheats.” As to trade,
“nothing worth mentioning except the linen of the north, a trade
casual, corrupted, and at mercy, and some butter from Cork.” The
ports and harbours were of no more use “than a beautiful prospect to
a man shut up in a dungeon.” Travellers never came to Ireland, since
they might expect to find there nothing but misery and desolation.
Whoever could leave the kingdom left at the first chance and stayed
away till the last excuse. Dublin was a “beggarly city,” one-seventh
of its houses falling in ruins, its populace hungry, idle, dissolute,
dirty, and noisy. Though it was the capital of an ancient kingdom, the
government was wholly in the hands of Englishmen who, blind to every
interest but their own, lived there as little as they could manage.
No theoretical doctrine of liberty moved Swift to take up the Irish
cause. “I do profess without affectation,” he explained to Pope,
“that your kind opinion of me as a patriot, since you call it so, is
what I do not deserve; because what I do is owing to perfect rage and
resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness
about me, among which I am forced to live.”
On the Catholic majority, those “savage old Irish,” he spent little
sympathy. They might be above the vermin of the island but they were
below the voters. He had no patience with the Dissenters. They were
outside the Church and to that extent outside his Ireland. Ireland for
him was the English settled there, the noblemen, the landlords, the
clergy, the lawyers, the merchants. Their ancestors had come to rule
the conquered province. They themselves ought now to rule it. Instead,
they were called Irish, which they were not, and in turn were ruled
by the newest English, a changing garrison of place-men. Men born
in Ireland could not hope for posts at home. They had either to rot
on their estates or to go abroad while their tenants were racked to
support them in a dingy splendour. The Irish Parliament had no power.
The laws, all made in England, condemned Ireland to poverty. Cattle
could not be shipped to England, woollen goods could not be shipped
anywhere. Without a free hand in agriculture, manufacture, or trade,
Ireland from being so long bound was numb or sodden.
Mortified by finding himself in exile among slaves, Swift first
despised them and then hated their tyrants. The tyrants were the Whigs
who had driven him out of power. He could not become a slave. He could
not endure a tyrant. Everything in his nature urged him to rouse the
slaves and resist the tyrants. But he had the advantage, when he turned
his fury loose, of a long experience in hating the party to which his
enemies belonged.
Where his whole cause was so good Swift did not need to be fastidious
about his particular occasion for attack. William Wood, an English
ironmonger, in 1722 obtained a patent from the King to coin halfpence
and farthings for Ireland for fourteen years. The Irish were not agreed
that they needed new copper coins, certainly not to the amount of a
hundred thousand pounds. The Irish were not consulted, nor even the
Lord Lieutenant. Higher interests were involved. The patent had really
been granted to the Duchess of Kendal, the King’s mistress, who sold
it to Wood for ten thousand pounds. Walpole, Lord Treasurer, did not
object. The Duchess had been loyal. The King was grateful. Through the
method of the patent she could be rewarded, not by the King directly
but indirectly by his Irish subjects, who already, if they had known
it, contributed three thousand annually in pensions to the loyal lady.
Since there was some risk, Wood deserved a profit for his trouble. The
necessary copper would cost him sixty thousand pounds. When he had
satisfied the Duchess he would still have thirty thousand, of which
perhaps one-fifth would pay for the coinage and about one-seventh go to
fees required by the patent. As jobs went in the government of Ireland
under Walpole, the profit was not unheard of.
But the failure to consult the Irish had angered them. Their Parliament
protested to the Treasury. Lord Carteret, a friend of Swift and now
Secretary of State, was at odds with Walpole. Walpole, persisting, got
Carteret appointed Lord Lieutenant early in 1724, to get rid of him
in London. By the time he reached Dublin the whole country was in a
passion.
The passion was led and guided by Swift. Walpole’s scheme, shabby,
cynical, insulting, brought the satirist with a roar out of his long
silence. He was as crafty as he was furious. Pretending to be a small
tradesman named Drapier, he addressed, between April and November 1724,
a series of letters to the shopkeepers, tradesmen, farmers, and common
people, to his printer, to the nobility and gentry, to the whole people
of Ireland. He was as furious as he was crafty. Wood was a “single,
diminutive, insignificant mechanic.” He and his agents, trying to
force upon the Irish the coins which the patent did not oblige them to
accept, were “enemies to God and this kingdom.” “I will shoot Mr. Wood
and his deputies through the head, like highwaymen or housebreakers, if
they dare to force one farthing of their coin upon me in the payment
of an hundred pounds. It is no loss of honour to submit to the lion,
but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being
devoured alive by a rat.” “I entreat you, my dear countrymen, not to
be under the least concern upon these and the like rumours, which are
no more than the last howls of a dog dissected alive, as I hope he hath
sufficiently been.”
Swift did not dare to accuse the King, and he only hinted at the
honorarium to the Duchess. It was the ministers who had planned this
contemptuous oppression. It was Wood who was to his own advantage
carrying it out at the expense of Ireland. If Wood’s copper became
current every Irishman who received a coin, even in the smallest
transaction, would get less than he gave, and every Irishman who paid
out a coin would give less than he got. While Wood prospered “we should
live together as merry and sociable as beggars, only with this one
abatement, that we should have neither meat to feed nor manufactures to
clothe us, unless we could be content to prance about in coats of mail
or eat brass as ostriches do iron.”
Swift must have known that his arguments were false, must have known
that the intrinsic value of such small coins did not matter and that
they would be as good as any if they were used. He who gave and he
who got could not be equally losers. But Swift did not boggle over
economic niceties. Here was a principle. To accept the coins would be
to surrender to tyrants and become slaves. As soon as he had stirred
the public to a fear of losing money and had assured them they could
lawfully refuse the new halfpence and farthings, he moved towards a
general position.
“Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England? How
have they forfeited their freedom? Is not their Parliament as fair
a representative of the people as that of England?... Are they not
subjects of the same king? Does not the same sun shine upon them? And
have they not the same God for their protector? Am I a freeman in
England, and do I become a slave in six hours by crossing the channel?”
“I have looked over all the English and Irish statutes without finding
any law that makes Ireland depend upon England any more than England
does upon Ireland. We have indeed obliged ourselves to have the same
king with them, and consequently they are obliged to have the same king
with us. For the law was made by our own ancestors, and our ancestors
then were not such fools (whatever they were in the preceding reign) to
bring themselves under I know not what dependence which is now talked
of without any ground of law, reason, or common sense.” “All government
without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”
“The remedy is wholly in your own hands.... By the laws of God, of
Nature, of nations, and of your own country you are and ought to be as
free a people as your brethren in England.”
No voice like this had ever been raised by an Englishman in Ireland.
All the Irish heard it. Never again were its echoes to be long silent
in that country. “Money,” Swift said, “the great divider of the world,
hath by a strange revolution been the great uniter of a most divided
people.”
On the day Carteret landed in October the fourth and most
thorough-going of the Drapier letters was issued. Hawkers crying it
through the streets met the Lord Lieutenant when he arrived in Dublin.
Much as Carteret admired “that genius which has outshone most of
this age and when you will display it again can convince us that its
lustre and strength are still the same,” he could not, in his station,
overlook the Drapier. He offered a reward of three hundred pounds for
information leading to the discovery of the author within six months.
All Dublin, including the Lord Lieutenant, knew that Swift had written
the dangerous letters. But there was no legal proof, even if there
was anywhere an informer. During the six months Swift dined at the
Castle and entertained Lady Carteret at a party in his garden. When
Carteret heard that Swift had “some thoughts of declaring himself” he
advised against it. Their friendship, however, was not tested to the
utmost. Walpole, seeing that the case was hopeless in such a tumult,
gave it up. The patent was withdrawn in 1725 as an instance of royal
favour and condescension. Wood was compensated with a pension of three
thousand pounds a year for twelve years. Carteret later summed up his
administration: “The people ask me how I governed Ireland. I say that
I pleased Dr. Swift.”
Swift, writing to Oxford’s son, apologized for his mention of the
Irish brawl. “This is just of as much consequence to your Lordship
as the news of a skirmish between two petty states in Greece was to
Alexander while he was conquering Persia, but even a knot of beggars
are of importance among themselves.” Yet Swift was too much a soldier
not to enjoy a battle after a stupid peace. Though there were others in
the field, he unmistakably commanded. The Grand Jury and the Liberty
of St. Patrick’s, that part of Dublin over which he as Dean had civil
jurisdiction, formally resolved against the hated coins, as did the
butchers, the brewers, the newsboys or “flying stationers,” and the
Black Guard. There were broadsheets on every corner, songs in every
tavern, some of them written by Swift, all of them in support of the
Drapier. While the furor lasted no jury would find anything seditious
in any pamphlet or lampoon if Wood were mentioned. After the victory
medals were struck in the Drapier’s honour, shops and taverns were
named for him, women carried handkerchiefs with his picture woven on
them. Something legendary began to enlarge Swift’s fame.
Irishmen who could barely spell out his arguments and knew only by
hearsay that he was a man of learning who had been great in London were
roused to veneration. They had thought of him as one of their rulers
sent from England, yet he had joined their cause against the English.
He was not a tyrant but a patriot. Standing superbly against the dread,
incalculable ministers, he had defended men and women to whom halfpence
and farthings were important. They stood uncovered when he passed in
the streets.