"Those who would grief describe, might come and trace
Its watery footsteps in Dorinda's face.
To see her weep, joy every face forsook,
And grief flung sables on each menial look.
The humble tribe mourned for the quickening soul,
That furnished spirit and motion through the whole."
Isn't that line in which grief is described as putting the menials into a
mourning livery, a fine image? One of the menials wrote it, who did not
like that Temple livery nor those twenty-pound wages. Cannot one fancy
the uncouth young servitor, with downcast eyes, books and papers in hand,
following at his honour's heels in the garden walk; or taking his
honour's orders as he stands by the great chair, where Sir William has
the gout, and his feet all blistered with moxa? When Sir William has the
gout or scolds it must be hard work at the second table; the Irish
secretary owned as much afterwards: and when he came to dinner, how he
must have lashed and growled and torn the household with his gibes and
scorn! What would the steward say about the pride of them Irish
schollards--and this one had got no great credit even at his Irish
college, if the truth were known--and what a contempt his Excellency's
own gentleman must have had for Parson Teague from Dublin. (The valets
and chaplains were always at war. It is hard to say which Swift thought
the more contemptible.) And what must have been the sadness, the sadness
and terror, of the housekeeper's little daughter with the curling black
ringlets and the sweet smiling face, when the secretary who teaches her
to read and write, and whom she loves and references above all
things--above mother, above mild Dorothea, above that tremendous Sir
William in his square-toes-and periwig,--when _Mr. Swift_ comes down from
his master with rage in his heart, and has not a kind word even for
little Hester Johnson?
Perhaps, for the Irish secretary, his Excellency's condescension was even
more cruel than his frowns. Sir William _would_ perpetually quote Latin
and the ancient classics _àpropos_ of his gardens and his Dutch statues
and _plates-bandes_, and talk about Epicurus and Diogenes Laertius,
Julius Caesar, Semiramis, and the gardens of the Hesperides, Maecenas,
Strabo describing Jericho, and the Assyrian kings. _Àpropos_ of beans,
he would mention Pythagoras's precept to abstain from beans, and that
this precept probably meant that wise men should abstain from public
affairs. _He_ is a placid Epicurean; _he_ is a Pythagorean philosopher;
_he_ is a wise man--that is the deduction. Does not Swift think so? One
can imagine the downcast eyes lifted up for a moment, and the flash of
scorn which they emit. Swift's eyes were as azure as the heavens; Pope
says nobly (as everything Pope said and thought of his friend was good
and noble), "His eyes are as azure as the heavens, and have a charming
archness in them." And one person in that household, that pompous,
stately, kindly Moor Park, saw heaven nowhere else.
But the Temple amenities and solemnities did not agree with Swift. He
was half-killed with a surfeit of Shene pippins; and in a garden-seat
which he devised for himself at Moor Park, and where he devoured greedily
the stock of books within his reach, he caught a vertigo and deafness
which punished and tormented him through life. He could not bear the
place or the servitude. Even in that poem of courtly condolence, from
which we have quoted a few lines of mock melancholy, he breaks out of the
funereal procession with a mad shriek, as it were, and rushes away crying
his own grief, cursing his own fate, foreboding madness, and forsaken by
fortune, and even hope.
I don't know anything more melancholy than the letter to Temple, in
which, after having broke from his bondage, the poor wretch crouches
piteously towards his cage again, and deprecates his master's anger. He
asks for testimonials for orders. "The particulars required of me are
what relate to morals and learning; and the reasons of quitting your
honour's family--that is, whether the last was occasioned by any ill
action. They are left entirely to your honour's mercy, though in the
first I think I cannot reproach myself for anything further than for
_infirmities_. This is all I dare at present beg from your honour, under
circumstances of life not worth your regard: what is left me to wish
(next to the health and prosperity of your honour and family) is that
Heaven would one day allow me the opportunity of leaving my
acknowledgments at your feet. I beg my most humble duty and service be
presented to my ladies, your honour's lady and sister."--Can prostration
fall deeper? could a slave bow lower?
Twenty years afterwards Bishop Kennet, describing the same man, says,
"Dr. Swift came into the coffee-house and had a bow from everybody but
me. When I came to the antechamber [at Court] to wait before prayers,
Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business. He was soliciting
the Earl of Arran to speak to his brother, the Duke of Ormond, to get a
place for a clergyman. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake, with
my Lord Treasurer, that he should obtain a salary of 200L. per annum as
member of the English Church at Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq.,
going into the Queen with the red bag, and told him aloud, he had
something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He took out his gold
watch, and telling the time of day, complained that it was very late. A
gentleman said he was too fast. 'How can I help it,' says the Doctor,
'if the courtiers give me a watch that won't go right?' Then he
instructed a young nobleman, that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope
(a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English, for which
he would have them all subscribe: 'For,' says he, 'he shall not begin to
print till I have a thousand guineas for him.' Lord Treasurer, after
leaving the Queen, came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow
him,--both went off just before prayers." There's a little malice in the
Bishop's "just before prayers."
This picture of the great Dean seems a true one, and is harsh, though not
altogether unpleasant. He was doing good, and to deserving men too, in
the midst of these intrigues and triumphs. His journals and a thousand
anecdotes of him relate his kind acts and rough manners. His hand was
constantly stretched out to relieve an honest man--he was cautious about
his money, but ready.--If you were in a strait would you like such a
benefactor? I think I would rather have had a potato and a friendly word
from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea and a
dinner. He insulted a man as he served him, made women cry, guests look
foolish, bullied unlucky friends, and flung his benefactions into poor
men's faces. No; the Dean was no Irishman--no Irishman ever gave but
with a kind word and a kind heart.
It is told, as if it were to Swift's credit, that the Dean of St.
Patrick's performed his family devotions every morning regularly, but
with such secrecy that the guests in his house were never in the least
aware of the ceremony. There was no need surely why a church dignitary
should assemble his family privily in a crypt, and as if he was afraid of
heathen persecution. But I think the world was right, and the bishops
who advised Queen Anne, when they counselled her not to appoint the
author of the "Tale of a Tub" to a bishopric, gave perfectly good advice.
The man who wrote the arguments and illustrations in that wild book,
could not but be aware what must be the sequel of the propositions which
he laid down. The boon companion of Pope and Bolingbroke, who chose
these as the friends of his life, and the recipients of his confidence
and affection, must have heard many an argument, and joined in many a
conversation over Pope's port, or St. John's burgundy, which would not
bear to be repeated at other men's boards.
I know of few things more conclusive as to the sincerity of Swift's
religion than his advice to poor John Gay to turn clergyman, and look out
for a seat on the Bench. Gay, the author of the "Beggar's Opera"--Gay,
the wildest of the wits about town--it was this man that Jonathan Swift
advised to take orders--to invest in a cassock and bands--just as he
advised him to husband his shillings and put his thousand pounds out at
interest. The Queen, and the bishops, and the world, were right in
mistrusting the religion of that man.
I am not here, of course, to speak of any man's religious views, except
in so far as they influence his literary character, his life, his humour.
The most notorious sinners of all those fellow-mortals whom it is our
business to discuss--Harry Fielding and Dick Steele, were especially
loud, and I believe really fervent, in their expressions of belief; they
belaboured freethinkers, and stoned imaginary atheists on all sorts of
occasions, going out of their way to bawl their own creed, and persecute
their neighbour's, and if they sinned and stumbled, as they constantly
did with debt, with drink, with all sorts of bad behaviour, they got upon
their knees and cried "Peccavi" with a most sonorous orthodoxy. Yes;
poor Harry Fielding and poor Dick Steele were trusty and undoubting
Church of England men; they abhorred Popery, Atheism, and wooden shoes,
and idolatries in general; and hiccupped Church and State with fervour.
But Swift? _His_ mind had had a different schooling, and possessed a
very different logical power. _He_ was not bred up in a tipsy
guard-room, and did not learn to reason in a Covent Garden tavern. He
could conduct an argument from beginning to end. He could see forward
with a fatal clearness. In his old age, looking at the "Tale of a Tub,"
when he said, "Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book!" I
think he was admiring not the genius, but the consequences to which the
genius had brought him--a vast genius, a magnificent genius, a genius
wonderfully bright, and dazzling, and strong,--to seize, to know, to see,
to flash upon falsehood and scorch it into perdition, to penetrate into
the hidden motives, and expose the black thoughts of men,--an awful, an
evil spirit.
Ah man! you, educated in Epicurean Temple's library, you whose friends
were Pope and St. John--what made you to swear to fatal vows, and bind
yourself to a life-long hypocrisy before the Heaven which you adored with
such real wonder, humility, and reverence? For Swift was a reverent, was
a pious spirit--for Swift could love and could pray. Through the storms
and tempests of his furious mind, the stars of religion and love break
out in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds
and the maddened hurricane of his life.
It is my belief that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of
his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put
his apostasy out to hire. The paper left behind him, called "Thoughts on
Religion," is merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief. He
says of his sermons that he preached pamphlets: they have scarce a
Christian characteristic; they might be preached from the steps of a
synagogue, or the floor of a mosque, or the box of a coffee-house almost.
There is little or no cant--he is too great and too proud for that; and,
in so far as the badness of his sermons goes, he is honest. But having
put that cassock on, it poisoned him: he was strangled in his bands. He
goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil. Like
Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and
knows that the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a
night, my God, it was! what a lonely rage and long agony--what a vulture
that tore the heart of that giant! It is awful to think of the great
sufferings of this great man. Through life he always seems alone,
somehow. Goethe was so. I can't fancy Shakspeare otherwise. The giants
must live apart. The kings can have no company. But this man suffered
so; and deserved so to suffer. One hardly reads anywhere of such a pain.
The "saeva indignatio" of which he spoke as lacerating his heart, and
which he dares to inscribe on his tombstone--as if the wretch who lay
under that stone waiting God's judgment had a right to be angry,--breaks
out from him in a thousand pages of his writing, and tears and rends him.
Against men in office, he having been overthrown; against men in England,
he having lost his chance of preferment there, the furious exile never
fails to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous "Drapier's
Letters" patriotism? They are masterpieces of dreadful humour and
invective: they are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is
as monstrous and fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the
grievance is so great, but there is his enemy--the assault is wonderful
for its activity and terrible rage. It is Samson, with a bone in his
hand, rushing on his enemies and felling them: one admires not the cause
so much as the strength, the anger, the fury of the champion. As is the
case with madmen, certain subjects provoke him, and awaken his fits of
wrath. Marriage is one of these; in a hundred passages in his writings
he rages against it; rages against children; an object of constant
satire, even more contemptible in his eyes than a lord's chaplain, is a
poor curate with a large family. The idea of this luckless paternity
never fails to bring down from him gibes and foul language. Could Dick
Steele, or Goldsmith, or Fielding, in his most reckless moment of satire,
have written anything like the Dean's famous "modest proposal" for eating
children? Not one of these but melts at the thoughts of childhood,
fondles and caresses it. Mr. Dean has no such softness, and enters the
nursery with the tread and gaiety of an ogre. "I have been assured,"
says he in the "Modest Proposal," "by a very knowing American of my
acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a
year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether
stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt it will equally
serve in a ragout." And taking up this pretty joke, as his way is, he
argues it with perfect gravity and logic. He turns and twists this
subject in a score of different ways: he hashes it; and he serves it up
cold; and he garnishes it; and relishes it always. He describes the
little animal as "dropped from its dam," advising that the mother should
let it suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render it plump and
fat for a good table!
"A child," says his Reverence, "will make two dishes at an entertainment
for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter
will make a reasonable dish," and so on; and, the subject being so
delightful that he can't leave it, he proceeds to recommend, in place of
venison for squires' tables, "the bodies of young lads and maidens not
exceeding fourteen or under twelve." Amiable humourist! laughing
castigator of morals! There was a process well known and practised in
the Dean's gay days: when a lout entered the coffee-house, the wags
proceeded to what they called "roasting" him. This is roasting a subject
with a vengeance. The Dean had a native genius for it. As the "Almanach
des Gourmands" says, _On naît rôtisseur_.
And it was not merely by the sarcastic method that Swift exposed the
unreasonableness of loving and having children. In Gulliver, the folly
of love and marriage is urged by graver arguments and advice. In the
famous Lilliputian kingdom, Swift speaks with approval of the practice of
instantly removing children from their parents and educating them by the
State; and amongst his favourite horses, a pair of foals are stated to be
the very utmost a well-regulated equine couple would permit themselves.
In fact, our great satirist was of opinion that conjugal love was
unadvisable, and illustrated the theory by his own practice and
example--God help him--which made him about the most wretched being in
God's world.
The grave and logical conduct of an absurd proposition, as exemplified in
the cannibal proposal just mentioned, is our author's constant method
through all his works of humour. Given a country of people six inches or
sixty feet high, and by the mere process of the logic, a thousand
wonderful absurdities are evolved, at so many stages of the calculation.
Turning to the first minister who waited behind him with a white staff
near as tall as the mainmast of the "Royal Sovereign," the King of
Brobdingnag observes how contemptible a thing human grandeur is, as
represented by such a contemptible little creature as Gulliver. "The
Emperor of Lilliput's features are strong and masculine" (what a
surprising humour there is in this description!)--"The Emperor's
features," Gulliver says, "are strong and masculine, with an Austrian
lip, an arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his
body and limbs well proportioned, and his deportment majestic. He is
taller _by the breadth of my nail_ than any of his court, which alone is
enough to strike an awe into beholders."
What a surprising humour there is in these descriptions! How noble the
satire is here! how just and honest! How perfect the image! Mr.
Macaulay has quoted the charming lines of the poet, where the king of the
pigmies is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of
the spear that was like "the mast of some tall admiral," but these images
are surely likely to come to the comic poet originally. The subject is
before him. He is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it. The
figure suggests itself naturally to him, and comes out of his subject, as
in that wonderful passage when Gulliver's box having been dropped by the
eagle into the sea, and Gulliver having been received into the ship's
cabin, he calls upon the crew to bring the box into the cabin, and put it
on the table, the cabin being only a quarter the size of the box. It is
the _veracity_ of the blunder which is so admirable. Had a man come from
such a country as Brobdingnag he would have blundered so.
But the best stroke of humour, if there be a best in that abounding book,
is that where Gulliver, in the unpronounceable country, describes his
parting from his master the horse. "I took," he says, "a second leave of
my master, but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he
did me the honour to raise it gently to my mouth. I am not ignorant how
much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular.
Detractors are pleased to think it improbable that so illustrious a
person should descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a
creature so inferior as I. Neither have I forgotten how apt some
travellers are to boast of extraordinary favours they have received. But
if these censurers were better acquainted with the noble and courteous
disposition of the Houyhnhnms they would soon change their opinion."
The surprise here, the audacity of circumstantial evidence, the
astounding gravity of the speaker, who is not ignorant how much he has
been censured, the nature of the favour conferred, and the respectful
exultation at the receipt of it, are surely complete; it is truth
topsy-turvy, entirely logical and absurd.
As for the humour and conduct of this famous fable, I suppose there is no
person who reads but must admire; as for the moral, I think it horrible,
shameful, unmanly, blasphemous; and giant and great as this Dean is, I
say we should hoot him. Some of this audience mayn't have read the last
part of Gulliver, and to such I would recall the advice of the venerable
Mr. Punch to persons about to marry, and say "Don't." When Gulliver
first lands among the Yahoos, the naked howling wretches clamber up trees
and assault him, and he describes himself as "almost stifled with the
filth which fell about him." The reader of the fourth part of
"Gulliver's Travels" is like the hero himself in this instance. It is
Yahoo language: a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations
against mankind--tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of
manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging,
obscene.
And dreadful it is to think that Swift knew the tendency of his
creed--the fatal rocks towards which his logic desperately drifted. That
last part of "Gulliver" is only a consequence of what has gone before;
and the worthlessness of all mankind, the pettiness, cruelty, pride,
imbecility, the general vanity, the foolish pretension, the mock
greatness, the pompous dulness, the mean aims, the base successes--all
these were present to him; it was with the din of these curses of the
world, blasphemies against heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began
to write his dreadful allegory--of which the meaning is that man is
utterly wicked, desperate and imbecile, and his passions are so
monstrous, and his boasted powers so mean, that he is and deserves to be
the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason.
What had this man done? what secret remorse was rankling at his heart?
what fever was boiling in him, that he should see all the world
blood-shot? We view the world with our own eyes, each of us; and we make
from within us the world we see. A weary heart gets no gladness out of
sunshine; a selfish man is sceptical about friendship, as a man with no
ear doesn't care for music. A frightful self-consciousness it must have
been, which looked on mankind so darkly through those keen eyes of Swift.
A remarkable story is told by Scott, of Delany, who interrupted
Archbishop King and Swift in a conversation which left the prelate in
tears, and from which Swift rushed away with marks of strong terror and
agitation in his countenance, upon which the Archbishop said to Delany,
"You have just met the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of
his wretchedness you must never ask a question."
The most unhappy man on earth;--Miserrimus--what a character of him! And
at this time all the great wits of England had been at his feet. All
Ireland had shouted after him, and worshipped him as a liberator, a
saviour, the greatest Irish patriot and citizen. Dean Drapier
Bickerstaff Gulliver--the most famous statesmen, and the greatest poets
of his day, had applauded him, and done him homage; and at this time,
writing over to Bolingbroke from Ireland, he says, "It is time for me to
have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better
before I was called into the best, _and not die here in a rage, like a
poisoned rat in a hole_."
We have spoken about the men, and Swift's behaviour to them; and now it
behoves us not to forget that there are certain other persons in the
creation who had rather intimate relations with the great Dean. Two
women whom he loved and injured are known by every reader of books so
familiarly that if we had seen them, or if they had been relatives of our
own, we scarcely could have known them better. Who hasn't in his mind an
image of Stella? Who does not love her? Fair and tender creature: pure
and affectionate heart! Boots it to you, now that you have been at rest
for a hundred and twenty years, not divided in death from the cold heart
which caused yours, whilst it beat, such faithful pangs of love and
grief--boots it to you now, that the whole world loves and deplores you?
Scarce any man, I believe, ever thought of that grave; that did not cast
a flower of pity on it, and write over it a sweet epitaph. Gentle lady,
so lovely, so loving, so unhappy! you have had countless champions;
millions of manly hearts mourning for you. From generation to generation
we take up the fond tradition of your beauty; we watch and follow your
tragedy, your bright morning love and purity, your constancy, your grief,
your sweet martyrdom. We know your legend by heart. You are one of the
saints of English story.
And if Stella's love and innocence are charming to contemplate, I will
say that in spite of ill-usage, in spite of drawbacks, in spite of
mysterious separation and union, of hope delayed and sickened heart--in
the teeth of Vanessa, and that little episodical aberration which plunged
Swift into such woful pitfalls and quagmires of amorous perplexity--in
spite of the verdicts of most women, I believe, who, as far as my
experience and conversation go, generally take Vanessa's part in the
controversy--in spite of the tears which Swift caused Stella to shed, and
the rocks and barriers which fate and temper interposed, and which
prevented the pure course of that true love from running smoothly--the
brightest part of Swift's story, the pure star in that dark and
tempestuous life of Swift's, is his love for Hester Johnson. It has been
my business, professionally of course, to go through a deal of
sentimental reading in my time, and to acquaint myself with love-making,
as it has been described in various languages, and at various ages of the
world; and I know of nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely
touching, than some of these brief notes, written in what Swift calls
"his little language" in his journal to Stella.
He writes to her night and morning often. He never sends away a letter
to her but he begins a new one on the same day. He can't bear to let go
her kind little hand, as it were. He knows that she is thinking of him,
and longing for him far away in Dublin yonder. He takes her letters from
under his pillow and talks to them, familiarly, paternally, with fond
epithets and pretty caresses--as he would to the sweet and artless
creature who loved him. "Stay," he writes one morning--it is the 14th of
December, 1710--"Stay, I will answer some of your letter this morning in
bed. Let me see. Come and appear, little letter! Here I am, says he,
and what say you to Stella this morning fresh and fasting? And can
Stella read this writing without hurting her dear eyes?" he goes on,
after more kind prattle and fond whispering. The dear eyes shine clearly
upon him then--the good angel of his life is with him and blessing him.
Ah, it was a hard fate that wrung from them so many tears, and stabbed
pitilessly that pure and tender bosom. A hard fate: but would she have
changed it? I have heard a woman say that she would have taken Swift's
cruelty to have had his tenderness. He had a sort of worship for her
whilst he wounded her. He speaks of her after she is gone; of her wit,
of her kindness, of her grace, of her beauty, with a simple love and
reverence that are indescribably touching; in contemplation of her
goodness his hard heart melts into pathos; his cold rhyme kindles and
glows into poetry, and he falls down on his knees, so to speak, before
the angel whose life he had embittered, confesses his own wretchedness
and unworthiness, and adores her with cries of remorse and love:--
"When on my sickly couch I lay,
Impatient both of night and day,
And groaning in unmanly strains,
Called every power to ease my pains,
Then Stella ran to my relief,
With cheerful face and inward grief,
And though by heaven's severe decree
She suffers hourly more than me,
No cruel master could require
From slaves employed for daily hire,
What Stella, by her friendship warmed,
With vigour and delight performed.
Now, with a soft and silent tread,
Unheard she moves about my bed:
My sinking spirits now supplies
With cordials in her hands and eyes.
Best pattern of true friends! beware;
You pay too dearly for your care
If, while your tenderness secures
My life, it must endanger yours:
For such a fool was never found
Who pulled a palace to the ground,
Only to have the ruins made
Materials for a house decayed."
One little triumph Stella had in her life--one dear little piece of
injustice was performed in her favour, for which I confess, for my part,
I can't help thanking fate and the Dean. _That other person_ was
sacrificed to her--that--that young woman, who lived five doors from Dr.
Swift's lodgings in Bury Street, and who flattered him, and made love to
him in such an outrageous manner--Vanessa was thrown over.
Swift did not keep Stella's letters to him in reply to those he wrote to
her. He kept Bolingbroke's, and Pope's, and Harley's, and
Peterborough's: but Stella, "very carefully," the Lives say, kept
Swift's. Of course: that is the way of the world: and so we cannot tell
what her style was, or of what sort were the little letters which the
Doctor placed there at night, and bade to appear from under his pillow of
a morning. But in Letter IV. of that famous collection he describes his
lodging in Bury Street, where he has the first-floor, a dining-room and
bed-chamber, at eight shillings a week; and in Letter VI. he says "he has
visited a lady just come to town," whose name somehow is not mentioned;
and in Letter VIII. he enters a query of Stella's--"What do you mean
'that boards near me, that I dine with now and then?' What the deuce!
You know whom I have dined with every day since I left you, better than I
do." Of course she does. Of course Swift has not the slightest idea of
what she means. But in a few letters more it turns out that the Doctor
has been to dine "gravely" with a Mrs. Vanhomrigh: then that he has been
to "his neighbour:" then that he has been unwell, and means to dine for
the whole week with his neighbour! Stella was quite right in her
previsions. She saw from the very first hint, what was going to happen;
and scented Vanessa in the air. The rival is at the Dean's feet. The
pupil and teacher are reading together, and drinking tea together, and
going to prayers together, and learning Latin together, and conjugating
_amo, amas, amavi_ together. The little language is over for poor
Stella. By the rule of grammar and the course of conjugation, doesn't
_amavi_ come after _amo_ and _amas_?
The loves of Cadenus and Vanessa you may peruse in Cadenus's own poem on
the subject, and in poor Vanessa's vehement expostulatory verses and
letters to him; she adores him, implores him, admires him, thinks him
something god-like, and only prays to be admitted to lie at his feet. As
they are bringing him home from church, those divine feet of Dr. Swift's
are found pretty often in Vanessa's parlour. He likes to be admired and
adored. He finds Miss Vanhomrigh to be a woman of great taste and
spirit, and beauty and wit, and a fortune too. He sees her every day; he
does not tell Stella about the business: until the impetuous Vanessa
becomes too fond of him, until the Doctor is quite frightened by the
young woman's ardour, and confounded by her warmth. He wanted to marry
neither of them--that I believe was the truth; but if he had not married
Stella, Vanessa would have had him in spite of himself. When he went
back to Ireland, his Ariadne, not content to remain in her isle, pursued
the fugitive Dean. In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed, and
bullied; the news of the Dean's marriage with Stella at last came to her,
and it killed her--she died of that passion.
And when she died, and Stella heard that Swift had written beautifully
regarding her, "That doesn't surprise me," said Mrs. Stella, "for we all
know the Dean could write beautifully about a broomstick." A woman--a
true woman! Would you have had one of them forgive the other?
In a note in his biography, Scott says that his friend Dr. Tuke of
Dublin, has a lock of Stella's hair, enclosed in a paper by Swift, on
which are written, in the Dean's hand, the words: "_Only a woman's
hair_." An instance, says Scott, of the Dean's desire to veil his
feelings under the mask of cynical indifference.
See the various notions of critics! Do those words indicate indifference
or an attempt to hide feeling? Did you ever hear or read four words more
pathetic? Only a woman's hair: only love, only fidelity, only purity,
innocence, beauty; only the tenderest heart in the world stricken and
wounded, and passed away now out of reach of pangs of hope deferred, love
insulted, and pitiless desertion:--only that lock of hair left; and
memory and remorse, for the guilty, lonely wretch, shuddering over the
grave of his victim.
And yet to have had so much love, he must have given some. Treasures of
wit and wisdom, and tenderness, too, must that man have had locked up in
the caverns of his gloomy heart, and shown fitfully to one or two whom he
took in there. But it was not good to visit that place. People did not
remain there long, and suffered for having been there. He shrank away
from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both died near
him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them die. He
broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan; he slunk away from his fondest
admirer, Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven score years. He
was always alone--alone and gnashing in the darkness, except when
Stella's sweet smile came and shone upon him. When that went, silence
and utter night closed over him. An immense genius: an awful downfall
and ruin. So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like
thinking of an empire falling. We have other great names to
mention--none I think, however, so great or so gloomy.
[1] From the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century.