CHAPTER III

THE AUTHOR OF “GULLIVER”

There are few figures in history, and still fewer in literature, which

have occupied so great a place in the world’s attention, or which retain

so strong a hold upon its interest, as that of Jonathan Swift, dean of

St. Patrick’s. It is considerably more than a century since he died, old

and mad and miserable: a man who had never been satisfied with life, or

felt his fate equal to his deserts; who disowned and hated (even when he

served it) the country of his birth, and with fierce and bitter passion

denounced human nature itself, and left a sting in almost every

individual whom he loved; a man whose preferment and home were far from

the center of public affairs, and who had no hereditary claim on the

attention of England. Yet when the English reader, or he who in the

farthest corner of the New World has the same right to English

literature as that which the subjects of Queen Victoria hold,--as the

American does--from the subjects of Queen Anne,--reads the title at the

head of this page, neither the one nor the other will have any

difficulty in distinguishing among all the ecclesiastical dignitaries of

that age who it is that stands conspicuous as the dean. Not in royal

Westminster or Windsor is this man to be found; not the ruler of any

great cathedral in the rich English midlands where tradition and wealth

and an almost Catholic supremacy united to make the great official of

the church as important as any official of the state--but far from

those influences, half as far as America is now from the center of

English society and the sources of power, one of a nation which the most

obstinate conservative of to-day will not hesitate to allow was then

deeply wronged and cruelly misgoverned by England, many and anxious as

have been her efforts since to make amends. Yet among the many strange

examples of that far more than republican power (not always most evident

in republics) by which a man of native force and genius, however humble,

finds his way to the head of affairs and impresses his individuality

upon his age, when thousands born to better fortunes are swept away as

nobodies, Swift is one of the most remarkable. His origin, though noted

by himself, not without a certain pride, as from a family of gentry not

unknown in their district, was in his own person almost as lowly and

poor as it was possible to be. The posthumous son of a poor official in

the Dublin law-courts, owing his education to the kindness, or perhaps

less the kindness than the family pride, of an uncle, Swift entered the

world as a hanger-on, waiting what fortune and a patron might do for

him, a position scarcely comprehensible to young Englishmen nowadays,

though then the natural method of advancement. Such a young man in the

present day would betake himself to his books, with the practical aim of

an examination before him, and the hope of immediate admission through

that gate to the public service and all its chances. It is amusing to

speculate what the difference might have been had Jonathan Swift, coming

raw with his degree from Trinity College, Dublin, shouldered his robust

way to the head of an examination list, and thus making himself at a

stroke independent of patronage, gone out to reign and rule and

distribute justice in India, or pushed himself upward among the

gentlemanly mediocrities of a public office. One asks would he have

found that method more successful, and endured the desk and the routine

of his office, and

[Illustration: JONATHAN SWIFT.

FROM PHOTOGRAPH OF ORIGINAL MARBLE BUST OF SWIFT BY ROUBILLIAC

(1695-1762), NOW IN THE LIBRARY OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN.]

“got on” with the head of his department, better than he endured the

monotony and subjection, the possible slights and spurns of Sir William

Temple’s household, which he entered, half servant, half equal, the poor

relation, the secretary and companion of that fastidious philosopher?

The question may be cut short by the almost certainty that Swift could

not have gained his promotion in any such way; but his age had not

learned the habit of utilizing education, and he was one of the idle

youths of fame. “He was stopped of his degree,” he himself writes in his

autobiographical notes, “for dullness and insufficiency, and at last

hardly admitted in a manner little to his credit, which is called in

that college _speciali gratia_.” Recent biographers have striven to

prove that this really meant nothing to Swift’s discredit, but it is to

be supposed that in such a matter he is himself the best authority.

The life of the household of dependents at Moor Park, where young Swift

attended Sir William’s pleasure in the library, while the Johnsons and

Dingleys, the waiting-gentlewomen of a system which now lingers only in

courts, hung about my lady, her relatives, gossips, servants, is to us

extremely difficult to realize, and still more to understand. This

little cluster of secondary personages, scarcely at all elevated above

the servants, with whom they sometimes sat at table, and whose offices

they were always liable to be called on to perform, yet who were all

conscious of gentle blood in their veins, and a relationship more or

less distinct with the heads of the house, is indeed one of the most

curious lingerings of the past in the eighteenth century. When we read

in one of Macaulay’s brilliant sketches, or in Swift’s own words, or in

the indications given by both history and fiction, that the

parson,--perhaps at the great house,--humble priest of the parish, found

his natural mate in the waiting-maid, it is generally forgotten that the

waiting-maid was then in most cases quite as good as the parson: a

gently bred and well-descended woman, like her whom an unkind but not

ignoble fate made into the Stella we all know, the mild and modest star

of Swift’s existence. It was no doubt a step in the transition from the

great medieval household, where the squire waited on the knight with a

lowliness justified by his certainty of believing himself knight in his

turn, and where my lady’s service was a noble education, the only school

accessible to the young gentlewomen of her connection--down to our own

less picturesque and more independent days, in which personal service

has ceased to be compatible with the pretensions of any who can assume,

by the most distant claim, to be “gentle” folk. The institution is very

apparent in Shakspere’s day, the waiting-gentlewomen who surround his

heroines being of entirely different mettle from the soubrettes of

modern comedy. At a later period such a fine gentleman as John Evelyn,

in no need of patronage, was content and proud that his daughter should

enter a great household to learn how to comport herself in the world. In

the end of the seventeenth century the dependents were perhaps more

absolutely dependent. But even this, like most things, had its better

and worst side.

That a poor widow with her child, like Stella’s mother, should find

refuge in the house of her wealthy kinswoman at no heavier cost than

that of attending to Lady Temple’s linen and laces, and secure thus such

a training for her little girl as might indeed have ended in the rude

household of a Parson Trulliber, but at the same time might fit her to

take her place in a witty and brilliant society, and enter into all the

thoughts of the most brilliant genius of his time, was no ill fate; nor

is there anything that is less than noble and befitting (in theory) in

the association of that young man of genius, whatsoever exercises of

patience he might be put to, with the highly cultured man of the world,

the ex-ambassador and councilor of kings, under whose auspices he could

learn to understand both books and men, see the best company of his

time, and acquire at second hand all the fruits of a ripe experience. So

that, perhaps, there is something to be said after all for the curious

little community at Moor Park, where Sir William, like a god, made the

day good or evil for his people according as he smiled or frowned; where

the young Irish secretary, looking but uneasily upon a world in which

his future fate was so unassured, had yet the wonderful chance once, if

no more, of explaining English institutions to King William, and in his

leisure the amusement of teaching little Hester how to write, and

learning from her baby prattle--which must have been the delight of the

house, kept up and encouraged by her elders--that “little language”

which had become a sort of synonym for the most intimate and endearing

utterances of tenderness. No doubt Sir William himself (who left her a

modest little fortune when he died) must have loved to hear the child

talk, and even Lady Giffard and the rest, having no responsibility for

her parts of speech, kept her a baby as long as possible, and delighted

in the pretty jargon to which foolish child-lovers cling in all ages

after the little ones themselves are grown too wise to use it more.

Jonathan Swift left Ireland, along with many more, in the commotion that

succeeded the revolution of 1688--a very poor and homely lad, with

nothing but the learning, such as it was, picked up in a somewhat

disorderly university career. Through his mother, then living at

Leicester, and on the score of humble relationship between Mrs. Swift

and Lady Temple, of whom the reader may perhaps remember the romance and

tender history,--a pleasant association,--he was introduced to Sir

William Temple’s household, but scarcely, it would appear, at first to

any permanent position there. He was engaged, an unfriendly writer says,

“at the rate of £20 a year” as amanuensis and reader, but “Sir William

never favoured him with his conversation nor allowed him to sit at table

with him.” Temple’s own account of the position, however, contains

nothing at all derogatory to the young man, for whom, about a year

after, he endeavored, no doubt in accordance with Swift’s own wishes, to

find a situation with Sir Robert Southwell, then going to Ireland as

secretary of state. Sir William describes Swift as “of good family in

Herefordshire.... He has lived in my house, read to me, writ for me, and

kept all my accounts as far as my small occasions required. He has Latin

and Greek, some French, writes a very good current hand, is very honest

and diligent, and has good friends, though they have for the present

lost their fortunes,” the great man says; and he recommends the youth

“either as a gentleman to wait on you, or a clerk to write under you, or

upon any establishment of the College to recommend him to a fellowship

there, which he has a just pretence to.” This shows how little there was

in the position of “a gentleman to wait on you,” of which the young

suitor need have been ashamed. Swift’s own account of this speedy return

to Ireland is that it was by advice of the physicians, “who weakly

imagined that his native air might be of some use to recover his

health,” which he was young enough to have endangered by the temptations

of Sir William’s fine gardens; a “surfeit of fruit” being the innocent

cause to which he attributes the disease which haunted him for all the

rest of his life.

His absence, however, from the Temple household was of very short

duration, Sir Robert Southwell having apparently had no use for his

services, or means of preferring him to a fellowship, and he returned to

Moor Park in 1690, where he remained for four years. It was quite clear,

whatever his vicissitudes of feeling might have been, that he identified

himself entirely with his patron’s opinions and even prejudices, and

was

[Illustration: MOOR PARK, RESIDENCE OF SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE, AND OF SWIFT.

DRAWN BY CHARLES HERBERT WOODBURY, ENGRAVED BY R. VARLEY.]

a loyal and devoted retainer both now and afterward. When Sir William

became involved in a literary quarrel with the great scholar Bentley,

young Swift rushed into the field with a _jeu d’esprit_ which has

outlived all other records of the controversy. The “Battle of the Books”

could hardly have been written in aid of a hard or contemptuous master.

Years after, when he had a house of his own and had entered upon his

independent career, he turned his little rectory garden into a humble

imitation of the Dutch paradise which Temple had made to bloom in the

wilds of Surrey, with a canal and a willow walk like those which were so

dear to King William and his courtiers. And when Temple died, it was to

Swift, and not to any of his nephews, that Sir William committed the

charge of his papers and literary remains. This does not look like a

hard bondage on one side, or any tyrannical sway on the other,

notwithstanding a few often-quoted phrases which are taken as implying

complaint. “Don’t you remember,” Swift asks long after, “how I used to

be in pain when Sir William Temple would look cold and out of temper for

three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons?” But these

words need not represent anything more than that sensitiveness to the

aspect of the person on whom his prospects and comfort depend which is

inevitable to every individual in a similar position, however

considerate and friendly the patron may be. The hard-headed and

unbending Scotch philosopher, James Mill, was just as sensitive to the

looks of his kind friend and helper in the early struggles of life,

Jeremy Bentham, in whose sunny countenance Mill discovered unspoken

offense with an ingenuity worthy of a self-tormenting woman. It was

natural indeed that Swift, a high-spirited young man, should fret and

struggle as the years went on and nothing happened to enlarge his

horizon beyond the trees of Moor Park. He was sent to King William, as

has been said, when Temple was unable to wait upon his Majesty, to

explain to him the expediency of certain parliamentary measures, and

this was no doubt intended by his patron as a means of bringing him

under the king’s notice. William would seem to have taken a kind of

vague interest in the secretary, which he expressed in an odd way by

offering him a captain’s commission in a cavalry regiment,--a proposal

which did not tempt Swift,--and by teaching him how to cut asparagus “in

the Dutch way,” and to eat up all the stalks, as the dean afterward, in

humorous revenge, made an unlucky visitor of his own do. But William,

notwithstanding these whimsical evidences of favor, neither listened to

the young secretary’s argument nor gave him a prebend as had been hoped.

Four years, however, is a long time for an ambitious young man to spend

in dependence, watching one hope die out after another; and Swift’s

impatience began to be irrestrainable and to trouble the peace of his

patron’s learned leisure. Although destined from the first to the

church, and for some time waiting in tremulous expectation of

ecclesiastical preferment, Swift had not yet taken orders. The

explanation he gives of how and why he finally determined on doing so is

characteristic. His dissatisfaction and restlessness, probably his

complaints, moved Sir William,--though evidently deeply offended that

his secretary should wish to leave him,--to offer him an employ of about

£120 a year in the Rolls Office in Ireland, of which Temple held the

sinecure office of master. “Whereupon [says Swift’s own narrative] Mr.

Swift told him that since he had now an opportunity of living without

being driven into the Church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to

Ireland and take Holy Orders.” This arbitrary decision to balk his

patron’s tardy bounty, and take his own way in spite of him, was

probably as much owing to a characteristic blaze of temper as to the

somewhat fantastic disinterestedness here put forward, though Swift was

never a man greedy of money or disposed to sacrifice his pride to the

acquisition of gain, notwithstanding certain habits of miserliness

afterward developed in his character. Sir William was “extremely

angry”--hurt, no doubt, as many a patron has been, by the ingratitude of

the dependent who would not trust everything to him, but claimed some

free will in the disposition of his own life. Had they been uncle and

nephew, or even father and son, the same thing might easily have

happened. Swift set out for Dublin full of indignation and excitement,

“everybody judging I did best to leave him,”--but alas! in this, as in

so many cases, pride was doomed to speedy downfall.

On reaching Dublin, and taking the necessary steps for his ordination,

Swift found that it was needful for him to have a recommendation and

certificate from the patron in whose house so many years of his life had

been spent. No doubt it must have been a somewhat bitter necessity to

bow his head before the protector whom he had left in anger and ask for

this. Macaulay describes him as addressing his patron in the language

“of a lacquey, or even of a beggar,” but we doubt greatly if apart from

prejudice or the tingle of these unforgettable words, any impartial

reader would form such an impression. “The particulars expected of me,”

Swift writes, “are what relates to morals and learning and the reasons

of quitting your honour’s family, that is whether the last was

occasioned by any ill action.” “Your honour” has a somewhat servile tone

in our days, but in Swift’s the formality was natural. Lady Giffard,

Temple’s sister-in-law, in the further quarrels which followed Sir

William’s death, spoke of this as a penitential letter, and perhaps it

was not wonderful that she should look on the whole matter with an

unfavorable eye. No doubt the ladies of the house thought young Swift an

unnatural monster for wishing to go away and thinking himself able to

set up for himself without their condescending notice and the godlike

philosopher’s society and instruction, and were pleased to find his

pride so quickly brought down. Sir William, however, it would seem,

behaved as a philosopher and a gentleman should, and gave the required

recommendation with magnanimity and kindness. Thus the young man had his

way.

Swift got a small benefice in the north of Ireland, the little country

parish of Kilroot, in which doubtless he expected that the sense of

independence would make up to him for other deprivations. It was near

Belfast, among those hard-headed Scotch colonists whom he could never

endure; and probably this had something to do with the speedy revulsion

of his mind. He remained there only a year; and it is perhaps the best

proof we could have of his sense of isolation and banishment that this

was the only time in his life in which he thought of marriage. There is

in existence a fervent and impassioned letter addressed to the object of

his affections, a Miss Waring, whom, after the fashion of the time, he

called Varina. He does not seem in this case to have had the usual good

fortune that attended his relationships with women. Miss Waring did not

respond with the same warmth; indeed, she was discouraging and coldly

prudent. And he was still pleading for a favorable answer when there

arrived a letter from Moor Park inviting his return--Sir William’s

pride, too, having apparently broken down under the blank made by

Swift’s departure. He made instant use of this invitation--which must

have soothed his injured feelings and restored his self-satisfaction--to

shake the resolution of the ungrateful Varina. “I am once more offered,”

he says, “the advantage to have the same acquaintance with greatness

which I formerly enjoyed, and with better prospects of interest”; and

though he offers magnanimously “to forego it all for your sake,” yet it

is evident that the proposal had set the blood stirring in his veins,

and that the dependence from which he had broken loose with a kind of

desperation, once more seemed to

[Illustration: DEAN SWIFT.

FROM COPPERPLATE ENGRAVING BY PIERRE FOURDRINIER, AFTER A PAINTING BY

CHARLES JERVAS.]

him, unless Varina had been melted by the sacrifice he would have made

for her, to be the most desirable thing in the world.

Macaulay, and after him Thackeray and many less distinguished writers,

still persistently represent this part of Swift’s life as one of

unmitigated hardship and suffering. The brilliant historian so much

scorns the guidance of facts as to say that the humble student “made

love to a pretty waiting-maid who was the chief ornament of the

servant’s hall,” by way of explaining the strange yet tender story which

has been more deeply discussed than any great national event, and which

has made the name of Stella known to every reader.

Hester Johnson was a child of seven when young Swift, “the humble

student,” went first to Moor Park. She was only fifteen when he

returned, no longer as a sort of educated man of all work, but on the

entreaty of the patron who had felt the want of his company so much as

to forget all grievances. He was not now a humble student, Temple’s

satellite and servant, but his friend and coadjutor, fully versed in all

his secrets, and most likely already chosen as the guardian of his fame

and the executor of his purposes and wishes; therefore it is not

possible that Macaulay’s reckless picturesque description could apply to

either time. Such an easy picture, however, has more effect upon the

general imagination than the outcries of all the biographers, and the

many researches made to show that Swift was not a sort of literary

lackey, nor Stella an Abigail, but that he had learned to prize the

advantages of his home there during his absence from it, and that during

the latter part of his life at Moor Park at least his position was as

good as that of a dependent can ever be.

Sir William Temple died, as Swift records affectionately, on the morning

of January 27, 1699, “and with him all that was good and amiable among

men.” He died, however, leaving the young man who had spent so many

years of his life under his wing, scarcely better for that long

subjection. Swift had a legacy of £100 for his trouble in editing his

patron’s memoirs, and he got the profits of those memoirs, amounting,

Mr. Forster calculates, to no less than £600--no inconsiderable present;

but no one of the many appointments which were then open to the

retainers of the great, and especially to a young man of letters, had

come in Swift’s way. He himself, it is said, “still believed in the

royal pledge for the first prebend that should fall vacant in

Westminster or Canterbury,” but this was a hope which had accompanied

him ever since he explained constitutional law to King William six years

before, and could not be very lively after this long interval.

Thus Swift’s life came to a sudden and complete break. The great

household, with its easy and uneasy jumble of patrons and dependents,

fell asunder and ceased to be. The younger members of the family were

jealous of the last bequest, which put the fame of their distinguished

relative into the hands of a stranger, and did their best to set Swift

down in his proper place, and to proclaim how much he was the creature

of their uncle’s bounty. In the breaking up which followed, there were

many curious partings and conjunctions. Why Hester Johnson, to whom Sir

William had bequeathed a little independence, should have left her

mother’s care and joined her fortunes to those of Mrs. Dingley instead,

remains unexplained, unless indeed it was Mrs. Johnson’s second marriage

which was the cause, or perhaps some vexation on the part of Lady

Giffard--with whom the girl’s mother remained, notwithstanding her

marriage--at the liberality of her brother to the child brought up in

his house. Mrs. Johnson had other daughters, one of whom Swift saw, and

describes favorably, years after. Perhaps Mrs. Dingley and the girl whom

he had taught and petted from her childhood had taken Swift’s side in

the Giffard-Temple difference, and so got on uneasy terms with the rest

of the household, always faithful to my lady. At all events, at the

breaking up Hester with her little fortune separated herself from the

connection generally, and with her elder friend made an independent new

beginning, as Swift also had to do. The fact seems of no particular

importance, except that it afforded a reason for Swift’s interference in

her affairs, and threw them into a combination which lasted all their

lives.

Swift was thirty-one, too old to be beginning his career, yet young

enough to turn with eager zest to the unknown, when this catastrophe

occurred. Sir William Temple’s secretary and literary executor must have

known, one would suppose, many people who could have helped him to

promotion, but it would seem as if a kind of irresistible fate impelled

him back to his native country, though he did not love it, and forced

him to be an Irishman in spite of himself. The only post that came in

his way was a chaplaincy, conjoined with a secretaryship, in the suite

of the Earl of Berkeley, newly appointed one of the lords justices in

Ireland, and just then entering upon his duties. Swift accepted the

position in hopes that he should be continued as Lord Berkeley’s

secretary, and possibly go with him afterward to more stirring scenes

and a larger life, but this expectation was not carried out. Neither was

his application--which seems at the moment a somewhat bold one--for the

deanery of Derry successful, and all the preferment he succeeded in

getting was another Irish living, with a better stipend and in a more

favorable position than Kilroot: the parish of Laracor, within twenty

miles of Dublin, which, conjoined with a prebend in St. Patrick’s and

other small additions, brought him in £200 a year; a small promotion,

indeed, yet not a bad income for the place and time. And he was

naturally, as Lord Berkeley’s chaplain, in the midst of the finest

company that Ireland could boast, one of a court more extended than Sir

William Temple’s, yet of a similar description, and affording greater

scope for his hitherto undeveloped social qualities. Satire more

sportive than mere scorn, yet sometimes savage enough; an elephantine

fun, which pleased the age; the puns and quibs in which the men emulated

one another; the merry rhymes that pleased the ladies,--seem suddenly to

have burst forth in him, throwing an unexpected gleam upon his new

sphere.

Swift was always popular with women. He treated them roughly on many

occasions, with an arrogance that grew with age, but evidently possessed

that charm--a quality by itself and not dependent upon any laws of

amiability--which attracts one sex to the other. Lady Berkeley, whom he

describes as a woman of “the most easy conversation joined with the

truest piety,” and her young daughters were charming and lively

companions with whom the chaplain soon found himself at home. And

notwithstanding his disappointment with respect to the preferment which

Lord Berkeley might have procured for him and did not, it would seem

that this period of hanging on at the little Irish court was amusing at

least. The lively little picture of the inferior members of a great

household which Swift made for the entertainment of the drawing-rooms on

the occasion when Mrs. Frances Harris lost her purse, is one of the most

vivid and amusing possible.

His stay in Ireland at this period lasted about two years, during which

he paid repeated visits to his living at Laracor, and made trial of

existence there also. The parsonage was in a ruinous condition; the

church a miserable barn; the congregation numbered about twenty persons.

Many are the tales of the new parson’s arrival there like a

thunder-storm, frightening the humble curate and his wife with the

arrogant roughness of manner which they, like many others, found

afterward covered a great deal of genuine practical kindness. His mode

of traveling, his sarcastic rhymes about the places at which he paused

on the journey, the careless swing of imperious good and ill

[Illustration: STELLA’S COTTAGE, ON THE BOUNDARY OF THE MOOR PARK

ESTATE.

DRAWN BY CHARLES HERBERT WOODBURY, ENGRAVED BY S. DAVIS.]

humor in which he indulged, contemptuous of everybody’s opinion, have

furnished many amusing incidents. One well-known anecdote, which

describes him as finding his congregation to consist only of his clerk

and beginning the service gravely with, “Dearly beloved Roger,” has

found a permanent place among ecclesiastical pleasantries. In all

probability it is true; but if not so, it is at least so _ben trovato_

as to be as good as true. There were few claims upon the energies of

such a man in such a sphere, and when Lord Berkeley was recalled to

England his chaplain went with him. But neither did he find any

promotion in London. Up to this time his only literary work had been

that wonderful “Battle of the Books,” which had burst like a bombshell

into the midst of the squabble of the _literati_, but which had only as

yet been handed about in manuscript, and was therefore known to few. No

doubt it was known to various wits and scholars that Sir William

Temple’s late secretary and literary executor was a young man of no

common promise; but statesmen in general, and the king in particular,

sick and worn out with many preoccupations, had no leisure for the

claims of the Irish parson. He hung about the Berkeley household, and

gravely read out of the book of moral essays which the countess loved

those Reflections on a Broomstick which her ladyship found so edifying,

and launched upon the world an anonymous pamphlet or two, which he had

the pleasure of hearing talked about and attributed to names greater

than his own, but made no step toward the advancement for which he

longed.

The interest of this visit to England was however as great and told for

as much in his life as if it had brought him a bishopric. It determined

that long connection and close intercourse in which Swift’s inner

history is involved. After he had paid in vain his court to the king,

and made various ineffectual attempts to recommend himself in high

quarters, he went on a visit to Farnham, where Hester Johnson and Mrs.

Dingley had settled after Sir William’s death. Swift found the two women

quite undetermined what to do, in an uncomfortable lodging, harassed for

money, and without any object in their lives. Most probably he was

called to advise as to their future plans, where they should settle and

how they were to live, both being entirely inexperienced in the art of

independent existence. They had lived together for years, and knew

everything about each other: Hester had grown up from childhood under

Swift’s eye, his pupil, his favorite and playfellow. She had now, it is

true, arrived at an age when other sentiments are supposed to come in.

She must have been about twenty, while he was thirty-four. There was no

reason in the world why they should not have married then and there, had

they so wished. But there seems no appearance or thought of any such

desire, and the question was what should the ladies do for the

arrangement of their affairs and pleasant occupation of their lives.

Farnham being untenable, where should they go? Why not to Ireland, where

Hester’s property was--where they would be near their friend, who could

help them into society and give them his own companionship as often as

he happened to be there? Here is his own account of the decision:

“I prevailed with her and her dear friend and companion, the other

lady,” he says, “to draw what money they had into Ireland, a great part

of their fortunes being in annuities upon funds. Money was then ten per

cent. in Ireland, besides the advantage of returning 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. But this 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. She came

over with her friend in the year 1700, and they both lived together

until the day [of her death, 1728].”

This was then the time which decided that which is called the “sad and

mysterious history” of Swift and Stella--a story so strangely told, so

obstinately insisted upon as miserable, unnatural, and tragical, that

the reader or writer of to-day has scarcely the power of forming an

impartial judgment upon it. We have not a word from the woman’s side of

the question, who is supposed to have passed a melancholy existence of

unsatisfied longings and disappointed love by Swift’s side, the victim

of his capricious affections, neglect, cruelty, and fondness. That she

should have wished to marry him, that the love was impassioned on her

side, and her whole life blighted and overcast by his fantastic

repugnance to the common ties of humanity, is taken for granted by every

historian. These writers differ as to Swift’s motives, as to the

character of his feelings, and even as to the facts of the case; but no

one has the slightest doubt of what the woman’s sentiments must have

been. But, as a matter of fact, we have no evidence at all what Stella’s

sentiments were. By so much written testimony as remains we are fully

entitled to form such conclusions as we please on Swift’s side of the

question; but there is actually no testimony at all upon Stella’s side.

Appearances of blighted life or unhappiness there are none in anything

we know of her. As the ladies appear reflected in that “Journal to

Stella”--which is the dean’s only claim upon our affections, but a

strong one--they seem to have lived’ a most cheerful, lively life. They

had a number of friends, they had their little tea-parties, their circle

of witty society, to which the letters of the absent were a continual

amusement and delight. And it is the man, not the woman, who complains

of not receiving letters; it is he, not she, who exhausts every playful

wile, every tender art, to keep himself in vivid recollection. Is it

perhaps a certain mixture of masculine vanity and compassion for the

gentle feminine creature who never succeeded in getting the man she

loved to marry her, and thus failed to attain the highest end of woman,

which has moved every biographer of Swift, each man more compassionate

than his predecessor, thus to exhaust himself in pity for Stella?

Johnson, Scott, Macaulay, Thackeray, not to mention many lesser names,

have all taken her injured innocence to heart. And nobody notes the

curious fact that Stella herself never utters any complaint, nor indeed

seems to feel the necessity of being unhappy at all, but takes her dean

most cheerfully,--laughing, scolding, giving her opinion with all the

delightful freedom of a relationship which was at once nature and

choice, the familiar trust and tenderness of old use and wont with the

charm of voluntary association. We see her only as reflected in his

letters, in the references he makes to hers, and all his tender,

sportive allusions to her habits and ways of thinking. This reflection

and image is not in rigid lines of black and white, but an airy and

radiant vision, the representation of anything in the world rather than

a downcast and disappointed woman. It is not that either of a wife or a

lover; it is more like the wilful, delightful image of a favorite child,

a creature confident that everything she says or does will be received

with admiration from the mere fact that it is she who says or does it,

and who tyrannizes, scoffs, and proffers a thousand comments and

criticisms with all the elastic brightness of unforced and unimpassioned

affection. It is through this medium alone that Stella is ever visible.

And he, too, laughs, teases, fondles, and advises with the same doting,

delightful ease of affection. By what process this attractive

conjunction should have furnished the idea of a victim in Stella, and in

Swift of a tyrannous secret lover crushing her heart, it is difficult to

understand. The external circumstances of their intimacy were, no doubt,

very

[Illustration: HESTER JOHNSON, SWIFT’S “STELLA,” PAINTED FROM LIFE BY

MRS. DELANY, ON THE WALL OF THE TEMPLE AT DELVILLE, AND ACCIDENTALLY

DESTROYED.

ENGRAVED BY M. HAIDER FROM COPY OF THE ORIGINAL BY HENRY MACMANUS, R. H.

A., NOW IN POSSESSION OF PROFESSOR DOWDEN.]

unusual, and might have lent occasion to much evil speaking. But they do

not seem to have done so, after the first moment at least. Nobody

ventured to assail the good fame of Stella, and Swift took every means

to make the perfect innocence of their friendship apparent. She cannot

be made out to have suffered in the vulgar way, and it seems to us one

of the most curious examples of an obstinately maintained theory to

represent her as Swift’s victim in what is supposed to be a long

martyrdom of the heart.

One can well imagine, however, when the two ladies arrived in Dublin,

where their friend had no doubt represented to them his power to gain

them access into the best society, and found that he did not come and

that they were stranded in a strange place, knowing nobody, how some

annoyance and disappointment, and perhaps anger, must have been in their

thoughts, and that P. D. F. R., as he is called in the little language,

faithless rogue! had his share of abuse. And no doubt it might be

believed by good-natured friends that their object in coming was to

secure the vicar of Laracor either for the young and lovely girl or the

elder woman, who was scarcely older than Swift--if not indeed that some

“secret history” more damaging still was at the bottom of the adventure.

Insensibly, however, Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Dingley found a place and

position for themselves. Swift was often away in the following years,

spending about half his time in London, and when he was absent they took

possession of his newly repaired and renovated house, or occupied his

lodging in Dublin, and gathered friends about them, and went out to

their card-parties, and played a little, and talked, and lived a

pleasant life. When he returned, they removed to their own rooms. Thus

there could be no doubt about the close association between them, which,

when it was quite apparent that it meant nothing closer to come, no

doubt made everybody wonder. But we have no contemporary evidence that

Stella was an object of pity, and her aspect as we see it in all Swift

says of her is exactly the reverse, and gives us the impression of a

charming and easy-minded woman, a queen of society in her little circle,

enjoying everything that came her way.

As Swift’s relations with Stella are the great interests of his life,

the subject which occupies every new writer who so much as touches upon

him, it is needless to make any excuse for entering into the question

with an amount of detail which our limited space would otherwise

scarcely justify. The mystery about it lends it an endless attraction,

and as, whatever it was, it is the one great love of his life, and

represents all the private satisfaction and comfort he got by means of

his affections, it has a permanent interest which most readers will not

find in the “Tale of a Tub,” or any other of the productions which made

this period of his life remarkable. Swift was continually going and

coming to London through these years. Though he had begun at once to

make Laracor a sort of earthly paradise with a Dutch flavor, such as he

had learnt from his early master, and though it was “very much for his

own satisfaction” that he had invited Stella to come to Ireland, yet

neither of these reasons was enough to keep him in the rural quiet among

his willows, though he loved them. He hankered after society, after fame

and power. He liked to meet with great men, to hear the news, to ride

over weaker reasoners in society, to put forth his own vigorous views,

and whip, with sharp satire, the men who displeased him. Tradition and

habit had made him a Whig, but political names were of easy interchange

in those days, and Swift’s objects were much more definite than his

politics. From the moment of Queen Anne’s ascension, when she gratified

the Church of England by the remission of certain dues hitherto paid to

the crown, Swift’s energies were directed to obtaining a similar

remission for the Irish Church, and this was the ostensible object of

his repeated journeys to London. He had also a purpose still nearer to

his heart, which was the advancement of Jonathan Swift to a post more

fitted to his genius. For these great objects he haunted the anterooms

of Halifax and Somers and Godolphin, and did what he could to show them

what they were not wise enough to perceive, that he was himself an

auxiliary well worth securing. The Whig lords played with, flattered,

and neglected the brilliant but importunate envoy of the Irish Church,

holding him upon tenterhooks of expectation, going so far as to make him

believe that his cause for the church was won, and that his bishopric

was certain, till disgust and disappointment overcame Swift’s patience.

Nine years had passed in these vain negotiations. It was in 1701 that he

paid that visit to Farnham which decided Stella’s fate, but his own was

still hanging in the balance when, after almost yearly expeditions in

the interval, he set out for London in the autumn of the year 1710 with

a threat upon his lips. “I will apply to Mr. Harley, who formerly made

some advances toward me, and, unless he be altered, will I believe think

himself in the right to use me well.” The change was sudden, but it had

little in it that could be called political apostasy. Every man was more

or less for his own hand, and the balance of popular feeling fluctuated

between war and peace: between pride and the glory of England on the one

hand, and horror of the sacrifices and misery involved in the

long-continued, never-ending campaigns of Marlborough on the

other--almost as much as Queen Anne wavered between the influence of the

imperious duchess and the obsequious Abigail. There was no shame to

Swift at such a moment in the sudden revolution he made.

The man who felt himself of sufficient importance to make this threat

seems to have possessed already, notwithstanding the neglect of the Whig

lords, the rank of his intellect rather than of his external position,

and this not entirely because of the anonymous productions which were

more or less known to be his. The “Tale of a Tub,” written while he was

still an inmate of Moor Park, had by this time been before the world six

years. It was published along with the “Battle of the Books” in 1704,

and caused great excitement and sensation among politicians, wits, and

critics. But the careless contempt of fame which mingled in him with so

fierce a hunger for it kept it long a matter of doubt whether the

immense reputation of these works belonged to him or not; and it would

appear that his own personality, the size and rude splendor of his

individual character, had at least as much to do with his position as

the doubtful glory of an anonymous publication. The vicar of Laracor was

not sufficiently important to be chosen as the representative of the

Irish Church--but Jonathan Swift was; and though the bishops schemed

against him in his absence when he seemed to have failed, no one seems

to have ventured to suggest that he was too humble a person to hold that

representative post. The book which dazzled English society and set all

the wits talking was by no means the kind of book to support

ecclesiastical dignity. It was indeed by way of being a vindication of

the superiority of the Anglican Church over Rome on the one hand, and

the dissenters on the other; but the tremendous raid against false

pretenses, hypocrisy, and falsehood which is its real scope, was

executed with such a riot and madness of laughter, and unscrupulous

derision of everything that came in the satirist’s way, as had scarcely

been known in English speech before. The mockery was at once brilliant

and careless, dashed about hither and thither in a sort of giant’s play,

full of the coarsest metaphors, the finest wit, indignation, ridicule,

fun, almost too wild and reckless to be called cynical, though

penetrated with the profoundest cynicism and disbelief of any good. The

power which still lives and asserts itself in those strange and often

detestable pages, must strike even the

[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.

ENGRAVED BY R. A. MULLER, FROM AN ENGRAVING IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, AFTER

A PAINTING BY SIR PETER LELY.]

reader to whom they are most abhorrent. And the standard of taste was

different in the reign of Anne, and critics were not easily alarmed. To

some readers the most desperate satire that was ever written appeared a

delightful piece of wit.

William Penn sent to the author from America a gammon of bacon on the

score of having been “often greatly amused by thy _Tale_,” and a hundred

years later it “delighted beyond description” at the robust mind of

William Cobbett, so that he forgot that he had not supped, and preferred

the book to a bed. The effect upon the general mind of his

contemporaries was equally great; and notwithstanding the immense

difference of taste and public feeling it has never lost its place among

English classics. Many indeed were horrified by its audacious treatment

of the most sacred things, and the objection of Queen Anne to give its

author a bishopric would probably have been shared by nine tenths of her

subjects. The “Tale of a Tub” is one of those books which furnish a test

of literary character. Like the man who was bound to hear the Ancient

Mariner, and whom that mystic personage knew whenever he saw him, the

reader of Swift’s great work must be born with the faculty necessary for

due appreciation and understanding. It is not a power communicable, any

more than it is possible to explain the story of the albatross, and the

curse that fell upon its slayer. The greater part of the public take

both for granted, and remain in a respectful ignorance. To such Swift’s

work is little better than a dust-heap of genius, in which there are

diamonds and precious things imbedded, which flash at every turning

over; but the broken bits of treasure are mixed up with choking dust and

dreary rubbish, as well as the offensive garbage which revolts the

searcher. The dedication of the work to Prince Posterity is thus wholly

justified, and at the same time a failure. It stands in the highest rank

of classic satire, and yet to the mass of readers it is nothing but a

name.

It is characteristic, however, of the man that he should have tossed

into the world without a name a book which made a greater impression

than any contemporary publication, enjoying no doubt the wonders and

queries, yet scorning to make himself dependent upon so small a thing as

a book for his reputation and influence. He was no more disposed than

the most sensitive of authors to let another man claim the credit of it,

yet proud enough in native arrogance to hold himself independent of such

aids to advancement, and thus to prove his scorn of the world’s opinion,

even when he sought its applauses most. Whether this work had anything

to do with his introduction to the society of the coffee-houses, and the

wits of London, we are not told. He was addressed by Addison as “the

most Agreeable Companion, the Truest Friend, and the Greatest Genius of

his age,” very shortly after the publication of his great satire; so

that it is probable he already enjoyed the advantage of its fame,

without seeming to do so. The friendship of Addison was a better thing

than the admiration of the crowd, and notwithstanding Swift’s imperious

temper and arrogant ways, it is just to add that he always numbered

among his friends the best and greatest of his time.

On a first accost, it would not seem that his manners were ingratiating.

This story, which is told of Swift’s appearance at the St. James

coffee-house is amusing, and may be true.

They had for several successive days observed a strange clergyman

come into the house who seemed entirely unacquainted with any of

those who frequented it, and whose custom was to lay down his hat

on a table and walk backward and forward at a good pace, for half

an hour or an hour, without speaking to any mortal, or seeming in

the least to attend to anything that was going forward there. He

then used to take up his hat, pay his money at the bar, and walk

away without opening his lips. On one particular evening, as Mr.

Addison and the rest were observing him, they saw him cast his eyes

several times on a gentleman in boots who seemed to be just come

out of the country, and at last advance, as if intending to address

him. Eager to hear what this dumb, mad parson had to say, they all

quitted their seats to get near him. Swift went up to the country

gentleman, and in a very abrupt manner, without any previous

salute, asked him, “Pray, sir, do you remember any good weather in

the world?” The country gentleman, after staring a little at the

peculiarity of his manner, answered, “Yes, sir, I remember a great

deal of good weather in my time.” “That is more,” rejoined Swift,

“than I can say. I never remember any weather that was not too hot

or too cold, or too wet or too dry; but however God Almighty

contrives at the end of the year it is all very well.” With which

remark he took up his hat, and without uttering a syllable more, or

taking the least notice of any one, walked out of the coffee-house.

His whimsical humor, and love of making the spectators stare, remained a

characteristic of Swift all his life.

These beginnings of social life were, however, past, and no one was

better known or more warmly welcomed, when he appeared with his wig new

curled, and his azure eyes aglow, than the Irish parson, waiting upon

Providence and the Whigs, whose political pamphlets, and papers in the

“Tatler,” and malicious practical joking with poor Partridge, the

astrologer, made him, at each appearance, a more notable figure to all

the lookers-on. His eyes must have been on fire under those expressive

brows when he came to London in 1710, resolved this time to be put off

by Whig blandishments no longer, but to try what the other side would

do. The other side received him with open arms, and the most instant

appreciation of what he was worth to them and what he could do. Harley

was not great in any sense of the word, but if he had shown as much

insight in the conduct of public affairs as he did in his perception of

the workmen best adapted to his purpose, in the struggle upon which he

had entered, he would have been the most successful of ministers. He

told Swift that his colleagues and himself had been afraid of none but

him in the ranks of their enemies, and that they had resolved to have

him. And in proof that they were ready to do anything to secure his

services, they pushed on and decided as soon as might be his suit for

the church, which had hung in the balance so long, was as good as

granted, now as far off as ever. It was settled at once, to Swift’s

great triumph. And to crown all, the new minister, the greatest man in

England, called him Jonathan!--of all wonderful things, what could be

more wonderful than that this great wit, this powerful and pitiless

satirist, this ambitious man, should be altogether overcome with

pleasure when Harley called him by his Christian name! Was it mere

servility, vanity, the flattered weakness of a hanger-on in a great

man’s familiarity, as everybody says? It is hard to believe this, though

it is taken for granted on all sides. Swift seems, at all events, to

have had a real affection for the shifty minister, who received him in

so different a fashion from that of his former masters. He flung himself

into all the backstair intrigues, and collogued with Abigail Masham, and

took his share in every plot. When Harley was stabbed, Swift felt for

him all the anxiety of a brother. He threw himself into the “Examiner,”

the new Tory organ, with fervor and enthusiasm, and expounded the

principles of his party and set their plans before the public with a

force and clearness which nobody but he, his patrons declared,

possessed. The two statesmen, Harley and Bolingbroke, who were so little

like each other, so ill calculated to draw together, were alike in this:

that neither could be flattering enough or kind enough to the great

vassal whom they had secured. He seems to have thought of himself that

he was a sort of third consul, an unofficial sharer of their power.

This extraordinary episode in the life of a man of Swift’s profession,

and so little likely to come to such promotion, lasted three years; and

the history of it is not less remarkable than the fact. It was a period

of the greatest intellectual

[Illustration: DELANY’S HOUSE AT DELVILLE, WHERE SWIFT STAYED.

DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY C. A. POWELL.]

activity and brilliancy in Swift’s career, and besides his hard

political work in the “Examiner” and elsewhere, he flung from him, amid

the exhilarating appreciation of the great world and his patrons, a

number of the best of his lighter productions. But nothing that he ever

wrote can be compared to the letters in which the story of this period

is told, since nowhere else do we find the charm of humanity, which is

more great and attractive even than genius. As if the rule of paradox

was to prevail in his life as well as in his wit, this cynic,

misanthrope, and satirist, ignoring love and every softer thought,

exhibits himself once to us in an abandon and melting of the heart such

as common men are as little capable of as they are of his fierce

laughter and bitter jests. If it is the true man whom we see in these

unpremeditated and careless pages, written before he got up of a

morning, or in the evening when he came home from his entertainments,

with the chairmen still wrangling over their sixpences outside, how

different is that man from the other who storms and laughs and mocks

humanity, and sees through all its miserable pretenses without a thought

of pardon or excuse! The “Journal” letters addressed to the ladies in

Dublin, Madam P. P. T. and Madam Elderby, the two women who shared his

every thought, now so well known as the “Journal to Stella,” are, of all

Swift’s works, the only productions that touch the heart. They are not

to be numbered among his “works” at all: publication of any kind never

seems to have occurred to him, while writing: they are as frank as

Pepy’s[spelling per original], and far more simple and true. They are

English history and London life, and the eighteenth century, with its

mannerisms and quaintness, all in one; and beyond and above every

circumstance, they are Swift as he was in his deepest soul,--not as he

appeared to men,--a human being full of tenderness, full of fun and

innocent humor, full of genius and individual nature, but, above all,

of true affection, the warmest domestic love. Passion is not in those

delightful pages; but the endearing playfulness, the absolute freedom of

self-revelation, the tender intimacy and confidence of members of the

same family, whose interests and subjects of thought and talk and merry

jests and delusions are one. They describe every day--nay, hour--of his

life, every little expedition, all the ups and downs of his occupations

and progress, with the boundless freedom and sportive extravagance, the

unimpassioned, unabashed adoration of something warmer than a father,

more indulgent, more admiring than a brother, yet brother, father,

lover, and friend all in one.

Only to a woman could such letters have been addressed, and few women

reading them will be disposed to pity Stella or think her life one of

blight or injury. Without these the life of the dean would not have

touched our human sympathies at all, but now that time has let us thus

fully into his confidence, and opened to our sight what was never

intended for any but hers and those of her shadow, her guardian, the

humble third in this profound and perfect union, it is with moistened

eyes that we read the ever living record. There is nothing in the coarse

and struggling potency of those books which critics applaud, that comes

within a hundred miles of the delightful life and ease of these

outpourings of Swift’s innermost soul. The “Tale of a Tub,” the “Battle

of the Books,” retain a sort of galvanic existence, but are for the

greater part insupportable to the honest readers who have no tradition

of superior acumen and perception to maintain. But when we turn to the

“Journal,” the clean and wholesome pages smile with a cordial life and

reality. If there is here and there a phrase too broad for modern ears,

it is nothing more than the language of the time, and has not a ghost of

evil meaning in it. The big arrogant wit--not unused to bluster and

brag, to act like a tyrant and speak like a bully--meets us there

defenseless, with the tenderest light upon his face, in his nightcap and

without his wig, smiling over little M. D.’s letter in the wintry

mornings, snatching a moment at bedtime when he is already “seepy,” and

can do nothing but bid “nite deelest dea M. D. nite deelest loques,”

making his mouth, he says, as if he were saying the broken, childish

words, retiring into the sanctuary of the little language with an

infinite sense of consolation and repose. Outside it may be he swaggered

and defied all men, even his patrons; but here an exquisite softness

comes over him. However he may be judged or mistaken in the world, he is

always understood by the women in that secret world where they make

their comments on whatever happens, and merrily answer back again with

their criticisms, their strictures, no more afraid of that impetuous,

angry genius than if he had been the meekest of rural priests. It is

this that has got Swift his hold upon many a reader, who, beginning by

hating him, the coarse and bitter wit, the scorner of men and crusher of

women’s hearts, has suddenly found his own heart melt in his breast to

see the giant lay by his thunders and prattle like an old gossip, like a

tender mother, father, all in one, in the baby-talk that first had

opened to him the knowledge of all that is sweetest in life. We do not

understand the man, much less the woman, who can read without forgiving

to Swift all his brutalities, as indeed most women who encountered him

seem to have done without that argument. He would treat the fine ladies

with the most imperious rudeness, giving forth his rule that it was they

who should make advances to him, not he to them, yet captivating even

those who resisted in the end.

The little language which this fierce satirist and cynic dared to put in

writing, the only man ever so bold as to pay such homage to affection,

puzzled beyond measure his first editors and expositors, who, with a

horrified prudery, seem to have done their best to interpret and

restore it to decorum and dignity; but it has now become the point in

his story which is most tenderly recollected, his sacred reconciliation

with mankind. A homeless boy, with none of the traditions of a family,

finding his unlovely life not less but more unpromising in his first

experiences of Temple’s luxurious English home, what a sudden fountain

of sweetness must have opened to him in the prattle of the delightful

child, which was a new revelation to his heart--revelation of all that

kindred meant, and delightful intimacy and familiar love. His little

star of life never waned to Swift: Stella grew old, but never outgrew

the little language, and every young woman had something in her of the

sprightly creature that loved to do his bidding, the P. P. T. who held

her own, and put him upon his best behavior often, yet never was other

than the “deelest little loque” whom he bantered and laughed at with

soft tears of tenderness in his eyes. “Better, thank God, and M. D.’s

prayers,” he says among the private scribbles of his daily diary, which

neither she nor any one was ever meant to see. Nevertheless, even while

he was writing this “Journal,” which is the record of a tender intimacy

so remarkable, Swift was meddling with the education of another girl,

incautiously, foolishly, who was not of the uninflammable nature of

Stella, but a hot-headed, passionate creature who did not at all imagine

that the mere

... delight he took

To see the virgin mind her book

was all Dr. Swift meant by his talk and attention. Swift says nothing of

this pupil in the “Journal.” He mentions his dinners at Mrs.

Vanhomrigh’s, and her handsome daughter, but he does not tell Madam P.

P. T. that he had given one of his usual caressing names to this girl,

whose early beauty and frank devotion had pleased him. There is, indeed,

no shadow

[Illustration: MARLEY ABBEY, THE RESIDENCE OF VANESSA, NOW CALLED

SELBRIDGE ABBEY.

DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY R. C. COLLINS.]

of Vanessa anywhere visible, though the brief mention of her name shows

that the second story, which was to be so fatally and painfully mingled

with the first, had already begun.

The three years of Swift’s stay in England were the climax of his life.

They raised him higher than ever a simple parson had been raised before,

and made of him (or so, at least, he believed) a power in the state. It

has been doubted whether he was really so highly trusted, so much built

upon, as he thought. The great lords who delighted in Swift’s talk, and

called him Jonathan, did not, perhaps, follow his advice and accept his

guidance, as he supposed. He says, jestingly,--yet half, perhaps, with

an uneasy meaning,--that everything that was said between himself and

Harley as they traveled sociably in my Lord Treasurer’s coach to

Windsor, might have been told at Charing Cross; but this was a rare

admission, and generally he was very full of the schemes of the

ministers and their consultations, and his own important share in them.

He seems to have constituted himself the patron of everybody he knew,

really providing for a considerable number, and largely undertaking for

others, though it was long before he got anything for himself. The

following anecdote gives an unpleasant view from outside of his demeanor

and habits. It is from Bishop Kennett’s diary during the year 1713, the

last of Swift’s importance:

Swift came into the coffee-room, and had a bow from everybody save

me. When I came to the antechamber to wait before prayers, Dr.

Swift was the principal man of talk and business, and acted as

minister of requests. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak

to his brother the Duke of Ormond to get a chaplain’s place

established in the garrison of Hull for Mr. Fiddes, a clergyman in

that neighborhood, who had lately been in jail and published

sermons to pay fees. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake with

my Lord Treasurer that according to his position he should obtain a

salary of £200 per annum as minister of the English Church in

Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going in with the red bag

to the Queen, and told him aloud he had something to say to him

from my Lord Treasurer. He talked with the son of Dr. Davenant, to

be sent abroad, and took out his pocket-book, and wrote down

several things as _memoranda_ to do for him. He turned to the fire,

and took out his gold watch, and, telling them the time of day,

complained it was very late. A gentleman said, “It goes 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 verse, for which, he

said, he must have them all subscribe. “For,” says he, “the author

shall not begin to print it 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.

But the account of the patronage which he exercised, and the brag and

general “swagger” of his demeanor, though it is by no means invisible in

the “Journal,” has a different aspect there, where he tells all about

his favor and power, to please his correspondents, with a good excuse in

this tender reason for magnifying all that happens to him. It was,

indeed, a position to turn even the soundest head, and Swift had

thirsted all his life for power, for notability, for that buoyant sense

of being on the top of the wave which was so contrary to all his

previous experience. His own satirical account of himself, as desiring

literary eminence only to make up for the mistake of not being born a

lord, is a self-contemptuous way of stating the thirst he had to be

foremost, to be doing, to be capable of moving the world. And he may

very well be excused for thinking now that he had done so.

Amid the many disappointments of his life he had these three years of

triumph, which are much for a man to have. If there was a certain

vulgarity in his enjoyment of them, there was at the same time a great

deal of active kindness, and though he might brag of the services he

did, he yet did service and remembered his friends, and helped as he

could those hangers-on and waiters upon Providence who, in those days,

were always about a minister’s antechamber. It is unnecessary to attempt

to go over again the story of the politics of the time, in which he was

so powerful an agent. To see Swift moving about in his gown and wig,

with his eyes, “azure as the heavens,” glowing keen from underneath his

deep brows, sometimes full of sport and laughter and tender kindness,

sometimes with something “awful” in their look, sometimes dazzling with

humorous tyranny and command, is more interesting than to fathom over

again for the hundredth time the confusing intrigues of the age. One

thing is evident, that while he served others he got nothing for

himself: the bishopric so long longed for did not come, nor even a fat

English deanery, which would have been worth the having and kept him

near the center of affairs. Was Harley, too, disposed to flatter rather

than promote his Jonathan? or was it the queen’s determined prejudice,

and conviction that the “Tale of a Tub” was no fit foundation for a

miter? The latter would have been little wonderful, for Swift had taken

pains to embroil himself with the court, by a coarse and ineffective

satire called the “Windsor Prophecy,” which no doubt amused the hostile

coteries, yet could not but do the rash writer harm.

At last, just before the fall of Harley, preferment was found for the

champion who had served him so well. It was the last that Swift would

have chosen for himself--a kind of dignified banishment and exile from

all he loved best. There was a question between the deanery of St.

Patrick’s and that of Windsor, he himself says. Had he gone to the royal

borough, what a curious change might have come to all his after life!

Would Stella, one wonders, have found a red-roofed house under the

cloister walls? and the dean lived, perhaps, to get the confidence of

Queen Caroline, a queen worth pleasing? and looked upon the world with

azure eyes softened by prosperity from the storied slopes, and worn his

ribbon of the Garter with a proud inflation of the bosom which had

always sighed for greatness? How many differences, how much softening,

expanding, almost elevation, might not the kind hand of Fortune work in

such great but troubled natures were it allowed to smooth and caress the

roughness away!

When the issue of the conflict between Harley and Bolingbroke became too

evident to be doubted, Swift showed the softer side of his character in

a very unexpected way. He ran away from the catastrophe like a nervous

woman, hiding himself in a country parsonage till the blow should be

struck and the calamity be overpast, a very curious piece of moral

timidity or nervous over-sensitiveness, for which we are entirely

unprepared. It was less extraordinary that he should write to offer

himself to Harley as a companion in his solitude when the minister was

fairly ousted, although even then Bolingbroke was bidding eagerly for

his services. But whether Swift would have accepted these offers, or

would have carried his evidently genuine attachment to Harley so far as

permanently to withdraw with him from public life, was never known. For

the victory of St. John was short indeed. “The Earl of Oxford was

removed on Tuesday, the Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and

how does Fortune banter us!” writes Bolingbroke. It was such a stroke of

the irony of fate as Swift himself might have invented, and St. John

applauded with the laughter of the philosopher. There was an end of

political power for both, and the triumph and greatness of Swift’s

reflected glory was over without hope of renewal.

He had now nothing to do but to return to Ireland, so long neglected,

the country of his disappointments, which did not love him, and which he

did not love, where his big genius (he thought) had not room enough to

breathe, where society was small and provincial, and life flat and bare,

and only a few familiar friends appreciated him or knew what he was.

How he was to make himself the idol of that country, a kind of king in

it, and gain power of a different kind from any he had yet wielded, was

as yet a secret hidden in the mists of the future to Swift and everybody

around. His account of himself when he got home to his dull deanery, “a

vast unfurnished house,” with a few servants in it, “all on board

wages,” is melancholy enough. “I live a country life in town, see

nobody, and go every day once to prayers, and hope in a few months to

grow as stupid as the present situation of affairs will require,” but he

consoles himself: “after all, parsons are not such bad company,

especially when they are _under subjection; and I let none but such come

near me_,” a curious statement, in which the great satirist, as often

before, gives a stroke of his idle sword at himself.

But Swift was not long left in this stagnation. Extreme quiet is in many

cases but a cover for brewing mischief, and the dean had not long

returned to Ireland when that handsome daughter of Mrs. Vanhomrigh, of

whom he had said so little in his letters, found herself, on her

mother’s death, drawn to Ireland, and the neighborhood of her tutor and

correspondent. It is curious to find so many links to Ireland in this

little company. Stella had a farm in Meath left to her by Sir William

Temple, Vanessa, “a small property at Celbridge,” to which it suited her

to retire. And thus there were gathered together within a short distance

the dean himself in his dull house, the assured and quiet possessor of

his tenderest affections in Dublin near him, and the impassioned girl

who had declared for him love of a very different kind, at Marley Abbey,

within the reach of a ride. That Swift had a heart large enough to admit

on his own terms many women is very evident, and that he had a fondness

for Vanessa among the rest; but how far he was to blame for her fatal

passion, it is scarcely possible to decide. The story of their

connection, as told from his side of the question in the poem of

“Cadenus and Vanessa,” shows an unconsciousness and innocence of purpose

which takes all the responsibility of her infatuation from the dean, and

shows him in a light all too artless.

The 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.

But this was not the light in which the headstrong young woman, who made

no secret of her love, and filled him with “shame, disappointment,

guilt, remorse,” by the revelation, regarded his attentions. Their

correspondence went on for nearly ten years. It is a painful

correspondence, as the outpouring of a woman’s passion for a man who

does not respond to it must always be; but Swift never seems to have

fostered that passion, nor to have done anything but discourage and

subdue a love so embarrassing and troublesome.

And now comes in the mystery which everybody has discussed, but which

none have brought to any certain conclusion. In 1716, two years after

Swift’s return to Ireland, it is said that he married Stella, thus

putting himself at once out of all possibility of marrying Miss

Vanhomrigh (which might have been a motive) and satisfying Stella, as

the notion goes. Scott receives the statement as proved; so does Mr.

Craik, Swift’s last, and a most conscientious and careful biographer.

The evidence for it is that Lord Orrery and Dr. Delany, the earliest

writers on the subject, both assert it (“if my informations are right,”

as the former says) as a supposition universally believed in society;

and that the fact was told by the Bishop of Clogher, who performed the

ceremony, to Bishop Berkeley, who told it to his wife, who told it after

her husband’s death, and long after the event, to George Monck Berkeley,

who tells the story. But Bishop Berkeley was in Italy at the time and

could not have been told, though he might have heard it at second-hand

from his pupil, the Bishop of Clogher’s son. We wonder if an inheritance

or the legitimacy of a child would be considered proved by such

evidence, or whether the prevailing sense of society that such a thing

ought to have taken place has not a large share in the common belief. At

all times, as at the present moment, wherever a close friendship between

man and woman exists (and the very fact of such rumors makes it

extremely rare), suggestions of the same description float in the air.

Nobody supposes, if the marriage took place at all, that it was anything

more than a mere form. It was performed, if performed at all, in the

garden without any formal or legal preliminaries. Supposing such a

fictitious rite to have any justification in Irish law, we wonder what

the authorities of the church would have had to say to two high

dignitaries who united to perform an act so disorderly and contrary to

ecclesiastical decorum, if to nothing else. It is totally unlike Swift,

whose feeling for the church was strong, to have used her ordinances so

disrespectfully, and most unlike all we know of Stella that she should

have consented to so utterly false a relationship. However, the question

is one which the reader will decide according to his own judgment, and

upon which no one can speak with authority. Mr. Forster, of all Swift’s

biographers the most elaborate and anxious, did not get so far in his

work as to examine the evidence, yet intimates his disbelief of the

story. We do not need, however, to have recourse to the expedient of a

marriage to explain how the story of Vanessa might have been a pain and

offense to Stella. Swift had not in this particular been frank with his

friends, and the discovery, so near them, of a woman making so

passionate a claim upon his affections must have conveyed the shock at

once of a deception and an unpardonable intrusion to one who was proudly

conscious of being his most trusted confidant and closest companion.

Whatever were the rights of the case, however, nobody can now know.

Whether Vanessa had heard the rumor of the private marriage, whether she

conceived that a desperate appeal to his dearest friend might help her

own claim, or whether mere suspicion and misery, boiling over, found

expression in the hasty letter to Stella which she wrote at the crisis

of her career, is equally unessential. She did write, and Stella,

surprised and offended, showed the letter to Swift. Nothing can be more

tragic than the events that follow. Swift, in one of those wild bursts

of passion which were beyond the control of reason, rode out at once to

the unfortunate young woman’s house. He burst in without a word, threw

her own letter on the table before her, and rode off again like a

whirlwind. Vanessa came of a short-lived race, and was then, at

thirty-four, the last of her family. She never recovered the blow, but,

dying soon after, directed her letters and the poem which contained the

story of her love and his coldness to be published. This was not done

for nearly a century; and now more than half of another has gone, but

the story is as full of passion and misery, as unexplained, as ever.

This was one of the occupations of Swift’s stagnant time. He fled, as he

had done at the moment of Harley’s fall, that, at least, he might not

see what was going to happen.

But a little while longer was the other, the love of his life, spared to

him. Five years after the tragical end of Vanessa, Stella too died,

after long suffering. There is a second story, of equally doubtful

authenticity and confused and extraordinary details, about a proposed

tardy acknowledgment of the apocryphal marriage; but whether it was he

or she who suggested this, whether it was he or she who found it “too

late,” whether there was any reality in it at all, no one has ever

determined. Stella’s illness grew serious while Swift

[Illustration: GEORGE, EARL OF BERKELEY.

FROM AN UNFINISHED ENGRAVING, IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, ATTRIBUTED TO DAVID

LOGGAN.]

was absent, and his anguish at the news was curiously mingled with an

overwhelming dread lest she should die at the deanery, and thus

compromise her reputation and his own; perhaps, too, lest the house to

which he must return should be made intolerable to him by the shadow of

such an event. That he should have kept away, with his usual terror of

everything painful, was entirely in keeping with his character. But the

first alarm passed away, and Swift was in the deanery when this great

sorrow overtook him. He who had kept a letter for an hour without daring

to open it, in which he trembled to find the news of her death, now shut

himself up heartbroken in his solitary house, and, somewhat calmed by

the irrevocable,--as grief, however desperate, always must

be,--proceeded to give himself what consolation was possible by writing

a “Character,” as was the fashion of the time, of “the truest, most

virtuous, and valuable friend I, or perhaps any other person, was ever

blessed with.” The calm after the storm, but a calm of sober despair and

dread, unreal composure, is in this strange document. He wrote till “my

head aches, and I can write no more,” and on the third day resumed and

completed the strange and melancholy narrative.

This is the night of her funeral, which my sickness will not suffer

me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am removed into

another apartment, that I may not see the light in the Church,

which is just over against the window of my bedchamber.

She was buried in his own cathedral by torchlight, as the custom was;

but he would no more bear the glimpses of that awful light through the

window, than he could witness the putting away of all that remained of

Stella in the double gloom of the vault and the night. In that other

apartment he concluded his sad panegyric, the story of all she was and

did, showing with intense but subdued eloquence that there was no fault

in her. “There is none like her, none.” This is the burden of the old

man’s self-restrained anguish, the tragedy of his age, as it is the

young lover’s pæan of triumph. The truest, most valuable friend that

ever man had--and now her beautiful life was ended, to be his

consolation no more. He had a lock of her hair in his possession

somewhere, either given him then or at some brighter moment, which was

found after his death, as all the world knows, with these words written

upon the paper that contained it: “Only a woman’s hair.” Only all the

softness, the brightness, the love and blessing of a life; only all that

the heart had to rest upon of human solace; only that--no more. He who

had thanked God and M. D.’s prayers for his better health, had now no

one to pray for him, or to receive his confidences. It was over, all

that best of life--as if it had never been.

It is easy to expand such a text, and many have done it. In the mean

time, before these terrible events had occurred, while Vanessa’s letters

were still disturbing his peace, and death had as yet touched none of

his surroundings, he had accomplished the greatest literary work of his

life, that by which every child knows Swift’s name--the travels of the

famous Gulliver. The children have made their selection with an unerring

judgment which is above criticism, and have taken Lilliput and

Brobdingnag into their hearts, rejecting all the rest. That Swift had a

meaning, bitter and sharp, even in the most innocent part of that

immortal fable, and meant to strike a blow at politicians and generals,

and the human race, with its puny wars, and glories, and endless

vanities and foolishness, is evident enough; and it was for this that

the people of his time seized upon the book with breathless interest,

and old Duchess Sarah in her old age chuckled and forgave the dean. But

the vast majority of his readers have not so much as known that he meant

anything except the most amusing and witty fancy, the keenest comic

delineation of impossible circumstances. That delightful Irish bishop,

if ever he was, who declared that “the book was full of improbable lies,

and for his part he hardly believed a word of it,” is the only critic we

want. “‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is almost the most delightful children’s

book ever written,” says Mr. Leslie Stephen, no small authority. It had

no doubt been talked over and read to the ladies, who, it would

incidentally appear, had not liked the “Tale of a Tub.” But Swift was at

home when he wrote “Gulliver,” and had no need of a journal to

communicate his proceedings.

Between 1714 and 1726, for a dozen years, he remained in Ireland without

intermission, altogether apart from public life. At the latter date he

went to London, probably needing, after the shock of Miss Vanhomrigh’s

death, and the grievous sense he must have had that it was he who had

killed her, a change of scene; and it was then that “Gulliver” was

published. The latter portions of it which the children have rejected we

are glad to have no space to dwell upon. The bitterness, passion, and

misery of them are beyond parallel. One would like to have any ground

for believing that the Houyhnhms and the rest came into being after

Stella’s death; but this was not the case. She was only a woman, and was

not, after all, of such vital importance in the man’s existence.

Withdrawal from the life he loved, confinement in a narrow sphere, the

disappointment of a soul which felt itself born for greatness, and had

tasted the high excitements of power, but now had nothing to do but

fight over the choir with his archbishop, and give occasion for a

hundred anecdotes in the Dublin coteries, had matured the angry passion

in him and soured the sweetness of nature. Few people now when they take

up their “Gulliver” go beyond Brobdingnag. The rest is like a succession

of bad dreams, the confused miseries of a fever. To think that in a

deanery, that calm seat of ecclesiastical luxury, within sound of the

cathedral bells and the choristers’ chants, a brain so dark and

distracted, and dreams so terrible, should have found shelter! They are

all the more bitter and appalling from their contrast with the

surroundings among which they had their disastrous birth.

The later part of Swift’s life, however, had occupation of a very

different and nobler kind. The Ireland he knew was so different from the

Ireland with which we are acquainted, that to contemplate the two is apt

to give a sort of moral vertigo, a giddiness of the intellect, to the

observer. Swift’s Ireland was the country of the English-Irish,

ultra-Protestant, like the real Ireland only in the keenness of its

politics and the sharpness of its opposition to imperial measures. It

was Ireland with a parliament of her own, and many of the privileges

which are now her highest aspirations, yet she was not content. Swift,

in speaking of the people, the true Irish, the Catholic masses, who at

that moment bore their misery with a patience inconceivable, said of

them that they were no more considerable than the women and children, a

race so utterly trodden down and subdued that there was no need for the

politician to take them into account. The position of the predominant

class was almost like that of white men among the natives of a savage

country, or at least like that of the English in India, the confident

and assured rulers of a subject race. Nevertheless, these men were full

of a sort of national feeling, and ready to rise up in hot and not

ineffectual opposition when need was, and reckon themselves Irish,

whereas no sahib has ever reckoned himself Indian. The real people of

Ireland were held under the severest yoke, but those gentlemen who

represented the nation can scarcely be said to have been oppressed.

Their complaint was that Englishmen were put into vacant posts, that

their wishes were disregarded, and their affairs neglected, complaints

which even prosperous Scotland has been known to make. They were

affected, however, as well as the race which

[Illustration: ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL, DUBLIN.

DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY C. A. POWELL.]

they kept under their feet, by the intolerable law which suppressed

woolen manufactures in Ireland, and it was on this subject that Swift

first broke silence, and appeared as the national champion, recommending

to his countrymen such reprisals as the small can employ against the

great, in the form of a proposal that Irishmen should use Irish

manufactures only, a proposal by no means unlikely to be carried out

should an Irish parliament ever exist again.

The commotion produced by this real and terrible oppression was nothing,

however, to that called forth by an innocent attempt to give a copper

coinage--the most convenient of circulating mediums--to Ireland. Nothing

could have been more harmless, more useful and necessary in reality, and

there is no reason to suppose that dishonesty of any kind was involved.

But the public mind was embittered by the fact that the patent had been

granted to one of King George’s German favorites, and by her sold to

Wood, an Englishman, who was supposed to be about to make an enormous

profit out of the country by half-pence not worth their nominal value.

Such an idea stirred the prejudices and fears of the very lowest, and

would even now rouse the ignorant into rage and panic. Whether Swift

shared that natural and national, if unreasonable, outburst of

indignation and alarm to the full extent, or if he threw himself into it

with the instinct of an agitator foreseeing the capabilities of the

subject, it is difficult to tell. But the “Drapier’s Letters” gave to

the public outcry so powerful a force of resistance, and excited the

entire country into such unanimity and opposition, that the English

Government was forced to withdraw from this attempt, and the position of

the Irish nation, as an oppressed yet not unpowerful entity, still able

to face its tyrants and protest against their careless sway, became

distinctly apparent. It is strange that a man who hated Ireland, and

considered himself an exile in her, should have been the one to claim

for her an independence, a freedom she had never yet possessed, and

should have been able to inspire at once the subject and the ruling race

with the sense that they had found a champion capable of all things, and

through whom for the first time their voice might be heard in the world.

The immediate result was to Swift a popularity beyond bounds. The people

he despised were seized with an adoration for him which was shared by

the class to which he himself belonged--perhaps the first subject on

which they had agreed. “When he returned from England in 1726 bells were

rung, bonfires lighted, and a guard of honor escorted him to the

deanery. Towns voted him their freedom and received him as a prince.

When Walpole spoke of arresting him a prudent friend told the minister

that the messenger would require a guard of 10,000 soldiers.” When the

crowd which had gathered to see an eclipse disturbed him by the hum they

made, Swift sent out to tell them that the event was put off by order of

the dean, and the simple-minded people dispersed obediently! Had he been

so minded, and had he fully understood and loved the race over which his

great and troubled spirit had gained such power, much might perhaps have

been ameliorated in that unfortunate country, so cursed in her friends

as in her foes, and much in the soul consuming itself in angry

inactivity with no fit work in hand. But it would have taken a miracle

indeed to have turned this Englishman born in Ireland, this political

churchman and hater of papists and dissenters, into the savior of the

subject race. That he was, however, deeply struck with an impression of

their misery, and that his soul, always so ready to break forth upon the

cruelty, the falsehood, the barbarous misconception of men by men, found

in their wrongs a subject upon which he could scarcely exaggerate, is

apparent enough. His “Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the

Poor in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country” is one

of those pieces of terrible satire which lacerate the heart. Tears as of

blood are in it, a passion of indignant pity, and fury, and despair.

“Eat them, then, since there’s nothing else to be done with them,” he

says, detailing with elaborate composure the way to do it and the

desirableness of such a supply of delicate food. The reader, unwarned

and simple-minded, might almost, with a gasp of horror, take the

proposal for genuine. But Swift’s meaning was really more terrible than

cannibalism. It was the sense that these children, the noblest fruit of

nature, were in truth the embarrassment, the fatal glut of a miserable

race, that forced this dreadful irony upon him. And what picture could

be more terrible than that of the childless old man with his bleeding

heart, himself deserted of all that made life sweet, thus facing the

world with scorn so infinite that it transcends all symbols of passion,

bidding it consume what it has brought forth?

But Swift, unfortunately for himself and her, loved Ireland as little

when he thus made himself her champion as he had done throughout his

life. At all times his longing eyes were turned toward the country in

which life was, and power, and friends, and fame. Though he was aware he

was growing old and ought to be “done with this world,” he yet cries

aloud his desire “to 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,”--a

terrific image, and one of those phrases that burn and glow with a pale

light of despair. But he never got into that better world he longed for.

The slow years crept over him, and he lived on, making existence

tolerable by such expedients as he could, a wonderful proof how the body

will resist all the frettings of the soul, yet growing more angry, more

desperate, more subject to the bitter passions which had broken forth

even in his best days, as he grew older and had fewer reasons for

restraining himself. At last the great dean, the greatest genius of his

age, the man of war and battle, of quip and jest, he who had thirsted to

be doing through all his life, fell into imbecility and stupor, with

occasional wild awakenings into consciousness which were still more

terrible. He died, denuded of all things, in 1745, having lived till

seventy-eight in spite of himself.

Ubi saeva indignatio

Cor ulterius lacerare nequit

is written on his tomb. No more can fiery wrath and indignation reach

him where he lies by Stella’s side in the aisle over against his chamber

window. The touch of her quiet dust must have soothed, one would think,

the last fever that lingered still in him even after death had done its

worst.