Part 5 (1/2)

But what success Vanessa met Is to the world a secret yet.[46]

Vanessa loved Swift; and Swift, it seems, allowed himself to be loved. One phrase in a letter written to him during his stay at Dublin, in 1713, suggests the only hint of jealousy. If you are happy, she says, ”it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except 'tis what is inconsistent with mine.” Soon after Swift's final retirement to Ireland, Mrs.

Vanhomrigh died; her husband had left a small property at Celbridge. One son was dead; the other behaved badly to his sisters; the daughters were for a time in money difficulties, and it became convenient for them to retire to Ireland, where Vanessa ultimately settled at Celbridge. The two women who wors.h.i.+pped Swift were thus almost in presence of each other. The situation almost suggests comedy; but unfortunately it was to take a most tragical and still partly mysterious development.

The fragmentary correspondence between Swift and Vanessa establishes certain facts. Their intercourse was subject to restraints. He begs her, when he is starting for Dublin, to get her letters directed by some other hand, and to write nothing that may not be seen, for fear of ”inconveniences.” The post-office clerk surely would not be more attracted by Vanessa's hand than by that of such a man as Lewis, a subordinate of Harley's who had formerly forwarded her letters. He adds that if she comes to Ireland, he will see her very seldom. ”It is not a place for freedom, but everything is known in a week and magnified a hundred times.” Poor Vanessa soon finds the truth of this. She complains that she is amongst ”strange prying deceitful people;” that he flies her and will give no reason except that they are amongst fools and must submit. His reproofs are terrible to her. ”If you continue to treat me as you do,” she says soon after, ”you will not be made uneasy by me long.” She would rather have borne the rack than those ”killing, killing words” of his. She writes instead of speaking, because when she ventures to complain in person ”you are angry, and there is something in your look so awful that it shakes me dumb”--a memorable phrase in days soon to come. She protests that she says as little as she can. If he knew what she thought, he must be moved. The letter containing these phrases is dated 1714, and there are but a few sc.r.a.ps till 1720; we gather that Vanessa submitted partly to the necessities of the situation: and that this extreme tension was often relaxed. Yet she plainly could not resign herself or suppress her pa.s.sion.

Two letters in 1720 are painfully vehement. He has not seen her for ten long weeks, she says in her first, and she has only had one letter and one little note with an excuse. She will sink under his ”prodigious neglect.”

Time or accident cannot lessen her inexpressible pa.s.sion. ”Put my pa.s.sion under the utmost restraint; send me as distant from you as the earth will allow, yet you cannot banish those charming ideas which will stick by me, whilst I have the use of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul, for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it.” She thinks him changed, and entreats him not to suffer her to ”live a life like a languis.h.i.+ng death, which is the only life I can lead, if you have lost any of your tenderness for me.” The following letter is even more pa.s.sionate. She pa.s.ses days in sighing and nights in watching and thinking of one who thinks not of her. She was born with ”violent pa.s.sions, which terminate all in one, that inexpressible pa.s.sion I have for you.” If she could guess at his thoughts, which is impossible (”for never any one living thought like you”) she would guess that he wishes her ”religious”--that she might pay her devotions to heaven. ”But that should not spare you, for was I an enthusiast, still you'd be the deity I should wors.h.i.+p.” ”What marks are there of a deity but what you are to be known by--you are (at?) present everywhere; your dear image is always before my eyes. Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe, I tremble with fear; at other times a charming compa.s.sion s.h.i.+nes through your countenance, which moves my soul. Is it not more reasonable to adore a radiant form one has seen, than one only described?”[47]

The man who received such letters from a woman whom he at least admired and esteemed, who felt that to respond was to administer poison, and to fail to respond was to inflict the severest pangs, must have been in the cruellest of dilemmas. Swift, we cannot doubt, was grieved and perplexed.

His letters imply embarra.s.sment; and, for the most part, take a lighter tone; he suggests his universal panacea of exercise; tells her to fly from the spleen instead of courting it; to read diverting books, and so forth; advice more judicious probably than comforting. There are, however, some pa.s.sages of a different tendency. There is a mutual understanding to use certain catch-words, which recall the ”little language.” He wishes that her letters were as hard to read as his, in case of accident. ”A stroke thus ... signifies everything that may be said to _Cad_, at the beginning and conclusion.” And she uses this written caress, and signs herself--his own ”Skinage.” There are certain ”questions,” to which reference is occasionally made; a kind of catechism, it seems, which he was expected to address to himself at intervals, and the nature of which must be conjectured. He proposes to continue the _Cadenus and Vanessa_--a proposal which makes her happy beyond ”expression,”--and delights her by recalling a number of available incidents. He recurs to them in his last letter, and bids her ”go over the scenes of Windsor, Cleveland Row, Rider Street, St.

James's Street, Kensington, the Shrubbery, the Colonel in France, &c. Cad thinks often of these, especially on horseback,[48] as I am a.s.sured.” This prosaic list of names recall, as we find, various old meetings. And, finally, one letter contains an avowal of a singular kind. ”Soyez a.s.suree,” he says, after advising her ”to quit this scoundrel island,”

”que jamais personne du monde a ete aimee, honoree, estimee, adoree par votre ami que vous.” It seems as though he were compelled to throw her just a crumb of comfort here: but, in the same breath, he has begged her to leave him for ever.

If Vanessa was ready to accept a ”gown of forty-four,” to overlook his infirmities in consideration of his fame, why should Swift have refused?

Why condemn her to undergo this ”languis.h.i.+ng death,”--a long agony of unrequited pa.s.sion? One answer is suggested by the report that Swift was secretly married to Stella in 1716. The fact is not proved, nor disproved:[49] nor, to my mind, is the question of its truth of much importance. The ceremony, if performed, was nothing but a ceremony. The only rational explanation of the fact, if it be taken for a fact, must be that Swift, having resolved not to marry, gave Stella this security that he would, at least, marry no one else. Though his anxiety to hide the connexion with Vanessa may only mean a dread of idle tongues, it is at least highly probable that Stella was the person from whom he specially desired to keep it. Yet his poetical addresses to Stella upon her birthday (of which the first is dated 1719, and the last 1727) are clearly not the addresses of a lover. Both in form and substance they are even pointedly intended to express friends.h.i.+p instead of love. They read like an expansion of his avowal to Tisdall, that her charms for him, though for no one else, could not be diminished by her growing old without marriage. He addresses her with blunt affection, and tells her plainly of her growing size and waning beauty; comments even upon her defects of temper, and seems expressly to deny that he loved her in the usual way.

Thou, Stella, wert no longer young When first for thee my harp I strung, Without one word of Cupid's darts Of killing eyes and bleeding hearts; With friends.h.i.+p and esteem possess'd I ne'er admitted love a guest.

We may almost say that he harps upon the theme of ”friends.h.i.+p and esteem.”

His grat.i.tude for her care of him is pathetically expressed; he admires her with the devotion of a brother for the kindest of sisters; his plain prosaic lines become poetical, or perhaps something better; but there is an absence of the lover's strain which is only not, if not, ostentatious.

The connexion with Stella, whatever its nature, gives the most intelligible explanation of his keeping Vanessa at a distance. A collision between his two slaves might be disastrous. And, as the story goes (for we are everywhere upon uncertain ground), it came. In 1721 poor Vanessa had lost her only sister,[50] and companion: her brothers were already dead, and, in her solitude, she would naturally be more than ever eager for Swift's kindness. At last, in 1723, she wrote (it is said) a letter to Stella, and asked whether she was Swift's wife.[51] Stella replied that she was, and forwarded Vanessa's letter to Swift. How Swift could resent an attempt to force his wishes, has been seen in the letter to Varina. He rode in a fury to Celbridge. His countenance, says Orrery, could be terribly expressive of the sterner pa.s.sions. Prominent eyes--”azure as the heavens” (says Pope)--arched by bushy black eyebrows, could glare, we can believe from his portraits, with the green fury of a cat's. Vanessa had spoken of the ”something awful in his looks,” and of his killing words. He now entered her room, silent with rage, threw down her letter on the table and rode off. He had struck Vanessa's death-blow. She died soon afterwards, but lived long enough to revoke a will made in favour of Swift, and leave her money between Judge Marshal and the famous Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley, it seems, had only seen her once in his life.

The story of the last fatal interview has been denied. Vanessa's death, though she was under thirty-five, is less surprising when we remember that her younger sister and both her brothers had died before her; and that her health had always been weak, and her life for some time a languis.h.i.+ng death. That there was in any case a terribly tragic climax to the half-written romance of _Cadenus and Vanessa_ is certain. Vanessa requested that the poem and the letters might be published by her executors. Berkeley suppressed the letters for the time; and they were not published in full until Scott's edition of Swift's works.

Whatever the facts, Swift had reasons enough for bitter regret if not for deep remorse. He retired to hide his head in some unknown retreat; absolute seclusion was the only solace to his gloomy, wounded spirit.

After two months he returned to resume his retired habits. A period followed, as we shall see in the next chapter, of fierce political excitement. For a time too he had a vague hope of escaping from his exile.

An astonis.h.i.+ng literary success increased his reputation. But another misfortune approached which crushed all hope of happiness in life.

In 1726 Swift at last revisited England. He writes in July that he has for two months been anxious about Stella's health, and as usual feared the worst. He has seen through the disguises of a letter from Mrs. Dingley.

His heart is so sunk that he will never be the same man again, but drag on a wretched life till it pleases G.o.d to call him away. Then in an agony of distress he contemplates her death; he says that he could not bear to be present; he should be a trouble to her, and the greatest torment to himself. He forces himself to add that her death must not take place at the deanery. He will not return to find her just dead or dying. ”Nothing but extremity could make me so familiar with those terrible words applied to so dear a friend.” ”I think,” he says in another letter, ”that there is not a greater folly than that of entering into too strict a partners.h.i.+p or friends.h.i.+p with the loss of which a man must be absolutely miserable; but especially [when the loss occurs] at an age when it is too late to engage in a new friends.h.i.+p.” The morbid feeling which could withhold a man from attending a friend's deathbed, or allow him to regret the affection to which his pain was due, is but too characteristic of Swift's egoistic attachments. Yet we forgive the rash phrase, when we read his pa.s.sionate expressions of agony. Swift returned to Ireland in the autumn, and Stella struggled through the winter. He was again in England in the following summer; and for a time in better spirits. But once more the news comes that Stella is probably on her deathbed; and he replies in letters which we read as we listen to groans of a man in sorest agony. He keeps one letter for an hour before daring to open it. He does not wish to live to see the loss of the person for whose sake alone life was worth preserving.

”What have I to do in the world? I never was in such agonies as when I received your letter, and had it in my pocket. I am able to hold up my sorry head no longer.” In another distracted letter, he repeats in Latin the desire that Stella shall not die in the deanery, for fear of malignant misinterpretations. If any marriage had taken place, the desire to conceal it had become a rooted pa.s.sion.

Swift returned to Ireland to find Stella still living. It is said that in the last period of her life Swift offered to make the marriage public, and that she declined, saying that it was now too late.[52] She lingered till January 28, 1728. He sat down the same night to write a few scattered reminiscences. He breaks down; and writes again during the funeral, which he is too ill to attend. The fragmentary notes give us the most authentic account of Stella, and show, at least, what she appeared in the eyes of her lifelong friend and protector. We may believe that she was intelligent and charming; as we can be certain that Swift loved her in every sense but one. A lock of her hair was preserved in an envelope in which he had written one of those vivid phrases by which he still lives in our memory: ”_Only a woman's hair_.” What does it mean? Our interpretation will depend partly upon what we can see ourselves in a lock of hair. But I think that any one who judges Swift fairly will read in those four words the most intense utterance of tender affection, and of pathetic yearning for the irrevocable past strangely blended with a bitterness springing not from remorse, but indignation at the cruel tragi-comedy of life. The destinies laugh at us whilst they torture us; they make cruel scourges of trifles, and extract the bitterest pa.s.sion from our best affections.

Swift was left alone. Before we pa.s.s on we must briefly touch the problems of this strange history. It was a natural guess that some mysterious cause condemned Swift to his loneliness. A story is told by Scott (on poor evidence) that Delany went to Archbishop King's library about the time of the supposed marriage. As he entered Swift rushed out with a distracted countenance. King was in tears, and said to Delany, ”You have just met the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question.” This has been connected with a guess made by somebody that Swift had discovered Stella to be his natural sister. It can be shown conclusively that this is impossible; and the story must be left as picturesque but too hopelessly vague to gratify any inference whatever.

We know without it that Swift was unhappy; but we know nothing of any definite cause.

Another view is that there is no mystery. Swift, it is said, retained through life the position of Stella's ”guide, philosopher and friend,” and was never anything more. Stella's address to Swift (on his birthday, 1721), may be taken to confirm this theory. It says with a plainness like his own that he had taught her to despise beauty and hold her empire by virtue and sense. Yet the theory is in itself strange. The less love entered into Swift's relations to Stella, the more difficult to explain his behaviour to Vanessa. If he regarded Stella only as a daughter or a younger sister, and she returned the same feeling, he had no reason for making any mystery about the woman who would not in that case be a rival.

If, again, we accept this view, we naturally ask why Swift ”never admitted love a guest.” He simply continued, it is suggested, to behave as teacher to pupil. He thought of her when she was a woman as he had thought of her when she was a child of eight years old. But it is singular that a man should be able to preserve such a relation. It is quite true that a connexion of this kind may blind a man to its probable consequences; but it is contrary to ordinary experience that it should render the consequences less probable. The relation might explain why Swift should be off his guard; but could hardly act as a safeguard. An ordinary man who was on such terms with a beautiful girl as are revealed in the _Journal to Stella_ would have ended by falling in love with her. Why did not Swift?

We can only reply by remembering the ”coldness” of temper to which he refers in his first letter: and his a.s.sertion that he did not understand love, and that his frequent flirtations never meant more than a desire for distraction. The affair with Varina is an exception: but there are grounds for holding that Swift was const.i.tutionally indisposed to the pa.s.sion of love. The absence of any traces of such a pa.s.sion from writings conspicuous for their amazing sincerity, and (it is added) for their freedoms of another kind, has been often noticed as a confirmation of this hypothesis. Yet it must be said that Swift could be strictly reticent about his strongest feelings--and was specially cautious, for whatever reason, in regard to his relation with Stella.[53]

If Swift const.i.tutionally differed from other men, we have some explanation of his strange conduct. But we must take into account other circ.u.mstances. Swift had very obvious motives for not marrying. In the first place, he gradually became almost a monomaniac upon the question of money. His hatred of wasting a penny unnecessarily began at Trinity College, and is prominent in all his letters and journals. It coloured even his politics, for a conviction that the nation was hopelessly ruined is one of his strongest prejudices. He kept accounts down to halfpence, and rejoices at every saving of a s.h.i.+lling. The pa.s.sion was not the vulgar desire for wealth of the ordinary miser. It sprang from the conviction stored up in all his aspirations that money meant independence.

”Wealth,” he says, ”is liberty; and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher--and Gay is a slave just by two thousand pounds too little.”[54] Gay was a d.u.c.h.ess's lapdog: Swift, with all his troubles, at least a free man. Like all Swift's prejudices, this became a fixed idea which was always gathering strength. He did not love money for its own sake. He was even magnificent in his generosity. He scorned to receive money for his writings; he abandoned the profit to his printers in compensation for the risks they ran, or gave it to his friends. His charity was splendid relatively to his means. In later years he lived on a third of his income, gave away a third, and saved the remaining third for his posthumous charity,[55]--and posthumous charity which involves present saving is charity of the most unquestionable kind. His principle was that by reducing his expenditure to the lowest possible point, he secured his independence and could then make a generous use of the remainder. Until he had received his deanery, however, he could only make both ends meet.

Marriage would therefore have meant poverty, probably dependence, and the complete sacrifice of his ambition.