Volume II Part 19 (1/2)
It will be said, where was her s.e.x's delicacy, where her woman's pride?
Alas!--
La Vergogna ritien debile amore, Ma debil freno di potente amore.
In this agonizing suspense she lived through eight long years; till, unable to endure it longer, and being aware of the existence of Stella, she took the decisive step of writing to her rival, and desired to know whether she was, or was not, married to Swift? Stella answered her immediately in the affirmative; and then, justly indignant that he should have given any other woman such a right in him as was implied by the question, she enclosed Vanessa's letter to Swift; and instantly, with a spirit she had never before exerted, quitted her lodgings, withdrew to the house of Mr. Ford, of Wood Park, and threw herself on the friends.h.i.+p and protection of his family.
This lamentable tragedy was now brought to a crisis. Swift, on receiving the letter, was seized with one of those insane paroxysms of rage to which he was subject. He mounted his horse, rode down to Celbridge, and suddenly entered the room in which Vanessa was sitting. His countenance, fitted by nature to express the dark and fierce pa.s.sions, so terrified her, that she could scarce ask him whether he would sit down? He replied savagely, ”No!” and throwing down before her, her own letter to Stella, with a look of inexpressible scorn and anger, flung out of the room, and returned to Dublin.
This cruel scene was her death warrant.[120] Hitherto she had venerated Swift; and in the midst of her sufferings, confided in him, idolized him as the first of human beings. What must he now have appeared in her eyes?--They say, ”h.e.l.l has no fury like a woman scorned;”--it is not so: the recoil of the heart, when forced to abhor and contemn, where it has once loved, is far,--far worse; and Vanessa, who had endured her lover's scorn, could not scorn _him_, and live. She was seized with a delirious fever, and died ”in resentment and in despair.”[121] She desired, in her last will, that the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, which she considered as a monument of Swift's love for her, should be published, with some of his letters, which would have explained what was left obscure, and have cleared her fame. The poem was published; but the letters, by the interference of Swift's friends, were, at the time, suppressed.
On her death, and Stella's flight, Swift absented himself from home for two months, nor did any one know whither he was gone. During that time, what must have been his feelings--_if_ he felt at all? what agonies of remorse, grief, shame, and horror, must have wrung his bosom! he had, in effect, murdered the woman who loved him, as absolutely as if he had plunged a poniard into her heart: and yet it is not clear that Swift was a prey to any such feelings; at least his subsequent conduct gave no a.s.surance of it. On his return to Dublin, mutual friends interfered to reconcile him with Stella. About this time, she happened to meet, at a dinner-party, a gentleman who was a stranger to the real circ.u.mstances of her situation, and who began to speak of the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, then just published. He observed, that Vanessa must have been an admirable creature to have inspired the Dean to write so finely.
”That does not follow,” replied Mrs. Johnson, with bitterness; ”it is well known that the Dean could write finely on a _broomstick_.” Ah! how must jealousy and irritation, and long habits of intimacy with Swift, have poisoned the mind and temper of this unhappy woman, before she could have uttered this cruel sarcasm!--And yet she was true to the softness of her s.e.x; for after the lapse of several months, during which it required all the attention of Mr. Ford and his family to sustain and console her, she consented to return to Dublin, and live with the Dean on the same terms as before. Well does old Chaucer say,
There can no man in humblesse him acquite As woman can, he can be half so true As woman be!
”Swift welcomed her to town,” says Sheridan, ”with that beautiful poem ent.i.tled 'Stella at Wood Park;'” that is to say, he welcomed back to the home from which he had driven her, the woman whose heart he had well nigh broken, the wife he had every way injured and abused,--with a tissue of coa.r.s.e sarcasms, on the taste for magnificence she must have acquired in her visit to Wood Park, and the difficulty of descending
From every day a lordly banquet To half a joint--and G.o.d be thanket!
From partridges and venison with the right _fumette_,--to
Small beer, a herring, and the Dean.
And this was all the sentiment, all the poetry with which the occasion inspired him!
Stella naturally hoped, that when her rival was no more, and Swift no longer exposed to her torturing reproaches, that he would do her tardy justice, and at length acknowledge her as his wife. But no;--it would have cost him some little mortification and inconvenience; and on such a paltry pretext he suffered this amiable and admirable woman, of whom he had said, that ”her merits towards him were greater than ever was in any human being towards another;” and ”that she excelled in every good quality that could possibly accomplish a human creature,”--this woman did he suffer to languish into the grave, broken in heart and blighted in name. When Stella was on her death-bed, some conversation pa.s.sed between them upon this sad subject. Only Swift's reply was audible: he said, ”Well, my dear, it shall be acknowledged, if you wish it.” To which she answered with a sigh, ”It is _now_ too late!”[122] It _was_ too late!--
What now to her was womanhood or fame?
She died of a lingering decline, in January, 1728, four years after the death of Miss Vanhomrigh.
Thus perished these two innocent, warm-hearted and accomplished women;--so rich in all the graces of their s.e.x--so formed to love and to be loved, to bless, and to be blessed,--sacrifices to the demoniac pride of the man they had loved and trusted. But it will be said, ”si elles n'avaient point aim, elles seraient moins connues:” they have become immortal by their connection with genius; they are celebrated, merely through their attachment to a celebrated man. But, good G.o.d! what an immortality! won by what martyrdom of the heart!--And what a celebrity!
not that with which the poet's love, and his diviner verse, crown the deified object of his homage, but a celebrity, purchased with their life-blood and their tears! I quit the subject with a sense of relief:--yet one word more.
It was after the death of these two amiable women, who had deserved so much from him, and whose enduring tenderness had flung round his odious life and character their only redeeming charm of sentiment and interest, that the native grossness and rancour of this incarnate spirit of libel burst forth with tenfold virulence.[123] He showed how true had been his love and his respect for _them_, by insulting and reviling, in terms a scavenger would disavow, the s.e.x they belonged to. Swift's master-pa.s.sion was pride,--an unconquerable, all-engrossing, self-revolving pride: he was proud of his vigorous intellect, proud of being the ”dread and hate of half mankind,”--proud of his contempt for women,--proud of his tremendous powers of invective. It was his boast, that he never forgave an injury; it was his boast, that the ferocious and unsparing personal satire with which he avenged himself on those who offended him, had never been softened by the repentance, or averted by the concessions of the offender. Look at him in his last years, when the cold earth was heaped over those who would have cheered and soothed his dark and stormy spirit; without a friend--deprived of the mighty powers he had abused--alternately a drivelling idiot and a furious maniac, and sinking from both into a helpless, hopeless, prostrate lethargy of body and mind!--Draw,--draw the curtain, in reverence to the human ruin, lest our woman's hearts be tempted to unwomanly exultation!
FOOTNOTES:
[107] As Swift said truly and wittily of himself:
As when a lofty pile is raised, We never hear the workmen praised, Who bring the lime or place the stones, But all admire Inigo Jones; So if this pile of scattered rhymes Should be approved in after-times, If it both pleases and endures, The merit and the praise are yours!
_Verses to Stella._
[108] Sheridan's Life of Swift.
[109] Dr. Johnson, who allows Stella to have been ”virtuous, beautiful, and elegant,” says she could not spell her own language: in those days few women _could_ spell accurately.