Part 2

Throughout what we may call the militant years of Jonathan Swift’s life, Stella was not the only young girl who, in the words of Dr. Johnson “from being proud of his praise grew fond of his person.” In following his life it becomes apparent that there was something in the morbid construction of his uncommon temperament that enabled him to derive a wanton and perverted satisfaction from mental intercourse with immature women. Both in his journals to Stella and in his letters to Vanessa this curious preoccupation is quite evident. It was this denaturalized and extraordinary man’s vice to make love not with his body but with his genius. This perilous pastime became a kind of obsession with him, an obsession which perhaps alone reconciled him to an existence for which as the years passed his distaste became more and more emphasized. His love letters are all written in ambiguous and masked language as though he half anticipated the fierce searchlight of inquiry that would be poured upon their pages by future generations. “Farewell, dear Sirrahs, dearest lives; there is peace and quiet with M D and nowhere else.”

Esther Vanhomrigh, as the other Esther had done before her, followed her equivocal lover to Ireland only to discover that she was conjured to practise the utmost discretion with regard to the amphibolous relationship. “You have taught me to distinguish and now you leave me miserable,” she wrote reproaching the Dean for his judicious abstentions.

Stella took alarm at the presence of a rival and managed to persuade Swift into marrying her, but even her triumph proved elusive for the Dean insisted upon the ceremony being performed with such rigid secrecy that to this day there are to be found those who hold to the opinion that it never took place at all.

Everybody knows what followed. Vanessa, distressed by a rumour of the wedding, wrote to Stella to have the matter cleared up. When the impolitic epistle was put into Swift’s hands, he rode in a fit of blind rage to Marlay Abbey. He reached the place in the early morning and, going straight up to the bed-room of the unhappy woman, threw the incriminating document at her feet and turned on his heel without a word. A week later Vanessa was dead and underground, killed, so it was said, by the single venomous, asp-like look that her ferocious lover had given her.

There are other equally strange stories connected with him. One of the most significant of these is recounted by Delaney. On one occasion he saw the Dean hurrying away from Archbishop King to whom he had been speaking. “You have just met the most unhappy man who ever lived,” was the only comment vouchsafed by the circumspect prelate. What it was that had been said or confessed during that historic conversation has never been divulged. But whatever horrible thing was hagriding the unfortunate man, worse was to follow.

In January 1732, Stella died. She was buried at midnight in the Cathedral. Swift was too ill to be present; and indeed had to be carried to the back of the deanery so as not to be distracted into a frenzy by the lights that shone into his room from the lanterns of those who were occupied in putting into church-yard mould the body of the only woman he had ever loved. From that hour he never lifted “his sorry head” in mirth again. A blank and hopeless gloom wrapped itself about him. The record of those years is one of the most terrible episodes in all literary history. Never for a moment was he unaware of his impending doom. He knew that he would inevitably go mad.

He was observed one day standing under an elm tree the top branches of which were already fading. “I shall be like that; I shall die first at the top,” he said. Once, when a heavy glass had fallen from its place nearly crushing him, and he was congratulated on his escape, he remarked simply, “I wish it had killed me.” A servant passing near his room overheard the words of a desperate prayer, “that he should be taken away from the evil to come.”

On the anniversaries of his birthday, when all Ireland was agog to do honour to the author of the “Drapier’s Letters,” and “A Modest Proposal,” he would sit quietly at home and read the third chapter of the book of Job, wherein that ancient, long-suffering Jew curses the day on which he was born. Already he began to feel a change coming over him. “Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!” he said once, as he turned over the pages of the “Tale of a Tub.” But worse was to follow.

An abscess as large as a hen’s egg formed over his left eye, and for a month the aging man howled out to the night in abject torment. Five servants could hardly prevent him from tearing out his own eyeball, and when the agony had passed he was left a lunatic. But was he? Occasionally, in spite of the strange aphasia by which he was afflicted, he would be heard to mutter words which to the awe of those who loved him seemed to denote that even yet, in some obscure way, he retained a ghastly and incredible consciousness.

More years passed by and still up and down the wide staircase and through the silent rooms of the deanery the figure that had been Jonathan Swift paced to and fro. Like a caged animal he ate his food--little chopped up pieces of meat--as he walked, and once he was found, with horrible contorted face, threatening his own image in one of the tall mirrors. Once his cousin called to see him. “Go, go,” he shrieked, and then pointing significantly to his head, “My best understanding.” Once there escaped from him the simple tragic words, “I am a fool”; and this from the lips of the man whom Addison had not hesitated to call the greatest genius of his age! Once more the devoted populace, as his birthday came round, lit bonfires, and paraded the streets, and rang the Dublin bells. The noise of their rejoicing came in through the open window and, to the dismay of the attendants, the idiot inmate uttered the words, “’Tis folly, better let it alone.” At another time a knife was left within his reach, and he who removed it was shocked to hear as though in rebuke for his own prudent action, the ambiguous and impressive utterance, “I am what I am.”

He died in his seventy-eighth year, October 19, 1745. He lies buried in his own cathedral near the grave of Esther Johnson. Amongst the letters that he left, as though he wished even after death to bewilder the over-curious concerning the true significance of the deepest emotions of his life, was found an envelope containing one of Stella’s tresses, “black as a raven’s wing,” with the four words, “only a woman’s hair” inscribed upon it.

His worldly goods were left by his will for the construction of a mad house.

MATTHEW PRIOR

Matthew Prior was undoubtedly one of the principal precursors of the Augustan age of English poetry; however, born as he was in 1664, his lighter verses are redeemed somewhat from the tedious classical anaesthesia that we associate with the eighteenth century by the fact that they still carry with them a suggestion of the delightful sophisticated levity which belonged to the Caroline epoch.

Matthew Prior, so we are assured by Dr. Johnson, was “one of those that have burst out from an obscure original to great eminence.” Whether or not the ancient county of Dorset is justified in claiming Wimborne Minster as the place of his actual birth, it is clear that it was from the immediate vicinity of that old-world country town that his progenitors sprang. Indeed it is within the memory of our own generation that the last of the family, Martha Prior, daughter of a simple shepherd, died at Godmanston.

The first authentic glimpse we get of the young poet is as a wine carrier in his uncle’s tavern in London. It was here that Lord Dorset discovered him, Horace in hand, and with that generous munificence, so characteristic of the restoration, paid for his schooling at Westminster and later for his entrance to St. John’s College, Cambridge. Matthew Prior it is quite evident made the best of his opportunities. He had a good “sense of direction,” if we may be permitted to use that invidious modern phrase, and cultivated with the utmost zeal useful friendships. In London during the vacations he sought the company of the wits and was one of those who frequented Wills’ Coffee-House and who during the long drawn-out evenings of the late summer would sit on the balcony of that famous resort “proud to dip a finger and thumb into Mr. Dryden’s snuff box.” This privilege, however, in no way prevented him from cleverly parodying in his City Mouse and Country Mouse the famous pro-Catholic poem of the Poet Laureate. It was, in fact, upon this undergraduate exercise that his future career was founded. He became secretary to the Ambassador at the Hague and, because of a series of chances, remained for several years as England’s chief representative “at this central cogwheel of the cumbrous engine” of the Coalition.

From a pecuniary point of view the berth was not as satisfactory as it might have been, and Prior’s letters from now on are filled with fretful references to the inadequacy of the Government’s payment of twenty shillings a day with an allowance for “reasonable extraordinaries.” He was never tired of deploring the fact that his creditors, as he put it, “were brisker in business than the Treasury.” “Who has ever heard,” he exclaimed, “of a professed panegyric poet that was able to advance two guineas to the public?” In vain he pointed out to the preoccupied authorities at home “that a little house, this winter, would be convenient in so cold a country as Holland.” His agitated pleas were greeted with evasions and procrastinations and the poet-diplomatist was left “to scramble at ordinaries with Switzers or French Protestants.” One of his own poems suggests, however, that his time was not entirely occupied with his ambassadorial duties. He too had, we may assume, as well as another, his margins, his moments, his golden week-ends when it mattered not a rush to him whether or no the “disaffected” reached the shores of England.

“In a little Dutch-chaise on a Saturday night On my left hand my Horace, a Nymph on my right.”

As the years passed his financial straits were considerably relieved by a sinecure secretaryship in Dublin, from which he drew for several years, though never setting foot in Ireland, remuneration to the tune of nearly £1,000 a year.

From the Hague he was eventually transferred to Paris. His letters from that capital are full of entertaining gossipy information. He was shown over the royal palace and as he viewed Le Brun’s gorgeous pictures representing the victories of Louis XIV was asked whether Hampton Court could be said to rival such a display. “The monuments of my master’s actions,” he replied appositely enough, “are to be seen everywhere but in his own house.” He visited the court of the exiled King of England and though the account he gives of that fallen monarch was not exactly in the best of taste it has its own interest: “I faced old James the other day at St. Cloud. Vive Guillaume! You never saw such a strange figure as the old bully is, lean, worn and riv’led.”

On his return to England he abandons his friends the Whigs and turns Tory, actually for a short time gaining a seat in the House of Commons, for which act of treachery, on the death of Queen Anne and the return of the opposition, he is held in custody for two years and is, so he fancies, in no small danger of losing his life.

But even so he is still full of resource. He conceives the fortunate idea of issuing a “tall folio” of his poems done on “paper imperial and the largest in England.” He manages to interest innumerable people in his project: Jonathan Swift even exerts himself and extracts not less than £200 from what he called the “hedge country” of his residence. The volumes are sold for two guineas each and Matthew Prior is soon rewarded by having four thousand pounds in his fob and this with an equal sum which he owed to the generosity of Lord Oxford and with the money due to him from his fellowship at John’s ensures the poet “his bread and butter at the last.” And yet when one looks over this famous collection of poems how few of them seem to us at this later date worthy of preservation. How weary one grows of his Cupids and Chloes and how truly gross and artificial so many of his poems appear! Their only redeeming quality lies, it would seem, in a certain airy amorousness which sometimes, but by no means always, carries with it a happy distinctive tone derived, we may perhaps be justified in surmising, from those wanton digressions in his private life which were to be afterwards so deplored by Samuel Johnson. For there can be small doubt that this “ambassador of meane extraction” as Queen Anne used to call him, this “creature” of Dorset’s, was extremely addicted to the pursuit of the not altogether intangible delights which come to those who indulge in what the Elizabethans were wont to name as the pastime of “wenching.”

Mat Prior was in fact a most incorrigible amorist. He would spend an evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift and then go off gay and incontinent to this or that little midnight drab.

“Fair Thames she haunts, and every neighbouring grove Sacred to soft recess, and gentle love.”

“So when I am wearied with wandering all day To thee, my delight, in the evening I come: No matter what beauties I saw in my way; They were but my visits, but thou art my home.”

However much one may regret in his poems the presence of a certain note of hard artificial and insensitive cynicism, one cannot but accede that he is able in his own facile way better almost than any other English poet to indicate the unwisdom of putting too high a value upon the ungenerous temptation of inordinate chastity. The iniquity of thus capriciously damming up one of the main streams of human happiness seems to have lodged itself very firmly in this Dorset man’s drain. And he was at pains to whisper his perilous convictions into the pretty conch-like ears of every young girl he had to do with.

“Never fancy time’s before you, Youth, believe me, will away; Then alas! who will adore you Or to wrinkles tribute pay.

All the swains on you attending Show how much your charms deserve; But, miser-like, for fear of spending, You amidst your plenty starve.

While a thousand freer lasses, Who their youth and charms employ, Though your beauty theirs surpasses, Live in far more perfect Joy.”

His frolic philosophy shows scant respect even towards the state of Holy Matrimony. It would seem that his profligate mind could find an excuse to justify the most reprehensible indulgence. His reasoning on this head cannot but be painful reading for married ears! What home would be safe if punishment were made to fit the crime at this rate?

“Since we your husband daily see So jealous out of season Phyllis, let you and I agree To make him so with reason.”

But it would be a mistake to think that Matthew Prior was altogether incapable of writing in a more moral vein. His book of poems ends with the epitaph he composed for the tomb of Sir Thomas Powys.

“Here lies Sir Thomas Powys Knight....

What by example he taught throughout his life At his death he recommended to his family and friends: ‘To fear God, and live uprightly’ Let who ever reads this stone Be wise, and be instructed.”

It is, however, unlikely that the author of the inscription, gave, if the truth were known, very much attention to this death bed exhortation, any more, with shame be it spoken, than does up to the present time the author of this Essay--the humblest and least punctilious of the large and graceless brood which owes its existence to the pious and potent loins of the Knight of Lilford Hall.

“To the grave with the dead And the living to the bread.”

With the money he derived from his book and with the gift of the house in Essex that he had from Lord Oxford, Matthew Prior proposed to spend the last years of his life happily enough. He had grown a little deaf for no other reason, as he explained, than that “he had not thought of taking care of his ears, while not sure of his head.” But apparently this slight physical handicap in no way interfered with his relish for life. We hear of him planting quincunxes in the garden of his manor, or spending long happy months at Wimple, Oxford’s country seat, delighted as much by the grace of the little Lady Margaret as he had before been by the manners “wild as colt untam’d” of the high-spirited Kitty, afterward to become the famous Duchess of Queensbury whom Beau Nash is said to have treated so roughly and who living to the latter end of the eighteenth century died, at last, characteristically enough, from a surfeit of cherries!

It was at Wimple that Matthew Prior himself ended his life on September 18, 1721. His will was found to contain a legacy to a woman whom Dr. Johnson does not hesitate to describe as “a despicable drab of the lowest species.”

In a letter written at the time we read:

“I find poor Prior’s will makes noise in town much to his disadvantage. Some malicious fellows have had the curiosity to go and inquire of the ale-house woman what sort of conversation Prior had with her. The ungrateful strumpet is very free of telling it and gives such accounts as affords much diversion.”

Also from Arbuthnot we get a suggestive glimpse of this side of the poet’s life, which was, after all, so singularly removed from the stately quincunxes, round which on August evenings “My noble, lovely little Peggy” was wont to play and trip it. “We are to have a bowl of punch at Bessy Cox’s. She would fain have put it upon Lewis that she was his Emma; she owned Flanders Jane was his Chloe.”

Matthew Prior had long had Westminster Abbey “in his eye” and in the end he indulged “a last piece of human vanity” by bequeathing five hundred pounds towards the erection of the preposterous monument which now stands above his grave.

The actual place of his burial is at the feet of Edmund Spenser in the poet’s corner.

It must be confessed there appears something curiously incongruous about a trick of fortune which could cause the wanton paramour of Mistress Besse Cox to lie down in the dust, head to heel, with none other than the fastidious author of the Faerie Queene.

WILLIAM COWPER

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days: I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind.

It is not for nothing that William Cowper is so often associated in our memory with the particular animal which delighted him more than any other. From the day of his birth to the day of his death his plight was curiously similar to that of a hunted hare. In his case, however, the flight, the desperate agony, the tragic climax, was by no means contained in the brief hours of a mud-splashed January afternoon, for it was the awful destiny of this sensitive and polished gentleman, of this elegant partial hermaphrodite, to hear for no less than sixty-nine years, unmistakably upon the midnight wind, the sound of “The Hound of Heaven” following close at his heels.

He heard it as a schoolboy crossing the churchyard of St. Margaret’s; he heard it in his chambers at the Inner Temple above “the sound of waters passing only into pails and pitchers”; he heard it in the sweet seclusion of Olney “upon the southern side of the slant hills” and louder and even louder he heard it during the last terrible years of exile in East Anglia.

William Cowper was born at Great Berkamstead in Hertfordshire on Nov. 26, 1731. His father was the rector of the village and also chaplain to George II. His mother, whose maiden name had been Donne, belonged to the same family as the famous Dean of St. Paul’s. While still but a child Cowper was sent to a boarding school, where he fell under the evil persecution of an older boy. So deeply did the personality of this bully impress itself upon the nerves of the young poet that he never dared to look at him above the knees, and, as he himself tells us, “knew him by his shoe buckles better than by anything else.” From this school he went to Westminster. Was it, one wonders, some half-conscious premonition of the terrible fate that the future had in store for him which as a boy led him to pay a visit to Bedlam, whose ghastly chamber in those days stood open for the morbid curiosity of the public? The good Hanoverian chaplain appears to have entertained no suspicion of the nature of his son’s temperament, for we learn that he at this time gravely put into his hands a treatise on suicide for the purpose of receiving the opinion of his eldest son on that academic question.

Only a few years were to intervene before William Cowper, whatever his judgment may have been upon the philosophical aspects of this problem, was to make a serious attempt to put the precepts of the dissertation into practical use. Terrified beyond reason by certain contingencies which might require him to appear in public, he deliberately tried to kill himself by means of his garters and his chamber door.

Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror and rising up in despair.

It was his first attack of actual madness, and he was taken to an asylum. Obsessed by the delusion that he was damned, he remained in this place for two years. His brother, John Cowper, came to visit him, but his sympathetic reasoning got for its pains only one answer: “O brother, I am damned--Think of eternity and then think what it is to be damned!”

On being released from confinement he went to live near Cambridge, and it was during this time that he attached himself to the household of a retired clergyman called Unwin. Shortly after this the good man, his host, was thrown from his horse and killed, and the haunted poet for the rest of his life continued to live under the same roof with the widow, Mary Unwin.

Under the influence of the Rev. John Newton, that “old African blasphemer,” as he loved to call himself, the family moved to Olney. There can be no doubt that close proximity to this converted ex-slave trader did William Cowper little good. They saw a great deal of each other. They attended prayer meetings, visited the sick, and collaborated in composing the Olney hymns. And what hymns those of William Cowper are! Some of them as liquid and beautiful as the songs heard from the lips of a shepherd boy in a shadowy fern-grown glade of the delectable mountains:

Hark, my soul! It is the Lord; ’Tis thy Saviour, hear His word;

and others, alas! marred by the primordial savageries of a crude and debased theology:

There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins; And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains.

John Newton had already earned a reputation for “preaching people mad!” And indeed it would seem that such achievements filled him with no slight complacence. “Near a dozen gracious people,” he tells us, “became disordered in their heads” after listening to his winged words. With such a man at his elbow, what chance, we may well ask, had William Cowper? In the year 1773 he was once more insane, and from then till the day of his death nothing was able to remove his fixed conviction that he had been utterly and finally abandoned by God to the irrevocable doom of eternal perdition.

Damned below Judas, more abhorred than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy Master!

So deep-set had this terrible delusion now become that he even denied himself the solace of prayer, deeming that to one in his extreme case it was useless, nay, blasphemous, to attend church or even so much as to say a grace over his daily bread.