Part 13

Secret enough, but not half as secret as Swift was about something dearer to him than any book. From the beginning of his visit he was worried about Stella, who was very sick at home but tried to keep the news from him. “I have these two months seen through Mrs. Dingley’s disguises,” Swift wrote in July. Early in that month he heard that Stella was in danger. Though it destroyed his peace, he said nothing to his friends in England. Bolingbroke knew that Swift had a friend called Stella and gallantly assumed she was his mistress. To Pope and Gay and Arbuthnot she was at most only a vague shape in Ireland. Neither at Twickenham nor at Whitehall, where Swift later lived with Gay, was she more than that. Swift, so long used to discretion where Stella was concerned, showed them a wit’s face, not a lover’s heart. But his letters to his friends in Ireland made plain how his grief had shaken him.

“What you tell me of Mrs. Johnson I have long expected, with great oppression and heaviness of heart. We have been perfect friends these thirty-five years. Upon my advice they both came to Ireland and have been ever since my constant companions; and the remainder of my life will be a very melancholy scene when one of them is gone whom I most esteemed upon the score of every good quality than can possibly recommend a human creature.... My heart has been so sunk that I have not been the same man, nor ever shall be again, but drag on a wretched life till it shall please God to call me away.... I wish it could be brought about that she might make her will....

“Think how I am disposed while I write this, and forgive the inconsistencies. I would not for the universe be present at such a trial of seeing her depart. She will be among friends that upon her account and great worth will tend her with all possible care, where I should be a trouble to her and the greatest torment to myself. In case the matter should be desperate I would have you advise, if they come to town, that they should be lodged in some airy, healthy part and not in the deanery, which besides, you know, cannot but be a very improper thing for that house to breathe her last in. This I leave to your discretion, and I conjure you to burn this letter immediately, without telling the contents of it to any person alive.

“Pray write me every week, that I may know what steps to take; for I am determined not to go to Ireland to find her just dead or dying. Nothing but extremity could make me familiar with those terrible words, applied to such a dear friend. Let her know I have bought her a repeating gold watch, for her ease in winter nights. I designed to have surprised her with it, but now I would have her know it, that she may see how my thoughts were always to make her easy. I am of opinion that there is not a greater folly than to contract too great and intimate a friendship, which must always leave the survivor miserable.... When you have read this letter twice, and retain what I desire, pray burn it and let all I have said lie only in your breast.

“Pray write every week.... I would rather have good news from you than Canterbury, though it were given me upon my own terms.”

What other lover who ever lived could, staggering with grief and dread, have talked about the terms of his lover’s will, measured her loss against the gain of an archbishopric, remembered that she must not die in his house, hesitated to go to her, and commanded that his anguish be kept secret?

“One of the two oldest and dearest friends I have in the world is in so desperate a condition of health as makes me expect every post to hear of her death. It is the younger of the two with whom I have lived in the greatest friendship for thirty-three years.... For my part, as I value life very little, so the poor casual remains of it, after such a loss, would be a burden that I must heartily beg God Almighty to enable me to bear; and I think there is not a greater folly than that of entering into too strict and particular a friendship, with the loss of which a man must be absolutely miserable, but especially at an age when it is too late to engage in a new friendship. Besides, this was a person of my own rearing and instructing, from childhood, who excelled in every good quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature.... Pardon me, I know not what I am saying. But believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting and as much engaging as violent love.”

Towards the end of July, Swift, at Twickenham, was one day answering a letter from Sheridan. “The account you give me is nothing but what I have some time expected with the utmost agonies, and there is one aggravation of constraint, that where I am I am forced to put on an easy countenance. It was at this time the best office your friendship could do, not to deceive me.... I look upon this as the greatest event that can ever happen to me, but all my preparations will not suffice to make me bear it like a philosopher, nor altogether like a Christian. There hath been the most intimate friendship between us from her childhood, and the greatest merit, on her side, that ever was in one human creature towards another. Nay, if I were now near her I would not see her. I could not behave myself tolerably, and should redouble her sorrow. Judge in what a temper of mind I write this. The very time I am writing I conclude the fairest soul in the world hath left its body.”

Just then Swift was interrupted. “Confusion! that I am this moment called down to a visitor, when I am in the country and not in my power to deny myself.”

He came back to his unfinished letter. “I have passed a very constrained hour, and now return to say I know not what. I have been long weary of the world, and shall for my small remainder of years be weary of life, having for ever lost that conversation which alone could make it tolerable. I fear while you are reading this you will be shedding tears at her funeral.”

In a week Swift knew that, no matter what he faced, he must go to Ireland. Pope, ignorant of the full reason, was so unwilling to lose his friend that he travelled with him to Chester. “I felt the extreme heat of the weather,” Pope said, “the inns, the roads, the confinement and closeness of the uneasy coach, and wished a hundred times I had either a deanery or a horse in my gift” to keep Swift in England or to make his journey more comfortable. But there were no words between them about Stella, as there were no words about her in any of the letters he wrote back to his English friends. Swift, so copious and eloquent about most of his passions, about this one was as quiet as a stone. Pope, who suspected something, risked only a hint in his wish that “you may find every friend you have there in the state you wish him or her.” Talking about everything else in the world the two great wits rode in the uneasy coach to Chester, where Swift was prepared to find mortal news waiting for him. The only word from him about her is in a letter to an Irish friend two months later. “Mrs. Johnson is much recovered since I saw her first, but still very lean and low.”

3

Pope wished “that your visits to us may have no other effect than the progress of a rich man to a remote estate, which he finds greater than he expected, which knowledge only serves to make him happier where he is, with no disagreeable prospect if ever he should choose to remove.” And Swift, coming home from his rich estate in London, was received, Arbuthnot said, like a Lord Lieutenant. When the ship was sighted in Dublin Bay the bells of the city were set to ringing. The Corporation, with less official citizens, went out in wherries to meet the “Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver.” The docks had bunting, every street a bonfire. The populace cheered their defender as he landed and rode to his gloomy house.

If Swift was human, as well as Swift, he was warmed by this loud affection. But they were the people who had hooted him when he came over to be Dean, before he had fought for them about their copper farthings. “I have often reflected in how few hours, with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown to him as the antipodes.” Between Swift and the Irish, or between him and any body of men, it was too late for reconciliation. He had been an alien all his life, and he had proved it in his Travels. There the world would soon have a chance to study its disgusting face.

_Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World_, published 28 October 1726 to vex the world rather than divert it, diverted it. Nobody spoke or apparently even thought of prosecution. “The politicians to a man agree,” Pope and Gay wrote to Swift, “that it is free from particular reflections, but that the satire on general societies of men is too severe.” Politicians were no more disposed than they were obliged to defend the human race against a libel. Mankind, invincibly abstract, invulnerably obtuse to general assaults, laughed. “From the highest to the lowest” the book was read, “from the cabinet council to the nursery.” The Princess of Wales did not care, probably did not know, that she was supposed to have sat for the Queen of Brobdingnag. She was delighted. The Duchess of Marlborough was “in raptures” and willing to forgive her old enemy. Arbuthnot saw that the book was to be a classic, and forecast for it “as great a run as John Bunyan.” The first impression was sold within a week. There were Dublin editions, and translations into French and Dutch within a year.

The third voyage, with its multiplied ridicule of pedants, pleased the least. That satire was too limited. Readers preferred to see all mankind in the refracting glass. Monkeys before a mirror, Swift might have said. They accepted the likenesses which they recognized, but they did not recognize those which might have vexed them. At least they did not take such likenesses to themselves. Untroubled by the satire, they enjoyed the story, so marvellous yet so circumstantial, so ingenious yet so simple. “Such a merry work,” Arbuthnot called it. Who was there who could fail to be diverted by these adventures among pigmies and giants, on an island that moved through the air, in a land where horses used men as beasts? Who minded that the traveller was a misanthrope? Misanthropy did not hurt its objects, so long as it confined itself to words.

Swift, accusing mankind of every vice and folly, had thought of it as more sensitive or less frivolous than it was. He let drive with all his pitiless force, and the world applauded his witty marksmanship.

Stella having for the time recovered, Swift went again the next April to England, where the Earl of Peterborough thought the Dean ran the risk of becoming a bishop. The second visit was an anticlimax. Swift made no progress with the life of Oxford. He was completely out of favour with Walpole. Twickenham, happily as Pope welcomed Swift there, was not what it had seemed before. It was pleasant to talk with Pope about his dunces. It was pleasant to read the verses of the opera which Gay, to whom Swift had said that “a Newgate pastoral might make an odd, pretty sort of thing,” was writing about rogues and beggars. It was pleasant to concoct their miscellanies, in which the poems to Stella were to appear. But it was unpleasant for Swift to be so deaf that he could hardly hear Pope’s feeble voice or have a share in the conversation of the friends who came to see them. Swift began to feel that he was a burden. He would go to London.

He would go to France. Voltaire gave him letters of introduction. Swift exchanged opinions with his French translator, telling him, in his French, that if the Travels were calculated only for the British Isles then the traveller was a pitiable writer. The same vices and the same follies, he said, reigned everywhere, at least in all the civilized countries of Europe; and the author who wrote only for one city, one province, one kingdom, or even one age so little deserved to be translated that he did not deserve to be read.

The death of George I and the accession to the throne of the Prince and Princess of Wales, who were the only royal friends Swift ever had, held him in England. Once more, and for the last time, he was disappointed. Walpole, after a fluttering interval, retained his power. Wit alone could not make a man a bishop.

Stella, it turned out, could not be well without Swift. He had left her settled in the deanery for the summer. In August Sheridan wrote that she was once more in danger. Swift, at the house of a kinsman in London, was helpless with his own malady.

“I walk like a drunken man, and am deafer than ever you knew me. If I had any tolerable health I would go this moment to Ireland. Yet I think I would not, considering the news I daily expect to hear from you.... I kept it [Sheridan’s letter] an hour in my pocket with all the suspense of a man who expected to hear the worst news that fortune could give him, and at the same time was not able to hold up my head.... I know not whether it be an addition to my grief or not, that I am now extremely ill; for it would have been a reproach to me to be in perfect health when such a friend is desperate. I do profess upon my salvation that the distressed and desperate condition of our friend makes life so indifferent to me, who by course of nature have so little left, that I do not think it worth the time to struggle. Yet I should think, according to what hath been formerly, that I may happen to overcome this present disorder. And to what advantage? Why, to see the loss of that person for whose sake only 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 head no longer.”

Still Swift would not tell his English friends about Stella. His secret had been buried in him too long to be dug up now. Too much of his heart would have come with it. Suddenly leaving London in September he lurched across England to Chester. Offered a passage from Parkgate in the official yacht, he refused, thinking he would be in Ireland sooner if he rode through Wales and shipped from Holyhead. There the winds delayed him for a week, spent in the smoky rooms of an inn which had no decent wine to drink, no books to read, no customers who could speak English.

Morning and afternoon he walked in the wind on the rocks. “I was so cunning these three last days that whenever I began to rage and storm at the weather I took special care to turn my face towards Ireland, in hopes by my breath to push the wind forward. But now I give up.” Every night he dined alone, and had five dreary hours ahead of him before he went to bed. Sleep was no relief. He had fantastic dreams, such as that Bolingbroke was preaching in St. Patrick’s and quoting Wycherley in his sermon. Morning was no restoration. Swift looked for the wind to change, and it would not change. “I live in suspense, which is the worst circumstance of human nature.” There was nothing to do but “scribble or sit humdrum.” He scribbled prose and verse.

“_I never was in haste before To reach that slavish hateful shore. Before I always found the wind To me was most malicious kind. But now the danger of a friend On whom my fears and hopes depend, Absent from whom all climes are curst, With whom I’m happy in the worst, With rage impatient makes me wait A passage to the land I hate._”

And when he finally got away the wind was so near a tempest that he was forced to land at Carlingford, sixty miles from Dublin, and complete his journey with “lazy dull horses.”

This time Stella, though comforted by his return, was dying. Swift would not say so to Pope, to whom Sheridan had secretly written the truth. Again Pope hinted his sympathy. “To your bad health I fear there was added some disagreeable news from Ireland which might occasion your so sudden departure.” Swift met the sympathy with a shield. His health, he said, had driven him home. “Here is my maintenance, and here my convenience.” He invited Pope to Dublin. “I have a race of orderly elderly people of both sexes at command who are of no consequence and have gifts proper for attending us, who can bawl when I am deaf and tread softly when I am only giddy and would sleep.” Six weeks later he repeated his invitation. “You may find about six rational, good, civil, learned, easy companions of the males; fewer of the females, but many civil, hospitable, and ready to admire and adore.”

Nothing about Stella, who had admired and adored beyond almost any woman who ever lived. Nothing about Stella to any man during the four months left to her. But Swift in October and November wrote three prayers which he used in her last sickness.

“Give her grace to continue sincerely thankful to Thee for the many favours Thou hast bestowed upon her: the ability and inclination and practice to do good, and those virtues which have procured the esteem and love of her friends and a most unspotted name in the world.... We beseech Thee likewise to compose her thoughts and preserve to her the use of her memory and reason during the course of her sickness. Give her a true conception of the vanity, folly, and insignificancy of all human things.... Let not our grief afflict her mind and thereby have an effect on her present distempers. Forgive the sorrow and weakness of those among us who sink under the grief and terror of losing so dear and useful a friend.”

On a Sunday in January, when Swift had guests at his house, “about eight o’clock at night a servant brought me a note with an account of the death of the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I, or perhaps any other person, ever was blessed with.... As soon as I am left alone, which is about eleven at night, I resolve, for my own satisfaction, to say something of her life and character.” He wrote of her parentage and girlhood, her intelligence and beauty (“only a little too fat”), her reasons for leaving England for Ireland. “Thus far I writ the same night between eleven and twelve.”

The next day he wrote of her memory and judgment and gracefulness, “somewhat more than human,” of her “civility, freedom, easiness, and sincerity.” “All of us who had the happiness of her friendship agreed unanimously that in an afternoon or evening’s conversation she never failed, before we parted, of delivering the best thing that was said in the company.” He wrote of the love her servants felt for her. “My head aches, and I can write no more.”

Tuesday was the day of the funeral at St. Patrick’s. “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 bed-chamber.” He wrote of her courage. She had once shot a burglar, trying to enter her house, and had killed him. She was never known to cry out with fear or weakness or affectation. He wrote of her manners, her reading in history, books of travel, the philosophers. “She had a true taste of wit and good sense, both in poetry and prose, and was a perfect good critic of style.” He wrote of her fortune and her management of it.

Afterwards he wrote as he found time. He wrote of her charity, her tact, her modesty. “She rather chose men for her companions, the usual topics of ladies’ discourse being such as she had little knowledge of, and less relish. Yet no man was upon the rack to entertain her, for she easily descended to anything that was innocent and diverting.” She loved Ireland more than most natives, and detested “the tyranny and injustice of England in their treatment of this kingdom. She had indeed reason to love a country where she had the esteem and friendship of all who knew her, and the universal good report of all who ever heard of her.”

This is as strange a language as love ever used, but it is a language of love, Swift’s language, Swift’s love. After he had written this he set down some of her sayings, which only a lover could have found as witty as Swift found them. After that he wrote not a word about her in any letter that survives. He is said never again to have spoken her name. He destroyed all her letters to him and all his letters to her except the journal which he had sent home from London. He would be as silent as Stella, the most silent of all famous lovers. But he could not quite equal her silence. On a paper containing some of her hair he wrote, it is said, the words “Only a woman’s hair.” A giant’s sentimentality and a devil’s contempt for it. Fire and ice.

VII

KING OF TRIFLERS

1

On the day after Stella died the _Beggar’s Opera_ was first given in London, the Duke of Argyll starting the applause which in the end became a delighted clamour. Swift, who had been doubtful about the dramatic form which Gay had chosen, said the opera would do “more public service than all the ministers of state from Adam to Walpole.” When it came to Dublin, and the Lord Lieutenant approved of it, so did the Dean of St. Patrick’s. Though Swift, who never went to the theatre, seems now to have made no exception, he spoke as from the Cathedral. Such humour would probably, he said with another moral comparison, “do more good than a thousand sermons of so stupid, so injudicious, and so prostitute a divine” as the court chaplain, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who had preached against the opera in London. Humour, Swift explained, was a “happy talent,” “fixed to the very nature of man.” Satire was public spirit “prompting men of genius and virtue to mend the world as far as they are able.”

The defence of Gay became a defence of Swift. “I demand whether I have not as good a title to laugh as men have to be ridiculous, and to expose vice as another hath to be vicious. If I ridicule the follies and corruptions of a court, a ministry, or a senate, are they not amply paid by pensions, titles, and power, while I expect and desire no other reward than that of laughing with a few friends in a corner?” Surely the objects of satire were as well off as the satirist. “If those who take offence think me in the wrong I am ready to change the scene with them whenever they please.”

In March 1728 Swift impartially observed that “the _Beggar’s Opera_ has knocked down Gulliver; I hope to see Pope’s Dulness knock down the _Beggar’s Opera_.” The _Dunciad_ appeared in May. It was then without the inscription to Swift which, included the next year, made him feel “abstracted from everybody in the happiness of being recorded your friend while wit and humour and politeness shall have any memorial among us.” But Swift had already seen the brilliant lines in which Pope named his friend with the greatest wits and complimented him with having driven Dulness out of Ireland, to settle, safe from him, in England.

“_O thou! whatever title please thine ear, Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver! Whether thou choose Cervantes’ serious air, Or laugh and shake in Rabelais’ easy chair, Or praise the Court, or magnify Mankind, Or thy grieved country’s copper chains unbind; From thy Bœotia though her power retires, Mourn not, my Swift, at aught our realm acquires. Here pleased behold her mighty wings outspread To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead._”