Part 4

“Are you in a condition to manage domestic affairs, with an income of less perhaps than three hundred pounds a year? Have you such an inclination to my person and humour as to comply with my desires and way of living and endeavour to make us both as happy as you can? Will you be ready to engage in those methods I shall direct for the improvement of your mind, so as to make us entertaining company for each other, without being miserable when we are neither visiting nor visited? Can you bend your love and esteem and indifference to others the same way as I do mine? Shall I have so much power in your heart, or you so much government of your passions, as to grow in a good humour upon my approach, though provoked by a ----? Have you so much good nature as to endeavour by soft words to smooth any rugged humour occasioned by the cross accidents of life? Shall the place wherever your husband is thrown be more welcome than courts or cities without him? In short, these are some of the necessary methods to please men who, like me, are deep-read in the world; and to a person thus made I should be proud in giving all due returns towards making her happy. These are the questions I have always resolved to propose to her with whom I meant to pass my life; and whenever you can heartily answer them in the affirmative I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without regarding whether your person be beautiful or your fortune large. Cleanliness in the first and competency in the other is all I look for.... I singled you out at first from the rest of women; and I expect not to be used like a common lover. When you think fit to send me an answer to this without ----, I shall then approve myself, by all means you shall command, Madam, your most obedient humble servant.”

It was as if a glacier had announced the course it meant to take down its valley. Swift possibly disliked the Warings no more than other men have disliked their prospective relatives. His terms were possibly no more ruthless than the assumptions on which other men have entered into marriage. But few men besides Swift can ever, in such a situation, have been so revealing and so unsparing. Varina had entertained him at tedious Kilroot. She had not known how to give up the roundabout arts of courtship for the forthright sciences of marriage. Her caution had humiliated him. Her advances now embarrassed him. Himself long past the time of languishing, he turned the truth loose upon the coquette. And Varina, who had, as Swift said of young ladies in general, spent her time in making a net instead of a cage, had had the misfortune to incur the frankness of the one man then alive who could put the most naked truth into the most naked words.

If Swift struck too hard for the occasion, it was no more than his dire intensity often forced him to do. His letter at least closed the episode. Varina, with these words before her, could understand that she was not dealing with a common lover, or with a lover at all.

A man who could demand so much of a wife, and say so to a woman, was no longer at any point in a man’s life where the odds are still on his marrying. About marriage Swift was frequently explicit. At twenty-five he declared that, to say nothing of his “cold temper and unconfined humour,” “the very ordinary observations I made with going half a mile beyond the University have taught me experience enough not to think of marriage till I settle my fortune in the world, which I am sure will not be in some years; and even then myself I am so hard to please that I suppose I shall put it off to the other world.... Among all the young gentlemen that I have known to have ruined themselves by marrying, which I assure you is a great number, I have made this general rule, that they are either young, raw, ignorant scholars who, for want of knowing company, believe every silk petticoat includes an angel, or else they have been a sort of honest young men who perhaps are too literal in rather marrying than burning.... I think I am very far excluded from listing under either of these heads. I confess I have known one or two men of sense enough who, inclined to frolics, have married and ruined themselves out of a maggot; but a thousand household thoughts, which always drive matrimony out of my mind whenever it chances to come there, will, I am sure, fright me from that; besides that, I am naturally temperate, and never engaged in the contrary which usually produces those effects.”

This may be taken to be the scorn of a young man who has not yet felt much desire or loneliness. But there is the later belief, cut to an axiom, that “no wise man ever married from the dictates of reason.” What then could beguile Swift into marriage, when, for all his passion, he had undertaken to live as faithfully under the dictates of reason as under the orders of the Church?

Swift, speaking of himself, seldom spoke less than the exact truth, though he often, by his harshness, said rather more. In the matter of marriage his course was, from first to last, as straight as was possible for a man fascinating to women and inclined to play with them when his powers were relaxed or his will checked. He had decided that, his fortunes being so much lower than his pride, and his health so much less than his strength, he would not marry except on some such extravagant terms as he proposed at thirty-three to Varina. He knew she would not accept them. Whether he realized it or not, he preferred his relationship with Stella to marriage with anybody else.

He turned out to prefer it to marriage with Stella. During the three or four years after he closed accounts with Varina, Swift came no doubt as near to marrying Stella as the great drive of his solitary ambition would let him. But he did not marry her, and he apparently found, as many men would find if they had the strength to test the principle, that what seems to be the need to marry, even a woman truly loved, is a panic impulse in a crisis. Swift, having survived the crisis which might have made him a husband, did not have to pay the customary price of losing the woman who might have become his wife. Stella was still the willing focus of that immense affection which turned the stare or scowl of hate to the rest of the world.

Only once more did he slip recklessly into his old amusement. Vanessa, infatuated and unceasing, threatened his solitude. He could not annihilate her with a letter or subdue her to friendship. He slackly let the affair drag on to a dreary and then vehement end. But still he did not break his straight course. He had not wanted to marry. He had not had to marry. He did not mean to marry. He had said as much to everybody whose business it could be.

Swift might have been believed if his course, no matter how straight, had also been usual: if he had spent his days in a cell; if, having failed to win some desired woman, he had desired no other; if he had run from woman to woman stopping nowhere long. Instead, he lived in the world, had as much of the women he wanted as he wanted of them, and was in many ways faithful to Stella. Gossip, bothered by what is unusual in the story, has tried to make it fit some more familiar pattern by imagining hidden circumstances which, if known, would show Swift to have been more like ordinary men. He may have been impotent, gossip suggests, and so avoided marriage out of vanity. He may have had syphilis, and so avoided marriage out of decency. He may, gossip even during his life went so far as to guess, have married Stella privately--without licence, witnesses, or record, when he was Dean of St. Patrick’s! But all these arguments, some of which have been twisted to coiling lengths, are still the hypotheses of gossip, one as good as another. Not one of them is as simple and sufficient as the conclusion that Swift, whom gossips could more easily think inadequate, dissolute, or secretive, was only, in marriage as in other matters, extraordinary.

2

Writing to Varina in May 1700 he swore that he then had no thoughts of another mistress or of another wife. As this was not a lover’s letter, this was hardly a lover’s oath, and may have meant what it said. But, as chaplain to Lord Berkeley, Swift was still, in a sense, a dependent; and at Laracor he saw he would be lonely. Of his three livings, Laracor and the incidental Agher and Rathbeggan, only Laracor had a church. Swift, arriving dejected and resentful, found himself doubtfully master of a scattered, monotonous territory with a dilapidated church and a vicarage and glebe not then fit to live in. The one pleasant thing about his post was that he could leave his duties in the hands of curates and himself live much of the time in Dublin lodgings. In April 1701 he went with Berkeley back to England, to remain there till September. And there he visited Stella at Farnham.

Her mother had married, or was to marry, another steward of Moor Park, and the daughter was living with another Temple dependent, Rebecca Dingley, on the income of a Temple legacy. “Her fortune,” as Swift told the story on the bitter, truthful night of Stella’s death, “at that time was in all not above fifteen hundred pounds, the interest of which was but a scanty maintenance, in so dear a country, for one of her spirit. Upon this consideration, and indeed very much for my own satisfaction, who had few friends or acquaintance in Ireland, I prevailed with her and her dear friend and companion, the other lady, to draw what money they had into Ireland, a great part of their fortune being in annuities upon funds. Money was then ten per cent in Ireland, besides the advantage of turning 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. She was at that time about nineteen years old, and her person was soon distinguished. But the 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.”

These are the known facts of Stella’s removal to Ireland. Nor was her life there less prudent than her going. She and Mrs. (that is, Miss) Dingley lived ordinarily in lodgings with their own servants. When Swift was at Laracor they lived in a cottage not far away or lodged in the neighbouring village of Trim. When he was in lodgings in Dublin they lodged elsewhere in town. Only, it seems, during his absences did they economize by living in the vicarage at Laracor or in his lodgings in Dublin. The relations between Stella and Swift were unwaveringly circumspect. No one knew that he made her an allowance of fifty pounds a year. “I wonder,” he wrote to a friend in 1726, “how you could expect to see Mrs. Johnson in a morning, which I, her oldest acquaintance, have not done these dozen years, except once or twice in a journey.” The afternoons or evenings which he spent with her are said never to have been without at least a third person.

She seldom made visits. “But her own lodgings,” Swift said, “from before twenty years old were frequented by many persons of the graver sort, who all respected her highly, upon her good sense, good manners and conversation.... And indeed the greatest number of her acquaintance was among the clergy.” At first she was extravagant, “and so continued till about two-and-twenty; when, by advice of some friends, and the fright of paying large bills of tradesmen who enticed her into their debt, she began to reflect upon her own folly.”

Did Stella, prudently setting out for Ireland at twenty, foresee so many clergymen? Could she without flares of rebellion give up her extravagance, even to “avoiding all expense in clothes (which she ever despised) beyond what was merely decent”? Had she in her nature no veins of natural folly waiting to be uncovered? Was there in her no longing for unreasonable adventures?

So far as marriage was concerned she knew, before too long, where Swift stood. Another of her clergymen, William Tisdall, himself began to court Stella. Finding how much authority Swift had with her, Tisdall wrote to him, then in London, hinting, it seems, that Swift had used his power in behalf of his own designs. Swift’s answer, in April 1704, left no doubt in Tisdall, nor in Stella, to whom Tisdall must have shown it.

“I will, upon my conscience and honour, tell you the naked truth. First, I think I have said to you before that, if my fortunes and humour served me to think of that state, I should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice, because I never saw that person whose conversation I utterly valued but hers. This was the utmost I ever gave way to. And, secondly, I must assure you sincerely that this regard of mine never once entered into my head to be an impediment to you; but I judged it would, perhaps, be a clog to your rising in the world; and I did not conceive you were then rich enough to make yourself and her happy and easy. But that objection is now quite removed by what you have at present.... I declare I have no other; nor shall any consideration of my own misfortune of losing so good a friend and companion as her prevail on me against her interest and settlement in the world, since it is held so necessary and convenient a thing for ladies to marry; and that time takes off from the lustre of virgins in all other eyes but mine.”

Swift insisted that he had done nothing to stand in Tisdall’s way, and that he had indeed thought the affair too far along to be broken off; “since I supposed the town had got it in their tongues, and therefore I thought it could not miscarry without some disadvantage to the lady’s credit. I ... must add that though it hath come in my way to converse with persons of the first rank, and that sex, more than is usual to men of my level and of our function, yet I have nowhere met with a humour, a wit, or conversation so agreeable, a better portion of good sense, or a truer judgment of men and things. I mean here in England, for as to the ladies of Ireland I am a perfect stranger.... I give you joy of your good fortunes, and envy very much your prudence and temper, and love of peace and settlement; the reverse of which has been the great uneasiness of my life, and is like to continue so. And what is the result?... I find nothing but the good words and wishes of a decayed Ministry, whose lives and mine will probably wear out before they can serve either my little hopes or their own ambition. Therefore I am resolved suddenly to retire, like a discontented courtier, and vent myself in study and speculation, till my own humour or the scene here shall change.”

This was the same language as that Swift used after Stella’s death, when he called her “the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I or perhaps any other person ever was blessed with,” and said he could not remember that he had “ever once heard her make a wrong judgment of persons, books, or affairs.” He could then say also, out of his long experience, that she was “the most disinterested mortal I ever knew or heard of.” But his praise was for her intellectual, moral, and social virtues, as it had always been. Not a surviving syllable about her suggests desire. None comes nearer to it than his words that “she had a gracefulness somewhat more than human in every motion, word, and action.” And they were written for posterity when she was dead, not when she was twenty-three and he faced a rival.

Stella, scrutinizing the letter to Tisdall, could no more find a possible husband there than Varina had found in her letter four years earlier. Tisdall, however, was rejected.

And not a surviving syllable from Stella tells whether she knew of any barrier between her and Swift except the cold sword of his ambitious pride, or whether she struggled against fitting herself to the place he made for her, or whether she ever felt bitterness or regret. The discretion as native to her as to Swift protected her almost entirely from scandal, even in the mouths of his most loquacious enemies. He alone was blamed, for leaving her alone. Stella seems not to have blamed him. She preferred what she had of Swift to all she might have had of Tisdall or any other possible husband.

She knew that Swift’s devotion was partly his pride admiring itself in its glass. He trusted her judgment, which was a bright reflection of his own. He took her advice, which was coloured by what she deftly guessed to be his will. But she was no such replica in dough as might have bored him or might have shamed him into guilt for using her as he did. She was witty and lively, talked back to him, was charmingly perverse when he convinced her of her errors, and would not allow him to have a maid or housekeeper “with a tolerable face.” Stella gave him, when he was resisted elsewhere, the comfort of feeling over her that power without which his temper could not live. She saw, however, that she was a need as well as a comfort. She could feel an occasional thrill of power in her general peace of compliance.

For nearly a decade after Stella went to Ireland the record is so silent about her that she has to be guessed at. Then for three years during which Swift wrote his journal to her, his light brings her to life. After that, silence and obscurity, seldom broken till the light shines again in Swift’s grief over her last illness. She hardly lives except in his words.

Once, however, Swift’s mirror answered him. It was in an exchange of verses between them when she had been for twenty years his closest friend. His verses showed how little time had taken from her lustre in his eyes. He had never “admitted love a guest,” but he could imagine nothing beyond what he had had from their friendship.

“_In all the habitudes of life, The friend, the mistress, and the wife, Variety we still pursue, In pleasure seek for something new; Or else, comparing with the rest, Take comfort that our own is best.... But his pursuits are at an end Whom Stella chooses for a friend._”

And Stella, with verses of her own on Swift’s birthday, answered him in kind. It was “your pupil and your humble friend” who congratulated him. The sum of her praise was that he had taught her to value her mind more than her person.

“_When men began to call me fair, You interposed your timely care. You early taught me to despise The ogling of a coxcomb’s eyes; Showed where my judgment was misplaced; Refined my fancy and my taste._”

Now, Stella gratefully assured him, she had a better fate than that of women “with no endowments but a face.”

“_You taught how I might youth prolong, By knowing what was right and wrong; How from my heart to bring supplies Of lustre to my fading eyes; How soon a beauteous mind repairs The loss of changed or falling hairs; How wit and virtue from within Send out a smoothness o’er the skin. Your lectures could my fancy fix, And I can please at thirty-six._”

Yet in this reasonable tribute Stella let her rhyme coax her into a favourable prevarication. She was not thirty-six, but forty. She would still give herself a slight advantage when she pronounced her judgment on the frailty of beauty, which she had to endure, Swift only to observe. He had been, as she said, her early and her only guide. After so many years her verses and her words were, as much as her handwriting, like his. But with a betraying phrase she could still show a tenderness for that person which her philosopher had taught her to value less than her mind.

3

The conquest of Stella, absolute and lasting, gave Swift his only relief from his ambition. His outward life during these ten years in Ireland need not have been hateful to him if his pride had left him free to enjoy it. The income from his livings was perhaps not much over two hundred pounds a year, but it enabled him to rebuild the vicarage at Laracor and to lay out a garden. He had a stream straightened to resemble a canal and a willow-walk where he might remember Moor Park as Temple had remembered Holland. The parish duties were so slight that Swift could consider Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan as hardly more than sinecures, of which he took the pay and left the work to deputies. In Dublin, where besides being a prebendary of the Cathedral he was, after Berkeley’s recall, chaplain to the Duke of Ormond and the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Lieutenants, Swift was domestically allied with the rulers of the kingdom. Moreover, he was only once long out of England. He travelled back and forth over the anxious bridge of his expectations. In London he published the letters, essays, and memoirs which Temple had left to him. And there he soon took a commanding though scornful rank among the wits he ridiculed.

Swift always valued conversation, “so useful and innocent a pleasure, so fitted for every period and condition of life, and so much in all men’s power.” He went to such coffee houses as the Whig St. James’s and the more neutral Will’s. But he never thought of himself as belonging with the general army of the wits. “The worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life,” he said, “was that at Will’s coffee house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble. That is to say, five or six men who had writ plays, or at least prologues, or had share in a miscellany, came thither and entertained one another with their trifling composures, in so important an air as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them. And they were usually attended with an humble audience of young students from the inns of court or the universities, who, at due distance, listened to these oracles and returned home with great contempt for their law and philosophy, their heads filled with trash, under the name of politeness, criticism, and belles lettres.”

If now and then Swift unbent his powers and talked in clubs, played at cold hoaxes, or wrote verse, no longer Pindaric, it was in the mood of idleness which had formerly turned him to flirtations. His successes came not from the pains he took but from the natural skill of his strong mind set to work at trifles. He moved among the wits proudly, somewhat gigantic, somewhat ominous.

His interests were in public affairs, in the government of the realm, in the whole behaviour of mankind. He began to write about politics while he was still chaplain to Berkeley. The Lords and Commons were in abusive conflict. Large tracts of land in Ireland having been forfeited to the Crown after the Revolution, the King had made grants of it to his favourites and to a former mistress. In 1700 the Commons had voted to annul these grants and to make other grants to other favourites. The Lords had resisted, but had finally given way. Lord Somers, the Whig leader of the Ministry, had been so displeasing to the Commons that the King had forced him to resign. The majority in the Parliament of 1701 was Tory, as was the Ministry. The Tories, blaming William and his Whig advisers for their foreign policy, impeached Somers, Portland, Orford, and Halifax (lately Addison’s Charles Montague). The Lords supported the impeached peers. Swift, returning with Berkeley to England in April, saw in the conflict a danger to the state, and undertook a warning. He was still so near Moor Park that he came only slyly into the open in his discourse, full of modern parallels, on the dissensions between the nobles and commons in Athens and Rome.