In Ireland Again.
Well, Swift at last goes back to Ireland—all his larger designs having miscarried—a saddened and disappointed man; full of growlings and impatience; taking with him from that wreck of London life and political forgatherings, only the poor flotsam of an Irish deanery.
He has some few friends to welcome him there: Miss Hester and Mrs. Dingley among the rest. How gladly would Stella have put all her woman’s art and her womanly affection to the work of cheering and making glad the embittered and disappointed Dean: but no; he has no notion of being handicapped by marriage; he is sterner, narrower, more misanthropic than ever. All the old severe proprieties and distance govern their intercourse. He visits them betimes and listens to their adulatory prattle; they, too, come up to the deanery when there are friends to entertain; often take possession when the Dean is away.
The church dignitaries are not open-handed in their advances; the Tale of a Tub, and stories of that London life (not much of it amongst churches) have put a wall between them and the Dean. But he interests himself in certain questions of taxation and of currency, which seem of vital importance to the common people; and he wins, by an influence due to his sharp pamphleteering, what they count a great relief from their dangers or burdens. Thus he becomes a street idol, and crowds throw up their caps for this doctor militant, whom they call the good Dean. He has his private large charities, too; there are old women, decrepit and infirm, whom he supports year after year; does this—Swift-like—when he will haggle a half hour about the difference of a few pennies in the price for a bottle of wine, and will serve his clerical friends with the lees of the last dinner: strange, and only himself in everything.
Then Miss Vanhomrigh—after the death of her mother—must needs come over—to the great perplexity of the Doctor—to a little country place which she has inherited in the pretty valley of the Liffey—a short drive away from Dublin; she has a fine house there, and beautiful gardens (Swift never outgrew his old Moor-Park love for gardens); there she receives him, and honors his visits. An old gardener, who was alive in Scott’s time, told how they planted a laurel bush whenever the Dean came. Perhaps the Dean was too blinded for fine reading in the garden alleys then; certainly his fierce headaches were shaking him year by year nearer to the grave.
Miss Hester comes to a knowledge of these visits, and is tortured, but silent. Has she a right to nurse torture? Some biographers say that at her urgence a form of marriage was solemnized between them (1716); but if so, it was undeclared and unregarded. Vanessa, too, has her tortures; she has knowledge of Stella and her friend, and of their attitude with respect to the deanery; so, in a moment of high, impetuous daring, she writes off to Mistress Hester Johnson asking what rights she has over her friend the Dean? Poor Stella wilts at this blow; but is stirred to an angry woman’s reply, making (it is said) avowal of the secret marriage. To the Dean, who is away, she encloses Vanessa’s letter; and the Dean comes storming back; rages across the country, carrying to Miss Vanhomrigh her own letter—flings it upon the table before her, with that look of blackness that has made duchesses tremble—turns upon his heel, and sees her no more.
In a fortnight, or thereabout, Poor Vanessa was dead. It was a fever they said; may be; certainly, if a fever, there were no hopes in her life now which could make great head against it. She changed her will before her death, cutting off Swift, who was sole legatee, and leaving one-half to Bishop Berkeley; through whom, strangely enough, Yale College may be said to inherit a part of poor Vanessa’s fortune.[115]
Such a blow, by its side bruises, must needs scathe somewhat the wretched Hester Johnson; but time brought a little healing in its wings. The old kindliness and friendship that dated from the pleasant walks in Moor Park, came back—as rosy twilights will sometimes shoot kindly gleams between stormy days, and the blackness of night. And Swift, I think, never came nearer to insupportable grief than when he heard—on an absence in London, a few years thereafter—that Stella was dying week by week.
“Poor Stella,” “dear Stella,” “poor soul,” break into his letters—break, doubtless, into his speech on solitary walks; but in others’ presence his dignity and coldness are all assured. There is rarely breakdown where man or woman can see him. Old Dr. Sheridan[116] says that at the last she appealed to him to declare and make public their private marriage; whereat he “turned short away.” A more probable story is that in those last days Swift himself proposed public declaration, to which the dying woman could only wave a reply—“too late!”
She died in 1728: he in the sixty-second year of his age, and she forty-eight.
He would have written about her the night she died; had the curtains drawn that he might not see the light where her body lay; but he broke down in the writing. They brought a lock of her hair to him. It was found many years after in an old envelope, worn with handling, with this inscription on it—in his hand—Only a woman’s hair.
I have not much more to say of Dean Swift, whose long story has kept us away from gentler characters, and from verses more shining than his. Indeed, I do not think the poems of Swift are much read nowadays; surely none but a strong man and a witty one could have written them; but they do not allure us. Everybody, however, remembers with interest the little people that Lemuel Gulliver saw, and will always associate them with the name of Swift. But if the stormy Dean had known that his Gulliver book would be mostly relished by young folks, only for its story, and that its tremendous satire—which he intended should cut and draw blood—would have only rarest appreciation, how he would have raved and sworn!
They tell us he had private prayers for his household, and in secluded places; and there are those who sneer at this—“as if a Dean should say prayers in a crypt!” But shall we utterly condemn the poor Publican who—though he sells drams and keeps selling them—smites his bosom afar off and cries, God be merciful!—as if there were a bottom somewhere that might be reached, and stirred, and sparkle up with effervescence of hope and truth and purity? He was a man, I think, who would have infinitely scorned and revolted at many of the apologies that have been made for him. To most of these he would have said, in his stentorian way, “I am what I am; no rosy after-lights can alter this shape of imperfect manhood; wrong, God knows; who is not? But a prevaricator—pretending feeling that is not real—offering friendship that means nothing—proffering gentle words, for hire; never, never!”
And in that great Court of Justice—which I am old-fashioned enough to believe will one day be held—where juries will not be packed, and where truth will shine by its own light, withstanding all perversion—and where opportunities and accomplishment will be weighed in even scales against possible hindrances of moral or of physical make-up—there will show, I am inclined to think, in the strange individuality of Swift, a glimmer of some finer and higher traits of Character than we are accustomed to assign him.
After Stella’s death he wrote little:[117] perhaps he furbished up the closing parts of Gulliver; there were letters to John Gay, light and gossipy; and to Pope, weightier and spicier.
But the great tree was dying at the top. He grew stingier and sterner, and broke into wild spasms of impatience, such as only a diseased brain could excuse and explain. His loneliness became a more and more fearful thing to be borne; but who shall live with this half-mad man of gloom?
At length it is only a hired keeper who can abide with him: yet still he is reckless, proud, defiant, merciless, with no words coming to his fagged brain whereby he may express his thought; having thoughts, but they were bitter ones; having penitences maybe, but very vain ones; having remorses—ah, what abounding ones!
Finally he has no longer the power, if the grace were in him, to ask pardon of the humanity he has wronged; or to tell of the laments—if at that stage he entertained them—over the grave of thwarted purposes and of shattered hopes; condemned to that imbecile silence which overtook him at last, and held him four weary years in fool’s grasp, suffering and making blundering unintelligible moans.
He died in 1745—twenty-two years after Vanessa’s death—seventeen years after the death of Stella.