The resolution should be read in the light of the fact that Stella was eighteen years old, a grown and comely woman. But the interpretation of it depends much more closely on the termination of Swift's affair with Varina. The date, 1699, suggests this. He had proposed to Varina, Miss Waring, in 1696, in a letter which is passionate enough, and had been rejected, at least provisionally, on the score of her ill health and his poverty. Four years later, after he had received the living at Laracor and seemed to be on the way to other preferments, she wished to hold him to his word, and he jilted her. There are three explanations. One is that he had fallen in love with Stella and so out of love with the other woman. The second explanation, Leslie Stephen's, is that his ambitions had not been realized, his advancement had not been brilliant, and marriage would have kept his nose to the grind-stone in an obscure living. That explanation is not good, for, though Swift always had an eye to the main chance and was worried about money, power, and position, it is only men of cool blood or men who have extra-marital opportunities to gratify their desires who are ever deterred by considerations of thrift and economy from marrying the beloved woman. Swift was not cold but passionate. And it is inconceivable that he, a clergyman in a small parish, was finding his pleasure in illicit intercourse.

The third explanation, which I venture to suggest, is that between his proposal to Varina in 1696 and his insulting rejection of her in 1700, between his twenty-ninth and thirty-third years, he had discovered a reason why he must not live with a woman. His resolutions, remember, not to marry a young woman and not to be fond of children were written in 1699. How could Stephen believe that those resolutions, with others "pithy and sensible," were "for behavior in a distant future?" Swift's heading, "when I come to be old," means nothing; he is writing from the misery of the moment. Why is the letter in which Swift puts an end to poor Varina so brutal and insulting that, in Stephen's words, no one with a grain of self-respect could accept the conditions of marriage which he lays down? Because he could not tell her the real reason, a reason based on fear rather than on physiological certainty. It is an honestly dishonest letter. It is a perfect example of that perplexing contradiction which appears everywhere in his life and writings, that he was brutally honest, saw through the postures and masks of everybody else, and yet postured, attitudinized, and lied himself. He carried his secret agony with fortitude and alternately raged against the world and fooled with it. In relation to the Varina episode Stephen misses the point, though what he says is true enough: "Swift could be the most persistent and ardent of friends. But when anyone tried to enforce claims no longer congenial to his feelings, the appeal to the galling obligation stung him into ferocity, and brought out the most brutal side of his imperious nature." Though a man has but one heart, yet his relations with his friends are quite different from his passions for women. A proud, ferocious and imperious nature is not the whole story of Swift. It does not give us the real foundation of the story of Varina, of Stella, of Vanessa and the man they loved.

On the foundation which I propose the story of Stella will rest securely, intelligibly. If Swift was married secretly to Stella in 1716—the evidence is not conclusive—the marriage was only a legal ceremony performed perhaps for the purpose of securing her in case her fortunes went wrong or gossip or other circumstances made necessary the protection of his name. Almost certainly there was no physical marriage, no union legal or illegal. Why? He was free and she was free. She was, by his own account, a charming person who would have been quite presentable to his friends and in all ways helpful to a man in middle age who is supposed to need a woman to take care of him. The answer is simply that Swift feared to propagate his tainted stock, that he refrained and suffered. And the "Journal to Stella" is a record of suffering, of passion disguised and writhing. A busy man, with other things to write, does not write that much to a woman he does not love, and he does not write that way to a woman he openly and avowedly loves. The "little language," the silliness, the foolings, the avoidance of direct declaration of love, the semi-paternal injunctions, the gossip about big people, much of it whimsical chatter in which we get only by implication the serious view of Swift and his times that has made it an important historical document, the two or three hintful promises of felicity which commit Swift to nothing, the passages of melancholy and half-humorous old man's grouch—all this is a veiled love letter. It is tingling and nervous and alert and full of pain, not the idle recreation of a tired man of affairs entertaining a child, but the heartbreak of a powerful man of forty-five expressed by indirections to a woman of thirty. Perhaps she understood his spleen and his complaints of ill-health. We may be on the way to understanding them now. Certainly Stephen is off the track when he says that there are "grounds for holding that Swift was constitutionally indisposed to the passion of love." Unless he means by that that Swift knew that there was something in his constitution which made the ultimate realization of love impossible. And Stephen does not mean that, for he speaks of the absence of traces of passion from writings "conspicuous for their amazing sincerity." An amazing example of a sincere biographer missing the trace! Swift's insistence on his "coldness" and his assertion that he did not understand love are precisely an affirmation of what the words deny.

Now enters the third woman of record—there may have been more—in Swift's unhappy sexual life, Vanessa, Esther Vanhomrigh. At the same time that he is writing his long love letter, the "Journal to Stella," he is seeing Vanessa. Of course. It is all explicable. The man can not have the woman he wants and is tantalized by another woman who wants him. He plays and he won't play. He is tormented by the same restraint that keeps him out of Stella's bed. He is handsome, virile, and distinguished. The woman is crazy about him. He is unable to keep away from her, but he is fighting, for reasons known to him, against the impulse to possess her. He plays again, as with Stella, a game which, viewed superficially, is fraudulent and unfair. He is teacher, guide, philosopher, and Dutch uncle. But she is not a docile, gentle girl like Stella. Mr. Freeman, who handles his documents admirably and is not slanted from the truth by moralistic concern for hero or heroine, is, nevertheless, naïve and blind to the facts which he has so carefully considered. He says: "The tragedy, then, was inevitable from the day when Vanessa attempted to arouse in him a love of which he was incapable. It might have been hastened, or its form might have been different, if he had sternly broken with Vanessa as soon as he discovered the nature of her desires." Swift was not incapable, in that sense, and he knew the nature of her desires, for he was not a fool. What he knew also was the nature of his own desires and their possible consequences. That is, I conjecture, the heart of the story of Swift's heart.

[1] Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift. Letters edited for the first time from originals. With an introduction by A. Martin Freeman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS

I.