“These proverbs,” he explains, “have always old words in them; lin is leave off.”
But if on new year you write nones
M.D. then will bang your bones.
Reading these fond triflings we feel even now as though we were unjustifiably prying into the writer’s confidence. What are we to say to them? We might simply say that the tender playfulness is charming; and that it is delightful to find the stern gladiator turning from party-warfare to soothe his wearied soul with these tender caresses. There is but one drawback. Macaulay imitates some of this prattle in his charming letters to his younger sister, and there we can accept it without difficulty. But Stella was not Swift’s younger sister. She was a beautiful and clever woman of thirty, when he was in the prime of his powers at forty-four. If Tisdall could have seen the journal he would have ceased to call Swift “unaccountable.” Did all this caressing suggest nothing to Stella? Swift does not write as an avowed lover; Dingley serves as a chaperone even in these intimate confidences; and yet a word or two escapes which certainly reads like something more than fraternal affection. He apologizes (May 23, 1711) for not returning; “I will say no more, but beg you to be easy till fortune takes her course, and to believe that MD’s felicity is the great goal I aim at in all my pursuits.” If such words addressed under such circumstances did not mean “I hope to make you my wife as soon as I get a deanery,” there must have been some distinct understanding to limit their force.
But another character enters the drama, Mrs. Vanhomrigh,[44] a widow rich enough to mix in good society, was living in London with two sons and two daughters, and made Swift’s acquaintance in 1708. Her eldest daughter, Hester, was then seventeen, or about ten years younger than Stella. When Swift returned to London in 1710, he took lodgings close to the Vanhomrighs, and became an intimate of the family. In the daily reports of his dinner, the name Van occurs more frequently than any other. Dinner, let us observe in passing, had not then so much as now the character of a solemn religious rite, implying a formal invitation. The ordinary hour was three (though Harley with his usual procrastination often failed to sit down till six), and Swift, when not pre-engaged, looked in at Court or elsewhere in search of an invitation. He seldom failed: and when nobody else offered he frequently went to the “Vans.” The name of the daughter is only mentioned two or three times; whilst it is perhaps a suspicious circumstance that he very often makes a quasi-apology for his dining-place. “I was so lazy I dined where my new gown was, at Mrs. Vanhomrigh’s,” he says, in May, 1711; and a day or two later explains that he keeps his “best gown and periwig” there whilst he is lodging at Chelsea, and often dines there “out of mere listlessness.” The phrase may not have been consciously insincere; but Swift was drifting into an intimacy which Stella could hardly approve, and, if she desired Swift’s love, would regard as ominous. When Swift took possession of his deanery, he revealed his depression to Miss Vanhomrigh, who about this time took the title Vanessa; and Vanessa again received his confidences from Letcombe. A full account of their relations is given in the remarkable poem called Cadenus and Vanessa, less remarkable, indeed, as a poem than as an autobiographical document. It is singularly characteristic of Swift that we can use what, for want of a better classification, must be called a love poem, as though it were an affidavit in a law-suit. Most men would feel some awkwardness in hinting at sentiments conveyed by Swift in the most downright terms; to turn them into a poem would seem preposterous. Swift’s poetry, however, is always plain matter of fact, and we may read Cadenus (which means of course Decanus) and Vanessa as Swift’s deliberate and palpably sincere account of his own state of mind. Omitting a superfluous framework of mythology in the contemporary taste, we have a plain story of the relations of this new Heloïse and Abelard. Vanessa, he tells us, united masculine accomplishments to feminine grace; the fashionable fops (I use Swift’s own words as much as possible) who tried to entertain her with the tattle of the day, stared when she replied by applications of Plutarch’s morals; the ladies from the purlieus of St. James’s found her reading Montaigne at her toilet, and were amazed by her ignorance of the fashions. Both were scandalized at the waste of such charms and talents due to the want of so called knowledge of the world. Meanwhile, Vanessa, not yet twenty, met and straightway admired Cadenus, though his eyes were dim with study and his health decayed. He had grown old in politics and wit; was caressed by ministers; dreaded and hated by half mankind, and had forgotten the arts by which he had once charmed ladies, though merely for amusement and to show his wit.[45] He did not understand what was love; he behaved to Vanessa as a father might behave to a daughter;
That innocent delight he took
To see the virgin mind her book
Was but the master’s secret joy
In school to hear the finest boy.
Vanessa, once the quickest of learners, grew distracted. He apologized for having bored her by his pedantry, and offered a last adieu. She then startled him by a confession. He had taught her, she said, that virtue should never be afraid of disclosures; that noble minds were above common maxims (just what he had said to Varina), and she therefore told him frankly that his lessons, aimed at her head, had reached her heart. Cadenus was utterly taken aback. Her words were too plain to be in jest. He was conscious of having never for a moment meant to be other than a teacher. Yet every one would suspect him of intentions to win her heart and her five thousand pounds. He tried not to take things seriously. Vanessa, however, became eloquent. She said that he had taught her to love great men through their books; why should she not love the living reality? Cadenus was flattered and half converted. He had never heard her talk so well, and admitted that she had a most unfailing judgment and discerning head. He still maintained that his dignity and age put love out of the question, but he offered in return as much friendship as she pleased. She replies that she will now become tutor and teach him the lesson which he is so slow to learn. But—and here the revelation ends—
But what success Vanessa met
Is to the world a secret yet.[46]
Vanessa loved Swift; and Swift, it seems, allowed himself to be loved. One phrase in a letter written to him during his stay at Dublin, in 1713, suggests the only hint of jealousy. If you are happy, she says, “it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except ’tis what is inconsistent with mine.” Soon after Swift’s final retirement to Ireland, Mrs. Vanhomrigh died; her husband had left a small property at Celbridge. One son was dead; the other behaved badly to his sisters; the daughters were for a time in money difficulties, and it became convenient for them to retire to Ireland, where Vanessa ultimately settled at Celbridge. The two women who worshipped Swift were thus almost in presence of each other. The situation almost suggests comedy; but unfortunately it was to take a most tragical and still partly mysterious development.
The fragmentary correspondence between Swift and Vanessa establishes certain facts. Their intercourse was subject to restraints. He begs her, when he is starting for Dublin, to get her letters directed by some other hand, and to write nothing that may not be seen, for fear of “inconveniences.” The post-office clerk surely would not be more attracted by Vanessa’s hand than by that of such a man as Lewis, a subordinate of Harley’s who had formerly forwarded her letters. He adds that if she comes to Ireland, he will see her very seldom. “It is not a place for freedom, but everything is known in a week and magnified a hundred times.” Poor Vanessa soon finds the truth of this. She complains that she is amongst “strange prying deceitful people;” that he flies her and will give no reason except that they are amongst fools and must submit. His reproofs are terrible to her. “If you continue to treat me as you do,” she says soon after, “you will not be made uneasy by me long.” She would rather have borne the rack than those “killing, killing words” of his. She writes instead of speaking, because when she ventures to complain in person “you are angry, and there is something in your look so awful that it shakes me dumb”—a memorable phrase in days soon to come. She protests that she says as little as she can. If he knew what she thought, he must be moved. The letter containing these phrases is dated 1714, and there are but a few scraps till 1720; we gather that Vanessa submitted partly to the necessities of the situation: and that this extreme tension was often relaxed. Yet she plainly could not resign herself or suppress her passion. Two letters in 1720 are painfully vehement. He has not seen her for ten long weeks, she says in her first, and she has only had one letter and one little note with an excuse. She will sink under his “prodigious neglect.” Time or accident cannot lessen her inexpressible passion. “Put my passion under the utmost restraint; send me as distant from you as the earth will allow, yet you cannot banish those charming ideas which will stick by me, whilst I have the use of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul, for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it.” She thinks him changed, and entreats him not to suffer her to “live a life like a languishing death, which is the only life I can lead, if you have lost any of your tenderness for me.” The following letter is even more passionate. She passes days in sighing and nights in watching and thinking of one who thinks not of her. She was born with “violent passions, which terminate all in one, that inexpressible passion I have for you.” If she could guess at his thoughts, which is impossible (“for never any one living thought like you”) she would guess that he wishes her “religious”—that she might pay her devotions to heaven. “But that should not spare you, for was I an enthusiast, still you’d be the deity I should worship.” “What marks are there of a deity but what you are to be known by—you are (at?) present everywhere; your dear image is always before my eyes. Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe, I tremble with fear; at other times a charming compassion shines through your countenance, which moves my soul. Is it not more reasonable to adore a radiant form one has seen, than one only described?”[47]
The man who received such letters from a woman whom he at least admired and esteemed, who felt that to respond was to administer poison, and to fail to respond was to inflict the severest pangs, must have been in the cruellest of dilemmas. Swift, we cannot doubt, was grieved and perplexed. His letters imply embarrassment; and, for the most part, take a lighter tone; he suggests his universal panacea of exercise; tells her to fly from the spleen instead of courting it; to read diverting books, and so forth; advice more judicious probably than comforting. There are, however, some passages of a different tendency. There is a mutual understanding to use certain catch-words, which recall the “little language.” He wishes that her letters were as hard to read as his, in case of accident. “A stroke thus ... signifies everything that may be said to Cad, at the beginning and conclusion.” And she uses this written caress, and signs herself—his own “Skinage.” There are certain “questions,” to which reference is occasionally made; a kind of catechism, it seems, which he was expected to address to himself at intervals, and the nature of which must be conjectured. He proposes to continue the Cadenus and Vanessa—a proposal which makes her happy beyond “expression,”—and delights her by recalling a number of available incidents. He recurs to them in his last letter, and bids her “go over the scenes of Windsor, Cleveland Row, Rider Street, St. James’s Street, Kensington, the Shrubbery, the Colonel in France, &c. Cad thinks often of these, especially on horseback,[48] as I am assured.” This prosaic list of names recall, as we find, various old meetings. And, finally, one letter contains an avowal of a singular kind. “Soyez assurée,” he says, after advising her “to quit this scoundrel island,” “que jamais personne du monde a été aimée, honorée, estimée, adorée par votre ami que vous.” It seems as though he were compelled to throw her just a crumb of comfort here: but, in the same breath, he has begged her to leave him for ever.