If Swift constitutionally differed from other men, we have some explanation of his strange conduct. But we must take into account other circumstances. Swift had very obvious motives for not marrying. In the first place, he gradually became almost a monomaniac upon the question of money. His hatred of wasting a penny unnecessarily began at Trinity College, and is prominent in all his letters and journals. It coloured even his politics, for a conviction that the nation was hopelessly ruined is one of his strongest prejudices. He kept accounts down to halfpence, and rejoices at every saving of a shilling. The passion was not the vulgar desire for wealth of the ordinary miser. It sprang from the conviction stored up in all his aspirations that money meant independence. “Wealth,” he says, “is liberty; and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher—and Gay is a slave just by two thousand pounds too little.”[54] Gay was a duchess’s lapdog: Swift, with all his troubles, at least a free man. Like all Swift’s prejudices, this became a fixed idea which was always gathering strength. He did not love money for its own sake. He was even magnificent in his generosity. He scorned to receive money for his writings; he abandoned the profit to his printers in compensation for the risks they ran, or gave it to his friends. His charity was splendid relatively to his means. In later years he lived on a third of his income, gave away a third, and saved the remaining third for his posthumous charity,[55]—and posthumous charity which involves present saving is charity of the most unquestionable kind. His principle was that by reducing his expenditure to the lowest possible point, he secured his independence and could then make a generous use of the remainder. Until he had received his deanery, however, he could only make both ends meet. Marriage would therefore have meant poverty, probably dependence, and the complete sacrifice of his ambition.
If under these circumstances Swift had become engaged to Stella upon Temple’s death, he would have been doing what was regularly done by fellows of colleges under the old system. There is, however, no trace of such an engagement. It would be in keeping with Swift’s character, if we should suppose that he shrank from the bondage of an engagement; that he designed to marry Stella as soon as he should achieve a satisfactory position, and meanwhile trusted to his influence over her, and thought that he was doing her justice by leaving her at liberty to marry if she chose. The close connexion must have been injurious to Stella’s prospects of a match; but it continued only by her choice. If this were in fact the case, it is still easy to understand why Swift did not marry upon becoming dean. He felt himself, I have said, to be a broken man. His prospects were ruined, and his health precarious. This last fact requires to be remembered in every estimate of Swift’s character. His life was passed under a Damocles’ sword. He suffered from a distressing illness which he attributed to an indigestion produced by an over-consumption of fruit at Temple’s when he was a little over twenty-one. The main symptoms were a giddiness, which frequently attacked him, and was accompanied by deafness. It is quite recently that the true nature of the complaint has been identified. Dr. Bucknill[56] seems to prove that the symptoms are those of “Labyrinthine vertigo,” or Ménière’s disease, so called because discovered by Ménière in 1861. The references to his sufferings, brought together by Sir William Wilde in 1849,[57] are frequent in all his writings. It tormented him for days, weeks, and months, gradually becoming more permanent in later years. In 1731 he tells Gay that his giddiness attacks him constantly, though it is less violent than of old; and in 1736 he says that it is continual. From a much earlier period it had alarmed and distressed him. Some pathetic entries are given by Mr. Forster from one of his note-books:—“Dec. 5 (1708).—Horribly sick. 12th.—Much better, thank God and M.D.’s prayers.... April 2nd (1709).—Small giddy fit and swimming in the head. M.D. and God help me.... July, 1710.—Terrible fit. God knows what may be the event. Better towards the end.” The terrible anxiety, always in the background, must count for much in Swift’s gloomy despondency. Though he seems always to have spoken of the fruit as the cause, he must have had misgivings as to the nature and result. Dr. Bucknill tells us that it was not necessarily connected with the disease of the brain, which ultimately came upon him; but he may well have thought that this disorder of the head was prophetic of such an end. It was probably in 1717 that he said to Young of the Night Thoughts, “I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top.” A man haunted perpetually by such forebodings might well think that marriage was not for him. In Cadenus and Vanessa he insists upon his declining years with an emphasis which seems excessive even from a man of forty-four (in 1713 he was really forty-five) to a girl of twenty. In a singular poem called the Progress of Marriage he treats the supposed case of a divine of fifty-two marrying a lively girl of fashion, and speaks with his usual plainness of the probable consequences of such folly. We cannot doubt that here as elsewhere he is thinking of himself. He was fifty-two when receiving the passionate love-letters of Vanessa; and the poem seems to be specially significant.
This is one of those cases in which we feel that even biographers are not omniscient; and I must leave it to my readers to choose their own theory, only suggesting that readers too are fallible. But we may still ask what judgment is to be passed upon Swift’s conduct. Both Stella and Vanessa suffered from coming within the sphere of Swift’s imperious attraction. Stella enjoyed his friendship through her life at the cost of a partial isolation from ordinary domestic happiness. She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice. It is one of the cases in which, if the actors be our contemporaries, we hold that outsiders are incompetent to form a judgment, as none but the principals can really know the facts. Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace Tisdall? If Stella chose, and chose freely, it is hard to say that she was mistaken, or to blame Swift for a fascination which he could not but exercise. The tragedy of Vanessa suggests rather different reflections. Swift’s duty was plain. Granting what seems to be probable, that Vanessa’s passion took him by surprise, and that he thought himself disqualified for marriage by infirmity and weariness of life, he should have made his decision perfectly plain. He should have forbidden any clandestine relations. Furtive caresses—even on paper, understandings to carry on a private correspondence, fond references to old meetings, were obviously calculated to encourage her passion. He should not only have pronounced it to be hopeless, but made her, at whatever cost, recognize the hopelessness. This is where Swift’s strength seems to have failed him. He was not intentionally cruel; he could not foresee the fatal event; he tried to put her aside, and he felt the “shame, disappointment, grief, surprise,” of which he speaks on the avowal of her love. He gave her the most judicious advice, and tried to persuade her to accept it. But he did not make it effectual. He shrank from inflicting pain upon her and upon himself. He could not deprive himself of the sympathy which soothed his gloomy melancholy. His affection was never free from the egoistic element which prevented him from acting unequivocally as an impartial spectator would have advised him to act, or as he would have advised another to act in a similar case. And therefore when the crisis came the very strength of his affection produced an explosion of selfish wrath; and he escaped from the intolerable position by striking down the woman whom he loved, and whose love for him had become a burden. The wrath was not the less fatal because it was half composed of remorse, and the energy of the explosion proportioned to the strength of the feeling which had held it in check.
CHAPTER VII.
WOOD’S HALFPENCE.
In one of Scott’s finest novels, the old Cameronian preacher, who had been left for dead by Claverhouse’s troopers, suddenly rises to confront his conquerors, and spends his last breath in denouncing the oppressors of the saints. Even such an apparition was Jonathan Swift to comfortable Whigs who were flourishing in the place of Harley and St. John, when, after ten years’ quiescence, he suddenly stepped into the political arena. After the first crushing fall he had abandoned partial hope, and contented himself with establishing supremacy in his chapter. But undying wrath smouldered in his breast till time came for an outburst.
No man had ever learnt more thoroughly the lesson, “put not your faith in princes;” or had been impressed with a lower estimate of the wisdom displayed by the rulers of the world. He had been behind the scenes, and knew that the wisdom of great ministers meant just enough cunning to court the ruin which a little common sense would have avoided. Corruption was at the prow and folly at the helm. The selfish ring which he had denounced so fiercely had triumphed. It had triumphed, as he held, by flattering the new dynasty, hoodwinking the nation, and maligning its antagonists. The cynical theory of politics was not for him, as for some comfortable cynics, an abstract proposition, which mattered very little to a sensible man; but was embodied in the bitter wrath with which he regarded his triumphant adversaries. Pessimism is perfectly compatible with bland enjoyment of the good things in a bad world; but Swift’s pessimism was not of this type. It meant energetic hatred of definite things and people who were always before him.
With this feeling, he had come to Ireland; and Ireland—I am speaking of a century and a half ago—was the opprobrium of English statesmanship. There Swift had (or thought he had) always before him a concrete example of the basest form of tyranny. By Ireland, I have said, Swift meant, in the first place, the English in Ireland. In the last years of his sanity he protested indignantly against the confusion between the “savage old Irish,” and the English gentry who, he said, were much better bred, spoke better English, and were more civilized than the inhabitants of many English counties.[58] He retained to the end of his life his antipathy to the Scotch colonists. He opposed their demand for political equality as fiercely in the last as in his first political utterances. He contrasted them unfavourably[59] with the Catholics, who had indeed been driven to revolt by massacre and confiscation under Puritan rule, but who were now, he declared, “true Whigs, in the best and most proper sense of the word,” and thoroughly loyal to the house of Hanover. Had there been a danger of a Catholic revolt, Swift’s feelings might have been different; but he always held, that they were “as inconsiderable as the women and children,” mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” “out of all capacity of doing any mischief, if they were ever so well inclined.”[60] Looking at them in this way, he felt a sincere compassion for their misery and a bitter resentment against their oppressors. The English, he said, in a remarkable letter,[61] should be ashamed of their reproaches of Irish dulness, ignorance and cowardice. Those defects were the products of slavery. He declared that the poor cottagers had “a much better natural taste for good sense, humour and raillery, than ever I observed among people of the like sort in England. But the millions of oppressions they lie under, the tyranny of their landlords, the ridiculous zeal of their priests, and the misery of the whole nation have been enough to damp the best spirits under the sun.” Such a view is now commonplace enough. It was then a heresy to English statesmen, who thought that nobody but a Papist or a Jacobite could object to the tyranny of Whigs.