The poem of Cadenus and Vanessa was written immediately on his return to Ireland and to Stella, (where he describes himself devoured by melancholy and regret,) and sent to Vanessa. Her passion and her inexperience seem to have blinded her to what was humiliating to herself in this poem, and left her sensible only to the admiration it expressed, and the hopes it conveyed. She wrote him the most impassioned letters; and he replied in a style which, without committing himself, kept alive all her tenderness, and rivetted his influence over her.
Meanwhile, what became of Stella? Too quick-sighted not to perceive the difference in Swift's manner, pining under his neglect, and struck to the heart by jealousy, grief, and resentment, her health gave way. His pitiful resolve never to see her alone, precluded all complaint or explanation. The Mrs. Dingley who had been chosen for her companion, was merely calculated to save appearances;—respectable, indeed, in point of reputation, but selfish, narrow-minded and weak. Thus abandoned to sullen, silent sorrow, the unhappy Stella fell into an alarming state; and her destroyer was at length roused to some remorse, by the daily spectacle of the miserable wreck he had caused. He commissioned his friend Dr. Ashe, "to learn the secret cause of that dejection of spirits which had so visibly preyed on her health; and to know whether it was by any means in his power to remove it?" She replied, "that the peculiarity of her circumstances, and her singular connexion with Swift for so many years, had given great occasion for scandal; that she had learned to bear this patiently, hoping that all such reports would be effaced by marriage; but she now saw, with deep grief, that his behaviour was totally changed, and that a cold indifference had succeeded to the warmest professions of eternal affection. That the necessary consequences would be, an indelible stain fixed on her character, and the loss of her good name, which was dearer to her than life."[113]
Swift answered, that in order to satisfy Mrs. Johnson's scruples, and relieve her mind, he was ready to go through the mere ceremony of marriage with her, on two conditions;—first, that they should live separately exactly as they did before;—secondly, that it should be kept a profound secret from all the world.[114] To these conditions, however hard and humiliating, she was obliged to submit: and the ceremony was performed privately by Dr. Ashe, in 1716. This nominal marriage spared her at least some of the torments of jealousy, by rendering a union with her rival impossible.
Yet, within a year afterwards, we find this ill-fated rival, the yet more unhappy Vanessa,—more unhappy because endued by nature with quicker passions, and far less fortitude and patience,—following Swift to Ireland. She had a plausible pretext for this journey, being heiress to a considerable property at Celbridge, about twelve miles from Dublin, on which she came to reside with her sister;[115] but her real inducement was her unconquerable love for him. Nothing could be more mal apropos to Swift than her arrival in Dublin: placed between two women, thus devoted to him, his perplexity was not greater than his heartless duplicity deserved: nothing could extricate him but the simple, but desperate expedient of disclosing the truth, and this he could not or would not do: regardless of the sacred ties which now bound him to Stella, he continued to correspond with Vanessa and to visit her; but "the whole course of this correspondence precludes the idea of a guilty intimacy."[116] She, whose passion was as pure as it was violent and exclusive, asked but to be his wife. She would have flung down her fortune and herself at his feet, and bathed them with tears of gratitude, if he would have deigned to lift her to his arms. In the midst of all the mortification, anguish, and heart-wearing suspense to which his stern temper and inexplicable conduct exposed her, still she clung to the hopes he had awakened, and which, either in cowardice, or compassion, or selfish egotism, he still kept alive. He concludes one of his letters with the following sentence in French, "mais soyez assurée, que jamais personne au monde n'a été aimée, honorée, estimée, adorée, par votre amie, que vous:"[117] and there are other passages to the same effect, little agreeing with his professions to poor Stella:—one or the other, or both, must have been grossly deceived.
After declarations so explicit, Vanessa naturally wondered that he proceeded no farther; it appears that he sometimes endeavoured to repress her over-flowing tenderness, by treating her with a harshness which drove her almost to frenzy. There is really nothing in the effusions of Heloïse or Mdlle. de l'Espinasse, that can exceed, in pathos and burning eloquence, some of her letters to him during this period of their connection.[118] When he had reduced her to the most shocking and pitiable state, so that her life or her reason were threatened, he would endeavour to soothe her in language which again revived her hopes—
Give the reed
From storms a shelter,—give the drooping vine
Something round which its tendrils may entwine,—
Give the parch'd flower the rain-drop,—and the meed
Of Love's kind words to woman![119]
It will be said, where was her sex's delicacy, where her woman's pride? Alas!—
La Vergogna ritien debile amore,
Ma debil freno è di potente amore.