When the issue of the conflict between Harley and Bolingbroke became too evident to be doubted, Swift showed the softer side of his character in a very unexpected way. He ran away from the catastrophe like a nervous woman, hiding himself in a country parsonage till the blow should be struck and the calamity be overpast, a very curious piece of moral timidity or nervous over-sensitiveness, for which we are entirely unprepared. It was less extraordinary that he should write to offer himself to Harley as a companion in his solitude when the minister was fairly ousted, although even then Bolingbroke was bidding eagerly for his services. But whether Swift would have accepted these offers, or would have carried his evidently genuine attachment to Harley so far as permanently to withdraw with him from public life, was never known. For the victory of St. John was short indeed. “The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday, the Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and how does Fortune banter us!” writes Bolingbroke. It was such a stroke of the irony of fate as Swift himself might have invented, and St. John applauded with the laughter of the philosopher. There was an end of political power for both, and the triumph and greatness of Swift’s reflected glory was over without hope of renewal.
He had now nothing to do but to return to Ireland, so long neglected, the country of his disappointments, which did not love him, and which he did not love, where his big genius (he thought) had not room enough to breathe, where society was small and provincial, and life flat and bare, and only a few familiar friends appreciated him or knew what he was. How he was to make himself the idol of that country, a kind of king in it, and gain power of a different kind from any he had yet wielded, was as yet a secret hidden in the mists of the future to Swift and everybody around. His account of himself when he got home to his dull deanery, “a vast unfurnished house,” with a few servants in it, “all on board wages,” is melancholy enough. “I live a country life in town, see nobody, and go every day once to prayers, and hope in a few months to grow as stupid as the present situation of affairs will require,” but he consoles himself: “after all, parsons are not such bad company, especially when they are under subjection; and I let none but such come near me,” a curious statement, in which the great satirist, as often before, gives a stroke of his idle sword at himself.
But Swift was not long left in this stagnation. Extreme quiet is in many cases but a cover for brewing mischief, and the dean had not long returned to Ireland when that handsome daughter of Mrs. Vanhomrigh, of whom he had said so little in his letters, found herself, on her mother’s death, drawn to Ireland, and the neighborhood of her tutor and correspondent. It is curious to find so many links to Ireland in this little company. Stella had a farm in Meath left to her by Sir William Temple, Vanessa, “a small property at Celbridge,” to which it suited her to retire. And thus there were gathered together within a short distance the dean himself in his dull house, the assured and quiet possessor of his tenderest affections in Dublin near him, and the impassioned girl who had declared for him love of a very different kind, at Marley Abbey, within the reach of a ride. That Swift had a heart large enough to admit on his own terms many women is very evident, and that he had a fondness for Vanessa among the rest; but how far he was to blame for her fatal passion, it is scarcely possible to decide. The story of their connection, as told from his side of the question in the poem of “Cadenus and Vanessa,” shows an unconsciousness and innocence of purpose which takes all the responsibility of her infatuation from the dean, and shows him in a light all too artless.
The 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.
But this was not the light in which the headstrong young woman, who made no secret of her love, and filled him with “shame, disappointment, guilt, remorse,” by the revelation, regarded his attentions. Their correspondence went on for nearly ten years. It is a painful correspondence, as the outpouring of a woman’s passion for a man who does not respond to it must always be; but Swift never seems to have fostered that passion, nor to have done anything but discourage and subdue a love so embarrassing and troublesome.
And now comes in the mystery which everybody has discussed, but which none have brought to any certain conclusion. In 1716, two years after Swift’s return to Ireland, it is said that he married Stella, thus putting himself at once out of all possibility of marrying Miss Vanhomrigh (which might have been a motive) and satisfying Stella, as the notion goes. Scott receives the statement as proved; so does Mr. Craik, Swift’s last, and a most conscientious and careful biographer. The evidence for it is that Lord Orrery and Dr. Delany, the earliest writers on the subject, both assert it (“if my informations are right,” as the former says) as a supposition universally believed in society; and that the fact was told by the Bishop of Clogher, who performed the ceremony, to Bishop Berkeley, who told it to his wife, who told it after her husband’s death, and long after the event, to George Monck Berkeley, who tells the story. But Bishop Berkeley was in Italy at the time and could not have been told, though he might have heard it at second-hand from his pupil, the Bishop of Clogher’s son. We wonder if an inheritance or the legitimacy of a child would be considered proved by such evidence, or whether the prevailing sense of society that such a thing ought to have taken place has not a large share in the common belief. At all times, as at the present moment, wherever a close friendship between man and woman exists (and the very fact of such rumors makes it extremely rare), suggestions of the same description float in the air. Nobody supposes, if the marriage took place at all, that it was anything more than a mere form. It was performed, if performed at all, in the garden without any formal or legal preliminaries. Supposing such a fictitious rite to have any justification in Irish law, we wonder what the authorities of the church would have had to say to two high dignitaries who united to perform an act so disorderly and contrary to ecclesiastical decorum, if to nothing else. It is totally unlike Swift, whose feeling for the church was strong, to have used her ordinances so disrespectfully, and most unlike all we know of Stella that she should have consented to so utterly false a relationship. However, the question is one which the reader will decide according to his own judgment, and upon which no one can speak with authority. Mr. Forster, of all Swift’s biographers the most elaborate and anxious, did not get so far in his work as to examine the evidence, yet intimates his disbelief of the story. We do not need, however, to have recourse to the expedient of a marriage to explain how the story of Vanessa might have been a pain and offense to Stella. Swift had not in this particular been frank with his friends, and the discovery, so near them, of a woman making so passionate a claim upon his affections must have conveyed the shock at once of a deception and an unpardonable intrusion to one who was proudly conscious of being his most trusted confidant and closest companion. Whatever were the rights of the case, however, nobody can now know. Whether Vanessa had heard the rumor of the private marriage, whether she conceived that a desperate appeal to his dearest friend might help her own claim, or whether mere suspicion and misery, boiling over, found expression in the hasty letter to Stella which she wrote at the crisis of her career, is equally unessential. She did write, and Stella, surprised and offended, showed the letter to Swift. Nothing can be more tragic than the events that follow. Swift, in one of those wild bursts of passion which were beyond the control of reason, rode out at once to the unfortunate young woman’s house. He burst in without a word, threw her own letter on the table before her, and rode off again like a whirlwind. Vanessa came of a short-lived race, and was then, at thirty-four, the last of her family. She never recovered the blow, but, dying soon after, directed her letters and the poem which contained the story of her love and his coldness to be published. This was not done for nearly a century; and now more than half of another has gone, but the story is as full of passion and misery, as unexplained, as ever. This was one of the occupations of Swift’s stagnant time. He fled, as he had done at the moment of Harley’s fall, that, at least, he might not see what was going to happen.
But a little while longer was the other, the love of his life, spared to him. Five years after the tragical end of Vanessa, Stella too died, after long suffering. There is a second story, of equally doubtful authenticity and confused and extraordinary details, about a proposed tardy acknowledgment of the apocryphal marriage; but whether it was he or she who suggested this, whether it was he or she who found it “too late,” whether there was any reality in it at all, no one has ever determined. Stella’s illness grew serious while Swift
GEORGE, EARL OF BERKELEY.
FROM AN UNFINISHED ENGRAVING, IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM,
ATTRIBUTED TO DAVID LOGGAN.