Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne

by Mrs. Oliphant

was absent, and his anguish at the news was curiously mingled with an overwhelming dread lest she should die at the deanery, and thus compromise her reputation and his own; perhaps, too, lest the house to which he must return should be made intolerable to him by the shadow of such an event. That he should have kept away, with his usual terror of everything painful, was entirely in keeping with his character. But the first alarm passed away, and Swift was in the deanery when this great sorrow overtook him. He who had kept a letter for an hour without daring to open it, in which he trembled to find the news of her death, now shut himself up heartbroken in his solitary house, and, somewhat calmed by the irrevocable,—as grief, however desperate, always must be,—proceeded to give himself what consolation was possible by writing a “Character,” as was the fashion of the time, of “the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with.” The calm after the storm, but a calm of sober despair and dread, unreal composure, is in this strange document. He wrote till “my head aches, and I can write no more,” and on the third day resumed and completed the strange and melancholy narrative.

This is the night of her funeral, which my sickness will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am removed into another apartment, that I may not see the light in the Church, which is just over against the window of my bedchamber.

She was buried in his own cathedral by torchlight, as the custom was; but he would no more bear the glimpses of that awful light through the window, than he could witness the putting away of all that remained of Stella in the double gloom of the vault and the night. In that other apartment he concluded his sad panegyric, the story of all she was and did, showing with intense but subdued eloquence that there was no fault in her. “There is none like her, none.” This is the burden of the old man’s self-restrained anguish, the tragedy of his age, as it is the young lover’s pæan of triumph. The truest, most valuable friend that ever man had—and now her beautiful life was ended, to be his consolation no more. He had a lock of her hair in his possession somewhere, either given him then or at some brighter moment, which was found after his death, as all the world knows, with these words written upon the paper that contained it: “Only a woman’s hair.” Only all the softness, the brightness, the love and blessing of a life; only all that the heart had to rest upon of human solace; only that—no more. He who had thanked God and M. D.’s prayers for his better health, had now no one to pray for him, or to receive his confidences. It was over, all that best of life—as if it had never been.

It is easy to expand such a text, and many have done it. In the mean time, before these terrible events had occurred, while Vanessa’s letters were still disturbing his peace, and death had as yet touched none of his surroundings, he had accomplished the greatest literary work of his life, that by which every child knows Swift’s name—the travels of the famous Gulliver. The children have made their selection with an unerring judgment which is above criticism, and have taken Lilliput and Brobdingnag into their hearts, rejecting all the rest. That Swift had a meaning, bitter and sharp, even in the most innocent part of that immortal fable, and meant to strike a blow at politicians and generals, and the human race, with its puny wars, and glories, and endless vanities and foolishness, is evident enough; and it was for this that the people of his time seized upon the book with breathless interest, and old Duchess Sarah in her old age chuckled and forgave the dean. But the vast majority of his readers have not so much as known that he meant anything except the most amusing and witty fancy, the keenest comic delineation of impossible circumstances. That delightful Irish bishop, if ever he was, who declared that “the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it,” is the only critic we want. “‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is almost the most delightful children’s book ever written,” says Mr. Leslie Stephen, no small authority. It had no doubt been talked over and read to the ladies, who, it would incidentally appear, had not liked the “Tale of a Tub.” But Swift was at home when he wrote “Gulliver,” and had no need of a journal to communicate his proceedings.

Between 1714 and 1726, for a dozen years, he remained in Ireland without intermission, altogether apart from public life. At the latter date he went to London, probably needing, after the shock of Miss Vanhomrigh’s death, and the grievous sense he must have had that it was he who had killed her, a change of scene; and it was then that “Gulliver” was published. The latter portions of it which the children have rejected we are glad to have no space to dwell upon. The bitterness, passion, and misery of them are beyond parallel. One would like to have any ground for believing that the Houyhnhms and the rest came into being after Stella’s death; but this was not the case. She was only a woman, and was not, after all, of such vital importance in the man’s existence. Withdrawal from the life he loved, confinement in a narrow sphere, the disappointment of a soul which felt itself born for greatness, and had tasted the high excitements of power, but now had nothing to do but fight over the choir with his archbishop, and give occasion for a hundred anecdotes in the Dublin coteries, had matured the angry passion in him and soured the sweetness of nature. Few people now when they take up their “Gulliver” go beyond Brobdingnag. The rest is like a succession of bad dreams, the confused miseries of a fever. To think that in a deanery, that calm seat of ecclesiastical luxury, within sound of the cathedral bells and the choristers’ chants, a brain so dark and distracted, and dreams so terrible, should have found shelter! They are all the more bitter and appalling from their contrast with the surroundings among which they had their disastrous birth.

The later part of Swift’s life, however, had occupation of a very different and nobler kind. The Ireland he knew was so different from the Ireland with which we are acquainted, that to contemplate the two is apt to give a sort of moral vertigo, a giddiness of the intellect, to the observer. Swift’s Ireland was the country of the English-Irish, ultra-Protestant, like the real Ireland only in the keenness of its politics and the sharpness of its opposition to imperial measures. It was Ireland with a parliament of her own, and many of the privileges which are now her highest aspirations, yet she was not content. Swift, in speaking of the people, the true Irish, the Catholic masses, who at that moment bore their misery with a patience inconceivable, said of them that they were no more considerable than the women and children, a race so utterly trodden down and subdued that there was no need for the politician to take them into account. The position of the predominant class was almost like that of white men among the natives of a savage country, or at least like that of the English in India, the confident and assured rulers of a subject race. Nevertheless, these men were full of a sort of national feeling, and ready to rise up in hot and not ineffectual opposition when need was, and reckon themselves Irish, whereas no sahib has ever reckoned himself Indian. The real people of Ireland were held under the severest yoke, but those gentlemen who represented the nation can scarcely be said to have been oppressed. Their complaint was that Englishmen were put into vacant posts, that their wishes were disregarded, and their affairs neglected, complaints which even prosperous Scotland has been known to make. They were affected, however, as well as the race which

they kept under their feet, by the intolerable law which suppressed woolen manufactures in Ireland, and it was on this subject that Swift first broke silence, and appeared as the national champion, recommending to his countrymen such reprisals as the small can employ against the great, in the form of a proposal that Irishmen should use Irish manufactures only, a proposal by no means unlikely to be carried out should an Irish parliament ever exist again.

The commotion produced by this real and terrible oppression was nothing, however, to that called forth by an innocent attempt to give a copper coinage—the most convenient of circulating mediums—to Ireland. Nothing could have been more harmless, more useful and necessary in reality, and there is no reason to suppose that dishonesty of any kind was involved. But the public mind was embittered by the fact that the patent had been granted to one of King George’s German favorites, and by her sold to Wood, an Englishman, who was supposed to be about to make an enormous profit out of the country by half-pence not worth their nominal value. Such an idea stirred the prejudices and fears of the very lowest, and would even now rouse the ignorant into rage and panic. Whether Swift shared that natural and national, if unreasonable, outburst of indignation and alarm to the full extent, or if he threw himself into it with the instinct of an agitator foreseeing the capabilities of the subject, it is difficult to tell. But the “Drapier’s Letters” gave to the public outcry so powerful a force of resistance, and excited the entire country into such unanimity and opposition, that the English Government was forced to withdraw from this attempt, and the position of the Irish nation, as an oppressed yet not unpowerful entity, still able to face its tyrants and protest against their careless sway, became distinctly apparent. It is strange that a man who hated Ireland, and considered himself an exile in her, should have been the one to claim for her an independence, a freedom she had never yet possessed, and should have been able to inspire at once the subject and the ruling race with the sense that they had found a champion capable of all things, and through whom for the first time their voice might be heard in the world. The immediate result was to Swift a popularity beyond bounds. The people he despised were seized with an adoration for him which was shared by the class to which he himself belonged—perhaps the first subject on which they had agreed. “When he returned from England in 1726 bells were rung, bonfires lighted, and a guard of honor escorted him to the deanery. Towns voted him their freedom and received him as a prince. When Walpole spoke of arresting him a prudent friend told the minister that the messenger would require a guard of 10,000 soldiers.” When the crowd which had gathered to see an eclipse disturbed him by the hum they made, Swift sent out to tell them that the event was put off by order of the dean, and the simple-minded people dispersed obediently! Had he been so minded, and had he fully understood and loved the race over which his great and troubled spirit had gained such power, much might perhaps have been ameliorated in that unfortunate country, so cursed in her friends as in her foes, and much in the soul consuming itself in angry inactivity with no fit work in hand. But it would have taken a miracle indeed to have turned this Englishman born in Ireland, this political churchman and hater of papists and dissenters, into the savior of the subject race. That he was, however, deeply struck with an impression of their misery, and that his soul, always so ready to break forth upon the cruelty, the falsehood, the barbarous misconception of men by men, found in their wrongs a subject upon which he could scarcely exaggerate, is apparent enough. His “Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country” is one of those pieces of terrible satire which lacerate the heart. Tears as of blood are in it, a passion of indignant pity, and fury, and despair. “Eat them, then, since there’s nothing else to be done with them,” he says, detailing with elaborate composure the way to do it and the desirableness of such a supply of delicate food. The reader, unwarned and simple-minded, might almost, with a gasp of horror, take the proposal for genuine. But Swift’s meaning was really more terrible than cannibalism. It was the sense that these children, the noblest fruit of nature, were in truth the embarrassment, the fatal glut of a miserable race, that forced this dreadful irony upon him. And what picture could be more terrible than that of the childless old man with his bleeding heart, himself deserted of all that made life sweet, thus facing the world with scorn so infinite that it transcends all symbols of passion, bidding it consume what it has brought forth?