Swift

Henriette Cordelet

Vanessa was not yet twenty, Swift already past forty, when their destinies crossed. This difference in age probably helped to blind Swift to the dangers of their intimacy. He opened his eyes shortly before his return to Dublin in 1713, when Vanessa confessed her love to him. Her secret escaped her when she learned he was about to leave. She hoped Swift would marry her. She did not know that another had prior and more sacred claims upon him. A kind of modesty always led Swift to avoid very intimate subjects. Perhaps his silence also came from a feeling of prudence. A certain cynicism constrained his heart, and he was to suffer all his life from that “coldness” of which he speaks in an early letter. The life of the heart, so deep in him beneath his reserve, remained subject to the tyrannical yoke of reason. He would have denied Pascal’s words: “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” A very acute sense of reality obliged him to calculations that killed his disinterested impulses outright. Even before Miss Vanhomrigh’s avowal, he did not think it necessary to reveal to her the secret of his life. He wished to see in her love only a young girl’s fancy and trusted to time and his own prudence to bring this affection back within the limits of friendship.

Besides, he was about to leave. He must have spoken to her without harshness, as befitted a gentleman, using firm and measured language, resorting to friendly raillery. From Saint-Albans, he wrote a short farewell letter. Another, from Dunstable, was addressed to Mrs. Vanhomrigh and contained only a joke or two for her daughters.

But Vanessa’s letters followed him on his journey, more and more frequent. The tone was humble and passionate. She wished to force him to reply, told him the bookmark was still at the place where they had stopped in the last book they read together, anxiously inquired about his health, for he had left unwell: “If I am indiscreet, I know you will be kind enough to forgive me when you consider how much I need to ask these questions. Oh! what would I not give to know how you are at this moment. My fate is too cruel; your absence was enough, without this added torment.” — “If you think I write too often, you have only to say so, or else to write to me, so that I may know at least that you do not entirely forget me.”

A word in these letters shows that a discreet allusion to Stella had perhaps been made by Swift himself before his departure, or that certain echoes had come from Dublin to Miss Vanhomrigh’s ears: “If you are very happy,” she wrote, “it is very wrong of you not to tell me so — unless it is irreconcilable with my own happiness.”

When he decided to reply, it was in a calm tone, with great circumspection: “I told you, when I left England, that I would try to forget everything connected with it, and that I would write as little as possible.”

On his return to London, as they frequented the same circle, their intimacy renewed itself. Mrs. Vanhomrigh having died, her eldest daughter had to face serious financial difficulties and assume the role of head of family toward a spendthrift brother and a very sickly younger sister. She appealed to Swift’s counsel so insistently that he could not escape. Even then, he did not forget his prudent resolutions. He acted as a devoted friend, without ceasing to warn her by his attitude that she must hope for nothing more. When he abruptly left England after the death of the Queen, he warned her that he would hardly write, and as she had already spoken of going to settle in Ireland to oversee her interests more closely, he added that he would not be able to see her often. But she would not understand, and she refused to forget him. She came to live in Dublin.

This step placed Swift in a very delicate situation. He thought to escape it by force of prudence. No doubt he would have preferred to cut to the quick. He recoiled before the necessity of being cruel, and counting on his firmness, continued to keep silent, without seeing that his silence was a crime.

His coldness exasperated Miss Vanhomrigh’s love. She never ceased to demand Swift’s presence and took advantage of her isolation to oblige him to play the role of counselor too imprudently accepted at the beginning of their intimacy: “What can there be wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman?” — And as Swift’s severities increased: “Pretend to be once more that indulgent friend you were formerly.”

Not one of her letters suggests that Swift encouraged her love. One can divine, on the contrary, the irritation this situation bred in him. He lost patience and terrified her instead of calming her. As for her, her passion was ever growing. By 1714 she had reached that paroxysm where human respect no longer exists: “You told me not to torment myself, and you added that you would see me as often as you could. You would have done better to say as often as you could bring yourself to, or as often as you could remember my existence. If you continue to treat me as you do, I shall not trouble you long. Words cannot express what I have suffered since your last visit: I am sure I would have endured the rack far better than those cruel, cruel words; I have several times resolved to die without seeing you again; but these resolutions, for your misfortune, do not last long. There is something in human nature which constrains us so strongly to seek relief in this world that I yield to it in spite of myself, and I beseech you to come see me and speak to me with kindness; you would condemn no one, I am sure, to suffer as I do, if only you could know what I have suffered. I write these things because, if I saw you, I could not tell them to you: the moment I begin to complain, you are angry; your look becomes then so terrible that it cuts me short. Oh! may you yet have enough affection for me that my complaint may stir some pity in your soul. I say as little as I can. If you only knew the thoughts that have come to me, I am sure you would forgive me; and you will believe me when I say that I cannot help saying these things and living.” (1714)

One understands the alternating moods of tenderness and impatience in Swift. It became harder and harder for him to resort to the radical course that wisdom should have counseled from the start. He persisted in the same attitude. Vanessa having settled permanently at Marley-Abbey (near Celbridge), he formed the habit of visiting her there. — The house stood in a romantic setting; the garden descended to the river, which flowed very swiftly among islets and rocks, between high banks covered with magnificent old trees. Swift and Vanessa loved to sit in the shade of a grove overlooking the river, to read and converse there as in the days of Bury-Street. She was the confidante of his literary labors. She herself submitted to him the verses she composed in the solitude of Marley-Abbey. He wrote some for her. He also revised the poem Cadenus and Vanessa, written as early as 1713: unable to respond to her passion, he allowed himself to flatter her pride, and sometimes even expressions of tenderness escaped him in spite of himself. She seized upon them avidly and provoked those fits of irritation which then plunged her into despair. “There are moments,” she said, “when you strike me with a prodigious terror, I tremble with fear; there are others when a charming compassion lights your face and restores my soul to life.” In 1720, she wrote to him: “It is not in the power of time or events to weaken the inexpressible passion I have for you…” — “…my love is not only in my soul: there is not a single atom of my person that is not permeated by it.” And as no doubt he counseled her to seek the support of Religion: “If I were very devout, you would be the God I adored.”

To these outbursts of passion, he replied by speaking to her of “esteem” and “friendship” and begging her not to make them both unhappy through “imaginings.” He urged her to see people and take care of her health: “Take what good the present moment may give.” — “Fortune represents nine-tenths of happiness and health the last tenth.” — “Converse with fools, and let them help you avoid the spleen.” There was assuredly pity behind these cynical words; the gentler words that escaped him at times prove it well.

Meanwhile the years passed. Stella’s health was declining rapidly. Miss Vanhomrigh had endured the waiting in the secret conviction that Swift would marry her after her rival’s death. But Stella languished without anything indicating a near resolution to this situation from which both must have suffered equally. The resolution came, however, and was as painful as it was sudden.

Miss Vanhomrigh, losing patience, wrote to Stella to ask the truth about the commitments Swift might have made toward her. Stella replied that a secret marriage had united her to Swift since 1716 and sent Miss Vanhomrigh’s letter to Swift.

Vanessa saw him arrive unexpectedly at Marley-Abbey. He threw the letter on the table and left without uttering a word. His physiognomy was so terrible at that instant that Miss Vanhomrigh was struck as if by death. She never saw him again, languished for a few weeks, and died, revoking the testament she had made in his favor. She took a more cruel revenge by ordering the publication of Cadenus and Vanessa. Swift left Dublin after her death, and for two months no one knew where he was. When he reappeared, he had recovered his outward calm. He never healed from the intimate shock.

The history of his marriage has remained very mysterious. Only a few friends were in the secret, and the nature of his relations with Stella changed in no way. She lived near Mrs. Dingley as in the past. Such was the reward of fifteen years of silent devotion.

CHAPTER IV

Before sinking definitively into misanthropy, Swift was still to accomplish a great work. The years of political struggle had left him completely disillusioned, but had not exhausted the enormous reserve of activity fermenting within him. The fall of the Ministry returned him, against his will, to private life. He would gain thereby the elevation to rise well above party spirit and to fight at last for a more generous cause. He was about to become the champion of oppressed Ireland.

Swift had always considered Ireland a land of exile. Although he had lived his childhood and part of his youth there, he was of pure English stock and too profoundly English in his reserve, his practical temperament, his love of order, and the almost fierce independence of his personality, to sympathize with the Irish character, spontaneous, prone to illusion, and full of disconcerting weaknesses.

The aim of his whole life had been to win a place worthy of him in England, to live in the familiar commerce of those who then formed the intellectual elite. Far from his friends, he was but an exile.

After London, Dublin represented for him that “dead calm” of the mind he dreaded above all. He also found there the spectacle of an enslaved people, forgetting its humiliations and sufferings in a craven resignation. Under England’s yoke, Ireland was no more than a “nation of slaves.” Swift could not see this abasement without grief and anger. He joined to a passionate love of liberty that power of indignation which only the most ardent and violently sincere natures can know.

He was so well organized for struggle that he had felt neither discouragement nor stupor when, after the fall of the Ministry, he had seen himself treated as a vanquished man. He had foreseen everything long in advance, with his habitual lucidity. He felt rather bitterness and anger. The spirit of resistance was a form of his need for logic, and was to die in him only with reason.

In his eyes, the best government, the one most capable of reconciling the two essential principles of order and liberty, could only come from a Tory ministry. Events forced him into opposition, and his temperament precipitated him there. He had only to look around him to find a cause to defend. One already senses him ready for action when he writes in 1716 to Atterbury, with such bitter irony: “I congratulate you, and England too, on joining us in the brotherhood of slavery. It is not so terrible as you imagine: we have long experience of it, and when you want to know how to behave in your new condition, you need seek no other counselor than me. But, being resolved to surpass you, we have sent a bill to England, which she will send back to us, giving the government and six members of the Council the right for three years to imprison for three months whomever they please, without trial and without examination, and I hope to be among the first to see the law executed against my person.” (18 April 1716)

In 1719, he said: “I am six years older and twenty years duller.” Ironic words, wrung from him by the impatience to act and by boredom, not by the actual consciousness of decline. He was only fifty-one. In reality, these years of apparent inactivity had been very full. To distract himself, he had devoted himself to his affairs with fierce determination, imposing great parsimony upon himself in order to free himself from his debts, and zealously fulfilling his ecclesiastical functions. He had imposed himself by his firmness, his disinterestedness, and his integrity, and had quickly mastered the resistance of his chapter. His rigid economy allowed him to hope for comfort soon. The government left him alone; the political atmosphere seemed to be clearing, and Bolingbroke himself was beginning to speak of returning.

Swift could no longer re-enter public life as the man of a party. But the grudges smoldering in him sharpened his indignation against the shameless system of oppression enforced in Ireland by the English. He asked Delany one day: “Do not the corruptions and villanies of men eat into your flesh and exhaust your energies?” — He lived in a painful state of inner rebellion. He was about to throw himself once more into action to find relief.

In 1720 appeared the pamphlet entitled Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures. He exhorted the people to close Ireland to English goods. It was a protest against the iniquitous decree of William III, which had ruined the Irish wool trade by limiting its export to England and Wales. It was resistance organized in a practical form, such as Swift would devise. And for the first time Ireland heard the language of liberty. But in what an ironic and haughty tone! “Scripture tells us that oppression makes a wise man mad. Therefore in good logic, if certain men are not mad, it is because they are not wise. It would be desirable, however, that oppression should teach a little wisdom to fools.”

He had as much contempt for the resignation of the Irish as anger against their oppressors, and was to defend this “nation of slaves” without ever forgiving it.

Thenceforth he intervened constantly through pamphlets or verse satires in public affairs. His popularity had grown considerably and he was beginning to be regarded as the champion of Irish liberties, when the Wood incident allowed him to take an even bolder stand. The people’s enthusiasm knew no bounds when the first Drapier’s Letters appeared.

Through the influence of the Duchess of Kendal, mistress of George I, a man named Wood obtained the right to mint for Ireland 108,000 pounds in halfpence and farthings. Neither the Lord Lieutenant nor the Privy Council was consulted. Against the extraordinary audacity and arbitrariness of this measure, Swift, indignant, rose up. Copper coinage was genuinely lacking, and Wood, it is said, was executing the contract honestly. But that mattered little to Swift. He was protesting in the name of violated liberty.

He did so with his usual practical sense. To move the people, he spoke to them of their interests. The Drapier affirmed to Ireland that it was being robbed: “Brethren, friends, countrymen and fellow subjects, what I intend now to say to you is, next to your duty to God and the care of your salvation, of the greatest concern to yourselves and your children…”

The tone maintains throughout this grave, simple, and ardent manner. It is a tradesman exhorting the people of his class to resistance and employing the arguments best calculated to move them.

Dublin was soon in an uproar and the agitation spread to the provinces. At Saint Patrick’s, Swift preached against Wood one of those sermons which, in his own expression, “were pamphlets.” Both Irish Houses asked the Crown to withdraw the patent; a single impulse united all parties and all sects; merchants refused Wood’s coinage; the populace held solemn processions and burned Wood in effigy. Swift further fanned the popular indignation by ballads and satires that hawkers went distributing to the remotest countryside.

Walpole tried first to reduce the issue to 40,000 pounds. But Swift wanted a more complete triumph. The moment had come to give the resistance its true character. From the fourth letter onward, he denounced the indignity of English policy and told the Irish, after showing their country governed by a Parliament in which they had not a single representative: “The remedy is entirely in your own hands, and therefore I have digressed, in order to show that according to the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your own country, you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.”

Three hundred pounds were offered for the denunciation of the author. Harding, the printer, was thrown into prison. Legal proof was lacking against Swift, but he made no secret of having written the Letters. He presented himself at the levee of Lord Lieutenant Carteret and asked what these severities meant against a poor bookseller who had published two or three letters “for the good of his country.” Carteret answered wittily with this Virgilian quotation: “Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt / Moliri.”

The tireless pen was still at work. He launched pamphlet after pamphlet before and after Harding’s trial. The jury returned a verdict of ignoramus despite the efforts and threats of the Lord Chief Justice Whitshed, who did not hesitate to commit two illegalities — by first asking the jury to state grounds for its verdict, then by dismissing it before the end of the session.

Three more Letters appeared. One of them, addressed to Lord Chancellor Middleton and signed by Swift, pleaded the Drapier’s cause. He had won the victory: the Ministry yielded; Lord Carteret indemnified Wood and withdrew his patent.

Swift thenceforth exercised a veritable royalty in Ireland. This good-natured people repaid his generous efforts and his lashings with immense popularity. Swift accepted this moral dictatorship without joy, for he could not forget that he reigned over “slaves.” The struggle had proved he had lost none of his fighting power; but it had occupied his restless soul without sating it. He emerged from it avenged upon the Whig party, elevated in the eyes of Ireland and even of England, and laden with glory. If he could have forgotten the past, if he had been capable of contemplating human weaknesses without indignation, he might perhaps, after this agitated life, have known a more serene old age. But forgetfulness and philosophical indulgence are equally impossible to certain souls. The hatred on which his genius had fed had become his genius itself. He was to be its most grievous victim.

CHAPTER V

He fought with ever more acute anguish the progress of his disease and foresaw the outcome with an atrocious clairvoyance. His memory faltered at times, but his faculties remained absolutely intact. The verses on “his own death,” written about 1735, are in a sense his moral testament and prove he had lost nothing of his intellectual vigor and his power of irony.

He was more alone than ever. Delany had broken with him. Sheridan himself had died shortly after drawing away from him, repelled by his tyrannical and too uneven temper. He had become so irritable that a careless word sometimes threw him into terrible fits of rage.

During the years 1738-1739, he still made desperate efforts to hold the disease at bay. The violent regimen he stubbornly followed exhausted him without calming his suffering. He had become skeletal. In the end, no longer daring to go out, he paced his house from top to bottom, or walked in his room for hours. He wished to die, and no doubt did not acknowledge the right to kill himself. But he said one day, when a mirror fell just at the spot he had just left: “I wish it had fallen on me.”

Conversation had always been his favorite distraction and remained, even during this agony, his sole pleasure. A letter from Mr. Deane Swift to Lord Orrery says that in August and September 1739 he could still converse with a stranger, provided a friend was there to help when his memory failed: he would then ask with a detached air, “What was I going to say?” and would “gather his ideas at the slightest word.” But he was clearly conscious of his condition, for he wrote: “I have for many months been nothing but the shadow of the shadow of Doctor Swift.”

He sank in 1740, after an agony of which his last letter bears the traces. He wrote to Mrs. Whiteway: “I have been very miserable all night, and today I am very deaf and I suffer horribly. I am in such a state of stupor and dullness that I cannot express my physical and moral misery. All I can say is that it is not yet the torture, but I expect it every day and every moment. Tell me, I pray, how you are and how all yours are. — I can barely understand a word of what I write at this moment. My days are numbered, I am sure… they are numbered and they will be miserable. I am, for these few days, entirely yours, J. SWIFT. If I am not mistaken, today is Saturday, 26 July 1740. If I live until Monday, I hope to see you, perhaps for the last time.”

He soon lost his memory entirely, and his best friends had to give up approaching him. Mrs. Whiteway, no longer daring to show herself to him, observed him in secret as he walked ceaselessly back and forth in his room. This restless prowling sometimes lasted ten hours. He had to be left alone before he would consent to eat. He no longer spoke. In March 1742, his fortune was entrusted to trustees and his person to the devoted care of Dr. Lyons. In September, a tumor appeared on his eye. The torture was such that for several weeks he had to be watched day and night, and at times five men were needed to prevent him from tearing out his eye.

Then came apathy. He no longer suffered and scarcely left his armchair. He vegetated peacefully thus for three years; his stoutness returned, his wrinkles faded, and beneath his snow-white hair his face, said Mrs. Whiteway, took on a gentle and childlike expression. A few words escaped him from time to time, “once or twice a week.” Having one day tried in vain to say something, he added: “I am a fool.” He was also seen to contemplate himself in the mirror with pity, then say: “Poor old man!” — And when a knife within his reach was taken away, he murmured, shaking his head: “I am what I am!”

Perhaps reason still lived within him; perhaps that fierce spirit of resistance which had animated him all his life was at last admitting defeat.

He did not know the great definitive rest until three years later. After thirty-six hours of convulsions, he died without suffering on 19 October 1745. He consecrated his entire fortune to building a hospital for the insane.

Epitaph composed by Swift. In his testament dated May 1740, he gives instructions for the words below to be inscribed upon his tomb, on a tablet of black marble, “in large Characters, deeply engraved and well gilded.”

HIC DEPOSITUM EST CORPUS JONATHAN SWIFT, S.T.P. HUJUS ECCLESIAE CATHEDRALIS DECANI UBI SAEVA INDIGNATIO ULTERIUS COR LACERARE NEQUIT. ABI, VIATOR, ET IMITARE, SI POTERIS, STRENUUM PRO VIRILI LIBERTATIS VINDICEM. OBIIT ANNO (1745) MENSIS (OCTOBRIS) DIE (19) AETATIS ANNO (78).

Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Sacred Theology, Dean of this Cathedral Church, where fierce indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go, traveler, and imitate, if you can, one who strove with all his might to champion liberty. He died in the year 1745, on the 19th day of October, in the 78th year of his age.