Chapter V: Part 5

To Pope, in 1716, Swift pointed out the use of fools, who, in his opinion, were “as necessary for a good writer as pen, ink, and paper.” He could take enough interest in wit to propose to Gay the subject of another pastoral. “What think you of a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there?” In 1717 he wrote once more to Addison, now Secretary of State, congratulating Addison upon his post and the Whigs for having chosen one man on his merits. In 1718 Swift wrote to Oxford’s son that time had sweetened him. “My servants tell all our neighbourhood that I grow gentler every day, and am content only to call my footman a fool for that which when you knew me first I would have broke his head.” And in December 1719 Swift wrote to Bolingbroke a letter in which his humour played again over his passion.

“I can now express in a hundred words what would formerly have cost me ten. I can write epigrams of fifty distichs which might be squeezed into one. I have gone the round of all my stories three or four times with the younger people, and begin them again. I give hints how significant a person I have been, and nobody believes me. I pretend to pity them, but am inwardly angry.... If I boast of having been valued three hundred miles off, it is of no more use than if I told how handsome I was when I was young.... If I can prevail on any one to personate a hearer and admirer, you would wonder what a favourite he grows. He is sure to have the first glass out of the bottle and the best bit I can carve. Nothing has convinced me so much that I am of a little subaltern spirit, _inopis atque pusilli animi_, as to reflect how I am forced into the most trifling amusements to divert the vexation of former thoughts and present objects.”

In another man this might have sounded like humility. In Swift it has, somehow, the imagined sound of a searchlight falling into a dark corner.

He was now almost Swift again. Looking back over his career as a wit he wrote an ironic letter of advice to a young poet, assuring him that poetry did not demand religion or learning or even sense of those who practised it. Ireland, he argued, must have a Grub Street. Ireland must have a poet laureate, a professor of poetry, a city bard for Dublin, a poet in fee for every parish. It might have more. “What if every one so qualified were obliged to add one more than usual to the number of his domestics, and besides a fool and a chaplain (which are often united in one person) would retain a poet in his family?” Looking back over his career as a parson Swift wrote a sober letter of advice to a young clergyman. To him, not to the poet, Swift said that “proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.”

Both these letters dealt with what for Swift was play. He resumed his work in a pamphlet urging all the Irish, as a protest against the ruinous export laws, to make a “universal use of Irish manufacture,” “utterly rejecting and renouncing everything wearable that comes from England.” Officials fumed. He was, they claimed, trying to divide the two kingdoms. The printer was brought to trial. When the jury acquitted him the Lord Chief Justice sent them back nine times, till they were willing to leave the verdict to the mercy of the judge. Though the case was dropped when the next Lord Lieutenant came over, the damage was done. Swift, having once more tasted Whig blood, was on his way to becoming an Irish patriot.

2

But before he gathered all his forces he had to go through his final conflict with Stella’s rival. The drama reaching its climax was already much too long.

He had met Vanessa (Esther Vanhomrigh) early in 1708 in London, where her mother was living with her children. It pleased the mother to call the daughter younger than she was, and it did not displease the daughter. She was a sleepy girl, still, at twenty, undecided between the nursery and the drawing-room, moody, idle, intelligent. Swift, at first considering her a child, discovered in her a mind, and was irresistibly, humorously impelled to shape it. “She had good principles,” he wrote three years later, “and I have corrected all her faults.” She had, however, the passion of sleepy women, not the obedience of Stella.

To that passion Swift was blind, first carelessly, then deliberately. No doubt he felt it. He had put his entire energy into his pride. His senses, no matter how cold towards women, must have learned that the relationship with Stella, no matter how close and kind, was sometimes dry and mild. She was nearly a wife, and some routine had got into their companionship. Vanessa was younger. Vanessa was new. Swift, for all his prudence, enjoyed the tumult in her disposition. Because he held her, as he seems always to have done, at a safe arm’s-length, he was obtuse to her eagerness. Obtuse and insufficiently concerned. Being forty, he could not quite resist such warmth from a girl, did not have quite the courage to put out such a fire or leave it. Too scrupulous or too temperate to make the full use of Vanessa’s passion, he went on idling within its perilous range. He was surprised when he found that he had on his hands a mistress as extraordinary as the wife he had in Ireland.

Stella the extraordinary wife. Vanessa the extraordinary mistress. Swift the extraordinary husband and lover. No other terms will bound the extraordinary triangle. Gossip then and gossip since has wasted its strength in trying to find out whether Swift was technically lover or husband to either of the women. What if he was? What if he was not? The drama remains the same.

Stella was for nearly forty years, child and woman, “the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I,” Swift said, “or perhaps any other person, ever was blessed with.” Call Stella his wife or be pedantic. Vanessa was for fifteen years his occasional companion, his delight, his torment, to whom he wrote--in bad French--that there was no merit nor any proof of his good taste in his finding in her all that nature had given any mortal in the way of honour, virtue, sense, wit, tenderness, agreeableness, and firmness of spirit. Call Vanessa his mistress or be pedantic. One side of Swift looked towards a wife, one towards a mistress. He maintained between them a singular course, but it was no more singular than his character. He was, after all, only one man loved by two women.

The friendship begun in 1708 between Swift and Vanessa, anxious to be possessed but willing to be taught, was kept up during that stay in England and, by letters, during his next absence in Ireland. When he returned to become a Tory in 1710 he had so lavish a welcome from the Vanhomrighs that their house became almost his. He lived near them, dined with them often and then more often, and had a small room there in which to read and write.

Stella, hearing about them, seems to have sniffed. “You say they are of no consequence,” he answered her. “Why, they keep as good female company as I do male. I see all the drabs of quality at this end of the town with them.” He spoke in his journal rather of the mother or of the whole family than of Vanessa.

When, having taken to Chelsea in the spring of 1711, he walked more or less daily to London and back, he kept his best gown and periwig at the Vanhomrigh house, and called twice a day to change. Vanessa, with the family, possibly visited him in Chelsea, as she probably did at Kensington in the summer of the year after. The Vanhomrighs certainly visited Swift at Windsor in September 1712, and Vanessa was on some score disappointed. “Why then,” he wrote, “you should not have come, and I knew that as well as you.”

So far any strong feelings there may have been in either of them had not risen into words. He teased her for her dawdling, for her chiding, for her jealousy of her younger sister, for her habit of coaxing him for political secrets. She complained, rather childishly, of his neglect of her when he was out of London. Their letters might have been between Swift and any young woman of his acquaintance.

But when he went to Ireland in June 1713, sick of England, Vanessa could not endure the stern break which suited him. The four letters she wrote before she got an answer were disconsolate. “I find no conversation on earth comparable but yours.” She had heard of his illness. “Oh! what would I give to know how you do at this instant. My fortune is too hard. Your absence was enough, without this cruel addition.” “How could you be so cruel, to defer telling me the thing of the world I wished most to know? If you think I write too much, your only way is to tell me so, or at least to write to me again, that I may know you don’t quite forget me; for I very much fear that I never employ a thought of yours now, except when you are reading my letters, which makes me ply you with them.... If you are very happy it is ill-natured of you not to tell me, except ’tis what is inconsistent with mine.”

Swift could not mistake this last clause. In seven words Vanessa made plain that she was wondering whether he could be happy without her, asking whether he was by any dreadful chance happy with some one else, announcing that she thought of him and her as having their happiness in common. His answer put cold oceans between them.

“I had your last spleenatic letter. I told you when I left England I would endeavour to forget everything there, and would write as seldom as I could. I did indeed design one general round of letters to my friends, but my health has not yet suffered me. I design to pass the greatest part of the time I stay in Ireland here in the cabin where I am now writing; neither will I leave the kingdom till I am called for; and if they have no further service for me I will never see England again. At my first coming I thought I should have died with discontent, and was horribly melancholy while they were installing me. But it begins to wear off and change to dulness. My river walk is extremely pretty, and my canal in great beauty, and I see trouts playing in it.”

Her ardour, that is, he saw as spleen. He meant to forget her along with all the others. If he were to go back it would be to politics. He was dull but not melancholy. Vanessa would be glad to know that there were fish in his canal.

Politics called Swift back in September, to London and to Vanessa. There are no letters belonging to that winter, but there is the poem, apparently written then, in which Swift told the story of Cadenus (that is _Decanus_, dean) and Vanessa.

He began lightly, with the graces of a contemporary wit. The shepherds and the nymphs, he said, had gone to law before the court of Venus, the nymphs accusing the shepherds of resisting love, the shepherds defending themselves by the counter-accusation that, thanks to the nymphs, “modern love” was no longer

“_A fire celestial, chaste, refined,
Conceived and kindled in the mind,_”

but had become a “gross desire,” moving through caprice and folly. Venus, unable to decide the suit, had undertaken an experiment, and had endowed Vanessa, happily new-born, with all the virtues which the Queen of Love--or Swift--thought most “lovely in the female kind”: “a sweetness above all perfumes,” a cleanliness “incapable of outward stains,” a mind as modest as “the speech of prudes,” and a “gentle, soft, engaging air.” Not yet satisfied, Venus had fooled Pallas into thinking that the baby was a boy, and had obtained for her the other virtues “for manly bosoms chiefly fit”: “knowledge, judgment, wit,” “justice, truth, and fortitude,” “honour which no breath can stain,” “open heart and bounteous hand,” and, since “meat must be with money bought,” as Pallas knew, “some small regard for state and wealth” and a useful fortune of five thousand pounds.

The romantic Venus, when all this was done, had looked for the restoration of her power. The realistic Pallas--

“_For how can heavenly wisdom prove
An instrument to earthly love?_”--

had, though enraged by the deceit, left “all things to their natural course.” And Pallas was justified. The beaux, when Vanessa came to town, listened to her hermaphroditic discourses--

“_Through nature and through art she ranged,
And gracefully her subject changed_”--

and thought her tiresome. The belles, disgusted by her lack of interest in clothes and gossip, thought her old-fashioned.

“_To copy her few nymphs aspired;
Her virtues fewer swains admired._”

Vanessa hardened her heart and turned her back on the world.

Was the actual Vanessa, when she had read this far, pleased with the figure she cut in the fable? Or did the actual Cadenus, if he read it to her, notice that she twisted in her chair?

The verses went on. Cupid, zealous for his mother’s credit, resolved to conquer the adamant Vanessa. At first he wasted shaft after shaft. Cadenus, the girl’s tutor, protected her by “placing still some book betwixt” her and the mischievous god. Cupid saw he must include the tutor in his revenge. At a time when Cadenus--

“_Grown old in politics and wit,
Caressed by ministers of state,
Of half mankind the dread and hate_”--

was reading to her, on her demand, from his “poetic works,” Cupid shot a dart of such length that it pierced the volume and, carrying with it “some lines more moving than the rest,” reached Vanessa’s heart. Unlucky Vanessa.

“_Cadenus, common forms apart,
In every scene had kept his heart,
Had sighed and languished, vowed and writ,
For pastime, or to shew his wit,
But books and time and state affairs
Had spoiled his fashionable airs.
He now could praise, esteem, approve,
But understood not what was love.
His conduct might have made him styled
A father, and the nymph his child.
That 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._”

Not having seen the malevolent arrow, he was amazed at the sudden change in his pupil. She seemed to listen more than ever but she could not keep her mind on what he said. Modestly he conjectured that he had bored her with studies too grave for her “tender sex and age.” He should have known better. “Nature must be nature still.” If she would excuse him, he would take his leave. But Vanessa, it soon appeared, had learned what he had taught her.

“_Now, said the nymph, to let you see
My actions with your rules agree,
That I can vulgar forms despise,
And have no secrets to disguise ...
Your lessons found the weakest part,
Aimed at the head but reached the heart._”

Cadenus was overwhelmed with “shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise.” He could not doubt her words, but he thought he must pretend to, out of policy. The difference in their ages was too great. Love between them would be a scandal. He told her she must not seem so tragic when, as he knew, she was only joking.

Vanessa was too good a disputant to be put off. Reason, she insisted, was her guide in love. In loving him she was only loving the virtues and merits which she had observed in him and had made her own. Her love was as strong as self-love, for it was that. She had seen him full of “love, esteem, and awe” for dead geniuses. Surely he would have felt the same emotions if he had lived when they did. Then consider her case. She lived in the same age with a great genius. It was as much her duty as her instinct to adore him.

“_Cadenus answers every end,
The book, the author, and the friend.
The utmost her desires will reach
Is but to learn what he can teach.
His converse is a system fit
Alone to fill up all her wit,
While every passion of her mind
In him is centred and confined._”

In that flood of reasons Cadenus wavered. They were his own reasons, thrown back at him with his skill. He could not think them bad reasons. He was proud of his pupil for her eloquence. His pride, called up by her, stayed to caress him. If he had been preferred to all the “colonels, lords, and beaux” by “so bright a nymph” whom he had never thought of courting, he must have the qualities which she saw in him.

“_’Tis an old maxim in the schools
That flattery’s the food of fools,
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit._”

Cadenus could not withstand her tribute. Love, of course, was out of the question.

“_Love why do we one passion call
When ’tis a compound of them all?
Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet,
In all their equipages meet,
Where pleasure mixed with pains appear,
Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear,
Wherein his dignity and age
Forbid Cadenus to engage._”

But he could offer friendship, “a constant, rational delight,” which was rooted in virtue and so could last, as shifting love could not. “Gratitude, respect, esteem”: those she could have to make up for his want of passion. He talked high about friendship.

Vanessa brought him down. If he was to give her “devotion, duty, and respect,” their rôles would be changed. She would, however, take him at his word. He could be pupil and she be tutor, though she could see already that he would have a hard time with the science she had in mind for him. Any fool knew more than Cadenus about love.

The actual Vanessa, reading or listening, must have nodded, not with sleep. Did she stamp when the poem broke off?

“_But what success Vanessa met
Is to the world a secret yet.
Whether the nymph to please her swain
Talks in a high romantic strain,
Or whether he at last descends
To act with less seraphic ends,
Or, to compound the business, whether
They temper love and books together,
Must never to mankind be told,
Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold._”

Did the reader or the listener follow the last lines of the fable, in which, with another flourish of contemporary grace, Venus decided against the shepherds, said her experiment had failed, left the world in the hands of her son, “harnessed her doves, and flew to heaven”?

The tragedy of Vanessa was that Swift saw their drama as a comedy. Experience had fortified him against this scene. With Stella--

“_When men began to call me fair
You interposed your timely care_”--

Swift had already played Cadenus. If his temper had ever inclined him to love, or if his years had left him more audacity, or if he had been less absorbed in the great campaign of his pride, he might have responded to Vanessa--or if, of course, he had felt for her that kind of passion which makes the sun, or the moon, of a fresh love seem to shine on an earth just created. He met none of these conditions. He had an impulse to regulate her mind, but not to possess her person. He even believed that the desire he had was more important than the one he lacked. Cold towards Vanessa as flesh and blood, he was warm only towards the idea of being loved by her.

It was his pride which glowed. If, at the declaration, he had either loved or hated Vanessa he would have known what to do. He would have taken her or he would have gone from her, in the storm of any consequences. As it was, he let his pride seduce him as she could not. Its device was simple. It argued with him, as no doubt Vanessa did, that her fiery need of him obliged him to be kind. He hesitated. She was quick to snatch at her advantage. Give her the present, and she would not worry about the future. Give her what he could give, and she would not ask for more. These were promises which no shrewd man would have trusted. He would have seen through them to what lay behind: the hope that if he could be held he could be won: the assurance that any kindness he might show would be more than kindness, would be the selfishness which she longed to find in him. Swift was not shrewd. Moved if not convinced, he agreed to do what he could to please her, not realizing how much it was to indulge himself.

Then, almost as if to clear himself of a last annoying suspicion, he told the story of Cadenus and Vanessa in the bold but humorous light in which he saw it. Such lucidity as his would have overpowered a stronger woman than Vanessa. Whether his version was at all points accurate or not, she had to fall into the place which his comedy had assigned her.

But she could struggle. The rest of her life was largely taken up by her efforts to get out of the poem and nearer to the poet. Swift, having made the blunder of undertaking to meet love with kindness, could never undo it. Vanessa pursued him like the ghost of his blunder. In August 1714, when he had sullenly retired to Berkshire, she surprised him with a visit. “You should not have come by Wantage for a thousand pound. You used to brag you were very discreet. Where is it gone?” As soon as he had settled in Ireland, Vanessa followed. Her mother, having died, had left the daughters something of a fortune, including a handsome house at Celbridge eleven miles out of Dublin. From her house in the country or from occasional lodgings in town Vanessa implored him.

“Once I had a friend that would see me sometimes, and either commend what I did or advise me what to do, which banished all my uneasiness. But now, when my misfortunes are increased by being in a disagreeable place, amongst strange, prying, deceitful people, whose company is so far from an amusement that it is a very great punishment, you fly me, and give me no reason but that we are amongst fools and must submit. I am very well satisfied that we are amongst such, but know no reason for having my happiness sacrificed to their caprice. You once had a maxim, which was to act what was right and not mind what the world said. I wish you would keep to it now. Pray what can be wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? I can’t imagine. You can’t but know that your frowns make my life insupportable. You have taught me to distinguish and then you leave me miserable.”

Swift answered only that he had “ever feared the tattle of this nasty town, and told you so.” He begged her to be easy if he saw her still less often. “These are accidents in life that are necessary and must be submitted to.”

Vanessa was not so frantic that she could mistake disinclination for discretion. “You bid me be easy, and you’d see me as often as you could. You had better said as often as you could get the better of your inclinations so much, or as often as you remembered that there was such a one in the world. If you continue to treat me as you do you will not be made uneasy by me long. ’Tis impossible to describe what I have suffered since I saw you last. I am sure I could have bore the rack better than those killing, killing words of yours. Sometimes I have resolved to die without seeing you more; but those resolves, to your misfortune, did not last long.... The reason I write to you is because I cannot tell it you, should I see you. For when I begin to complain, then you are angry, and there is something in your look so awful that it strikes me dumb.... I say as little as ever I can. Did you but know what I thought I am sure it would move you. Forgive me, and believe I cannot help telling you this and live.”

There are ways to get rid of importunate Vanessas, but they are ways unknown to men who can try to be kind to women desperately in love with them. Swift, with his variations of temper, was the worst man in the world for this Vanessa. In one letter he could write: “A fig for your letters and messages”; and in another: “I cannot see you, I fear, today, having affairs of my place to do; but pray think it not want of friendship or tenderness, which I will always continue to the utmost.” Vanessa, prying into every sentence to see what might be hidden in it, turning every word over and over with a lover’s feverish research, could arrive at the security neither of hope nor of despair.

The affair dragged on, irresistible passion matched with immovable affection. Swift was Dean of St. Patrick’s, known to be the friend, and by some gossips thought to be the husband, of Stella, who, though she did not live at the deanery, was the centre of such life as it had. He refused to give the world the least excuse for regarding Vanessa as his mistress. He smothered her with discretion, hating it yet unable to take a final stand at one extremity or another. When he had snubbed her long enough to put an end to any ordinary suit, he would turn kind, would insist upon his esteem and admiration, and so would once more rouse her. He could or would not learn that her love and his kindness were oil and water.

During the half-dozen dark years after he left the Court for Ireland he perversely relished the secret drama, whatever form it took, and let himself be drawn into various cautious meetings with Vanessa. When, towards the end of that eclipse, he began to be more thoroughly himself, he became less cautious. His whole nature, as if by some rejuvenation, expanded. He took up the cause of Ireland against the Whigs. He wrote verses, tender, intimate, teasing, to Stella. As if he thought the conflict between him and Vanessa was settled, he tried to get back to the old footing.

Instantly her desire flared up. “I here tell you,” she wrote to him, “that I have determined to try all manner of human arts to reclaim you.” He did what he could to laugh off her seriousness, even to praising the art with which she wrote. Nothing would now quiet her. His least kindness intoxicated her. When he told her to use assumed names in her letters, which he was afraid might be opened, and dashes for “everything that may be said to Cad---- at beginning or conclusion,” she was suddenly in raptures over sharing secrets with him. “---- ---- ---- ---- Cad----, you are good beyond expression, and I will never quarrel again if I can help it.” Swift did not take warning.

“What would you give,” he asked her in August 1720, “to have the history of Cad---- and ---- exactly written, through all its steps, from the beginning to this time? I believe it would do well in verse, and be as long as the other. I hope it will be done. It ought to be an exact chronicle of twelve years, from the time of spilling the coffee to drinking of coffee, from Dunstable to Dublin, with every single passage since. There would be the chapter of the blister; the chapter of Madam going to Kensington; the chapter of the Colonel’s going to France; the chapter of the wedding, with the adventure of the lost key; of the strain; of the joyful return; two hundred chapters of madness; the chapter of long walks; the Berkshire surprise; fifty chapters of little times; the chapter of Chelsea; the chapter of swallow and cluster; a hundred whole books of myself and so low; the chapter of hide and whisper; the chapter of Who made it so? My sister’s money.”

Vanessa, answering that “it would be too much once to hope for such a history,” asked him “did those circumstances crowd on you, or did you recollect them to make me happy?” But, though she might suspect that he had meant to please her, she could not help exulting that he had remembered. She was not sure friendship had such a memory. She knew love had.

Swift had suggested that he might, for the first time, visit her at Celbridge. “Is it possible you will come and see me? I beg for God sake you will.” He did visit her. Back in Dublin he advised her to take more exercise, be cheerful, “read pleasant things that will make you laugh, and not sit moping with your elbows on your knees on a little stool by the fire.”

Vanessa was out of hand. “I ... here declare that ’tis not in the power of art, time, or accident to lessen the unexpressible passion which I have for -- -- --. Put my passion under the utmost restraint, send me as distant from you as the earth will allow, yet you cannot banish those charming ideas which will ever stick by me whilst I have the use of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul, for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it.... For heaven’s sake tell me what has caused this prodigious change in you which I have found of late. If you have the least remains of pity for me left, tell me tenderly. No, don’t tell it so that it may cause my present death; and don’t suffer me to lead a life like a languishing death, which is the only life I can lead if you have lost any of your tenderness for me.”

Swift did not reply. The death of Vanessa’s sister revived the correspondence, which went on with the same disparity. “The worst thing in you and me,” he wrote, “is that we are too hard to please, and whether we have not made ourselves is the question.... We differ prodigiously in one point: I fly from the spleen to the world’s end, you run out of your way to meet it.” He urged her--Swift of all men--to accept what came and be pleased with it. She did her best to be the kind of philosopher he specified, but “I find the more I think the more unhappy I am.”

In his last surviving letter to her he reminded her of the pleasant episodes “of Windsor, Cleveland Row, Ryder Street, St. James’s, Kensington, the Sluttery, the Colonel in France.... Cad thinks often of these, especially on horseback, as I am assured. What a foolish thing is time, and how foolish is man who would be as angry if time stopped as if it passed.” This was in August 1722. Vanessa died in June 1723.

The end of the story is all gossip. It says that Vanessa, unable to endure her jealousy, wrote to Swift, or to Stella, asking if it were true that Stella was Swift’s wife. It says in one account that Stella answered that she was, in another that she sent the letter to Swift to answer. It says that Swift took the letter from Vanessa to Stella, or to him, and with it rode savagely to Celbridge, entered the room where Vanessa was, threw down the letter, gave Vanessa a look which for the last time struck her dumb and, without one of his “killing, killing words,” left the house. It says that Vanessa thereupon changed her will, leaving her fortune to strangers, not to Swift, and died.

All gossip, any of it true, or none. Vanessa did leave her fortune to strangers and did not mention Swift among the friends to whom she gave small legacies to buy mourning rings. Something had parted Cadenus and Vanessa before she died. The parting was natural, but tragically late. She had loved a man whose thoughts, she said, “no human creature is capable of guessing at, because never any one living thought like you.” She had spent her life trying to win him, and he had let her spend it. Dying, she planned what revenge was left to her, the publication of his poem about Cadenus and Vanessa and of the letters between them.

When the poem, though not the letters, appeared in 1726 to the comfort of his enemies, Swift kept silence. It had been, he told a friend, a “cavalier business,” “a private humoursome thing which by an accident inevitable and the baseness of particular malice” had been made public. “I never saw it since I writ it.” He refused to “use shifts or arts” to justify himself, “let people think of me as they please.... I have borne a great deal more.” He had gone through what was comedy for him and tragedy for Vanessa. Others must make up their own minds, if they had them, about who was to blame, if there must be blame, when a universal Héloïse encountered a special Abélard.

3

With whatever remorse, with whatever relief, with whatever concern for scandal, Swift the day after Vanessa’s death left Dublin for the south of Ireland. Stella and Dingley were to spend the summer in the country at a friend’s house. About Vanessa, so far as any record shows, Swift was silent, except to refer in a letter to her “incontinence in keeping secrets.” And Stella was silent, except to remark, when she heard her rival praised, that the Dean could write finely about a broomstick. If there was between Swift and Stella such silence about Vanessa as they kept towards the world it was a silence beyond conjecture. The facts are drama enough. Stella went noiselessly in one direction. Swift went restlessly in another.

By the end of June he had made his way past Cork and had written a Latin poem on the rocks at Carbery where the ocean tore at the cliffs. By the beginning of August he had come up the west to Galway, still a hundred miles from home and “half weary of the four hundred I have rid.” Late in September he was back in Dublin. Stella returned to town. Swift greeted her with his old raillery. She had been spoiled, he said, by the “generous wines and costly cheer” of Wood Park, and tried to ape them on her income.

“_Thus for a week the farce went on;
When, all her country savings gone,
She fell into her former scene,
Small beer, a herring, and the Dean._”

_Painted probably after Vanessa’s death_]

It happened that during his absence from Dublin both Pope and Bolingbroke, and a little later Arbuthnot, took up the correspondence which they, and Swift more than they, had recently neglected. Fresh memories of England stirred in him. He exchanged affectionate letters with the Duchess of Ormond and Lady Masham. He wrote to Oxford demanding the bribe of a letter and a picture, “for who else knows how to deliver you down to posterity?” Bolingbroke had written: “I have vowed to read no history of our own country till that body of it which you promise to finish appears.” Swift thought often of making himself the real historiographer of those buried, unforgotten years, in spite of the dullard who had the title. But he was not yet ready for history. He was still alive to the events passing under his bitter eyes.

Swift hated Ireland because it was his place of banishment: “the whole kingdom a bare face of nature, without houses or plantations; filthy cabins, miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape; one insolent, ignorant, oppressive squire to be found in twenty miles riding; a parish church to be found only in a summer day’s journey, in comparison with which an English farmer’s barn is a cathedral; a bog of fifteen miles round; every meadow a slough, and every hill a mixture of rock, heath, and marsh; and every male and female, from the farmer inclusive to the day-labourer, infallibly a thief and consequently a beggar, which in this island are terms convertible.” “The old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins, and no new ones in their stead.” “The wretched merchants, instead of being dealers, are dwindled to pedlars and cheats.” As to trade, “nothing worth mentioning except the linen of the north, a trade casual, corrupted, and at mercy, and some butter from Cork.” The ports and harbours were of no more use “than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon.” Travellers never came to Ireland, since they might expect to find there nothing but misery and desolation. Whoever could leave the kingdom left at the first chance and stayed away till the last excuse. Dublin was a “beggarly city,” one-seventh of its houses falling in ruins, its populace hungry, idle, dissolute, dirty, and noisy. Though it was the capital of an ancient kingdom, the government was wholly in the hands of Englishmen who, blind to every interest but their own, lived there as little as they could manage.

No theoretical doctrine of liberty moved Swift to take up the Irish cause. “I do profess without affectation,” he explained to Pope, “that your kind opinion of me as a patriot, since you call it so, is what I do not deserve; because what I do is owing to perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness about me, among which I am forced to live.”

On the Catholic majority, those “savage old Irish,” he spent little sympathy. They might be above the vermin of the island but they were below the voters. He had no patience with the Dissenters. They were outside the Church and to that extent outside his Ireland. Ireland for him was the English settled there, the noblemen, the landlords, the clergy, the lawyers, the merchants. Their ancestors had come to rule the conquered province. They themselves ought now to rule it. Instead, they were called Irish, which they were not, and in turn were ruled by the newest English, a changing garrison of place-men. Men born in Ireland could not hope for posts at home. They had either to rot on their estates or to go abroad while their tenants were racked to support them in a dingy splendour. The Irish Parliament had no power. The laws, all made in England, condemned Ireland to poverty. Cattle could not be shipped to England, woollen goods could not be shipped anywhere. Without a free hand in agriculture, manufacture, or trade, Ireland from being so long bound was numb or sodden.

Mortified by finding himself in exile among slaves, Swift first despised them and then hated their tyrants. The tyrants were the Whigs who had driven him out of power. He could not become a slave. He could not endure a tyrant. Everything in his nature urged him to rouse the slaves and resist the tyrants. But he had the advantage, when he turned his fury loose, of a long experience in hating the party to which his enemies belonged.

Where his whole cause was so good Swift did not need to be fastidious about his particular occasion for attack. William Wood, an English ironmonger, in 1722 obtained a patent from the King to coin halfpence and farthings for Ireland for fourteen years. The Irish were not agreed that they needed new copper coins, certainly not to the amount of a hundred thousand pounds. The Irish were not consulted, nor even the Lord Lieutenant. Higher interests were involved. The patent had really been granted to the Duchess of Kendal, the King’s mistress, who sold it to Wood for ten thousand pounds. Walpole, Lord Treasurer, did not object. The Duchess had been loyal. The King was grateful. Through the method of the patent she could be rewarded, not by the King directly but indirectly by his Irish subjects, who already, if they had known it, contributed three thousand annually in pensions to the loyal lady. Since there was some risk, Wood deserved a profit for his trouble. The necessary copper would cost him sixty thousand pounds. When he had satisfied the Duchess he would still have thirty thousand, of which perhaps one-fifth would pay for the coinage and about one-seventh go to fees required by the patent. As jobs went in the government of Ireland under Walpole, the profit was not unheard of.

But the failure to consult the Irish had angered them. Their Parliament protested to the Treasury. Lord Carteret, a friend of Swift and now Secretary of State, was at odds with Walpole. Walpole, persisting, got Carteret appointed Lord Lieutenant early in 1724, to get rid of him in London. By the time he reached Dublin the whole country was in a passion.

The passion was led and guided by Swift. Walpole’s scheme, shabby, cynical, insulting, brought the satirist with a roar out of his long silence. He was as crafty as he was furious. Pretending to be a small tradesman named Drapier, he addressed, between April and November 1724, a series of letters to the shopkeepers, tradesmen, farmers, and common people, to his printer, to the nobility and gentry, to the whole people of Ireland. He was as furious as he was crafty. Wood was a “single, diminutive, insignificant mechanic.” He and his agents, trying to force upon the Irish the coins which the patent did not oblige them to accept, were “enemies to God and this kingdom.” “I will shoot Mr. Wood and his deputies through the head, like highwaymen or housebreakers, if they dare to force one farthing of their coin upon me in the payment of an hundred pounds. It is no loss of honour to submit to the lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat.” “I entreat you, my dear countrymen, not to be under the least concern upon these and the like rumours, which are no more than the last howls of a dog dissected alive, as I hope he hath sufficiently been.”

Swift did not dare to accuse the King, and he only hinted at the honorarium to the Duchess. It was the ministers who had planned this contemptuous oppression. It was Wood who was to his own advantage carrying it out at the expense of Ireland. If Wood’s copper became current every Irishman who received a coin, even in the smallest transaction, would get less than he gave, and every Irishman who paid out a coin would give less than he got. While Wood prospered “we should live together as merry and sociable as beggars, only with this one abatement, that we should have neither meat to feed nor manufactures to clothe us, unless we could be content to prance about in coats of mail or eat brass as ostriches do iron.”

Swift must have known that his arguments were false, must have known that the intrinsic value of such small coins did not matter and that they would be as good as any if they were used. He who gave and he who got could not be equally losers. But Swift did not boggle over economic niceties. Here was a principle. To accept the coins would be to surrender to tyrants and become slaves. As soon as he had stirred the public to a fear of losing money and had assured them they could lawfully refuse the new halfpence and farthings, he moved towards a general position.

“Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England? How have they forfeited their freedom? Is not their Parliament as fair a representative of the people as that of England?... Are they not subjects of the same king? Does not the same sun shine upon them? And have they not the same God for their protector? Am I a freeman in England, and do I become a slave in six hours by crossing the channel?” “I have looked over all the English and Irish statutes without finding any law that makes Ireland depend upon England any more than England does upon Ireland. We have indeed obliged ourselves to have the same king with them, and consequently they are obliged to have the same king with us. For the law was made by our own ancestors, and our ancestors then were not such fools (whatever they were in the preceding reign) to bring themselves under I know not what dependence which is now talked of without any ground of law, reason, or common sense.” “All government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.” “The remedy is wholly in your own hands.... By 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.”

No voice like this had ever been raised by an Englishman in Ireland. All the Irish heard it. Never again were its echoes to be long silent in that country. “Money,” Swift said, “the great divider of the world, hath by a strange revolution been the great uniter of a most divided people.”

On the day Carteret landed in October the fourth and most thorough-going of the Drapier letters was issued. Hawkers crying it through the streets met the Lord Lieutenant when he arrived in Dublin. Much as Carteret admired “that genius which has outshone most of this age and when you will display it again can convince us that its lustre and strength are still the same,” he could not, in his station, overlook the Drapier. He offered a reward of three hundred pounds for information leading to the discovery of the author within six months. All Dublin, including the Lord Lieutenant, knew that Swift had written the dangerous letters. But there was no legal proof, even if there was anywhere an informer. During the six months Swift dined at the Castle and entertained Lady Carteret at a party in his garden. When Carteret heard that Swift had “some thoughts of declaring himself” he advised against it. Their friendship, however, was not tested to the utmost. Walpole, seeing that the case was hopeless in such a tumult, gave it up. The patent was withdrawn in 1725 as an instance of royal favour and condescension. Wood was compensated with a pension of three thousand pounds a year for twelve years. Carteret later summed up his administration: “The people ask me how I governed Ireland. I say that I pleased Dr. Swift.”

Swift, writing to Oxford’s son, apologized for his mention of the Irish brawl. “This is just of as much consequence to your Lordship as the news of a skirmish between two petty states in Greece was to Alexander while he was conquering Persia, but even a knot of beggars are of importance among themselves.” Yet Swift was too much a soldier not to enjoy a battle after a stupid peace. Though there were others in the field, he unmistakably commanded. The Grand Jury and the Liberty of St. Patrick’s, that part of Dublin over which he as Dean had civil jurisdiction, formally resolved against the hated coins, as did the butchers, the brewers, the newsboys or “flying stationers,” and the Black Guard. There were broadsheets on every corner, songs in every tavern, some of them written by Swift, all of them in support of the Drapier. While the furor lasted no jury would find anything seditious in any pamphlet or lampoon if Wood were mentioned. After the victory medals were struck in the Drapier’s honour, shops and taverns were named for him, women carried handkerchiefs with his picture woven on them. Something legendary began to enlarge Swift’s fame.

Irishmen who could barely spell out his arguments and knew only by hearsay that he was a man of learning who had been great in London were roused to veneration. They had thought of him as one of their rulers sent from England, yet he had joined their cause against the English. He was not a tyrant but a patriot. Standing superbly against the dread, incalculable ministers, he had defended men and women to whom halfpence and farthings were important. They stood uncovered when he passed in the streets.

They could not know that he had acted, at least at first, out of hate for their slavery and folly and baseness, out of a fierce unwillingness to be slavish and foolish and base along with them. He who had had a hand in ruling an empire would not submit to being counted among the docile subjects of the province to which he had been banished. Private resentment had stirred him to public rebellion. He could not help it if what he had done for hate was the same as if he had done it for love. Such an outcome was only another proof that the world was wrong. Like Gulliver in Lilliput, wading home with the Blefuscudian fleet at the end of a packthread, Swift decently exulted. But he would not let himself forget that the adventure had taken place among the pigmies. Whatever he accomplished was a small affair. Great affairs were always maddeningly beyond him, or, he remembered his days with Oxford, behind him.

VI

TRAVELLER

1

Swift never set a foot outside Ireland or England except when he hurried across Wales on his restless journeys between London, the bright centre of his world, and Dublin, the dreary margin. Though he constantly diverted himself with books of travel, he found in them nothing which convinced him that he would anywhere meet more wisdom or less folly than he everywhere observed. The Scotch were a “poor, fierce northern people,” the Dutch grasping and shifty, the French frivolous and Catholic. If he had some liking for the Swedes it was because he was fascinated by Charles XII, that sudden, terrific king who had burst upon Europe from his cold peninsula and stirred philosophers to admiration by such a career as Swift would have chosen for himself. But dividing mankind into nations was little more than drawing lines on a map. The whole earth was inhabited by the human race.

Once Swift had hopes of going to Austria, once to Sweden, once to France. Each time prevented, he hardly grumbled. If he thought of other countries it was for their better climate, which might, he said, have kept his wit and humour lively, as Ireland’s had not. “I imagine,” he wrote in 1724, “France would be proper for me now, and Italy ten years hence.” But he could not rouse himself from thinking about the world to travel far to look at it. There was his giddiness, which might at any time make him reel and fall. There was his deafness, which forced him to live “among those whom I can govern and make them comply with my infirmities.” There was the prospect of blindness. “My eyes will not suffer me to read small prints, nor anything by candlelight, and if I grow blind, as well as deaf, I must needs become very grave and wise and insignificant.” He was caged in Ireland, with nothing to do but pace his cage.

In Ireland, however, Swift was not confined to the cramped cottage at Laracor or to the hollow deanery in Dublin. During the twelve unbroken years of his banishment after 1714 he often visited other houses. His hosts could never have enough of him. Near Laracor were the houses of Peter Ludlow, George Rochfort, and Knightley Chetwoode. Near Dublin were the houses of the Grattans and Patrick Delaney and Charles Ford, with whom Stella spent a summer. Forty miles from Dublin was Thomas Sheridan’s ramshackle house which Swift could sometimes have to himself. He is said to have visited an ancestor of the Earls of Llandaff in Tipperary. He visited the Ashes--St. George Ashe had been Swift’s college tutor--at Clogher in Tyrone, Robert Cope in Armagh, the Bishop of Dromore in Down. And during the summers of 1722 and 1723, when banishment had become almost unendurable, Swift made long, lonely journeys to the north and to the south. “I have shifted scenes,” he told Vanessa in July 1722, “oftener than I ever did in my life, and I believe I have lain in thirty beds since I left the town.”

Six hundred miles in the north, five hundred in the south the year following, all solitary and speculative. But these were not merely random travels in search of change and health. Though Swift was still incorrigibly Swift, he was also Gulliver, now with a purpose studying the despicable ways of men.