Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne

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 joyIn 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

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?

But Swift, unfortunately for himself and her, loved Ireland as little when he thus made himself her champion as he had done throughout his life. At all times his longing eyes were turned toward the country in which life was, and power, and friends, and fame. Though he was aware he was growing old and ought to be “done with this world,” he yet cries aloud his desire “to get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage like a poisoned rat in a hole,”—a terrific image, and one of those phrases that burn and glow with a pale light of despair. But he never got into that better world he longed for. The slow years crept over him, and he lived on, making existence tolerable by such expedients as he could, a wonderful proof how the body will resist all the frettings of the soul, yet growing more angry, more desperate, more subject to the bitter passions which had broken forth even in his best days, as he grew older and had fewer reasons for restraining himself. At last the great dean, the greatest genius of his age, the man of war and battle, of quip and jest, he who had thirsted to be doing through all his life, fell into imbecility and stupor, with occasional wild awakenings into consciousness which were still more terrible. He died, denuded of all things, in 1745, having lived till seventy-eight in spite of himself.

Ubi saeva indignatioCor ulterius lacerare nequit

is written on his tomb. No more can fiery wrath and indignation reach him where he lies by Stella’s side in the aisle over against his chamber window. The touch of her quiet dust must have soothed, one would think, the last fever that lingered still in him even after death had done its worst.

Chapter IV

THE AUTHOR OF “ROBINSON CRUSOE”

THE age of Queen Anne was one which abounded in paradoxes, and loved them. It was an age when England was full of patriotic policy, yet every statesman was a traitor; when tradition was dear, yet revolution practicable; when speech was gross and manners unrefined, yet the laws of literary composition rigid, and correctness the test of poetry. It was full of high ecclesiasticism and strict Puritanism, sometimes united in one person. In it ignorance was most profound, yet learning most considered and prominent. An age when Parson Trulliber was not an unfit representative of the rural clergy, yet the public could be interested in such a recondite pleasantry as the “Battle of the Books,” seems the strangest self-contradiction; yet so it was in this paradoxical age. No man lived who was a more complete paradox than Defoe. His fame is world-wide, yet all that is known of him is one or two of his least productions, and his busy life is ignored in the permanent place in literary history which he has secured. His characteristics, as apart from his conduct, are all those of an honest man, but when that most important part of him is taken into the question it is difficult to pronounce him anything but a knave. His distinguishing literary quality is a minute truthfulness to fact which makes it almost impossible not to take what he says for gospel. But his constant inspiration is fiction, not to say, in some circumstances, falsehood. He spent his life in the highest endeavors that a man can engage in: in the work of persuading and influencing his country, chiefly for her good; and he is remembered by a boy’s book, which is indeed the first of boy’s books, yet not much more. Through these contradictions we must push our way before we can reach to any clear idea of Defoe, the London tradesman who by times composed almost all the newspapers in London, wrote all the pamphlets, had his finger in every pie, and a share in all that was done, yet brought nothing out of it but a damaged reputation and an unhonored end.