Маргарет Олифант
Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne
a loyal and devoted retainer both now and afterward. When Sir William became involved in a literary quarrel with the great scholar Bentley, young Swift rushed into the field with a jeu d’esprit which has outlived all other records of the controversy. The “Battle of the Books” could hardly have been written in aid of a hard or contemptuous master. Years after, when he had a house of his own and had entered upon his independent career, he turned his little rectory garden into a humble imitation of the Dutch paradise which Temple had made to bloom in the wilds of Surrey, with a canal and a willow walk like those which were so dear to King William and his courtiers. And when Temple died, it was to Swift, and not to any of his nephews, that Sir William committed the charge of his papers and literary remains. This does not look like a hard bondage on one side, or any tyrannical sway on the other, notwithstanding a few often-quoted phrases which are taken as implying complaint. “Don’t you remember,” Swift asks long after, “how I used to be in pain when Sir William Temple would look cold and out of temper for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons?” But these words need not represent anything more than that sensitiveness to the aspect of the person on whom his prospects and comfort depend which is inevitable to every individual in a similar position, however considerate and friendly the patron may be. The hard-headed and unbending Scotch philosopher, James Mill, was just as sensitive to the looks of his kind friend and helper in the early struggles of life, Jeremy Bentham, in whose sunny countenance Mill discovered unspoken offense with an ingenuity worthy of a self-tormenting woman. It was natural indeed that Swift, a high-spirited young man, should fret and struggle as the years went on and nothing happened to enlarge his horizon beyond the trees of Moor Park. He was sent to King William, as has been said, when Temple was unable to wait upon his Majesty, to explain to him the expediency of certain parliamentary measures, and this was no doubt intended by his patron as a means of bringing him under the king’s notice. William would seem to have taken a kind of vague interest in the secretary, which he expressed in an odd way by offering him a captain’s commission in a cavalry regiment,—a proposal which did not tempt Swift,—and by teaching him how to cut asparagus “in the Dutch way,” and to eat up all the stalks, as the dean afterward, in humorous revenge, made an unlucky visitor of his own do. But William, notwithstanding these whimsical evidences of favor, neither listened to the young secretary’s argument nor gave him a prebend as had been hoped.
Four years, however, is a long time for an ambitious young man to spend in dependence, watching one hope die out after another; and Swift’s impatience began to be irrestrainable and to trouble the peace of his patron’s learned leisure. Although destined from the first to the church, and for some time waiting in tremulous expectation of ecclesiastical preferment, Swift had not yet taken orders. The explanation he gives of how and why he finally determined on doing so is characteristic. His dissatisfaction and restlessness, probably his complaints, moved Sir William,—though evidently deeply offended that his secretary should wish to leave him,—to offer him an employ of about £120 a year in the Rolls Office in Ireland, of which Temple held the sinecure office of master. “Whereupon [says Swift’s own narrative] Mr. Swift told him that since he had now an opportunity of living without being driven into the Church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to Ireland and take Holy Orders.” This arbitrary decision to balk his patron’s tardy bounty, and take his own way in spite of him, was probably as much owing to a characteristic blaze of temper as to the somewhat fantastic disinterestedness here put forward, though Swift was never a man greedy of money or disposed to sacrifice his pride to the acquisition of gain, notwithstanding certain habits of miserliness afterward developed in his character. Sir William was “extremely angry”—hurt, no doubt, as many a patron has been, by the ingratitude of the dependent who would not trust everything to him, but claimed some free will in the disposition of his own life. Had they been uncle and nephew, or even father and son, the same thing might easily have happened. Swift set out for Dublin full of indignation and excitement, “everybody judging I did best to leave him,”—but alas! in this, as in so many cases, pride was doomed to speedy downfall.
On reaching Dublin, and taking the necessary steps for his ordination, Swift found that it was needful for him to have a recommendation and certificate from the patron in whose house so many years of his life had been spent. No doubt it must have been a somewhat bitter necessity to bow his head before the protector whom he had left in anger and ask for this. Macaulay describes him as addressing his patron in the language “of a lacquey, or even of a beggar,” but we doubt greatly if apart from prejudice or the tingle of these unforgettable words, any impartial reader would form such an impression. “The particulars expected of me,” Swift writes, “are what relates to morals and learning and the reasons of quitting your honour’s family, that is whether the last was occasioned by any ill action.” “Your honour” has a somewhat servile tone in our days, but in Swift’s the formality was natural. Lady Giffard, Temple’s sister-in-law, in the further quarrels which followed Sir William’s death, spoke of this as a penitential letter, and perhaps it was not wonderful that she should look on the whole matter with an unfavorable eye. No doubt the ladies of the house thought young Swift an unnatural monster for wishing to go away and thinking himself able to set up for himself without their condescending notice and the godlike philosopher’s society and instruction, and were pleased to find his pride so quickly brought down. Sir William, however, it would seem, behaved as a philosopher and a gentleman should, and gave the required recommendation with magnanimity and kindness. Thus the young man had his way.
Swift got a small benefice in the north of Ireland, the little country parish of Kilroot, in which doubtless he expected that the sense of independence would make up to him for other deprivations. It was near Belfast, among those hard-headed Scotch colonists whom he could never endure; and probably this had something to do with the speedy revulsion of his mind. He remained there only a year; and it is perhaps the best proof we could have of his sense of isolation and banishment that this was the only time in his life in which he thought of marriage. There is in existence a fervent and impassioned letter addressed to the object of his affections, a Miss Waring, whom, after the fashion of the time, he called Varina. He does not seem in this case to have had the usual good fortune that attended his relationships with women. Miss Waring did not respond with the same warmth; indeed, she was discouraging and coldly prudent. And he was still pleading for a favorable answer when there arrived a letter from Moor Park inviting his return—Sir William’s pride, too, having apparently broken down under the blank made by Swift’s departure. He made instant use of this invitation—which must have soothed his injured feelings and restored his self-satisfaction—to shake the resolution of the ungrateful Varina. “I am once more offered,” he says, “the advantage to have the same acquaintance with greatness which I formerly enjoyed, and with better prospects of interest”; and though he offers magnanimously “to forego it all for your sake,” yet it is evident that the proposal had set the blood stirring in his veins, and that the dependence from which he had broken loose with a kind of desperation, once more seemed to
him, unless Varina had been melted by the sacrifice he would have made for her, to be the most desirable thing in the world.
Macaulay, and after him Thackeray and many less distinguished writers, still persistently represent this part of Swift’s life as one of unmitigated hardship and suffering. The brilliant historian so much scorns the guidance of facts as to say that the humble student “made love to a pretty waiting-maid who was the chief ornament of the servant’s hall,” by way of explaining the strange yet tender story which has been more deeply discussed than any great national event, and which has made the name of Stella known to every reader.
Hester Johnson was a child of seven when young Swift, “the humble student,” went first to Moor Park. She was only fifteen when he returned, no longer as a sort of educated man of all work, but on the entreaty of the patron who had felt the want of his company so much as to forget all grievances. He was not now a humble student, Temple’s satellite and servant, but his friend and coadjutor, fully versed in all his secrets, and most likely already chosen as the guardian of his fame and the executor of his purposes and wishes; therefore it is not possible that Macaulay’s reckless picturesque description could apply to either time. Such an easy picture, however, has more effect upon the general imagination than the outcries of all the biographers, and the many researches made to show that Swift was not a sort of literary lackey, nor Stella an Abigail, but that he had learned to prize the advantages of his home there during his absence from it, and that during the latter part of his life at Moor Park at least his position was as good as that of a dependent can ever be.
Sir William Temple died, as Swift records affectionately, on the morning of January 27, 1699, “and with him all that was good and amiable among men.” He died, however, leaving the young man who had spent so many years of his life under his wing, scarcely better for that long subjection. Swift had a legacy of £100 for his trouble in editing his patron’s memoirs, and he got the profits of those memoirs, amounting, Mr. Forster calculates, to no less than £600—no inconsiderable present; but no one of the many appointments which were then open to the retainers of the great, and especially to a young man of letters, had come in Swift’s way. He himself, it is said, “still believed in the royal pledge for the first prebend that should fall vacant in Westminster or Canterbury,” but this was a hope which had accompanied him ever since he explained constitutional law to King William six years before, and could not be very lively after this long interval.
Thus Swift’s life came to a sudden and complete break. The great household, with its easy and uneasy jumble of patrons and dependents, fell asunder and ceased to be. The younger members of the family were jealous of the last bequest, which put the fame of their distinguished relative into the hands of a stranger, and did their best to set Swift down in his proper place, and to proclaim how much he was the creature of their uncle’s bounty. In the breaking up which followed, there were many curious partings and conjunctions. Why Hester Johnson, to whom Sir William had bequeathed a little independence, should have left her mother’s care and joined her fortunes to those of Mrs. Dingley instead, remains unexplained, unless indeed it was Mrs. Johnson’s second marriage which was the cause, or perhaps some vexation on the part of Lady Giffard—with whom the girl’s mother remained, notwithstanding her marriage—at the liberality of her brother to the child brought up in his house. Mrs. Johnson had other daughters, one of whom Swift saw, and describes favorably, years after. Perhaps Mrs. Dingley and the girl whom he had taught and petted from her childhood had taken Swift’s side in the Giffard-Temple difference, and so got on uneasy terms with the rest of the household, always faithful to my lady. At all events, at the breaking up Hester with her little fortune separated herself from the connection generally, and with her elder friend made an independent new beginning, as Swift also had to do. The fact seems of no particular importance, except that it afforded a reason for Swift’s interference in her affairs, and threw them into a combination which lasted all their lives.
Swift was thirty-one, too old to be beginning his career, yet young enough to turn with eager zest to the unknown, when this catastrophe occurred. Sir William Temple’s secretary and literary executor must have known, one would suppose, many people who could have helped him to promotion, but it would seem as if a kind of irresistible fate impelled him back to his native country, though he did not love it, and forced him to be an Irishman in spite of himself. The only post that came in his way was a chaplaincy, conjoined with a secretaryship, in the suite of the Earl of Berkeley, newly appointed one of the lords justices in Ireland, and just then entering upon his duties. Swift accepted the position in hopes that he should be continued as Lord Berkeley’s secretary, and possibly go with him afterward to more stirring scenes and a larger life, but this expectation was not carried out. Neither was his application—which seems at the moment a somewhat bold one—for the deanery of Derry successful, and all the preferment he succeeded in getting was another Irish living, with a better stipend and in a more favorable position than Kilroot: the parish of Laracor, within twenty miles of Dublin, which, conjoined with a prebend in St. Patrick’s and other small additions, brought him in £200 a year; a small promotion, indeed, yet not a bad income for the place and time. And he was naturally, as Lord Berkeley’s chaplain, in the midst of the finest company that Ireland could boast, one of a court more extended than Sir William Temple’s, yet of a similar description, and affording greater scope for his hitherto undeveloped social qualities. Satire more sportive than mere scorn, yet sometimes savage enough; an elephantine fun, which pleased the age; the puns and quibs in which the men emulated one another; the merry rhymes that pleased the ladies,—seem suddenly to have burst forth in him, throwing an unexpected gleam upon his new sphere.
Swift was always popular with women. He treated them roughly on many occasions, with an arrogance that grew with age, but evidently possessed that charm—a quality by itself and not dependent upon any laws of amiability—which attracts one sex to the other. Lady Berkeley, whom he describes as a woman of “the most easy conversation joined with the truest piety,” and her young daughters were charming and lively companions with whom the chaplain soon found himself at home. And notwithstanding his disappointment with respect to the preferment which Lord Berkeley might have procured for him and did not, it would seem that this period of hanging on at the little Irish court was amusing at least. The lively little picture of the inferior members of a great household which Swift made for the entertainment of the drawing-rooms on the occasion when Mrs. Frances Harris lost her purse, is one of the most vivid and amusing possible.
His stay in Ireland at this period lasted about two years, during which he paid repeated visits to his living at Laracor, and made trial of existence there also. The parsonage was in a ruinous condition; the church a miserable barn; the congregation numbered about twenty persons. Many are the tales of the new parson’s arrival there like a thunder-storm, frightening the humble curate and his wife with the arrogant roughness of manner which they, like many others, found afterward covered a great deal of genuine practical kindness. His mode of traveling, his sarcastic rhymes about the places at which he paused on the journey, the careless swing of imperious good and ill
humor in which he indulged, contemptuous of everybody’s opinion, have furnished many amusing incidents. One well-known anecdote, which describes him as finding his congregation to consist only of his clerk and beginning the service gravely with, “Dearly beloved Roger,” has found a permanent place among ecclesiastical pleasantries. In all probability it is true; but if not so, it is at least so ben trovato as to be as good as true. There were few claims upon the energies of such a man in such a sphere, and when Lord Berkeley was recalled to England his chaplain went with him. But neither did he find any promotion in London. Up to this time his only literary work had been that wonderful “Battle of the Books,” which had burst like a bombshell into the midst of the squabble of the literati, but which had only as yet been handed about in manuscript, and was therefore known to few. No doubt it was known to various wits and scholars that Sir William Temple’s late secretary and literary executor was a young man of no common promise; but statesmen in general, and the king in particular, sick and worn out with many preoccupations, had no leisure for the claims of the Irish parson. He hung about the Berkeley household, and gravely read out of the book of moral essays which the countess loved those Reflections on a Broomstick which her ladyship found so edifying, and launched upon the world an anonymous pamphlet or two, which he had the pleasure of hearing talked about and attributed to names greater than his own, but made no step toward the advancement for which he longed.
The interest of this visit to England was however as great and told for as much in his life as if it had brought him a bishopric. It determined that long connection and close intercourse in which Swift’s inner history is involved. After he had paid in vain his court to the king, and made various ineffectual attempts to recommend himself in high quarters, he went on a visit to Farnham, where Hester Johnson and Mrs. Dingley had settled after Sir William’s death. Swift found the two women quite undetermined what to do, in an uncomfortable lodging, harassed for money, and without any object in their lives. Most probably he was called to advise as to their future plans, where they should settle and how they were to live, both being entirely inexperienced in the art of independent existence. They had lived together for years, and knew everything about each other: Hester had grown up from childhood under Swift’s eye, his pupil, his favorite and playfellow. She had now, it is true, arrived at an age when other sentiments are supposed to come in. She must have been about twenty, while he was thirty-four. There was no reason in the world why they should not have married then and there, had they so wished. But there seems no appearance or thought of any such desire, and the question was what should the ladies do for the arrangement of their affairs and pleasant occupation of their lives. Farnham being untenable, where should they go? Why not to Ireland, where Hester’s property was—where they would be near their friend, who could help them into society and give them his own companionship as often as he happened to be there? Here is his own account of the decision:
“I prevailed with her and her dear friend and companion, the other lady,” he says, “to draw what money they had into Ireland, a great part of their fortunes being in annuities upon funds. Money was then ten per cent. in Ireland, besides the advantage of returning it, and all the necessaries of life at half the price. They complied with my advice, and soon after came over; but I happening to continue some time longer in England, they were much discouraged to live in Dublin, where they were wholly strangers. But this adventure looked so like a frolic, the censure held for some time as if there were a secret history in such a removal; which however soon blew off by her excellent conduct. She came over with her friend in the year 1700, and they both lived together until the day [of her death, 1728].”
This was then the time which decided that which is called the “sad and mysterious history” of Swift and Stella—a story so strangely told, so obstinately insisted upon as miserable, unnatural, and tragical, that the reader or writer of to-day has scarcely the power of forming an impartial judgment upon it. We have not a word from the woman’s side of the question, who is supposed to have passed a melancholy existence of unsatisfied longings and disappointed love by Swift’s side, the victim of his capricious affections, neglect, cruelty, and fondness. That she should have wished to marry him, that the love was impassioned on her side, and her whole life blighted and overcast by his fantastic repugnance to the common ties of humanity, is taken for granted by every historian. These writers differ as to Swift’s motives, as to the character of his feelings, and even as to the facts of the case; but no one has the slightest doubt of what the woman’s sentiments must have been. But, as a matter of fact, we have no evidence at all what Stella’s sentiments were. By so much written testimony as remains we are fully entitled to form such conclusions as we please on Swift’s side of the question; but there is actually no testimony at all upon Stella’s side. Appearances of blighted life or unhappiness there are none in anything we know of her. As the ladies appear reflected in that “Journal to Stella”—which is the dean’s only claim upon our affections, but a strong one—they seem to have lived’ a most cheerful, lively life. They had a number of friends, they had their little tea-parties, their circle of witty society, to which the letters of the absent were a continual amusement and delight. And it is the man, not the woman, who complains of not receiving letters; it is he, not she, who exhausts every playful wile, every tender art, to keep himself in vivid recollection. Is it perhaps a certain mixture of masculine vanity and compassion for the gentle feminine creature who never succeeded in getting the man she loved to marry her, and thus failed to attain the highest end of woman, which has moved every biographer of Swift, each man more compassionate than his predecessor, thus to exhaust himself in pity for Stella? Johnson, Scott, Macaulay, Thackeray, not to mention many lesser names, have all taken her injured innocence to heart. And nobody notes the curious fact that Stella herself never utters any complaint, nor indeed seems to feel the necessity of being unhappy at all, but takes her dean most cheerfully,—laughing, scolding, giving her opinion with all the delightful freedom of a relationship which was at once nature and choice, the familiar trust and tenderness of old use and wont with the charm of voluntary association. We see her only as reflected in his letters, in the references he makes to hers, and all his tender, sportive allusions to her habits and ways of thinking. This reflection and image is not in rigid lines of black and white, but an airy and radiant vision, the representation of anything in the world rather than a downcast and disappointed woman. It is not that either of a wife or a lover; it is more like the wilful, delightful image of a favorite child, a creature confident that everything she says or does will be received with admiration from the mere fact that it is she who says or does it, and who tyrannizes, scoffs, and proffers a thousand comments and criticisms with all the elastic brightness of unforced and unimpassioned affection. It is through this medium alone that Stella is ever visible. And he, too, laughs, teases, fondles, and advises with the same doting, delightful ease of affection. By what process this attractive conjunction should have furnished the idea of a victim in Stella, and in Swift of a tyrannous secret lover crushing her heart, it is difficult to understand. The external circumstances of their intimacy were, no doubt, very
unusual, and might have lent occasion to much evil speaking. But they do not seem to have done so, after the first moment at least. Nobody ventured to assail the good fame of Stella, and Swift took every means to make the perfect innocence of their friendship apparent. She cannot be made out to have suffered in the vulgar way, and it seems to us one of the most curious examples of an obstinately maintained theory to represent her as Swift’s victim in what is supposed to be a long martyrdom of the heart.
One can well imagine, however, when the two ladies arrived in Dublin, where their friend had no doubt represented to them his power to gain them access into the best society, and found that he did not come and that they were stranded in a strange place, knowing nobody, how some annoyance and disappointment, and perhaps anger, must have been in their thoughts, and that P. D. F. R., as he is called in the little language, faithless rogue! had his share of abuse. And no doubt it might be believed by good-natured friends that their object in coming was to secure the vicar of Laracor either for the young and lovely girl or the elder woman, who was scarcely older than Swift—if not indeed that some “secret history” more damaging still was at the bottom of the adventure. Insensibly, however, Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Dingley found a place and position for themselves. Swift was often away in the following years, spending about half his time in London, and when he was absent they took possession of his newly repaired and renovated house, or occupied his lodging in Dublin, and gathered friends about them, and went out to their card-parties, and played a little, and talked, and lived a pleasant life. When he returned, they removed to their own rooms. Thus there could be no doubt about the close association between them, which, when it was quite apparent that it meant nothing closer to come, no doubt made everybody wonder. But we have no contemporary evidence that Stella was an object of pity, and her aspect as we see it in all Swift says of her is exactly the reverse, and gives us the impression of a charming and easy-minded woman, a queen of society in her little circle, enjoying everything that came her way.
As Swift’s relations with Stella are the great interests of his life, the subject which occupies every new writer who so much as touches upon him, it is needless to make any excuse for entering into the question with an amount of detail which our limited space would otherwise scarcely justify. The mystery about it lends it an endless attraction, and as, whatever it was, it is the one great love of his life, and represents all the private satisfaction and comfort he got by means of his affections, it has a permanent interest which most readers will not find in the “Tale of a Tub,” or any other of the productions which made this period of his life remarkable. Swift was continually going and coming to London through these years. Though he had begun at once to make Laracor a sort of earthly paradise with a Dutch flavor, such as he had learnt from his early master, and though it was “very much for his own satisfaction” that he had invited Stella to come to Ireland, yet neither of these reasons was enough to keep him in the rural quiet among his willows, though he loved them. He hankered after society, after fame and power. He liked to meet with great men, to hear the news, to ride over weaker reasoners in society, to put forth his own vigorous views, and whip, with sharp satire, the men who displeased him. Tradition and habit had made him a Whig, but political names were of easy interchange in those days, and Swift’s objects were much more definite than his politics. From the moment of Queen Anne’s ascension, when she gratified the Church of England by the remission of certain dues hitherto paid to the crown, Swift’s energies were directed to obtaining a similar remission for the Irish Church, and this was the ostensible object of his repeated journeys to London. He had also a purpose still nearer to his heart, which was the advancement of Jonathan Swift to a post more fitted to his genius. For these great objects he haunted the anterooms of Halifax and Somers and Godolphin, and did what he could to show them what they were not wise enough to perceive, that he was himself an auxiliary well worth securing. The Whig lords played with, flattered, and neglected the brilliant but importunate envoy of the Irish Church, holding him upon tenterhooks of expectation, going so far as to make him believe that his cause for the church was won, and that his bishopric was certain, till disgust and disappointment overcame Swift’s patience. Nine years had passed in these vain negotiations. It was in 1701 that he paid that visit to Farnham which decided Stella’s fate, but his own was still hanging in the balance when, after almost yearly expeditions in the interval, he set out for London in the autumn of the year 1710 with a threat upon his lips. “I will apply to Mr. Harley, who formerly made some advances toward me, and, unless he be altered, will I believe think himself in the right to use me well.” The change was sudden, but it had little in it that could be called political apostasy. Every man was more or less for his own hand, and the balance of popular feeling fluctuated between war and peace: between pride and the glory of England on the one hand, and horror of the sacrifices and misery involved in the long-continued, never-ending campaigns of Marlborough on the other—almost as much as Queen Anne wavered between the influence of the imperious duchess and the obsequious Abigail. There was no shame to Swift at such a moment in the sudden revolution he made.
The man who felt himself of sufficient importance to make this threat seems to have possessed already, notwithstanding the neglect of the Whig lords, the rank of his intellect rather than of his external position, and this not entirely because of the anonymous productions which were more or less known to be his. The “Tale of a Tub,” written while he was still an inmate of Moor Park, had by this time been before the world six years. It was published along with the “Battle of the Books” in 1704, and caused great excitement and sensation among politicians, wits, and critics. But the careless contempt of fame which mingled in him with so fierce a hunger for it kept it long a matter of doubt whether the immense reputation of these works belonged to him or not; and it would appear that his own personality, the size and rude splendor of his individual character, had at least as much to do with his position as the doubtful glory of an anonymous publication. The vicar of Laracor was not sufficiently important to be chosen as the representative of the Irish Church—but Jonathan Swift was; and though the bishops schemed against him in his absence when he seemed to have failed, no one seems to have ventured to suggest that he was too humble a person to hold that representative post. The book which dazzled English society and set all the wits talking was by no means the kind of book to support ecclesiastical dignity. It was indeed by way of being a vindication of the superiority of the Anglican Church over Rome on the one hand, and the dissenters on the other; but the tremendous raid against false pretenses, hypocrisy, and falsehood which is its real scope, was executed with such a riot and madness of laughter, and unscrupulous derision of everything that came in the satirist’s way, as had scarcely been known in English speech before. The mockery was at once brilliant and careless, dashed about hither and thither in a sort of giant’s play, full of the coarsest metaphors, the finest wit, indignation, ridicule, fun, almost too wild and reckless to be called cynical, though penetrated with the profoundest cynicism and disbelief of any good. The power which still lives and asserts itself in those strange and often detestable pages, must strike even the
