DEAN SWIFT

Evening Post, Volume c, Issue 54, 5 March 1934, Page 16

DEAN SWIFT

HIS LIFE SECRET

REASON FOR. HIS HATE

PROBING A MYSTERY

Tho illustrious are faring badly in the light of tho new biography, -which explores their private lives, not with a Hash-lamp, but with full electric installation. They aro left with but slender chance of preserving the secrets they hugged in life. Among others Dr. Jonathan Swift, whose epitaph boasts him safe at last in the grave where "savage indignation can lacerate his heart no further," is not so safe as ho thought (writes J. B. Firth in the "Daily Telegraph"). A hundred years ago prying curiosity peered into his skull, as if to determine the disorder of his genius and the order of his madness; today a brace of biographers probe anew brain and heart, and. do not spare the stomach which in life was always "cold." The famous Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, died miserably like a poisoned rat in a hole. It was his own terrible phrase. His. worldly ambitions had gone down to the dust before him. His religion brought no consolation. He had outlived all faculties except his unrivalled power to hate. ROOTED IN EGOTISM. legends, possible and impossible, have clustered thick around the misanthrope. Even many of the known facts are mysterious. Towards their elucidation Mr. Mario M. Rossi and Mr. J. M. Hone offer a new "Life" which they claim to be '.'founded not on historical method, for in history we start with facts, whereas in biography we should start with the character of the man we are dealing with." Novel but dangerous doctrine, however brilliantly illustrated, as in this book! I am distrustful of a method which is confessedly careless about keeping close to facts, and explains all the seeming contradictions of a man's life by reference to a single master passion. The Dean is here presented as rooted in egotism. No doubt he was. But that in his friendships he only loved himself, and only forgot himself in his hatreds I do not credit. It would be truer to say that he realised himself in his hatreds^ Much deeper, however, goes the following judgment: ""Women only could be Swift's best friends, for women always seek for someone to whom they can dedicate themselves, whose actual brutality they can pardon and ask for more." I should challenge the "always," but the statement is true enough, of Swift's two Esthers—Esther Johnson,'- the Stella of the "Journal," and Esther or Hester Vanhomrigh, his Vanessa. These were the two women whom ho loved best and .who loved him better, and he treated them both infamously. SWIFT AND STELLA. Yet if Swift ever loved any woman sincerely it was Esther Johnson, whose opening mind he began to mould and form, when ihey both lived under the chilly roof of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, he as secretary and she in the housekeeper's room. Ho was fourteen years her senior, but such disparity of age is no insuperable barrier to ardenf; affection between engaging pupil and worldly-wise: and susceptible tutor. The "Journal" mirrors his feelings as in a glass. i ' ■ A marriage would have been the natural end of the affectionate rela: tionships there disclosed, especially when on Temple's de^ith Swift persuaded Stella and her sister to come and settle in Ireland in his own parish of Laracpr.: "Why did he not marry her? Tongues naturally began to wag, in spite of the extreme precautions-which Swift took not to see Stella except in' the presence of a third party. What was the obstacle, if any, to a wedding? When another parson, named Tisdall, asked Stella's hand in marriage and invited Swift's friendly offices, the latter replied: "If my fortune and humour served me to think of that state (marriage) I should cer--tainly among all persons make your choice." Then why did he hold back? BRUTALLY COARSE. The question of fortune had little to do with it; their.;joint incomes would have amply sufficed. The real obstacle lay in his "humour." "A wise man," he once wrote, "grows weary of acting the lover and treating his wife like a mistress, but wants a reasonable companion and a true friend through every stage of his life." There was more than this, however. As his biographers observe, struggling rather painfully for once to find le mot juste, "marriage compels to a continuous intimacy and does not. allow for an escape from the franker experience of, contingent human vulgarity." The intimacy of a mistress, on the other hand, is "exempt from all such disgusts." The reader is left to make of that cryptic saying what he can. It plainly suggests that Swift was alike extremely sensitive and at times brutally coarse. This perversity of his was a permanent constituent of his "humour" and egotism. No wonder the Freudians have leaped upon him as their lawful prey. _- But if Swift could just tolerate the idea of1 a mistress yet recoiled from that of a wife, was Stella, in fact, his mistress? Those who bring the divorce court mind to a perusal of the "Journal" would seem to be confirmed in their yiow by the episode with Esther Vanh'omrigh, in London, when Swift was thoroughly enjoying the sweets of recognition in the great world of politics and fashion. VANESSA IN LONDON. In 1708 Vanessa was 20, Swift was 41, and Stella was in Ireland, out of sight, and —judging by the great gap in the "Journal"—out of mind. Once more Swift played the tutor to a clever, attractive, and romantic girl, with the same result as before: — Your lesson found the weakest part, lAimed at the head but reached the heart. According to Swift, Vanessa threw herself at his head, as afterwards in despair at his feet. He accepted the adoration, and the affaire ran its course through a succession of lively episodes, as recounted by the Dean himself in a reminisccntial and Stracheyish vein many years later:— "It ought to have been an exact chronicle of twelve years from the time of spilling the coffee, to drinking of coffee, from Dunstablo to Dublin, with every single passage since. There would be the chapter of Madame going to Kensington, the chapter of the Colonel going to France, the chapter of the wedding, of the adventure of the lost key; of the shams; 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." Only the Eecording Angel could exactly interpret these allusions, but on any reading they indicate somothing more than platonic friendship. When Cadenus tired, Vanessa entreated and prayed. Nay, worse, she clutched and followed the Dean to Dublin not as a transient visitor but as a permanent resident, settling not far from the Deanery, and within easy gossip distance of Stella. Vanessa was not a philosopher. She •was a woman in lore and she wanted

Swift, whatever his shortcomings as a lover.Tho climax came when the poor creature wroto to Stella in a frenzy, begging her to say whether or not she was married to Swift. Stella sweetly passed on tho letter to the Dean, who dropped it at Vanessa's feet and departed without a word. Nothing then remained for Vanessa but to die. Whether Swift had married Stella in 1716, as many believe, though there is no known record in any register, remains' a mystery. If ho did the marriage was never publicly acknowledged. They never lived together under the same roof, though they share the same tomb. By 1716 Swift had long ceased to care romantically for one who had "doubled her years and size," and the news of her death in 1728 drew from him not even lukewarm teams but a cool appraising analysis of her character. A PHILANDERER. Swift's new biographers describe Stella as Swift's "greatest success," because he had given her "a masculine, quality and endowed her with the deep distrust of mankind which had enabled her to live as a sensible woman." But, pray, what is meant by "a sensible woman"? I suppose one who took Swift as she found him, accepted his "humour," refrained from vain complainings, and, above all, did not create scenes. What lay at the back of it all? The theory now generally accepted is that Swift was an impotent. That would explain much. If he who came to find the whole world abnormal was himself an abnormality something by way of extenuation can be found. Beddoes desscribed him as a philanderer, "hovering with lingering fondness on. the honey he could not sip." If that was the curse which blighted the supreme genius of the English Augustan Age and turned his magnificent creative powers to a sterile misanthropy and hate, then, indeed —poor Swift! It would explain the worse side of his character and the intolerable streak of foulness in his composition. STARK REALISM. . Messrs. Rossi and Hone, however, will not have it so. They find explanation enough in their formula of egotism, aiid in the fits of vertigo from which Swift suffered from early life, aggravated by severe deafness, chronic dyspepsia, and "cold in the stomach." In the end he suffered from a senile decay which deprived him of his power of speech. So the decaying solitary, over the threshhold of whose chamber, as his biographers finely s say, stood the old curse "Vac soli," paid full penalty in life for the sufferings he had brought to those who loved him, and perished "terribly alone arid terribly naked." This book is a stark piece .of realistic .analysis, like one of those grim anatomical pictures of the dissecting room which the old Dutch masters used to paint. Messrs. Eossi and Hone, however, are such masters of their craft that the dissection of Dean Swift's Remains becomes, a vivisection of the living and writhing man.