DEAN SWIFT AND VANESSA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23649, 5 November 1938, Page 4

DEAN SWIFT AND VANESSA

During his long friendship with Esther Vanhomrigh, "Vanessa" of his best-known poem, Swift sent her the following lines: Who could such a nymph forsake, Except a blockhead or a rake? Or how could she her heart bestow, Except where wit and virtue grow?

As is, alas, sometimes the way, it would seem that Vanessa's lover, for whom she cherished the strongest feelings until her death, found it only too possible to forswear her company and neglect the favours she offered. But if virtue did not nourish in her adored one, wit most certainly did, for Vanessa's chosen lover was the great Jonathan himself. Whether the two actually were lovers, in the accepted literal sense, remains a matter for solemn debate among the more studious admirers of the dean. That they held each other in auction, in which Vanessa's ardour was of more and lasting ardour, is plain from their letters. These, in her declining days, she placed in the care of one of the executors of her considerable estate, a young man to whom she also left half her fortune. The other half, it is worth mentioning in passing, went to another dean, George Berkeley, afterwards the saintly Bishop of Cloyne, who had no recollection of having met the lady, but welcomed the bequest as a gift from Providence to further his aim of establishing an ideal university in the West Indies. Dean Swift was not mentioned in her will. His association with her is mainly celebrated in the portion of the correspondence extant in the British Museum. But these letters, while they establish much leave as much again in doubt, and there was room for the sympathetic examination by Mr Gibbs of the facts and the hypothetical interpretation of them.

Mr Gibbs deplores, as a partisan of Vanessa, that she should have been allotted by Swift's biographers and devotees so small a place in his story, while to- the other Esther, the famous " Stella," they have devoted themselvei with compassion, criticism and fervour He claims, and not untenably, that if Swift is among the immortals, so, " in a shadowy way," is Vanessa. But that being conceded, the evidence, such a?

THE STORY OF A TRAGIC FRIENDSHIP "Vanessa and the Dean." By Lewis Gibbs. Illustrated. London: Dent; 16s.

it is, will not allow that she had influence on his work, nor yet, except in an obstructive way, upon his life. Their love appears to have been decidedly one-sided. Their story commences in London, when Swift, at the. height of his political influence, was introduced into the home of Vanessa. She laid siege to him, a man twice her age, and with a devotion which was ill-rewarded, pursued him. The late Rithard Garnett explained their predicament thus:

Her letters reveal a spirit full of ardour and enthusiasm, and warped by that perverse bent which leads so many women to prefer a tyrant to a companion. Swift, on. the other hand, was devoid of passion. Of friendship, even of tender regard, he was fully capable, but not of love. The spiritual realm, whether in Divine or earthly things, was a region closed to him, where he never set foot. As a friend he must greatly have preferred Stella to Vanessa.

Mr Gibbs, though he labours mightily and persuasively, does little to change this verdict. The final breach came when the unfortunate Vanessa, driven to action by the "prodigious change" in him after she followed him to Ireland, taxed him with the rumours of his marriage to Esther Johnson (which still await the proof). Whether or not it was in a personal interview, as Mr Gibbs declares, or through the agency of a letter to Stella herself, the result is beyond doubt. Swift turned from her finally, and one may with some relief. Their relations had long since changed from being a source of somewhat dubious satisfaction to the flattered object of Vanessa's affections, and had become distinctly an embarrassment. She died, as the saying goes, of a broken heart, worn out by his evasions. She was the victim of a crand passion, not its subject. Mr Gibbs has made the story of their association eminently readable, achieving both in imagined conversations and in the re-creation of the literary background of Swift's career, a pleasantly authentic yet informal flavour. The volume is well illustrated, and though the author in a postcript declares his narrative to be "in the form of a novel." its publication in that manner which bespeaks the biography will displease none, unless on account of the enhanced price. J. M,