On the Death of Stella O N January 28th, 1728, Jonathan
Swift, while he was supping with some friends at the Deanery, received from a servant the message that he had been awaiting. At length, when his guests- had left him, he sat down to write On the Death of Mrs. Johnson, a strange . and methodical catalogue of the beauty and virtue of the woman he had loved for thirty years, and whom he never saw, it is said, except in the presence of a- third persOn. " She had a gracefulness somewhat More than human, in every emotion, word, and action. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection. .• . . One of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London, only a little too fat." There are pages of it, restrained, literal, pedestrian almost, but with sudden and incongruous. flashes of emotion extorted, as it were, by the presSure of pain, from the matter-of-fact recitation- of moral qualities.
Two hundred years have passed since the death of Stella, but the mystery of Swift's relationship. with the dead woman, unfathomed by the most intimate of his contemporaries, has never been revealed. Swift met Esther Johnson . at Moor 'Park, the house of Sir William- Temple,- his patron, where her mother lived as companion ' to Lady Giffin* Temple'S sister. Swift (it was n habit of his which was not invariably fortunate in irs results) - supervised her education,. and watched her _ growing. from s!ekly childhood until. the beeame, as Delany said, who knew her, " a .wcimaii, who would have done honour to thechoice Of the greatest prince' on earth."
On Temple's death she inherited a cOmpetence, and Swift, advised her that her fortune would go further 'in' Dublin than in London. She accepted hiS achrice, an such was the beginning of an a'ssdciation that is Without. paitliel, one Would- siippOse, in the history*Ot love itself.' her-death, more than a quarter of a century later, Stella lived- on in Dublin. When Swift was there he visited her in her own apartments. When he was abroad she lived at the Deanery. In his absences he wrote to her daily. When she died he could "` hold up his sorry head no longer." Life had become for him then what it remained until his own fearful dissolution, " a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators awhile, and then act our own part in it."
There were those who said that Swift was secretly married to Stella, but that he never lived with her, perhaps because he discovered that she was his natural sister. On the evidence the first supposition is no more than an improbable possibility, the second is true, and the last nakedly absurd. There were those who said that they did not love one another, as the term is generally understood between men and women ; that there existed between them some passionless intellectual relationship which was its own gratification. But the documents which Swift left behind him will lend no justification to this view. Swift, despite his devotion to the Church, was not a religious man ; he said that he only preached two sermons in his life, and those political pamphlets. Yet the prayers which he composed during Stella's last illness, and which he spoke, on his knees at her bedside, are informed not only by a genuinely religious feeling but by a deep personal love.
The Journal to Stella, that bulky volume which contains his daily correspondence with Esther Johnson during the period of his political ascendancy in London, is neither more nor less than a series of love-letters. True, they are the strangest letters ever exchanged between a lover and his mistress, but in their very incongruousness there is something infinitely moving. Whenever he reached his lodging, after dining with the Lord Treasurer or St. John, and ruling them as they ruled England, he would • climb into bed, and there write her a detailed account of all that had taken place, and intersperse his history (for it was history that he was making ; it is difficult for us to realize the immense influence wielded by a pen like Swift's in those days, after the abolition of the censorship and before the reporting of Parliamentary debates) with the pages of childish endearments and almost completely unintelligible baby talk that would have been foolish in a boy, but are somehow very actively touching in the middle-aged scourge of half mankind. It is certain that Swift loved- Stella, and that their love was frustrated. For its frustration none has ever discovered the reason. Nor is it strange, since Swift himself never knew.
To his note On the Death of Mrs. Johnson, Swift added, two days later, a passage which, as it seems to the present writer, is symbolic of his relationships with the women he loved or who loved him. " This is the night of the funeral," he wrote, " 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 my bed-chamber."
For that was Swift's way. He imagined that, to escape the consequences of his actions, he had only to " remove into another apartment." And so in each case, Stella, Varina, Vanessa, when the bill that he had backed fell due he dishonoured it. The satirist who prided himself above all upon his sincerity was incapable of sincerity in this fundamental relationship. He was sincere neither with the woman nor with himself. He never adMitted that he loved : he denied that such an emotion was passible to him.
The source of this repression it is impossible to guess at. . . , That it existed seems incontrovertible. The clearest evidence for it is to be found in those satires which, perhaps, would never have been written without it. The astonishing obscenities of Gulliver's Travels are obviously born of fear of emotion, and even of life. They are not prurient ; the age which had an unusually high appreciation of prurience was shocked by them. They are disgusting because they represent a hideous perversion. The same tendency is to be observed in much of his verse, and those shattering jeers at the inmost sanctities of human nature are horrible, not as the mockery of a cynic, but because they are the anger of an outraged morality. The man who could write, without irony and in all sincerity " Now and then, beasts may degenerate into men " could have no truce with that through which alone life can exist.
R. K. LAW.
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