The Journal to Stella | Page 9

ends; Or, to compound the business, whether They temper love and books together, Must never to mankind be told, Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold."
Such is the poem as we now have it, written, it must be remembered, for Vanessa's private perusal. It is to be regretted, for her own sake, that she did not destroy it.
Swift received the reward of his services to the Government--the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin--in April 1713. Disappointed at what he regarded as exile, he left London in June. Vanessa immediately began to send him letters which brought home to him the extent of her passion; and she hinted at jealousy in the words, "If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except 'tis what is inconsistent with my own." In his reply Swift dwelt upon the dreariness of his surroundings at Laracor, and reminded her that he had said he would endeavour to forget everything in England, and would write as seldom as he could.
Swift was back again in the political strife in London in September, taking Oxford's part in the quarrel between that statesman and Bolingbroke. On the fall of the Tories at the death of Queen Anne, he saw that all was over, and retired to Ireland, not to return again for twelve years. In the meantime the intimacy with Vanessa had been renewed. Her mother had died, leaving debts, and she pressed Swift for advice in the management of her affairs. When she suggested coming to Ireland, where she had property, he told her that if she took this step he would "see her very seldom." However, she took up her abode at Celbridge, only a few miles from Dublin. Swift gave her many cautions, out of "the perfect esteem and friendship" he felt for her, but he often visited her. She was dissatisfied, however, begging him to speak kindly, and at least to counterfeit his former indulgent friendship. "What can be wrong," she wrote, "in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? You cannot but know that your frowns make my life unsupportable." Sometimes he treated the matter lightly; sometimes he showed annoyance; sometimes he assured her of his esteem and love, but urged her not to make herself or him "unhappy by imaginations." He was uniformly unsuccessful in stopping Vanessa's importunity. He endeavoured, she said, by severities to force her from him; she knew she was the cause of uneasy reflections to him; but nothing would lessen her "inexpressible passion."
Unfortunately he failed--partly no doubt from mistaken considerations of kindness, partly because he shrank from losing her affection--to take effective steps to put an end to Vanessa's hopes. It would have been better if he had unhesitatingly made it clear to her that he could not return her passion, and that if she could not be satisfied with friendship the intimacy must cease. To quote Sir Henry Craik, "The friendship had begun in literary guidance: it was strengthened by flattery: it lived on a cold and almost stern repression, fed by confidences as to literary schemes, and by occasional literary compliments: but it never came to have a real hold over Swift's heart."
With 1716 we come to the alleged marriage with Stella. In 1752, seven years after Swift's death, Lord Orrery, in his Remarks on Swift, said that Stella was "the concealed, but undoubted, wife of Dr. Swift. . . . If my informations are right, she was married to Dr. Swift in the year 1716, by Dr. Ashe, then Bishop of Clogher." Ten years earlier, in 1742, in a letter to Deane Swift which I have not seen quoted before, Orrery spoke of the advantage of a wife to a man in his declining years; "nor had the Dean felt a blow, or wanted a companion, had he been married, or, in other words, had Stella lived." What this means is not at all clear. In 1754, Dr. Delany, an old friend of Swift's, wrote, in comment upon Orrery's Remarks, "Your account of his marriage is, I am satisfied, true." In 1789, George Monck Berkeley, in his Literary Relics, said that Swift and Stella were married by Dr. Ashe, "who himself related the circumstances to Bishop Berkeley, by whose relict the story was communicated to me." Dr. Ashe cannot have told Bishop Berkeley by word of mouth, because Ashe died in 1717, the year after the supposed marriage, and Berkeley was then still abroad. But Berkeley was at the time tutor to Ashe's son, and may therefore have been informed by letter, though it is difficult to believe that Ashe would write about such a secret so soon after the event. Thomas Sheridan, on information received from his father, Dr. Sheridan, Swift's friend, accepted the story of the marriage in his