by Leo Damrosch
In a society in which women are conditioned to be shallow flirts, Vanessa embodies the virtues of both sexes—literally, in a lovely body. She has “a sweetness above all perfumes” and a “gentle, soft, engaging air,” and also “knowledge, judgment, wit,” and a soul endued with “justice, truth, and fortitude.” Most of these were conventionally masculine qualities, though Swift always held that women ought to aspire to them just as much as men. Anne Long, who evidently saw an early draft, told Swift that “my poor cousin is taken for an hermaphrodite.”19
Women, of course, despise Vanessa as a bookish prude, and in criticizing her unfashionable attire they provide a voyeuristic glimpse under her dress:
A petticoat without a hoop!
Sure, you are not ashamed to stoop,
With handsome garters at your knees,
No matter what a fellow sees.20
But men aren’t attracted to her either, since she disdains conventional feminine wiles. Impatient at the lack of action, Cupid decides to forget about the young men and tries to plant his arrow in the middle-aged Jonathan Swift. Swift’s books serve as a defensive shield, and Vanessa is hit instead. She too is holding a book by Swift, but the arrow goes straight through it and she falls desperately in love. He is flattered, but unable to respond in the way she wants. The rest of the poem is a fascinating debate in which they explain their conduct to each other and try to justify it.
Of course Cadenus and Vanessa is a poem, not a transcript, and we have no way of knowing how well it corresponds to what actually went on. Unquestionably, Swift wanted to put his own spin on how the relationship developed. All the same, he clearly expected Vanessa to appreciate the poem, and it’s a unique window into his emotional life.
It seems likely that Swift, one of whose favorite authors was the unillusioned moralist Rochefoucauld, was strongly impressed by the French conception of romantic love. Venus may preside over love and sex, but individual choices are arbitrarily chosen by her son, whom Swift describes as “full of mischief.” Falling in love is not much different from a serious illness; Rochefoucauld says, “The most accurate comparison one can make of love is with a fever—we have no more power over one than over the other, whether for its violence or its duration.” A corollary in the French tradition is that the emotional storm provokes fantasizing, in which the victim projects impossibly ideal perfections onto the loved one.21
Vanessa, not in years a score.
Dreams of a gown of forty-four;
Imaginary charms can find
In eyes with reading almost blind;
Cadenus now no more appears
Declined in health, advanced in years.
She fancies music in his tongue,
Nor further looks, but thinks him young.22
If “not in years a score” is right, Vanessa fell in love as long ago as 1707, when she met Swift at the inn in Dunstable.
In some lines that were deleted by whoever eventually printed the poem, it’s clear that Vanessa actively pursued Swift:
Strange, that a nymph by Pallas nursed
In love should make advances first.
She wished her tutor were her lover,
Resolved she would her flame discover;
And when Cadenus would expound
Some notion subtle or profound,
The nymph would gently press his hand
As if she seemed to understand,
Or dext’rously dissembling chance
Would sigh, and steal a secret glance.23
These lines were no doubt deleted because they made Vanessa seem too forward for a virtuous young woman of the time.
Vanessa’s next move is to attack Swift at his weakest point. He prides himself on reason. Very well, it is his own ethical teaching that she has taken to heart:
Two maxims she could still produce,
And sad experience taught their use:
That virtue, pleased by being shown,
Knows nothing which it dare not own;
Can make us without fear disclose
Our inmost secrets to our foes;
That common forms were not designed
Directors to a noble mind. . . .
Your lessons found the weakest part,
Aimed at the head, but reached the heart.24
Swift always dreaded gossip, and as he indicated in his note at Windsor, this situation seemed sure to ignite it.
Appearances were all so strong,
The world must think him in the wrong;
Would say, he made a treach’rous use
Of wit, to flatter and seduce;
The town would swear he had betrayed
By magic spells the harmless maid,
And every beau would have his jokes,
That scholars were like other folks. . . .
Five thousand guineas in her purse?
The Doctor might have fancied worse.
Still, his vanity is tickled, and he lacks the resolution to dismiss Vanessa outright.
Cadenus, to his grief and shame,
Could scarce oppose Vanessa’s flame,
But though her arguments were strong,
At least could hardly wish them wrong.
Howe’er it came, he could not tell,
But sure she never talked so well.
His pride began to interpose,
Preferred before a crowd of beaux.25
The poem ends with a meditation on the complexity of love, the milder pleasures of friendship, and a teasing hint that the story isn’t over. First comes the meditation:
Love, why do we one passion call,
When ’tis a compound of them all?
Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet,
In all their equipages meet;
Where pleasures mixed with pains appear,
Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
Swift offers instead “friendship, in its greatest height . . . which gently warms, but cannot burn.” Vanessa prefers to burn.26
As for the teasing hint, it aroused intense curiosity from the moment the poem was published:
But what success Vanessa met
Is to the world a secret yet:
Whether the nymph, to please her swain,
Talks in a high romantic strain,
Or whether he at last descends
To act with less seraphic 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.
“Conscious” is used in the sense then current, defined by the OED as “having awareness of one’s own wrongdoing; affected by a feeling of guilt.” But what if sex and intellect can indeed be partners, tempering love and books together?27
It’s hard to agree with Ehrenpreis that “by desexualizing both partners, the panicky poet removes the element that threatens him,” or that he talks like “a fatherly admirer trying to cheer up a solitary spinster.” Sheridan remarked long ago that if Swift was hoping to discourage Vanessa’s passion, a poem that described her “in the most flattering colours was not likely to administer to her cure.” And the modern critic is surely right who sums up Cadenus and Vanessa as “a darkly lustrous myth of dalliance.”28
There is persuasive evidence that after 1714, when Swift went back to Ireland and Vanessa followed him there, they did descend to less seraphic ends. Even before then, the relationship seems to have been more intense than Cadenus and Vanessa might suggest. On an earlier trip to Ireland in 1713, Swift said this: “I promised to write to you, and I have let you know that it is impossible for anybody to have more acknowledgements at heart for all your kindness and generosity to me.” He signed off, “Pray God preserve you, and make you happy and easy—and so adieu brat.” Soon afterward there was another letter that has not survived, to which Vanessa replied joyously, “Now you are good beyond expression in sending me that dear voluntary from St. Albans; it gives me more happin
ess than you can imagine or I describe to find that your head is so much better already.” The reference to Swift’s head presumably means an attack of vertigo; a “voluntary” could be an extempore or spontaneous piece of writing. This time it’s Vanessa who drops hints about coffee: “I am very impatient to hear from you at Chester. It is impossible to tell you how often I have wished you a cup of coffee and an orange at your inn.”29
CHAPTER 16
Tory Triumph
A BROTHERHOOD OF WRITERS
Swift relished being called a brother by the members of the political Club, but even more enjoyable was the company of leading writers. At this time Addison and Steele were launching a sequel to the Tatler, called the Spectator, which came out every weekday from March 1711 to December 1712. There were 555 papers in all, on popular topics such as snuff taking, current fashions, courtship, the coffeehouses, and so on. There were also easy-to-understand discussions of intellectual topics, such as the excellence of Paradise Lost and the pleasures of imagination.
“Mr. Spectator” is presented as a coffeehouse regular, with a circle of friends who include a Whiggish merchant, the appropriately named Sir Andrew Freeport, and a lovable but hopelessly backward country squire, Sir Roger de Coverley. In politics Swift favored frontal attacks, but Addison’s insidious portrait of Sir Roger is just as effective in its own way. C. S. Lewis comments, “The enemy, far from being vilified, is turned into a dear old man.”1
From Swift’s point of view, the Spectator was lightweight popularization. “I shall take it for the greatest glory of my work,” Steele wrote, “if among reasonable women this paper may furnish tea-table talk.” Addison declared, “Women were formed to temper mankind, and soothe them into tenderness and compassion.” It’s possible that Addison approached Swift for a contribution or two, but he told Stella, “I will not meddle with the Spectator, let him fair-sex it to the world’s end.”2
Besides, Swift was disgusted by the way his former friends were promoting the Whig agenda. One day in 1712 he ran into Addison and “Pastoral Philips” on the Mall and walked with them for a bit, “but they both looked terrible dry and cold—a curse of party.”3 Addison, at least, continued to be polite, but Steele did not. Like Swift, he was deeply involved in political polemics, and they ended up calling each other names in print.
After relations with Addison began to cool, Swift’s closest friend was Dr. John Arbuthnot, an urbane Scotsman who was physician to the queen and a fellow “brother” in the Club. (His name was probably stressed on the second syllable, since Swift playfully rhymes “a good Arbuthnot” with “I know his worth not.”) Swift gave his friend a deft inverted compliment: “All your honor, generosity, good nature, good sense, wit, and every other praiseworthy quality will never make me think one jot the better of you. That time is now some years past, and you will never mend in my opinion. But really, brother, you have a sort of shuffle in your gait; and now I have said the worst that your most mortal enemy could say of you with truth.” Apparently there was something peculiar about the way Arbuthnot moved. Pope recalled that when he was about to meet him for the first time, Swift commented, “He is a man that can do everything but walk.”4
45. Dr. John Arbuthnot.
Arbuthnot was a writer, but only occasionally. His one extended work is The History of John Bull, in which he invented the bluff country squire as a symbol of Britain. It was in conversation that he shone, and he shared with Swift a fondness for deadpan irony. Late in life Swift acknowledged as much, managing to be ironic about irony:
Arbuthnot is no more my friend,
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce,
Refined it first, and showed its use.5
One short piece gives a good sense of Arbuthnot’s style, a mock epitaph on a scandalous aristocrat named Francis Charteris. As Pope said, Charteris was “a man infamous for all manner of vices,” who got rich by unscrupulous means, was always in trouble with the law, and ended up imprisoned for alleged rape. This shameful career inspired Arbuthnot’s little masterpiece:
HERE continueth to rot
the body of FRANCIS CHARTRES,
who with an INFLEXIBLE CONSTANCY,
and INIMITABLE UNIFORMITY of life,
PERSISTED,
in spite of age and INFIRMITIES,
in the practice of EVERY HUMAN VICE,
excepting PRODIGALITY and HYPOCRISY:
his insatiable AVARICE exempted him from the first,
his matchless IMPUDENCE from the second. . . .
He was the only person of his time
who could CHEAT without the mask of HONESTY,
retain his primeval MEANNESS
when possessed of TEN THOUSAND A YEAR,
and, having daily deserved the gibbet for what he did,
was at last condemned to it for what he could not do.
Oh indignant reader!
think not his life useless to mankind!
PROVIDENCE connived at his execrable designs
to give to after-ages
a conspicuous PROOF and EXAMPLE
of how small estimation is EXORBITANT WEALTH
in the sight of GOD,
by his bestowing it on the most UNWORTHY OF
ALL MORTALS.6
Pope himself, twenty-one years younger than Swift, came into the picture only at the end of Swift’s time in London. At that point they saw each other a lot, but we know little about their meetings, since the Journal to Stella stops short in June of 1713.
Born into a loving Catholic family, Pope was astonishingly precocious, and his literary talent was warmly encouraged. His masterful Rape of the Lock was published in 1712, when he was twenty-four, and in a brilliantly enlarged version in 1714. Before he was thirty he brought out a volume of Works that contained a whole series of major poems. By then he was acknowledged to be the greatest poet of the time, at an age at which Swift had published nothing but the forgettable Ode to the Athenian Society.
46. Alexander Pope.
Pope had painful handicaps as well as great abilities, and writing was essential compensation for him. In an era of anti-Catholic repression he was debarred from most careers and even from owning property. And in childhood he contracted Pott disease, in which a tubercular infection spreads to the spine. The usual consequences of this condition are progressive bone loss, nerve pain, and deformity, and he experienced all of them. He was hunchbacked and four and a half feet tall, condemned to continuous discomfort in what he wryly called, in his great Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, “this long disease, my life.” “Let me tell you,” he wrote to another friend, “my life in thought and imagination is as much superior to my life in action and reality as the best soul can be to the vilest body.”7
Pope couldn’t stand Addison, who seemed to him to be jealous of rising talent. The Epistle to Arbuthnot includes a devastating portrait of him, with phrases that have become proverbial:
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.8
Addison no doubt saw Pope as a pushy and presumptuous youth.
Another member of the circle of writers was John Gay, author of pleasantly chatty topical poems. At this time he was working on Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London. Swift laughed at his claim to be a great walker, and told him that he always had “a rooted laziness, and an utter impatience of fatigue.” Gay was impressively overweight, and getting fatter all the time; Congreve adapted Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—and said that Gay’s motto should be Edit ergo est—“He eats, therefore he is.”9
For a brief period the wits banded together to collaborate on a satire called The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus. It is often claimed that the Scriblerus Club was a potent seedbed of later works. But all we
really know is that the group met a few times in 1714, that Arbuthnot was the principal author of the Memoirs, and that he got bored with it almost immediately. It was not until 1741 that Pope finally put it into print, no doubt with revisions of his own. And the masterpieces that these writers went on to produce—Pope’s Dunciad, Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—are so different from each other that it doesn’t mean much to call them all “Scriblerian.”10
WINNING THE PEACE
Meanwhile, in the public world, mighty events were taking place. After the British triumph at Oudenarde in 1708, France was eager for peace; its economy was bankrupt, and poor harvests threatened famine. And then, in 1709, the horrific bloodshed at Malplaquet made most people in England equally ready for peace. Negotiations began at The Hague in 1709, but the Whigs clung to their slogan “No Peace without Spain,” which would take years to conquer if it could ever be achieved at all.
Many army officers were furious at the Tory determination to depose the Duke of Marlborough and shut down the war. Swift told Stella about a group of them who were discharged “for drinking destruction to the present ministry, and dressing up a hat on a stick and calling it Harley; then drinking a glass with one hand, and discharging a pistol with the other at the maukin [effigy].”11 Death threats followed.
In November of 1712, Swift was personally present at a shocking near disaster. In a letter to the Evening Post he described what happened. A bandbox—a container for a lawyer’s or clergyman’s neck bands—was delivered to Harley. Something aroused his suspicions, and Swift asked to see the box. Referring to himself in the third person, he told what followed:
He took it to the window, at some distance from my Lord, and opened it by cutting with a penknife the packthreads that fastened the lid. The first thing that appeared was the stock and lock of a pocket pistol, lying across the middle of the bandbox, and fastened at each end with two nails; on each side of the firelock were laid the middle pieces of two large inkhorns charged with powder and ball. . . . The small nails which fastened the stock at either end were so contrived that by taking it up at the first view, as it was natural to do with all the implements about it, the cock would have gone down and fired the whole train, which would immediately have discharged both barrels different ways.”
