Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  60. Mullagh Lake, Quilca, seen from the site of the Sheridans’ house.

  Sheridan, if not his wife, was tolerant of Swift’s bossiness, and Swift was grateful for that. When his vertigo got bad, he needed to escape the social interchange of Dublin and live among understanding friends. He wrote to the second Earl of Oxford, who had recently succeeded to his father’s title, “I have been four months in a little obscure Irish cabin about forty miles from Dublin [Irish miles were longer than English], whither I fled to avoid company in frequent returns of deafness. . . . While I am thus incommoded I must be content to live among those whom I can govern, and make them comply with my infirmities.”13

  Swift detailed the house’s faults in a short poem with a long title, To Quilca, A Country House in No Very Good Repair, Where the Supposed Author and Some of His Friends Spent a Summer in the Year 1725 (the friends were Stella and Rebecca):

  Let me my properties explain:

  A rotten cabin, dropping rain,

  Chimneys with scorn rejecting smoke,

  Stools, tables, chairs, and bedsteads broke. . . .

  Through all the valleys, hills, and plains,

  The goddess Want in triumph reigns,

  And her chief officers of state,

  Sloth, Dirt, and Theft around her wait.

  Sheridan got back at Swift with a description of the furnishings at Laracor:

  An oaken, broken elbow chair;

  A caudle cup, without an ear;

  A battered, shattered ash bedstead;

  A box of deal, without a lid.14

  During another visit Swift wrote up a catalogue of “the blunders, deficiencies, distresses, and misfortunes of Quilca.” The few “vessels for drink” were leaky, bottles were uncleanable, only one chair was safe to sit on and even it was “in a very ill state of health,” and peat was in such short supply that the guests had to go down to the bog to help gather it. Swift’s room had a door full of chinks that the wind blew through, and a bed with “two damnable iron spikes” that threatened to break his shins. The room that Stella and Rebecca shared was no better, with a hole in the floor they had to avoid stumbling into, and two big gaps in the wall, “either of which would blow out a candle in the calmest day.” The servants were shameless thieves, and even the cats gave offense, getting into the cellar to eat the food stored there, “for which one was tried, condemned, and executed by the sword.”15

  Sheridan was unrepentant. A couple of years later he wrote a poem cheerfully acknowledging similar defects of his Dublin house, starting with the parlor door:

  How oft in turns have you and I

  Said thus—“Let me”—“No, let me try.”

  “This turn will open it, I engage.”

  You push me from it in a rage!

  Twisting, turning, trifling, rumbling,

  Scolding, staring, fretting, grumbling;

  At length it opens, in we go;

  How glad are we to find it so!

  Sheridan’s joke is to find a solemn moral in every inconvenience, in the spirit of Swift’s Meditation on a Broomstick.

  If you’re disposed to take a seat,

  The moment that it feels your weight,

  Out go its legs, and down you come

  Upon your reverend Deanship’s bum.

  Hence learn, and see old age displayed,

  When strength and vigor are decayed,

  The joints relaxing with their years;

  Then what are mortal men, but chairs?16

  Once, when Swift was staying at Quilca, he heard that there was going to be a beggars’ wedding nearby, and he proposed to show up at it dressed as a blind fiddler, with Sheridan leading him as his guide. They entered delightedly into the beggars’ storytelling and joking, parted from them with hearty good wishes, and even accepted money from them. But there was a distressing sequel. When Swift and Sheridan went for a walk the next day and encountered the beggars, “they found some upon crutches, who had danced very nimbly at the wedding; others stone blind, who were perfectly clear-sighted at the feast. . . . The Dean, who mortally hated those sturdy vagrants, rated [that is, berated] them soundly, told them in what manner he had been present at the wedding and was let into their roguery; and assured them, if they did not immediately apply to honest labour, he would have them taken up and sent to jail.17 It’s far from clear how Swift, who knew nothing of music, managed to pass himself off as a fiddler.

  All was not dreary at Quilca. Stella enjoyed working in the garden, and at one point Swift wrote to Sheridan, who was away in Dublin at the time, “She is so pleased with her pickaxe that she wears it fastened to her girdle [belt] on her left side, in balance with her watch.” Someone who later owned the pickaxe said it had a cherrywood handle sixteen inches long and a pointed head of nine inches.18

  61. Stella’s pickaxe.

  Since Quilca was the name of a house and not a town, it would be impossible to find the site today without local knowledge. It is as isolated as ever, buried among the woods a couple of miles from the village of Virginia (named by English settlers for the Virgin Queen). A Victorian visitor was shocked when the verdant landscape around Kells abruptly gave way to barren brown bogs, and the road grew rutted and bumpy. A “fine old peasant,” whose name was coincidentally Sheridan, pointed the way to Quilca. Nothing remained there but some tumbledown walls, the beech trees that Swift had helped to plant, and his canal, “now filled up.”19 A house does stand today where Quilca used to be, but the one Swift knew is long gone.

  CHAPTER 21

  Stella

  CAN WE KNOW HER?

  Given that Stella was Swift’s closest friend during her entire adult life, and also that mutual friends saw them both almost daily, it is extraordinarily difficult to get her into focus. What was she really like? Were they in love? Did she want to marry Swift, and did he refuse? Or did he indeed marry her but insist on keeping it secret?

  We don’t even know what Stella looked like, since no authentic portrait exists. The one certainty is that, as Swift said, “her hair was blacker than a raven.” He confirms that she was beautiful but doesn’t say in what way—“every feature of her face in perfection.” Delany’s wife told someone else, who subsequently told Sir Walter Scott, that Mrs. Delany “was struck with the beauty of her countenance, and particularly with her fine dark eyes. She was very pale, and looked pensive, but not melancholy, and had hair black as a raven.” That’s thirdhand testimony, and the raven comparison suggests that Scott, who edited Swift’s works, may have been remembering his description. Black hair was definitely admired. Fielding’s ravishing Sophia Western has black hair, and an English traveler describing an Irishwoman said, “Her hair is black, or near it (and then I need not tell ye it is charming).”1

  Nor did the friends who knew Stella best—the elder Sheridan, Delany, Ford—record a distinct impression of what she and Swift were like together. They all testified that to the best of their knowledge, the two of them were never alone without a third person present. That person was usually Rebecca Dingley, and about her, too, it’s impossible to learn much. No one knows how close she and Stella had been at Moor Park, and whether their living together was evidence of an important friendship or just a way to preserve propriety and save money.

  Swift’s references to Rebecca after the Journal to Stella are few, unenthusiastic, and sometimes dismissive. A little song called Dingley and Brent describes her and the deanery housekeeper Anne Brent as empty-headed:

  Dingley and Brent,

  Wherever they went,

  Ne’er minded a word that was spoken;

  Whatever was said,

  They ne’er troubled their head,

  But laughed at their own silly joking.

  When Swift himself is witty, however, Rebecca can’t be bothered to pay attention:

  You tell a good jest

  And please all the rest;

  Comes Dingley, and asks you “What was it?”

  And curious to know,

 
; Away she will go

  To seek an old rag in the closet.2

  Presumably Anne and Rebecca never saw this poem, which wasn’t published until long after they and Swift were dead.

  A little house near Laracor, in which Stella supposedly lived, is itself a symbol of uncertainty. It was first given the name “Stella’s cottage” on an Ordinance Survey map of 1836, drawing on local tradition; but that tradition was more than a century old.

  The cottage was located on the roadside halfway between Laracor and Trim, an easy mile’s walk either way. But that’s all we have to go on, and the latest writer on the question agrees with Sir William Wilde, who visited Laracor a few years after the Ordinance Survey map was made, that the association with Stella was “somewhat apocryphal.”3

  At any event, the uncertainty reflects the way in which most traces of Swift and his circle have vanished from the earth. The surviving foundation is a challenge even to find, hidden in an unmarked, overgrown patch behind a fence. Wildflowers and weeds fill the space in which Stella may possibly have lived.

  62. Stella’s cottage. The little house as it still appeared in the mid-nineteenth century.

  Lacking clear evidence, interpreters project their own assumptions on the relationship between Stella and Swift. Victorian writers used to sentimentalize her as a sweet victim of fate. Thus Thackeray: “Gentle lady! so lovely, so loving, so unhappy! you have had countless champions, millions of manly hearts mourning for you. From generation to generation we take up the fond tradition of your beauty; we watch and follow your tragedy, your bright morning love and purity, your constancy, your grief, your sweet martyrdom. We know your legend by heart. You are one of the saints of English story.”4

  Stella was not so sweet as all that, and if she had been, it’s hard to imagine that she and Swift would have gotten along. He made a list of her snappy replies: “A very dirty clergyman of her acquaintance, who affected smartness and repartee, was asked by some of the company how his nails came to be so dirty. He was at a loss; but she solved the difficulty, by saying, ‘The doctor’s nails grew dirty by scratching himself.’” The initial question was remarkably impolite; perhaps Swift himself gave Stella her setup. He also recorded a retort that was downright caustic: “A gentleman who had been very silly and pert in her company at last began to grieve at remembering the loss of a child lately dead. A bishop sitting by comforted him that he should be easy, because the child was gone to Heaven. ‘No, my Lord,’ said she, ‘that is it which most grieves him, because he is sure never to see his child there.’”5

  63. The remains of Stella’s cottage.

  Swift claimed that Stella “excelled almost beyond belief” at bon mots. But as Johnson remarked, “Of her wit, so loudly vaunted, the smart sayings which Swift himself has collected afford no splendid specimen.” This one is typical: “A Quaker apothecary sent her a phial corked; it had a broad brim, and a label of paper about its neck. ‘What is that,’ said she, ‘my apothecary’s son?’ The ridiculous resemblance, and the suddenness of the question, set us all a-laughing.”6

  64. Stella’s ghost. Stella imagined by a Victorian artist: her spirit watches tenderly over a grieving Swift, while the sands of his own mortality sift away in the hourglass in front of him.

  Victorian pieties are out of fashion nowadays, but it is still usual to imagine a docile Stella who willingly subordinated herself. When Swift was moody, Nokes says, she would play along, “and, if necessary, modify his ideas by soothing rather than ruffling him.” There is no evidence for that. Swift did say, in a memorial description after her death, “Never was so happy a conjunction of civility, freedom, easiness, and sincerity.” That’s not docility, however, and he also told her that she had a quick temper:

  Your spirits kindle to a flame,

  Moved with the lightest touch of blame,

  And when a friend in kindness tries

  To show you where your error lies,

  Conviction does but more incense;

  Perverseness is your whole defense.

  Truth, judgment, wit, give place to spite,

  Regardless both of wrong and right. . . .

  Stella, for once you reason wrong,

  For should this ferment last too long,

  By time subsiding, you may find

  Nothing but acid left behind.7

  Ehrenpreis is certain that Swift was completely asexual, and also believes that since he never knew a father of his own, he had a powerful desire to play a father’s role himself. Ehrenpreis invokes symbolic paternity in contexts of every kind, even in political ones—“With an instinctive pleasure in the duties of a father and a long training in the work of a priest, Swift naturally welcomed the Examiner’s opportunities to form the opinions of Englishmen.”8

  Confident that he can always recognize unconscious motivations, Ehrenpreis offers a most peculiar interpretation of the relationship with Stella. The master key is the notion, based on a handful of instances, that Swift was profoundly drawn to women in poor health. “He worried incessantly about her health, her eyesight, her melancholy. . . . To all this solicitude there is a distasteful side. By attaching himself to an invalid, a man can relieve himself of angry impulses without openly admitting them, because the beloved is always suffering a punishment that he has not administered. Without feeling guilty, therefore, he can indulge a kind of sadism, even prolonging the existence of the woman in order to prolong his participation in her suffering.”9 There is not the slightest evidence for this quite offensive interpretation.

  As for the asexuality, we have already noted hints to the contrary in Swift’s correspondence with Vanessa. He was well known for his intensity, with a magnetic personality and a compelling gaze that people responded to instinctively. He had powerful, even volatile emotions. He had intense likes and dislikes. He flirted with attractive women all his life; when he visited his mother in Leicester she warned him to stop, and even in late middle age, so many women were drawn to him that a jealous friend, Lord Orrery, called them his “seraglio.”10 And the two women he deeply loved, both of whom were exceptionally good-looking, loved him in return and remained permanently bonded to him.

  THE POEMS TO STELLA

  From 1719 on, Swift wrote a birthday poem for Stella on March 13 nearly every year. In each of these poems, the depth and sincerity of affection are movingly apparent. The first one is short enough to quote in full.

  Stella this day is thirty-four

  (We won’t dispute a year or more).

  However, Stella, be not troubled,

  Although thy size and years are doubled

  Since first I saw thee at sixteen,

  The brightest virgin of the green,

  So little is thy form declined,

  Made up so largely in thy mind.

  Oh, would it please the gods to split

  Thy beauty, size, and years, and wit,

  No age could furnish out a pair

  Of nymphs so graceful, wise, and fair,

  With half the lustre of your eyes,

  With half thy wit, thy years, and size.

  And then, before it grew too late,

  How should I beg of gentle Fate

  (That either nymph might have her swain)

  To split my Worship too in twain.11

  Stella was thirty-eight, actually, as Swift well knew; he always liked to tease her by pretending to mistake her age. And there is a frank admission that they were both putting on weight, with the word “size” breaking in repeatedly until it finishes up a line. The age of sixteen is significant: not when Swift met Stella as a young girl, but when he returned from Ireland to Moor Park and realized she had grown into a woman. “My Worship” is a nice touch, a playful adaptation of the polite “Your Worship” with which people addressed the dean. Aging and fat though they are, outward changes only emphasize the changelessness of inner worth.

  In the next year Swift sent a nonbirthday poem, To Stella, Visiting Me in My Sickness, expressing gratitude for her at
tention when he was laid up once again with vertigo.

  When on my sickly couch I lay,

  Impatient both of night and day,

  Lamenting in unmanly strains,

  Called every power to ease my pains,

  Then Stella ran to my relief

  With cheerful face, and inward grief. . . .

  My sinking spirits now supplies

  With cordials in her hands, and eyes;

  Now with a soft and silent tread

  Unheard she moves about my bed.

  I see her taste each nauseous draught,

  And so obligingly am caught:

  I bless the hand from whence they came,

  Nor dare distort my face for shame.12

  The 1721 birthday poem is another compliment to Stella’s excellence of mind. Just as people keep frequenting a favorite inn even after it begins to decay,

  Now this is Stella’s case in fact:

  An angel’s face, a little cracked

  (Could poets or could painters fix

  How angels look at thirty-six).

  This drew us in at first to find

  In such a form an angel’s mind,

  And every virtue now supplies

  The fainting rays of Stella’s eyes.13

  In the same year, Stella reciprocated with a birthday poem of her own for Swift, written in his style:

  St. Patrick’s Dean, your country’s pride,

  My early and my only guide,

  Let me among the rest attend,

  Your pupil and your humble friend. . . .

  When men began to call me fair

  You interposed your timely care;

  You early taught me to despise

  The ogling of a coxcomb’s eyes;