The Spirit of Place, and Other Essays

								

editor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against
the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love,
and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that
they make the "she" and "her" of every letter.  And this shall be a paper
of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.
No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours.  In
love "to divide is not to take away," as Shelley says; and Dingley's half
of the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothing
from the whole of Stella's half.  But the sentimentalist has fought
against Mrs. Dingley from the outset.  He has disliked her, shirked her,
misconceived her, and effaced her.  Sly sentimentalist--he finds her
irksome.  Through one of his most modern representatives he has but
lately called her a "chaperon."  A chaperon!
MD was not a sentimentalist.  Stella was not so, though she has been
pressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this respect
been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy charming MD,"
"saucy little, pretty, dear rogues," "little monkeys mine," "little
mischievous girls," "nautinautinautidear girls," "brats," "huzzies both,"
"impudence and saucy-face," "saucy noses," "my dearest lives and
delights," "dear little young women," "good dallars, not crying dallars"
(which means "girls"), "ten thousand times dearest MD," and so forth in a
hundred repetitions.  They are, every now and then, "poor MD," but
obviously not because of their own complaining.  Swift called them so
because they were mortal; and he, like all great souls, lived and loved,
conscious every day of the price, which is death.
The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with his
summary and wholesale ready-made sentiment, has thus obstinately put them
asunder.  No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than foolishly play
havoc with such a relation.  To Swift it was the most secluded thing in
the world.  "I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters,
except MD's;" "I ought to read these letters I write after I have done.
But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend:
but methinks," he adds, "when I write plain, I do not know how, but we
are not alone, all the world can see us.  A bad scrawl is so snug; it
looks like PMD."  Again: "I do not like women so much as I did.  MD, you
must know, are not women."  "God Almighty preserve you both and make us
happy together."  "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may
never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives."  "Farewell,
dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy
day since he left you, as hope saved."
With them--with her--he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the bar of
St. James's coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-day, and was