We cannot do her honour by her Christian
name. All we have to call her by more tenderly
is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with
whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved “better
a thousand times than life, as hope saved.”
MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight times
in a line for the pleasure of writing it. “MD
sometimes means Stella alone,” says one of many
editors. “The letters were written nominally
to Stella and Mrs. Dingley,” says another, “but
it does not require to be said that it was really
for Stella’s sake alone that they were penned.”
Not so. “MD” never stands for Stella
alone. And the 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 “in pain except
he saw MD’s little handwriting.”
He hid with them in the long labours of these exquisite
letters every night and morning. If no letter
came, he comforted himself with thinking that “he
had it yet to be happy with.” And the
world has agreed to hide under its own manifold and
lachrymose blunders the grace and singularity — the
distinction — of this sweet romance.
“Little, sequestered pleasure-house” — it
seemed as though “the many could not miss it,”
but not even the few have found it.
It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic
historian that Stella should be the victim of hope
deferred, watching for letters from Swift. But
day and night Presto complains of the scantiness of
MD’s little letters; he waits upon “her”
will: “I shall make a sort of journal, and
when it is full I will send it whether MD writes or
not; and so that will be pretty.” “Naughty
girls that will not write to a body!” “I
wish you were whipped for forgetting to send.
Go, be far enough, negligent baggages.”
“You, Mistress Stella, shall write your share,
and then comes Dingley altogether, and then Stella
a little crumb at the end; and then conclude with
something handsome and genteel, as ’your most
humble cumdumble.’” But Scott and Macaulay
and Thackeray are all exceedingly sorry for Stella.
Swift is most charming when he is
feigning to complain of his task: “Here
is such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours;
I must be writing every night; O Lord, O Lord!”
“I must go write idle things, and twittle twattle.”
“These saucy jades take up so much of my time
with writing to them in the morning.”
Is it not a stealthy wrong done upon Mrs. Dingley
that she should be stripped of all these ornaments
to her name and memory? When Swift tells a woman
in a letter that there he is “writing in bed,
like a tiger,” she should go gay in the eyes
of all generations.
They will not let Stella go gay, because
of sentiment; and they will not let Mrs. Dingley go
gay, because of sentiment for Stella. Marry come
up! Why did not the historians assign all the
tender passages (taken very seriously) to Stella,
and let Dingley have the jokes, then? That would
have been no ill share for Dingley. But no, forsooth,
Dingley is allowed nothing.
There are passages, nevertheless,
which can hardly be taken from her. For now
and then Swift parts his dear MD. When he does
so he invariably drops those initials and writes “Stella”
or “Ppt” for the one, and “D”
or “Dingley” for the other. There
is no exception to this anywhere. He is anxious
about Stella’s “little eyes,” and
about her health generally; whereas Dingley is strong.
Poor Ppt, he thinks, will not catch the “new
fever,” because she is not well; “but why
should D escape it, pray?” And Mrs. Dingley
is rebuked for her tale of a journey from Dublin to
Wexford. “I doubt, Madam Dingley, you are
apt to lie in your travels, though not so bad as Stella;
she tells thumpers.” Stella is often reproved
for her spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the
better hand. But she is a puzzle-headed woman,
like another. “What do you mean by my fourth
letter, Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say
you had my fifth, goody Blunder?” “Now,
Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent slut to except
a letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage!
No, little Dingley, I am always in bed by twelve,
and I take great care of myself.” “You
are a pretending slut, indeed, with your ‘fourth’
and ‘fifth’ in the margin, and your ‘journal’
and everything. O Lord, never saw the like, we
shall never have done.” “I never
saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish, so everything.”
Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries
for his health. He pauses seriously to thank
them in the midst of his prattle. Both women — MD — are
rallied on their politics: “I have a fancy
that Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and
D a sort of trimmer.”
But it is for Dingley separately that
Swift endured a wild bird in his lodgings. His
man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland.
“He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible
litter; but I say nothing; I am as tame as a clout.”
Forgotten Dingley, happy in this,
has not had to endure the ignominy, in a hundred essays,
to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed
wife; so far so good. But two hundred years is
long for her to have gone stripped of so radiant a
glory as is hers by right. “Better, thanks
to MD’s prayers,” wrote the immortal man
who loved her, in a private fragment of a journal,
never meant for Dingley’s eyes, nor for Ppt’s,
nor for any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for
two centuries stolen all the credit of those prayers,
and all the thanks of that pious benediction.