MRS. DINGLEY

We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {2} 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