Swift and Stella at Moor Park

A.L. Rowse

It was many years ago that I first made the acquaintance of Moor Park when, young, I thought of writing a biography of Swift, who has always much influenced me. The house was then still occupied, as a house should be, hY a country family. Today such places are country museums or public institutions, and Moor Park is a college of education. It was called after the grander Moor Park in Hertfordshire, a splendid palace built by Leoni. Our Moor Park is in Surrey, a couple of miles south of Farnham, in the narrow valley of the

Wey. overhung by woods and well-grown trees,

This place is of interest to all who care for literature and history as the creation of Sir ‘Villiam Temple, celebrated for the part he had in affairs in the time of Charles II, hus

band of Dorothy Osborne, the recipient of her Charming letters and himself a writer of distinction. Still more, it was the home for a number of years of the young Jonathan Swift, Where he educated himself under the aegis of .1'111Ple, where he first found and developed his.genius: Moor Park was his college of education. Here he wrote the poems of his first Period, in the seventeenth-century style of Cowley and Dryden, which he then discarded, no less revealing than the later ones so much better known. Here he wrote, coming to the defence of Sir William, The Battle of the Books, and most of The Tale of a Tub, the masterpiece of his youth as Gulliver's Travels Was of his middle age. It was here that Swift aChieved maturity — after experiencing some kind of traoma, a crisis that determined his career, the character of his work and writing. Here, too, Stella grew up from childhood, the little companion of Swift's youth, whom he trained and formed for the strange part she Played in his life. It all makes a famous story, though it is Hardly realised what a decisive part Moor l'rk played in it. For me the place is alive levith these associations, marked by their Memory, every walk and turn round house Lan d terrace, garden and wooded slope still n,aunted by their presence, figures more familiar than the passing shadows of today. The place has its charm, though to me a somewhat melancholy one: it certainly is not gay under those hanging woods, the crowding trees, though of many colours. In i.reMple's time it was more open, and famous or the gardens he created; from his time abroad as ambassador in Holland he brought back the cult of Dutch gardening, imported bulbs and plants and fruit trees, made a canal It) the improved manner, now overgrown, the fine kitchen-garden impossible (of course) to cultivate today. The house was smaller and prettier in his time, and of red brick — one can see how Pretty from the little arcaded servants' wing at the back along the terrace. His collateral descendants, the Bacons, added a third storey In the later eighteenth century, made it bigger, gave it an elegant staircase and enclosed me whole in white stucco. It is something of a wonder how they were all accornmodated within the smaller house — Sir illiam, his family and all his dependants. 'nen. too, there were his collections, the treasure-trove of his years on the Continent, for ne Was a cultivated man — cabinets of china, Objects of virat, books, pictures, portraits of nirnself — he was complacent of his fame — al,d Dorothy, family and friends: Lelys, VandYkes, Van der Meulens, Momperts, Netschers, Le Bruns. One wonders how and

where there was room for the expansive, and explosive, young Jonathan — the tradition is that he occupied a room on the ground floor next to Sir William's study. A great deal of conjectural nonsense has been written about Swift and Stella and their supposed relationship to Temple — more than about any figures in our literature except Shakespeare himself. The simple truth is that they were just poor relations, who had their place in the family and served in the house in regular seventeenth-century man ner. Swift's mother was a poor relation of

Dorothy Osborne, Temple's wife; so was one or other of Stella's parents, the Johnsons.

The Dingleys were cousins of Temple himself, of good Isle of Wight stock, but impoverished. They waited on Temple's sister, Lady Giffard, who lived with him and Dorothy and ran the household — a kindly woman, she had independent means. All these dependants were of good family: Johnsons, Dingleys, Swift but they were .poor. There was the rub for young Jonathan, as proud as Lucifer and more touchy, exceedingly sensitive about himself, inconsiderate of others: a young man, growing conscious of genius, in subordination to a man of talent.

Temple bought the house in the year of Charles it's death, 1685, and at the Revolution of 1688 retired here. Dutch William knew Temple well and would willingly have recruited him to his service, much needed in the awkward circumstances of taking over from

the mess left by James II. But Temple was a man of conscious rectitude: he had promised

James that he would serve no other. He was — like hardly anyone else among the politicians of the age — an incorruptible man. This rendered him someMiat ineffective; he was a diffident man, and therefore less important than people thought him. An intellectual in politics, he was too refined for the rough and tumble: he was glad to retire to this sequestered place and write his Memoirs. It was very sequestered in those days, cut off from London by the empty heaths of Aldershot and .Bagshot, where highwaymen were apt to cut

off travellers. Once and again William III visited Sir William — the King is said to have

played bowls in the bowling-alley there; but nothing could persuade Temple from his delicious otium.

Jonathan first came to Moor Park, on a temporary basis, to help Sir William for some six months in 1689. Temple's father, Master of the Rolls in Dublin, had been kind to the Swifts there: Swift's parents had committed

an imprudent marriage, according to their son, who said he had felt the consequences in his education and all his life. He condemned improvident marriages, as he condemned all improvidence; having been poor and dependent, he became a careful saving man, accumulating capital to found a lunatic asylum for the Irish, He never knew his father, who died before he was born. Then a very strange thing happened to him: his nurse took the baby away with her to Cumberland and kept him there a couple of years. Nothing about Jonathan Swift was quite like anyone else. And what was the young man to do, who had been an unsatisfactory student and taken a bad degree at Trinity? Sir William took him on, gave him a trial as an amanuensis, found that he wrote a beautiful hand and was careful at keeping accounts. When he went back to Ireland, Temple gave him a strong recommendation for a fellowship, or at least employment. There had been a tragedy for the family at Moor Park that year. Temple's prestige had gained for his son and heir the splendid opening of appointment as Secretary for War at twenty-five. All that that young fool could do was to fill his pockets with stones and throw himself into the Thames. What would not Jonathan Swift have given to have such a chance offered him? Temple later promised to press the King for some preferment for him, but found him too useful to dispense with his services. No wonder Swift formed an obsessive complex about preferment — conscious of exceptional abilities and gifts, waiting on Sir William's promises, no move made, no provision for him when he died.

Perhaps unrealised by himself, the lonely uncouth boy was looking for a father. But Sir William was surrounded by adoring women; there were both his wife and his sister; there was old Mother Ludwell, the herbalist and wise woman, who helped him with his simples and his concoctions. And there was little Esther Johnson, the orphaned daughter of his steward, who took the place in his affections of his own daughter who had died.' Hetty ' to the household was an enchanting child, dark and intelligent, to whom they talked baby talk, for she could not yet pronounce all the letters and sounds. Sir William, saddened by his own losses, virtually adopted her: she was the light of his declining days. The baby-talk was the origin of the 'little language ' which features in Swift's Journal to Stella, for to him she became Stella.

At his first visit she was only a child of eight. Swift discovered no openings in Ire land, which he detested anyway, and Temple found that he needed his services. In 1691 he returned to Moor Park and remained there for two years and a half, Temple using him in his affairs and on confidential missions to King William, promising to press for a pre bend for him. In these years Swift wrote his early and unduly disconsidered poems. A great person in Ireland had told him that his mind was "like a conjured spirit, that would do mischief if I would not give it employment."

This was a discerning remark — and Jonathan described to cousin Thomas how he employed it: "I esteem the time of studying poetry to be two hours in a morning, which I esteem the flower of the whole day. Yet I seldom write above two stanzas a week — I mean such as are to any Pindaric ode — and yet I have known myself in so good humour as to make two in a day, but it may be no more in a week after. When all is done I alter them a hundred times; and yet I do not believe myself to be a laborious dry writer, because if the fit come not immediately I never heed it, but think of something else."

What this shows is that, from the first, Swift was a born writer, to whom inspiration came unsought, though then he worked at what was given him, a donne. Further, these poems of his nonage — which have been usually overlooked — are fascinating autobiographically: they give us our closest clue to the developing inner man. The Pindaric ode — of which Dryden has set the model with his Ode to St Cecilia, had been the most admired form for a generation; three of the poems we have from Moor Park were such elaborate odes. The patron encouraged the youthful poet: "Sir William Temple speaking to me so much in their praise, made me zealous for their cause, for really I take that to be part of the honesty of poets that they cannot write well except they think the subject deserves it."

The poems deal then with the subjects the poet thought deserving, his mentors and admirations — for the young Swift longed for what he could admire. They reveal his inner values: above all, moral uprightness and incorruptibility in a corrupt age, virtue in high place, such as he saw exemplified in Dr Sancroft and Sir William Temple, his pattern. Sancroft had given up the Archbishopric of Canterbury, because he would not go back on the oaths he'd taken to James II. Temple had resisted the temptations of office, had never soiled his hands with lucre and had preferred to withdraw from politics rather than compromise himself or his principles. All this was very naïf and idealistic, but Swift was yet young: he would learn the truths of life the hard way.

Not that, even as a young man, he had any opinion of the mass of men — on his way to Moor Park he had found his relations at Leicester "a parcel of' wretched fools." He calls on his Muse, Rather put on thy anger and thy spite, And some kind power for once dispense Through the dark mass the dawn of so much sense To make them understand, and feel me when I write: The Muse and I no more revenge desire,

Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.

There remains always Temple, his idol and ideal, to whom he dedicated his next Ode. What a contrast he offers with the pedants of colleges and schools! — and the young man gets his own back at the dons of Trinity who had downgraded him: They purchase knowledge at the expense Of common breeding, common sense, And grow at once scholars and fools; Affect ill-mannered pedantry, Rudeness, ill-nature incivility, And sick with dregs and knowledge grown, Which greedily they swallow down, Still cast it up and nauseate company.

In that last turn of phrase there is already the mature Swift. Temple exemplified a better ideal: a man of the world, a man of affairs, a statesman who had yet dedicated himself to maintaining peace — he was the fabricator of the Triple Alliance to keep Louis XIV in check — where others devoted themselves to making war: War! that mad game the world so loves to play And for it does so dearly pay; For though with loss or victory awhile Fortune the gamesters does beguile, Yet at the last the box sweeps all away. To anyone who has lived through the wars of the twentieth century Swift's condemnation of humans for their idiot propensity to war on each other brings home the sad truth. And daily converse with Temple instructed him what petty considerations and smallness of mind ruled in the world of politics: Methinks, when you expose the scene.

Down the illorganed engines fall; Off fly the vizards, and discover all: How plain I see through the deceit!

How shallow and how gross the cheat! ...

On what poor engines move The thoughts of monarchs, and designs of states!

What petty motives rule their fates!

Temple is praised, in an image which ingeniously celebrates his devotion to gardens and horticulture:

Here we expect from you

More than your predecessor, Adam, knew. ... You strove to cultivate a barren Court, in vain; Your garden's better worth your nobler pain. Hence mankind fell, and here must rise again. It cannot have been disagreeable to that

somewhat self-complacent man to have his virtues so celebrated in verse, and his choice of withdrawal approved. No wonder he encouraged the poet and praised his work. The youth responded ardently: "shall I believe," he wrote, A spirit so divine Was cast in the same mould with mine?

He himself is only a poet, obsessed with writing: In vain to quench this foolish fire I try In wisdom and philosophy; In vain all wholesome herbs I sow Where nought but weeds will grow.

Whate'er I plant, like corn on barren earth,

By an equivocal birth Seeds and runs up to poetry. How revealing it is! We see the background of Temple's garden, his interest in herbs as • cure for disease; perhaps even the phrase equivocal birth' betrays something unconsciously. There is the young scholar's earlier indolence being trained to work and method, the regularity of that well-conducted life under his eyes from which to learn.

This was followed by a less successful 'Ode to the Athenian Society,' which he wrote in nine days. Less interesting autobiographically, it yet has characteristic touches — his scorn of pedantry, his contempt for censorious criticism from those incapable of achieving anything themselves, the cheap cynicism of intellectuals: The wits, I mean the atheists of the age. Who fain Would rule the pulpit, as they do the stage.

Dr Johnson said that this was the poem that Swift showed to Dryden, then the dictator of letters and another eminent personage of whom Swift was a relation. If so, it was rather touching of the poor young poet, proud to show him the one poem as yet in print. Dryden came down upon him with, "Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet! " He was never forgiven for this. In Swift, with his equivocal birth, who had never known a father, whose early years had been so lonely, without family or encouragement, rejection maddened him. And such is the cursedness of Spectator August 25, 10 things that he met with it at every decisive juncture all the way along — until it built up a complex in him: he would do the rejectini. people, love, marriage, family, life itself, the human race. He took an almighty revenge4 No power on earth, in the end, could prevent him from getting his own back, once th, nerve was touched. It was, of course, !II* sensitive of Dryden to be so crushing — IP; sensitive and unintelligent, for in fact SwIlt was a poet, if of a different kind. Henceforth Dryden becomes a bete noire; he is guyed 111 The Battle of the Books, he is never men. tioned but to be denigrated. Swift was wounded and discouraged: Ile wrote no more poems for over a year. When he resumed writing, the poems are of a differ' ent kind: no more grand Pindaric odes, bill simpler verse in rhymed couplets, in the coll. versational style, with ironic or satiric inflo!: ions, to which he henceforth adhered. Sir WII'

'

ham did not approve of satire (he wouldn't) but from this time Swift threw overboard the heavy supercargo of moral idealism, noble a5, pirations, hero-worship. For something No happened to the poet: he was changed. Hitherto, he had been nail', modest, admiria content to look up to others; he had now seen through them. The wounds he received fronl, their insensibility released his pride, injured pride; if they made him suffer, he would make them suffer, with all the power, integrity, and ruthlessness in his nature.

It was not until November 1693 that be wrote another poem, and then not until he had three times rejected the impulse. He WO now a man of twenty-six, unknown to faille or fortune, with no establishment, no secur ity, still dependent on Temple — with no pre' bend forthcoming. His junior by some three years at Trinity, Congreve, had had a brilliant success in London with his first comedy, The Old Batchelor, and was about to have another with The Double-Dealer. This was suf.. ficiently irritating, and a note of irritation is discernible in Swift's letter to his cousin, TV. mas Swift: "I desire you would inform your self what you-mean by bidding me keep rrlY verses for Will Congreve's next play; for I tell you they were calculated for any of his, and If it were but acted when you say, it is as earl!' as ever I intended, since I only design the' , should be printed before it." They were not printed before it: with a brilliant career on the London stage well in train, Congreve had n° need of a boost from a writer in the countrY ' not known to have written anything. This theme and the ambivalence of Swift 5 attitude are not far under the surface of the poem. Is it for Swift to sing the praises of Congreve, his Muse inquires, and bring the

vices of the town into the country?

... no power divine , 1 Cgmulidneleap the bounds which part your world arw 1

". I

Nor did he mean to draw attention to hull' self by praising Congreve's parts: 1

That be my thought when some large bulky writ 1

Shows in the front the ambition of my wit. Meanwhile, in the country, Swift had been 'I angered by some young scholar of FarnliaIll School who, having been up in London for 3 bit, came back to patronise the counw bumpkins at Moor Park:

Who in his idiom vile, with Gray's Inn grace, Squandered his noisy talents to my face, Named every player on his fingers' ends. Swore all the wits were his peculiar friends, 1 Talked with that saucy and familiar ease

Of Wycherley, and you, and Mr Bays . . 1 Thus are the lives of fools a sort of dreams, Rendering shades, things, and substances of name It must have been the more provoking since as he said himself, "when I was young, I thought all the world as well as myself wil5 ; wholly taken up in discoursing on the last new play."

One observes a perfectly natural feeling of s

envy of Congreve in the lines: 1

'Troth I could pity you; but this is it, '1 You find, to be the fashionable wit.

Swift follows with his usual low view of critics, and already announces boldly — con.

sidering that he has not yet written anything — that he will never give them a name: Whose name must not within my lines be shown, Lest here it live, when perished with his own. To this rule he subsequently adhered, when famous. Two scarifying lines stand out among the 250 of the poem, and again foretell the Swift to come:

Shy' hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed all on a day make sin and folly bleed.

e poem concludes, after so curious a salute

his college-friend's triumph, with a return 10 Moor Park and the salutary life of the country: .iorrie short refreshment for your weary mind ... „l'e by a mountain's side, a reverend cave

• i_Ives murmuring passage to a lasting wave: H on a better day, some druid dwelt, _tad the young Muse's early favour felt.

ine mountain's side ' is poetic licence for the

ridge that overhangs the valley in which Moor Park lies. Mother Ludwell's Cave is at the end of the walk underneath the wooded slope, at what

w. as the southern entrance to the domain;

Just across from the grotto stands what is

rw known as Stella's Lodge. Obviously a

ormer mill-house, it is supposed to have been where the Johnsons lived. Swift did not print these charming occasional verses that so well ?yoke Moor Park and its denizens in the 690s, There is the poet himself, who was in

,10 need of Parnassus:

;,that of Ludwell sing, to Ludwell run, .c,'Frself my Muse, her spring my Helicon, :,ne neighbouring park its friendly aid allows,

Perfumed with thyme, o'erspread with shady A„ 'al}, canopies new thoughts instil, Crooksbury supplies the cloven hill— f.,". of Parnassus.

'ere came the occupants to refresh themsel

vues at the shallow brook:

ere thirsty souls carouse with innocence,

uc'r owe their pleasure to their loss of sense.

i,'ere, too, came virgin footsteps, evidently the

That soft and swift, Camilla-like, advance,

even movements seem to fly a dance. ther also comes the Master: ,thinks I see him from his palace come,

cWith his presence grace the baleful room. wonsider, Ludwell, what to him you owe, N h° does for you the noisy Court forgo.

he a rich and gaudy silence leaves:

I ()LI share the honour sweet Moor Park receives. Next month Moor Park nearly lost its re!red Master; and Swift celebrated Temple's --covery with the last of his early poems. It is curious effort, describing the grief of the ueusehold at Temple's danger, but in rather H terms so far as Swift was concerned. ,"Lere are the two ladies who worshipped at "ie shrine of the great man, Dorothy Osborne 4Id Martha Giffard.

Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great,

sl'eMbling beheld the doubtful hand of fate ... ?June from a better world, and chosen then best companion for the best of men. :11en there is Dorinda: A'lius, when Dorinda wept, joy every face forsook, 11111 d grief flung sables on each menial look; humble tribe mourned for the quickening soul

'flat furnished spirit and motion through the Whole

nt1,8 was the poetic way of saying that Lady -111ard ran the house. More interesting is what Swift tells us '70ut himself. Again, in contemporary cliche reproaches the Muse for giving his 711d no rest; in other words, there was 'the '-19tijured spirit 'seeking employment. this -restlessness of mind he owes his un1315Piness:

thee I owe that fatal bent of mind,

Till to unhappy restless thoughts inclined; 1,2 thee, what oft I vainly strive to hide,

).;Iat scorn of fools, by fools mistook for pride. e resolves, at the end of the poem, to abjure Poetry.

s,tvl.clnews's like this no fancy ever seized. 'T`,111 to be cheated, never to be pleased.

sion:

"e consolations of poetry are no less a deluThe

k re thy enchantment broke, and from this hour

, are renounce thy visionary power; And since thy essence on my breath depends, Thus with a puff the whole delusion ends. This was not the only devotion that he found illusory. He had offered Temple heart and soul; he found that what Temple wanted was his services. Instead of a son, the great man wanted a client. This was all that Swift meant to him. Sir William was prepared to offer him an Irish sinecure, which would enable him to retain Swift's services, still, a dependent, in subordination. He was deeply wounded by the discovery — life had once more revealed her true features behind the veil; with his absoluteness of temperament, he threw everything up. In May 1699 Swift went back to Ireland, determined to make a career for himself, accept anything rather than dependence, a miserable chaplaincy in Lisbon, exile. He could find a place in the Church: he would be ordained.

In Ireland, which he despised, a place was found for him, the living of Kilroot in Ulster, dominated by Presbyterians. But he found to his dismay that he could not be ordained without a certificate of good character from Sir William Temple. Swift tried several bishops before swallowing his pride and yielding to necessity; he put off writing to Temple till the last possible moment. " May it please your Honour, that I might not continue by any means the many troubles I have given you, I have all this while avoided one, which I fear proves necessary at last.... The sense I am in, how low I am fallen in your Honour's thoughts, has denied me assurance enough to beg this favour, till I find it impossible to avoid."

Temple had been ' extreme angry' at his leaving; but he was a just man, and he gave Swift the good character he deserved, if only for his services. He was ordained, and moved up to Kilroot, near Belfast, to take over the living. Though it was small, carefully nursed it henceforth gave the ordained clergyman independence of a sort.

Having achieved it, Swift proceeds to fall in love in the most normal way in the world with a young lady of the vicinity — a Miss Waring, Varina 'in the letters. She had small independent means, enough to found a family on, with Swift's further prospects in the Church. She hesitated, she put him off. "Surely, Varina, you have but a very mean opinion of the joys that accompany a true, honourable, unlimited love; yet either nature or our ancestors have hugely deceived us, or else other sublunary things are dross in comparison. Is it possible you cannot be yet insensible to the prospect of a rapture and delight so innocent and so exalted? Trust me, Varina. Heaven has given us nothing else worth the loss ot a thought. Ambition, high appearance, friends, and fortune, are all tasteless and insipid when they come in competition; yet millions of such glorious minutes we are perpetually losing, for ever losing, irrecoverably losing, to gratify empty forms and wrong notions, and affected coldness and peevish humour. These are the unhappy encumbrances which we who are distinguished from the vulgar do fondly create to torment ourselves. The only felicity permitted to human life we clog with tedious circumstances and barbarous formality. By Heaven, Varina, you are more experienced and have less virgin innocence than I. Would not your conduct make one think you were hugely skilled in all the little politic methods of intrigue?"

This is what Jonathan Swift really thought; but we shall never hear that note again in all his writings. She fended him off, she played with him; when this man of genius laid everything he had before her, she turned him down. Again the reaction is absolute; he had warned her that "if I leave this kingdom before you are mine, I will endure the utmost indignities of fortune than ever return again." A few years later she thought better of it and attempted to get him to renew his offer: she received a brutal reply. One more rejection, with calculable consequences: just as Dryden's rejection had made him turn his back on poetry in the nobler sense, now he turned his back on love.

In 1696, after Swift's rejection by Varina there came a renewed offer from Sir William Temple, who found that he could not get on without him. "I am once more offered the advantage to have the same acquaintance with greatness that I formerly enjoyed, and with better prospect of interest." He had offered to forgo it all for Varina's sake; he now accepted.

Temple was putting his papers together for posterity, and he had been trying to make do with Swift's cousin, Thomas. Evidently he was not a patch on Jonathan, who was now assured of being Temple's literary executor, with the prospect of preferment at the hands of his friends in power, the Whigs.

Swift came back to Moor Park and stayed with Temple until he died. He worked 'on Temple's writings, his various works, literary and diplomatic, and his Memoirs. He also acted as the great man's emissary to court, with the chances that offered of picking up preferment. In 1697 Swift was thirty: it was high time that he got some secure footing, if he were ever to emancipate himself from Ireland and establish himself in England. He had reached maturity, without having accomplished anything worthy of him. These last years at Moor Park were to see nothing in the way of poetry, but the writing of his first prose work to receive notice. The Battle of the Books, and the writing of his first masterpiece, The Tale of a Tub, which had been conceived at Kilroot.

He read a great deal in Temple's library — his real university: he read Lucretius three times in one year — with what results for his very minimal religious faith can be imagined. He read Thucydides, along with other classics

— one must suppose, Lucian; he read Hobbes. Samuel Butler's Hudibras was a familiar companion. Lucretius, Lucian, Hudibras, Hobbes

— one sees the direction his mind was taking: not that of a clergyman. The Swift scholar, Herbert Davis, told me that he had once come upon one of his marginalia, commenting on

the Nicene Creed: Credo digna barbaris. Hardly a frame of mind to equip one for a

bishopric, though no bar apparently today.

Temple was fluent and well-read in French; Swift owed his reading in contemporary French literature to this. At Moor Park in ,these years he lived the life of a professional writer, which was what he was. Always de pendent on exercise and a regular walker, he used to run half a mile up and down the hill beside the house every two hours. What he did with himself about sex — so vigorous a man — we do not know: apparently, nothing. All his energy went into work, prose works, the illusions of poetry and love abnegated and denied.

In 1690 Temple had published his Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning, which intro

duced into this country the dispute that had raged in France on the subject. His aim had been to question the assumption of automatic progress, that in literature the Moderns were better than the Ancients for the later had the earlier to go upon, plus themselves. In the course of his quite sensible argument, Temple made a serious blunder, for he was not a scholar in the exact sense of the word: he accepted the authenticity of the Letters of Phalaris, as among the earliest remains of Greek literature — which brought the formidable Bentley down on him. Phalaris was defended by the wits of Christ Church, Boyle and Atterbury, and a lively controversy ensued.

Swift obviously did not care about the scholarly issue, the battle of the pedants: he took the opportunity to write a delightful burlesque, with parodies of the Homeric simile, and flouts at the moderns all round — there is Creech of All Souls, as well as Temple's opponents, Wotton and Bentley.

They are all made fun of, but especially Dryden, unable to mount in the comic encounter — evidently suggested by Hudibros. The,' renowned Dryden 'was set up to oppose

but " his helmet was nine times too larg.0 for his head, which appeared situate far in the hinder part, even like the lady in a lobster, or like a mouse under a canopy of state, or like a shrivelled beau from within the pent-house of a modern periwig; and the voice was suited to the visage, sounding weak and remote." We must assume that this was what Dryden looked like in his declining years — his cousin, the ordained cleric, was not one to forgive.

The dispute between Ancients and Moderns was of little interest to Swift, though he makes a good point when he suggests that, on the cloven hill of Parnassus, the Moderns would be better advised to raise their own side of the hill than dream of pulling down that of the Ancients. He himself was to make a notable contribution to this effort — a modem Lucian, among other things. And, strangely, we come upon what Matthew Arnold took for his life-long text, Sweetness and Light ' — it is surprising to find its source here. Vintage Swift is the Preface: "Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it." This is a different inflexion from that of the earlier years at Moor Park. Sir William Temple had not approved of satire. Swift had now emancipated himself from his mentor; henceforth his writing would be all satire, irony, burlesque.

This was the nature of his comic masterpiece, written in his years at Moor Park, The Tale of a Tub, — a strange work for that sedate and ordered background. One can hardly suppose that he showed this manuscript to Sir William, it was too radical, too disturbing to complacency. It had been begun at Kilroot, as a satire against the Presbyterian Dissenters. Swift had enrolled himself in the Church of England in the spirit of one enrolling himself in the Army, the best army available, and he hated anyone out of step. In any case, he was hereditarily a Churchman, grandson of the redoubtable vicar of Goodrich, pillaged by the Roundheads, the neighbouring castle blown up and then slighted by Cromwell: since then a magnificent ruin. Anyone who knows the destruction wrought by the Civil War, by fanaticism let loose, the palaces, houses, castles ruined; the works of art, the pictures, archives, books destroyed; the stained-glass windows, the tombs, sculptures, brasses in the churches wrecked; the organs smashed, the choirs dispersed, the marvellous music of the Elizabethans ended; the theatres closed, plays suppressed in the interest of sermons; the rich royal collections of pictures, the tapestries of the cathedrals, sold abroad — most historians who write about the Civil War are too philistine to register the losses to the country, but those who are not must sympathise with ' Hudibras ' Butler and Swift who cordially detested the fanatics who let loose this whirlwind: ludicrous Levellers, An tinomlans, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy men, Quakers, what not.

A deeper, more philosophic reason for Swift's dislike was precisely his scepticism: since it was so difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at truth in the realm of the unknowable, it was sensible to conform to the norms of society laid down by custom, sanctioned by authority, and tested by experience. As for the pretensions to knowledge by the ignorant and half-baked, he regarded their 'inspiration 'as wind: this is the theme of The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, written at Moor Park in 1697 -a very funny tract, with its underlying serious theme. It really belongs, like the other digressions, that on Madness, for example, with the Tale. The dominant themes of the work are the suspect origins of all claims to inspiration, especially in the realm of religion, where they had done so much harm; the real folly of the human race out of' which they arose, amounting to madness — so that the creators of new religions (such as the Muggletons, Joseph Smiths, Baker Eddys, Aimee Semple Macphersons) were all more or less touched. We may see to what an extent Swift was a creator of the characteristic eighteenth-century frame of mind, with its hatred of enthusiasm.

Swift's weapon against it all was ridicule. The Apostles, we learn from authority, were gathered together in one accord: no two conventicles were ever in accord, or the aspirants to inspiration ever saw eye to eye. There is the fissiparousness of the sects, as well as their ludicrousness; the Apostles received the gift of tongues: modern saints hardly under-, stand their own, (What if the Apostles were mistaken too or, rather, talked nonsense?) " Who that sees a little paltry mortal, droning, and dreaming, and drivelling to a multitude, can think it agreeable to good common sense that either Heaven or Hell should be put to the trouble of influence or inspection upon what he is about?" Swift's religion was the religion of common sense; but what is that? He would have said the observance of common codes of good conduct, without inferior intelligences questioning what they could never understand, is in fact beyond understanding.

As for inspiration, he suggests a physical or mechanical explanation for it. "The spinal marrow being nothing else but a continuation of the brain, must needs create a very tree communication between the superior faculties and those below; and thus the thorn in the flesh serves for a spur to the spirit." So much for St Paul, who tells us that he suffered from 'the thorn in the flesh,' perhaps epilepsy or some sexual inadequacy (he was celibate, and not normal about sex). In fact, Swift comes close to a modern view that sees the need of religious inspiration in sublimation of sex.

We must not omit to note that the work is tingling with intellectual high spirits, always irresistible: Swift never fails to get a kick out of human foolery. And not only religious believers — though belief makes fools of us all. " Lovers for the sake of celestial converseare but another sort of Platonics, who pretend to see stars and heaven in ladies' eyes' [had he not been one, with Varinan and to look or think no lower. But the same pit is provided for both " — with their eyes on the stars, both are ditched (he had been himself).

Or, to go further, into public affairs, the events of history. "The very same principle that influences a bully to break the windows of a whore who has jilted him naturally stirs up a great prince to raise mighty armies, and dream of nothing but sieges, battles and victories." Swift was thinking of Louis XIV who had filled the age with his alarms and aggressions, his sieges and battles. "Of such mighty consequence it is where those exhalations fix, and of so little whence they proceed. The same spirits which, in their superior progress, would conquer a kingdom, descending upon the anus, conclude in a fistula." This was what Louis XIV suffered from.

So, too, with the fanatics. One might adapt

his message in a phrase, into "one touch of madness makes the whole world kin." It is a touch of mad fanaticism that communicates itself most effectively to other humans — look at Lenin or Hitler in our time, Luther or Calvin in theirs; in ours a C. S. Lewis; in the world of literary criticism, a Dr I.", or of historical journalism, an ***"' (I follow Swift in his use of asterisks). "I do not remember any other temper of body or quality of mind, wherein all nations and ages of the world have so unanimously agreed, as that of a fanatic strain, or tincture of enthusiasm; which, improved by certain persons or societies of men, and practised upon the rest, has been able to produce revolutions of the greatest fi

gure in history." And those individuals are precisely those, again, " whose natural reason had admitted great revolutions," i.e. were touched with madness.

The climate of the book is comic, the tone one of gay insolence bordering on effrontery. since there was very little in humans he could respect. He had observed the modes and manners of the Roundheads, carried on by the Dissenters. "The method of this arcanum is as follows. They violently strain their eyeballs inward, half closing the lids. Then, as they sit, they are in a perpetual motion of see-saw.

making long hums at proper periods and continuing the sound at equal height, choosing their time in those intermissions while the preacher is at ebb," (1 have myself heard these groans, as a child, in Nonconformist chapels in Cornwall.) "By which, and many other symptoms among them, it manifestly appears that the reasoning faculties are all suspended and superseded, that imagination hath usurped the seat, scattering a thousand deliriums over the brain."

The professors of these mysteries or, as we might say, these leaders or stewards, these humbugs, Swift does not qualify so much as impostors, though he thought them so, as mechanics. "This mystery of vending

spiritual gifts is nothing but a trade, acquired by as much instruction, and mastered by equal practice and application as others are.' "In the language of the spirit, Cant and Droning supply the place of sense and reason in the language of men." He describes the art of Canting. "The first ingredient is a competent share of inward light; that is to say, a large memory, plentifully fraught with theological polysyllables and mysterious texts from Holy Writ, applied and digested by those methods and mechanical operations." The response was in keeping: "thus it is frequent for a single vowel to draw sighs from a multitude, and for a whole assembly of saints to sob to the music of one solitary liquid." During the rule of the Saints one of the hardest things for civilised persons to support must have been the nasal whine in which it was de rigueur for Puritans to impart their lights. All these phenomena were lower-class, of course. Among the varied expressions of the Spirit, " there is none to be compared with that of conveying the sound through the nose, which under the denomination of snuffling, hath passed with so great applause in the world. ... In a short time no doctrine passed for sound and orthodox, unless it were delivered through the Nose." Swift pretended gravely to have been informed by one of the superior brethren that " in the height and orgasmus of their spiritual exercise it has been frequent with them *** st; immediately after which they found the spirit to relax and flag of a sudden with the nerves, and they were forced to hasten to a conclusion."

Never mind: "Remark your commonest pretender to a light within, how dark and dirty and gloomy he is without," The varieties of human foolery do not change much from one age to another: Swift might be talking about the student-generation or hippy-culture of today. He gives us an insight into his method of work; he evidently kept notebooks or commonplace-books. Like Flaubert, he kept something like a Dictionnaire des idees recues, a compendium of the nonsense humans believe and a collection of the commonplace cliches they express it in. He found that the Ancients collected the utterances of Critics under the hieroglyph of the Ass — and so one well might, what with the academic pedants on one side, and journalist clowns on the other, those whom Swift described as Smatterers.

What an extraordinary book to have come out of the quietude of Moor Park! An admirable critic in our time, Middleton Murry — of course, disconsidered by those inferior to him — has summed it up well: " A comic masterpiece, it was poured forth out of a cornucopia of invention, which Swift either never

commanded or never unloosed again." In fact, it could never be repeated: it exhausted the possibilities of the subject. Swift was never impelled, or felt free, to let himself go quite like that again. And this is not only from reasons of expediency, but from some inner psychological reason: "When we set the Tale in its place in Swift's writings, and compare it with what had gone before and What was to come after, we cannot repress the feeling that in it he found his truest and richest vein, the completest expression of his genius. The fumblings and approximations of his previous poetry, the perceptible tension between his impulse to admiration and his impulse to denunciation, are resolved, and his creative energy is free of its frustration. The work is triumphant; it breathes confidence and power."

Of course, the question of expediency arose. When the book was published in 1704, in the aura of respectability of Queen Anne's reign — it had been written against the backFound of later seventeenth-century sceptic'am and rationalism — everyone was Shocked . Dr Johnson continued to be shocked, and could not bear to recognise that was written by a clergyman. Swift appears ,T,1 it as a kind of Rabelais of Rationalism. very little of recognisable Christianity survives the exposure of the origins of religious inspiration — religion as a common social bond was another matter. However, another layer of irony emerged: the author was made to Pay, by fools, for writing a masterpiece. Its Publication put paid to all Swift's hopes of preferment for ever in England; Queen Anne and her spiritual adviser, Archbishop Sharp, blocked any promotion —and Swift must have thought of Queen Anne and her Archbishop as no less fools than most humans. „On January 29, 1699 Sir William Temple u!ecl, rather suddenly, with Swift still unprovided for in England. He had managed to exchange Kilroot and the vicinity of Miss Waring for the hying of Laracor and the neighbourhood of Dublin. In 1697," ten days before nlY resignation, my Lord Sunderland fell and I with him. Since that there have been other courses Which, if they succeed, I shall be Proud to own the methods; or, if otherwise, Very much ashamed." Anything to remain in .riglancll It sounds as if he had attempted to Purchase his way in. Nothing came of it, and now Sir William was dead, leaving him a Mere £100 to edit and see his works through the press, with the copyrights. It was a proper reward for a secretary. „ Swift was impelled to take the opening ofrerea him of going back to Ireland as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, going over as Lord Justice there. He pushed forward the publication, first, of Temple's Letters, the very next Year, 1700, with a hopeful dedication to " his Most sacred [an improbable adjective] MajestY William III • .. these Letters having been left to my care, they are most humbly presented to your Majesty by your Majesty's Most dutiful and obedient subject: Jonathan

SWift." Nothing came of that, and the King, to Whom Swift was known, was shortly dead. The Preface is of more interest, " It is generally believed that this author had advanced our English tongue to as great a per

fection as it can well bear." This was true: Temple was much admired also for his literary style. We must add that to the debts the Young Swift owed to him during those years at Moor Park. The publication of Temple's Memoirs in 1709 — when Swift was now a well known ltiterary figure — occasioned a quarrel with 'adY Giffard, which broke the harmony of the Moor Park family circle and poisoned its memories. In that volume Temple had desribed the duplicity of the leading figures at harles II's Court, and how they had taken aavantage of Temple's obvious integrity to odwink him. Among those about whom 'envie spoke the truth was the late Lord

Essex — but old Lady Essex was still alive, and she was a friend of Lady Giffard.

Lady Giffard made a great fuss: she had intended to edit this volume (she was incapable of it). She organised sympathy among the grand ladies at Court against the impertinent clergyman. The Duchess of Somerset was inflamed for her aunt: " I remember we both agreed with you that it was not proper to be made public during my aunt Essex's life, and I am sure Doctor Swift has too much wit to think it is: which makes his having done it unpardonable and will confirm me in the opinion 1 had before of him that he is a man of no principle either of honour or religion." There was the danger point, for the Duchess was a close friend of Queen Anne; and this is the reason for Swift's hatred of the Duchess. He shortly wrote a terrible lampoon on her, The Windsor Prophecy, repeating the charge that she had been implicated in the death of her former husband at the hands of a lover, Count Konigsmarck. The fact was that, a great heiress, she had been married against her will to Thomas Thynne of Longleat,' Tom of Ten Thousand.' She was abroad by the time Thynne was shot dead in his coach — the scene is sculpted in relief on his tomb in Westminster Abbey. Four months later the widow married the Duke of Somerset. When she had left the country, she fled to the protection of the Temples at the Hague. So, in a way, the story was all in the family.

Swift never forgave Temple's sister for making the fuss and rousing such feelings against him. The affair must have touched a raw nerve, the sense of his old inferior standing at Moor Park. Lady Giffard may hardly have appreciated the changed situation — he was now a foremost writer and a power in the land. The issue was one that often crops up in a historian's experience. Was Swift to suppress the facts, the truth of history, for an old lady's susceptibilities? He was not the one to do so: he would think history more important.

But it affected his feelings about Moor Park and the Temples. Though he later spoke with justice' of Temple's good qualities, he took against the family. And it made a permanent breach in the old familiar circle. Stella's mother remained with Lady Giffard; Swift to Stella: " I never wish to see any of them again." Now a great man in London, boasting to Stella back in Dublin of his grand ac quaintances — true enough, but rather path etic when one understands all that was behind it — he says of Temple's sister, " I will never go to her house unless she begs my par don." This was an unlikely eventuality. He kept on terms with Stella's mother; we hear of him forwarding a portrait of 'Lady G.' to Stella on her mother's behalf, and of her being with Lady Giffard down at Moor Park.

But he never went there again.

And what had happened to Stella? All that we know of her we learn from Swift himself. When he came back to Moor Park for his third stay wounded by the rejec tion of his love for Miss Waring, passionate in his reactions, he abjured for ever the love of women. I think it was Bacon who said that resentment keeps old wounds green. In 1699, when he was thirty-two, he wrote down a number of resolutions for" when I come to be old." One of them was: "Not to be fond of children, nor let them come near me hardly."

Out of passion and pride, resentment and re venge, he was engaged in killing love in himself — on one side of him, the most irresistible of men; over and done with for him were love and the family, the ties of normal humanity. He would tread the hard paths of ambition and greatness to the end.

When he had first come to Moor Park, little Hetty was a child of eight, with her pretty lisp; in 1699 she was an attractive young woman of eighteen. Swift never allowed himself to be attracted to her sexually; it would have been another imprudent marriage. Their -relations were tutorial: he undertook her instruction. She was an intelligent and apt pupil, who wrote well, though she had difficulty with her spelling, about which Swift used to tease her affectionately. She was well-read and read French easily, unlike many more fashionable ladies. Swift brought her up the way she should go, formed her mind and trained her for the perfect companion she in time became for him. He later wrote of her, as if from a distance, that he had had 'some share in her education, by directing what books she should read, and perpetually instructing her in the principles of honour and virtue; from which she never swerved in any one action or moment of her life. She was sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen; but grew into perfect health and was looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful and agreeable young women in London, only a little too fat. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection. She lived generally in the country, with a family where she contracted an intimate friendship with another lady of more advanced years.' This was, of course, Rebecca Dingley.

At his death Sir William had bequeathed his favourite a lease of some lands in county Wicklow; altogether at this time her independent fortune was not above £1,500, though Lady Giffard held £400 for her in trust, upon which a little annuity was paid. It was not enough for a lady in England; Swift urged the two women to "draw what they had into Ireland," where they could at least live like ladies, their money going twice as far. They obeyed his Commands; henceforth he looked after them financially, improved their position considerably, with his saving disposition. They arranged his household affairs, though Swift was careful to see neither except in the presence of the other.

Stella had been formed for his companionship, to identify herself with his interests, share his values. She must have hoped to marry him. No such offer was forthcoming. Had he not taught her to regard love as ' a ridiculous passion '? But no woman would believe that — only a man could, and a very remarkable and wilful man at that. Life had its revenge upon him -when, a middle-aged, famous man in London, lonely and always responsive to feminine companionship, he fell in love with a girl younger even than Stella: another Esther, the Vanessa of his poems and her tragic story.

If it had not been for his sense of duty, his life-long obligations to Stella, he might have married Vanessa: she had penetrated his defences, certainly his outer defences, his heart. But Stella was the whole of his past, too intimately entwined with it, the confidante of all his secrets, his ambitions, hopes and disappointments, from the beginning, those early days at Moor Park. She had known him all her life: he could not betray her.

In the poem that he wrote for her thirtyfourth birthday, he recalled them — it is significant that he thought of her as she was at his last return there, a young lady of sixteen: Stella this day is thirty-tour (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. How uncomplimentary, utterly realistic — he is determined to keep their relations on the tutorial level, those of the mind.

It seems that he underwent a secret marriage — an empty, formal, unacknowledged marriage — to give to a woman to whom he was not sexually attracted the security that he would never marry the woman to whom he was attracted. It was not a recipe for happiness. But then, by now, he had long been wedded to the conviction that happiness consisted in " a perpetual possession of being well deceived,"