Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  If the exchange took place at all, it’s possible to put a different spin on it. In a version that may have originated with Swift himself, what Dryden really said was “Nature has never formed you for a Pindaric poet.” Years afterward, Swift might have had to agree. In any event, he always had it in for Dryden. Long afterward he bitterly recalled the scene at Will’s coffeehouse in London, where “Battus”—clearly Dryden—“reclining on his elbow-chair / Gives judgment with decisive air” while disciples lap up his opinions. Swift especially disliked Dryden’s talent for self-promotion. “The world would never have suspected him to be so great a poet,” he later wrote, “if he had not assured them so frequently in his prefaces, that it was impossible they could either doubt or forget it.”20

  18. John Dryden late in life. The great poet has the air of cool superiority that infuriated Swift.

  Long afterward, Swift observed, “Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength.” By then he had become a celebrated writer, and in public affairs the most admired man in Ireland. He had come to understand that his strength was best exerted in satire, and there is an anticipation of that in the Congreve poem:

  My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed

  Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed.

  In another early poem the aggressiveness is even more startling: “Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.”21

  In the Ode to Temple Swift lamented that writing lyric poetry was for him “an incurable disease.” He was soon cured of pretentious odes, at any rate, and a poem about Temple’s recovery from illness bids farewell to a nonexistent Muse:

  There thy enchantment broke, and from this hour

  I here renounce thy visionary power;

  And since thy essence on my breath depends,

  Thus with a puff the whole delusion ends.22

  BATTLING BOOKS

  Some poets, Dryden and Pope, for instance, excelled in verse satire, but Swift was learning that his best medium was prose. At Moor Park, he began to experiment with it. A mock epic called The Battle of the Books embodied some of Swift’s deep convictions, but was mainly intended as a gift for Sir William Temple.

  The occasion of this piece was an unseemly public quarrel over the authorship of an obscure Greek text, which became the pretext for a culture war with important implications. The reason Swift weighed in was that Sir William Temple had already done so, and was rightly regarded as having made a complete fool of himself. In itself the affair was trivial, but it is worth describing because Temple was defending a privileged way of life.

  In France, where science was struggling to free itself from the ancient Greeks and Romans, its spokesmen had recently attracted notice by championing the “moderns” over the “ancients.” Charles Perrault, best known today for his collection of fairy tales, claimed provocatively that the French poet Boileau was greater than Horace, and the French playwright Corneille greater than Sophocles.23 British traditionalists rose to the bait, and Temple saw his chance. Like others of his class, and indeed like Swift himself, he had been brought up to believe that the classics were the foundation of civilized life, an indispensable preparation for politics, the Church, and the law. So in 1690 he published An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, which attracted a good deal of attention.

  In a way Temple was wasting his time, since he had to admit that the champions of the moderns conceded “the preeminence of the ancients in poetry, oratory, painting, statuary, and architecture.” But that wasn’t enough for Temple. He insisted that the moderns were no good at science, either. “There is nothing new in astronomy to vie with the ancients,” he declared, “unless it be the Copernican system; nor in physic, unless Harvey’s circulation of the blood.” He thought that neither theory had been proved, and that even if they could be proved it would make no difference, since they “have been of little use to the world.”24

  What Temple really cared about was literature, and there he was certain that the moderns were pigmies. The only English writers of any note, he said, were Sir Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, and John Selden—no mention of Milton or Shakespeare. It was impossible to rival the great geniuses of old, and Temple incautiously gave an example: “I think the Epistles of Phalaris to have more race, more spirit, more force of wit and genius, than any others I have ever seen, either ancient of modern.”25 Phalaris was a ruler in Sicily in the fifth century B.C. Some pedants, Temple acknowledged, had doubted the authenticity of those letters, but that only showed their inability to appreciate great writing.

  What happened next was that a new edition of the Phalaris letters appeared at Oxford, inspired perhaps by Temple’s praise. The choice of text and editor were both rather casual. The head of Christ Church College at Oxford was in the habit of asking his brightest undergraduates to produce new editions of minor works, and Phalaris fell to seventeen-year-old Charles Boyle, a favorite because he was the younger brother of the Earl of Orrery. Boyle accordingly sent word to the King’s Library in London that he would like someone to collate the manuscript copies there (it did not occur to him to do the work himself), and he claimed afterward that the head of the library had insultingly refused access to his assistant.

  That librarian was the formidable Richard Bentley, one of the greatest classicists England has ever produced, who would soon play a decisive role in the debate. A learned friend of Bentley’s, William Wotton, had already published a critique of Temple’s views on Phalaris, and in a second edition he included a Dissertation in which Bentley totally demolished young Boyle, proving that the so-called Phalaris mentioned events that occurred long after he lived, referred to cities that didn’t yet exist, and used a dialect not yet current. Temple had cut off his own retreat. It might have been possible to argue that even if the Epistles were not by Phalaris, they were still excellent, but since his claim was that the human mind was at its best in earliest antiquity and degenerated thereafter, he was trapped with no way out.26

  What was at stake, really, was not the merits of the obscure Phalaris, but a privileged culture that preferred urbane wit to what it regarded as dreary pedantry. Christ Church was not just an educational institution, it was a feeder for worldly success, and its members were extremely well connected. Macaulay says that they were “dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns of Court and the College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and in the literary and fashionable circles of London.” In a collective rejoinder called Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations Examined, the Christ Church gang rested their case on Temple’s cultural superiority, “mixing wit with reason, sound knowledge with good manners, and making the one recommend and set off the others.” Never mind Bentley’s arguments from history and philology. Phalaris was a king. Temple “had written to kings and they to him, and this has qualified him to judge how kings should write, much better than all Dr. Bentley’s correspondence with foreign professors.”27

  Swift’s contribution, written but not published in 1697, was a mock epic called The Battle of the Books. Its theme is not just ancients versus moderns, but the larger opposition between two different ways of reading and living. To Swift, as to Temple, the classics were living voices; to scholars like Bentley, they were apparently just documents to be analyzed. So in Swift’s satire, the books in the King’s Library divide into armies and join battle, with the ancients of course victorious. Fighting on their side is Sir William Temple, and when Wotton hurls a lance at him, “Temple neither felt the weapon touch him, nor heard it fall.” Before long Wotton and Bentley, represented insultingly as homosexual lovers, are skewered by a single javelin from Boyle. Dryden gets another kick, too. When he has to face off against Virgil, whom he had translated brilliantly into English, he rides a “gelding of a monstrous size”—big but castrated—and his helmet is “nine times too large for the head.”28

  The Battle of the Books is clever and energetic, but for most readers today, too deeply invested in a lon
g-forgotten controversy to have much appeal. The most interesting thing in it is the very first sentence: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” For the rest of his life Swift would continue to experience that truth. The second most interesting thing is a fable about a spider and a bee, adapted from various earlier sources. The spider is the modern artist with his cult of originality, proud of creating out of his own vitals. His weapons are poison and a flimsy web. The bee, on the other hand, ranges freely from flower to flower, injuring nothing while gathering nectar, and his product is honey and wax, “sweetness and light” (wax as used in candles).29 So Bentley is a spider sucking the juices from books that he has stung to death, while Temple is a lover of literature gathering sweet sustenance as he roves.

  The affair soon blew over, for as Gibbon said eighty years later, “The Epistles of Phalaris have been pronounced spurious after a much fuller hearing than they deserved.”30 It is not known why Swift didn’t publish The Battle of the Books right away, when the controversy was still going on. Temple disliked satire, and may have advised against publication. It is definitely an odd piece of work, and like much else that Swift would go on to write, paradoxical. On the one hand, it displays a probing, ironic, skeptical intelligence; on the other hand, it asserts a reactionary commitment to an idealized past. All his life Swift would declare that Homer had more genius than any writer who ever lived, more even “than all the rest of the world put together.”31

  GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

  In January 1699, Sir William Temple died at the age of seventy-one. During the last few months of his life Swift kept a detailed record of Temple’s health, but his Dublin friend Dr. Lyon, who had seen it, quoted only the final sentence: “He died at one o’clock in the morning, and with him all that was great and good among men.” Lacking the rest of the entries, we have no way of knowing what their tone was, or even why Swift made them. Elias suggests persuasively that it was Lady Giffard, who monitored her brother’s condition attentively, who asked him to do it. In that case the eulogistic conclusion would have been intended for Lady Giffard.32

  Shortly after Temple’s death Swift wrote on the flyleaf of a Bible, no longer extant, this eulogy: “He was a person of the greatest wisdom, justice, liberality, politeness, eloquence, of his age and nation; the truest lover of his country, and one that deserved more from it by his eminent public services than any man before or since; besides his great deserving of the commonwealth of learning, having been universally esteemed the most accomplished writer of his time.” Ehrenpreis calls this “extravagant,” which it certainly is, and “reverently admiring,” which is less certain. Swift doesn’t say that it’s his own opinion that Temple was the greatest writer of the age, but claims improbably that everybody thought so. And it’s hard to believe that no one could have been as wise and liberal as the self-important and tight-fisted Temple. Elias makes the suggestion that a Bible at Moor Park could have been available for anyone to see, and that these words too were for Lady Giffard’s benefit.33

  The years at Moor Park were now ended, and it was surely discouraging to reflect on how many those years had been. When Swift arrived he was a hopeful twenty-one. He was leaving just shy of thirty-one, totally unknown. His one attempt to strike out on his own, at Kilroot, had been a disaster. He was now a clergyman without a church. And no one could possibly have thought of him as a writer, since his sole publication was the unimpressive and anonymous Ode to the Athenian Society back in 1692.

  The first thing to do was to wind up Sir William’s affairs. Swift helped with arrangements for the funeral in London, and together with the rest of the Moor Park staff he was measured for mourning clothes, the cost of which was charged to the household account. His own share was 8 shillings for breeches and a waistcoat. On the same bill Ralph Mose, the steward by now, received 13 shillings.34

  Sir William was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. His heart, however, remained at Moor Park, as specified in his will: “I desire and appoint that my heart may be interred six feet underground, on the southeast side of the sundial in my little garden at Moor Park.” The will also gave detailed instructions for bequests, including the amazingly generous one to Stella, and it had a curious codicil that reflected Temple’s experience as a diplomat: his granddaughters would forfeit their inheritance if they married Frenchmen.35

  “To Mr. Jonathan Swift, now dwelling with me,” went a legacy of ₤100, along with an obligation that would prove onerous. Swift was to finish collating and editing Temple’s papers and to oversee their publication, with any profits to go to himself. Due to his high opinion of his own writing, Temple may have thought that this would make Swift rich, but it did nothing of the kind, and required much labor over a period of years. There were seven volumes in all: one of Letters, three of Miscellanies, and three of Memoirs, published from 1705 to 1709. So for ten years after Temple’s death, Swift was still working for him. His total income from all of the books was somewhere between £200 and £250, spaced out over a decade.36

  What happened after that, in 1709, brings out Swift’s bitterness at the haughty way Sir William had treated him. Lady Giffard complained that he had published her brother’s Memoirs from an “unfaithful copy.” His reply was wounded and indignant. As Temple’s secretary, he explained, it had been his job to write down every word that Temple intended to print, under the author’s direct supervision. Beyond that stenographic function, “I pretend not to have had the least share in Sir William Temple’s confidence above his relations or his commonest friends. (I have but too good reasons to think otherwise.)”37

  Two years later, Swift told Stella, “I thought I saw Jack Temple and his wife pass by me today in their coach, but I took no notice of them. I am glad I have wholly shaken off that family.” Jack was the nephew who would inherit Moor Park after Lady Giffard’s death, and who told the story about Swift not eating at the Temples’ table. Three months later Swift ran into Jack Temple at court, where it wasn’t possible to avoid him, “so we talked two or three careless words, and parted.”38

  Swift nursed this resentment of the Temples for a long time. As late as 1726 he got into a name-calling exchange with Sir William’s nephew, Viscount Palmerston. Swift was writing to complain that someone he had recommended was mistreated and another person dismissed solely because it was Swift who recommended them—“but these are some of the refinements among you great men, which are above my low understanding.” Palmerston defended his conduct in a spirited reply, adding insultingly, “I fear you hugged the false report to cancel all feelings of gratitude that must ever glow in a generous breast and to justify what you had declared, that no regard to the family was any restraint to you. These refinements are past my low understanding, and can only be comprehended by you great wits.” The charge of ingratitude infuriated Swift: “I own myself indebted to Sir William Temple,” he retorted, “for recommending me to the late King, although without success, and for his choice of me to take care of his posthumous writings. But I hope you will not charge my living in his family as an obligation, for I was educated to little purpose if I retired to his house on any other motives than the benefit of his conversation and advice, and the opportunity of pursuing my studies. For, being born to no fortune, I was at his death as far to seek as ever, and perhaps you will allow that I was of some use to him.”39

  This was not just disappointment at lack of career advancement; it reflects a deep sense of injury in being treated as a mere stenographer. Certain that he himself was a great writer, Temple never considered that Swift might be one.

  When Swift was leaving Moor Park, his sister Jane told their cousin Deane, “My poor brother has lost his best friend, Sir William Temple, who was so fond of him whilst he lived that he made him give up his living in this country [Kilroot in Ireland] to stay with him at Moor Park, and promised to get him one in England; but death came in between, and has left him unprovided both of friend and living.”40 It had pro
bably been several years since Jane was at Moor Park, and there is no way of knowing how much genuine fondness she perceived there. As for “friend,” the word had a wider range of meanings than it does today, and is used here in the sense defined in Johnson’s Dictionary: “favourer, one propitious.”

  Perhaps, though, bygones were finally bygones. In 1737 Jack Temple wrote to Swift to ask whether he could buy a portrait of Lady Giffard that Rebecca Dingley possessed. Swift wrote back courteously to say that he was welcome to it, and that it would be generous to make some gift as well to the aged and impoverished Dingley. Jack was living by then at Moor Park, and Swift added a pleasant reminiscence: “The tree on which I carved those words, factura nepotibus umbram [may it give shade to the nephews], is one of those elms that stand in the hollow ground just before the house; but I suppose the letters are widened and grown shapeless by time.”41

  For six months or so in 1699, Swift hung about London, hoping that a couple of noblemen with Temple connections would help him to the long-desired prebend at Canterbury or Westminster. They didn’t, and probably couldn’t. The young clergyman with little experience was setting his sights too high. The best thing he was able to secure was a chance to be chaplain to Lord Berkeley, on his way to Ireland to govern the country as the representative of the Crown.

  A new century was at hand, and it struck many people as a turning point. In 1700 Dryden captured the transition in a theatrical piece called The Secular Masque (“secular” means “of the century”). The god Janus embodies the end of one era and the start of the next. Diana represents the court’s love of hunting in the early 1600s, Mars the civil wars of midcentury, and Venus the amorous intrigues of the Restoration. At the end Momus, god of laughter, puts them all in their places: