Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

218
The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift
It is remarkable that a writer who was destined to become the greatest
of English humourists, and one of the greatest masters of English
prose, should have wholly failed to discover his true talents before his
twenty-ninth year. There is some reason to believe that the first sketch
of “The Tale of a Tub” was written at Kilroot, but it was on his return
to Moor Park in 1697 that this great work assumed its complete form,
though it was not published till 1704. To the same period also belongs
that exquisite piece of humour, “The Battle of the Books,” the one
lasting fruit of the silly controversy about the comparative merits of
the ancient and modern writers which then greatly occupied writers
both in France and England, and into which Temple, though totally
destitute of classical scholarship, had foolishly flung himself. Of the
merits of the controversy which such scholars as Bentley and Wotton
waged with the Christ Church wits, the world has long since formed
its opinion; but the fact that the burlesque was intended to ridicule
the party who were incontestably in the right does not detract from its
extraordinary literary merits. It appears to have been written to amuse
or gratify Temple, and it was not published till 1704.
[ . . . ]
“Whoever has a true value for Church and State,” Swift wrote at
a later period, “should avoid the extremes of Whig for the sake of the
former and the extremes of Tory on account of the latter.” In these
words we have the true key to his politics. He was at no period of his
life a Jacobite. He fully and cordially accepted the Revolution, and
either never held the Tory doctrine of the divine right of kings, or at
least accepted the king de facto as the rightful sovereign. As long as the
question was mainly a question of dynasty he was frankly Whig, and it
was natural that a young man who was formed in the school of Temple
should have taken this side. On the other hand, Swift was beyond all
things a Churchman, and was accustomed to subordinate every other
consideration to the furtherance of Church interests. In each period of
his life this intense ecclesiastical sentiment appears. Coarse and irreverent
as are many passages in the “Tale of a Tub,” which was published
in 1704, the main purport of the book was to defend the Church of
England, by pouring a torrent of ridicule and hatred on all its opponents,
whether they be Papists, or Nonconformists, or Freethinkers. In
his “Project for the Reformation of Manners,” in his “Sentiments of a
Church of England Man,” in his “Argument against the Abolition of
Christianity,” in his “Letter to a Member of Parliament concerning the