THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

y a subtle ambiguity, by a troubled delight in oppositions and reversals, and by a play
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with alternative voices, personae, and perspectives — are intimately related to the deeply riven political, religious,
and national issues of the Britain and Ireland of his time.
The severe disruption of Irish affairs attendant upon James II’s attempt to rally Catholics to his cause in the
summer of 1690 obliged Swift to seek refuge in England and it was in the house of the distinguished diplomat and
essayist, Sir William Temple (1628-99), that he composed his effusively celebratory ode on the success of William
III’s expedition against James, the aftershocks of which still unsettle Irish history. Swift remained an adherent of the
principles of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, convinced, as he expresses it in is poem, that William’s ‘fond enemy’ had
tried ‘upon a rubbish heap of broken laws | To climb at victory | Without the footing of a cause’. If in 1702 he
insistently declared himself still a defender of the cause of the Revolution, ‘a lover of liberty’ and much inclined to be
‘what they called a Whig in politics’, he laid equal stress on another principle of the post-1688 settlement, the
supremacy of the Anglican Church. He was a High-Churchman, he told Lord Somers, and he could not conceive ‘how
anyone who wore the habit of a clergyman, could be otherwise’. These loyalties, like so much in Swift’s career as a
priest and a writer, steadily came into conflict with one another, driving him, without obvious incongruity, towards an
espousal of English Toryism and the nascent nationalism of the new Irish Ascendancy. His spiritual and political
adherence to Anglicanism is spelled out in a further product of his years in the service of Sir William Temple, the
prose satire A Tale of a Tub (written in part perhaps c. 1696, published in 1704). This story of the diverging tastes
and opinions of three brothers who represent Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Calvinistic Dissent, constantly
seems to question its own shape through a use of multiple narrators and editors, through subversions, gaps,
disjunctions, and long digressions on criticism, ancient and modern literature and, above all, madness. The core of the
narrative, however, presents an effervescent attack on Catholic additions to, and Protestant detractions from, the
fundamental doctrines of the Church, doctrines metaphorically expressed as a coat which the brothers alter according
to the whims and fashions that they contortedly justify. The ‘Anglican’ brother, Martin, comes out, just, as the most
vindicated of the three. The ‘Author's Apology’ prefaced to the work in 1709 attempts both to excuse its ‘youthful
sallies, which from the grave and wise may deserve a rebuke’ and, far less tongue-in-cheek, to offer a clear celebration
of the Church of England ‘as the most perfect of all others in discipline and doctrine’.
This ‘Author’s Apology’ concludes with the observation that ‘as wit is the noblest and most useful gift of human
nature, so humour is the most agreeable’. Swift’s distinction between ‘wit’ and ‘humour’ is one which is too often
glossed over by modern readers. It was a vital enough one in the eighteenth century. Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755
defines ‘wit’ as both ‘the intellect’ and as ‘quickness of fancy’, attaching to this second definition a quotation from
Locke: ‘Wit lying in the assemblage of ideas, and pulling these together with quickness and
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variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures in the fancy.’ For
Johnson one pertinent definition of ‘humour’ entailed ‘grotesque imagery, jocularity, merriment’, and he illustrated
this with a brief reference to Sir William Temple: ‘In conversation humour is more than wit, easiness more than
knowledge.’ Swift had aspired to variety and to an intermixture of wit and humour, quickness of fancy and jocularity,
both in A Tale of a Tub and in the satire on the pretensions of modern literature, The Battle of the Books, published
with it in 1704. The Battle of the Books or, to give the allegorical squib its full title, A Full and True Account of the
Battel fought last Friday, Between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library, originated as a
complement to Temple’s defence of classical literature as opposed to its modern vernacular rival. The real ‘battle’,
fiercely fought over in the academies and salons of Europe, was once taken very seriously, not to say pompously, but
Swift’s allegory part ridicules, part supports the validity of the contention. In the midst of the dispute the animalloving
Æsop mediates between the claims of a pro-‘modern’ spider, who spins his dirty webs out of his own entrails,
and a pro-‘ancient’ bee, who goes to nature in order to produce, in the now famous phrase, ‘the two noblest of things
... sweetness and light’. Although Æsop reaches a reasoned conclusion, his arbitration simply serves to heighten
animosities. The consequent tumult spills over into a farcically confused disorder in which Aristotle tries to fire an
arrow at Bacon and hits Descartes by mistake, and Virgil encounters his translator, Dryden, accoutred in a helmet
nine times too large for his head. Dryden’s attempts to soothe his opponent are diminished by the tenor of a voice
which, ‘suited to the visage’, sounds ‘weak and remote’. The published text of The Battle of the Books, purporting to
be derived from a much-damaged manuscript, is broken up by non sequiturs and hiatuses and its end ends nothing,
concluding as it does with an aborted new paragraph.
Swift’s later satires play with the idea of a narrator who appears to have assumed a mask in order to strip masks
from the men, the women, and the opinions which are the object of his attack. All draw more distinctly from his