[In the essay that follows, Ramsey discusses why Jonathan Swift entered the Battle of the Books, the tactics he used, what role his book of the same name played, and how Swift's arguments were indicative of his future philosophical direction.]

Swift published The Battle of the Books along with A Tale of a Tub and the Discourse on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit in 1704, shortly after the death of his patron, Sir William Temple. Temple, who had seen fit to write in defense of the Ancients, had been vigorously attacked in print for his trouble—and for his errors. Swift, then Temple's secretary, stepped in—probably without being asked—to defend his employer by depicting his chief critics William Wotton and Richard Bentley, along with a generous selection of their Modern allies, as the losers in a mock-epic battle with their elders and betters. The Battle was not published as part of Temple's reply, but it clearly shows the Modern army routed, Wotton and Bentley in particular made too laughable to be taken seriously.

Criticism commonly suggests that while Swift may have won the day for Temple, he did so only among a small circle and only after Temple's death.¹ Furthermore, criticism generally alleges that Swift's victory was secured by the use of wit and invective, by disparaging valid scientific achievements. Swift might have relieved Temple's discomfort, this view holds, but he was wrong about the Moderns.²

Unlike other defenders of the Ancients, Swift goes beyond personal attacks on Wotton and Bentley, and he presents a consistent philosophy or system of values. His personal contribution consists principally in the use of two devices unremarked in this particular connection. First, Swift introduces such Modern scientists as Halley, Harvey, and even Bacon into the Battle; but, while he manages to leave the reader with an impression of their inferiority, he does not depict them as defeated by their Ancient counterparts. Rather, using the false hiatus, he pretends that key sections of the manuscript have been destroyed, thus leaving the outcome of these contests in doubt. Second, Swift silently changes the rules of the game Temple and his critics had been playing. They had used the terms Ancient and Modern in a chronological sense—“old” and “new”—but Swift uses them to mean “worthy of lasting” and “ephemeral.” The device is tacit re-definition. These two tactics produce a kind of subtext to the defense of Temple, an early statement of the humanistic values which continue through Swift's life to inform his attacks on those who cause or perpetuate sickness, suppression, or want.

In selecting combatants and thus defining the scope of the conflict, Swift follows Temple. Temple's professed aim had been to censure the pride of those who felt that man had broken the cyclic pattern of history, that significant explication of the universe was possible, and that the Ancients had been excelled. There were, Temple believed, only so many things that man could expect to know; and there was a limit to the success he could expect to attain in any art.³ Temple did not believe that the Ancients were constitutionally superior to modern men, or that they were superior in any way as a result of their chronological position. On the contrary, he argued that any Modern might be capable of as much knowledge, learning, or art as any Ancient, but that unfortunately no such man happened to exist just then. In the field of philosophy he finds Descartes and Hobbes the Ancients' only challengers, and suggests that Fontanelle is the only Modern hardy enough to claim superiority in poetry—a presumption against which, he says, “There could, I think, never have been given stronger evidence than by his own poems, printed together with that treatise.”⁴

Temple found the sciences uninteresting. He preferred moral to natural philosophy, and while he was aware of wide-spread ferment over the discovery of new principles, he felt no personal excitement. The modern scholars had, he observed, “for a hundred years past, learned their lesson pretty well”⁵—but their education had only given them airs. So unaware was he of specifics that he could question the validity of the Copernican system and Harvey's demonstration of circulation; so lacking was he in any grasp of application that he did not believe these discoveries, even if they were correct, would change the conclusions of astronomy or alter the practice of medicine. Minimal effort would have saved Temple from displaying this lack of information, which the ungenerous could and did call ignorance. But, the same is not true of his selection of the Epistles of Phalarus and the Fables of Aesop as outstanding and unsurpassed products of the Ancients. Highly specialized scholarship was required to refute him here, and his embarrassment drew attention because the field was one over which he claimed some command. Swift undertook to defend Temple on both charges, but without endorsing either his narrowness or his errors: Swift manages this by quietly recognizing the accomplishments of science through his use of lacunae and by forthrightly dismissing the textual demonstrations as misguided and trivial.

Swift counters Bentley's dating of the Fables and Epistles with a bold attack: he claims that they are Ancient anyway. Whatever his precise opinion of Aesop and Phalarus, he must accept in his own heart Temple's position, as he redefines it in order to make this assertion. In the case of the scientists, however, he can find no ground to share with his employer and must choose evasive tactics, taking as much care to mask his own disagreement as to further his case.

Swift was perhaps grateful, then, to confine his own references to those introduced by Temple. Because Temple's mistake over the authenticity of the Epistles and the Fables had become the popular focus of the attack, Swift could keep his own focus on the literary side of the quarrel. He insists on the physical nature of his subject—he is writing about books—and thus he reduces the findings of Harvey and the poetry of Virgil into identical objects, equally irrelevant in their concrete nature to the philosophical grounds of the dispute. Since books, however, by their very nature suggest literature rather than science, and since the Ancients were far stronger in an area which allowed them to invoke taste as a decisive judge, their cause gained substantially by the basis of Swift's conceit.

In the fighting itself, the literary superiority of the Ancients is generally apparent. No Ancient champion falls, though on several occasions an Ancient spares a Modern who also possesses some great merit. Thus Cowley is bisected by the sword of Pindar, but one of his halves—one cover and a certain number of pages representing his love poetry, the reader learns through a note which defends the Pindarics—is metamorphosed by Venus into a dove to help pull her chariot. Cooper's Hill secures recognition for Denham: that poem is rescued from the general ruin by Apollo, who turns it into a star. Dryden, who receives more detailed treatment, is recognized and spared by Virgil, but is described in very ridiculous terms, and obtains mercy only by humbly allowing the Ancient as his master. When the two exchange horses as tokens, Dryden is frightened and cannot mount—but a hiatus interrupts the scene and saves him from further confusion.

Swift uses the hiatus to avoid making a commitment in the case of every natural philosopher introduced, with the exception of Descartes. Descartes' destruction at the hands of Aristotle is described in graphic terms, but the arrow that strikes him was meant for Bacon, who is pictured as a “valiant Modern.”⁶ The contest between Aristotle and Bacon is then interrupted again, so that Swift leaves the unemphatic but distinct impression that the seminal figure of the empirical revolution is at least proof against the Ancients. The narrator's description of the confrontation between Galen and Paracelsus breaks off just as the Ancient's shield blocks the first blow, delivered this time “with a mighty Force” (244) by Galen. Again the Modern is treated as a serious opponent, and the issue of this combat, too, is left in doubt. Now Temple had specifically though casually disparaged Harvey's work, and when Swift introduces Harvey, he appears at the head of “a vast Body of Dragoons” (236), the entire medical profession. Rather than enhancing Harvey's stature, however, this eminence associates the researcher and theoretician with the common, maltrained practitioner and exposes him to the abuse conventional for quacks. His followers are armed with scythes, instruments dipped in poison, and powders which kill patients but escape detection as the cause of death. The pun on “white Powder which infallibly killed without Report” (236) makes Harvey's support for the Moderns even more suspect, and it suggests Swift's indignation at the idea that gunpowder might be a great achievement. However, when the time for combat comes, Harvey is passed over in a fragment which reveals that he is wounded but says nothing of how honorably, or of his opponent's fate.

Swift thus handles the case against science in a few brief paragraphs consisting largely of lacunae. He deemphasizes science further by placing all the contests involving its champions at the beginning of the battle, in contrast to the elaborate description of Boyle's defeat of Wotton and Bentley, which seems to conclude the whole war. Although Swift reports that information concerning the actual outcome is lost because of another imperfection in the manuscript, he clearly intended his treatment of Temple's chief adversaries to enjoy the concluding emphasis. The final sentence, his promise to immortalize the “beloved, loving Pair” by means of his “Wit and Eloquence,” is an ironic repetition of a conventional concluding device.

In fact, Swift's endorsement of a cyclic concept of history means he believes it impossible to assign final eminence to anyone. At most he could point out the greatest men to have come along. These great men are Ancients in the sense that their achievements will withstand the test of time and retain their value for posterity. Swift, adopting the scope of Temple's essay, does not diffuse his point by mentioning recent examples of such greatness—Milton, Shakespeare, or Dante, for example. He does, however, tacitly distinguish three kinds of Ancients: 1) the great Greeks and Romans; 2) modern admirers and defenders of these temporal Ancients, a somewhat junior or honorary category which includes Temple (228); and 3) those born in any age whose achievements are great enough to last with those of the temporal Ancients, and who are thus on an equal footing with them. Placing himself in this last class with a great deal of impudence as well as some sublimity, the Apologist says: “Therefore, since the Book seems calculated to live at least as long as our Language and our Tast admit no great Alterations, I am content to convey some Apology along with it” (3).

The association of the term “Ancient” with quality and durability underlies Swift's satiric treatment of Modernism throughout the volume. Modern art, he maintains, cannot discern quality, and Modern science does not care about it. For Swift, those authors and critics (soon to join Pope's dunces) who claim that the age excels or equals antiquity are equipped at best with the scientific characteristic of mechanical or mathematical precision. This qualitative/quantitative distinction is central to the famous dialogue between the Spider and the Bee. Their confrontation, staged high in the window of the King's library, takes place just as the argument between the books below is about to escalate from words to action. The character of the Spider refers directly to Wotton or Bentley in some respects—pugnacity and the use of abusive language—but in others represents the Moderns on a broader scale. Swift certainly shared Temple's contempt for the systems of Descartes and Burnet, but systems in general he perhaps thought more dangerous than Temple would allow. Thus while he was forced by Temple's claims to deal with Bacon, and by his own rules to grant him escape with honor, he may well have been happy to ignore Newton, whom Temple disregarded completely in Of Ancient and Modern Learning. Newton's Principia had been published in 1689, and Swift would have been more aware than Temple of its impact. Kathleen Williams observes of the period, “Simplicity can now be gained only by leaving out what has its own often unwelcome validity.”⁷ But Swift cannot leave it out. He may not congratulate Modern genius, as his immediate occasion for writing would hardly allow, but where Temple introduces great Moderns, Swift acknowledges by means of the hiatus that they can hold their own with the Ancients or, in his terms, that they may well be among them.

For Swift, however, there is genius and “genius.” The Spider boasts not only that he has designed his web according to his own accomplishments in mathematics and the sciences, but also that he has produced all of his own raw material. The Bee must grant the Spider credit for his design, but he is ready to focus his criticism on the substance of the web: “In that Building of yours, there might, for ought I know, have been Labor and Method enough, but by woeful Experience for us both, 'tis too plain, the Materials are nought, and I hope, you will henceforth take Warning, and consider Duration and Matter as well as Method and Art” (232). In one sense Swift liberalizes here the line Temple took in Of Ancient and Modern Learning. Perhaps because his education was more current or his reading wider, Swift recognizes the significance of recently developed scientific techniques and discoveries. However, he carefully separates a technique from its product. He saw the contemporary situation more clearly than did Temple, but he applied the same test. The product of any endeavor should be substantial knowledge about how man can better occupy his place in the world and thus improve the quality of his life. In Modernism—science, art, and scholarship alike—he found instead an increasing concern with inquiry for its own sake, the product of which he equated with cobwebs or some worse form of excrement.

Swift thus gives his bitterest, most violent language to general denunciations of the Moderns, though he employs his most extravagant invention in dealing with such individuals as Dryden. The Bee's reply to the Spider is the central example of his vehemence: “You possess a good plentiful Store of Dirt and Poison in your Breast; And, 'tho I would by no means, lessen or disparage your genuine stock of either, yet, I doubt you are somewhat obliged for an Encrease of both, to a little foreign Assistance. Your inherent Portion of Dirt, does not fail of Acquisitions, by Sweepings exhaled from below: and one Insect furnishes you with a share of Poison to destroy another” (232). Swift's Aesop is scarcely less brutal in applying the Bee's speech to the Modern books in the library: “Erect your Schemes with as much Method and Skill as you please; yet if the materials be nothing but Dirt spun out of your own Entrails (the guts of Modern Brains) the Edifice will conclude at last in a Cobweb” (234). Aesop is especially appropriate as a narrator here since he, along with Phalarus, was discredited by Bentley as a spurious Ancient. Implicit in Swift's use of Aesop is the charge that Bentley missed the point. The qualities that make Aesop an Ancient cannot be determined by scientific scholasticism and the assignment of a precise chronological location. These are quantitative factors, while quality assures Aesop's eminence. Critics who do not approach Aesop on a qualitative basis can do no more than throw mud on him and steal his armor (258); he remains essentially intact.

Swift's anger reflects a view of the universe which infinitely reduces man's importance, and therefore his capacity to deal with the roots of his own unhappy situation. Swift believes that the real obstacles to successful life are not material, and thus are not subject to technological manipulation. The impediments to general fulfillment and the “good” life (only incidentally a happy life) for mankind are rooted in moral self-understanding and in interpersonal relations governed by that general understanding. A working, if unpoetic, definition of what Swift means by Sweetness and Light—the things that improve the quality of life—will not fit the products of a scientific system. The ingredients of Sweetness and Light, according to the Bee, cannot be identified automatically according to rule-governed formulae, and a system for selecting them cannot be arrived at by all the scientists in the world, even if they are envisioned working blindly on their own small part of the great task.

The ingredients of Sweetness and Light are found, the Bee tells us, “by an universal Range, with long Search, much study, true Judgment, and Distinction of Things” (232). Aesop echoes this formula, saying that the Ancients do not pretend to be the source of their own material, but search through every corner of nature in making their observations. Swift extends Temple's argument by emphasizing the criteria used by the Ancients in selecting the objects of their “research.” He understands better than Temple that after Bacon's insistence on the importance of a vast compendium of factual knowledge the charge of “sufficiency” must be made with care. The purest Modernism advances its great claims not on behalf of any individual, but on behalf of all mankind. The individual rather claims humility. This meek assumption of a small part in a large task hides for Swift insidious pride not in what man can do but in what he is. The Ancients are ready enough to admit great men, heroes, but place their greatness in overcoming the limitations inherent in their humanity, not in fulfilling the exalted destiny of the species. Swift therefore concentrates his attack on the practical result of granting all things equal value as subjects for investigation. This failure, in fact refusal, to make a choice is the thrust of Aesop's recapitulation of the Bee's practice: “The difference is, that instead of Dirt and Poison, we have rather chose to fill our Hives with Honey and Wax” (234). Emphasis here is on the element of choice. The Ancients use what the Bee called “true Judgment and Distinction of Things” to make a human, and therefore moral, judgment; the Moderns exercise theories rigidly bound to physical fact, and their operation—unbiased by any consideration of the possible or probable effect of their products (gunpowder, atom bomb, particle beam) on humanity—is therefore amoral.

Swift's two devices thus merge to produce the figure of a Modern competent to the point of genius, able to stand with the Ancients in point of intellect and talent, but incomplete. The Modern is blinded by a distinterestedness which prevents him from caring not only about which way an experiment turns out, but also about the nature of the experiment and its implications. Science for the sake of man is one thing, science for the sake of knowledge another. This distinction between Ancient and Modern not only gives philosophical direction to The Battle of the Books, one of Swift's earliest works, but also lies near the source of his perplexing anti-intellectualism and continues to pervade his greatest writing: The king of Brobdingnag's revulsion at the idea of gunpowder amplifies the punning allusion which connects gunpowder to Harvey. The Battle of the Books is not a mere exercise in vicious wit; clever though it is, it presents a consistent and complex view of innovation, discovery, and true quality in life, themes which Swift continued to develop through all his major works.

Notes

1. A. C. Elias, Jr., in Swift at Moor Park: Problems in Biography and Criticism (Philadelphia, 1982), see especially p. 194, argues that Swift was satirizing Temple to a considerable extent in the pieces he wrote at Moor Park. This would explain why he was not eager to publish while Temple lived.

2. Donald Greene, in “Swift: Some Caveats,” Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Toronto, 1973), 2: 341-58, observes that Swift has been generally misrepresented as an enemy of science, and asserts that the Bee's reply to the Spider essentially advocates Baconian empiricism.

3. Margaret J. Osler points usefully to the different attitudes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists, and to the distinctions drawn between science and natural philosophy, and between knowledge and probability. See “Certainty, Skepticism, and Scientific Optimism: The Roots of Eighteenth-Century Attitudes toward Scientific Knowledge,” in Probability, Time, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (New York, 1979), pp. 3-28.

4. Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Ann Arbor, 1963), pp. 196-97.

5. Ibid., p. 62.

6. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of A Tub: To which is added The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nicol Smith, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1958), p. 244. Citations presented parenthetically in the text refer to this edition.

7. Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence, Kan., 1958), p. 25.