Swift's Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing

Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing

G. Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137311047
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

More than three centuries later, Jonathan Swift's writing remains striking and relevant. In this engaging study, Atkins brings forty-plus years of critical experience to bear on some of the greatest satires ever written, revealing new contexts for understanding post-Reformation reading practices and the development of the modern personal essay.

1

The World Swift Saw Aborning

Abstract: Detailed attention to the literary and religious contexts of Swift’s work helps us comprehend the character and texture of the Modern world that was dawning. Such works as his cousin John Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682) and the little-considered, voluminous writing of the Nonjuring clergyman George Hickes show complementary attacks on this “new world” in establishing the perceived nature of that world. Swift’s early satires thus emerge in opposition to forward-looking Latitudinarianism and “Anglican rationalism,” with which much twentieth-century scholarship mistakenly aligned him.

Atkins, G. Douglas. Swift’s Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137311047.

The period in English life and culture from the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 to, say, the death of Swift in 1745 shows Ancients skirmishing with Moderns on numerous fronts. Literature is but one of those fronts. In its cause, forces of Modernism enlisted commercialism and capitalism, political democracy, religious toleration, and even liberty, and in literary matters the rise of criticism and commentary, frequent and ready butts of Swift’s and Pope’s satire, the vocation of writing that was replacing the avocation, and by no means least in importance, the related enfranchised “priesthood of all readers.” Ancients often wound up not defending the status quo, but romanticizing a past that perhaps never was.

Even Moderns, riding the wave of the future, could not but look back—to “the world turned upside down”¹: the years of Civil War, the nonpareil beheading of the King, and the experiment in so-called democracy called the Commonwealth Interregnum, which discovered, in popular parlance, that “new presbyter [was] but old priest writ large.” The years roughly from 1642 to 1660 burned in English minds and hearts, stoked the fires of popular opposition to Charles II and his court in the late 1670s and early 1680s, and broke out in full force with the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 that spelled the end of Stuart rule and the ascendancy of William and Mary and the House of Orange.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope wrote that Chaos was being “restor’d”: “Light dies before [the] uncreating word” of Dulness and Duncery (Dunciad 4.653).² In this cataclysmic situation, all the arts and sciences were said to combine to blot out forces of difference and distinction, the bright prospects of 1660 long since forgotten, eclipsed by the enthronement of self-interest. “A gloomy Clerk”—Dr. Samuel Clarke—epitomizes the desire as he reveals, in an address to the Queen, what Pope saw as the ultimate cause of the demise of civilization. If the world had once been turned upside down, it was now spiraling ever downward in a vortex of self that recalls Swift’s spider’s total reliance on his own filth and poison. Clarke’s every word bears destructive charge, indicative of Pope’s acute analysis and reflective of a deconstruction of the so-called Age of Reason:

We nobly take the high Priori Road,

And reason downward, till we doubt of God:

Make Nature still incroach upon his plan;

And shove him off as far as e’er we can:

Thrust some Mechanic Cause into his place;

Or bind in Matter, or diffuse in Space.

Or, at one bound o’er-leaping all his laws,

Make God Man’s Image, Man the final Cause,

Find Virtue local, all Relation scorn,

See all in Self, and but for self be born:

Of nought so certain as our Reason still,

Of nought so doubtful as of Soul and Will.

Oh hide the God still more! and make us see

Such as Lucretius drew, a God like Thee:

Wrapt up in Self, a God without a Thought,

Regardless of our merit or default. (4.471–86)

The cause célèbre of eminent darkness and vacancy—the voracious and unrestrained self—is, ultimately, the same as that that promoted the Civil War and its aftermath nearly a hundred years before. Dryden had issued the warning two decades after the Restoration.

As Dryden had greeted and embraced it in 1660, the return of the Stuart monarchy had been the kind of restoration opposite to the return of Chaos and Old Night, predictive of “times whiter Series” that “in soft Centuries shall smoothly run” (Astraea Redux 292–93).³ Dryden addressed a King about to open the country to new possibilities, his own capaciousness truly incarnational (“But most your Life and Blest Example wins” [317]). Paradox abounds in Dryden’s exuberantly witty representation:

And welcome now (Great Monarch) to your own;

Behold th’ approaching cliffs of Albion;

It is no longer Motion cheats your view,

As you meet it, the Land approacheth you.

The Land returns, and in the white it wears

The marks of penitence and sorrow bears. (250–56)

Moreover, Dryden endows Charles II with such “mildness” as shall usher in a reign of peace, which, according to the poet, has precisely been earned through adversity and suffering. Astraea Redux: A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second thus looks both forward and backward, linking suffering and understanding, past and future, new prospects and ancient parallels (including, thanks to a slight echo, Odysseus)—Charles has been purged of any tendency toward rashness and made into a worthy steward moderate and peaceable:

Inur’d to suffer ere he came to raigne

No rash procedure will his actions stain.

To bus’ness ripened by digestive thought

His future rule is into Method brought:

As they who first Proportion understand

With easie Practice reach a Masters hand.

Well might the Ancient Poets then confer

On Night the honour’d name of Counseller,

Since struck with rayes of pros’prous fortune blind

We light alone in dark afflictions find. (87–96)

The darkness that Pope saw aborning in 1744 had already blighted the middle of the previous century, but the darkness Charles had undergone during the Civil War had turned a bad into a good consequence. Mention of “Method” looks forward to the Age of Reason, not to the brilliant impurity of Charles I’s reign or James’s before him, but that of “Ancient Poets” points toward a link that Dryden sought to re-establish. He looked toward the creation of new time; Pope, less than a century later, saw the end of time.

Effectively, Dryden posits a symmetry of age and man, a complementarity that bears signs of Providence. Again he invokes classical glory as a standard of measurement and judgment, concluding Astraea Redux:

Oh happy Prince whom Heav’n hath taught the way

By paying Vowes, to have more Vowes to pay!

Oh happy Age! Oh times like those alone

By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus Throne!

When the joint growth of Armes and Arts foreshow

The World a Monarch, and that Monarch You. (318–23)

While he looked back to the “Ancient Poets,” Dryden also heralded a new age of verse, unlike anything that had come before in English. His epigone T.S. Eliot captured what Dryden was doing in a memorable phrase, about a quite different matter: Dryden was bent on “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme” (Ash-Wednesday).⁴ It is precisely the entailed issues that Dryden took up in his magisterial Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay (1668) that followed in the wake of two sobering events of great consequence, the Plague and the Great Fire of London.

Dryden’s Essay is itself something new: critical commentary dramatized and concretely contextualized, with the four speakers as characters who can be identified with historical persons, including Dryden himself (as Neander, who gets the last word). Critical positions are embodied thanks to Dryden’s fiction, with literature being different from philosophy’s penchant for disembodied ideas. Moreover, the setting for the Essay bears thematic weight. It not only suggests the importance of the critical “warfare” (by juxtaposition with the literal battle then being fought as the English meet the Dutch sailing up the Thames, not far, in fact, from where the little boat moors), but that concrete and particular situation roots the critical discussion; that is to say, criticism is not an isolated matter, separate from “the real world” and questions of culture, politics, and history. The Essay, thus, in more than one fashion works against “mere” transcendence.

The Essay also serves as a panegyric on the present age, its promise, its early achievement, and, above all, its difference from the “previous age.” Early on, in fact, Crites, defender of the Ancients and based on Dryden’s father-in-law Sir Robert Howard, slams one poet of the Cromwell era as “a very Leveller in poetry” and proceeds to this fulsome praise of scientific advances, which Swift and Pope would soon lampoon, but which the Essay sets up as a prelude to literary advances: is it not evident now, asks Crites, “when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome” that

almost a new Nature has been reveal’d to us? that more errours of the School have been detected, more ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• IntroductionThe Spider and the Bee: Ancients vs. Moderns and The Battle of the Books
• 1  The World Swift Saw Aborning
• 2  The Priesthood of All Readers: This Good Had Full as Bad a Consequence
• 3  Swift and the Modern Personal Essay: A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposal
• 4  Tripping and Troping, Inside and Out: Surface, Depth, and the Converting Imagination in A Tale of a Tub
• 5  The Physical Act of Worship, Not the Mental Act of Belief or Assent: Reading An Argument against Abolishing Christianity
• Bibliography
• Index