by Leo Damrosch
Swift was intensely proud of his achievement. During his declining years, when a relative read aloud from it, he exclaimed, “Good God! what a flow of imagination had I, when I wrote this!”3 Anyone who dips into it will see the truth of that, but unlike Gulliver’s Travels, published two decades later, it is heavy going for a modern reader. Two main points concern us here. One is the way the Tale revealed Swift’s great gifts, hidden until then. The other is the way it seriously damaged his career.
In a defense later on, Swift emphasized that “there generally runs an irony through the thread of the whole book.”4 Irony can be simple when a speaker obviously means the opposite of what he’s saying, but in this book it’s seldom obvious. A Swiss reviewer commented perceptively, “An odd game goes on through the book, where we often do not know whether the author is making fun or not, nor of whom, nor what his intention is.” Swift’s ironies are maddeningly hard to pin down. Dr. Lyon remembered a wit calling him “the first left-handed genius in the world; this metaphor is taken from fencing, where a left-handed adversary makes the wickedest pass, and the most difficult to be parried.”5 Or as we might say today, the ball comes at you with an unfamiliar spin. The trickiness is all the more disconcerting because Swift often speaks ingratiatingly—“Hark in your ear”—and at the same time abuses the reader. Claude Rawson remarks “the note of quarrelsome intimacy that is the hallmark of Swift’s satire.”6
MODERNISM AND GRUB STREET
A Tale of a Tub, like The Battle of the Books, which was published in the same volume, jeers at modernism of every kind. (The first citation for the word modernism in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a letter by Swift, though he meant by that only faddish expressions, not a worldview.) “I claim an absolute authority in right,” declares the mock author of the Tale, “as the freshest modern, which gives me a despotic power over all authors before me.” Homer, he says, is grossly overrated, because we know so much that Homer didn’t. “What can be more defective and unsatisfactory than his long dissertation upon tea?”7 Obviously, Homer had never heard of tea.
Swift’s models were Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the Greek satires of Lucian. Fielding saw the affinity: “To translate Lucian well into English is to give us another Swift in our own language.” But Lucian is relaxed and genial, whereas Swift is challenging and intense. Rabelais isn’t a close model either, though Pope said Swift was “a great reader and admirer of Rabelais,” and imagined seeing him “laugh and shake in Rabelais’ easy chair.” Coleridge got it right, quoting Rabelais himself: “Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco—the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.”8
Among other things the Tale is a mock book, parodying the cut-and-paste quality of many productions of the day. It takes forever to get started. First there’s a dedication to a politician, next a message from “the Bookseller,” then a dedication to “Prince Posterity,” then a “Preface,” and at long last “Section I: The Introduction.” In some ways the Tale anticipates postmodernism.9
One of Swift’s targets is Grub Street, defined by Johnson as “originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet.” Johnson’s mention of dictionaries was no accident. When desperately poor, he had labored there himself.
These writers were a new type, dependent not on wealthy patrons but on publishers who were feeding the demand of a middle-class reading public. What kept them in poverty was not just the ephemeral nature of what they churned out—one of them compared his job to slaving in a coal mine, except that he got to work in daylight—but the nonexistence of royalties.10 That concept did not exist. In 1710 a Copyright Act would finally protect publishers from having their books pirated, but it was still the publisher who owned a book outright. Only a really famous author could negotiate a good price, and no matter how well the book sold he would never get another penny.
Pope derided Grub Street “hacks” for their poverty, but Swift never did. Throughout his career he made constant use of this new publishing industry. He was a prolific writer of political pamphlets, and many of his poems also appeared first as single-page broadside sheets. What Swift did despise was mindless, formulaic writing with nothing to say. At the end of the Tale he imagines being reduced “to write upon nothing; when the subject is utterly exhausted, to let the pen still move on, by some called the ghost of wit, delighting to walk after the death of its body.”11
Off and on, Tale mimics the ramblings of a bad writer, who introduces himself as a Grub Street regular: “The shrewdest pieces of this treatise were conceived in bed, in a garret; at other times (for a reason best known to myself) I thought fit to sharpen my invention with hunger; and in general, the whole work was begun, continued, and ended under a long course of physic, and a great want of money.”12 But the voice is always Swift’s own, even when it’s ironic and parodic. And the left-handed ironies allow him to suggest things that he would never dare to say straight out.
DEFENDING RELIGION OR SUBVERTING IT?
Swift disliked the whole tendency of modern thought, centering in the scientific program of the Royal Society that threatened to reduce all of life to a materialist explanation. But that wasn’t what made the Tale of a Tub notorious—it was the allegorical story of the brothers and their father’s will.
Since the brothers are triplets they ought to be equals, but competition soon breaks out. Peter, representing Roman Catholicism, brazenly claims that he is the eldest and has a right to be obeyed. Jack, named for John Calvin, fights back ferociously. Martin, recalling Martin Luther, is more temperate, and represents something like the Anglican middle way.
The allegory begins like a fairy tale. “Once upon a time, there was a man who had three sons by one wife, and all at a birth; neither could the midwife tell certainly which was the eldest. Their father died while they were young; and upon his deathbed, calling the lads to him, spoke thus: ‘Sons, because I have purchased no estate, nor was born to any, I have long considered of some good legacies to bequeath you; and at last, with much care as well as expense, have provided each of you (here they are) a new coat.’”13
Peter smothers his coat in fancy decorations, symbolizing the worldly ostentation and doctrinal inventiveness of Catholicism, and then has to concoct far-fetched reinterpretations of the will, which stipulated that the coat must never be altered. He locks up the will so that his brothers can’t see it, but they break open his strongbox and make copies for themselves (Protestant translations of the Bible, which the Catholic Church restricted to the Latin Vulgate). Jack, a Puritan determined to be as different from the Catholics as possible, rips the decorations off his own coat and leaves it in shreds. “Ah, good brother Martin,” he pleads, “do as I do, for the love of God! Strip, tear, pull, rent, flay off all, that we may appear as unlike the rogue Peter as it is possible.” The moderate Martin removes only such frills as he safely can, and refuses to damage his coat any further.14
What ignited criticism was not so much the story as the way Swift told it. “Everything spiritual and valuable,” William Empson says with Swift in mind, “has a gross and revolting parody, very similar to it, with the same name. Only unremitting judgment can distinguish between them.”15 In his later satires Swift usually planted clues to guide that judgment, but in the Tale of a Tub the ironies keep turning inside out. Many readers felt that it wasn’t just abuses in religion that were under attack, but religion itself. And when the author’s identity became known, it was scandalous that such a subversive satire had been written by a clergyman.
Swift’s fondness for making abstractions concrete led to serious problems. Why isn’t it blasphemous to make the three brothers pleasure-seekers in modern London? “They writ, and raillied [exchanged witty repartee], and rhymed, and sung, and said, and said nothing; they drank, and fought, and whored, and slept, and swore, and took snuff; they went to new pla
ys on the first night, haunted the chocolate-houses, beat the watch, lay on bulks, and got claps [beat night watchmen, slept on shop stalls, and caught venereal disease]; they bilked hackney coachmen, ran in debt with shopkeepers, and lay with their wives; they killed bailiffs, kicked fiddlers downstairs, ate at Locket’s, loitered at Will’s.”16 Locket’s was a fashionable eating house at Charing Cross; Will’s was the coffeehouse, favored by writers, where Dryden used to hold forth.
It was likewise outrageous to suggest that divine inspiration was really the result of disgusting vapors with a physiological cause. Swift invents a sect of Aeolists who hold that air is the principle of all things, and that belching is “the noblest act of a rational creature.” Puritans liked to use the biblical term vessel to refer to the body (“he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified”), and Swift made it literal: “At other times were to be seen several hundreds linked together in a circular chain, with every man a pair of bellows applied to his neighbour’s breech, by which they blew up each other to the shape and size of a tun; and for that reason, with great propriety of speech, did usually call their bodies their vessels.” Like Greek oracles, these people are inspired by vapors that penetrate their bodily orifices, women being especially gifted because their organs are “better disposed for the admission of those oracular gusts.”17 Freud would have been impressed. Here are both anal and genital sources for religious emotion.
In a slighter work published together with the Tale, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, Swift made that point explicitly. “Persons of a visionary devotion, either men or women, are in their complexion of all others the most amorous; for zeal is frequently kindled from the same spark with other fires. . . . I have been informed by certain sanguine brethren of the first class that in the height and orgasmus of their spiritual exercise, it has been frequent with them * * * * *, immediately after which they found the spirit to relax and flag of a sudden with the nerves.”18 Swift was fond of using asterisks as if parts of the manuscript had been lost, as editors of classical texts often did. Needless to say, many readers took offense at the implication that religious emotion was a symptom of repressed or displaced sexuality.
One of the original illustrations to the Tale shows three ways in which men gratify their egos by rising above their fellows. It is dominated by a lugubrious Puritan preacher, high above his glum congregation (they were encouraged to brood on their unworthiness). Puritans favored simplicity in their pulpits, which were popularly derided as tubs, here made literal. In the distance, climbing a ladder to the gallows, a condemned man mirrors the preacher’s gesture in his farewell statement, achieving a final celebrity. And just below, a mountebank on a stage prepares to amaze the crowd with some sort of magic trick. All three are phonies, and by implication, all in the same way.
A fundamental doctrine of Calvinism was predestination, the inability of human beings to alter the fate foreordained by God. Swift translates that theology into everyday terms:
[Jack] would shut his eyes as he walked along the streets, and if he happened to bounce his head against a post or fall into the kennel (as he seldom missed either to do one or both), he would tell the gibing prentices who looked on that he submitted with entire resignation, as to a trip or a blow of fate, with whom he found by long experience how vain it was either to wrestle or to cuff, and whoever durst undertake to do either would be sure to come off with a swingeing fall or a bloody nose. “It was ordained,” said he, “some few days before the Creation, that my nose and this very post should have a rencounter, and therefore Providence thought fit to send us both into the world in the same age, and to make us countrymen and fellow citizens. . . . ’Tis true, I have broke my nose against this post, because Providence either forgot or did not think it convenient to twitch me by the elbow and give me notice to avoid it.”
30. The preacher in his tub.
This was very risky on Swift’s part. Anglicans might not believe in predestination, but they did believe in Providence, and it was easy to suspect that Providence itself was under attack. Swift had second thoughts, and when he brought out a new edition both mentions of “Providence” had disappeared, replaced by the innocuous words “Nature” and “Fortune.”19
A sect that worships tailors holds that the universe is “a large suit of clothes,” and each person “a micro-coat, or rather a complete suit of clothes with all its trimmings.” Values and ideals are thus external and easily shed.
Is not religion a cloak, honesty a pair of shoes worn out in the dirt, self-love a surtout, vanity a shirt, and conscience a pair of breeches, which, though a cover for lewdness as well as nastiness, is easily slipped down for the service of both? . . . ’Tis true, indeed, that these animals, which are vulgarly called suits of clothes or dresses, do according to certain compositions receive different appellations. If one of them be trimmed up with a gold chain, and a red gown, and a white rod, and a great horse, it is called a Lord Mayor; if certain ermines and furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop.20
It wasn’t news that religion could be used as a hypocritical mask, or that a bishop could have high status but no inner worth (Johnson defines “lawn” as “fine linen, remarkable for being used in the sleeves of bishops”). But Swift’s description sounds all too much like what someone who actually did despise religion would say. Voltaire commented, “He claims to have respected the father while giving a hundred strokes of the birch to the three children. People of a difficult turn of mind believed that the stick was so long it reached to the father as well.”21
As for Catholicism, there are a lot of knockabout jabs at relics, holy water, miracles, and so on, but the critical issue is transubstantiation, the doctrine that the consecrated bread and wine in the Eucharist are literally the body and blood of Christ. When Peter invites his brothers to a dinner of roast mutton, he serves up instead a loaf of bread. Jack protests:
“By God, my Lord,” said he, “I can only say that to my eyes, and fingers, and teeth, and nose, it seems to be nothing but a crust of bread.” Upon which the second [brother] put in his word: “I never saw a piece of mutton in my life so nearly resembling a slice from a twelve-penny loaf.” “Look ye, gentlemen,” cries Peter in a rage, “to convince you what a couple of blind, positive, ignorant, willful puppies you are, I will use but this plain argument: by God, it is true, good, natural mutton as any in Leadenhall Market, and God confound you both eternally if you offer to believe otherwise.” Such a thundering proof as this left no further room for objection.22
This captures the aggressive anger that true believers can give way to, but that’s not all it does. Protestants held that Communion bread was only a sign or symbol, not literally Christ’s body, but still, what it symbolized was Christ. And since Christ was regularly referred to as the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God, it was outrageous to see him represented as mutton.23
THE HAPPINESS OF BEING WELL DECEIVED
These religious issues have cooled with time, but one section of the Tale, “A Digression concerning Madness,” still speaks with unsettling power. Like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, but far more bitterly, it bundles together every kind of human craziness. Whether in religion, science, or politics, people are all too frequently insane. War, for example, is the acting out of irrational aggression, and like emotional religion, it may reflect displaced sexuality. “Having to no purpose used all peaceable endeavours, the collected part of the semen . . . ascended to the brain. The very same principle that influences a bully to break the windows of a whore who has jilted him naturally stirs up a great prince to raise mighty armies, and dream of nothing but sieges, battles, and victories. Teterrima belli causa.” In Swift’s Latin quotation the crucial word, cunnus, is discreetly omitted. Horace is referring to Helen of Troy and saying that “a cunt was the most dreadful cause of war.”24
In all of these versions of madness, the focus of Swift’s satire is obvious. But then th
e digression veers in a new direction, and exposes the human impulse to be in denial more generally. Or is it not just an impulse, but a psychological necessity?
Whatever philosopher or projector can find out an art to solder and patch up the flaws and imperfections of Nature, will deserve much better of mankind, and teach us a more useful science, than that so much in present esteem of widening and exposing them (like him who held anatomy [that is, dissection] to be the ultimate end of physic). And he whose fortunes and dispositions have placed him in a convenient station to enjoy the fruits of this noble art; he that can with Epicurus content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superficies of things; such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity, called the possession of being well deceived, the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.25
No one wants to be a fool, Swift least of all. But is the alternative to be a knave? We know that Swift was deeply suspicious of Epicurus’s materialism, according to which all we can perceive is the superficial “films” that objects give off. We also know that he had a disillusioned view of human nature, and no sympathy with attempts to patch and solder it. “He is fond of probing wounds to their depth,” Orrery said, “and of enlarging them to open view. He prefers caustics, which erode proud flesh, to softer balsamics, which give more immediate ease.”26