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SWIFT AND THE ANCIENTS-MODERNS CONTROVERSY Philip Pinkus There is apparently no question about Swift's loyalties in the Ancients-Moderns controversy; he is considered an Ancient. The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub seem to demonstrate this unmistakably. But how much an Ancient is he? and of what kind? These are legitimate questions, for when we look closely at Swift's writings we soon realize that the standard definitions of the terms do not fit. In fact, we are no longer sure what an "Ancient" is. The difficulty is in the definitions. In Swift's day "Ancient" and "Modern " were, for the most part, epithets of abuse employed in the heat of controversy, and though they carried a meaning, that meaning was seldom precise. One might even argue that preciseness of meaning comes later, imposed by scholars in search of neat definitions. The fullest definition of the "Ancient" has been given by llichard Foster Jones in his Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Background of the Battle of the Books,' a landmark in seventeenth-century studies. Mr. Jones ranges wide to explain the term. In the universal conflict that has beset all societies, he explains, the Ancient is the conservative and the traditionalist who is opposed to the forces of liberalism and progress. The stock arguments of conservatism since the world began appear in the defence of antiquity. We should honor the ancients because they are the fathers of our knowledge and have received the sanction of many ages and of all the universities. We should be slow to discard the findings of civilization . There were an irrational hatred of novelty and an equally irrational love for the old and tried. Individual wits who would pit their own ideas against the tested truth of the past should be curbed in their pride.2 Before we can understand Mr. Jones, though, a few questions have to be answered, such as, what is progress? what is conservatism? is conser- SWIFT 47 vatism necessarily opposed to progress? and if to be conservative is to be obstinately rooted to the past can we apply this label to Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell or any of the Queen Anne wits, all of whom have been called Ancients? Even if we could answer such questions, Mr. Jones's description of the Ancient is still questionable. Most members of the Royal Society, who were brought up on the classics, would not deny honour to the ancients as "the fathers of our knowledge"-and if anything is Modern it is the Royal Society. If we insist that Swift is an Ancient, an irrational hatred of novelty and an irrational love for the old and tried are characteristics that can hardly be attributed to him. Swift's attitude to the past, it can be shown, was not rigid, and certainly not irrational. We cannot even say that the "wits who would pit their own ideas against the tested truth of the past" are Modern, because if we do, that makes a Modern of Swift. In A Tale of a Tub, he partially rejected Plato and Aristotle, and totally rejected Diogenes, Appollonius, and Lucretius.' As for the Ancients' caution that one should be slow to discard the findings of civilization, on this point Swift would stand patthough to know precisely what he is standing on we should have to know how slow is slow. This is the general part of Mr. Jones's definition. More particularly, Mr. Jones makes the theory of nature's decay the characteristic mark of the Ancient. "Probably no single factor," he says, "was so responsible for the feeling of modern inferiority as the belief that all nature was decaying in its old age. It lay, indeed, at the bottom of most manifestations of the worship of antiquity, though frequently not finding expression in words.'" And again: "Perhaps, more than we discover in print, this lingering conception of universal decay was at the bottom of the worship of antiquity and the regard for Latin and Greek writers which characterized the criticism of the neo-classical period.'" Unfortunately, we cannot examine what is not in print, but if we concern ourselves...

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