No Apologies, Dr. Swift!

...give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.

— Oscar Wilde

Give me a Penny, and I’ll sing you a Song: But give me the Penny first .

— A Tale of a Tub

“An Apology” forA Tale of a Tub, which has been printed first in every edition ofA Tale of a Tub since 1734, makes a very misleading entry intoA Tale of a Tub and should be relegated to the end ofA Tale of a Tub as an appendix, which it is.

My argument is that “An Apology” makes a misleading entry intoA Tale of a Tub because it is not part of the creative act that producedA Tale of a Tub . “Creative act” is not a topic that can be confronted head-on; it is not susceptible of direct analysis. The best we can do is to imagine what kind of man Swift was in 1696–97 (when he began or resumed work onA Tale of a Tub) and what he wanted to make. Here we are skirting dangerously close to the “ SerbonianBog” of authorial intention into which “Armies whole [of textual critics] have sunk.” ¹ But there is no other way.

Swift’s first literary ambition was to become a panegyrist in the ingratiating manner of Waller and the mock-Pindaric stanzas of Cowley: “they that could do nothing else could write like Pindar.” ² “When I writ[e] what pleases me,” Swift confessed to his cousin in 1692, “I am Cowley to my self.” ³ But he wrote little that pleased him. Of the four mock-Pindaric panegyrics that he wrote in 1691–92, three remained unpublished and one unfinished. Of the 900 lines in these four poems more than a quarter are autobiographical—complaints about the pains the poems cost him: “thedeluding Muse oft blinds me,” “Me...to the Muse’s Gallies ty’d.” ⁴ The only feature of Pindar that Swift successfully imitated is obscurity: “igad,” Swift said in May 1692, “I can not write anything easy to be understood” (Correspondence, 1:10).

Swift’s bitter failure in 1691–92 shaped the entire enterprise ofA Tale of a Tub in 1696–97. In 1692 he imagined himself chained to the bench as a galley slave in the Muses’ barge. The trouble was that he was enslaved to the wrong Muse, Calliope (epic), and not to Thalia (comedy), and he knew it: “In vain I tug and pull the Oar” (Poems, pp. 32–33). But in December 1693 he broke away from Calliope: “from this hour / I here renounce thy visionary pow’r” (Poems, p. 55). Whatever else the new creative act was to be, it was to be as unlike panegyric in mock-Pindarics as possible, namely: mock epic (Thalia) instead of epic (Calliope) and satire instead of panegyric; and it was to have clarity instead of Pindaric obscurity and a personated narrator instead of the autobiographical “I.”

A Tale of a Tub had a long gestation and by the spring of 1704 when it was finally published had become a complex work of twenty-four parts, like theIliad —a “modern epic,” in Franco Moretti’s phrase. ⁵ These parts include the twelve parts ofA Tale of a Tub proper and its front matter.The Battle of the Books and its front matter, and the two parts ofA Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit and its front matter. The conception of the work probably goes back fifteen years to the spring of 1689 when Jonathan Swift, a displaced person and unemployed graduate student, was hired as secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat and belletrist. As Swift recalled in his autobiographical fragment, “he was received by Sr Wm Temple, whose Father had been a great Friend to the Family,” particularly to Swift’s mother, if Denis Johnston is right. ⁶

When Swift arrived in the spring of 1689, Sir William had been reading, or was soon to read, two books. Thomas Burnet’sTheory of Sacred Earth (1684–89) was an eccentric example of the New...