Frank T. Boyle Fordham University, New York

New Science in the Composition of ATaleofaTub

Abstract. This essay challenges the commonly accepted reading of the events which led to Swift’s entering the English Battle of the Books. According to this view, Swift’s patron, Sir William Temple, was outraged because he had been “demolished,” in the aftermath of his mistaken judgement about the Epistles of Phalaris, by social inferiors, William Wotton and his friend, the classical scholar . In fact, Wotton had denounced Sir William as an enemy of Christianity. This harsh criticism may be accounted for by Wotton’s involvement in the Royal Society’s theological efforts to marshal new scientific ‘evidence’ against the growing threat of atheism. In doing so, Wotton pitted his own faith in linear progress, buttressed by the New Science and its giants and Isaac Newton, against Temple’s cyclical view of history. While Temple presumably never understood what was really at stake, his secretary Swift, by a variety of circumstances, was well positioned to fathom both the religious and scientific aspects of the affair.

I have come to think the best advice I can give a graduate student hoping to do original work on Swift is to discover one of those relatively rare places where all Swiftians seem to agree. Still the finest example of how this works is A. C. Elias’s dismantling of the consensus that Swift’s admiration for Sir William Templehelped us understand the development of Swift’s own thought and work. Swift at Moor Park reopened the whole question of how Swift’s complex interactions with the “great” man influenced Swift and, particularly, his early works.1 Here I want to return to Moor Park and to an even earlier period in Swift’s formative years to ask additional questions about the consensus view of the role the Ancient/Modern controversy played in TheBattleoftheBooksand ATaleofaTub, and consider some implications throughout Swift’s literary career. I intend to demonstrate that, however profoundly Templemay have failed to understand the assault from William Wotton and Richard Bentley, Swift recognized the controversy as an essentially theological dispute fought on the grounds of the New Science. The consensus I hope to unravel here begins with the commonplace, if deeply mistaken, sentiment that Wotton’s1694 Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning

1 See Swift at Moor Park: Problems in Biography and Criticism (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 1982). 176 Frank T. Boyle were “by no means abusive of Temple.”2 Ehrenpreis himself claimed that “Wotton had courteously taken issue, in print, with Temple’s essay.”3 In the narrative that usually follows from this misperception, the controversy arises from the misfortune of a gentleman essayist, Temple,publishing into an environment increasingly defined by newly emergent modern scholarship best represented by Wotton’s companion in confronting Temple, Richard Bentley. Significantly, some commentaries begin explaining the controversy by mentioning Wotton only along the way, focusing on how Bentley’s scholarship on the Epistles of Phalaris “demolished” Temple’s claim that Phalaris was an ancient author.4 Even in so impressive and seemingly comprehensive a study as Joseph Levine’s TheBattleoftheBooks5 a reader may come away with a detailed understanding of the humanistic implications of the controversy without seeing that Wotton and Bentley were engaged in a theological dispute that depended on methodologies of what would later come to be termed Newtonianism.6 The dates are helpful in putting the controversy in its proper historical context. Te m p l e ’ s Upon Ancient and Modern Learning was published as the first of four essays in his Miscellanea: The Second Part in 1690.7 Wotton responded with his Reflections in 1694.8 It is only with the second edition of Wotton’s essay in 1697 that Bentley entered the fray directly, appending a scathing dissertation on Temple’s claims for the antiquity of the Phalaris text. But this is not to say that Bentley was not involved earlier. On the contrary, while Bentley’s historically sound but unmannerly handling of Phalaris eventually became the relatively safe point of entry

2 The Oxford Authors: , eds Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 606; reprinted, with revisions, in Oxford’s World’s Classics series under the title Jonathan Swift, Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2003). 3 Ehrenpreis, Mr Swift, pp. 195–96. At the time, the abusiveness of the attack was clear. Thomas Rymer, who supported experimental philosophy and said that Wotton had the better argument, nevertheless claimed that Wotton “rudely” sought to provoke Temple, and was more intent on “proclaim[ing] open War against Sir William Temple” than arguing the question (Thomas Rymer, An Essay concerning Critical and Curious Learning, ed. Curt A. Zimanski, ARS, no 113 [Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1965 (1698)], pp. 47–58). 4 See, for example, the introductory note to The Battle of the Books in The Basic Writings of Jonathan Swift, eds Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins (New York, 2002), p. 968 (Notes by Ian Higgins); and Miriam Kosh Starkman, Swift’s Satire on Learning in “A Tale of a Tub” (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1950), particularly pp. 15–17. 5 See Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 6 See Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1700 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1976). 7 See Homer E. Woodbridge, Sir William Temple: The Man and his Work (New York: Modern Language Association, and London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 222. 8 See Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (London: by J. Leake for Peter Buck, 1694). See also Marie-Luise Spieckermann, William Wottons “Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning” im Kontext der englischen “Querelle des anciens et des modernes” (Frankfurt on Main: Peter Lang, 1981).