THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
8 diciembre 2010 by KSENIIA
“The Battle of the Books” is considered to be a part of the prolegomena for Jonathan Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub”, and it was written in 1704. It is called so because the work itself depicts a literal battle between books in the King’s Library, as an allusion to the authors that at the moment were struggling for supremacy.
Ancients and Moderns
As it is usual for Swift, the story concerns one of the current polemics that was taking place in society at that time. The controversy of the day was the so-called quarrel between the “Ancients and Moderns”. Faith in ancient models of taste and morality was a feature that defined the Ancients’ camp. In this
“battle” Swift took the side of Sir William Temple (whose essay written in 1690 “Upon Ancient and Modern Learning” inflamed a controversy) and the Ancients, though not unequivocally. To the twenty-first century reader, the Ancients and the Moderns debate might look like petty squabbling between privileged men with nothing better to do, but for the participants the course of civilization was at stake.
“Ancients” and “Moderns” were not simply old authors and new authors, not those who prefer one or the other, they were two groups advancing two different concepts of knowledge. “Ancients” stressed the relationship between learning and the welfare of the people. Statesmen, they thought, should be schooled in letters to be able to govern justly. The proper end of learning is a good, moral life, and the study of ancient authors best achieved that end. “Moderns”, by contrast, saw knowledge as part of a progress toward ever greater degrees of understanding about experience. Impressed by the remarkable recent achievements of the new science, most Moderns assumed humanity could progress in other areas of learning as well. They thought they could know more than their predecessors simply because they had the advantage of building upon previous work.
Responding the Temple’s essay (who becomes one of the most prominent representatives of the Ancients), William Wotton published his “Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning” in 1694 where he contradicts Temple saying that modern authors in time could equal and perhaps even surpass the ancient ones. However the controversy reached its height in 1697 when Wotton appended to his “Reflections” an essay by his friend Richard Bentley who had used modern scholarly tools to expose embarrassing mistakes in Temple’s essay on Ancient and Modern Learning.
“The Battle of the Books”: reflection of the conflict
Swift’s contribution to the current fray was “The Battle of the Books” where the books, instead of real people, do the fighting. Although Swift’s attitude towards the discussion remains ambiguous, he apparently defends Temple and sides with the Ancients. Throughout “The Battle of the Books” he emphasizes aesthetics and morality, placing the weight of both on the Ancients’ side. Indeed for Swift’s Ancients beauty and virtue – sweetness and light – are what the fight is about. From the Ancients’ perspective, the Moderns threaten to empty the world of both.
Just as the battle begins, the combatants are interrupted by an argument between a spider and a bee. Observing the quarrel, Æsop shows why he belongs to the Ancients. He argues that like the bee that ranges abroad, gathering nectar from distant flowers to produce honey and wax, honorary Ancients such as Temple realize their dependence on the flowers of ancient learning and nature itself for their work – work that endures. The Moderns, by contrast, resemble the spider that, proudly convinced of his self-sufficiency, spins filth from his own entrails – a web that soon disintegrates.
“The disputants,” said he, “have admirably managed the dispute between them, have taken in the full strength of all that is to be said on both sides, and exhausted the substance of every argument pro and con. It is but to adjust the reasonings of both to the present quarrel, then to compare and apply the labours and fruits of each, as the bee has learnedly deduced them, and we shall find the conclusion fall plain and close upon the Moderns and us. For pray, gentlemen, was ever anything so modern as the spider in his air, his turns, and his paradoxes? he argues in the behalf of you, his brethren, and himself, with many boastings of his native stock and great genius; that he spins and spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any obligation or assistance from without. Then he displays to you his great skill in architecture and improvement in the mathematics. To all this the bee, as an advocate retained by us, the Ancients, thinks fit to answer, that, if one may judge of the great genius or inventions of the Moderns by what they have produced, you will hardly have countenance to bear you out in boasting of either. Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as you please; yet, if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern brains), the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb; the duration of which, like that of other spiders’ webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a corner. For anything else of genuine that the Moderns may pretend to, I cannot recollect; unless it be a large vein of wrangling and satire, much of a nature and substance with the spiders’ poison; which, however they pretend to spit wholly out of themselves, is improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the insects and vermin of the age. As for us, the Ancients, we are content with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own beyond our wings and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labour and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is, that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to till our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.” (A. From now on I will use this online text as a reference for the quotations)
Pride, in both Christian and classical traditions, is a moral menace that threatens to unravel social and spiritual order. Destructive, divisive pride marks the Moderns in the “Battle”, who quarrel from the start over who will lead them: “The Moderns were in very warm debates upon the choice of their leaders; and nothing less than the fear impending from their enemies could have kept them from mutinies upon this occasion. The difference was greatest among the horse, where every private trooper pretended to the chief command, from Tasso and Milton to Dryden and Wither”.
Despite the dangers the Moderns pose, they finally appear impotent in the “Battle”’s allegory. Swift suggests the insignificance of Bentley’s analysis when the portly Modern can only run around Æsop and Phalaris “trampling and kicking and dunging in their faces”. Even after he steals their armour, they remain unscathed. Similarly, Temple does not feel the strike from Wotton’s lance. Though the battle is left incomplete, the heroic Ancients seem destined to prevail.
Who wins in the end?
However, the case is not so easy as it seems to be. Swift skillfully manages to avoid saying which way victory fell. He portrays the manuscript as having been damaged in places, thus leaving the end of the battle up to the reader. The incompleteness of the “Battle” with its missing passages tends to undermine the Ancients’ position. We do not, actually, have as the long title advertises, “A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought last Friday between the Ancient and the Modern Books in Saint James’s Library”. Thus, not assuring the reader of the Ancients’ victory, Swift leaves us wondering how we can trust in the completeness of ancient learning and its transmission over far greater reaches of time and geography. Besides, Swift seems to subvert the position of the Ancients in other ways too. The narrator suggests that both sides, Ancients and Moderns, have their share of ugly rancour when he insists before the battle that “the champions of each side should be coupled together or otherwise mixed,” so that “like the blending of contrary poisons, their malignity might be employed among themselves”.
Perhaps in all this fuss about spiders, bees and warring books in a dusty library on a Friday afternoon, Swift suggests the absurdity of the controversy. Although the Ancients fare better than the Moderns in “The Battle of the Books”, the author’s precise position remains unclear. (4)
In the book Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise by Kathleen Williams (2, p.122-123) we find an opinion that Swift, in general, “seems not very deeply concerned in the matter. The actual battle, led on one side by the formidable combination of Homer, Pindar, Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Livy and Hippocrates, and on the other by a rabble of contenders for the chief command, is a lighthearted affair in which Swift’s interest, and ours, lies not so much in the rights and wrongs of the argument as in the fun of the parody of heroic language and incidents and in the ingenuity of the episodes. The exchange of armour and the projected exchange of horses between Virgil and Dryden, or Wotton’s abortive attack on Temple, who “neither felt the weapon touch him, nor heard it fall”, and indeed most of the contests, are amusing and neat in their translation of literary differences into physical encounters[…]Swift was not by nature disposed to see things in plain black and white; perhaps the issue here[…]was too simplified to be real, and made too little appeal for him to feel deeply involved, though his admiration for Temple and the life that Temple stood for was real enough”.
This can remind us of the controversy between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in “Gulliver’s Travels”. Such questions as literature, as well as religion, are very subjective and cannot be treated in a rigid way. It depends on a person what to consider more important for the humanity and what way of obtaining knowledge to think to be better. As the practice shows, it is wiser to abstain from any categoric statements as the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. Both sides can have their advantages, that is probably why, knowing this, Swift in his later works does not show himself ready to support either party without reservations, and even here, in “The Battle of the Books”, several of the Moderns are courteously treated, Cowley, Denham, Milton (whom Swift certainly admired) and Bacon among them.