The Battle of the Books; with selections from the literature of the Phalaris controversy

Front matter

THE KING'S CLASSICS UNDER THE GENERAL EDITORSHIP OF PROFESSOR I. GOLLANCZ, LITT.D.

THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

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Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The Ancient and Modern Learning Controversy

The Battle of the Books is one of a large number of books and pamphlets written towards the end of the seventeenth century when both in England and in France men were eagerly debating whether the genius and achievements of their contemporaries or immediate predecessors were or were not greater than those of the ancients. It would be tedious and useless to tell again the history of the quarrel farther than is necessary to explain the circumstances under which Swift wrote his book. This account of the quarrel in France, accordingly, begins at that point from which Sir William Temple appears to have known of it. But it must be remembered that the controversy was in no sense a new one. The reader of Lucretius or Vergil, of Homer or Aristophanes, finds that even in the days of these writers, laments were heard of the degeneracy in physical strength, in mental power, in morality, of the men of their time: and from the time of Horace to the present day, men have always been found to preach the doctrine that mankind, week by week, and month by month, is becoming more and more unworthy of the glorious past. In the present instance the quarrel was chiefly concerned with the literary and scientific attainments of the ancients and moderns, though it was impossible that reference should not be made to other subjects. It was said, for example, that the introduction of Christianity gave the moderns great advantages over the ancients, and one Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, an official at the court of Louis XIV, tried to prove that Christian stories were more suited for poetical treatment than the fictions which formed the subject-matter of the epics of Greece and Rome. Not content with the peaceable possession of his convictions, Des wrote a number of poems, intended, by their pathos and sublimity, to demonstrate the truth of his theories; of the existence of which poems (to borrow Swift's phrase) the world has ever since been pleased to make a profound secret, so that their usefulness has been much circumscribed. After the death of Desmarets his ideas were taken up and elaborated by Charles Perrault.

Perrault and Fontenelle

On the 27th of January, 1687, at a meeting of the French Academy called to celebrate the recovery of Louis XIV from a serious illness, Perrault recited a poem, which he had written for the occasion, called Le Stiècle de Louis le Grand. He maintained in it that the works of the ancients were not perfect: that men had not degenerated: that in many ways the moderns were greater than the ancients, for whom nevertheless it was only fitting that they should feel the greatest reverence. The audience was divided. Some received the reading of the poem with applause: others, chief among them Boileau, regarded it as a disgrace to the Academy. Some one pointed out that Perrault had omitted Boileau's name from his poem, although he mentioned a large number of other French authors as the equals in genius of the ancients. Angered at the wrong done to his favourite authors, Boileau wrote bitterly against Perrault and his friends, and furious war raged between the advocates of the ancients and the advocates of the moderns.

A year before Perrault's poem was read, Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (1686), had thrown out certain disrespectful insinuations touching the ancients, and a year after Perrault's poem had convulsed literary France, he again set forward his views in his Poésies Pastorales: Avec un Traité sur la Nature de l'Eglogue, et une Digression sur les Anciens et [sur] les Modernes (1688). In the Traité Fontenelle examines in some detail the pastoral poems of Vergil, of Theocritus, and of other pastoral poets, and comes to the conclusion 'entre la grossièreté ordinaire des bergers de Théocrite, et le trop d'esprit de la plupart de nos bergers modernes, il y a un milieu à tenir.' His own pastorals, printed in the same volume, are intended to show where the via media lies. The Digression deals with the whole dispute. At the outset Fontenelle declares that the whole question comes only to this: were the trees which grew formerly finer than those we have now? If they were, Nature has evidently become enfeebled, and in these later ages we cannot hope to equal the works of the ancients: if they were not, it is clear that Nature is still the same, and men, too, must be as great as ever they were, and capable of producing works as fine as those of Homer or Plato or Demosthenes. To say that the ancients have made all the greatest discoveries proves nothing: the ancients made these discoveries because they lived before us, not because of their greater genius. The life of the world is the life of one man: a cultivated man now, has all the culture of the ages that went before him: so that like a being which has lived from the beginning of the world until the present day, having been once a child, thinking only of the most pressing needs of life, and then a youth, succeeding in the things of the imagination and beginning to reason for himself, mankind has become what it is now, a race reasoning with greater power and insight than ever before. But unlike the being to whom Fontenelle has compared it, the human race will never fall into dotage and lose its earlier powers—'les hommes ne degenereront jamais!' Such are some of the arguments Fontenelle advances.

In the year in which Fontenelle's Poésies Pastorales appeared, Perrault began issuing his Parallèles des Anciens et des Modernes (1688-1696), which dealt at large with the comparative claims of the ancients and moderns in literature and the arts. Only one or two of his arguments are interesting in connection with the Battle of the Books, and these are mentioned in the notes to this volume.

Temple's Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1690)

In 1690 Sir William Temple published the second part of his Miscellanea. It consisted of four Essays: I. Upon ancient and modern learning, II. Upon the gardens of Epicurus, III. Upon heroic virtue, IV. Upon poetry. The first of them introduced into England the quarrel raging in France. It is true that for many years a controversy on the question had been going on in England, but it had not attracted general attention. Sir William Temple was one of the best-known men in England, and the public paid to his utterances that peculiar deference which is shown to a popular statesman when he leaves politics and turns to a subject of which he is profoundly ignorant. The greater part of his Essay is given in the Appendix to this volume (pp. 50–76), and the reader can judge its merits for himself. One paragraph in it involved Temple in a bitter dispute. There existed, among a large number of other such compositions, a series of 148 letters supposed to have been written by , 'a shadowy figure in the early legends of ancient Sicily.' Of Phalaris the most important thing known is that he was wont to roast to death in a brazen bull those persons who incurred his displeasure. There is not the slightest doubt that the Epistles attributed to him were spurious compositions, written hundreds of years after his death: but when Temple wrote some eminent scholars regarded them as genuine.

Temple may have read the Epistles in one of the Latin translations enumerated in Boyle's Preface (see pp. 93 and 305–8), or in the English translation made by one W. D. and published in 1634: that he could not have read them in the Greek in which they were written, seems quite certain. Nevertheless, in the paragraph of his Essay just referred to, writing as one who had moved as an equal among the greatest men of his time, and as one who had corresponded with kings, Temple asserted that the Epistles must be genuine, because no forger could possibly have imitated so perfectly the thoughts and language of a tyrant. By so choosing his ground Temple left himself no way of escape in case the Epistles should be proved spurious. Later he would have been happier if he had not written with such a show of conviction. For the time, however, all went well. His Essay was received with applause, and he had no suspicion that any hand would be raised against him.

Charles Boyle

Charles Boyle (grand-nephew of Robert Boyle, the great scientist), a boy of seventeen, was in 1693 at Christ Church, Oxford. He seems to have been clever, and was very much liked. Dr Aldrich, then Dean of Christ Church, was, we are told, in the habit of asking his best pupils to edit some classical author. In 1693, no doubt owing to Temple's Essay, he asked Boyle to prepare an edition of the Epistles of Phalaris. It was not to be expected that a boy of Boyle's age should be able to prepare, unaided, an edition of a Greek author; and it must have been understood in academic circles that Aldrich's young men relied upon their tutors for the learning to be put into their books: but no doubt many men resented the fraud of issuing, in the name of a boy, the work of his masters. During 1693 and 1694 Boyle worked at his edition.

Wotton's 'Reflections' (1694)

Meanwhile an opponent to Sir William Temple's views was writing a book to demonstrate the folly of belittling the moderns in order to increase the reputation of the ancients. William Wotton had as a child exhibited the most wonderful precocity: at the age of six he knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; at ten he entered Cambridge; and at thirteen he obtained his degree. When Temple's Essay appeared he was about twenty-four years old. He proceeded to write a book in which he compared the achievements of the ancients and moderns in Moral and Political Knowledge, in Eloquence and Poetry, in Grammar, in Architecture, Statuary, and Painting, in Logic and Metaphysics, in Geometry and Arithmetic, in Chemistry, in Anatomy, in Natural History, in Astronomy and Optics, in Music, in Physic, in Philology, and in Theology; and he wrote besides chapters on the learning of Pythagoras and the most ancient philosophers of Greece, on the History, Geometry, Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Alchemy of the Ancient Egyptians, and on the learning of the Ancient Chaldæans and Arabians.

The book appeared in 1694, when Wotton was twenty-eight years old, and was called Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning. Although its style was not exhilarating, the book was quite readable, and it disposed decisively of the claims of the ancients in learning, though not of course in literature and the fine arts. Wotton's tone in speaking of Sir William Temple is extremely civil, though one detects here and there a suspicion of contempt, but he destroyed utterly the fabric of his vision. Temple had not thought that any one would dare to answer him, still less that any one would refute him, and Wotton's book made him exceedingly angry. He was sufficiently mortified. Swift said later, at being called the adversary of Wotton. But worse things were to come.

Boyle's 'Phalaris' (1695)

In the course of his work upon Phalaris (which does not appear to have been very arduous) Boyle (or his tutors) wished to obtain the readings of a manuscript copy of the Epistles of Phalaris which was in the Royal Library at St. James's Palace. Accordingly in July or August 1693 he instructed his book-seller Thomas Bennet, who lived at the sign of the Half-Moon, in St. Paul's Churchyard, to obtain the manuscript for him. The Librarian (or Library-keeper as he was called) at St. James's was at this moment Henri Justel, but Bennet does not seem to have made any application to him.

He knew as a customer (he says himself 'as a friend') Richard Bentley, who in the previous year (1692) had delivered in St. Martin's Church the first course of Boyle Lectures (founded by the great-uncle of Charles Boyle), and who had written in 1690 a Latin Letter to Dr Mill on the Chronicle of Malelas, which showed him to be one of the greatest classical scholars in England. There were rumours that Justel was about to resign his post and that Bentley would take his place. Accordingly Bennet asked Bentley if he would get the MS. for him, and Bentley seems to have promised to do so. It is clear that Boyle ought not to have expected to get the MS. merely by a request made through a third person, for Bentley knew nothing of Boyle, except that he was a relation of the great scientist who had founded the Lectureship which he had recently held: but this reason for not lending the MS. was not mentioned until later, and Bentley never suggested that it had influenced him in any way.

Despite his promise, Bentley did not get the MS. for Bennet, although Bennet reminded him frequently of the matter when he came to the shop: but he seems to have spoken contemptuously of the Epistles, and of the members of a great College who proposed to issue a new edition of a worthless book. Bentley's manner and speech was always haughty and often insolent; and he may have said things which would have deeply offended Boyle and his friends at Christ Church had they been repeated. Bentley's reason for not getting the MS. at once (except the obvious one that he was not appointed Librarian until April 1694), was never given. One may suggest that this is what happened: Bentley promised the MS. at a time when he felt sure that he would succeed Justel, but difficulties arose about his appointment; and while they were being settled he felt that it would be unwise for him to act as though he had obtained the post. When his appointment was made he found that he had promised more than he should have done: hence the delay in getting the MS. and his anxiety not to let it remain long out of the Library.

When Bentley took office he claimed under the Licensing Act of Charles II (which would soon expire) a large number of books which had not been sent by the booksellers to the Royal Library, during the last year or two of Justel's rule. Among others Bennet had to send a number of volumes, and this probably did not increase his liking for Bentley.

Meanwhile Boyle had written several times to Bennet about the MS. and was becoming impatient. On May 1st, 1694, he wrote, 'I am almost ashamed to trouble you any more, Mr Bennet, about the MS. I wish I had it; but if at all I must have it very quickly...' Bennet made another application to Bentley, and this time the MS. was delivered to him. Bentley said that he came and offered it voluntarily, but in this he seems to have been mistaken. Having obtained the MS., and knowing that Boyle was in great haste, Bennet sent the MS. to one George Gibson, a corrector of the press (what we should now call a 'proof-reader'), who could only work at nights, as he was engaged in his regular business all day; and told him to make a collation of the MS. with a printed copy of the Epistles; but fixed no time by which the work was to be completed. Gibson accordingly did not hurry.

Bentley had to go to Worcester towards the end of May. He says that he told Bennet this, and instructed him not to lose any time in getting the collation made, but Bennet stoutly denied that Bentley gave him any such warning. However that may be, Bentley had to leave for Worcester at five o'clock on Monday morning towards the end of May (either on May 21st or May 28th). On the Saturday preceding he called about noon at Bennet's shop, and said that the MS. must be returned at once as he was going away and could not trust the MS. out of the Library until his return. Bennet sent a messenger to the collator, who returned with the answer that the collation was not yet finished. Bentley apparently waited until this message was received, and then said that the MS. must be returned that day. Bennet asked that he might keep it till Sunday morning, and engaged to make the collator (who had been working all day) sit up all night to finish the collation. For whatever reason, Bentley refused, as he had a perfect right to do. By the same evening, therefore, the MS. was returned to Bentley, with no hint that the collation was not finished. When a quarrel broke out on this question Bentley tried how long the work should have taken, and found that he could have collated the whole book (which only contained 127 of the 148 Epistles) in four hours. The MS. had been in Bennet's hands about a week when Bentley asked for its return, and he had therefore no reason to think that between the noon and evening of Saturday, the work had not been completed.

However, Gibson had only collated 40 of the Epistles (and these so carelessly that Bentley noted 50 variant readings where Boyle's edition only recorded one), and the unfinished collation was sent to Boyle with the explanation that Bentley had refused the further use of the MS. No doubt Bennet thought the task a very much longer one than it really was, and no doubt Gibson worked very much more slowly at a Greek text than did the greatest Greek scholar in Europe, but this did not explain Bennet's explanation to Boyle of his failure to carry out his instructions.

About four months later Bentley returned to town and heard not a word from any one about the MS.: before the end of the year (1694) he spent a fortnight in Oxford, where Boyle's Phalaris was then being printed; he even visited Christ Church, where Boyle and his tutors lived, and not a single complaint of any kind was made to him.

On January 1st, 1695, Boyle's edition of the Epistles appeared. It contained a dedication to Dr Aldrich, a preface, a life of Phalaris, a Greek text with a Latin translation at the foot of each page, and a few notes at the end. The whole book (except, of course, the text) was, according to the fashion of the time, in Latin. It was a feeble performance (though for this, Boyle's tutors, and not Boyle, must be held responsible) and would long ago have been forgotten but for the last paragraph but one in the Preface.

'I have collated the Epistles themselves (Boyle wrote) with two Bodleian MSS. from the Cantuar and Selden collection: and I have also had them collated, as far as the 40th Epistle, with a MS. in the Royal Library: the Librarian with the courtesy for which he is remarkable refused me the further use of it.'

In the Preface, which deals with the question of the genuineness of the Epistles, Boyle explicitly stated—or his tutors said for him—that there was great doubt about the authorship of the Epistles: but he adopted Temple's estimate of their literary value, and paraphrased his paragraph about them from the Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning. A large number of copies of the book were distributed in Christ Church, according to Aldrich's custom, as a New Year's gift. Bentley did not see the book until January 26th, when copies were already in the hands of the booksellers. He wrote at once in terms of great civility to Boyle, and explained the circumstances under which he had withdrawn the MS. Boyle replied that he had written according to what he had heard from Bennet, that he should be much concerned if it proved that he had been misled, and that Bentley 'might do himself right' in what method he pleased.

Here, for the time, the matter rested.

Bentley's first 'Dissertation' (1697)

When Wotton was writing his Reflections Bentley, who was one of his personal friends, told him that the Epistles of Phalaris and the Fables of Æsop, which Temple had praised so highly, were spurious; and he promised that on some other occasion he would prove his assertion.

In 1697 Wotton told Bentley that he was preparing a second edition of his Reflections, and asked him to fulfil his promise. Not very reluctantly, perhaps, Bentley wrote A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and others; and the Fables of Æsop: and the paper was printed with a separate title-page at the end of Wotton's volume. That there might be no mistake about his intentions, Bentley reprinted at the head of the Dissertation the passage from Temple already referred to. In the Dissertation Bentley examined the Epistles under sixteen different heads. He showed that Phalaris was made in them to speak of things that did not exist in his time, of towns that had not been built or thought of; to quote from books that had not yet been written; to use Attic Greek, although he could only have known Doric Greek; to use a form of Attic that did not exist until hundreds of years after his death; to speak of the Sicilian talent (worth 1s. 10d. ) as though it had been the Attic talent (worth £180); and to write in a style that might well come from a rhetorician but could not possibly belong to a tyrant.

He then passes to a word with the editors of the new edition and tells his story of the withdrawal of the MS. The rest of the book is concerned with the other spurious Epistles mentioned in the title.

Throughout the Dissertation Bentley assumes that the edition of Phalaris is not the work of Boyle, but the work of his tutors: he speaks, not of 'the Editor' but of 'the Editors.' Bentley wrote his Dissertation in English, though replying to a Latin book, (as well, of course, as to Temple's Essay)—a thing which Boyle's friends seem to have resented—and was therefore making his appeal to the general public. Whether he should, under these circumstances, have used the knowledge which he possessed of the way in which the book was prepared, is at least doubtful. But if he had not done so, he would have been obliged to seem to attack publicly a young man of twenty (Boyle was eighteen when his Phalaris was published) for mistakes which he could not have been expected to avoid; for Bentley showed that the edition was extremely careless and revealed deplorable ignorance in its editors.

There were thus three disputes in progress at once—the first between Temple and Wotton about Ancient and Modern Learning; the second between Temple and Bentley about the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris; the third between Bentley, on the one side, and Boyle and his tutors, on the other, (a) about the withdrawal of the MS. of the Epistles, {b) about the value of the Epistles as literature, (c) about the scholarship exhibited in the new edition. This leaves out of the account the dispute about the Fables of Æsop which hardly concerns us here.

Boyle's 'Examination' (1698)

Boyle's tutors—of whom the most important was Atterbury, afterwards Dean of Christ Church—saw that for their own credit they must attempt an answer to Bentley: and some of the wits of Christ Church—Atterbury himself, Smalridge (who succeeded Atterbury as Dean), Alsop, Freind—joined in drawing up an answer to the Dissertation. In their reply (Dr Bentley's Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, and the Fables of Æsop, examin'd by the Honourable Charles Boyle, Esq… 1698) they attempted an answer to every one of Bentley's objections, and they even went so far as to say, that his attack on the Epistles tended to convince them that they were, after all, genuine. Although the book was issued in Boyle's name it was an open secret that he had very little indeed to do with it: and to judge from the tone of a letter written by Atterbury when returning the proofs of the book to him, Boyle felt by no means satisfied with their performance. He only remarked, Atterbury says, that 'he hoped the book would do him no harm.' But Boyle showed considerable generosity in allowing himself to be used as a stalking-horse for his tutors. The book although full of every sort of blunder was also full of life, and had a kind of wit. Its success was immediate: every one, except a few obscure scholars, thought that Bentley was defeated, and as Budgell says, 'the world was pleased to see a young man of quality and fortune get the better of an old critic,'—a sentence which exhibits the tone of the controversy. Bentley, it may be remarked, was thirty-six years of age.

Temple, who had suffered so severely at the hands of Wotton and Bentley, was delighted with Boyle's reply. He had himself begun a reply to Wotton but abandoned it, evidently feeling that he was unequal to the task: and Swift took up the quarrel for him. But of this more will be said in its place.

Boyle's Examination advanced the quarrel about the MS. another stage. Bennet replied, through Boyle, to Eentley's remarks in the Dissertation, and tried to show that he was in no way to blame for the trouble that arose.

Bentley's second 'Dissertation' (1699)

In the course of the year 1698 at least six other pamphlets were published, dealing more or less directly with the controversy that had arisen, but they are none of them important.

Bentley, meanwhile, was preparing his reply. In his first Dissertation there had been one or two small mistakes which his enemies were able to expose. He determined that there should, if possible, be nothing at which they could cavil in his new work. Early in 1699 his second Dissertation appeared, this time as an independent volume. In a preface of 112 pages he replied to Bennet's representations, and to a number of new charges brought against him in Boyle's Examination The body of the book consisted of a reprint, section by section, of his previous Dissertation; after each section he considered at full length the objections brought against it by his antagonists, so that the book was made up of a number of papers dealing with various disputed points in classical scholarship. And except in the cases of the small mistakes already mentioned, Bentley made an overwhelming reply to everything brought against him. The learning he showed was so stupendous as almost to defeat its own purpose, for there were, perhaps, hardly a dozen men in England fit to judge his work: those who understood saw not merely that he had demolished Phalaris and his supporters, but also that he had proved himself the greatest classical scholar of his day, one worthy to rank with the greatest who had ever lived.

But public opinion did not immediately acclaim his victory. Sir Richard Jebb has pointed out that for many years the idea remained current that Boyle had defeated Bentley. The publication of the Battle of the Books in 1704 is in itself sufficient evidence that popular feeling was on the side of Boyle and his friends.

Shortly after this Dissertation was published, the Christ Church men produced another book against Bentley—A Short Account of Dr Bentley's Humanity and Justice to those Authors who have written before him … 1699. In an Appendix, perhaps written by Dr King, Bennet, the bookseller, answered Bentley's statements in his second Dissertation. This book was answered on Bentley's behalf by Solomon Whateley who had recently produced a new edition of the Letters of Phalaris.

Three other books appeared during this same year (1699) containing references to the dispute: and then there was an interval of peace.

Atterbury's 'Short Review' (1701)

In 1701 Atterbury, the person most concerned on the wrong side of the controversy, produced A Short Review of the Controversy between Mr Boyle and Dr Bentley, a violent attack on Bentley, concluding with a character of Dr Bentley, made up of extracts from Bentley's writings. Neither this book, nor those that preceded, prevented Bentley and Atterbury coming to have respect for one another in later years.

In the same year Swift published the third part of Temple's Miscellanea containing among other papers, that defence of his Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning which Temple had begun but never completed: and in 1704 Swift published the volume containing the Tale of a Tub, and the Battle of the Books. Of these it remains to speak.

Swift and Temple

Born in 1667, at a house in Hoey's Court, Dublin, Jonathan Swift was the child of English parents. His father died some months before the birth of this his only son (a daughter had been born some time before); and Swift was educated at Kilkenny Grammar School, and Trinity College, Dublin, at the expense chiefly of one of his uncles, Godwin Swift. He remained some time at Trinity College after taking a not very honourable degree, and then went to live with his mother at Leicester. Towards the end of the year 1689 he became a sort of amanuensis to Sir William Temple, whose wife, Dorothy Osborne, the writer of delightful letters, was distantly related to Swift's mother. He lived with Sir William first at Sheen, and then at More Park in Surrey, but on the advice of physicians 'who weakly imagined that his native air might be of some use to recover his health,' left him in May 1690 in order to return to Ireland.

He came back to Temple's house in the autumn of 1691 and remained with him until May 1694, when in a fit of anger he left his patron, went to Ireland in the following month, took Holy Orders four months later, and became Prebendary of Kilroot in the following year.