INTRODUCTION

The two tracts reprinted here, as well as Swift’s Proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue, which occasioned them, may be viewed in the context of the many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century suggestions for the formation of a British Academy. They are in part a result of the founding of the French Academy in 1635, although the feeling in England that language needed regulating to prevent its corruption and decline was not purely derivative. By the close of the seventeenth century an informed Englishman might have been familiar with a series of native proposals, ranging from those of Carew of Antony and Edmund Bolton early in the century to that of Defoe at the close. Among the familiar figures who urged the advantages of an Academy were Evelyn, the Earl of Roscommon, and Dryden. Of these Dryden was particularly vocal; but Evelyn’s suggestion, associated as it was with the Royal Society, was rather more spectacular. In 1665 he set forth for the Society’s Committee for Improving the Language an exhaustive catalogue of the forces tending to the corruption of the English tongue. Those, he declared, are “victories, plantations, frontiers, staples of commerce, pedantry of schools, affectation of travellers, translations, fancy and style of court, vernility and mincing of citizens, pulpits, political remonstrances, theatres, shops, &c.” There follows Evelyn’s careful formulation of the problems facing those who would refine the language and fix its standards.

This sense of the corruption of the language and of the urgent need for regulation was communicated to the eighteenth century, in which a number of powerful voices called for action. Early in the period Addison advocated “something like an Academy that by the best Authorities and Rules ... shall settle all Controversies between Grammar and Idiom” (The Spectator, No. 135). He was followed by Swift, who in turn was followed by such diverse persons as Orator Henlay, the Earl of Orrery, and the Earl of Chesterfield. Curiously, Johnson’s appears to be the only weighty voice in opposition: “the edicts of an English Academy,” he insisted, “would probably be read by many, only that they might be sure to disobey them.”

But if the two tracts reprinted here may be viewed in this context, they may also be seen from another vantage--as part of the interminable wrangling in the period between Whigs and Tories, even over a matter so apparently non-political as the founding of an Academy. Since it was Swift’s “petty treatise on the English Language”--the epithet is Johnson’s--which provoked these two replies, we must look briefly at his handiwork. Swift was undoubtedly guilty of pride of authorship with respect to his Proposal, which appeared on May 17, 1712, in the form of a Letter to the Earl of Oxford. He had touched on the problem earlier in the Tatler (No. 230), but this is a more considered effort. In June, 1711, he first broached to Harley the idea of “a society or academy for correcting and settling our language,” and with Harley’s approval he began to compose the Letter. Yet it was eight months before the document reached Harley and another two months, during which it circulated among friends, before Swift retrieved it for the printer. Thus, and this fact has significance, the Proposal had its inception and its first consideration in the Tory circles attached to the Harley ministry. A few days before its publication Swift wrote to Stella: “I suffer my name to be put at the End of it, wch I nevr did before in my Life.”

Now this willingness to publish under his own name also has a special significance. It is not merely, as is often assumed, that he cherished the project, though very likely that played a part. He was motivated, I am convinced, by a desire to flaunt the Proposal as a party document. It is true that he wrote to Stella two weeks after its publication that “there are 2 Answers come out to it already, tho tis no Politicks, but a harmless Proposall about the Improvement of the Engl. Tongue.” “I believe,” he added, “If I writt an Essay upon Straw some fool would answer it.” But this disclaimer is ingenuous in the light of the political overtones in the Proposal; for example, the extended praise of Barley as one who saved his country from ruin “by a foreign war and a domestic faction.” In fact, the lengthy panegyric of the Lord Treasurer, as well as other matter, is bluntly and deliberately partisan. It could not conceivably have been interpreted otherwise by contemporaries; nor could Swift have been unaware of its provocative impact upon his readers. Oldmixon remarks ironically of this part the Proposal--and small wonder that he does--that it is “incomparable, full of the most delicate Eulogy In the World.” Furthermore Swift knew, in view of his position as leading writer for the Tory ministry, that to sign his name was to invite attack--even if he wrote, as he says, upon straw.

There is no doubt he thought the formation of an Academy a matter of great importance. Why then did he deliberately introduce controversial elements and thus make impossible a discussion of his proposal wholly on its merits? I suggest as a possible answer that he wished the Whigs to dissociate themselves from the project and that he used the tactics expected to achieve this end, in the desire that entire credit for the founding of the Academy should rest with Harley and Harley’s supporters. The partisan approach was therefore shrewdly calculated to provoke opposition and to avoid any leaven of Whiggism in the “institution and patronage” of the Academy. Swift wanted the contemporary prestige, as well as the favorable verdict of posterity, to be unmistakably placed. Nevertheless there was no intention of excluding meritorious Whigs from the original membership--only, as is clear from Swift’s attitude, from the “institution and patronage” of the Academy. In a list of Academicians drawn up by Swift and Harley, unhappily not extant, members of both parties were included--so Swift wrote to Archbishop King in Dublin, and there is no reason to doubt it. Even Oldmixon grudgingly reports that Swift had promised “the Whigs that they shall come in if they will.” However violent his partisanship at times, Swift could and did respect merit; and Harley was always ready to placate individual members of the Opposition. There is therefore no need to take seriously, as Oldmixon and the authors of The British Academy pretend to do, the list of potential members of the Academy printed first in the Amsterdam Gazette and quoted in The British Academy. It will be seen at a glance that they constitute that dinner group of Tory “Brothers,” the Society to which Swift belonged, a group sufficient for its avowed purpose--“to advance conversation and friendship, and to reward deserving persons” -- but of course he would not have accepted them in toto for the Academy.

The Whig writers began their attack on the Proposal immediately. In the Medley, founded by Mainwaring and Oldmixon “to provide an Antidote against the Poison of the Examiner,” there is a brief reference in the issue of May 19-23, 1712, to “the very extraordinary Letter to a Great Man,” followed in the next issue by an extended political attack with the Proposal as the point of departure. Thus at the outset Swift’s pamphlet was treated as a party document. At the same time the Whig writers were readying two pamphlets in answer, both announced in the Medley of May 19-23 as soon to be printed. Apparently neither of these appeared, at least not under the announced titles; but by May 26 Oldmixon’s Reflections had been published anonymously and was referred to in the Medley as “a very ingenious Pamphlet.” As any reader of the Reflections will observe for himself, the pamphlet opens on a violent political note and sustains it throughout. Although Oldmixon is more concerned to level charges against Swift--a lewd, irreverent cleric, a turncoat, a party scribbler, etc.--than to deny the validity of Swift’s views concerning the language, he does directly challenge certain points. And he arrives at a conclusion which may well have been the result of honest conviction rather than mere party opposition: that it is neither desirable nor possible to fix the language forever. In a sense this was the chief issue, and the one where the authoritarian view as represented by Swift and others was most vulnerable. Is it possible, by the edicts of an academy however eminent its members and respected its authority, to negate or control the principle of change inherent in language? Unfortunately Oldmixon did not live long enough to see his attitude aggressively expounded by one of greater stature who also took issue with Swift, both in the Preface to the Dictionary and in the life of Swift.

The British Academy, published May 30, 1712 (advertised in the Spectator of that date), is of composite authorship. The one person known to have had a hand in it--“a great Hand,” says Oldmixon--is Arthur Mainwaring (The life and posthumous works of Arthur Maynwaring, Esq. [London, 1715], p. 324; this is the source of most of our knowledge of Mainwaring.). The identity of Mainwaring’s collaborators is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps the most eligible are those who assisted with the Medley, as Steele, Anthony Henley, and White Kennett. Among other possibilities are such active Whig writers as Thomas Burnet and George Duckett; and even Oldmixon cannot be ruled out. Doubtless Mainwaring was the inspiring spirit--of this as well as other attacks on the group surrounding Harley. Poet, ardent Jacobite convert to Whiggism, member of the Kit Kat Club, member of Parliament, and Auditor of the Imprest, Mainwaring had a brief but full career. It included a part in the Whig Examiner and chief responsibility for the Medley. In the course of his political opposition he appears to have developed a genuine hatred of Swift, to whom he always referred, if Oldmixon’s word can be trusted, as “one of the wickedest Wretches alive.” By May, 1712, when The British Academy was published, he was already ill of the disease which ended in his death a few months later; but he seems to have retained his vigor and his clear intelligence to the end. The British Academy is shrewdly conceived to cast odium on Swift’s proposal for an Academy by identifying its potential members as a Tory faction and the whole project as merely a scheme to provide Harley with a set of pensioners who would be obliged in gratitude “to revere his Virtue and his Memory.” Whereas in the Reflections Swift is assaulted with hard obvious blows, in The British Academy a more subtle intelligence is evident: the attack is oblique and ironic, and a tone of Addisonian urbanity is fairly well maintained. Nevertheless it is not as literature that these two answers to Swift are to be judged. They are minor, though interesting, documents in political warfare which cut athwart a significant cultural controversy.

-- Louis A. Landa
   Princeton University