'Who First Reduced Lying Into an Art'

A storied day in literary history. Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels on October 28 in 1726, and his distant offspring, Evelyn Waugh, was born on the same date 178 years later. In Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper (1992), Waugh, in the year before his death, tells his friend he has just read Nigel Dennis’ Jonathan Swift: A Short Character (1965) and observes: “I found many affinities with the temperament (not of course the talent) of the master.”

In the privacy of a letter, Waugh could acknowledge the genius of his forebear – “the master.” His readers need no prompting to notice the affinity. Both men are masterful practitioners of English prose. Waugh is a satirist but not merely a satirist (nor is Swift, for that matter). In Scoop (1938), his funniest novel, Mr. Baldwin tells our hero, William Boot:

“I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.”

Swift edited The Examiner, a newspaper sympathetic to the Tory cause, from 1710 to 1714. Queen Anne had recently replaced Whig ministers with Tories. In the issue published on Sept. 11, 1710, Swift also takes up the question of truth:

“But although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation, by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.

“Who first reduced lying into an art, and adapted it to politics, is not so clear from history, although I have made some diligent inquiries. I shall therefore consider it only according to the modern system, as it has been cultivated these twenty years past in the southern part of our own island.”