'The First Proselyte He Makes Is Himself'

“Readers may be divided into three classes -- the superficial, the ignorant, and the learned, and I have with much felicity fitted my pen to the genius and advantage of each.”

 

It’s not my job to assess readers and divvy them up accordingly. Leave that to Jonathan Swift and his readers. Late at night, alone in your skull, you know who you are. It’s my job to make myself plain to the hapless readers who wander in. Swift is writing in A Tale of a Tub (1704), his first major work, one that still confounds readers. What’s he up to? Swift demands his readers have a nimble mind, one at home with proliferating ironies. That wasn’t always the case with Dr. Johnson. Boswell recalls an evening with friends at the Literary Club on this date, March 24, in 1775:

 

“Johnson was in high spirits this evening at the club, and talked with great animation and success. He attacked Swift, as he used to do upon all occasions. ‘The Tale of a Tub is so much superiour to his other writings, that one can hardly believe he was the authour of it. There is in it such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life.’”

 

All true, but Swift often disturbed Johnson, who sometimes thought him insane. Boswell continues:

 

“I wondered to hear him say of Gulliver's Travels, ‘When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.’ [Johnson similarly dismissed another Irish-born writer, Laurence Sterne.] I endeavoured to make a stand for Swift, and tried to rouse those who were much more able to defend him; but in vain. Johnson at last of his own accord allowed very great merit to the inventory of articles found in the pockets of the Man Mountain, particularly the description of his watch, which it was conjectured was his GOD, as he consulted it upon all occasions. He observed, that ‘Swift put his name to but two things, (after he had a name to put,) ‘The Plan for the Improvement of the English Language,’ and the last ‘Drapier’s Letter.’”

 

For a critic as acute as Johnson to repeatedly belabor the failings of so great a writer suggests he recognized in Swift a personal affront. What we resent in others is often what most disturbs us in ourselves, and Johnson always feared madness. In his “Life of Swift,” he writes: “He is querulous and fastidious, arrogant and malignant; he scarcely speaks of himself but with indignant lamentations, or of others but with insolent superiority when he is gay, and with angry contempt when he is gloomy.” Except for “fastidious,” one can see Johnson in the description.

 

And this: “His asperity continually increasing, condemned him to solitude; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity.” All his life, Johnson feared solitude and associated it with insanity. Swift wrote in A Tale of a Tub:

 

“When a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding as well as common sense, is kicked out of doors; the first proselyte he makes is himself.”