'Irrefragable and Prodigious in Their Tenets'

Jonathan Swift was enormously prolific but much of his work is polemical, spawned by long-forgotten controversies in England and Ireland. Everyone has read Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal,” and even Journal to Stella, The Drapier’s Letters and some of the poetry have their enthusiasts, but a vast amount of his work remains the preserve of scholars. Reading Swift can sometimes be likened to reading an occasional poem while knowing nothing about the occasion. The prose is always a model of clarity. In “A Letter to a Young Clergyman” (1720), Swift famously wrote, “Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style,” but added: 

“Professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meanings to those who are not of their tribe: a common farmer shall make you understand in three words, that his foot is out of joint, or his collar-bone broken, wherein a surgeon, after a hundred terms of art, if you are not a scholar, shall leave you to seek. It is frequently the same case in law, physic, and even many of the meaner arts.”

 

I try to remedy my ignorance by occasionally exploring the more obscure regions of Swift’s work. For instance, “Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs”(1714). It deals with the internecine squabbling among the ministers and others in the wake of Queen Anne’s death, George I’s accession to the throne, the return of Whigs to power and the trial of Tory leaders for treason (for conducting secret negotiations with France). One reads such work for the elegance and power of Swift’s argumentation, and for the simple pleasure of words artfully arranged. Here are sample sentences:

 

“Lastly, the danger of introducing too great a number of unexperienced men at once into office, was urged as an irrefragable reason for making changes by slow degrees. To discard an able officer from an employment, or part of a commission, where the revenue or trade were concerned, for no other reason but differing in some principles of government, might be of terrible consequence.”

 

Swift states a truth we might think of today as quintessentially conservative – prudent, pragmatic, non-dogmatic. One word was unknown to me: irrefragable. Here is the OED’s definition: “That cannot be refuted or disproved; incontrovertible, incontestable, indisputable, irrefutable, undeniable.” To the modern mind, the adjective suggests, on the one hand, inarguable certainty; on the other, close-minded arrogance. The word entered English from the Latin in the sixteenth century. The OED cites Southey, Ruskin and, best of all, Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Here is Burton on the character of those under the influence of yellow bile, according to the theory of humours:

 

“[T]hey are bold and impudent, and of a more harebrain disposition, apt to quarrel, and think of such things, battles, combats, and their manhood, furious; impatient in discourse, stiff, irrefragable and prodigious in their tenets; and if they be moved, most violent, outrageous, ready to disgrace, provoke any, to kill themselves and others . . . In their fits you shall hear them speak all manner of languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, that never were taught or knew them before.”

 

Apart from the allusion to glossolalia, doesn’t that sound familiar?