Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Sources: Biography

The name of Swift, I daresay, will always lie under tbe cloud of Thackeray's dreadful invective. Every schoolboy is familiar with tbe picture of tbe poor Dean lying in wait for his enemies "in a sewer" and disposing of them with "a coward's blow and a bludgeon." How much truth is in it? Probably very little. Thackeray was led into libel and nonsense by his own colassal sentimentality. He was a true son of the Victorian age, as Swift was a true son of the age of Anne, and between the two there could be no sympathy and little understanding. Swift's crime quickly becomes apparent. He was wholly devoid of the fundamental Victorian virtues: uxoriousness, philoprogenitiveness, love of the hearth. His view of marriage was so harsh that it ranged him among "madmen"; when he spoke of children he became a downright "ogre." What other Englishman, ancient or modern, would have proposed handing the little dears over to the cook, and so getting something out of them beyond mere spiritual where and usufructs? The jocosity wounded Thackeray where he was tenderest. It was, to one who took a fierce, Christian pride in both his stomach and his loins, a veritable blow below the belt. Hence his celebrated philippic, and hence lingering notion that Swift was a low and knavish fellow, armed with his grandmother's shinbone, and ready to crack a friend's head for the price of a pair of silver buckles.

He was, of course, nothing of the sort. He was simply a premature and lonely forerunner of the modern age -- a Voltaire born in the wrong country and a couple of generations too soon. He was the first great enemy of the immemorial anthropocentric delusion. Long before him, stretching back into the remotest shadows, there had been critics of man, and some of them had laid on with vast ferocity, but he was the first to go the whole hog - he was the first to deny the very premisses with which all the rest began. When he regarded Homo sapiens he did not see a god with a few lamentable defects; he saw a poor worm with no virtues at all, but only a crushing burden of follies, weaknesses and imbecilities. He saw a coward and an idiot, a fraud and a scoundreL Was this preposterous quadruped made in the image of God? Then God Himself was not fit to be lord of the noble horse, the august lion, the brave and honest rat. Was it any wonder that the "Thoughts on Religion" had "scarce a Christian character" and that they were, at bottom, "merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief"? The fact outraged another of Thackeray's sentimentalities, and so added to his indignation. But he was wrong again, as he had been wrong before. A Christian character, forsooth! It was precisely Swift's merit that he was superior to all such sweet bilge that he somehow managed to rid himself of the romantic baggage of his race, and to stand upon a hilltop regarding it, with sharp and horrible eyes.

But the fellow, one hears, was an unspeakable hypocrite! Religion, to him, was a mere cloak, a means of livelihood. He embraced it as a modern idealist disports in Rotary, to attract eyes and increase sales. In politics he was first on one side and then on the other, and full of terrific heat and eloquence on both. He had no lofty principles. He was always in the market, chasing buyers. Well, one lives this life as God ordains, and in whatever wallow His infinite wisdom designates. Swift lived in the age of Anne, when the only men who were not for sale were in jail. Principles? What principles were actually at stake in the politics he knew? The combat was not between heroes and knaves, but between two gangs of knaves. In order to do execution upon one gang he had to work for the other. The dilemma is not unknown in our own time. It makes, alas, for cynicism. But I fancy that the world could bear the cynicism if its annual fruit was another "Gulliver's Travels". . . .

Few books hold up better. After two hundred years its blistering humors are as fresh as today's witticism. When Swift began to write it is uncertain; probably some time before fifty. When he printed it at last he was nearing his sixtieth birthday, and the chief struggles of his life were over. There is plain internal evidence that the first part was written, or at least sketched out, a good while before the second. It is very much milder, more good humored, more discreet. A few changes have sufficed to turn it into a favorite story for sucklings. In the second half there is a radical change of tone. The humor, gradually hardening, finally takes on a savagery almost unparallelled. It comes in great gusts, blasts, tornados. It is cruel, relentless, devastating. Swift wrote to Pope in 1725 that its aim was "to vex the world, not to divert it." His life was behind him, and he was beginning to reckon up the score. The time was past for hope, and with bope gone there was no need for disguise. He wanted it to be known, once and for all time, that he "hated and detested tbat animal called man."