Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Quotations: Comments about Swift

"A Bishop here said, that Book [Gulliver's Travels] was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it; and so much for Gulliver." Swift in letter to Alexander Pope, 27 Nov 1726.

"His eyes are as azure as the heavens, and have a charming archness in them." Alexander Pope [as quoted by Thackeray, The English Humourists]

"I have not the courage...to be such a satirist as you, but I would be as much, or more, a philosopher. You call your satires, libels; I would rather call my satires, epistles. They will consist more of morality than of wit, and grow graver, which you will call duller." Alexander Pope, letter to Swift, 1733

Let Ireland tell, how Wit upheld her cause,
Her Trade supported, and supply'd her Laws;
And leave on Swift this grateful verse ingrav'd,
The Rights a Court attack'd, a Poet sav'd.
Alexander Pope, Epistle to Augustus, 1737

"My sincere love of that valuable, indeed incomparable man, will accompany him through life, and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives, as many of his works will live which are absolutely original, unequalled, unexampled. His humanity, his charity, his condescension, his candour, are equal to his wit, and require as good and true a taste to be equally valued." Pope, to Lord Orrery, on J.S. (quoted by Lecky)

"pray forgive an admirer of you, who ows to yr writings the love he bears to yr language..." Voltaire, letter to Swift, 14 December 1727

"the more I read your works, the more I am ashamed of mine." Voltaire, letter to Swift, March 1728

"M. Swift est Rabelais dans son bon et vivant en bonne compagnie." Voltaire, Lettres sur les Anglais,, 1734

". . . He had not the least tincture of vanity in his conversation. He was, perhaps, as he said himself, too proud to be vain. When he was polite, it was in a manner entirely his own. In his friendships he was constant and undisguised. He was the same in his enmities." -- Orrery. [as quoted by Thackeray, The English Humourists]

"The style of his conversation was very much of a piece with that of his writings, concise and clear and strong." Delany: Observations upon Lord Orrery's "Remarks, &c. on Swift." [as quoted by Thackeray, The English Humourists]

"Dr. Swift had a natural severity of face, which even his smiles could scarce soften, or his utmost gaiety render placid and serene; but when that sternness of visage was increased by rage, it is scarce possible to imagine looks or features that carried in them more terror and austerity. "-- Orrery. [as quoted by Thackeray, The English Humourists]

:Dean Swift ... perceived that there was a spirit of romance mixed with all the works of the poets who preceded him; or, in other words, that they had drawn nature on the most pleasing side. There still therefore was a place for him, who, careless of censure, should describe it just as it was, with all its deformaities; he therefore owes much of his fame, not so much to the greatness of his genius, as to the boldness of it. He was dry, sarcastic, and severe; and suited his style exactly to the turn of his thought, being concise and nervous." Goldsmith, An History of England, 1764

"Who that has read Dean Swift's disgusting description of the Yahoos, and insipid one of Houyhnhnm with a philosophical eye, can avoid seeing the futility of degrading the passions, or making man rest in contentment?" -- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

"In this last part of his imaginary travels, Swift has indulged in a misanthropy that is intolerable. The representation which he has given us of human nature, must terrify, and even debase the mind of the reader who views it." Lord Orrery

"Johnson . 'Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves. His excellence is strong sense; for his humour, though very well, is not remarkably good. I doubt whether The Tale of a Tub be his; for he never owned it, and it much above his usual manner.'" Boswell's Life of Johnson Oxford Standard Authors. London : Oxford University Press, 1904 [1966], p. 319-20 [Thursday, 28 July 1763].

"Swift having been mentioned, Johnson, as usual, treated him with little respect as an authour. Some of us endeavored to support the Dean of St. Patrick's by various arguments. One in particular praised his Conduct of the Allies. Johnson. 'Sir, his Conduct of the Allies is a performance of very little ability.' 'Surely, Sir, (said Dr. Douglas,) you must allow it has strong facts.' Johnson. 'Why yes, Sir; but what is that to the merit of the composition? In the Sessions-paper of the Old Bailey there are strong facts. Housebreaking is a strong fact; robbery is a strong fact; and murder is a mighty strong fact; but is great praise due to the historian of those strong facts? No, Sir. Swift has told what he had to tell distinctly enough, but that is all. He had to count ten, and he has counted it right.'" Boswell's Life of Johnson Oxford Standard Authors. London : Oxford University Press, 1904 [1966], p. 319-20 [Thursday, 28 July 1763].

"Swift must be allowed for a time, to have dictated the political opinions of the English nation." Dr. Johnson [as quoted by Thackeray, The English Humourists]

"One, in particular, praised his `Conduct of the Allies. `-- Johnson: `Sir, his "Conduct of the Allies" is a performance of very little ability . . . . Why, sir, Tom Davies might have written the "Conduct of the Allies !" ' " -- Boswell's Life of Johnson. [as quoted by Thackeray, The English Humourists]

"[Samuel Johnson] attacked Swift, as he used to do upon all occasions. The Tale of a Tub is so much superior 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.' I wondered to hear him say of Gulliver's Travels, 'When one you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.' 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." Boswell's Life of Johnson Oxford Standard Authors. London : Oxford University Press, 1904 [1966], p. 595 [Friday, 24 March 1775].

"He [Dr. Johnson] seemed to me to have an unaccountable prejudice against Swift; for I once took the liberty to ask him if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me he had not." -- Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides. [as quoted by Thackeray, The English Humourists]

"His style was well suited to his thoughts, which are never subtilised by nice disquisitions, decorated by sparkling conceits, elevated by ambitious sentences, or variegated by far-sought learning. He pays no court to the passions; he excites neither surprise nor admiration; he always understands himself, and his readers always understand him: the peruser of Swift wants little previous knowledge; it will be sufficient that he is acquainted with common words and common things; his neither required to mount elevations nor to explore profundities; his passage is always on a level, along solid ground, without asperities, without obstruction." Samuel Johnson, Life of Swift, 1781.

"In the Poetical Works of Dr. Swift there is not much upon which the critick can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety. They are, for the most part what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. There seldom occurs a hard-laboured expression, or a redundant epithet; all his verses exemplify his own definition of a good style, they consist of proper words in proper places." Samuel Johnson, Life of Swift, 1781.

"But it was the Lilliputians upon Gulliver." Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly, March 21, 1801.

"As a poet, Swift's post is pre-eminent in the sort of poetry which he cultivated. He never attempted any species of composition, in which either the sublime or the pathetic were required of him. But in every department of poetry where wit is necessary, he displayed, as the subject chanced to require, either the blasting lightning of satire, or the lambent and meteor-like coruscations of frolicsome humour. His powers of versification are admirably adapted to his favorite subjects. Rhyme, which is a handcuff to an inferior poet, he who is master of his art wears as a bracelet. Swift was of the latter description; his lines fall as easily into the best grammatical arrangement, and the most simple and forcible expression, as if he had been writing in prose...Swift has more easily attained this perfection of fictitious narrative, because in all his works of whatever description, he has maintained the most undeviating attention to the point at issue." Sir Walter Scott, Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, 1814

"One can only repeat what Scott says somewhere about Swifts style, perhaps the purest and strongest we have in the language. "Swift's style," said Scott, "seems so simple that one would think any child might write as he does, and yet if we try we find to our despair that it is impossible." XVI. Webster. ¤ 7. Webster's Developed Style. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. 1907-21.

"He a was, without exception, the greatest and most efficient libeller that ever exercised the trade; and possessed, in an eminent degree, all the qualifications which it requires: -- a clear head -- a cold heart -- a vindictive temper -- no admiration of noble qualities -- no sympathy with suffering -- not much conscience -- not much consistency -- a ready wit -- a sarcastic humour -- a thorough knowledge of the baser parts of human nature -- and a complete familiarity with every thing that is low, homely, and familiar in language. These were his gifts; -- and he soon felt for what ends they were given. Almost all his works are libels; generally upon individuals, sometimes upon sects and parties, sometimes upon human nature...Disregarding all the laws of polished hostility, he uses, at one and the same moment, his sword and his poisoned -- his hands, and his teeth, and his envenomed breath, -- and does not even scruple, upon occasion, to imitate his own yahoos, by discharging on his unhappy victims a shower of filth, from which neither courage nor dexterity can afford any protection. -- Against such antagonist, it was, of course, at no time very easy to make head; and accordingly his invective seems, for the most part, to have been as much dreaded, and as tremendous as the personal ridicule or Voltaire. Both were inexhaustible, well directed, and unsparing; but even when Voltaire drew blood, he did not mangle the victim, and was only mischievous when Swift was brutal ... Of his Poetry, we do not think there is much to be said; -- for we cannot persuade ourselves that Swift was in any respect a poet." Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review, 1816

"Swift's reputation as a poet has been in a manner obscured by the greater splendour, by the natural force and inventive genius of his prose writings; but if he had never written either the Tale of the Tub or Gulliver's Travels, his name merely as a poet would have come down to us, and have gone down to posterity with well-earned honours." William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, 1818

"Swift's style is, in its line, perfect; the manner is a complete expression of the matter, the terms appropriate, and the artifice concealed. It is simplicity in the true sense of the word." Samuel Coleridge, Lecture on Style, 1818

"Swift was anima Reabelaisii habitans in sicco, -- the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place." Samuel Coleridge, Table Talk

"...if, undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you, and not had the pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram about you -- watched for you in a sewer, and come out to assail you with a coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon." Thackeray, The English Humourists 1853

"An immense genius: an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling. Thackeray, The English Humourists

"His hand was constantly stretched out to relieve an honest man -- he was cautious about his money, but ready. -- If you were in a strait would you like such a benefactor? I think I would rather have had a potato and a friendly word from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea and a dinner." Thackeray, The English Humourists

"As for the humour and conduct of this famous fable [Gulliver's Travels], I suppose there is no person who reads but must admire; as for the moral, I think it horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous; and giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him. Some of this audience mayn't have read the last part of Gulliver, and to such I would recall the advice of the venerable Mr. Punch to persons about to marry, and say, "Don't." Thackeray, The English Humourists

"He describes his characters as if for the police-court." Emerson [quoted by Lecky]

"No fouler pen than Swift's has soiled our literature. His language is horrible from first to last. He is full of odious images, of base and abominable allusions. It would be a labour of Hercules to cleanse his pages. His love-letters are defaced by his incurable coarseness. This habit of his is so inveterate that it seems a miracle he kept his sermons free from blackguard phrases. It is a question not of morality, but of decency, whether it is becoming to sit in the same room with the works of this divine. How the good Sir Walter ever managed to see him through the Press is amazing. In this matter Swift is inexcusable." Augustine Birrell, Essays About Men, Women and Books, 1894 [as quoted in Suppressed Books]

"No better style in English prose was ever written, or can be," William Dean Howells, "Preface," Gulliver's Travels, 1913. [quoted by Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler's Legacy. New York : Atheneum, 1969, p. 224.]

"Swift may be claimed as a whole -- work and man -- as one of the greatest, one of the completest, sources of interest...in the whole range of literature." George Saintsbury, The Peace of the Augustans, 1916

"... Swift, the greatest writer of English prose, and the greatest man who has ever written great English prose..." T.S. Eliot, Clark Lectures, 1926 in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Faber & Faber, 1993

"Real irony is an expression of suffering, and the greatest ironist was the one who suffered the most -- Swift." T.S. Eliot, Clark Lectures, 1926 in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Faber & Faber, 1993

"Tourneur's 'suffering, cynicism, and despair', to use Collins' words, are static; they might be prior to experience, or be the fruit of but little; Swift's is the progress cynicism of the mature and disappointed man of the world. As an objective comment on the world, Swift's is by far the more terrible. For Swift had himself enough pettiness, as well as enough sin of pride, and lust of domination, to be able to expose and condemn mankind in its universal pettiness and pride and vanity and ambition; and his poetry, as well as his prose, attests that he hated the very smell of the human animal. We may think as we read Swift, 'how loathesome human beings are'; in reading Tourneur we can only think, 'how terrible to loathe human beings so much as that.'" T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1932

"We can understand the comment of J.W. Allen, the historian of Sixteenth-Century political thought, who called [Thomas More's Utopia] 'the saddest of fairy tales. . . . an indictment of humanity almost as terrible as Gulliver's Travels.'" Utopia as Mirror for a Life and Times by Richard Marius

"...I felt I'd seen enough of men; I'd seen them at their old games again. I just followed my own instinct. This is very interesting to me-- take Jonathan Swift, a person who's a great rationalist and a great satirist, and his satire Gulliver's Travels" Sir Laurens van der Post in "A Singular Individual"

"Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine faces. Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell. Lantern jaws. Abbas father, furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff! Descende, calve, ut ne nimium decalveris. A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace (descende), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down, bald poll! A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar's horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat." -- James Joyce, "Proteus," Ulysses

"Swift haunts me; he is always just round the next corner." W. B. Yeats. Introduction. Words Upon the Window-Pane. Dublin, Ire.: The Cuala Press, 1934.

"If the Houyhnhnms should ever catch me, and, finding me particularly vicious and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me..." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, chapter X.

"When the great dean of St. Patrick's died in 1745 he had already ceased to be understood by the eighteenth century. Disregarded he could not be; his satires, misrepresented, vexed the more, and his imperious personality took on an almost diabolic aspect. No English writer of corresponding stature has been repudiated so persistently and so fiercely by immediately succeeding generations..." Louis Quintana, The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift. (1936) vii.

"If the duty of criticism toward Jonathan Swift is to judge him insane, criticism should be turned over to the psychoanalysts." Norman O. Brown, "The Excremental Vision," in Swift: a Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Ernest Tuveson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice-Hall, 1964, p. 34.

"Swift is literature's great ventriloquist, and we have come to recognize that understanding his works is a matter of distinguishing the master's voice from those of his puppet personae." David Nokes, "Swift and the Beggars," Essays in Criticism 26.3 (July 1976) 218-35.

"...Swift is probably the hardest for modern critics to cope with -- not only because he habitually mocks all that we academics hold dear but also because he affects us in ways which our training leaves us handicapped in dealing with. When we teach ourselves to read and analyze literature with professional dispassion, we find ourselves hamstrung when dealing with an author skilled at playing tricks with his readers -- provoking their laughter in unsettling ways, stirring them up obscurely, making fools of them. Before we can analyze the literary ways and means of Swift's satire, we may find that we need to confess how badly we've been stung by it -- an awkward position at best, and for intellectuals a well-nigh intolerable one...It is little wonder that Swift criticism has demonstrated such bewildering variety and vehemence over the years..." A.C. Elias Jr. Swift at Moor Park. (1982) x.

"Swift's work is a persisting miracle of how much commentary an author's writing can accommodate and still remain problematic." Edward Said, "Swift's Tory Anarchy." The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1983. 54-77.

"When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that 'wonderful kind of engine...a globe,half of silver and half of some transparent metal,' they identified it immediately as the god he worshipped. After all, 'he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.' To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire.Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?" James Gleick Faster

"What can you say about Daniel Boone? I had just read all the biographies and thought about it and finally realized that one thing I hadn't known about him was that he was literate. I had never thought about it. I read that he always carried Gulliver's Travels with him. I knew what he was doing on his hunting trips so I was able to write the scene where he is with his dog up in the mountains with the snow and he's got a turkey hanging over the fire and he's reading Gulliver's Travels. He's trying to understand it and here he is in this country where the Indians, for example, have no understanding or concept of the fact that white men want to own land. It's so alien to them that it is like Gulliver's Travels for the Indians." A Conversations with Noah Adams

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