The "Travels of Lemuel Gulliver" were dropped, said the publisher, at his house, in the dark, from a hackney-coach. In regard to this work, the Dean followed his custom of sending out his writings to the world to make their way on their own merits, without the assistance of his name. But the authorship of the book could not long remain unknown before the storm of applause and curiosity which it immediately excited. It was a production, said Johnson,[152] "so new and strange that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and amazement. It was received with such avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made; it was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. Criticism was for a while lost in wonder; no rules of judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity." Whether read for the satire or the story, the adventures of Gulliver proved equally fascinating. They "offered personal and political satire to the readers in high life, low and coarse incidents to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age and disappointed ambition."[153]
The early part of the eighteenth century offered rich material to the satirist, and Swift brought to his work unparalleled fierceness and power. He attacked the corruption of the politician and the minister, the vanity and vice of the courtier, the folly and extravagance of the fashionable world, and gathering venom in his course, made his satire universal and painted the pettiness and deformity of the human race. But among the follies and vices of mankind, vanity was the fault most offensive to Swift, and that which he lashed with his most bitter invective. To ridicule human pride, and to expose its inconsistency with the imperfection of man, is the ruling object of his great satirical romance. On Gulliver's return to England from the land of the Houyhnhnms, where, under the degraded form of Yahoos, he had studied mankind as they appeared when influenced by all human vices and brutal instincts unveiled by hypocrisy or civilization, he describes his horror at observing the existence of vanity among his countrymen who resembled Yahoos so closely;—
My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those vices and follies only which nature has entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things: but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I ever be able to comprehend how such an animal, and such a vice, could tally together.
In the "Voyage to Lilliput" the follies and vanities of individuals and of parties are ridiculed by the representation of their practice among diminutive beings. Sir Robert Walpole suffered in the person of Flimnap the Lilliputian Premier, Tories and Whigs in the High-Heels and Low-Heels, Catholics and Protestants in the Big-endians and Small-endians. In the "Voyage to Brobdingnag," where Gulliver finds himself a pigmy among giants, the general object of the satire is the same, but its application becomes more bitter and universal. Characteristics of the human race hardly perceptible in their ordinary proportions, attain a disgusting and monstrous prominence when seen in the huge persons of the Brobdingnagians. The king of this gigantic people is represented as a beneficent monarch, who directs all his energies toward the peace, prosperity, and material advancement of his subjects; who seeks with a cold, calculating mind, undisturbed by passion or prejudice, the greatest good of the greatest number. To this monarch Gulliver gave a description of his native country: "I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favorable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow; for I have always borne that laudable partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarnasseusis, with so much justice, recommends to a historian; I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light." But the impression produced upon the King of Brobdingnag by Gulliver's relation expressed the widespread sense of evil which existed in Swift's day, which tinctured literature with misanthropy, and made Rousseau at a later time argue the superiority of the savage man over his civilized, but corrupt and hypocritical brother.
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting: "It was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce."
His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then, taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: "My little friend, Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers for their conduct or valor; judges for their integrity; senators for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. * * * I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth!"
In the voyage to Laputa the satire is directed against the vanity of human wisdom, and the folly of abandoning useful occupations for the empty schemes of visionaries. The philosophers of Laputa had allowed their land to run to waste, and their people to fall into poverty in their attempts to "soften marble for pillows and pin-cushions," to "petrify the hoofs of a living horse to prevent them from foundering," to "sow land with chaff," and to "extract sunbeams from cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers." The satire cannot be considered too broad when we consider the folly and credulity which, at the time of the South Sea mania, led many persons into sinking their whole fortunes in such enterprises as the company "To Fish up Wrecks on the Irish Coast," to "Make Salt-Water Fresh," to "Extract Silver from Lead," and to "Import Jackasses from Spain."
It is impossible within the limits of this volume to comment with any completeness on the application of Gulliver's Travels. The satire gathered strength and bitterness in its progress, until the limits of horror were reached in the voyage to the Houyhnhnms. This portion of the work cannot be considered to apply universally. Man does not here perceive a truthful reflection of himself. The Houyhnhnms, beings endowed with reason, but undisturbed and untempted by the passions or struggles of earthly existence, are not brutes, and are not to be compared with men. The Yahoos, in their total depravity, are not human; they represent, and that with a terrible truthfulness, the condition into which men may fall when their animal instincts and baser passions are allowed to subvert their reason and their noble qualities. The more a man suffers his better nature to yield to his lower, the more he resembles the detestable Yahoo. In this sense alone, the satire applies generally to mankind; but it applies with peculiar point to some characteristics of Swift's time. In reading the following passage, it is impossible not to be reminded of the treatment of Sir Robert Walpole by his former flatterers and sycophants when his power seemed at an end:
Some curious Houyhnhnms observe that in most herds there was a sort of ruling Yahoo, * * * who was always more deformed in body and mischievous in disposition than any of the rest; that this leader had usually a favorite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master's feet * * * and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass's flesh. This favorite is hated by the whole herd, and, therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and * * * (defile) him from head to foot.
But Swift, in his denunciation of men under the form of the Yahoos, disclosed the narrowness of his own misanthropy. When Gulliver has returned from his last voyage, with a mind which had dwelt on the beastliness and vice of the human race as it existed in the land of the Houyhnhnms, his warped judgment is unable to discern in his countrymen any attributes but those which they seem to share with the Yahoos:—
My wife and family received me with great surprise and joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust, and contempt; and the more, by reflecting on the near alliance I had to them. * * * As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour. At the time I am writing, it is five years since my last return to England: during the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable, much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. To this hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup; neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the hand.