The description of Friday is well conceived. This interesting barbarian worships his master’s gun and talks to it, desiring it not to kill him. He says of Benamuckee, the creator, “All things say ‘Oh!’ to him,” and the objections of this child of nature to his master’s theology are very lifelike. “If God much stronger than the devil, why God no kill the devil, so make him no more do wicked?” And after Crusoe had replied, “God will at last punish him severely; he is reserved for the judgment and is to be cast into the bottomless pit, to dwell with everlasting fire,” Friday’s rejoinder has never yet, I think, been successfully answered,—“Why not kill the devil now, not kill great ago?” It was natural that Crusoe should say, “Here I was run down again by him to the last degree.”
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
JONATHAN SWIFT
I suppose the human mind is naturally inclined to a belief in dwarfs and giants. There are legends about them in the folk-lore of nearly every people. It requires only an exaggeration of the things we know to believe in larger men and smaller men than we have ever seen. In “Gulliver’s Travels” Swift has worked out the details of comparative size with great particularity, and the book is an illustration of the principle that even a palpable fiction may be made so definite and circumstantial that it will almost command belief.
The figure of the great Man-Mountain dragging the tiny fleet of Lilliput is vivid and lifelike, and when in Brobdignag the same giant becomes a helpless dwarf, is carried like a mouse in the mouth of a dog, and has fierce struggles with a frog and a rat, the scenes do not seem at all impossible. The art of the story-teller gives probability to the wildest fancies, and you can hardly doubt, as you read, that the kingdoms of the big people and the little people must have existed, so plain are the scenes before your eyes.
But Swift’s description of the physical characteristics of these peoples is not more vivid than his account of their customs and social peculiarities.
Much of his satire was meant to set off certain follies of his own time, but to us the most valuable part of it is that which portrays the general frailties of humanity. He holds up to nature a mirror which, while it distorts the features a little, still makes the caricature extremely lifelike. Even where the Lilliputians are most absurd we recognize their similarity to ourselves. The quarrels between the partisans of low and high heeled shoes, the revolution and obstinate war concerning the proper manner of opening an egg, are not a whit more nonsensical than some of our own social and theological controversies. The Lilliputians bury their dead with the head down in order that the body may be in the right position for the resurrection, just as the Mahometan faces Mecca in his prayers, the Christian builds his church according to certain points of the compass, and the ritualist makes his genuflexions in carefully prescribed forms, for reasons quite as cogent and unanswerable.
The “little people” well knew there were no other regions of the earth than Lilliput and Blefuscu, and here, too, we are like them. Most of us consider that all there is of importance in the universe is that which falls within our own spheres of observation.
No one can read Swift’s story without reflecting that our own little world must seem much like Lilliput to the great eye which looks upon this planet as only one among the islands of the firmament.
In Laputa we see ourselves even more clearly. We can find counterparts of the great lord of wide attainments and eminent services, who was accounted ignorant and stupid because he had so ill an ear for music that he beat time in the wrong place. The philosophers who moved about the earth with one eye turned inward and the other upward toward the zenith, and who constantly required a flapper to bring them to their senses, are old and familiar acquaintances.
The proposition to impose a tax upon men’s vices has been put into practice many a time, and the scheme of a general raffle to secure the prizes of patronage would seem to be a tolerable refuge from our former system of political appointments.