for their slavery and folly and baseness, out of a fierce unwillingness
to be slavish and foolish and base along with them. He who had had a
hand in ruling an empire would not submit to being counted among the
docile subjects of the province to which he had been banished. Private
resentment had stirred him to public rebellion. He could not help it
if what he had done for hate was the same as if he had done it for
love. Such an outcome was only another proof that the world was wrong.
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, wading home with the Blefuscudian fleet at
the end of a packthread, Swift decently exulted. But he would not let
himself forget that the adventure had taken place among the pigmies.
Whatever he accomplished was a small affair. Great affairs were always
maddeningly beyond him, or, he remembered his days with Oxford, behind
him.
VI
TRAVELLER
1
Swift never set a foot outside Ireland or England except when he
hurried across Wales on his restless journeys between London, the
bright centre of his world, and Dublin, the dreary margin. Though he
constantly diverted himself with books of travel, he found in them
nothing which convinced him that he would anywhere meet more wisdom or
less folly than he everywhere observed. The Scotch were a “poor, fierce
northern people,” the Dutch grasping and shifty, the French frivolous
and Catholic. If he had some liking for the Swedes it was because he
was fascinated by Charles XII, that sudden, terrific king who had
burst upon Europe from his cold peninsula and stirred philosophers to
admiration by such a career as Swift would have chosen for himself. But
dividing mankind into nations was little more than drawing lines on a
map. The whole earth was inhabited by the human race.
Once Swift had hopes of going to Austria, once to Sweden, once to
France. Each time prevented, he hardly grumbled. If he thought of other
countries it was for their better climate, which might, he said, have
kept his wit and humour lively, as Ireland’s had not. “I imagine,” he
wrote in 1724, “France would be proper for me now, and Italy ten years
hence.” But he could not rouse himself from thinking about the world
to travel far to look at it. There was his giddiness, which might at
any time make him reel and fall. There was his deafness, which forced
him to live “among those whom I can govern and make them comply with my
infirmities.” There was the prospect of blindness. “My eyes will not
suffer me to read small prints, nor anything by candlelight, and if I
grow blind, as well as deaf, I must needs become very grave and wise
and insignificant.” He was caged in Ireland, with nothing to do but
pace his cage.
In Ireland, however, Swift was not confined to the cramped cottage at
Laracor or to the hollow deanery in Dublin. During the twelve unbroken
years of his banishment after 1714 he often visited other houses. His
hosts could never have enough of him. Near Laracor were the houses of
Peter Ludlow, George Rochfort, and Knightley Chetwoode. Near Dublin
were the houses of the Grattans and Patrick Delaney and Charles
Ford, with whom Stella spent a summer. Forty miles from Dublin was
Thomas Sheridan’s ramshackle house which Swift could sometimes have
to himself. He is said to have visited an ancestor of the Earls of
Llandaff in Tipperary. He visited the Ashes--St. George Ashe had been
Swift’s college tutor--at Clogher in Tyrone, Robert Cope in Armagh, the
Bishop of Dromore in Down. And during the summers of 1722 and 1723,
when banishment had become almost unendurable, Swift made long, lonely
journeys to the north and to the south. “I have shifted scenes,” he
told Vanessa in July 1722, “oftener than I ever did in my life, and I
believe I have lain in thirty beds since I left the town.”
Six hundred miles in the north, five hundred in the south the year
following, all solitary and speculative. But these were not merely
random travels in search of change and health. Though Swift was still
incorrigibly Swift, he was also Gulliver, now with a purpose studying
the despicable ways of men.
Gulliver’s travels were Swift’s travels, disguised with Swift’s wit,
loaded with Swift’s hate. He gave years to them, as to nothing else
he ever wrote about, five or six years thinking of them as Martin
Scriblerus’s travels, nearly as long thinking of them as Gulliver’s or
his own. “I am now writing a History of my Travels,” Swift told Ford
in April 1721, “which will be a large volume, and gives account of
countries hitherto unknown; but they go on slowly for want of health
and humour.” By December of that year Bolingbroke knew about them. “I
long to see your Travels; for, take it as you will, I do not retract
what I said, and will undertake to find in two pages of your bagatelles
more good sense, useful knowledge, and true religion than you can show
me in the works of nineteen in twenty of the profound divines and
philosophers of the age.” In June 1722 Vanessa had read something about
the giants. In January 1724 Swift was near the end. “I have left the
Country of Horses,” he wrote to Ford, “and am in the Flying Island,
where I shall not stay long, and my two last journeys will soon be
over.” In July 1725 Bolingbroke referred to the pigmies and giants of
which he had heard. In August, Swift wrote to Ford: “I have finished my
Travels, and am now transcribing them. They are admirable things, and
will wonderfully mend the world.”
In September, after a summer at Sheridan’s house in the country,
Swift wrote to Pope: “I have employed my time, besides ditching, in
finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing my Travels, in four
parts complete, newly augmented, and intended for the press when the
world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be found brave
enough to venture his ears.” Thereafter all Swift’s friends waited
to see how he would, as he said, “vex the world rather than divert
it.” They could be sure he had written more than a story of imaginary
voyages in a book. This would be Swift’s revenge.
In the days of the Scriblerus Club it had been planned that Martin
on his first voyage should be carried “by a prosperous storm to a
discovery of the ancient Pygmean empire”; on his second should be
“happily shipwrecked on the land of the giants, the most humane people
in the world”; on his third should reach a “kingdom of philosophers who
govern by the mathematics”; and on his fourth should, among beings not
yet named, “display a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust
of his species.” These plans had broken up with the Club. Returning to
this theme, Swift saw that the bungling Martin would no longer serve.
If he were to be the traveller, much of the folly of the narrative
would have to appear in his misadventures. Better to let the traveller
be a plain, reasonable, unimaginative man who would report what he had
seen in the language of common sense.
Swift’s nature included such a Gulliver. It included, too, an observer
as alien to what went on around him as Gulliver could be on his most
distant, most surprising island. “My disaffection to the world ... has
never varied from the twenty-first ... year of my life.” Disaffection,
singularity, had driven Swift, no less than most men, to think of
himself as playing various rôles. At Kilkenny and Trinity he had been
a tragic hero, neglected and abused by fortune. At Moor Park he had
been a scholar in a garden, despising the rabble of wits and pedants.
At Laracor he had been a soldier in a garrison, when there were wars
elsewhere. In London he had been the conscience and voice of ministers,
insisting upon order and virtue in the state. In Dublin, exiled, he had
turned from governing to resisting and had made himself the hammer of
tyrants. Now he was a creature of a different race, thrown among men,
full of antipathy for them, but full also of a scornful curiosity.
It was the best rôle he ever found. Without once taking ship to the
corners of the earth as Gulliver did, Swift had moved about at home
too large for the pigmies, too small for the giants, too sensible
for the philosophers, too human for the animals. He had never been
able quite to adjust himself to the scale of life as other men lived
it. Other men, even when they had the pride of distinction, could
submit. Swift could not. As if he were really an alien to the race,
he had been obliged, whether he chose or not, to feel and act alien.
Only once in more than fifty years had he found an occupation which
truly involved him, and that only while a short delusion lasted. He
had been unwilling to take a wife, though women desired and loved
him. He had compromised so far as to have friends, but he was always
conscious of the exceptions he was making. “I have ever hated all
nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is towards
individuals.... But principally I hate and detest that animal called
man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This
is the system upon which I have governed myself many years.... Upon
this great foundation of misanthropy ... the whole building of my
Travels is erected; and I will never have peace of mind till all honest
men are of my opinion.”
If he had been fully alien he would not have troubled himself to be a
missionary. He was a man to the extent that he was a moralist as well
as a misanthrope. He would cure if he could. If not, he would punish.
“Drown the world! I am not content with despising it, but I would anger
it if I could with safety.” Here was the flaw in his misanthropy. Here
was the strain of humanity through which he could be fretted and hurt.
Here was the deep source of his fury. But he was alien enough to feel,
dramatically, that he was only a traveller in strange lands.
Yet Swift was not a Timon, bawling and railing. Swift’s misanthropy
was in his constitution, not in his disposition. His friends spoke
always of his sweetness, his charm, his delightful temper, his hearty
affections, his honest generosity. He had about him a magic almost like
beauty’s magic. Nor did they think of him as morose and surly, whatever
he said about himself. “Gulliver is a happy man,” said the experienced
Arbuthnot, “that at his age can write such a merry work.” Swift on his
travels could no more help the wit on his tongue than he could help the
detestation in his heart.
He was as ingenious as he was grave. He took pains, with a few slips,
to draw his pigmies and giants to scale, the pigmies an inch to a human
foot, the giants a foot to a human inch. He deftly commandeered the
inventions of earlier writers: Philostratus, Lucian, Rabelais, Cyrano
de Bergerac, Perrot d’Ablancourt, Tom Brown. The nautical terms paraded
in the voyage to Brobdingnag were copied almost word for word from
a mariner’s handbook. Swift did not disdain to parody contemporary
travellers. Whereas a mere misanthrope would have clamoured, a mere
moralist would have scolded, Swift, being a wit, was satisfied to tell
a story, pretending that he was a spectator who had no share in what he
told. There were the characters, there were the incidents. They could
be understood by anybody who had an understanding.
Consider the insectile people of Lilliput. Swift, in the guise of
Gulliver, was at first received with dread, then with wonder, then with
hospitality. Though they kept him a prisoner, they let him into the
secrets of the Court and of the government, which were preposterously
like England’s. The Lilliputian ministers to commend themselves to the
king capered before him on a tight-rope. Gulliver, whose mind was part
of Swift’s, remembered larger ministers. Flimnap, who could caper an
inch higher than any other lord in the empire, seemed remarkably like
Walpole. The great men of Lilliput who sought honours from their king
competed, by jumping over a stick held in his hand, for silken threads
six inches long, one blue, one red, one green, which reminded Gulliver
of the Order of the Garter, of the Bath, and of the Thistle.
Lilliput and the neighbouring Blefuscu had long been at war. A
Lilliputian schism was the cause. Formerly all the people had broken
their eggs at the larger end. One of their kings, having cut his finger
on the larger end of one of his eggs, had by royal edict made the
smaller end orthodox. There had been a civil war. Some of the defeated
conservatives had fled to Blefuscu and had there found refuge and
favour at the court. England, Gulliver reflected, had been entirely
Catholic before Henry VIII. The Catholic Pretender had fled to France,
and France had long been at war with England.
Grateful for the kindness shown him, Gulliver aided Lilliput in its
war by capturing the Blefuscudian fleet and bringing it as a gift to
his royal host. But the Lilliputians were no more grateful in return
than the English had been to the Oxford ministry for ending the war
with France. One party among the pigmies insisted that Blefuscu be
subjugated to a province with a viceroy, as some of the Whigs had
insisted France might be. The sourest of the tiny ministers became
Gulliver’s enemy, as the dismal Nottingham had become Swift’s.
Gulliver’s chief offence was that, when a fire broke out in the queen’s
apartment at the palace, he extinguished it in a manner more natural to
him than agreeable to the queen. Had not Queen Anne implacably resented
the spattering ridicule which Swift had let fall upon what he thought
was menacing the Church and State? Thereafter the position of Gulliver
in Lilliput was hopeless. The cabinet decided he must die. The friendly
minister Reldresal, who may have stood for Carteret, thought it would
be enough to blind Gulliver and allow him to starve to death.
From that compromise Gulliver escaped to Blefuscu, and back to England,
knowing that the smallest people in the world had all the familiar
follies and vices of mankind in general.
Next Swift, as Gulliver, was blown to the giants of Brobdingnag, that
humane people. It was his turn to be insectile. He was exhibited
as a toy freak by the kind, greedy farmer who had found him.
Scientists wondered what species he could belong to. The king, being
a philosopher, supposed that such creatures as Gulliver “have their
titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and
burrows that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress
and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they
betray.” And when Gulliver had defended his species by an account of
their government and politics, their wars and luxuries, the king,
being a humane philosopher, concluded “your natives to be the most
pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to
crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
He himself abominated mystery, refinement, and intrigue in governors.
He limited government “to common sense and reason, to justice and
lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes.” He
held that “whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass
grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve
better of mankind ... than the whole race of politicians put together.”
Gulliver, or Swift, sardonically despaired of such a monarch. His
people were no better. Their learning was only in morality, history,
poetry, and useful mathematics. They were unable to form conceptions of
what Gulliver meant by “entities, abstractions, and transcendentals.”
They were dull with virtue and peace.
Gulliver found in their habits less to remind him of England than he
had found in Lilliput. His story was taken up with the ingenious shifts
by which he got along among them. But after the giants he could not so
easily return to the old scale of life as he could after the pigmies.
His own people seemed contemptible by their smallness. He was twice as
far from mankind as he had been before.
Swift’s, Gulliver’s, third voyage seems to have been to the Country
of Horses, but when he told the story he saved that for the venomous
conclusion and in the third place put the account of the Flying Island
and the continent which was topsy-turvy with philosophers.
Once more, as in Lilliput, he was often reminded of Europe. The name
of Laputa was like the Spanish for harlot. The island, when its rulers
wished, could hover over stubborn cities and shut out the sun, as
England shut out the sun from Ireland. Whether aloft or on land the
people were rapt in abstruse speculations or abandoned to fantastic
projects. Among the islanders nobody spoke sense except, possibly,
the tradesmen, women, and children. The others were so many pedants
exaggerated from the breed that Swift had detested in his earliest
satires. The Academy of Lagado was a Bedlam of Science, where men wore
out their lives trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, to build
houses downward from the roofs in the fashion of the bees and spiders,
to plow fields only with the snouts of hogs, to make silk from spider
webs, to cure colic with a pair of bellows, to soften marble for
pincushions, to propagate naked sheep, to write books by a mechanical
device, to discover painless methods of taxation.
Gulliver grew dizzy. He lacked the head, as Swift did, for this
whirling universe. It did not steady him when, on the neighbouring
island of Glubbdubdrib, he was allowed to call up the spirits of the
famous dead and found how falsely they had been presented in history.
It did not steady him when in Luggnagg he learned of the immortal
struldbrugs, for whom immortality was only human life prolonged to
an infinity of horrible old age. “I ... thought,” said Gulliver, for
Swift, “that no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run
with pleasure from such a life.” When he was out of the mad lands of
Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, and Luggnagg, he was nearly upside
down, giddy, and three times as far from mankind.
Now for the antipodes of misanthropy. Among the Houyhnhnms Gulliver
was almost undisguisedly Swift. The day on which Gulliver set sail
from Portsmouth was the precise day of September 1710 on which Swift
had arrived in London to make his fortune with the new men in power.
Gulliver’s discovery of an island where the horses were as much wiser
and nobler as they were stronger than the men was such a discovery as
Swift may have made as he rode through desolate, beggarly Ireland.
It is easy to guess, though only to guess, that the device came to his
mind on that dark expedition to the south in the summer of 1723 after
Vanessa’s death. Everywhere he saw the “savage old Irish,” “miserable,
tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape,” living “in
the utmost ignorance, barbarity, and poverty, giving themselves wholly
up to idleness, nastiness, and thievery,” “brought up to steal or beg
for want of work,” so that to them “death would be the best thing to
be wished for both on account of themselves and the public.” Swift had
not yet reached the point where he could take up the cause of these
miserable victims. He felt chiefly a sick repulsion. He would not admit
that they and he were of the same kind. At least they must belong to a
tribe which had degenerated till they were less than beasts.
Less than beasts? Compare them with his horse, healthy, patient,
without follies or vices, incapable of pride. Horses, the animals Swift
had most to do with and knew best, were more fit to rule than degraded
men. Suppose some traveller should find a country where the horses did
rule. Suppose Gulliver were to find it. The Scriblerus Club had not
decided what race Martin was to visit on his fourth voyage, only that
he was to “display a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust
of his species.” Nothing could disgust a traveller, even wholesome
Gulliver, more than to study the horrid antics of a debased human
tribe in the company of utopian horses who could see little difference
between him and those apish copies. Gulliver had been disgusted among
the giants when the maids of honour laid him against their terrible
breasts. That had been only a shrinking of his senses. Now his soul
itself must shrink with an absolute antipathy from which he could not
recover. When he came back he would prefer the horses of England to the
men.
With something like these gathering plans, though they must be guessed
at, in something like this mood, which is certain enough, Swift rode
through the south and west. In September he was in Dublin again. By the
next January he had “left the Country of Horses.”
On his icy, fiery travels among the Houyhnhnms Swift (why call him
Gulliver?) did not bother to observe such stinging likenesses to
particular English persons and episodes as he observed among the
pigmies and the philosophers. The last of his adventures was the
simplest, as it was the most deadly. All actual fantasy, all apparent
fact.
He came upon his first Yahoos without realizing that they were inferior
men and upon his first Houyhnhnms without realizing that they were
superior horses. When he found himself taken for a Yahoo he hurried
to tell his Houyhnhnm master about Europe. He told him of wars, their
causes, means, and ends; of litigation and the arts of lawyers; of
money, and of poverty and riches; of luxury and dissipation; of
diseases and their remedies; of ministers of state and noblemen. The
reasonable Houyhnhnm said he had noticed the rudiments of all these
human ways of life among the Yahoos.
They had their tribal and civil wars. They hoarded shining stones
which they could not use, fought over them, and sometimes lost them
to bystanders who snatched them away as expertly as any lawyer. They
gorged themselves with food and sucked a root that made them drunk.
They had the only diseases in the country, because of their gluttony
and filth. They had in most herds a sort of ruling Yahoo, always
deformed in body and mischievous in disposition, who continued in
office till a worse could be found. They were lewd and promiscuous.
They were invariably dirty and sometimes splenetic. They had, it
appeared, all the human vices except unnatural appetites, these
“politer pleasures” not having occurred to them. They were unteachable
because they were perverse and restive, but they had the brains to be
cunning, malicious, treacherous, revengeful, insolent, abject, and
cruel. It was plain to the Houyhnhnm who talked with Swift that the
visitor was a Yahoo after all. That “small pittance of reason” which by
some accident had been given to the European Yahoos they used only to
multiply their natural corruptions and to acquire new ones not supplied
by nature.
To be fully reasonable was to be like the Houyhnhnms. They did not
know what lying was. They affirmed or denied only when they were
certain. Their two principal virtues were friendship and benevolence,
felt towards the whole species without partiality except where there
were special virtues to attract them. In marriage they were without
jealousy, fondness, quarrelling, or discontent. The young of both sexes
were brought up in moderation, industry, exercise, and cleanliness.
Their only government was an annual council of the entire nation. They
had no literature except poems composed, not written down, in praise
of virtue. They were skilful workmen in the necessary arts, but wasted
no time on superfluity or show. Reasonably born and bred, they lived
reasonably without passions and died reasonably without sickness or
fear.
“At first, indeed, I did not feel that natural awe which the Yahoos and
all other animals bear towards them; but it grew upon me by degrees,
much sooner than I imagined, and was mingled with a respectful love and
gratitude that they would condescend to distinguish me from the rest of
my species. When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or
human race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in
shape and disposition.” Swift would have remained with the Houyhnhnms
for ever if they had not sent him away. The beasts could not tolerate
a man. Nor could a man who had lived among the beasts ever again live
among men without disgust.