Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

• The author and his times

Gulliver's Travels was an overnight success, a runaway best-seller. Swift was dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin when his novel came out. Since in this book he wrote about - and often attacked - prominent political figures, he published the book anonymously. While most readers were trying hard to find out who the author was, Swift's close friends had great fun keeping the secret. Days after the publication of the Travels, Alexander Pope, one of Swift's dearest friends and the author of such important works as “The Rape of the Lock” and “An Essay on Man,” wrote him in an especially playful letter:

“Motte [Swift's publisher] receiv'd the copy (he tells me) he knew not from whence, nor from whom, dropp'd at his house in the dark, from a Hackneycoach: by computing the time, I found it was after you left England, so for my part, I suspend my judgment.”

Pope, of course, knew perfectly well that Swift was the author of Gulliver's Travels.

London fairly buzzed with speculations, suggestions, and countersuggestions regarding the author's identity, as well as those of some of his characters. In Part I, for example, the Lilliputian Emperor - tyrannical, cruel, corrupt, and obsessed with ceremony - though a timeless symbol of bad government, is also a biting satire of George I, King of England (from 1714 to 1727), during much of Swift's career. The Lilliputian Empress stands for Queen Anne, who blocked Swift's advancement in the Church of England, having taken offence at some of his earlier, signed satires. There are two political parties in Lilliput, the Low-Heels and the High-Heels. These correspond respectively to the Whigs and Tories, the two major British political parties.

It didn't take long for people to catch on to the fact that the author was writing about England by way of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms. And it also didn't take long for the public to discover that the author was Jonathan Swift. Not only had he been involved in some of the most important and heated political events of the time, but he was also a well-known political journalist and satirist whose style was, to say the least, distinctive.

Swift got his political feet wet in the Glorious Revolution (1688-89), the object of which was to convince James II (king of England from 1685 to 1688) to abdicate the throne. James, a Roman Catholic, sought to increase the power of the Roman Church in England at the expense of the Anglican Church, long considered the country's official church. James' interests ran counter to those of the majority of his subjects, which was bad enough, but his methods - underhanded, blatantly discriminatory against Anglicans (also called Episcopalians), and cruel made the situation impossible. James did flee England in December 11, 1688, when William of Orange, his son-in-law and a moderate Protestant, arrived with a small army to depose him. James lived the rest of his life in France under the protection of Louis XIV, but the English remained anxious that he or his son would again try to seize the throne.

At this point, Swift was secretary to Sir William Temple, a prominent Whig. Though Swift (an Anglican clergyman) welcomed the Protestant William of Orange, he was uneasy that the monarch was so lenient towards Roman Catholics. Swift, for example, favoured the Test Act, which required all government officials to take the Sacraments according to the rites of the Anglican Church. This measure, of course, would exclude Catholics and other non-Anglicans from holding government posts. This put Swift at odds with the Whig party which, like the king, favoured the repeal of the Test Act. By 1710 it became clear that the Whig government would fall. After making sure that the Tories would support his policies for a strong Church of England, Swift changed parties.

All of Part I of the Travels is an allegorical account of British politics during the turbulent early eighteenth century, when the main political parties, the Tories and the Whigs, competed with each other bitterly. England is a limited monarchy. There is a king and/or queen, whose power is checked by Parliament, especially the House of Commons, which consists of representatives of the people. In Swift's time the Tories tended to be a more conservative party: they supported a strong monarchy and a strong Church of England; they were hostile to the new mercantile classes; their support came mostly from the landed gentry and clergy.

The Whigs, on the other hand, emphasized the parliamentary aspect of the government, supported the rise of the new middle class, and were more religiously tolerant than the Tories. The Whigs were a more varied group than the Tories, and drew support from the new middle class, sectors of the nobility who hadn't profited from James II's abdication, bankers and financiers, as well as Catholics and other non-Anglican members.

From 1710 to 1714 Swift, who was now a Tory, was one of the most influential members of the English government. As editor of the Examiner, the Tory party organ, he was also one of the most famous political journalists of his day. He was very close to Oxford and Bolingbroke, heads of the Tories (they also appear, in various “disguises,” in Part I). Swift wrote in support of the Peace of Utrecht (1713), which ended the War of the Spanish Succession with France and Spain. This war is recounted allegorically in Book I as the war between Lilliput (England) and Blefuscu (France).

While in London Swift worked passionately for his political ideals. He expected that in return for his efforts he'd be rewarded with a bishopric in England. I this way he would remain close to London, the center of activity. He was slighted, however, and given the deanship of St. Patrick's in Dublin. This was a blow from which many say Swift never really recovered. He felt as though he'd been banished, unfairly, and in many ways he had been.

Despite his disappointment Swift worked hard for his church in Ireland and for the cause of Irish freedom against the Whigs, many of whom considered Ireland more of a colony than a country. For most of the rest of his life, Swift was a clergyman/writer/activist. In 1729, when he was sixty-three, he wrote A Modest Proposal, considered by many to be the best satire ever written in English. In it Swift makes use of the persona of a respectable Whig businessman. His protagonist makes the suggestion that the Irish should fatten their children so that they could grace the tables - in the form of food - of the English. This would solve two problems, argued Swift's Whig. First, it would relieve Ireland's overpopulation problem. Second, English lords wouldn't have to import meat from so far away.

In A Modest Proposal Swift made his readers take notice of the dire situation in Ireland, and he pointed a finger at the English, whom he considered responsible for it and callous about it.

Swift's aims in the Proposal were humanitarian, yet his satire cut like a knife. This is in keeping with Swift's contradictory personality, which makes him one of the most puzzling figures in English literature. Acknowledged as a brilliant man of his age, he was a poor student. He entered the church reluctantly as a way of earning a living, yet he quickly became an ambitious and influential clergyman. His harsh satires caused many to call him a misanthrope. Yet he was a very outgoing man, a dazzler in the sparkling intellectual/literary/political/social constellation of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele. He wrote many letters, and with few exceptions, they are witty, charming, and lively.

Even Swift's biographers have had to live with the hard fact that the story of Swift's life is hidden behind the public events, the verifiable dates, and the published works. For all his activism and close relations with public figures, we know surprisingly little about the private Swift. No one even knows if Swift ever married. He had a long, passionate relationship with Esther Johnson and many have suspected that the two were secretly married. Though they saw each other every day, they didn't live together, and always visited in the company of a chaperone. Swift's famous Journal to Stella, in which he satirizes his own fame and writing (another contradiction - he worked hard to achieve recognition, and obviously wanted it badly), was written from 1710 to 1714 while he was in London with the Tories. Swift also had an involvement with a woman he called Vanessa (her real name was Hester Vanhomrigh), who left England to be with Swift in Ireland. They also didn't live together, though Vanessa was devoted to Swift for years. Because Swift died insane, some biographers have suggested that he never married because he'd contracted syphilis as a young man and feared passing it on.

Swift was born in Dublin on November 30, 1667. Swift's father, an English lawyer, died while his wife was pregnant with Jonathan. Right after Jonathan was born his mother left him to be raised by her brother. Jonathan, never a good student, was graduated from Trinity College as a favour to his uncle. He worked halfheartedly on a master's degree, but left to join the Glorious Revolution.

From then on we have a satisfactory account of his public deeds, but the private man remains mysterious. Swift was simultaneously praised to the skies and criticized severely for Gulliver's Travels. His admirers called attention to the literary merits of the book and its ultimately humanitarian concerns; his critics said he hated mankind and cited his invention of the Yahoos as proof. It seems impossible to have a lukewarm opinion on Swift; the work is too strong and his personality, as his contemporaries tell it, seemed larger than life. As in the work there are few “mellow” passages, so Swift seemed to swing from one extreme mood to another.

Swift's last years were a torment. He suffered awful bouts of dizziness, nausea, deafness, and mental incapacity. Swift's harshest critics tried to discredit the Travels on the grounds that the author was mad when he wrote it. But he wasn't. The Travels were published in 1726 and Swift didn't enter a mental institution until 1742. He died in 1745.

Gulliver's Travels was written to flay the foibles, vices, and follies of humanity. It is ironical that it is now remembered not, as the author had hoped, as a corrective satire, but as an extravagant and fantastic fairy tale. This is regrettable for several reasons. For one thing, the work reflects not merely the attitudes of a single period, but essentially summarizes those excesses of mankind which are foolishly preserved and compounded in every age. Again, Gulliver's Travels is an artistic enterprise conceived on multiple levels, touching practically all fields of human endeavour - politics, religion, education, ethics - and holding up to them the satiric mirror in which one's image is to be beheld and improved. Finally, it is the thoughtful, mature expression of an original genius, and the culmination of a career devoted to guiding manners and morals.

The book was finished in rough form in 1725, rewritten over the next year, and published in October, 1726. It was an unqualified success (its popularity demands comparison with today's bestsellers), was read from “cabinet council to nursery” and was even taken as the gospel truth in more than one quarter of the realm. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that the majority of Swift's contemporaries found Gulliver's veracity unimpeachable, but there were a small handful who swallowed his solemn reports hook, line and sinker; some claimed direct acquaintance with Gulliver himself, and others confirmed the geographical charts that Gulliver had so faithfully reproduced and Swift so fancifully fabricated. For the general public, however, the appeal of the book rested mainly on its satiric content and its associations with certain literature of the time.

• Sources and inspiration

Scholars today generally agree that Swift conceived the idea for his book sometime in 1714 during his association with Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, John Gay, and other men of letters who were members of the so-called Martinus Scriblerus Club. The purpose of this club was to satirize the foolishness of modern man. Each member was given a topic; Swift's was to satirize the current “boom” in travel literature.

Evidently, the portion of the “joint-stock” satire assigned to him was a narrative concerning several voyages of the pedant-hero, Martin Scriblerus. For a brief period Swift worked with apparent gusto on his assignment, sending Martin first to a land inhabited by pygmies and later to one ruled by philosophers. While it is quite obvious that these two sketches were incorporated into Gulliver's Travels as Parts I and III, the lack of any early manuscript makes it impossible to conclude how closely pygmy-land and Lilliput, philosopher-land and Laputa are allied, either satirically or factually. Undoubtedly, Martin Scriblerus had none of the dimensions of Lemuel Gulliver, since the travels themselves underwent extensive additions and revisions over the next dozen years as Swift's satiric design became more intricate and his satiric scope wider.

Among the literary genres of the 18th century, accounts of authentic voyages were extremely popular. This craze is easily understandable for an age involved with constant expansion but deprived of instruments for intercontinental communication. In England, Captain William Dampier had become acknowledged as the principal voyager, and copies of his books were sold as fast as they appeared. Many publishers rode the crest of this vogue by bringing out similar accounts - all purporting to be factual, all written in the same dry style and with the identical scientific objectiveness as Dampier's journals. Gulliver's Travels itself certainly capitalized on the fad for such literature, and Swift might possibly have chosen the form for his satire to assure its success and circulation. But one is soon persuaded that the satire depends neither on the existence or non-existence; of the countries visited by Gulliver. And though the letter and tone of the book appear factual, the spirit is strictly speculative. Consequently, the Travels have more in common with the “imaginary” (or philosophical) voyage, popularized through history by Lucian, Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Sir Thomas More. In this genre, a European traveller visits some fictitious country, observes the morals and customs of its inhabitants, and, through objective reporting, allows the disparities between the two civilizations to filter through. Needless to say, the new society is revealed as the ideal one, and Europe comes off second-best; hence the philosophic cast to the genre.

But while Swift embraces the tradition of such philosophic voyages, he plays fast and loose with it as well. There are, in Gulliver's Travels, no real “Utopias” which have in the manner of Thomas More or Plato been purged of all worldly evils. Brobdingnag is remote from any other land, and utopistic only in this fact of isolation; and the country of the Houyhnhnms, which at first seems ideal, is, ultimately, ideal only if one happens to be a rational horse. Understanding the influences on Gulliver's Travels, one should be aware that Swift is not simply satirizing institutions within a certain framework, but quite broadly he is satirizing the framework itself.

• Characters

1. Gulliver

Gulliver is not a character in the accepted sense of the word; he is merely a mask behind which Swift hides when he delivers his satirical thrusts at the foibles of mankind. But Swift, in creating Gulliver, conjures up a most plausible personage, much as the skilled ventriloquist often imparts to his dummy spokesman a personality that eventually overwhelms his creator. That is the singular technique of Swift's characterization: Lemuel Gulliver emerges as lifelike in spite of the fact that his role is merely that of a mouthpiece for an author who prefers to remain anonymous. Yet Gulliver, for all of his pseudo-personality, is not to be confused with his author, Swift. Actually Gulliver is a prototype through which his creator voices derision of the typical middle class Englishman of his time. Gulliver is stolid, humourless, methodical, unimaginative: a smug bore serenely entrenched in his own concept of superiority. In designing Gulliver, Swift provided this prototype with a good, solid background, first as ship's doctor and later as captain; therefore Gulliver's education and experience is limited to the practical and the technical. Gulliver knows what he has been taught through rote, and by this means he arrives at preconceived opinions which he holds to be the gospel truth. The dogmatic Gulliver has never learned to sift facts for truer understanding, to discriminate between extremes, nor to seek for a perspective. Hence, he cannot make judgments; he can only report factually what he sees. Gulliver does have some redeeming features: he is trustworthy and he is honest to the degree that he recognizes honesty. However, these fine qualities are blunted by his naivety, for Gulliver is gullible, as Swift points out in the obvious play on words (gull = a dupe). A sophisticated Gulliver would have penetrated the weaknesses and corruptions in the societies which surrounded and spoiled him. He has courage, but this is balanced by stubbornness. He has a fair share of ability and ingenuity, but this is bogged down by lack of common sense.

Pride is an important component of Gulliver's character, and, because it is tinged by the hero's estimate of himself, this pride almost overwhelms him. The reader at first sympathizes with Gulliver in his pride of achievement (he is a good man; he has a fair degree of intelligence and a good profession). As the story progresses, Gulliver's pride is gradually undermined and we learn how false it is. Stimulated by the title of “Nardack,” pride causes him to toady to the small minds and souls of the Lilliputians and to drop to their level. Then when he looks at the simple moral standards of the noble Brobdingnagians and finds out how mean and insignificant Europeans are, he forgets that he, too, is the average European. The stay in Laputa does little to resolve matters for Gulliver, for here Swift veers from attacks on the physical and moral stature of man to his own views on science and the abuse of reason, and Gulliver, completely out of depth, is little more than a confused reporter. In the final voyage, Gulliver's false pride is shattered beyond repair when reason shows him that he is neither a bestial Yahoo nor a rational horse. Stripped of the pitiful remnant of pride, Gulliver cannot develop a reasonable alternative: self-respect. Because he lacks the perception and tolerance to develop this trait of the rational human, Gulliver is condemned by his author to remain suspended between two untenable positions: a misanthrope who prefers the company of horses but cannot attain their “horse sense” and a hermit who shuns the society of men because he detects the bestiality of Yahoos within them.

2. The Lilliputians and Blefuscudians

The six inches which Swift allots to these tiny people are the measurement not only of their physical stature, but the limits of their minds and souls as well. They are, in essence, that side of human nature which has shrunken through the years in thought, integrity, virtue, and moral principles. The Lilliputians have lost their perspective (a distance of eight hundred yards to them is equivalent to an ocean span) and their narrow outlook accounts for the great schisms that have developed in their society - is one to be a “High Heel” or a “Low Heel,” a “Big Endian” or a “Little Endian?” The internal dissension over infinitesimal issues only magnifies the ferocity with which they wage wars over the sheerest trivia. In these pretty, diminutive people, vanities, cruelties, corruptions, and moral depravities show up in colossal proportions. Their misdeeds are all the more heinous because they arise from the pettiness of mind and soul to which all mankind can descend.

3. The King of Brobdingnag

In the King of Brobdingnag, Swift has created a model of the benevolent paternalism, for he is the best of people among beings who are as great in physical stature as they are in moral excellence. The King of Brobdingnag makes no false pretentions to intellectualism, pure reasoning, abstract theorizing, or complexities. What he does advocate are the solid virtues of common sense, simple morality, and learning that is administered as practically and concretely as possible. Here Swift deviates from his former measure of comparison of Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Where Gulliver once appeared amiable, likeable, sensitive, humane, and even noble when paralleled with the Lilliputians, he is now dwarfed to Lilliputian size when contrasted with the evident superiorities of the Brobdingnagian king who feels that Gulliver's people must be “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” To the microscopic eye of Gulliver, greatness is not without flaws, for greatness of stature exaggerates the size of faults as well as virtues. Greatness is not necessarily perfection as Gulliver discovers when he is revolted by the coarseness of the giant skin pores, the gross habits and immorality of the maids of honor, and the avarice of his farmer host. But there is something to be learned here: the Brobdingnagian has need to excel in moral and physical stature; he has no gun-powder - the European can exist with less scruples because he does have gunpowder!

4. The Houyhnhnms

The Houyhnhnms are not characters, but symbolic personifications of pure reason. They are the rational, unmoved animals that man is not, and can never be. In the rationalist Utopia, Houyhnhnms are an aristocratic society based on the slave labour of the bestial, almost-human Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms represent pure reason, a state which is sound in theory, but cold, comfortless, cheerless in practice. Their society has advanced to hard perfection at the expense of qualities which are essential to human survival; emotions and feelings do not enter into their controlled, frigid world. Gulliver, who would like to rise to their rarified level, finds he is unable to do so, for he is regarded a Yahoo.

5. The Yahoos

Like the Houyhnhnms the Yahoos are symbolic personifications. They depict the bestiality inherent in man: foul, ugly, obscene, stupid, and depraved. But even Swift does not identify the odious personification of Yahoo bestiality with man himself: Gulliver does. Somewhere between this rational Heaven of Houyhnhnmism and the sensual Hell of Yahooism, Gulliver fits in. Unfortunately he is closer to the Yahoo in physical and emotional responses than to the Houyhnhnm, and this he will not accept. Gulliver aspires to the pure reason and lofty behavior which he admires in the elite Houyhnhnms. The satiric point in this characterization is that man's misuse of reason (or his disuse of reason) is the reason he can not rise much beyond the despised Yahoo.

• Gulliver's Travels as a satire

1. Objects of satire and topical allusions

Gulliver's Travels is a masterpiece of satire. Deprived of teeth and claws, it becomes little more than a charming fable for children - a formidable tiger turned into a purring cat. The satire is both general - on all mankind - and particular: on the affairs of the age. The particular satire in the book is predominantly political and then religious. Part I especially is heavily weighted with specific allusions, though there are a number of others scattered here and there throughout the remainder of the travels, becoming progressively infrequent and disappearing entirely in Part IV where Swift savagely attacks all humanity.

Certain references provoke speculation at the outset. Gulliver first sets sail in 1699, the year that Temple's death left Swift without patron or position; and the last voyage (which includes Gulliver's misanthropy) is concluded in 1714, the year Queen Anne died, the Tories lost power, and Swift “exiled” himself to Ireland. One must be cautious in forwarding these parallels, or in doing so must remember that the travels are primarily a product of George's, not Anne's reign. The Emperor of Lilliput - the pygmy island in Part I where the inhabitants are one-twelfth Gulliver's size - has, in fact, like the German George, an “Austrian lip” (Part I, Chap. 2); and the potentate's Treasurer and prize rope-dancer, Flimnap, is most likely Sir Robert Walpole, the agile prime minister, head of the Whig party, and perhaps the most satirized statesman ever. Certainly, the detailing of court ceremony (Part I, Chap. 3) and the digression on the blue, red, and green ribbons could relate to Walpole's flamboyant conferral of the Orders of the Garter, Bath, and Thistle on his supporters and flunkies.

To be sure, some historical background is necessary in detecting, as well as connecting such allusions. Less abstruse, perhaps, is the differentiation between “the two struggling parties [called] Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high heels and low heels on their shoes” (Part I, Chap. 4), the former being the Tories (High Church) and the latter the Whigs (Low Church). This split along religious-political lines is elaborated most comically in the clash of the Endian factions (Part I, Chap. 4). The Big-En-dians (who choose to break their eggs at the big end) are patently the Roman Catholics, the Little-Endians, the Protestants; and the controversy outlined by Reldresal probably goes back to the struggles under Henry VIII - struggles which grew out of religious differences but which soon took a political turn. More immediately the allegory involves the Jacobite uprising following Anne's death and the attempted restoration of the Stuarts to the throne. Like the Big-Endians in Blefuscu (the island across the channel from Lilliput), the Jacobites in France were biding their time until the moment for revolution seemed ripe; the time did come, but the revolution was immediately crushed.

These several examples acquaint the reader with Swift's method of particular satire, though they do not quite reveal all its subtleties. There is something to be said for Part I being an extended allegory on the plight of the Tory party during Anne's reign, with the equations constructed something like this: the Big-Endian and Little-Endian controversy; the Oxford-Bolingbroke schism; the fire at the royal palace: the War of the Spanish Succession; the indelicate quenching of the fire: the Peace of Utrecht; the Empress's subsequent outrage: Anne's dissatisfaction with the treaty; and the trumped-up list of charges against Gulliver (Part I, Chap. 7): the severe accusations levied against both Bolingbroke and Oxford after their party collapsed. Those wwho feel that Swift involved himself more personally in Lilliputian affairs interpret Gulliver's attempts throughout Part I to ingratiate himself with the court factions as Swift's own labors for preferment. An especially ingenious (and amusing) theory relates the fire in the Emperor's apartments to the outbreak among Anglicans, Catholics and dissenters, Gulliver's quenching the flames by urinating on them to the appearance of his own A Tale of A Tub, and the Empress's subsequent indignation and hostility to Anne's abhorrence of that book.

Personal and party grievances are absorbed in the general satire of Part II, when the second voyage takes Gulliver to Brobdingnag, a land where the inhabitants are twelve times his size. Placing Gulliver in such a predicament doubly strengthens the satiric effect: for not only does he become to the Brobdingnagians - the name is in itself gigantic - what the Lilliputians were to him, but he is inadvertently forced into reevaluating past experiences in the light of present ones. Turned from giant to pygmy, Gulliver again undergoes serious bodily inconveniences and indignities, (Part II, Chaps. 3,5), but this time finds that physical readjustment also necessi­tates readjustment of moral values.

Oddly, one is likely to feel that Swift has narrowed his sights in Part III of the travels, which consists of not a single voyage but of five: to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and Japan. In all, he is concerned with attacking a multiplicity of things. The Flying Island of Laputa sug­gests England, its political oppression of Ireland, and its potential desire to crush the Irish entirely. The Grand Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi (Part III, Chaps. 4, 5, 6) directly satirizes the Royal Society, a scientific organization chartered under Charles II and devoted to experiments and projects. The members of the society and those others submitting inventions to it were thought of by most - Swift included - as cranks and crackpots, and soon came to be known as “projectors,” a disreputable term. Gulliver's visit to the Grand Academy gave Swift an opportunity to exhaustively list such projectors' work in progress which, interestingly enough, were no fictional brainchildren .of Swift but actual experiments sponsored by the Royal Society. Swift obviously weights his list in favour of the absurd, but one should understand that many of the Society's theories proved xperimentally sound, and that no less a personage than Sir Isaac Newton presided over the group for many years.

Yet Swift's bias (or shortsightedness) is an outgrowth neither of feigned ignorance nor of studied “anti-intellectualism.” Rather, he primarily inveighs in Part III against any sort of excesses, speculative or real, that run counter to common sense. The philosophers, critics, and historians of Glubbdubdrib - a name that in itself says everything - are censured for perpetuating lies in the face of truth; and the Struldbruggs of Luggnagg, those creatures apparently blessed with immortality, but cursed also with physical deterioration, are cautions to man's desires for mere long life without the accompanying ability to live it.

No less a dilemma confronts Gulliver in the fourth section of the travels when his final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms (pronounced “Whinnems” after the manner of whinnying), where horses, purged of all mean passion and guided exclusively by pure reason, are masters over the vile, filthy Yahoos: creatures that Gulliver soon realizes are in shape and form identical to human beings, but who possess a savage, bestial nature. Here, throughout the remainder of the travels, Gulliver must decide with whom he can finally identify. For while his physical characteristics should place him among the Yahoos, his sensibilities and reason make him avoid his counterparts and identify with the rational horses. The tension in this, the greatest voyage of the travels, is built step by step as the hero's struggle, at first outward, is turned in­ward, reflecting polar opposites inherent in man - Yahoodom and Houyhnhnmism, unlicensed passion and absolute reason. Detailed commentary, much as the entire force and movement of the proceeding three parts, is refined and concentrated in the problems raised by Gulliver's last voyage, its complexities cannot be briefly dealt with. What may be noted, however, is that Part IV emphasizes several “controlling ideas” that place Gulliver's Travels against a broad intellectual background.

Swift was a child of both the 17th and 18th centuries, come of age in a time of ideological ferment and revolution. Whether moving with or against the intellectual currents that flowed through Europe during the Age of Reason, Swift was in every way affected by them. The two most popular, deism and optimism, won many adherents, Alexander Pope being an early convert to both philosophies. Deism, which had a decided religious impact, held that God created the world and set it in motion, subject to nature's laws, but took no interest in His work after the original creation. The second current, optimism, more ethical and social, maintained that everything in the world is ordered for the best since the universe itself is tending towards a better state; in the phrase of Leibniz, the German philosopher who propounded the doctrine of optimism: “All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.” Deism, optimism, and a host of other “isms” which seemed rational, were rejected by Swift.

Paramount to all Swift's writing is this insistence on “reason.” Reason only becomes cor­rupted when turned into a rationalistic system. For, as man falls under the control of a system, he relaxes his reason - since the system naturally does the thinking for him - and becomes a slave to his “passions.” Logically, passion can, in the extreme, so corrupt man that reason is no longer needed, and selfishness and pride now rule in the place of enlightenment.

2. The importance of Parts I, II and III

Sir Walter Scott made a famous analogy concerning Swift's satirical style: that in Parts I and II of the travels Swift alternately observes man through different ends of a telescope. This observation, however, while striking, is not always valid. Exaggerated smallness and largeness often inhibit exacting scrutiny, and as much goes into seeing the pygmies and giants as in gaining the final view. The voyages are complementary; but one must be steered away from drawing the hasty conclusion that the Brobdingnagians are enlarged Lilliputians, or the Lilliputians abbreviated Brobdingnagians. To be sure the “telescope” analogy holds for something more than size. Part I is “merry” and, for the most part, gently satiric, while Part II is endowed, with greater comic passages and richer expressions of satire. In Part II moral excellence is superior, Utopian principles firmer, positive attributes multiplied conspicuously. Both books are, however, distortions of the human situation: “little men” and “big men” serve equally well for Swift's immediate purposes and gain a double effectiveness by reflecting aspects of each other. Taken on its own plane, measured against its own scale, each part has a crucial satiric center: paired, the voyages produce a more complete and complex ironic effect.

Swift's satire in Part I is aimed at man's susceptibility to corruption. At one time Lilliputian institutions bordered on the Utopian: a person who made knowingly false accusations against another was put to death and his property given to the innocent party; fraud was “a greater crime than theft”; people were rewarded for good actions, not simply punished for evil ones; important posts were obtained by persons whose morals were as irreproachable as their abilities; and “ingratitude” had been a “capital crime.” Over the years, however, despite this solid foundation, integrity, virtue, moral principles had become impaired (and all but disappeared): individually through mistrust and selfishness, collectively through political strife and contention.

But however bumbling and mildly vain Gulliver is in Part I, he himself never quite reaches the despicable size of the decadent Lilliputians. On the contrary, his comparative kindness and generosity are exhibited to illustrate how potentially more dangerous corruption may be as a latent, rather than as a manifest force. Flagrant, it can at least be forcibly countered; the enemy is exposed. Concealed or veiled, corruption is at its most insidious, working through insinuation to impute evil motives to good ones, deceit to candor, cruelty to benevolence, and to mock in human beings those rare instances of altruism. Swift shows how thoroughly destructive of the moral and social animal corruption can be in the Lilliputians' preparation of the impeachment articles. Gulliver's freehearted actions are twisted (in conformity with parochial prejudices and shabby intentions of revenge) into capital crimes: his urinary feat at the palace, once lauded, is now deemed treasonable, done as it was “under colour of extinguishing the fire”; his refusal to decimate the Blefuscudian towns and the Big-Endians and their following is ascribed to a “pretence of unwillingness to force the consciences or destroy the liberties and lives of innocent people, etc.” The methods of punishment which the Lilliputian ministers have de vised for Gulliver surpass in their malignity the articles of impeachment The “graciousness” of the Emperor in approving - on the counsel of Gulliver's sole “friend,” Reldresal - the inflicting of blindness merely, instead of permitting various other mortal tortures, is the refined illustration of naked malignity. Man is truly stunted by the corruption which gnaws at his political, social and moral being. Absolute corruption, on any plane, corrupts absolutely. And even as the tiny Lilliputians are mocked and ridiculed for their pretentions to vice, the reader is made aware how pervasive the condition is. Corruption, which has pulled the wool over Gulliver's eyes, has all but finally pulled him down.

In Part II, mankind revives momentarily before going under Swift's satiric scalpel once more. Gulliver's horror and shock at finding himself among giants seem only natural after his trials in Lilliput. Contrary to expectations, the Brobdingnagian character is, with few exceptions, the reverse of the Lilliputian. Where the little people were hypocritical, the giants are ingenuous; where ungrateful, obliging; where cruel, humane; where petty, noble-minded. In accordance with the character of its people, the Brobdingnagian monarchy is a model of benevolent paternalism. The king, full of wisdom and learning, is by nature induced to be virtuous. Ironically, Gulliver does not have to contend with physical superiority but (to maintain his pride) moral excellence. Being a “Lilliputian” in size, he becomes one in attitude: wheedling, cajoling, blustering, lying to convince the king of mankind's power and ingenuity. He naturally fails. The more Gulliver reveals the schemes and machinations of man, the further he damages his case, heaping scorn upon himself and his kind. From Gulliver's discourses with the King of Brobdingnag, the latter can only logically conclude that European affairs have been only an 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 ... and the bulk of natives... the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Gulliver's sole defence (a childish one) to this accusation is to inwardly rail against the ruler, finding him the possessor of “narrow principles and short views.” Here, even more violently than in Lilliput, Swift is satirizing man's refusal to be instructed in “perfection,” even after having met it face to face. The mutual contempt of the Brobdingnagian king and Gulliver for their respective institutions swells ironically when Gulliver, finally having departed the country, encounters human beings again and finds them as contemptible as the monarch had supposed.

Part II also satirizes the physical aspect of man. Compared to the picturesque Lilliputians the Brobdingnagians appear gross and fulsome. Gulliver's sensibilities are shattered more than once: around the dinner table watching food being forked into huge mouths; watching babies being breast-fed; watching the maids in the palace rooms perform various bodily functions and necessities. The sight of the body in close-up appears repulsive and nauseating. Gulliver remembers how the Liliputians complained of the unsightliness of his own complexion, whereas he thought that their own skin was unusually smooth and attractive. Again, through manipulating the perspective, Swift shatters an illusion - this time about the beauty of the human body.

In Part III, man is seen overall not as a social or political being but as a machine. And save a cursory glance at religion in the Japan episode, the third voyage is conspicuous for its absence of detailed criticisms on morals. People (and governments) are so metaphysical, so preoccupied in worshipping the abstract that they have grown immune to questions of morality. This is the uniform disaster in the countries in Part III. Society's only reason for existing is to benefit its members. Surrendering this function, society atrophies, decays, and misrule ensues. Witness the continual reign of terror in Lalaputa and Japan, the barrenness of the lands in Balnibarbi, the cruelty of the Luggnaggian monarch. Social disorder is called anarchy; personal and moral disorder, madness; and at the heart of the third voyage is the panoramic sweep of madness which mirrors, in varying stages, the decline of the human race even as it apparently progresses, The Royal Academy of Lagado is employed in projects that have no remote connection with sane, day-to-day living; the historians and philosophers of Glubbdubdrib prove that the intellectual wealth of ages is humbug and perversity; birth and death become, among ;the Struldbruggs, a mockery. Little wonder that Gulliver, learning more and more, despairing more and more, becomes trapped on this whirligig of insanity and almost goes mad himself. The acme of his disillusion is seeing the immortals in decay: when his finest hopes for humanity are embodied in shrivelled, sickly, filthy creatures, Gulliver is primed for his voyage to the Houyhnhnms.

3. The importance of Part IV

Throughout Swift's writings one thread runs straight and clear: firm belief in the power of reason. Whatever Swift the churchman might have thought about faith, it is perfectly clear that he based man and mankind's secular salvation on the ability to grasp universal and particular truth through the employ of right reason. Reason only was the judge and jury; it provided the checks-and-balances for a sane, healthy, moral life. For Swift, reason was predicated upon three things: scriptural teachings, traditional wisdom, and the rules of morals and conduct held by the great thinkers in every age. What Swift excluded from philosophy was, at one extreme, formalized systems founded on and bound inextricably by rationalistic principles (which could lead to the hodge-podge societies in Part III), and, at the other extreme, pure intuition (which could lead either to pride or undue optimism). As Swift apealed for morality and reform, he advocated always the the “middle way” which took its coarse between polar opposites.

In Part IV of Gulliver;s Travels the reader is presented with two different societies: the purely rational Houyhnhnms and the purely irrational Yahoos. To them comes Gulliver, neither completely rational nor completely irrational, potentially capable of searching out the middle ground between the poles. Yet he does not or cannot. He ends a misfit misanthropist, preferring stablehorses to the family. While Gulliver's misanthropy seems beyond dispute, Swift's is nowhere discoverable. Two letters to Alexander Pope - written shortly before the publication of the travels - clarify the author's position at once:

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, arid all my love is toward individuals.: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one and Judge Such-a-one; so with physicians (I will not speak of my own trade), soldiers, English, French, Scotch and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, etc.... I have got materials towards a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale (rational animal); and to show it should be only rationis capax (capable of reason.) Upon this great foundation of misanthropy (though not Timon's manner) the whole building of my travels is erected. . .. (Sept., 1725)

I tell you after all that I do not hate mankind; it is vous autres who hate them because you would have them reasonable animals and are angry for being disappointed. I have always rejected that definition and made another of my own. (Nov., 1725)

What did Swift intend by concluding the travels so negatively? Or apparently negatively, since Gulliver's misanthropy is definitely not Swift's. One may begin with the Houyhnhnms. For years, eminent critics argued that these horses were emblematic of the rational life of man and, therefore, were Swift's models of reason - to be admired and imitated. The Houyhnhnm grand maxim - “to cultivate reason and to be wholly governed by it” - seems without doubt the logical and sane conduct of life, and the attendant virtues of Houyhnhnm reason - friendship and benevolence - are qualities sanctioned in both social and religious spheres. Free, virtuous, simple, moral, the Houyhnhnms would seem the paradigm of the good life that all rational beings should emulate.

Subsequent views on the Houyhnhnms became less charitable as critics grew chary of Swift's intentions. While cultivating and being governed wholly by reason may seem sound in theory, it becomes a nightmare in practice. Following a regimen grounded on abstract reason is clearly a maddening impossibility. If it succeeds for the Houyhnhnms it is because they are “the perfection of nature.” Yet even a horse-eyed view of the matter will make it readily apparent that “perfection” is never realized by the majority of people. And one must remember that Swift did not expect perfection. He saw man as only capable of reason: that is, possessed of an ability to behave rationally, not burdened with the impossibility of never swerving from the reasonable path. On the other hand, the Houyhnhnms are rational animals, living examples, in fact, of those who make a profession of being rational. Reason is gained, but at the expense of personality; for upon closer scrutiny the Houyhnhnms and their institutions are revealed as cold, forbidding, antiseptic, dull.

The Yahoos offer fewer complications. Filthy, foul, ugly, corrupt, obscene, the Yahoos embody the animal nature of man. In them Swift satirizes the so-called “noble savage”: the intuitive creature, deprived of civilizing influences, living the natural life without moral law. Swift depicts the Yahoos in an early stage of human evolution: in the dark primitivism of man's past before he became a social being, getting together for welfare and mutual protection. The Yahoos then become man in his pre-human state: slave to appetite, passion, environment, and to those with the barest jot of reason.

But more significantly, the Yahoos must be seen not merely as depraved throwbacks to an earlier condition, but as symbolic of the decadence and degeneration which may await man as he supposedly advances. Deprived of rationality, the Yahoos stand for any anarchic flux latent in all societies, ready at the slightest imbalance to erupt. There is something terrifying and frightening in this second view. For man, the potential master of reason, it is not simply a biological obligation to function rationally, but a moral one as well. Man is worse than any animal when he fails to exercise his rational abilities. What Swift envisions in the Yahoos is not what man has become, but what he can become unguided by wisdom and civilization.

Gulliver thinks that only the Houyhnhnms have created the perfect Utopian society. He identifies himself with the Yahoos and decides that the best is lodged with the Houyhnhnms. Living three years among horses has given Gulliver a hippocentric view of the world; he judges humanity not with man-reason but horse-reason. Grown absurd in his misanthropy, Gulliver falls from being the agent of satire into being its object. He sniffs about his lodgings, nose stuffed with rue and lavender, conversing with his horses, surrendering to a nagging paranoia.

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