The King was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines,
and the proposal I had made. He was amazed how so impotent and grovelling an insect
as I (these were his expressions) could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a
manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all by the scenes of blood and desolation, which
I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines, whereof, he said,
some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself,
he protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art
or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom than be privy to such a secret,
which he commanded me, as I valued my life, never to mention any more. A strange
effect of narrow principles and short views!Greater surprises await Gulliver in Book IV in the land of the Houyhnhnms,
noble horses endowed with reason. These humane enlightened creatures rule over
the Yahoos, a savage man-like race remarkable for lust, greed and filth. The
Houyhnhnms have no word for lying, and are shocked by Gulliver’s accounts of civil-
ization. He adopts the ways of these equine philosophers, but they expel him. Picked
up by a Portuguese ship, he returns to London, but he so recoils from the Yahoo-like
smell of humans that he prefers the stable to the marital home.
We find that we have been rationally tricked into disowning our own natures: like
Gulli-ver, we have been truly gullible (‘gull’: fool). In each of the books Swift alters
one dimension of life, beginning with magnitude. In Book III he removes death: the
Struldbruggs are granted immortality – but without youth. As they age, they grow
less and less happy. In Book IV he reverses the traditional image of reason guiding
the body as a man rides a horse. Should we prefer the society of rational horses to
stinking Yahoos?
Swift defined Man not as a rational animal but as an animal capable of reason. He
had a keen sense of our capacity for self-delusion, folly and vice. His telescope gives
perspectives, at first comic, then horrific, which confront us with unpleasant facets
of human life, silently recommending proportion, humility and fellow-feeling. Swift
misleads the complace nt reader into the same traps as Gulliver. His reductio ad
absurdum intensifies the paradoxes of existence, offending humanists from Johnson
to Macaulay to F. R. Leavis. His is the intellectual ferocity of the 17th century, of La
Rochefoucauld or Pascal, not the cheerful brutality of the 18th century. He enjoyed
spoiling men’s romantic delusions about women, as in his line ‘Celia, Celia, Celia
sh––s’. His poems to Stella show that he was no misogynist. Those who have
suggested that he was misanthropic have misunderstood his irony; he did not believe
in eating children.But he was anti-romantic, hating false hearts and false ideals. A
passionate English churchman, he showed integrity, courage and cunning in defend-
ing Catholic Ireland against English exploitation.
Swift was also very funny. In his Academy of Projectors, for instance, a scientist
tr ies to extract moonbeams out of cucumbers. And his Verses on the Death ofDr
Swift is a masterpiece of comic realism:... Here shift the scene, to represent
How those I love, my death lament.
Poor Pope will grieve a month; and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day.
St John himself will scarce forbear Bolingbroke
To bite his pen, and drop a tear.
The rest will give a shrug, and cry
‘I’m sorry, but we all must die.’ ...188 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790