Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift 223
as loathsome, but there is nothing sensual in his writings; he never
awakens an impure curiosity, or invests guilt with a meretricious
charm. Vice certainly never appears attractive in his pages, and it may
be safely affirmed that no one has ever been allured to vicious courses
by reading them. He is often very repulsive and very indecent, but his
faults in this respect are rather those of taste than of morals.
[ . . . ]
That morbid melancholy to which he had ever been subject assumed
a darker hue and a more unremitting sway as the shadows began to
lengthen upon his path. It had appeared very vividly in “Gulliver’s
Travels,” which was published in 1726. Like nearly all Swift’s works
this great book was published anonymously, and like nearly all of
them it met with a great and immediate success. It is, indeed, one of
the most original as well as one of the most enduring books of the
eighteenth century. Few things might have seemed more impossible
than to combine in a single work the charm of an eminently popular
children’s story, a savage satire on human nature, and a large amount
of shrewd and practical political speculation. Yet all this will be found
in “Gulliver.” Of all Swift’s works it probably exhibits most frequently
his idiosyncrasies and his sentiments. We find his old hatred of
mathematics displayed in the history of Laputa; his devotion to his
disgraced friends in the attempt to cast ridicule on the evidence on
which Atterbury was condemned; his antipathy to Sir Isaac Newton,
whose habitual absence of mind is said to have suggested the flappers;
as well allusions to Sir R. Walpole, to the doubtful policy of the Prince
of Wales, and to the antipathy Queen Anne had conceived against
him on account of the indecorous manner in which he had defended
the Church. We find, above all, his profound disenchantment with
human life and his deep-seated contempt for mankind in his picture
of the Yahoos. Embittered by disappointment and ill-health, and
separated by death or by his position from all he most deeply loved,
he had learnt to look with contempt upon the contests in which so
much of his life had been expended, and his naturally stern, gloomy,
and foreboding nature darkened into an intense misanthropy. “I love
only individuals,” he once wrote. He “hated and detested that animal
called man,” and he declared that he wrote “Gulliver” “to vex the
world rather than to divert it.” It was his deliberate opinion that man
is hopelessly corrupt, that the evil preponderates over the good, and
that life itself is a curse. No one who really understands Swift will