THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

notion of ‘wit’ than they do from the ease of ‘humour’. In a simple form, such as the early spoof, Meditation on a
Broomstick (1710), he imitates the solemn style and manner of a primly pious moral essayist, but effectively
undermines the tone of seriousness by the patent ridiculousness of the chosen subject (though the meditation is said to
have taken in Lady Berkely who, believing it was by her favourite author, Robert Boyle, remarked ‘there is no
knowing what useful lessons of instruction this wonderful man may draw from things apparently the most trivial’).
The extraordinary force of A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a
Burden to their parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Publick (1729) stems, however, from the
very reasonableness, arithmetical orderliness, and modesty of expression of what is effectively a monstrous proposal
for the human consumption of the surplus infant population. The Irish dimension, which adds a special piquancy to
the
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supposed argument of A Modest Proposal, reflects Swift’s newly determined defence of Irish interests and
sensibilities. The Drapier’s Letters (1724) stem from a more obviously public and popular indignation at English
indifference to Ireland. The five letters, purporting to be the work of ‘M.B.’, a Dublin draper, play on provincial pride
and a specifically local grievance. The Draper’s popularity with a wide cross-section of Irish opinion stemmed not
simply from a general assent to his opposition to the relatively petty injustice which he addressed, but from a
narrating voice which was carefully attuned to a broad audience: he is colloquial, mocking, denunciatory; he tellingly
quotes Scripture as well as pertinent facts; he speaks in earnest and he occasionally rises to patriotic rhetoric when he
knows that the rhetoric will hit home.
Swift’s skill in selecting a voice appropriate to the form in which he is working is nowhere more evident than in his
masterpiece Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, familiarly known as Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
Lemuel Gulliver is an English surgeon who rises to be a ship’s captain; he is well-educated, proud of his national
origins, and informed both professionally and politically, but he is essentially l’homme moyen sensuel and it is by
means of his limitations that Swift scores his finest effects. In each of the four books into which his narrative is
divided Gulliver is faced with the extraordinary. He copes efficiently, even bravely; he masters foreign languages and
he observes and reports scrupulously, but he judges partially and, as his name implies, he is all too readily ‘gulled’.
He seems to be oblivious to the parallels between the pettiness of the affairs of Lilliput and Blefescu and those of
Europe, and having stoutly defended his history, belligerence, and institutions of Great Britain to the king of
Brobdingnag he seems unshaken by the king’s trenchant conclusion that the bulk of Gulliver’s compatriots appear to
be ‘the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth’.
Gulliver is, however, both fascinated and shocked by ordure and the evidence of physical decay that he encounters.
His tact in disposing of his own excreta in Lilliput and his practical (if offensive) means of extinguishing the fire in
the royal palace have tended to be edited out of bowdlerized versions of the story, but his fastidious horror at the
smell, skin, and hair of the Brobdingnagian maids of honour, and his alarm at the sign of a gigantic decapitation, are
integral to his overall reaction to the disturbing magnification of the human form. In the third book he detachedly
confronts both mental aberration and the terrible anguish of the Struldbruggs, condemned to an immortality of slow
decay, a ‘mortifying sight’ which quells his ‘keen appetite for perpetuity of life’. The first two voyages deal with
physical disproportion; the episodic third largely with mental imbalance; the fourth serves both to replay themes of
physical and mental disorder and to demand a reordering of all Gulliver’s, and by extension, his readers’
preconceptions. In the land of the Houyhnhnms it is clear from the beginning that Gulliver is unwilling to associate
himself with the abominable humanity of the Yahoos by his constant reference to them in animal terms and by his all
too evident disgust at their proximity to him.
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Nevertheless, his often desperate attempts to associate himself with real, if extraordinarily endowed, animals lead both
to failure and to a mental state which can only be called aberrant. Though the Houyhnhnms have reason, stoic
morality, sociability, and the outward signs of an advanced civilization based on qualities most admired by
eighteenth-century theorists, they lack passion. In Lilliput or Brobdingnag Gulliver had quickly adjusted to the
standards of the nations in which he found himself; in the land of the Houyhnhnms he passionately seeks to be
considered an honorary horse rather than an honourable Yahoo, and it is this passion, a distorted, panicking
reasonability, which leads to his final imbalance. In his voyage back to England he seems incapable of coming to
terms with basic human goodness; at home he rejects human companionship and human relationships in favour of life
in a stable where, he tells us, ‘my horses understand me tolerably well’. Mind and body, reason and passion, seem to
be angrily and disastrously disjointed.
Many commentators have wanted to see Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels as a dark howl of rage against humankind,