XVI
SWIFT[1]
Jonathan Swift is one of the four greatest writers of England (Shakespeare and Carlyle are of the same company: the reader may choose the fourth to suit himself).
Gulliver’s Travels is one of those few books, pleasant or unpleasant, light or profound, which may be read and reread at all ages, even when other books have been exhausted and laid aside.
Upon the basis of these axiomatic premises, we must necessarily thank the translator and the publisher who have brought out a new Italian edition of Swift’s masterpiece. The volume is none too elegant, but it is not repulsive; the translation is by no means perfect (I suspect that it is not based directly on the English text), but it is at least complete, or nearly complete. Italian publishers have usually printed only the first two of the four parts of the Travels, since the first two are the parts that are popular among children, amusement seekers, and superficial readers. Of the lands to which Gulliver journeyed, the only one that is popular and famous among us is Lilliput. Brobdingnag is a close second. But we have only the vaguest notions of Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, and Glubbdubdrib, and we are quite willing to leave unvisited the land of the terrible Yahoos. But the last two parts are really more characteristic than the first two: their omission in previous Italian editions is then another instance of the fact that excisions are usually ill-judged.
The translator expresses his regret that the work “has always been so slightly and so inaccurately known and so grotesquely interpreted in Italy. Thanks to the absurdity of publishers and of the public Gulliver’s Travels has been regarded as a book for children, a harmless fantastic romance founded upon an idea that is clever but superficial.” The translator is right so far as modern Italy is concerned, but for the sake of justice he should have recalled the fact that in the eighteenth century, even before the death of Swift, Italian men of letters knew him and admired him as a satirist and moralist, and not by any means as an author of extravaganzas for children. Algarotti, for example, cited him often, and called him the modern Lucian. Baretti paid him due esteem, though he once wrote in the Frusta that “half of Swift’s fancy was always covered with filth.” Albergati and Cesarotti were fond of quoting him; Bettinelli imitated him in one of his poems; and in 1770 Giuseppe Pelli, the Dantist, introduced him as one of the characters in his Dialogues of the Dead. So then Italian men of letters of a century and a half ago, when there were no reviews of modern philology, and no volumes on comparative literature, were better acquainted with certain foreign authors than are the Italian writers of today. And I therefore share the translator’s hope that this new edition may help to win for Gulliver’s Travels its rightful place among the most famous works of European literature.
It is, without question, of the highest rank. Swift’s book, like most of the masterpieces of European imagination, is an adventurous journey which affords a pretext for a critical survey of humanity. So too the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, and Faust are marvelous journeys and at the same time satires on mankind. The books I have named are but the greatest. The mere titles of those of the second rank would cover a page. In all these books we find the same scheme and the same design, varied according to variations in time and in genius—a review of human life (in most cases a sad and bitter review) effected by means of imaginary experiences which may be sublime or fascinating or ridiculous.
Of these fantastic “reports on mankind” Swift’s is one of the most extraordinary. The Odyssey moves in the world of pagan mythology; the Divine Comedy is based on Christian mythology; Faust mixes all mythologies; Don Quixote remains within the Spanish reality of every day. Gulliver’s Travels achieves the marvelous without recourse to mythology, and transcends English reality without falling into absurdity. All the author needs is a simple premise, a mere quantitative alteration at the start—men of extraordinary littleness, men of extraordinary hugeness, horses of extraordinary wisdom—and all the rest proceeds with the most orthodox logic, with no trace of specific improbability, without inventive effort. We are within the field of the incredible, yet we are within the field of reality. Strange happenings seem normal, madness assumes the forms of reason. Just a difference in nature, just a shift of dimensions, and we have with the utmost naturalness the most unnatural of worlds. It is the classic method for the creation of the extraordinary, a method to be resumed a century later by Poe for his travels into the realms of mystery.
By thus reducing absurdity to the minimum and gaining in consequence the maximum of effect, Swift succeeded in making Gulliver’s Travels one of the classic documents of man’s scorn for man. The sharp and cynical spirit of the Dean of St. Patrick’s vented itself within the limits of this ingenious device by mocking and humiliating men in all the attitudes and occupations of their lives. Never has an indictment of the cowardice, the weakness, and the foolishness of humanity been fiercer or more complete than that contained in this book for children. Those who believe that pessimism had its rise in Germany in the nineteenth century are blind or forgetful. The most definitive condemnation of life as we live it was uttered in England in the year 1721. Even before Swift’s time many of the things whereof men boast, wherein they glory, had been reproached and bitterly attacked. There had been elegiac laments and sarcastic demolitions. But no one had extended such treatment to the whole human race, no one had said these things with such force, with such refined cruelty. Dr. Gulliver, surgeon and average man, seeks in appearance to maintain the dignity and the greatness of his species, and yet the most terrific accusations emerge from his apologetic efforts.
Lemuel Gulliver is honest, intelligent, educated, good-looking; he can reason, he is a man of feeling; and yet his invisible enemy condemns him to be a toy in the hands of giants, and to resemble the disgusting Yahoos, slaves of the wise horses. After we have seen our foolish littleness reflected in the Lilliputians, he reveals us as still more little by putting one of us amid the giants of Brobdingnag. In Laputa and in Balnibarbi we find our madnesses enlarged and deformed as in a convex mirror. In the island of Glubbdubdrib we find our past; in the land of the Houyhnhnms we find our foul bestiality. Nothing escapes Swift's black hatred. Political divisions are no more important than the division between those who wear high heels and those who wear low heels; religious divisions are like the division between those who crack eggs on the side and those who crack them at the end; ministers of state win their positions by proficiency in dancing on the tight-rope. Kings are proud and pitiless in proportion to their weakness. Woman's beauty appears full of stains and ugliness when it is magnified. All that to us seems glorious and majestic would be but a pygmy's farce to beings greater and wiser than we—as to the King of Brobdingnag, who observed:
"How contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I: and yet," says he, "I dare engage, these creatures 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."
But with the hairs of this king's beard, Gulliver makes himself a comb! The same king, however, by way of unconscious vengeance, proves in a twinkling the defects of parliamentary government, touches the sore spots of English history and administration, and concludes that the majority of Gulliver's fellow-citizens form "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin, that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
Nothing is spared in the implacable review of our miseries: neither our legislation nor our philosophy nor our desire to make war and to conquer. In Laputa and in the academy of Lagado our metaphysicians and our scientists, our schemers and our dreamers, are mocked and laughed to scorn. In Glubbdubdrib the lies of our historians and the weaknesses of our ancestors stand revealed. And in the land of horses the whole human race is pilloried and unspeakably humbled in the image of the Yahoos—wild, vicious, foul, malignant creatures who yet possess a terrible resemblance (if the veils and paints and powders of civilization be disregarded) to the beings that enjoy the full benefits of civilization.
Swift's book does not mount toward redemption. It makes no concessions to optimism. His pitiless hatred for humanity increases from chapter to chapter, even to the final insult. Along the way everything has been denied, everything has been stripped of glamor: politics, religion, morals, valor, knowledge, thought, history, civilization. It remains only for the poor Yahoos, naked and unmasked, to reveal us at the last as we really are: mere apes, wild, stupid, evil. Thus ends this marvelous and grievous outburst of as unprejudiced a spirit as ever lived and suffered in this world.
Swift is not only a simple, clear, and clean-cut writer: he is original. Macaulay himself, though he points out a resemblance between a passage in one of Addison’s Latin poems and a passage in the voyage to Lilliput, recognizes that Swift owes exceptionally little to his predecessors. There are stories of giants and pygmies in popular mythology, to be sure; but the idea of making use of these differences of stature to proclaim and represent the tragi-comedy of human life was Swift’s own. There had been earlier accounts of imaginary voyages to strange lands; but no author had succeeded, as Swift was to do, in fusing intense satire with amusing narrative. Before the time of Swift there had been Utopias wherein more perfect men had framed wise regulations for their common life; but in Gulliver’s Travels, after the voyage to Lilliput, there is scarcely a trace of the “cities of the sun.” The one perfect society is that of the illiterate horses: a bitter mockery of our pride as literary bipeds.
Yet human vanity, never content, has sought to turn this book—with all its strangeness, sadness, and profundity—into a humorous work, a book for children. It is not a matter of chance that the very pages that make children laugh are those that may well bring tears of shame to the rest of us.
- ↑ Written à propos of A. Valori’s version of Gulliver’s Travels: I viaggi di Gulliver, Genoa, 1913.