Jonathan Swift’s Savage Indignation

Miranda: “O wonder! . . . / O brave new world / That has such people in’t!”
Prospero: “‘Tis new to thee.” 

The great themes of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the masterpiece whose tricentenary this is, are an elaborate and pungent meditation on this exchange between Miranda and Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Wonder takes a sharp well-aimed blow from a blunt object. Awe at the marvels the world holds, gratitude for the privilege of being human, this glorious being whom God has placed at the pinnacle of earthly life, and who can take pleasure in the whole spectacle before him—a closer look at this enchantment reveals how much of it is flimflam. Disappointment, disillusion, shame, disgust, and horror sum up the shrewder assessment. And this wised-up revulsion is Swift’s hallmark. The Latin epitaph for his memorial in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where he served as dean for over thirty years, declares that he is now peacefully beyond the reach of his own saeva indignatio, the savage indignation that lacerated his heart.

Countless readers have loved Gulliver’s Travels in spite of its savagery. For many children it is the first book written for adults that they read, a treasury of fantastic exploits in an endlessly fascinating world. As one learns from Leo Damrosch’s excellent biography of Swift, frontiersman Daniel Boone read the novel aloud around the campfire to his fellow adventurers in the American wilderness. George Orwell read it many times over, and proclaimed it one of “six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed.” John Wesley found Gulliver’s description of European warlike viciousness appallingly correct: “Is it not astonishing beyond expression that this is the naked truth? . . . And meanwhile we gravely talk of the ‘dignity of our nature’ in its present state.” William Makepeace Thackeray, expert in the vanities and vices of mankind, pronounced it “filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene. . . . [T]he meaning is that man is utterly wicked, desperate, and imbecile, and his passions are so monstrous, and his boasted powers so mean, that he is and deserves to be the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason.” 

Swift teaches by indirection, with object lessons in irrationality, that reason is the instrument by which men ought to direct their moral action. The pretensions of all earthly rulers are cut down to size by the preposterous magniloquence of the official proclamations of the emperor of Lilliput, “Delight and Terror of the Universe . . . at whose Nod the Princes of the Earth shake their Knees”—lord and master of a touchy people not quite six inches tall. These petulant homunculi kill and die for what to us is plainly an absurdity. The destructive decades-long war between Lilliput and Blefuscu originated in a religious dispute over which end of a breakfast egg ought properly to be cracked open. It’s all quite unnecessary: The crucial text, an imperial secretary explains, from “our great Prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth Chapter of the Brundecral,” appears to satisfy the demands of both reason and revelation, and to leave room for irenic compromise: “For the Words are these: That all true Believers shall break their Eggs at the convenient End: and which is the convenient End, seems, in my humble Opinion, to be left to every Man’s Conscience, or at least in the Power of the Chief Magistrate to determine.” 

Here Swift lampoons the momentous religious controversies of the seventeenth century and the attendant wars between Anglo-Catholic England and Roman Catholic France. Yet he does not give reason in the form of freedom of conscience the run of the place, but bends the knee to religious and political authority: It was after all his duty as a minister of the Church of Ireland—that is, the Anglican Church in Ireland, the established Protestant Church in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country—to enforce doctrinal conformity. The chief magistrate, otherwise known as the king of England, held sway, if not exactly over every Irishman’s conscience, then over his public worship. 

The limitations of reason are evident too on the airborne island of Laputa, carried aloft by the wondrous minds of natural philosophers, for its denizens are men of exceptional ability in mathematics and music, like the geniuses of the Royal Society; but they are useless in more commonplace affairs—such as building houses, for they despise “practical Geometry” as “vulgar and mechanick”—and in making “Judgments in Matters of State,” where they meddle ceaselessly, blind to their incapacity. From Albert Einstein to Bertrand Russell, from Francis Crick to Linus Pauling to Paul Ehrlich, the modern scientists who stake their reputations on misguided “Disquietudes,” “Disturbances,” and “Apprehensions,” or advocate for perpetual peace through a single world government, are legion. Swift knew their type and saw them coming.

Reason has its empire, not among men or their recognizable second cousins, but in the land ruled by wise horses. A two-year sojourn in the country of the Houyhnhnms changes Gulliver from a lover of mankind to the most vehement misanthrope, for the foulest beings he has ever encountered, the Yahoos, the Houyhnhnms’ natural slaves, miscreants who revel in every possible degradation, are all too clearly the near relations of human beings.  

The ultimate philosophic rationality is the Houyhnhnms’ lucid purity of mind. The truth, Gulliver learns from his acknowledged equine master, is always clear, incontrovertible, beyond dispute; it is never complicated by the passions, which are the real cause of intellectual wrangling among men. The only question ever debated by the Houyhnhnms in their grand assembly is “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth.” Gulliver is not privy to the outcome of that debate.  

The Houyhnhnms look upon Gulliver with a mingling of wonder and misgiving, for they take him for a Yahoo of an astonishingly amiable and refined sort. And in the end they expel him from their land, for fear he might corrupt by his continued presence. His experience of the Houyhnhnms’ perfect reasonableness and the Yahoos’ filthiness of body and mind disqualifies Gulliver from ordinary human life.  Upon returning to England, he cannot abide the sight or smell of even his own wife and children. Sometimes he sleeps in the stable with his horses. It is left to the reader to decide whether the intellectual and moral excellence that Gulliver has come to know is not inhuman, in every sense of that word. Would he have been better left untouched by rational perfection?