Part 12

From that compromise Gulliver escaped to Blefuscu, and back to England, knowing that the smallest people in the world had all the familiar follies and vices of mankind in general.

Next Swift, as Gulliver, was blown to the giants of Brobdingnag, that humane people. It was his turn to be insectile. He was exhibited as a toy freak by the kind, greedy farmer who had found him. Scientists wondered what species he could belong to. The king, being a philosopher, supposed that such creatures as Gulliver “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.” And when Gulliver had defended his species by an account of their government and politics, their wars and luxuries, the king, being a humane philosopher, concluded “your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

He himself abominated mystery, refinement, and intrigue in governors. He limited government “to common sense and reason, to justice and lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes.” He held that “whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind ... than the whole race of politicians put together.” Gulliver, or Swift, sardonically despaired of such a monarch. His people were no better. Their learning was only in morality, history, poetry, and useful mathematics. They were unable to form conceptions of what Gulliver meant by “entities, abstractions, and transcendentals.” They were dull with virtue and peace.

Gulliver found in their habits less to remind him of England than he had found in Lilliput. His story was taken up with the ingenious shifts by which he got along among them. But after the giants he could not so easily return to the old scale of life as he could after the pigmies. His own people seemed contemptible by their smallness. He was twice as far from mankind as he had been before.

Swift’s, Gulliver’s, third voyage seems to have been to the Country of Horses, but when he told the story he saved that for the venomous conclusion and in the third place put the account of the Flying Island and the continent which was topsy-turvy with philosophers.

Once more, as in Lilliput, he was often reminded of Europe. The name of Laputa was like the Spanish for harlot. The island, when its rulers wished, could hover over stubborn cities and shut out the sun, as England shut out the sun from Ireland. Whether aloft or on land the people were rapt in abstruse speculations or abandoned to fantastic projects. Among the islanders nobody spoke sense except, possibly, the tradesmen, women, and children. The others were so many pedants exaggerated from the breed that Swift had detested in his earliest satires. The Academy of Lagado was a Bedlam of Science, where men wore out their lives trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, to build houses downward from the roofs in the fashion of the bees and spiders, to plow fields only with the snouts of hogs, to make silk from spider webs, to cure colic with a pair of bellows, to soften marble for pincushions, to propagate naked sheep, to write books by a mechanical device, to discover painless methods of taxation.

Gulliver grew dizzy. He lacked the head, as Swift did, for this whirling universe. It did not steady him when, on the neighbouring island of Glubbdubdrib, he was allowed to call up the spirits of the famous dead and found how falsely they had been presented in history. It did not steady him when in Luggnagg he learned of the immortal struldbrugs, for whom immortality was only human life prolonged to an infinity of horrible old age. “I ... thought,” said Gulliver, for Swift, “that no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure from such a life.” When he was out of the mad lands of Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, and Luggnagg, he was nearly upside down, giddy, and three times as far from mankind.

Now for the antipodes of misanthropy. Among the Houyhnhnms Gulliver was almost undisguisedly Swift. The day on which Gulliver set sail from Portsmouth was the precise day of September 1710 on which Swift had arrived in London to make his fortune with the new men in power. Gulliver’s discovery of an island where the horses were as much wiser and nobler as they were stronger than the men was such a discovery as Swift may have made as he rode through desolate, beggarly Ireland.

It is easy to guess, though only to guess, that the device came to his mind on that dark expedition to the south in the summer of 1723 after Vanessa’s death. Everywhere he saw the “savage old Irish,” “miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape,” living “in the utmost ignorance, barbarity, and poverty, giving themselves wholly up to idleness, nastiness, and thievery,” “brought up to steal or beg for want of work,” so that to them “death would be the best thing to be wished for both on account of themselves and the public.” Swift had not yet reached the point where he could take up the cause of these miserable victims. He felt chiefly a sick repulsion. He would not admit that they and he were of the same kind. At least they must belong to a tribe which had degenerated till they were less than beasts.

Less than beasts? Compare them with his horse, healthy, patient, without follies or vices, incapable of pride. Horses, the animals Swift had most to do with and knew best, were more fit to rule than degraded men. Suppose some traveller should find a country where the horses did rule. Suppose Gulliver were to find it. The Scriblerus Club had not decided what race Martin was to visit on his fourth voyage, only that he was to “display a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust of his species.” Nothing could disgust a traveller, even wholesome Gulliver, more than to study the horrid antics of a debased human tribe in the company of utopian horses who could see little difference between him and those apish copies. Gulliver had been disgusted among the giants when the maids of honour laid him against their terrible breasts. That had been only a shrinking of his senses. Now his soul itself must shrink with an absolute antipathy from which he could not recover. When he came back he would prefer the horses of England to the men.

With something like these gathering plans, though they must be guessed at, in something like this mood, which is certain enough, Swift rode through the south and west. In September he was in Dublin again. By the next January he had “left the Country of Horses.”

On his icy, fiery travels among the Houyhnhnms Swift (why call him Gulliver?) did not bother to observe such stinging likenesses to particular English persons and episodes as he observed among the pigmies and the philosophers. The last of his adventures was the simplest, as it was the most deadly. All actual fantasy, all apparent fact.

He came upon his first Yahoos without realizing that they were inferior men and upon his first Houyhnhnms without realizing that they were superior horses. When he found himself taken for a Yahoo he hurried to tell his Houyhnhnm master about Europe. He told him of wars, their causes, means, and ends; of litigation and the arts of lawyers; of money, and of poverty and riches; of luxury and dissipation; of diseases and their remedies; of ministers of state and noblemen. The reasonable Houyhnhnm said he had noticed the rudiments of all these human ways of life among the Yahoos.

They had their tribal and civil wars. They hoarded shining stones which they could not use, fought over them, and sometimes lost them to bystanders who snatched them away as expertly as any lawyer. They gorged themselves with food and sucked a root that made them drunk. They had the only diseases in the country, because of their gluttony and filth. They had in most herds a sort of ruling Yahoo, always deformed in body and mischievous in disposition, who continued in office till a worse could be found. They were lewd and promiscuous. They were invariably dirty and sometimes splenetic. They had, it appeared, all the human vices except unnatural appetites, these “politer pleasures” not having occurred to them. They were unteachable because they were perverse and restive, but they had the brains to be cunning, malicious, treacherous, revengeful, insolent, abject, and cruel. It was plain to the Houyhnhnm who talked with Swift that the visitor was a Yahoo after all. That “small pittance of reason” which by some accident had been given to the European Yahoos they used only to multiply their natural corruptions and to acquire new ones not supplied by nature.

To be fully reasonable was to be like the Houyhnhnms. They did not know what lying was. They affirmed or denied only when they were certain. Their two principal virtues were friendship and benevolence, felt towards the whole species without partiality except where there were special virtues to attract them. In marriage they were without jealousy, fondness, quarrelling, or discontent. The young of both sexes were brought up in moderation, industry, exercise, and cleanliness. Their only government was an annual council of the entire nation. They had no literature except poems composed, not written down, in praise of virtue. They were skilful workmen in the necessary arts, but wasted no time on superfluity or show. Reasonably born and bred, they lived reasonably without passions and died reasonably without sickness or fear.

“At first, indeed, I did not feel that natural awe which the Yahoos and all other animals bear towards them; but it grew upon me by degrees, much sooner than I imagined, and was mingled with a respectful love and gratitude that they would condescend to distinguish me from the rest of my species. When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or human race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in shape and disposition.” Swift would have remained with the Houyhnhnms for ever if they had not sent him away. The beasts could not tolerate a man. Nor could a man who had lived among the beasts ever again live among men without disgust.

The fourth voyage marked the peak of Swift’s fury and of his art. Great as that art was, it could not quite conceal that fury. The narrative might seem, however fantastic, to be the very mathematics of misanthropy, never looser than a syllogism. But the cold tread of intellect was repeatedly broken by the rush of nerves. The most reasonable sentence might suddenly throb with words of a shuddering hate. “Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European army, confounding the ranks, overturning the carriages, battering the warriors’ faces into mummy by terrible yerks from their hinder hoofs.” Intellect would have been satisfied with beating the European Yahoos down; nerves, furious and yet frightened at their own desperation, must imagine battering the noisome faces into mummy. Nothing less than an agonized antipathy could have made Swift remark that the female Yahoo who embraced Gulliver was not red-haired, “which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular,” but “black as a sloe”--or as Stella. Hate possessed him as love possesses some other men.

If he had been a lover of his kind he might have been hot with praises for the lofty merits which he found in them, and might have seen the world smirk at his tribute. Instead, he was a hater. Was there not as good an excuse for hating as for loving? Was it any less accurate to perceive ugliness, deformity, vice, stupidity, loathsomeness in the human race than to perceive beauty, grace, virtue, wit, charm? Swift would have known that these were absurd questions, asked to no purpose. Mankind would always answer them for its own comfort, which demands that love must be, in moral arguments, preferred to hate. The crowded tribes of the earth lived too precariously to welcome the hate, however instinctive, which might come among them to separate man from man, tribe from tribe, man from tribe. Only in the warmth of love could they live together. If the Swifts of the world must hate they must live alone, even if what they hated, as with Swift, was hate itself, along with cruelty, avarice, oppression, filth, intemperance, presumption.

All this Swift had learned. But he had no choice. His nature insisted upon taking its revenge as a coiled spring insists upon uncoiling as soon as it is free. He had travelled through the world. He would tell the whole truth about his travels.

2

A man who had been around the world and under it might after twelve years of banishment venture from Ireland to London. Swift’s friends had never ceased urging him to visit them again. He would only now and then allow himself to think of it.

“What can be the design of your letter but malice,” he wrote to Gay in January 1723, “to wake me out of a scurvy sleep, which however is better than none?... I shall not be able to relish my wine, my parsons, my horses, nor my garden for three months, until the spirit you have raised shall be dispossessed. I have sometimes wondered that I have not visited you, but I have been stopped by too many reasons, besides years and laziness, and yet these are very good ones. Upon my return after half a year amongst you there would be to me _desiderio nec pudor nec modus_. I was three years reconciling myself to the scene and the business to which fortune has condemned me, and stupidity was what I had recourse to. Besides, what a figure should I make in London, while my friends are in poverty, exile, distress, or imprisonment, and my enemies with rods of iron? Yet I often threaten myself with the journey, and am every summer practising to ride and get health to bear it. The only inconvenience is that I grow old in the experiment.”

But in November 1724, Oxford having died, Oxford’s son invited Swift to come to England to write the biography which he had proposed. “There would be nobody more welcome to me than yourself. You should live in your own way and do just what was most agreeable to you. I have houses enough; you shall take your choice.” By September 1725 Swift had his Travels ready to be printed. With two such reasons for going he had no excuse for staying. His friends urged him with fresh tenderness and wit.

“I have often imagined to myself,” Pope wrote in October, “that if ever all of us met again, after so many varieties and changes, after so much of the old world and of the old man in each of us has been altered, after there has been such a new heaven and a new earth in our minds and bodies that scarce a single thought of the one, any more than a single atom of the other, remains just the same--I have fancied, I say, that we should meet like the righteous in the millennium, quite in peace, divested of all our former passions, smiling at all our own designs, and content to enjoy the kingdom of the just in tranquillity.”

Arbuthnot, just recovering from a nearly fatal illness, had intended to add a postscript to Pope’s letter. He was so moved by what Swift had said--“Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my Travels”--that he wrote a letter of his own. “For God’s sake do not tantalize your friends any more. I can prove by twenty unanswerable arguments that it is absolutely necessary you should come over to England; that it would be committing the greatest absurdity that ever was not to do it the next approaching winter. I believe, indeed, it is just possible to save your soul without it, and that is all.”

Some feverish disorder kept Swift “sitting like a toad in a corner of his great house” for a part of that winter, but he had set his mind on England for the spring. “If you do not know me when we meet,” he told Pope, “you need only keep one of my letters and compare it with my face, for my face and letters are counterparts of my heart.” About the middle of March he was in London, in the best of health and spirits, Pope said, and “the joy of all here who know him, as he was eleven years ago.”

There were two weeks of joyful, leisurely reunion. Pope left his villa for Swift’s lodgings. Arbuthnot “led him a course through the town” with such new men of fashion as Lord Chesterfield and William Pulteney (later the Earl of Bath). Harcourt and Peterborough made plans to introduce him to Walpole; Pope, though Arbuthnot got ahead of him, to the household of the Prince of Wales through Mrs. Howard, the Princess’s confidante. Swift visited Bolingbroke and Pope in the country, and by the first of April was ready, with Pope, “to ramble to Lord Oxford’s and Lord Bathurst’s and other places.” Pope found his guest “the best-natured and most indulgent man I know.”

Swift had come into a world as strange to him as the world he had found in 1710. Though the Whigs were in power, they were not the Whigs he had known. Somers, Halifax, Wharton, and Addison were dead. Congreve was alive, but gouty and almost blind. Steele was alive, but in Wales and paralyzed. The Tories Swift had known were scattered. Oxford had died, Ormond had settled in Spain, Bolingbroke, though pardoned and again in England, was excluded from the House of Lords. The Society of Brothers no longer dined together, men of influence with men of wit. Prior was dead.

Only in what had once been the Scriblerus Club was London much the same as Swift had left it, except that Parnell too was dead. Bolingbroke, formerly a kind of honorary member, now gave his time to philosophizing near Uxbridge about the uses of retirement and scheming how to get back in power. Pope, having made a fortune out of Homer, had retired to his house and grotto at Twickenham and was brewing poison for the dunces. Gay, with a small sinecure and lodgings in the palace at Whitehall, was completing the fables which he wrote for Prince William, son of the Prince of Wales. Arbuthnot, still as always a man of learning, virtue, sense, and wit, called his house in London Martin’s office, though the Scriblerus Club had given up its regular meetings.

Swift, being Swift, could not withhold himself from politics. The authorities in Ireland warned the authorities in England to watch out for him. Walpole, who may have wanted to win Swift over and who may have wanted merely to learn about Irish affairs, invited Swift to dine with him at Chelsea and later to call on him in London. First and last they were at deadlock, however, though scandal buzzed about a treaty between them. Walpole’s opinions concerning Ireland, Swift said, “I could not reconcile to the notions I had of liberty.” “I was neither offered nor would have received” any promotion “except upon conditions which would never be granted.” By the end of April he was “weary of being among ministers whom I cannot govern, who are all rank Tories in government and worse than Whigs in Church, whereas I was the first man who taught and practised the direct contrary principle.” If he had any hope it was in the opposition being organized by Pulteney and Sir William Wyndham, with the help and advice of Bolingbroke, and with the name of the Patriots. But Swift’s old zest, perhaps his old delusion, had gone.

“This is the first time I was ever weary of England and longed to be in Ireland,” he wrote to Sheridan. “But it is because go I must, for I do not love Ireland better nor England, as England, worse. In short, you all live in a wretched, dirty doghole and prison, but it is a place good enough to die in. I can tell you one thing, that I have had the fairest offer made me of a settlement here that one can imagine, which if I were ten years younger I would gladly accept, within ten miles of London and in the midst of my friends. But I am too old for new schemes, and especially such as would bridle my freedoms and liberalities.”

This was Swift’s way of saying that though some unknown patron had offered him a pleasant living in England, and it tempted him, he actually preferred Ireland, where he could be, as Dean, independent and liberal. He was closer to Ireland than he would admit. He did not during his stay in England even find time to go through the Oxford papers among which he had once thought he wanted to live over the days of his power, writing the history of the minister he had served and loved.

But if public affairs were disappointing, friendship and wit, for which Swift had his genius, were all he had looked forward to. His friends would not take his politics too seriously. “I hope,” Bolingbroke wrote to “the three Yahoos of Twickenham, Jonathan, Alexander, John,” “Jonathan’s imagination of business will be succeeded by some imagination more becoming a professor of the divine science _la bagatelle_.” During May and June Swift was as cheerful as he ever urged others to be. He was at Twickenham with Gay and Pope, content to let the world go its way if they could laugh at it. “Mr. Pope ... prescribes all our visits without our knowledge, and Mr. Gay and I find ourselves often engaged for three or four days to come, and we neither of us dare dispute his pleasure.” Bolingbroke and Bathurst were not far away. Congreve came out to dinner. Mrs. Howard had a house at Marble Hill. The Prince of Wales’s court left London for Richmond where Swift made it his habit, as he put it, “to sponge a breakfast once a week.”

The days were as busy, if not as weighty, as they had been for Swift when he spent them with the Ministry, but in the evenings he played backgammon with Pope’s mother. Pope, Gay, and Swift went off for two weeks on horseback, to Lord Cobham’s house at Stowe, to Bathurst’s house at Cirencester, probably to Windsor Forest. Pope and Swift seem to have helped Gay with a ballad which he wrote at the inn at Wokingham. All three of them agreed upon a volume or volumes of miscellanies in which, as Pope described it, they were to “look like friends, side by side, serious and merry by turns, not in the stiff forms of learned authors, flattering each other and setting the rest of mankind at naught, but in a free, unimportant, natural, easy manner, diverting others just as we diverted ourselves.”

At the same time, Twickenham saw them working upon bigger schemes. Gay had his fables, taking from the behaviour of animals the rules for human conduct which he wittily versified for the little prince. Pope, angry at the spiteful dunces who had envied his success, was paying them off in a satire. Swift at first had thought they hardly deserved it. “Take care the bad poets do not outwit you, as they have served the good ones in every age, whom they have provoked to transmit their names to posterity.” Swift himself almost never mentioned fools by name when he slaughtered them in prose or verse, unless the slaughter were political. But when he read Pope’s satire he changed his mind, as Pope had now changed his. Pope was going to burn the verses. Swift saved them from the fire. When three such wits had come together they might as well all whip the world. Let Gay have his moral animals, and Pope his dunces. Swift would take mankind.

They read and discussed his Travels. Pope and Swift thought of means of publishing the book so stealthily that there would be no danger of prosecution. The printer, having seen a quarter of it, agreed to pay within six months the two hundred pounds which Pope made Swift demand. Only after Swift had left England the middle of August did the printer receive the manuscript, “he knew not whence, nor from whom, dropped at his house in the dark from a hackney coach” in which it is likely that the mystifying Pope enjoyed his subterfuge.