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eventually produce "Books in Philosophy, Poetry,
Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology."

The effect of Laputa and its subject kingdom is
of a wilful abandoning of the physical and of the
vital for the abstract, the mechanical, and the
unproductive. The prevailing images here are not of
real people and animals, even "little odious vermin,"
but of ruins, mechanical constructions, men who look
like allegorical figures and women who are thought of
as rhomboids or parallelograms. Animals are only
negatively present, as in the pathetic horses and
sheep of the Academy. Even Laputa itself is a
mechanical device, and the flying island expresses
not only the Laputans' desertion of the common earth
of reality but their conversion of the universe to a
mechanism and of living to a mechanical process.

A gloomy enough picture of both the ancient and the
modern world, and upon this ghostly history follows
the most somber episode of all, that of the
Struldbrugs of Luggnagg, in which the lesson of
Laputa with its naive hopes, its misplaced ambition,
and its eventual sterility is repeated with more open
seriousness. A right sense of values, a proper
attitude to living, is here suggested not through the
handling of contemporary aims and habits of thought
but through the figure of man, immortal yet still
painfully recognizable. Gulliver, hearing of the
immortals, cries out "as in a Rapture," exclaiming
upon the wisdom and happiness which they must have

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achieved. And he is only too willing to tell his
hearers how he would plan his life, if he were a
Struldbrug, to bring the greatest possible benefit to
himself and his country. In fact, of course, the
immortal and aged creatures, though free from the
fear of death, are yet as full of fears and
wretchedness as any other men: being what we are, we
will always find occasion to display those vices
which as human beings we •will always have, however
long we may live. The Struldbrugs certainly do not
keep their minds free and disengaged, and for them
the prospect of endless life does not conjure up
visions of endless improve-nient in wisdom and
virtue.

They regard their immortality as a "dreadful
Prospect" even as other men regard their death, and
indeed they long to die as did the wretched Sibyl in
Petronius's Satyricon, regarding with great jealousy
those of their acquaintance who go "to an Harbour of
Rest, to which they themselves never can hope to
arrive." 16 Immortal man is still man, limited in his
capacity for growth, sinful, fearful, dissatisfied;
the somber simplicity of the passage, and indeed of
the whole of the visit to Glubbdubdrib, is
reminiscent of Johnson's methods rather than of
Swift's, and the message is essentially similar.
Gulliver, who has dreamed of being a king, a general,
or a great lord, and now dreams of being a
Struldbrug, has to learn the same lesson as the
Prince of Abyssinia: that life is a serious,

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difficult, and above all a moral undertaking, and
thought no Tyrant could invent a Death into which I
would not run with Pleasure from such a Life,"

The voyage to Laputa is a voyage of illusion,
the escape from facts, ends in a darker reality than
any Gulliver has yet encountered. Gulliver himself,
in this book, becomes a part of the world of illusion
and distorted values. Already in the earlier voyages
the shifting, inconsistent quality which Gulliver
shares with all Swift's satiric mouthpieces has been
made to contribute to effects of relativity, and to
suggest the hold of physical circumstances over
mankind. That he is, generally, a different man in
Brobdingnag and in Lilliput is made into part of
Swift's presentation of human nature. In the "Voyage
to Laputa," any still surviving notion that Gulliver
is a safe guide through these strange countries is
ended.

9.5 The Moral vision of Swift

Samuel H. Monk remarks “Gulliver's Travels is a
complex book. It is, of course, a satire on four
asgects of man: the physical, the political, the
intellectual, and the mofalTThe last three are
inseparable, and when Swift writes ofone he always
has in view the others. It is also a brilliant parody
oftravel literature; and it is at once science
fiction and a witty parodyof science fiction. It
expresses savage indignation at the folios, vices,

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/and stupidities of men, and everywhere implicit in
the book as a whole is an awareness of man's tragic
insufficiency. But at the same time it is a great
comic masterpiece, a fact that solemn and too-
sensitive readers often miss.’

Swift's satire was written in anger, contempt, or
disgust, but it was written to promote self-knowledge
in the faith that self-knowledge will lead to right
action. Swift did not wish us to laugh but beyond the
mirth and liveliness are gravity, anger, anxiety,
frustration and he meant us to experience them fully,
there is an abyss below this fantastic world the
abyss of corrupt human nature. He is the great master
of shock. With perfect control of tone and pace, with
perfect timing, he startles us into an awareness of
this abyss and its implications. We are forced to
gaze into the stupid, evil, brutal heart of humanity,
and when we do, the laughter that Swift has evoked is
abruptly silenced. The surface of the book is comic,
but at its center is tragedy, transformed through
style and tone into icy irony.”

Gulliver in all respects is a goodman. He is
simple, direct, uncomplicated. At the outset he is
full of naive good will, and, though he grows less
naive and more critical as a result of his voyaging
among remote nations, he retains his benevolence
throughout the first three voyages. The four voyages
"into several remote nations of the world," are so
arranged as to attain a climactic intensification of

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tone as we travel through increasing darkness into
the black heart of humanity.jBut the forward movement
is interrupted by the third voyage, a macabre scherzo
on science, politics, economics as they are practiced
by madmen—Swift's term for those who misuse and abuse
human reason. The first two voyages, Gulliver is made
aware of his disproportion;" placed on this isthmus
of a middle state, in the voyage to Lilliput he looks
down the chain of being and knows himself an awkward,
if kindly, giant in that delicate kingdom; in the
voyage to Brobdingnag he looks up the chain and
discovers a race of "superior beings," among whom his
pride shrivels through the humiliating Knowledge of
his own physical insignificance. The emphasis here is
upon size, the physical; but it is none the less
notable that Lilliputia calls into operation
Gulliver's engaging kindliness and gentleness, and
that Brobdingnag brings out his moral and physical
courage.

Gulliver, who seemed lovable and humane among
the Lilliputians,-appears an ignominious afld morally
insensitive being in contrast to the enlightened and
benevolent Brobdingnagians. The Lilliputian's
ingeniously capture the Hercules whom chance has cast
on their shore; they humanely solve the problem of
feeding him; their pretty land and their fascinating
little city take our fancy. But in the end what do
they prove to be? prideful, envious, rapacious,
treacherous, cruel, , vengeful, jealous, and
hypocritical. Their primitive social and political

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systems have been corrupted; they are governed by an
Emperor who is ambitious totally to destroy the
neighboring kingdom, and by courtiers and ministers
who are chosen not for their fitness for office, but
for their skill in walking the tightrope, leaping
over sticks or .creeping under them.

"Climbing," Swift once remarked, "is performed
in the same Posture with Creeping." These little
people, like Gulliver himself, are an instance of the
disproportion of man. Their vices, their appetites,
their ambitions, their passions are not commensurate
with their tiny stature. They appear to Gulliver as
he and his kind must appear to the higher orders of
beings—as venomous and contemptibly petty. In
Brobdingnag we meet creatures ten times the size of
Europeans, 'and we share Gulliver's anxiety lest
their moral natures be as brutish as their bodies.
But the reverse is true; and through a violent and
effective shift of symbol, tone, and point of view,

In the questions which the king asks and which
Gulliver meets with only an embarrassed silence, the
voice of morality is heard condemning the
institutions of the modern world. And the verdict of
a moral being on European man is given in words as
icy as controlled contempt can make them: "But, by
what I have gathered from your own Relation, and the
Answers I have with much Pains wringed and extorted
from you; I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your
Natives to be the most pernicious Race of little

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odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon
the Surface of the Earth." Such a conclusion is
inevitable, for the King is high-minded, benevolent,
and, in Swift's sense of the word, rational: i.e., he
and his people think practically, not theoretically;
concretely, not metaphysically; simply, not
intricately. Brobdingnag is a Swiftian Utopia of
com.mon good sense and morality; and Gulliver,
conditioned by the corrupt society from which he.
comes, appears naive, blind, and insensitive to moral
values/His account of the history of England in the
seventeenth century evokes the King's crushing
retort: “... it was only an Heap of Conspiracies,
Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions,
Banishments; the very worst Effects that Avarice,
Faction, Hypocracy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage,
Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, and Ambition
could produce.”

Houyhnhnms are the embodiment of pure reason.
They know neither love nor grief nor lust nor
ambition. They cannot lie; indeed they have no word
for lying and are hard put to it to understand the
meaning of opinion, Their society is an aristocracy,
resting upon the slave labor of the Yahoos and the
work of an especially-bred servant class. With icy,
stoical calm they face the processes of life—
marriage, childbirth, accident, death. Their society
is a planned society that has achieved the mild
anarchy that many Utopian dreamers have aspired to.
They practice eugenics, and since they know no lust,

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they control the size of their population; children
are educated by the state; their agrarian economy is
supervised by a democratic council; government is
entirely conducted by periodic assemblies.

The Houyhnhnms feel natural |iuman affection for
each other, but they love every one equally. It is
Gulliver, not Swift, who is dazzled by the Houyhnhnms
' and who aspires to rise above the human condition
and to become pure intelligence as these horses and
the angels are the most powerful single symbol in all
Swift is the Yahoos. They <Jo not represent Swift's
view of man, but rather of the bestial element in
man—the unenlightened, unregenerate, i r r a t i o n a l
element in human nature—the id or the libido.

From the moment that the banished Gulliver
despairingly sets sail from Houyhnhnm land, his
pride, his misanthropy, his madness are apparent.
Deluded by his worship of pure reason, he commits the
err: r of the Houyhnhnms in equating human beings
with the Yahoos, Cy ired by a Portuguese crew and
forced to return from sullen solitude to humanity, he
trembles between -fear and hatred. The captain of the
ship, Don Pedro de Mendez, like Gulliver himself,
shares the nature of the Houyhnhnm and the Yahoo; and
like the Gulliver of the first voyage he is tolerant,
sympathetic, kindly, patient, and charitable; but
Gulliver can no longer recognize these traits in a
human being. With the myopic vision of the
Houyhnhnms, he perceives only the Yahoo and is

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repelled by Don Pedro's clothes, food.

“In the words of Gulliver my Reconcilement to
the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult,
if they would be content with those Vices and Follies
only which Nature hath entitled them to. I am not in
the least provoked at the Sight of a Lawyer, a
Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a
Politician, a Whoremunger, a Physician, an Evidence,
a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traytor, or the like: This
is all according to the due Course of Things: But
when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both
of Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately
breaks all the Measures of my Patience; neither shall
I ever be able to comprehend how such an Animal and
such a Vice could tally together”.7

The grim joke is that Gulliver himself is the
supreme instance of a creature smitten with pride.
His education has somehow failed. He has voyaged into
several remote nations of the world, but the journeys
vere not long, because of course he has never moved
outside the bounds of human nature. The countries he
visited, like the Kingdom of Heaven, are all within
us. The ultimate danger of these travels was
precisely the one that destroyed Gulliver's humanity—
the danger that in his explorations he would discover
something that he was not strong enough to face. This
befell him, and he took refuge in a sick and morbid
pride that alienated him from his species and taught
him i the gratitude of the Pharisee—"Lord, I thank

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Thee that I am not.

9.6 Gulliver’s Travels as a Satire on Man.

Gulliver's Travels is divided in to four books recounting the
adventures of Gulliver in four lands. The main burden of Gulliver’s
Travels is satirical and Swift set out to show man in the most
despicable form. Swift once said to Pope, "I heartily hate and detest
that animal called man," and this book is an elaboration of that
attitude. He magnifies man into a giant, and then diminishes him into
a manikin, and he finds him wicked, insolent and mean. He regards man
in his wisdom, and he finds him a fool. In despair, in the last book
o f t h e Travels, he turns from man altogether, and in the brute
creation he discovers a charity and sagacity before which humanity
grovels as a creature , beastly beyond measure.

In the first book of Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver's ship is
wrecked at Lilliput where the inhabitants are six inches tall— except
their emperor, "taller by almost the breadth of my nail". Here the
satire obviously consists in showing human motives at work on a small
scale, and in suggesting by the likeness of the Lilliputians to
ourselves, the littleness of human affairs, and especially t h e
pettiness of political intrigues. The arts by which the officers of
the government keep their places, such as cutting capers on a tight
rope for the entertainment of the emperors, remind us of the quality
of statesmanship in both Swift's day and our own. The dispute over
the question at which end an egg should properly be broken which
plunged Lilliput into the civil war, is a comment on ' the
seriousness of party divisions in the greater world.

Gulliver's next voyage, recounted in the second book, is to
Brobdingnang, where the people are as large in comparison with man as
the Lilliputians are small. Once more his adventures are a tale of
wonder behind which lurks Swift's contempt for man's meanness.
Gulliver tells the giant beings by whom he is a mere manikin, of the
world from which he has come. Among other things he tells of the
invention of gunpowder and the use of instruments of warfare. "The
king was struck with horror at the description If had given of these
terrible engines. He was amazed how so important and grovelling an
insect as I could entertain these inhuman ideas."

The first two books of the Travels, in spite of the satirical

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tone,
have a charm and vivacity that delight the old and the young. The
satire
lurks in the allegory, but it is so delicately tinselled over that it
does
not repel. The crowded incidents are plausible and lively, and they
are often spiced with a quaint and alluring humour.

Here his comments upon mankind are shrewd and arresting, as
well as satirical,

There is playfulness of fancy, a lightness of touch about the two
books and a simplicity of treatment that gives it a readier access of
appeal.

In the third book we have Gulliver's voyage to Laputa and
other curious places embodying Swift's contempt for pedantry and for
useless 'scientific' experiment. In the fourth voyage a burning
indictment of man's tortuous and sly reasoning as compared to the
noble inhabitants of' Houyhnhnm land is highlighted who within the
shapes of horses embody 'perfection of nature.' The beastly Yahoos
represent Swift's conception of man living in a degenerate state of
nature. The evil instincts of 'civilized' men are here again bitterly
portrayed.

9.7 GULLIVER’S TRAVELS AS A POLITICAL SATIRE

T h e s i x -inch high creatures of lilliput are
perfectly conceived to show the mental and moral
smallness of man, the pettiness of the concerns about
which we are so pompous and self important. For
Swift eighteenth century party politics, with its
struggles for office and for court favour, was one of
the areas of human activity where such smallness and
pretensions could be seen.

Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput are riddled
with more allusions to contemporary political evens

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and personalities than any other part of the travels:
Part I of Gulliver’s Travels, ostensibly a satire on
human greatness, can be seen, if one looks a little
deeper, to be simply on attack on England, on the
dominant Whig Party and on the war with France.

The Tiny ruler of Lilliput whose c o u n t r y
measures twelve miles round is no mere king but the
mighty Emperor, delight and terror of the Universe
whose head strikes against the Sun. At court,
Gulliver sees the candidates for great office
competing before the Emperor, and the skill they are
required to show is calculated by Swift to point to
the kind of quality needed for political success
under George. I. The fact that a Lilliputian rope
looks to Gulliver like a slender white thread
increases our sense of the dexterous balance required
for survival in the precarious world of eighteenth
century politics. Similarly the art of jumping over
or crawling under stick for the reward of what looks
to Gulliver like a colored silk thread-the ribbons of
the order of the Garter (blue), Bath (red) and
Thistle (green) suggests both the subservience
demanded by Lilliputian Emperor and the worthlessness
of the honour for which the ‘great persons’ compete.
Swift of course, disapproved of George I’s government
led by the Whig Sir Robert Walpole. Under Walpole’s
leadership political life was thought by many to be
more than usually corrupt, and his politics were
disliked by Swift. Walpole figures in the story as
the supremely skilful rope dancer Flimnap. The
cushion that broke his fall represents the Duchess of

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Kendal, one of George I’s mistresses. Reldresal is
thought to be Lord, Cateret, a personal friend of
Swift’s but a political opponent in the affair of
wood’s half pence. Many of the details of the
Lilliputian political scene, and of Gulliver’s
relations with the Emperor and his ministers relate
to England under George I and his predecessor Queen
Anne.

In his account of the two parties in the country
distinguished by the use of high heels and low heels,
Swift satirises English Political parties, and t h e
intrigues that centred around the Prince of Wales.
Religious feuds were laughed at in an account of a
problem which was dividing the people; ‘Should eggs
be broken at the big end or the little end?’ All this
is a reference to current politics at the time of
Swift. Gulliver stands largely for Belingbroke, the
secretary of the state from 1710 – 1714.

In Lilliput, although Gulliver is under a strong
guard, he is unavoidably expressed to the
‘Impertinence’ and malice’ of the ‘rabble’ some of
whom sheet arrows at him. But the colonel delivers
six of the ring leaders into his hands. Gulliver
frightens each one by pretending he will eat the man
alive and then setting them free. It was under
Bolingbroke, as Secretary of State that the
Government was trying to stamp out journalistic
opposition by means of frequent arrests rather than
by court action. Swift, libeled like the government
has thus created an allegorical detail from
Belingbroke’s method of dealing with the dart-

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throwing hack writers of 1710-1714.

The fire in the palace is put off by Gulliver
urinating over it. Case interprets it as the Treaty
of Utrecht ending the war of the Spanish Succession.
Gulliver’s story is based on Bolinbroke’s adventures,
with only minor references to Oxford. Swift mentions
the displeasure of the Emperor of Lilliput when
Gulliver makes friends with the ambassadors from
Blufuscu and agrees to visit their emperor, thus
creating a suspicion of high treason. The proposed
visit to the French Court, and the suspicion of his
disaffection would be due to Bolinbroke’s having seen
the Pretender during that visit. The fourth article
of the impeachment against Gulliver for treason
corresponds to that against Belingbroke and
Gulliver’s flight to Blefuscu is a close parallel of
Boling broke’s flight to France in 1715.

Lilliputians are proud, envious, rapacious,
treacherous, cruel, vengeful, jealous, and
hypocritical. Their emperor is ambitious totally to
destroy the neighbouring king. The Lilliputians, like
the nations, regard accession of strength primarily
as a means to overcome their rivals. Though Gulliver
is willing to defeat the aggressive intentions of the
Blefuscans by capturing their navy, he draws the line
firmly at being used to subjugate and enslave them.
To punish him for this the Lilliputians states-man
resolve to put him to death. The first voyage exposes
man in his myopic self- esteem.

Thus the High heels and the low heels are the

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Tories and the wigs, the Big and Little endians
stand for the catholics and the protestants, and
Lilliput and Blefuscu correspond to England and
France. Firth identified skyresh Bolgolam, Gulliver’s
chief opponent, with the earl of Nottingham, who
became a personal enemy of swift in the years before
1714. A.E. Case postulated that Gulliver’s career in
Lilliput represents the joint political fortunes of
Oxford and Boling broke during the latter half of
Anne’s reign, when the two men shared the leadership
of the Tory party. The inventory of his personal
effects refers to the attempt by the whigs in that
year to implicate Harley in the treason committed by
one of the clerks in his office. His release
symbolizes Harley’s return to power in 1710, the
conditions attached to it by Belgelam representing
Nottingham’s amendment on ‘No peace without Spain
which was added to the House of Lord’s address in
1711. The reaction of the empress is equated with
Queen’s growing disgust with Oxford’s policies and
person, and his final dismissal in 1714. The
Lilliputian ministers named by Gulliver as being his
main opponents case identified as members of George
I’s cabinet, Reldresal representing Townsend the
secretary of state who prepared dealing with the
fallen minister’s leniently.

Gulliver who has deserved the highest gratitude
from the Lilliputians, is impeached for capital
offences chiefly for making water within the
precincts of the burning royal palace Under – colour
of extinguishing the fire, and for traitorously

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refusing to reduce the empires of Blefuscu to a
province and put to death all the Big Endians. The
courts debate en how to dispose off Gulliver is
corrosive satire, savage and irenic. They decide to
blind Gulliver and to starve him to death.

Then there is a delightful side kick at all
government officials. Because Gulliver was suc h a n
attraction people were flecking into town from all
over the island, leaving farming and household duties
in a state of neglect. The emperor therefore issues
proclamation saying that anybody who had seen
Gulliver once must return home and must not again
presume to come within fifty yards of his house
without license from court, whereby adds Gulliver,
‘the secretaries of state get considerable fees.’

In this voyage swift also attacks the time

honoured target, the disproportionate aims for which

nations go to war. The article of impeachment, and

especially the alleged reasons for Gulliver’s crimes,

are so flimsy that swift is here hitting at the

processes of the law in Britain. In Lilliput a set

of puny insects, or animalcules in human shapes are

ridiculously engaged in a affairs of importance. In

Broadening the monsters of enormous size are

employed in trifles. In the fourth voyage, he gives

an account of the political state of the political

state of Europe.

Gullivers conversations with the king of
Brobdingnag are often quoted as example of Swift’s

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satiric force. In the first encounter with the king

that Gulliver reports, the king observes.

How contemptible a thing was human grander

which could be mimicked by such

diminutive Insects as I2,

At Brobdingnag Gulliver is part pet, part freak of
doll, and in each of these aspects his experiences
enable Swift to indulge in satirical exposure of
human pride and pretension. The King of Brodingbag
is horrified when Gulliver offers him a way to
complete dominion over his subjects by teaching him
to make gunpowder. The King is baffled by the
concept of political science as to how could the art
of government be reduced to a science? The King’s
comment makes us aware of our pettiness of the
disproportion of our recent of the shocking
difference between what we profess and what we are.
But Swift uses the good giants to strike an
unexpected blow at human vanity. Gulliver’s tiny
stature and comparative importance lend a particular
irony to his grandiose account of western
civilization. It is of course the ludicrous size of
his tiny visitor which prompts the king to comment on
the folly and pride of human beings.

Gulliver boasts to the king about thousand’s of
books in Europe written on politics and the art of
government. Again the king’s reaction is unexpected.
For him the art of government consists almost
entirely in common sense and reason, justice and
lenity, and speedy decisions in all legal cases.

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Thus in his Gulliver’s Travels Swift has
successfully exposed the vain pride vain pride and
absurd whims of monarchs, the stupidity of men with
titles, the intrigues, of courtiers, the corruption
and greed of politicians, the false glory of
conquers, the treachery and meanness of court
favorites and the corrupt and unscrupulous nature of
politicians.

Gulliver who seemed lovable and humane among the
Lilliputians, appears an ignominious and morally
insensitive being in contrast to the enlightened and
benevolent Brobdingnagians. Since Gulliver is ‘We’,
his shame, insufficiency, and ludicrousness are ours.
The giant king is high-minded, benevolent and, in
Swift’s sense of the work, rational i.e., he and his
people thing practically, not theoretically,
concretely, not metaphysically, simply, not
intricately. Brobdingnag is a Swiftian Utepia of
common good sense and morality, and Gulliver
conditioned by the corrupt society from which he
comes, appears, native, blind and insensitive to
moral values.

In the country of faints, the animal imagery is
more explicit; the giant is half afraid of Gulliver,
as of ‘a small diangerous animal’s like a weasel.
The first impression Gulliver makes is of an animal.
The tiny Gulliver, so self important about the great
affairs of his diminutive country is absurb to the
huge king; he is an insect.

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The Brobdingnagians, as Gulliver explains in his

epilogue, are the least corrupted of the Yahoo

species, and their ‘Wise maxims in morality and

government it would be our happiness to observe’.

But not all the Brobdingnagians are superior beings.

The treatment of Gulliver by his farmer captor is

pitiless and in human, he intends, without a qualm,

to work him to death much as contemporary society

treated Negro slaves. Gulliver’s portrait of the

king of Brobdingnag agrees in many essentials with

the character of temple. In politics the King of

Brobdingnag professed both to abominate and despise

all mystery, refinement and intrigue, either (of) a

prince or minister.

Though less vicious than the pigmies, the

Brobdingnagians possess a fair complement of human

weakness. Error abounds even among the least

corrupted of mankind.

The voyage to Laputa, gives us the most

elaborate ‘mechanical’ image of the state. Here the

actual functioning of the government depends on

managing the flying island and its lode stones. This

allows an ironical comparison to be made with the

political situation and oppressive centre of power in

London. The Lapouta – Balnibarbi situation, is the

impasse between England and Ireland, is seen as

allowing free scope for misapplied reason in social,

political and economic matters where bright ideas

solely motivated by self interests seem better than

the traditional values of good government

responsibility, duty, compassion and love, informed

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by intelligence. The flying island of Laputa seems
to be the English court.

The King and his court are devoted entirely to
two subjects, music and mathematics, the most
obstruct of sciences rather than as an art. Those
who held this view began to demand that the state
should be run by experts well versed in mathematics
and other sciences, rather than by cultured amatures,
Swift’s dislike of government by ‘experts’ is most
clearly demonstrated in Gullivers description of the
flying island of Laputa. Here the political
arithmeticians are completely in change, and they are
making as complete a mess of things. Gulliver’s
marration of affairs in Laputa and Balnibarbi is a
political satire on the whigs and the tories and on
Anglo- Irish relations. The whigs were regarded as
the champlions of professional government. and the
Tories as the up holders of the ancient constitution.
The first favoured the employment of experts in
government, the

second looked upon them as a virus introduced into
the body politic, which was never really healthy
unless cared for by honest country gentlemen. The
flying island can be a symbol for the English court
in which case Balinbarbi represents the whole of
Great Britain But laputa can stand for England and
lindalino for Ireland

There is also a personal element in the political

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satire. Swift had spent many vain weeks in 1708
trying to get the government to make a definite move
on the subject of extending queen Anne’s bountry to
Ireland . He never forged the frustrations which he
suffered from their perpetual procrastination and
their indifference to Irish affairs. His reception
from the whigs of Anne’s reign was surely in his
mind when he wrote of Gulliver’s (receptions from the
king of Luputa.

Gulliver praises the progress of the laputans in the
science of astronomy and describes the revelt of the
people of lindaline. They erected high towers, with
strong magnets at the top of each which effectively
neutralized the magnets of laputa and the king of the
latter was eventually forced to grant the request of
the lindalinians.

In the Academy of projectors in lagade Gulliver
visits the school of political projectors. There is a
doctor who relates physical well – being closely to
political judgements and administers the appropriate
medicines to every senator, who after arguing any
case, should give his vote ‘ directly contrary to
what he had argued, be cause if that were done, the
result would infallibly terminate in the good of the
public ‘ He even suggests that the senators should
be operated on and part of the brains of one should
be transferred to another since the mingling of
brains would induce moderation. Gulliver visits the
island of luggage, where he is required literally, to

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lick the dust before the king but is otherwise
hospitably received It is not only the English
political life of his time which he thus dissects,
the monarchy itself the paraphernalia that surrounds
it the courts and countries the debating assembles,
the struggles of parties, the wiles of the favorites
of both sexes everything upon which in fact, rests
the contemporary administration of Europe is
irremediably damaged by this corrosive satire. The
object of ridicule is the absurdity of human
government.

The flying island, in its devious and sensitive
oblique movements, suggests the relationship of king
and country. Laputa is ultimately dependent upon
Dalnibarbi, its motions only allowed by the magnetic
quality of the ‘kings’ Dominious. It is this quality
which has allowed the Laputan king to establish his
power but there is a reciprocal dependence, for if
either side pressed its power too far the result
would be general ruin. The king’s last resource, in
case of defiance from the populace of Balnibarbi, is
to let the flying island drop upon their heads. But
t h i s t hough it would certainly destroy both houses
and men, would at the same time damage the adamant of
Laputa itself.

Laputa signifies a condemnation of political,

scientific and moral irresponsibility, For England

the symptoms include the Royal society the Walpole

towns head fued and the personal vices of George As

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the decay of agriculture, industry, and trade In such
a scene to busy oneself with fantastic inquiries and
useless experiments appears criminal.

In the fourth voyage we get a picture of an anarchist
society, not governed by lawn the ordinary sense but
by the dictates of reason which are voluntarily
accepted by every one. Swift was a Tory anarchist,
despising authority while disbelieving in liberty,
and preserving the aristocratic out look while
focusing clearly that the existing aristocracy is
degenerate and contemptible.

In recent years critics have tended
increasingly, to find the Houynhms satire upon the
neoteric humanism of shaft burry or the Deists.

9.8 Gulliver’s Travels as a Satire on Humanity
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels may be seen as a

controlled display of man’s nature and his social
life. It presents Swift’s vision of the essential
contradictions of human nature, of the war between
rational control and animal drive, between just
judgement and pride, between ignorance and knowledge,
between true belief and illusion, between freedom and
tyranny.

The intention of the imaginary voyages was
almost always to satirize the existing European
order, and it did so by playing up the innocence,
manliness and high ethical standards of the untutored

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people whom the voyages claimed to have met. These
voyages tend alike to stress the goodness of
unspoiled primitive man. Swift makes use of animals
as his symbols in order, to make it quite plain that
pure rationality is not available to man. His irony
is directed against all the common failings of
mankind. All human institutions from the family to
the state are the targets of his irony.

In Lilliput, Gulliver’s body is grosser than

he can imagine and the Lilliputians seem more

delicate than in fact they are. Gulliver’s ineptness

among the Lilliputians like his insignificance among

the Brobdingnagians is not a weakness which can be

attributed to any identifiable group or person; it is

the result of his normal, his universal human

qualities, in large part simply of his ordinary

human size. The moral frailties he displays-

inflexibility and vanity, for example are generic

human weaknesses. The Lilliputian stature is

employed to augment the ludicrous effect of their

complacency, arrogance and short sightedness, all of

which are displayed as human failings.

Gulliver discovers in the Lilliputians admirable
qualities absent from the English, For example their
treatment of Children, which consists of an odd
mixtures of rational and common sense and a Swiftian
mistrust amounting to dislike of human sentiments.
Swift’s ideas regarding the education of children are
outlined in his description of the educational

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systems of the Lilliputians and the Houyhnms. At
both places parents are not entrusted with the
education of their own children. As infants they are
sent to nurseries where they are taught by expert
professors. The aim of education in both places is
not to make the students merely literate but to
develop in them noble qualities of character.

Gulliver treats the Lilliputians kindly, but
when he leaves he reveals how readily he still thinks
of them, because they are smaller than the humans he
is used to-as not so different from animals. As he
is taking the tiny cattle home, ‘to propagate the
bread’, so he would have taken’ a dozen of the
natives, ‘without considering them as individual
humans, who might be distressed at being so treated.

The voyage to Brobdingnag contains such sarcasm
on the structure of the human body, as too plainly
show us, that the author was unwilling to lose any
opportunity of debasing and ridiculing his own
species. Swift’s purpose is to make an assault on
human pride, particularly on the beauty of the female
form. Swift makes us share Gulliver’s disgust at the
cancerous breasts and lousy bodies of the beggars; at
the blotched color, the huge pores, the coarse hairs.
Swift shows that our beauty is only apparent, our
disportion is real. Swift’s satire on women in
general is very sharp. Women in his view are
the embodiment of physical,
intellectual and moral waste under a fair exterior.

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He regarded women as loathsome creatures and marriage
as a calamity for man.

Voyage to Laputa brings out Swift’s satire on

the abuse of learning. The Laputans neglect

practical matters to indulge in theory. Their houses

are illbuilt without even one right angle in any

apartment, and this defect arises from the contempt

they bear to practical geometry, which they despise

as vulgur. From Laputa Gulliver goes to Balnibarbi

and its capital Lagage, and in the description of the

Academy of projectors in Lagado, Swift satirizes

inventors and promoters of schemes for improving

everything. A new method of teaching is as follows:

The preparation and demonstration were
fairly written

on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a
caphalick

_incture. This the student was to swallow
upon a

fasting stomach, and for three days
following eat

nothing but bread and water. As the water
digested,

the tincture mounted to his brain, bearing
the

proposition along with it.

Laputans with their absorption is music, mathematics,
and astronomy, represent specifically the members of

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the Royal Society but more generally all those who
believe that, by turning away from the impressions of
the senses and the ordinary concerns of human nature
they can ignore sublunary confusion and reach eternal
truth. The sources for nearly all the theories of the
works at the academy of Lagade came from Swift’s
contemporary scientists and particularly in the
philosophical transactions of the Royal Society.

The account of the miscalculations of Laputan
tailers in making-Gulliver’s clothes is a satire on
Newton who makes a mistake in his calculations of the
distance of the sun.

The Laputans c a l c u l a t e that after a certain
number of years the sun would lose its heat and they
are sure that it would be the end of the world. Such
f e a r s a r e not original to the Laputans. Many
scientists of that age have pandered over the
possibility of such calamities. It is the influence
of Newton which makes people fear that their planet
might one day fall into the sun.

Among the professors of Lagade is a man born
blind who has several apprentices in his own
condition; and who could distinguish colors by
feeling and smellings. Swift is here attacking Robert
Boyle’s Experiments and observations upon colours.
Another projector whom Gulliver saw it work was
trying to calcineice into gun powder. This is an
attack on Boyle’s Experiments and observations upon

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cold in which he had suggested this idea.

One experiments at the Academy want to change
human excretion into original food. There is also an
architect who wanted to construct houses by beginning
at the roof and then coming down to the foundation.
At the school of languages, one of the experiments is
to simplify the language by retaining only
monosyllabic words and nouns.

Their efforts are summed up by an illustrious

member who has been given the title of the ‘The

Universal Artist’ and who has been for the

thirty years directing his followers in various

ways of converting things into their opposites, thus

turning the useful, into the unusable and the vital

into the atrophied. Air is made tangible and marble

left. land is sown with chaff and naked sheep are

bred and perhaps as an epitome of the achievement of

the Academy of the heeves of a living hoarse are

being petrified.

From Lagade Gulliver makes his way to
Gulubbddubdrib, where again he is in a world of no
meaning, of delusion and death, darker and more
shadowy than Laputa. The final mockery of the pursuit
of progress comes when Gulliver visits luggage and
meets the immortal struid-bruggs. These, so far from
leading the idyllic life he imagined would be the lot
of a human freed from the fear of death, were the
most miserable of beings. Although they have eternal

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life they do not have eternal youth, so that physical
and mental decay continue until ‘they acquired an
additional ghastliness in proportion to their number
of years, which is not be described’.

It has been fully demonstrated that in his
satire of scientists and projectors swift made use of
the knowledge of actual experiments which were being
undertaken by members of the Royal Society, possibly
drawn to his attention by his friend Dr. Arbuthnet.
Swift was not opposed to all forms of progress. What
he opposes is what he regards as artificial, as
distinct from natural progress. The political
arithmeticians appear ludicrously absentminded and
impractical when Gulliver tells of the Flappers who
attend them to keep their minds on the immediate
subject under discussion and of the ill-fitting suits
of clothes produced by their refined method of
measuring. Gulliver sees for himself the effects of
their
schemes when he looks around Balnibarbi. There they
have inspired projects designed to work economic
miracles. The projects are not brought to perfection
and the whole country lay miserably waste, the houses
in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By
contrast the estates of Gulliver’s friend lord Munodi
who used old fashioned methods were flowing with milk
and honey. Balnibarbi is badly cultivated, its people
in misery and want.

The Luptans, though they are in human shape, are

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more obviously allegorical creatures than any in
Gulliver’s Travels. Their effect is made through at
the same time it tends to destroy itself. The
Houyhnhnms are a race of noble horses who live
according to the laws of reason and nature. Serving
them and despised by them are the beastly Yahoos, a
degenerate species of man. Gulliver himself
recognizes how detestable the yahoos are before he
realises to his ‘horror and astonishment’, that these
‘abominable animals’ had perfect human figures.
Gulliver is appalled by the bestiality of the yahoos,
recoiling from them as creatures for whom, he had
natural antipathy. Yet it is demonstrated that the
yahoos are men, although completely degenerate men.

The life of reason asked by the Houyhnmnms is
curiously dead. George orwell has argued that the
reason which governs them is really a desire for
death. He says that they are exempt from love,
friendship, curiosity fear and sorrow except in their
feeling of anger and hatred towards the Yahoos, who
occupy rather the same place in their community as
the Jews in Nazi Germany. Gulliver concludes the
voyage by describing his difficulty in reconciling
himself to life among yahoos in England after his
experience with the noble Houyhnhnm race, and he ends
with a final bread side against human pride.

In this voyage Gulliver discovers the shocking
recognition that man, in his brute nakedness, is
indeed a Yahoo, his ugliness vainly disguised by

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civilized artifice, his animal powers merely vitiated
by refinements which are actually corruptions. The
second discovery emerges largely in Gullivers
dialogues with the Houyhnhnm master, it is simply
that those systems which we regards the hall marks of
civilization law military science, government,
breeding, medicine, and the best represent the
institutionalizing, the elaboration of our animal
indications toward hatred, avarice and sensuality.
Gulliver’s own account of western society produces a
third discovery, unequivocally advanced by the
Houyhnhnm master himself who defines mankind as:

.....a sort of animals to whose share, by
what

accident he could not conjecture some small
pittance of reason had fallen, where of we

made no
other use than by its assistance to

aggravate
our natural corruptions, and to acquire new
ones which nature had not given us.

The superiority of the Houhynhnms is discovered
by Gulliver as proof of the fact that a horse-even a
horse could, if endowed with that genuine reason on
which man falsely prides himself, achieve a serene,
beign and cleanly prosperity which is the opposite,
in every important respect to the present state of
civilized man. The traditional view was that the
Yahoos represent man as he actually is, self-seeking,
sensual and depraved while the Houyhnhnm symbolize

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what men ought to be, altruistic rational and
cultured.

Yahoos have a strong disposition to nasty ness
and dirt. Their eating habits are equally filthy.
Their undistinguishing appetite to devour every thing
that came in their way, whether herbs, roots,
berries, corrupted flesh of animals or all mingled
together rendered them odious. Excrement to the
yahoos is no mere waste product but a magic
instrument for self expression and aggression. In the
Yahoo system of social indentation their leader had
usually a favorite as like himself as he could get,
whose employment was to lick his master’s feet and
posteriors, and drive the female Yahoos to his
kennel. As a constrast to the Yahoos, the horses do
not shirk, do not lie, do no evil, and so the
Houyhnhnms are industrious, truthful and virtuous.
They have no word in their language to express
anything that is evil, except what they borrow from
the deformities or ill qualities of the Yahoos.

Swift is attacking the Yahoo in each of the
reader The good qualities are given the non-human
form of the horse, and the bad qualities the nearly
human form of the Yahoo. The etymology of the word
Houyhnhnm means ‘horse’ but also the ‘perfection of
nature’. Swift was trying to create a sort of utopia
in his account of the life if ‘reason’ led by
Houynhnhnms. It was a singularly dull and inhuman
utopia. These noble horses never experience love or
hope, curiosity or passions they take pleasure in sex

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and feel no more affection for their own off spring
strictly limited to two per ‘family’ than for other
foals. The only reference to music in their lives is
the rather comic idea of a song composed in honour of
the victors in their running race. They apparently
have no conception of beauty, other than the
comeliness of their chosen, mates, and even their
poetry is apparently restricted to ‘exalted motions
of friendship and benevolence and the praise of
successful athletes. It is difficult to resist the
conclusion that Swift was more concerned to satirize
human nature in the Yahoos than to arouse our respect
and admiration for the Houyhnhnms.

Swift presents a number of descriptions of

Yahoo behaviour, provokingly reminiscent of human

behaviour but cruder; more contemptible in one sense,

and yet more harmless. The pictures of the Yahoo

treatment of a fallen favourite and a Yahoo female

sexually excited can be cited as an example. It is

the human equivalent that we are continually

confronted with in these descriptions. Swift’s

intensity and disgust are now here more striking than

here when the Houyhnhnms compare. Gulliver with the

Yahoo at first objects acknowledging ‘some

resemblance’, but insists that he cannot account for

their ‘degenerate and brutal nature’. The Houyhnhnms

have none of this however, deciding that if Gulliver

does differ he differs for the worse. The

contemptuous view of mankind formed by the Houyhnhnms

is the main satiric charge.

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Although the Houynhnhnms embody traits which
Swift admired they do not represent his moral ideal
for mankind. The Houyhnhnms combine deistic and
stoic views of human nature – views against which as
a devout Anglican, he fought. Swift wished men to be
as a rational as possible; he believed that religion
helps them to become so, and that reason leads them
towards revelation. But the deistic efforts to build
a rational system of morals outside revelation, he
regarded as evil and absurb, Gulliver, occupying a
position between the two, part beast, part reason, is
Swift’s allegorical picture of the dual nature of
man.

Arthur.E. Case thinks that Gulliver’s Travels is

a politico – sociological treatise much of which is

covered in the medium of satire. The legend of Swift

as a savage, mad, embittered misanthrope largely

rests upon the reading of the last voyage of

Gulliver. His hatred was directed against

abstract man, against men

existing and acting within semi-human or dehumanized

racial or professional groups. Apparently he felt

that when men submerge their individual judgement and

moral beings in such groups they necessarily further,

corrupt their already corrupted natures. Swift’s

satire rises from philanthropy and not misanthropy.

It is strange that in spite of the universal
condemnation of mankind, Gulliver Travels remains a

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popular work. That is because nobody is hurt when
every body is condemned.

Swift is regarded as one of the greatest masters
of satire in English literature. In Gulliver’s
Travels Swift’s aim is to expose all the foibles,
petty aims and ambitions of men and to show how these
lie at the root of all man’s struggles. Swift wanted
to entertain and instruct his readers, and to make
them feel the vanity of human grandeur. Gulliver’s
Travels is, in its totality, a satiric construction
and the attractive fiction which supports the entire
work is merely the mask or vehicle for sustained
satiric assault. The surface of the book is comic but
at its centre is tragedy, transformed through style
and to into icy irony.

Gulliver’s Travels resembles John Bunyan’s
allegory Pilgrims Procress in its popularity and
human interest. Bunyan used fiction for the practical
purpose of converting the ungodly. Swift wrote to
express his contempt and abhorrence for great mass of
human kind.

The outstanding characteristic of swift style is
its clarity. This is the result of the simplicity of
his language. His page is a model of plainness. Swift
always hides his aim of attacking a vice behind a
voile of superfluous playfulness. He possessed
piercing insight into human nature. Swift is a great
master of irony. The shock technique of irony has
been used in Gulliver’s Travels. His irony is deadly
and bitter and yet not lacking sincerity. We are

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forced to gaze into the stupid, evil brutal heart of
humanity, and when we do, the laughter that swift has
evoked is abruptly silenced.

The effectiveness of Swift’s satire is derived
from his mastery of the technique of grim irony,
unrolled in pages of closely knit prose without
padding or waste of words. To discover the virtues of
English prose, a young writer may still, following
the advice of Dr.Johnson, give his days and nights to
the study of the volumes of Addison, but he will do
better to substitute the paragraphs of Swift.

Swift was skilled in the use of fable and
dramatic technique. The use of fiction as sugar
coating for a pill of bitter philosophy is one of his
greatest distinctions. Secondly to this use of
fiction must be added Swift’s wit and humour also an
ingredient indispensable to good satire every where.

As a convinced Tory, Swift opposes p o p u l a r
radicalism in politics, philosophy and religion when
he satirizes existing government, he attackes not the
theory but the abuse of authority. When he castigates
bishops and prime ministers it is because they are
unintelligent or corrupt. More difficult for our
generation to accept is Swift’s open contempt for
‘Free thinkers’ , but here, as elsewhere he

is ahead of, not behind, his times, and may prove to
be the prophet of the twenty first century. If Swift

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has been admired and feared more than he has been
loved, it is partly because he does not write the
language of heart, unromantic by temperament but it
should be recalled that his age distrusted sentiment
and disdained romance. In his refusal to reduce human
suffering to statistics, in his concern for the
starving in Ireland, in his horror of the effects of
war, Swift writes with a compassion which speaks
across the centuries.

In the voyage to Lilliput, Swift satirizes the
pettiness of political intrigues. The arts by which
the officers of the government keep their places,
such as cutting capers on a tight rope for the
entertainment of the emperor, remind us of the
quality of statesmanship in Swift’s day. The dispute
over the question, at which end an egg should be
broken, which plunged Lilliput into Civil war is a
comment on the seriousness of party divisions in the
greater world. Politics of England is ridiculed
mainly in the voyage to Brobdingnag especially
through the comments of the Giant King. Political
satire becomes very bitter when we come to the flying
island. Gulliver’s narration of affairs in laputa and
Balnibarbi is a political satire on the whigs and the
Tories and on Angle Irish relations. The voyage to
Laputa is a scientific parody and burlesque of the
experiments of contemporary scientists and schemes of
other projectors. The entire myth of a voyage to the
Houyhnhnml and is an instrument of one who in hatred
of what he saw about him set out to vex the world.

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Hazlitt contends that there is nothing

misanthropical in Swift, whose main purpose in

Gulliver’s Travels is to strip empty pride and

grandeur of the imposing air which external

circumstances throw around then, Swift unlike pope

restricts himself to general rather than personal

attacks. His dissection of humanity shows a powerful

mind relentlessly probing into the weaknesses and

hypocrisy of mankind.

Addison says that Swift is the greatest genius
of his age. Saints b u r y has praised Swift for his
talents. Sir Walter Scott, who edited Swift’s work
thought Swift was irritability and savage indignation
all compact, combined with an extraordinary but
perverse genius. Scott feels that we are compelled
to admire the force of his talents, even when he is
employed in exposing the worst part of our nature.

Gulliver’s Travels, despite common impressions
to the contrary, presents in every voyage a balanced
picture of human nature and the presence of goodness
and good sense, as well as folly and vice in each
country visited. What happens to Gulliver is a
warning and a psychological preparation for the
readers. Swift holds up before us a glass in an
eighteenth century frame; but if we will we can see
in it our twentieth century faces too.

Gulliver’s Travels is the most mature, the most

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pondered of all Swift’s works, and the most complex,

though it has in many ways a deceptive air

of

simplicity. Complex as the book is stuffed with

personal, political and philosophic criticism and

dicta, crammed with personal and literary allusions,

the story is unified, as it is made vital by the

tremendous urgency of the desire to humble human

pride.

Gulliver’s Travels is not a reviling of man’s
indignity, but a passionate plea for the dignity of
man, in spite of his loathsome body, his absurd mind,
his ridiculous political pretensions, and his
arrogant ignorance. The only hope for salvation,
Swift tells us, is to rid ourselves of our cruel
illusions, to be aware of and to accept the hells
beneath, so that we may not subside into them.

9.9 Style and Technique of Gulliver’s Travels

Swift's use of humour and irony are sometimes as bitter as

gall. His works are challenge to an easy, complacent optimism, and as

an ironist, he is superior to any other writer of the age except

Fielding. His irony, savage and bitter, glows with consuming

intensity of feeling. His gravest dialect is enlivened by apt

similes and strong metaphors;1 but he is often outrageously

coarse, and in the ludicrous degradation of his victims he makes

on affection of kindliness.

Often the satire is violent and sometimes it is coarse and
repulsive perhaps the result of his own physical disabilities and his
keen disappointment at his failure to gain the preferment which he
left himself to have merited. The pettiness, the stupidity, and the
injustice, which he saw so cleverly, roused his satirical humour and
his venom.

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In all the four bo o k s o f Gulliver's Travels, the vigorous
spirit of satire is seen.

In the first book dealing with the Lilliputians, the satire
obviously consists in showing human motives at work on a 'small
scale, and in suggesting, by the likeness of the Lilliputians to
ourselves, the littleness of human affairs, and the pettiness of
political intrigues. The dispute over the question at which end an
egg should properly be broken, which plunged Lilliput into the civil
war is a comment on the seriousness of party divisions in the greater
world.

Gulliver's next voyage to Brobdinginag brings him to a people
as large in comparison with man as the Lilliputians are small. Here
man is magnified into a giant, though in the earlier work he is
reduced to a manikin. The third voyage to Laputa and other curious
places embodies Swift's contempt for pedantry and for useless
'scientific' experiment. And, lastly in the fourth voyage there is an
indictment of man's tortuous and sly reasoning as compared to the
noble inhabitants of Houyhnhnmland, who within the shapes of horses
embody 'perfection of Nature.'

The beastly Yahoos represent Swift's conception of man living
in a degenerate state of nature. The evil instincts of 'civilized'
man are here again bitterly portrayed. In short, the voyage of
Lilliput and Brobding satirised the politics and manner of England
and Europe; that to Laputa mocked the philosophers; and the last, to
the country of the Houyhn-hnras, lacerated and defiled the whole body
of humanity. Swift's pessimism that had been gnawing at his own heart
finds its expression in this terrible attack on his fellow men. The
entire work is an elaboration of the attitude expressed by him to
Pope, "I heartily hate and detest that animal called man."

Swift's method in all these works is to strike boldly with
sarcasm and irony. He hates wrangling and argument, and seldom
bothers to use the weapons of logical controversy. He attempts, with
his almost unparalleled fund of ingenuity and caustic wit, to laugh
his opponents off the stage. In his writings there is a disconcerting
intermingling of earnestness and play. His unique position, his
singularity and peculiar impressivenes among English writers is due
to his thorough pessimism and the contribution he made to the deve-
lopment of English prose style as a writer of English prose his
importance is historical.

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Swift's style is marked for its clarity, precision and
conciseas Herbert remarks, "However widely his vision might extend,
however deep his insight, his mode of expression remained simple
dignity and clearly comprehensible. Directness and simplicity,
economy of words, his ironic ingenuity and practical downright ness
are the virtues by which he writes. He is concerned with the full and
effective expression of his deep, passionate convictions in all their
sincerity in a language simple, unvarnished, precise and transparent
which at once reveals the meaning below its surface.

Clarity he valued most." In the words of Compton-Rickett,
"Like other great stylists of the time, Pope and Addison, he achieves
a triumphant clarity ; but unlike Pope he is never epigrammatic ;
unlike Addison he had little plasticity of form He is plainly and
forcefully clear with a greater strength than theirs ; all the more
striking and urgent for his lack of ornament and concentrated
passion." He never used redundant words.

Swift employed figures of speech and epigrammatic expressions
very rarely indeed. Dr. Johnson said, "The rogue nev e r h a z a r d s a
metaphor. His delight was in simplicity." That he has in his works no
metaphor, as has been said, is not true, but his few metaphors, seem
to be conceived rather by necessity than by choice. He tried to avoid
the figurative language and most of the rhetoric devices such as
balance, rhythm and antithesis. In fact, Swift's style is of one who
followed 'the plain path of Nature and Reason'. He is an inimitable
master of forceful narrative prose.

Swift made no use of Latin wordsy He strongly advis e d h i s
clergymen against the use of words like ubiquety, omniscience and
idiosyncrasy. These latin words create obscurity and Swift h e i s
dead set against obscurity in style. Likewise he was strongly opposed
to the stylistic device of contracting or abbreviating, words like
incog. fpj incognists, phizz. for physiognamy, pozz. for positive.

As the most original writer of his time, Swift proves to be
one of the greatest masters of English prose. Directness, vigour, and
simplicity mark his every page. Among writers of his age he stands
almost alone in his domain of literary effects. Keeping his object
steadily before him he drives straight to the end, with a convincing
power that has new surpassed in English language. Herbert rightly
remarks, “The prose style of Swift is unique. It is an instrument of
clear, animated, animating and effective thought. English prose has

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perhaps attained here and there a noble profundity, and here and
t h e r e a subtler complexity ; but never has maintained such a
constant level of inspired expression."

The prose style of Swift has been admired by many a critics

Albert says that in Gulliver's Travels the style of Swift it is

clean, powerful and as clear as summer noon day. Moddy and Lovett

are of the view that directness and simplicity are the hall marks of

his writing. Absolute, unmitigated prose he wrote, the quintessence

of prose. In the words of John Dennis “If we regard the writer's

end, it must be admitted that his language is admirably fitted for

that end. Swift's style wants the 'sweetness and lacks also the

elevation which inspires, and the persuasiveness that convinces

while it claims. No style, perhaps, is better fitted to exhibit scorn

and contempt; It is a radically a low and homely style, without

grace and without affection, and chiefly remarkable for a great

choice and profusion of common words and expressions”.

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9.10 Let us Sum Up

Gulliver's Travels "is one of the supreme comic masterpieces of the
world, As a comedy it is not only Swift's masterpiece but one of the
masterpieces of all time. The unit of the book lies in its satirical
tone.

9.11 Lesson – End Activities

1. Consider Gulliver’s Travels as a Satire on

Humanity

2. Write an Essay on the element of satire in

Gulliver’s Travels

3. Comment on the style and technique of Gulliver’s

Travels

9.12 References

Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels. London & New York

: J.M.Bent & Sons, Ltd & E.P.Dutten & Co., Inc,

1906, rpt., 1977.

Swift, Jonathan, Satires and Personal Writings. ed.,

Willian Affred Eddy. London : Oxford University.

Baugh, Albert, C.Literary History of England. London :
Rouledge & Kegan Ltd., 1967.

Bridgewater, William and Kurtz, Seymour. The Columbia

Encyclopaedia. New York and London : Columbia

University Press, 1935.

Dobree, Bonamy, English Literature in the Early
Eighteenth Century. London : Oxford University
Press, 1959.

Daiches, David, A Critical History of English
Literature V.3. England: Martin Secker & Warburg
Ltd., 1960

Davis, Herbert, Jonathan Swift : Essays on his satire
and other studies : The Satire of Jonathan Swift.
New York : Oxford University Press, 1964.

Dyson, A.E. The Crazy Fabric : Essays in Irony. London

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Macmillan and co., Ltd., 1965.

Ehrenpreis, Irvin. Swift the man, his works and the

age Vol I & II. Great Britain : The Broad water

Press Ltd., 1967.

Ford, Boris. A guide to English Literature. Vol IV.
Great Britain : penguin Books Ltd., 1957 rpt.,
1965.

Jeffares, A. Norman. Swift : Modern Judgements. Great
Britain : Western Printing Services Ltd., Bristol,
1968.

Mathur. S.S.Swift : Gulliver’s Travels. Agra : The
Premier Press, Lakshmi Narain Agarwal, 1980.

Rosenheim, Edward. W.Swift and the satirist’s art.

Chigaco : The University of Chicago Press, 1963,

rpt., 1967.

Ross, Angus. Swift : Gulliver’s Travels. London :
Edward Arnold, 1968.

Speck. W.A. Literature in perspective : Swift :
Gulliver’s Travels. Montague House, Russel Square,
London, W.C.I. Evans Brothers Ltd., 1969.

Tuveson, Ernest. Twentieth century views on Swift :
United States of America : Prentice – Hall Inc., 1964.

Williams, Kathleen. Profites in Literature : Jonathan

Swift. Great Britain : Northumberland Press Ltd.,

1968.

Williams, Kathleen. Swift : the critical Heritage.

London : Rouledge and kegan Paul Ltd., 1970.

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Unit – V

LESSON 10
PHILIP SIDNEY
APOLOGY FOR POETRY

Contents
10.0 Aims and Objectives
10.1 Introduction
10.2 An Outline of Sidney’s Apologie for poetry
10.3 Introduction to Apology
10.4 Sidney’s reply to the charges against Poetry
10.5 The Nature and Function of poetry:
10.6 Let us Sum Up
10.7 Lesson – End Activities:
10.8 References

10.0 Aims and Objectives
This lesson is devoted for making you understand

the works of Philip Sidney and how he expressed his
own intelligence, and intellectual milieu.
10.1 Introduction

T h e A p o l o g y is not epoch-making, but it is
epoch – marking. Of course Sidney was unaware of
what vernacular English Poets were to achieve within

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the next generation or so, and yet what he intends is
triumphantly authenticated by their achievement.

10.2 An Outline of Sidney’s Apologie for poetry

EXORDIUM
Employs a recognised method of indirect approach to the
case and seeks to capture the goodwill of the audience by
humorous anecdote, mock expostulation, and modesty
formulas. The anecdote adumbrates the concern of the
Apology with the relation between the theory and practice
of an art.

NARRATION
Relates the facts which give dignity to poetry.Brief
transitional argument to lower the personal creditof the
opponents of poetry Facts indicating worth of poetry(a)
bits superior antiquity the universality of poetry
its names and etymology title of vates title of '
maker.

III PROPOSITION
That poetry is to be commended and approved for what it
essentially is — Imitation.This is the central issue of
the controversy and sums up what is about to be discussed
step by step.

IV DIVISION
Shows the way in which the facts averred in the NARRATION are
going to be systematically interpreted to prove the
PROPOSITION.
Poetry classified according to
(a) its subject matter or fable (i) religious themes
(ii) philosophical themes (iii) strictly imitative
themes its form DIVISION ends with ENUMERATION.

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CONFIRMATION
V CONFIRMATION or PROOF

by examining the ' works '—the nature and effects of
poetic imitation
(i) the essential function of human arts
(ii) claims of philosophy to be the supreme discipline
(iii) claims of history
(iv) Comparison of poetry with other disciplines
(v) examples showing value of poetic imitation

(vi) conclusion
by examining the ' parts ' - character and effects of the
different kinds of poetry
SUMMARY of the whole argument up to this point leading to
the conclusion that poetry is the worthiest of all
disciplines.
VI REFUTATION
Deals with the specific charges against poetry which
the prosecution is assumed to have made.
(a) personally discrediting attack on those who defame
poetry
(b) objections against poetic form answered
(c) objections against poetic material listed
(i) fallacy of argument that poetry is unprofitable
exposed
(ii) assertion that the poet is a liar rebutted

(iii) assertion that poetry is the nurse of abuse re-
butted

(iv) Plato's condemnation of poets answered

SUMMARY of favourable points from REFUTATION which by leading to
the conclusion that poetry should be the more honoured turns
the REFUTATION into a corroboration of the PROOF.

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Digression
Indicates the ways in which contemporary English writers
disgrace the ideal of poetry set out in the rest of the
Apology, and how they should amend. The DIGRESSION has the
structure of an independent oration.

NARRATION giving an account of situation
(i) great men in the past honoured poetry
(ii) even in England poetry was once honoured
(iii) poetry now despised and produced by base writers
ii PROPOSITION that poets must seek to know what to do and
how to do it, if poetry is to be esteemed properly
in DIVISION indicating the need for art, imitation, and
exercise, followed by ENUMERATION of matters to be
discussed
iv CONFIRMATION by consideration of

(a) subject-matter or fable
(b) (i) deficiencies in past practice

(ii) defects in drama
in disregard of unities lapses in decorum
(iii) defects in the other kinds (6) words or expression
(i) verbal affectations

(ii) dangers of exaggerated Ciceronianism
(iii) vice of Euphuism (iv) general failure to make
proper use of language of
art (c) Conclusion to treatment of defects
(d) Commendation of the English language
for its expressiveness for its metrical possibilities
v CONCLUSION of DIGRESSION leading into

VII PERORATION of the whole

10.3 Introduction to Apology

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Sidney opens his defense of poetry by referring
to John Pietro Pugliano who as horseman praised the
horse and horsemanship so profusely that a hearer
would wish to become a horse or a horseman. When
Stephen Gosson dedicated his puritanic attack on
poetry to Sidney, and hence Sidney had to make his
reply.

Philip Sidney wrote his Apology for Poetry in
reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse. Stephen
Gosson denounced the art of poetry and condemned
poets as the ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwelth”. The
earliest works of Greece, Rome, Italy, England and
other countries of the world prove the antiquity and
universality of poetry. The earliest works, even,
philosophical works of various nations, have been
written either in verse or in a poetical style.

Even the historians used the poetical art in
designing their historical writings.

Poetry has the power to popularize the abstract
principles and thorny arguments of philosophy as well
as the imperfect and unethical matters of history.

The Roman word ‘Vates’ means a prophet and it
is used to denote a poet endowed with prophetic
power. The oracles of Delphos and Sibylla’s
Prophecies were delivered in verse.

The association of poetry with the divine power
clearly reveals its highest value. David’s Psalms are
written in verse. Poetry is closely connected with
the Church and God, its source of inspiration and

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enlightenment. The meaning of the Greek word potein
is ‘to make’; it denotes the creative power of the
poet in building up an ideal world by making virtue
triumphant and vice powerless. All arts and sciences
imitate the imperfect visible nature without any
modification. But Poetry differs from them in its
treatment of nature.

The Poet has unlimited freedom to imitate
nature as well as penetrate behind appearance and
discern the hidden ultimate reality. He presents
heroes as demigods, Cyclops, chimeras and funnies in
his works. He transforms the brazen world of Nature
in to a golden world of poetic reality.

When the real world of God is made imperfect by
man’s abuse of his free will, the poet perfects it by
introducing ideal heroes as well as imperfect
villains and by making virtue triumph over vice in
all his works. Sidney sets forth the nature of poetry
by means of his references to classical times.

Sidney cities Aristotle’s definitions of poetry
to bring out the dignity and utility of poetry.
Poetry represents the real world in all respects and
offers delightful instruction to its readers. There
are three kinds of poetry described which are
religious poetry, philosophical poetry and tree-
poetry. The first kind, that of religious poetry is
illustrated by David’s Psalms, Solomon’s Song of
songs the Hymns of Moses and Deborah.

Philosophical poetry, is found in the moral
works of Tyrtaeus, and Cato. ‘True’ poetry differs

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