Gulliver's Travels. Edited with an Introd. by Ernest Bernbaum
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0") CO I GULLIVER'S TRAVELS BY JONATHAN SWIFT V EDITED. WITH AN INTRODUCTION. BY ERNEST BERNBAUM PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. PR C-,1 700407 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS PA0B INTRODUCTION v THE PUBLISHER TO THE READER 3 A LETTER FROM CAPTAIN GULLIVER TO HIS COUSIN SYMPSON 5 TRAVELS PART I. A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT 11 PART II. A VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG 82 PART III. A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB, AND JAPAN .... 165 PART IV. A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUY- HNHNMS 226 INTRODUCTION THE SIGNIFICANCE OF " GULLIVER'S TRAVELS " " " To be great is to be misunderstood holds true of some books as of some men. The severest critics have not denied the greatness of Gulliver's Travels; but even thoseLIU who have highly praised its narrative art have, think, often misinterpreted its purpose and meaning. " e are told that it exhibits a morbid effort to /w " degrade mankind below the level of brutes," that only a cynic or misanthrope would find convincing in Swift's " anything views/' and that it is a classic of pessimism^ Sir Walter Scott, who acknowledged that Swift "jwas in active life a steady patriot,ji warm friend, and a bounti- ful patron," and that " regretfully paradoxically opined in his writings he exhibited a tone of the most bitter misanthropy." These censures seem to me half-truths. " They are misleading. such terms as cyni- " They employ" " cal," misanthropic," and pessimistic without that which is the f./st of sound criticism. exactitude requisite" " If Gulliver's Travel were misanthropic," cynical," " and pessimistic," in the true sense of those words, it should display, without reservation, hatred of mankind, incredulity of human goodness, and a conviction that all things in the universe tend to evil. / This is an attitude towards life which may be maintained, which has, indeed, been fostered by poets and philosophers of eminence, by Lucretius, by Hobbes, by Schopenhauer. No better introduction to Gulliver's Travels can be had than to read characteristic passages from such authors, in order to discriminate between what is genuinely the literature of pessimism and what is falsely so called. Open Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and ponder these utterances: vi INTRODUCTION " Life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards be- tween pain and ennui. That has expressed itself very oddly in this way: after man had transferred all pains and torments to hell, there remained nothing left for heaven but ennui. Man is the most necessitous of beings; ... he is a con- cretion of a thousand necessities. With these he stands upon the earth, left to himself, uncertain about everything except his own need and misery. Consequently the care for the maintenance of his existence under exacting demands, renewed every day, occupies as a rule, the whole of human life. To this is directly related his second need, that of the propagation of the species. With cautious steps and anxious glances he pursues his path, for a thousand accidents and a thousand enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went while yet a savage, thus he goes in civilized life; there is for him no security. Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis Degitur hoc aevi, quodcumque est! (Lucretius; II, 15). The life of the great majority is only a constant struggle for this existence itself, with the certainty of losing it at last. " The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and maintains them in motion. But when existence is assured, they know not what to do with it; thus the second thing which moves them is the effort to get free from the burden of existence, to make it cease to be felt, 'to kill time,' i.e., to escape from ennui. " Ennui is by no means an evil to be lightly esteemed; in the end it depicts on the countenance real despair. It makes beings who love each other as little as men do, seek each other eagerly, and thus becomes the source of social intercourse. In middle-class is the and life, ennui represented by Sunday; want, by the six week days. Thus between desiring and attain- ing, all human life flows on. The desire is, in its nature, pain; the attainment soon begets satiety." That is a message of pessimism. Or turn to the most poetical expression of pessimism in English literature, to James Thomson's City of Dread- ful Night: Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be My miserable self than He, than He Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace. The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou From whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin ! abhorred, Malignant and implacable! I vow INTRODUCTION vii That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled, For all the temples to Thy glory built, Would I assume the ignominious guilt Of having made such men in such a world. And some are great in rank and wealth and power, And some renowned for genius and for worth; And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth Of body, heart, and soul, and leave to others All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers, The saddest and the weariest men on earth. My heart is sick with anguish for your bale ! Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail And perish in your perishing unblest. And I have searched the heights and depths, the scope Of all our universe, with desperate hope To find some solace for your wild unrest. And now at last authentic word I bring, Witnessed by every dead and living thing; Good tidings of great joy for you, for aS: There is no God; no Fiend with names divine Made us and tortures us; if we must pine, It is to satiate no Being's gall. This little life is all we must endure, The grave's most holy peace is ever sure, We fall asleep and never wake again; Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh In earth, air, water, plants, and other men. I find no hint throughout the Universe Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse; I find alone Necessity Supreme; With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark, Unlighted ever by the faintest spark For us, the flitting shadows of a dream. viii INTRODUCTION Speak not of comfort, where no comfort is; Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss: Hush and be mute, envisaging despair. That, again, is a message of pessimism: mankind is vile miserable there is the Absolute is un- and ; no God ; only fathomable Necessity; all hope of virtue and happiness is delusion. It is not from this school of thought that Gulliver's Travels issued. /Three interpretations of life compete for the approval of mankind. One is materialism, doubting the reality of anything supernatural, and regarding man as essen- tially an egotistic animal, a view which leads logically to the pessimism at which we have glanced. The second, the opposite of materialism, is sentimentalism or pan- theism, optimistically proclaiming that the natural is the divine, that man instinctively is good, and that this is, rightly regarded, the best of all possible worlds. The thira school, occupying a place midway between those extremes, accepts the paradoxical dualism x>f the uni- verse^ the reality of both the divine and the natural, actual the reality of both the beautiful ideal and the ugly ; and it recognizes in man an inseparable complex of good and evil. This is that humanism which, rising in certain classics of pagan Greece, was in our era merged in the faith of Christianity, and which constitutes the Great Tradition of modern thought and literature. It is to/ this Great Tradition that Gulliver's Travel* adheres. /Swift himself, in a letter to Pope, explaining the purport of his work, refers to the antagonism between the traditional humanistic view of man and the optimistic sentimental view, saying: " I have got materials towards a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show that it should be only animal rationis capax. ... I will never have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion." That was not the pessimistic one that man is opinion " " animal irrationale (signifying non-spiritual rather WTRODUCTION, " irrational is than ") ; nor the sentimental one, that man animal rationale; but the classical-Christian, that man is a being with a capacity for spiritual and rational life, but with animal propensities which too often frustrate his fulfilment thereof. " In Swift's day, however, as always, not all honest men were of that opinion." The Great Tradition, sup- ported by the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, and con- stantly attacked from two sides, was assailed at the beginning of the eighteenth century by its old enemies in a new The of materialism was guise. champion " Bernard de Mandeville, who has been called a pot- house Hobbes," and who might, in our times, be called a bibulous Bernard Shaw. Mandeville is another author whom one should read to perceive the exact position of Swift. In 1705 he published a poem, The Fable of the Bees, which in 1714 and 1725 he republished wtfh' lengthy prose commentaries denying the reality of human virtues and asserting that the basis of civilization and prosperity was the natural egotism of mankind.