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curious sobriety of fancy which leads him to keep in his most daring flights upon the confines of the possible. In the imaginary travels of Lucian and Rabelais, with which Gulliver is generally compared, we frankly take leave of the real world altogether. We are treated with arbitrary and monstrous combinations, which may be amusing, but which do not challenge even a semblance of belief. In Gulliver this is so little the case that it can hardly be said in strictness that the fundamental assumptions are even impossible. Why should there not be creatures in human form with whom, as in Lilliput, one of our inches represents a foot, or, as in Brobdingnag, one of our feet represents an inch? the assumption is so modest that we are presented, it may be said, with a definite and soluble problem. We have not, as in other fictitious worlds, to deal with a state of things in which the imagination is bewildered, but with one in which it is agreeably stimulated. We have certainly to consider an extremely exceptional case, but one to which all the ordinary laws of human nature are still strictly applicable. Imagine giants and dwarfs as tall as a house or as low as a footstool, and let us see what comes of it. That is a plain, almost mathematical problem; and we can therefore judge his success and receive pleasure from the ingenuity and verisimilitude of his creations.

"When we have once thought of big men and little men,' said Johnson, perversely enough, 'it is easy to do the rest.' The first step might, perhaps, seem in this case to be the easiest, yet nobody ever thought of it before Swift, and nobody has ever had similar good fortune since. There is no other fictitious world the deni

zens of which have become so real for us and which has supplied so many images familiar to every educated mind. But the apparent ease is due to the extreme consistency and sound judgment of Swift's realization. The conclusions follow so inevitably from the primary data, that when they are once drawn we agree that they could not be otherwise, and infer, rashly, that anybody else could have drawn them. It is as easy as lying; but everybody who has seriously tried the experiment knows that even lying is by no means so easy as it appears at first sight. In fact, Swift's success is something unique. The charming plausibility of every incident throughout the two first parts, commends itself to children, who enjoy definite concrete images, and are fascinated by a world which is at once full of marvels surpassing Jack the Giant Killer and the wonders seen by Sindbad, and yet as obviously and undeniably true as the adventures of Robinson Crusoe himself." This is, of course, more even than the edge of the satire, the true cause of Gulliver's popularity, and not among children only.

In arranging the present selection, I have sought to give especial prominence to this peculiar power of realization, which lends a unique charm to Swift's narrative. Of the extracts from Gulliver, which fill a third of this volume, half were chosen on account of the microscopic realism of the pictures they present of purely imaginary states of existence. Such extracts are the "Reception in Lilliput," perhaps the most successful example of the logical expansion of a fanciful hypothesis in English literature; the Inventory," where the same idea is consistently developed; the "Capture of the Fleet"; and the meeting with the

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Gray Houyhnhnm, which to my mind possesses a grace and charm which cannot be matched in all the rest of the wonderful book. The other extracts from Gulliver show Swift's vein of cynical satire in its most sober and restrained dignity. We feel, as Hazlitt said, that we are reading the measured judgments of some inhabitant of a higher sphere, who looks down with sovereign contempt upon the hollow pretences, the puny rivalries, the gratuitous falsehoods, which go to help out the "ridiculous tragedy" called life. The King of Brobdingnag's Inquiry" reads as coldly and judicially as a state paper. The passion and scorn that underlie the calmest irony in Swift is here so subdued that it might almost pass unsuspected. There is little of the exuberant slashing ridicule of the Tub or the Books; it is rather the expression of the contemptuous despair of one who has seen through life, and pronounces it altogether vanity. The quiet hopelessness of the satire reaches its most gloomy stage in the picture of the Struldbrugs, where Swift turns the Tithonus myth into a horrible reality, and shows us old age in its most revolting and dismal aspect.

I have drawn less freely than some will perhaps approve from the voyage to Laputa; but when it was necessary to exclude even some of the most celebrated passages in Lilliput and Brobdingnag, it was inevitable that the inferior work of the third voyage should be represented very briefly. The hitherto unpublished addition to Laputa, however, printed in the Notes, will make some amends for the omissions in the text.

The studiously restrained contempt of the satire and the extraordinary lifelike quality of the narrative make Gulliver Swift's greatest work; but there are many

who would give a nearly equal rank to the Tale of a Tub. Swift himself, in the dreary decline of his powers, was observed to turn over the pages of his earliest work, and exclaim, "Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book!"-and genius is written on every page of it. The vigorous young intellect rejoices in its strength, and wantons and riots in its work of destruction. He has already found out that all is vanity and hypocrisy, and he tears the mask from the solemn shams and decorums of the world with shouts of derisive laughter. He is divesting himself of "prejudices," he says, and is confident that he, and he alone, is free from the conventional impostures and plausible formulas of the world. He exposes the cant of religion and the pretensions of letters and the unrealities of every established form of putative virtue or genius with a keen enjoyment of the ruin he lays bare. He anticipates the philosophy of clothes when he shows that it is the robe makes the difference between the mayor and the bishop; and he works out the dominant idea of the relativity and accidental character of all so-called greatness, when he draws his famous parallel between madness and genius, and explains the common attributes of Curtius and Empedocles.

In style, and as an artistic whole, the Tale of a Tub is Swift's masterpiece. The satire is more pointed and concise than in Gulliver, the thought more full and vigorous, the ideas and language more sustained and nervous. But to our modern taste there is much in the story of the three brothers that is painful and repellent. Without intending to do more than expose religious shams, Swift deals with what, to

many people, are very sacred things, with a rude and coarse brutality that make the Tale hateful to sensitive readers. Fortunately the introduction into it of "Digressions" (a satire upon the "padding" of Grub Street) affords an opportunity for selection. While the religious part of the satire must necessarily be omitted from a volume which everyone should be able to read without offence, the digressions, which Ideal chiefly with the literary forms of imposture, are capable of being reproduced here with hardly any omissions, and though they do not adequately represent the almost boisterous humour of the work, they show Swift's style in its utmost perfection. As English, the "Epistle Dedicatory to Prince Posterity," complaining of the unfairness of his governor, Time, towards the literary productions of the age, is unsurpassed in all Swift's works.

The Battle of the Books is represented by the "Apologue of the Spider and the Bee," which gives the moral of the whole dispute, and by the Homeric combats which end it. The work cannot rank with the Tub, but it is a remarkable example of Swift's early mood, when he loved to run a-tilt against any. thing, for the mere enjoyment of sound knocks, and did not trouble himself about the merits of the case. The Argument against abolishing Christianity is introduced, partly because it is a singularly fine specimen of Swift's lighter satire, and is capable of being given in its entirety; and partly because it gives some hints of his opinions as a Churchman, which form the key to many difficulties in his political career. Swift was before all things a churchman, but his thorough contempt for abstract thought,

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