Swift as a misanthropist

            Swift’s Misanthropy in Gulliver's Travels: 

Swift hatred towards mankind:

swift as a misanthropist:

Gulliver's Travels is an anatomy of human nature, a sardonic looking-glass, often criticized for its apparent misanthropy. Gulliver's Travels was unique in its day; it was not written to woo or entertain. It was an indictment, and it was most popular among those who were indicted.

On the subject of misanthropy Swift famously said, “Principally I hate and detest that animal called man" Swift called man not the "animal rationale" but only the "rationis capax”, animal capable of reason.

In a letter to Alexander Pope Swift wrote:

“I have ever hated all Nations professions and Communities and all my love is towards individuals. . .Upon this great foundation of misanthropy the whole building of my travels is erected”

He admits that the chief end of all his labour is “to vex the world rather than divert it”.

Swift so violently ‘vexed’ the world that different critics from his own time to this day have bitterly criticized him.

Thackeray attacked his book claiming it to be “filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.” Walter Scott condemns Swift’s attack on mankind as “severe, unjust and degrading.” 

William Hazlitt however defends Swift against these charges:

“What a libel is this upon mankind! What a convincing proof of misanthropy! What presumption and what malice prepense, to shew men what they are, and to teach them what they ought to be!”

Gulliver’s Travel’s serves as a magnifying mirror to show us our faults so that we can see how far we have strayed from reasonable behavior.

Paul Turner writes of Gulliver’s four voyages: “The four pictures form a series, in which the view grows gradually darker; that is, they represent stages in Gulliver's disillusionment.”

In the first part of the book, Swift takes us to the land of midgets, the “human creatures not more than six inches high”. Lilliput is a miniature empire with a little monarch who entitled himself as "delight and terror of the universe".

In Lilliput, which is, quite literally, a microcosm, the vices and follies not merely of England but of all mankind are epitomized. The human race viewed in miniature, at first seems rather charming; but the tiny creatures soon turn out to be cunning, malicious, treacherous and revengeful. They are ready to sacrifice all humane feeling, whether towards Gulliver or the Blefuscudians, to their own petty ambitions.

In Brobdingnag, however, it is as if we are looking at humanity through a magnifying glass. Gulliver is often repulsed by both the size and coarseness of the physical bodies of the Brobdingnagians. But Swift throws in a nice twist with the first two parts of Gulliver's Travels. Though the Brobdingnagians are more repulsive physically because of their size, they are categorized by Gulliver as "the least corrupted".

When Gulliver gives brief description of the political and legal institutions of England to Brobdingnagian King, the King dismissively concludes "the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

Swift was certainly not one of the optimists typical of his century. He did not believe that the ‘Age of Science’ was a triumph. Science and reason needed limits, and they did not require absolute devotion. In order to satirize mankind in general and science in particular, Swift takes us to an imaginary floating island where the inhabitants were wholly engrossed in their fruitless meditation."Their heads were all reclined either to the right, or the left; one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith.” The various researches that were in progress at the Academy of Projectors in Lagado were fantastic and preposterous. Experiments were being made “to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers, to convert human excrement into its original food, to build houses from the roof downwards to the foundation, to obtain silk from cobwebs”

Swift’s alleged misanthropy reaches its crescendo in the fourth voyage of Gulliver. As Gulliver reaches the land governed by philosophical horses Houyhnhnms, he is instantly confronted with a pack of Yahoos which give him such an obnoxious and disgusting treatment that he develops an intense hatred for them, owing to their vile physical appearance and their filthy and mischievous way of life. Gulliver highlights:

“Upon the whole, I never behold in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, nor one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.”

The Houyhnhnms, on the other hand, are “endued with a proportionable degree of reason” and “orderly and rational, acute and judicious”. They know neither love nor grief nor lust nor ambition for they face each of these phenomena with stoical calm. Their cardinal virtues are “friendship and benevolence”. The Houyhnhnms are “the Perfection of Nature” while “the Yahoos … were observed to be the most unteachable of all brutes”

Gulliver’s epiphany occurs he identifies himself with the detestable Yahoos:

“My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure.”

The theme of Gulliver’s hatred of mankind is climaxed when he told he must leave Houyhnhnmland. He exclaims “that the certain prospect of an unnatural death was the least of my evils, for…how could I think with temper of passing my days among Yahoos”. Thus Gulliver would rather die than live among his own race of Yahoos. Nonetheless, he must leave. But he plans not to go home, but to find some small uninhabited island so that he can, in solitude, “reflect with delight on the virtues of those imitable Houyhnhnms.” Yet, fate would not allow it. He is discovered by Portuguese Captain and seamen and is forcibly rescued and given passage to Lisbon. With the short-sightedness of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver perceives only the Yahoo and is repelled by Captain Don Pedro de Mendez’s clothes, food, and odour as he remarks: “I wondered to find such civilities from a Yahoo. However, I remained silent and sullen; I was ready to faint at the very smell of him and his men.”

Gulliver’s frenzy of his extreme misanthropy has driven him into madness as can no longer bear his own wife and children:

“I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with me, at the farthest end of a long table…. Yet the smell of a Yahoo continuing very offensive, I always keep my nose well stopped with rue, lavender, or tobacco leaves. “

Gulliver concludes his travels on a misanthropic note:

“When I behold a lump of deformity, and diseases both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience.”

While the character of Gulliver eventually reveals himself to be a misanthrope, the author Jonathan Swift does not. The reader must be conscientious to see that Gulliver’s idealized glance of Houyhnhnms’ logical approach to life is not always consistent with Swift’s. A carful denotation suggests that the author is just as satirical toward Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms as he is toward the Yahoos. Gulliver remains true to his gullible nature as he seems unable to discern the negative aspects of the Houyhnhnms’ rational philosophy. Swift, on other hand, uses these quadrupeds to show how reason untouched by love, compassion, and empathy is also inadequate to deal with the myriad aspects of the human life.