BOOKS AND WRITERS
44 NCE you have thought of big men and little men," said Dr. Johnson, " it is very easy to do all the rest." This
was his table-talk judgement of Gulliver's Travels ; more deferentially, he admitted that criticism had for a while been lost in wonder, as it always must be before this ageless book. It forms, in an unexpurgated edition, the bulk of Mr. Hayward's Selected Prose Works of Jonathan Swift,* and justly so, for it is his best and most revealing work. Others had thought of big and little men ; Rabelais and Lucian had, and Berkeley had just suggested the subjectivity of magnitude. The scene was perhaps inspired by Robinson Crusoe, or the Arabian Nights, or the journeys to the kingdom of the Great Mogul and to Siam that Swift had read in Sir William Temple's library. Yet the work remains the most original we know, and far from an easy accomplishment. By writing about himself, Swift made Gulliver his one flesh-and-blood character. The nightmarish but matter-of-fact world in which Gulliver moves owes nothing to the conventions • of literature ; beauty, tragedy and comedy are unknown there, and there is neither the ridiculous nor the sublime. Gulliver enters on his hazardous adventures without the least surprise. In Lilliput he is the elephantine rationalist assailed by hordes of pigmies, the self-centred Swift magnanimously belittling his political and theological enemies. In Brobdignag he is a toy among giants, nauseated by the enlarged imperfections of man. When he arrives at Laputa, Swift's richest vein of fantasy is given play. It was a Flying Island, in the control of a people whose minds were wholly taken up by intense Newtonian speculation, clumsy, awkward and unhandy because of their un- swerving addiction to mathematics and musical instruments. Here Gulliver ate rhomboid beef and cycloid pudding, and was computed into a suit of clothes. At the Grand Academy in Balnibari he met a strange group : the singed and meagre man who had been eight years on a project for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers ; another calcining ice into gunpowder ; one who fed his spiders with coloured flies so that they spun dyed webs ; and, last, the Universal Artist who, while his workmen were " condensing air into a dry tangible Substance," or softened marble for pillows, or petrified the hooves of live horses, designed to propagate, in time, a breed of naked sheep. In mocking futility Swift revenged himself on the academic world ; his imagination never soared out of sight of reality.
The fourth voyage brings to the surface an intolerable pessimism. " Plus je connais les homilies, plus jainte les bites " was an old saying, but mild compared with the perverse loathing that had overcome Swift by now. Between the beastly and servile 'Yahoos and the noble Houyhnhnms Gulliver was bandied in constant com- parison, and proved unworthy of the equine masters he adored. The Houyhnhnms were too good. Their grand maxim was to cultivate Reason and be governed by it ; they were of stoic virtues, temperate, industrious, clean and modest ; their knowledge was traditional, their discourse classical, they excelled in poetry of the kind Plato thought proper, and died quiescent deaths. His eyes dazzled by this ideal State, Gulliver had abominable difficulties in adjusting himself, when at last exiled, to the horrors of humanity.
Swift very properly vexes our conscience with this earthy morality. In a nerve-racked style he constructed a master-plan showing every modification between savage and insidious irony. Yet overworked though it is with private and public allusions, Gulliver's Travels emerges as a work of translucent perfection, of a clarity that has sometimes been mistaken for simplicity. His ingenious insults to the human race abound in other works. He attacked Boyle in the brief and witty Meditation Upon a Broomstick ; he was sly and malevolent in his Directions to Servants ; his art of Polite Conversa- tion is elaborately facetious ; his Modest Proposal for disposing of * Selected Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. Edited and with an intro- duction by John Hayward. (Cresset Press. 9s. 6d.) t The Voyages of Captain Cook. Selected and edited by fAitistopher Lloyd. (Cresset Press. 9s. 6d.) surplus children is brilliantly macabre. As an Irish patriot, he was an indefatigable pamphleteer. His Thoughts could be as cynical and paradoxical as La Rochefoucauld's, but when it came to a personal anguish that touched through his egotism, he was human and moving. His prayers for. Stella and his tribute to her after her death belong to this rarer mood. It is a pity that space could not be found to include, as well, something from the Battle of the Books, or more from the Tale of a Tub, or The Mechanical Opera- tion of the Spirit, or the Critical Essay on the Faculties of the Mind. Even so, the selection does the satirist full honour.
Swift once used the tail of Halley's Comet to lash at petty sinners by prophesying the end of the world in a collision with that star. More constructively, Halley was responsible for another minor masterpiece of eighteenth-century letters. The astronomer had suggested that the distance of the earth from the sun could be determined by observing, in 1769, the transit of the planet Venus, and the Admiralty agreed to send a ship for that purpose to the recently discovered island of Tahiti. Lieutenant Cook, who had already proved his natural genius for charting, was sent in command of the bark ' Endeavour,' on one of the best equipped expeditions that had ever left England. The motive of the voyage was ostensibly scientific, but Cook had secret instructions to discover " a continent or land of great extent." This was the vast mass known to the old geographers as Terra Incognita, and its existence was still an idie fixe. It was a political problem ; the French had just lost Canada, and, keen to claim this potential empire, had sent de Bougainville exploring the Pacific. But the myth was demolished. Cook wrote: " If I have failed in discovering a continent, it is because it does not exist in a navigable sea, and not for want of looking after."
James Cook kept journals because it was part of his duty to do so, and he wrote with almost revolutionary accuracy. When first published, they were " edited " to suit current standards of fine writing, and have generally suffered these alterations ever since. Mr. Lloyd's admirable selectionst anticipate the first complete critical edition of Cook's writings, now- in the hands of the Hakluyt Society. His writings show the discoverer as a man tenacious of purpose and of great moral courage. His way with men was summary and efficient. His_style is dry, and at times laconic. But where he feels the subject demands it, he expands into detailed accounts that are invaluable ethnology. What he saw in the islands he came across did not dispose him to-share the illusions of European philosophers about the Noble Savage. The Fuegians he found " perhaps as miserable a set of people as are this day on earth." Wherever he landed; he found the Pacific islanders accomplished thieves to a man ; they were licentious and diseased, rashly pugnacious, and, what he had hoped was untrue, often cannibals, and given to human sacrifice. Yet in spite of this he made and left friends, as was his mission. He was on the best of terms with chieftains and kings, and with the unhappy Omai, who was taken. to grace fashionable London, and was returned home spoilt. Among these primitives Cook was always alert to record what he could of their customs and habits, their religions, mysteries and modes of government. In the Friendly Isles he first investigated the compre- hensive systems of taboo, and encountered totemism.
The notions of antiquity die hard. To solve the ancient problem of the North-West Passage Captain Cook set out on a third voyage in 1776. Returning from beyond Alaska he stopped in a group of islands he had discovered on the way. There, on the beach at Hawaii,.a confused contretemps sprang up ; Cook turned his back and was struck down. Ironically, it seems that here he was identi- fied with a legendary king who had been deified as the god of peace and prosperity. But he was not immortal. Parts of his dismembered body were recovered, and other relics, it is said, were paraded round the island until 1820. The loss of Cook's life was grievous, but his achievement was secure. For us, the Journals are living and exemplary literature ; for the world, as Mr. Lloyd says, his monument
Previous page
