Page 48 - Gullivers

We should be ashamed at aspects of human behaviour, but not feel bound to agree with the king’s judgment uncritically. For real human beings on our earth
are (as we know) perfectly capable of goodness and honesty – of trying to live up to the Christian ideal: it is just that
we seldom succeed in doing so.
Towards the very end of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift drops his mask and tells
us what his ideal reader of taste and discernment would have seen all along: though Gulliver is still the ostensible mouthpiece, Swift is here speaking to
the reader directly; Gulliver would not find it so hard to reconcile himself to humanity (particularly to Englishmen),
he says, if humans were only content
with the vices and follies ‘which Nature hath entitled them to.’ He goes on:
‘I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-Pocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician,
a Whoremonger, a Physician, an Evidence, a Subborner, an Attorney, a Traytor,
or the like: But 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.’
And this is what Gulliver’s Travels is about – human pride. This is a book with
a moral message, one which aims to make the reader aware of the dire consequences which await those who succumb to the human failing that Swift’s friend, Alexander Pope, described as ‘the never-failing vice
of fools’. For the enlightened men and women of Swift’s age, and particularly for those who espoused the Christian creed, pride was the most inexplicable, the most heinous sin of all. Gulliver’s Travels shows the reader, in comic exaggeration, the awful effects of human pride. Surely, as
we lie on our desert island reading and re-reading this entertaining and challenging book, it is impossible not to take to heart its final sentence: ‘I here intreat those
who have any Tincture of this absurd Vice, that they will not presume to appear in
my sight.’
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