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PARTISAN REVIEW
to get used to moving among people my own size!" He has had
strange and interesting adventures and now he is delighted to be home.
Surely no explanation that Swift was a disappointed man of genius
who concluded in insanity is necessary if all the reader has read is the
cartoon edition.
If
he reads the original, he is certainly bound to be
disturbed. For the original concludes in a way which is very different
from
Classics Illustrated.
Gulliver explains to the "Courteous Readers,"
on the next to the last page, that having lived among horses and
among human beings, he still prefers horses to human beings. When
he has just come back to his own house in England, his wife's kiss
makes him faint: "My Wife took me in her Arms, and kissed me;
at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious Animal for
so many years, I fell in a Swoon for almost an Hour," and he feels
disgusted with himself at the thought that he has become the father
of human beings: the fact strikes him "with the utmost Shame, Con–
fusion, and Horror." For the first year after his return to England "I
could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the Smell of
them was intolerable." (I am quoting at length because anyone who
has not read
Gulliver's Travels
recently will probably think any synopsis
or paraphrase an exaggeration of Swift's satire.) As to the purpose of
the work, Gulliver declares that "I write for the noblest End, to inform
and instruct Mankind, over whom I may, without Breach of Modesty,
pretend to some superiority, from the Advantages I received by con–
versing among the most accomplished Houyhnhnms. I write without
any View toward Profit or Praise," which is to say that, having dwelt
with horses, Gulliver feels superior to mankind and capable of in–
structing human beings in how to improve. At the very end, having
been back among civilized human beings for five years, Gulliver declares
that he is now able to sit at the same dinner table with his wife, although
since the smell of any civilized being is still offensive to him, he has
to keep applying rue, lavender, or tobacco to his nose. And he adds
that he would
be
able to accept human nature as it is in most of its
follies and vices except for one unbearable trait, the vice of pride, which
causes more viciousness than any other human trait. It is the viciousness
of pride and vanity which make civilized existence insupportable.
Clearly, there is little likelihood that the juvenile reader of the
cartoon version of
Gulliver's Travels
will be corrupted by Swift's
cynicism and nihilism (which was inspired, we ought to remember, by an
intense idealism and an intense purity as well as by the disappointment
of ambition and the distortion of growing neurosis). But the important
point here is not the juvenile reader himself or herself, but the adult pub-
