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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
For when we opened him we found,
That all his vital parts were sound.
“Verses on the Death of Dr Swift” (Poems, II, p. 559, lines 175–6)His delight was in simplicity. That he has in his works no metaphor, as has been said, is not true; but his few metaphors seem to be received rather by necessity than choice.
Samuel Johnson on Swift's “Life”The Earl of Orrery had little use for Gulliver's Travels, that “irregular essay” full of trifles and optical deceptions. He particularly disapproved of what Swift does with proportion in the Travels:
Lemuel Gulliver has observed great exactness in the just proportion, and appearances of the several objects thus lessened and magnified: but he dwells too much upon these optical deceptions. The mind is tired with a repetition of them, specially as he points out no beauty, nor use in such amazing discoveries, which might have been so continued as to have afforded improvement, at the same time that they gave astonishment.
(Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, pp. 135–6)Swift, Orrery complains, accentuates the deformities rather than the beauties of nature, and debases in the process a human nature that an enlightened dean of the Church of Ireland should be exalting. He is right to be uneasy, for Swift indeed employs his optical “deception” not to regularize and harmonize nature, but to deform it, and he does so not out of perversity but out of necessity.
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