What I like best about a man like Swift is not that the satirist tells the whole truth about human nature. He doesn’t pretend to. It’s that he tells those truths about us that we don’t always care to hear, and he tells them with a twist of the scalpel, yet somehow he causes us to delight in hearing them. Partly that works because, with his cunning use of irony, he invites us, with a wink, to join him in the judge’s box. We’re in the know. So, if we are the objects of his satire, as are all human beings, we are also participants in the satire, enjoying the enterprise. That’s hard to pull off! You can’t be bitter or snide or merely flippant, but can’t pull punches, either. A tall order.
Here’s the finale of Book One, when Gulliver escapes from Lilliput, because his enemies at court, the Emperor now among them, accuse him of capital crimes when all he has done is to the benefit of that empire. The forms of the politics change from age to age and nation to nation, but the passions do not.
