Satire has, indeed, often done more service to the cause of
religion and morality than a sermon, since the remedy is agreeable,
whilst it at the same time communicates indignation or fear:--
"Of all the ways that wisest men could find,
To mend the age and mortify mankind,
Satire, well writ, has most successful prov'd.
And cures, because the remedy is lov'd."
To produce, however, the full effect, satire must possess a certain
degree of impartiality, and be levelled in all instances at the vices
or follies, and not at the man. The first sketch of Gulliver's Travels
occurs in the proposed Travels of Martinus Scriblerus, devised in that
pleasing society where most of Swift's miscellanies were planned. Had
the work, however, been executed under the same auspices, it would
probably, as Sir Walter Scott has suggested,[1] "have been occupied by
that personal satire, upon obscure and unworthy contemporaries, to
which Pope was but too much addicted. But when the Dean mused in
solitude over the execution of his plan, it assumed at once a more
grand and a darker complexion. The spirit of indignant hatred and
contempt with which he regarded the mass of humanity; his quiet and
powerful perception of their failings, errors, and crimes; his zeal
for liberty and freedom of thought, tended at once to generalize,
while it embittered, his satire, and to change traits of personal
severity for that deep shade of censure which Gulliver's Travels throw
upon mankind universally.
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