'Give It One Lash the More at My Request'

Just for fun, as a sort of intellectual palate cleanser, I read Swift’s well-known September 29, 1725, letter to Alexander Pope, in which he modifies “world” with “rascally.” Swift was occupied correcting the galleys of Gulliver’s Travels, which would be published the following year. Rascally was a borrowing from French and originally referred to the rabble, the common folk. It came to mean, the OED tells us, “unprincipled or dishonest in character or conduct; untrustworthy, roguish,” which devolved into its modern “weakened sense: mischievous, cheeky.” Today, to be rascally could even be judged charming or cute. That’s not what Swift had in mind. He goes on in his letter to Pope: 

“When you think of the world give it one lash the more at my request. I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals; for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians—I will not speak of my own trade—soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally, I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”

 

When you hear someone proclaiming his love for humanity in the mushy, grandstanding, Whitmanesque sense, check your wallet and watch your back. The con is on. Loving the sprawling, abstract mass makes it easier to send the individual to the Gulag for his own good. Swift is close to describing what Moses Herzog memorably dismissed as “low-grade universal potato love.” Swift is telling Pope that realism and common sense are the philosophical underpinning of Gulliver’s Travels:

 

“This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax [“capable of reason”]. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy, though not in Timon's manner, the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion. By consequence you are to embrace it immediately, and procure that all who deserve my esteem may do so too. The matter is so clear that it will admit of no dispute; nay, I will hold a hundred pounds that you and I agree in the point.”