Page:Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships.djvu/22

xiv ''narrator. It is not the invention of the machinery, but its consummate management, that proves Swift's greatness.''

Of the four parts, the first two, Lilliput and Brobdingnag, are the most simple in their plan, the most easy and natural in their narrative, and the most direct in their effect upon the reader. Laputa ''was Swift's favourite: and though it has never attained the acceptance achieved by those that precede it, the cause of his preference is not difficult to trace. In it, Swift comes nearest to the subject of the Tale of a Tub: he attacks those foibles of intellectual complacency and of pedantic folly which most moved his ire. Nor can we forget that in the Struldbrugs we have perhaps the most tragic passage in the whole book, as well as one of the finest specimens of his style. In the Houyhnhnms he gives the most free rein to his consuming indignation against his fellow-men. He revels in admiration of the race, because it has least relation to mankind. In that part the picture has no relief from modulated colours: it is all fierce contrast of light and shadow: the calm wisdom, self-control, and dignity of the Houyhnhnm is always in the most striking contrast with the unmitigated brutality and degradation of the Yahoo.''

''Critics and moralists have condemned the book, and have ascribed its unflattering picture of human nature either to the perversity of morbid fancy, or to the encroachment of incipient madness. But readers of every generation and of every country have found it irresistible in interest : and children have found in it an unfailing store of enjoyment. MHio shall say that Swift has not driven Jiome a lesson and a moral in its pages ? And if its writer is condemned for the gloom of the picture he has drawn, we must yet remember that the fierceness of that saeva indignatio which inspired it, lacerated his own heart vwre than any other.''

H. C.