In these three voyages the evident purpose is to strip off the veil of habit and custom, with which men deceive themselves, and show the crude vices of humanity as Swift fancies he sees them.  In the fourth voyage the merciless satire is carried out to its logical conclusion.  This brings us to the land of the Houyhnhnms, in which horses, superior and intelligent creatures, are the ruling animals.  All our interest, however, is centered on the Yahoos, a frightful race, having the form and appearance of men, but living in unspeakable degradation.

The Journal to Stella, written chiefly in the years 1710-1713 for the benefit of Esther Johnson, is interesting to us for two reasons.  It is, first, an excellent commentary on contemporary characters and political events, by one of the most powerful and original minds of the age; and second, in its love passages and purely personal descriptions it gives us the best picture we possess of Swift himself at the summit of his power and influence.  As we read now its words of tenderness for the woman who loved him, and who brought almost the only ray of sunlight into his life, we can only wonder and be silent.  Entirely different are his Drapier’s Letters, a model of political harangue and of popular argument, which roused an unthinking English public and did much benefit to Ireland by preventing the politicians’ plan of debasing the Irish coinage.  Swift’s poems, though vigorous and original (like Defoe’s, of the same period), are generally satirical, often coarse, and seldom rise above doggerel.  Unlike his friend Addison, Swift saw, in the growing polish and decency of society, only a mask for hypocrisy; and he often used his verse to shock the new-born modesty by pointing out some native ugliness which his diseased mind discovered under every beautiful exterior.

That Swift is the most original writer of his time, and one of the greatest masters of English prose, is undeniable.  Directness, vigor, simplicity, mark every page.  Among writers of that age he stands almost alone in his disdain of literary effects.  Keeping his object steadily before him, he drives straight on to the end, with a convincing power that has never been surpassed in our language.  Even in his most grotesque creations, the reader never loses the sense of reality, of being present as an eyewitness of the most impossible events, so powerful and convincing is Swift’s prose.  Defoe had the same power; but in writing Robinson Crusoe, for instance, his task was comparatively easy, since his hero and his adventures were both natural; while Swift gives reality to pygmies, giants, and the most impossible situations, as easily as if he were writing of facts.  Notwithstanding these excellent qualities, the ordinary reader will do well to confine himself to Gulliver’s Travels and a book of well-chosen selections.  For, it must be confessed, the bulk of Swift’s work is not wholesome reading.  It is too terribly satiric and destructive; it emphasizes the faults and failings of humanity; and so runs counter to the general course of our literature, which from Cynewulf to Tennyson follows the Ideal, as Merlin followed the Gleam,[191] and is not satisfied till the hidden beauty of man’s soul and the divine purpose of his struggle are manifest.