With Gulliver it is different.  It is a commonplace on its subject (but like many other commonplaces a thing ill to forget or ignore) that natural and unsophisticated children always do, and that almost anybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he chooses can, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy it hugely.  It would be a most preternatural child or a most singularly constituted adult who could read Utopia or Oceana, or even Cyrano’s Voyages, “for the story” and enjoy them hugely.  This means that Swift had either learnt from Defoe or—­and considering those earlier productions of his own much more probably—­had independently developed the knack of absorbing the reader—­the knack of telling a story.  But of course there is in one sense much more, and in another much less, than a story in Gulliver:  and the finest things in it are independent of story, though (and this once more comes in for our present purpose) they are quite capable of adaptation to story-purposes, and have been so adapted ever since by the greatest masters of the art.  These are strokes of satire, turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, and seasonings of description.  But the great point of Gulliver is that, like Defoe’s work, though in not quite the same way, it is interesting—­that it takes hold of its reader and gives him its “peculiar pleasure.”  When a work of art does this, it is pretty near perfection.

There is, however, another book of Swift’s which, though perhaps seldom mentioned or even thought of in connection with the novel, is of real importance in that connection, and comes specially in with our present main consideration—­the way in which the several parts of the completed novel were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart for the use of the accomplished novelist.  This is the very curious and agreeable piece called Polite Conversation (1738), on which, though it was not printed till late in his life and close on Pamela itself, there is good reason for thinking that he had been for many years engaged.  The importance of dialogue in the novel has been often mentioned and will scarcely be contested:  while frequent occasion has been taken to point out that it had hitherto been very ill-achieved.  Swift’s “conversation” though designedly underlined, as it were, to show up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and thoroughly.  Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage, though it is naturally connected therewith.  Non-poetical stage dialogue in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of “wit” like that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of action and character.  Of course, novel conversation may diverge in the first direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether.  But, as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allow itself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, the desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the “boards” of a room-floor and not of a stage.