Of these fantastic “reports on mankind” Swift’s is one of the most extraordinary. The Odyssey moves in the world of pagan mythology; the Divine Comedy is based on Christian mythology; Faust mixes all mythologies; Don Quixote remains within the Spanish reality of every day. Gulliver’s Travels achieves the marvelous without recourse to mythology, and transcends English reality without falling into absurdity. All the author needs is a simple premise, a mere quantitative alteration at the start—men of extraordinary littleness, men of extraordinary hugeness, horses of extraordinary wisdom—and all the rest proceeds with the most orthodox logic, with no trace of specific improbability, without inventive effort. We are within the field of the incredible, yet we are within the field of reality. Strange happenings seem normal, madness assumes the forms of reason. Just a difference in nature, just a shift of dimensions, and we have with the utmost naturalness the most unnatural of worlds. It is the classic method for the creation of the extraordinary, a method to be resumed a century later by Poe for his travels into the realms of mystery.
By thus reducing absurdity to the minimum and gaining in consequence the maximum of effect, Swift succeeded in making Gulliver’s Travels one of the classic documents of man’s scorn for man. The sharp and cynical spirit of
