Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, is obviously an observer. The very title of his narrative appeals to popular interest in observations brought back from voyages of exploration—voyages that represent a geographical conquest of space contemporary with Europe's mathematical conquest of space during the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. Peering through windows and eye glasses and perspective glasses, Gulliver observes both nature and manners. He observes natural curiosities, donating some giant wasp stings to Gresham College. He observes new lands, suggesting alterations to the world's maps. He observes courts and a public execution and a learned society, bringing back the plan of a machine to generate speculative knowledge mechanically. Finally, he publishes his observations, quarrelling with his critics as he does so. No fellow of the Royal Society could do more. Nevertheless, distortion is a more obvious feature of the Travels than the transparent record of experience recommended by that Society. Johnson's dismissive comment that 'once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest' suggests that the book is based on systematic distortion; this implies that its exploration of science goes beyond its specific satire of the Royal Society and Cartesianism in book III.¹ Surprisingly often, the Travels confronts the reader with the act of observation itself, emphasizing not only perspective glasses and empirical scepticism about the evidence of the senses but also, centrally, the dislocations of point of view inherent in observation.

A fairer version of Johnson's dismissal is Marjorie Hope Nicolson's suggestion that the two views through a perspective glass, one magnifying and one diminishing, determine the strategy of the first two voyages of the Travels. That perspective glass, however, is untrustworthy because it distorts sense impressions. When Galileo presented the results of his observations, for example, he learned that many men were highly sceptical of the images seen through his strange glass. In the Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton expresses this popular distrust of glasses by calling Galileo and earlier investigators of sight deluding magicians who promise 'to do strange miracles by glasses,' much as a modern sceptic announces that stage magicians somehow do it with mirrors. By Swift's day, this distrust has impressive support in philosophical distrust of the faculty of sight itself. Since the ideal observer sees himself as pure mind confronting an objective order but is nevertheless dependent on sense impressions, the eye occupies the ambiguous boundary between mind and matter. The means of investigation consequently becomes an object of investigation for a long list of distinguished observers. Kepler finally discovered how the eye forms images because he was investigating how far the eye and its instruments might introduce errors into his astronomical calculations. Similarly, Descartes, who also wrote on optics, found it natural to begin his Meditations by doubting the evidence of his senses, while Locke, in opposition to Descartes, based knowledge on sense impressions but therefore asserted the limitations of human knowledge. Indeed, the empiricist distinction between primary qualities existing in objects themselves and secondary qualities created by the act of perception expresses the ambiguity of the eye's mediation between mind and matter. As the Travels often suggests, knowledge of sense impressions can be unreliable even before a glass distorts those impressions.²

Gulliver's Houyhnhnm Master, for example, denies man any clear glass of understanding that accurately reflects truth. He suggests instead 'some Quality fitted to increase our natural Vices; as the Reflection from a troubled Stream returns the Image of an ill-shapen Body, not only larger, but more distorted.'³ In this view, human reason is as naturally distorting as the human body is 'ill-shapen.' Although Gulliver comes to share this view, for reasons I discuss below, one has, so to speak, nagging doubts about the greater appropriateness of a horse's body to the clear glass of reason the Houyhnhnms seem to possess. Nevertheless, Gulliver's Master is a sound Baconian despite his provincialism, for Bacon too recognized the human idolatry that distorts observations:

… as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind, when it receives impressions of objects through the sense, cannot be trusted to report them truly, but in forming its notions mixes up its own nature with the nature of things.⁴

This echo of St Paul's dark glass is appropriate even in the age of telescopes and microscopes. Newton adopted reflecting telescopes because his work with refraction convinced him of the problems inherent in refracting lenses. Modern research reveals high degrees of spherical aberration—distortion—and chromatic aberration—added colour—in eighteenth-century compound microscopes; that is, they distorted both primary and secondary qualities. Since the eye's instruments are as unreliable as the eye, the imperfect glass still supplies an image of the imperfect understanding.

The observer's dissatisfaction with the eye's weakness and ambiguity is reinforced by his mind's desire to roam more freely than the body permits in search of a more convenient point of view. Since the ambitious observer wants to describe mathematically the configuration of objects with respect to a particular point of view, that convenience is often mathematical. Gulliver's inconvenient description of the motions of the flying island (pp 168-70) reminds us that mathematical convenience is sometimes convenient only to mathematicians, but the tendency to think in terms of their spatial models appears even in unmathematical forms. When Addison describes the delight of experiencing sensations with two senses at once in Spectator no. 412, for example, he compares the interplay of sensations to the way 'the different Colours of a Picture, when they are well disposed, set off one another, and receive an additional Beauty from the Advantage of their Situation':⁵ he thus translates a complex experience into a purely visual experience of relative positions in space. This suggests that he has assimilated the assumptions of the age of observation, for post-Copernican astronomy similarly but more drastically wrenches the point of view of ordinary experience in order to translate experience into geometrical terms. Although the eye sees the sun go round the earth, we find the equations simpler if we mentally view the solar system from the sun.

Claudio Guillén's study of the history of the notion of point of view relates the conventions of perspective painting not only to the Cartesian split between observer and observed but also to the underlying fiction of a single observing eye located at a fixed point of view. A revealing example of this second notion appears in the Travels when Gulliver sees a Brobdingnagian man's eyes magnified by his glasses and compares them to 'the Full-Moon shining into a Chamber at two Windows' (p 96)! Since it is impossible to see the moon through different windows at the same time, Gulliver's lunatic comparison represents a triumph of theory over observation. Guillén's early examples come from artificial perspective (the linear perspective of painting) rather than natural perspective (optics) or science, but there are many analogies between art and other forms of observation. Like science, art uses glasses to aid observation and uses mathematics to describe the relative positions of objects in space with respect to a particular point of view.⁶ Art is important in popularizing the notion of point of view because it can play with the artificiality of its conventions more readily than science can. Exploring Guillén's subject, Ernest B. Gilman demonstrates the impact of linear perspective on seventeenth-century English literature. He suggests especially that curious perspectives supplied the conceptual basis of the literary conceit. (Such perspectives exploited the convention of the single fixed eye by presenting two extreme but complementary points of view in a single painting or engraving; Holbein's Ambassadors, in which a second point of view resolves the blur in the foreground into a skull, is perhaps the example most famous today.) Gilman concludes, however, that the eighteenth-century mind was too well balanced to delight in such grotesque games except in the didactic comedy of something like Hogarth's Method of Perspective.⁷ Johnson's dislike of the conceit, which, like the curious perspective, yoked disparate images by violence together, would seem to support this view, and certainly many eighteenth-century writers yearned for the clear glass of understanding. However, the sceptic might find the interplay of points of view revealing. Writing after the triumph of the scientific revolution based on the perspective glass and the shifting point of view, though, he would have internalized these assumptions, like Addison, and so be less likely to present them as playful novelty. Certainly many of the distortions in the Travels suggest the limitations and distortions of the observing eye.

Despite his correct record of the number and orbits of Mars's moons, most of Gulliver's observations exist on the level of commonplace amusement. Brobdingnag is a microscopist's dream come true, for example, but it is hardly novel. Robert Hooke's Micrographia published engravings of magnified objects in 1665, and even Hooke later lamented the lack of new discoveries through improved telescopes and complained of the microscope that he could 'hear of none that make any other Use of that Instrument, but for Diversion and Pastime, and that by reason it is become a portable Instrument, and easy to be carried in one's Pocket.' By 1730, even the laziest amateur who purchased a Culpepper microscope received with it a set of four ivory slides of prepared specimens: Gulliver's most memorable images of magnified nature—hair, a bit of human skin, and a louse—appeared together on just one of these slides! When Swift himself contemplated buying Stella a pocket microscope in November 1710, he spoke slightingly of 'the common little ones, to impale a louse (saving your presence) upon a needle's point,' and teased her for her trendy interest by calling her a virtuoso. Gulliver's observations are as banal as his very ordinary background.⁸

His delight in what he sees is partly delight in the distorted—magnified—power conferred by his perspective glass. This appears in his delighted accounts to the King of Brobdingnag and his Houyhnhnm Master of the destructiveness of modern war: the detachment of the distant observer permits his vicarious enjoyment of the power of weapons that act as he looks—from a distance. Similarly, the modern television viewer's detachment permits the disturbing glee evident in many analyses of the success of high-technology weapons in remote conflicts, like that in the Falkland Islands recently. Pat Rogers is surely right to see hypertrophy of the sight in the Travels' many glasses: although the moralist can readily find plain reason why man has not a microscopic eye, the ordinary observer asserts with Descartes that 'there is no doubt that the inventions which serve to augment [the eye's] power are among the most useful that there can be.'⁹ Since, as Gulliver asserts, 'nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison' (p 87), the perspective that magnifies the observed diminishes the observer. In fact, much of the Travels' play with proportions is already implicit in the illustrations in Gaspar Schott's seventeenth-century Magia universalis that show human observers dwarfed by enormous perspective glasses. S. Bradbury traces the interpretation of these impossible 'giant microscopes' as an engraver's error that substituted a whole man for the still-familiar single eye placed at the aperture of such instruments, commenting that the engravings are at odds with the proportions mentioned in the text (Bradbury, Evolution, pp 15-18). What is a 'misreading' from the perspective of a historian of science, however, may, from another perspective, be an interpretation of the new proportion between man and his powerfully augmented sight. Schott treats perspective as one of the magic sciences and devotes a book of his Magia to anamorphosis, a term he may have coined (Baltrušaitis, pp 85-6). Imaginative play with the conventions of art is an appropriate context for engravings of the transformations wrought by the magic of optical instruments that dupe the eye. Gulliver is similarly transformed by the same instruments.

At the heart of what a Baconian would call the commerce of Gulliver's mind with the nature of things are his delight in his disproportionate power and his uncritical reliance on distorted sense impressions. That reliance unsettles his point of view, as do scientific models and the conventions of perspective art. Thus Gulliver is disgusted by the skin of a Brobdingnagian woman he sees nursing her baby but then reconsiders his usual point of view:

This made me reflect upon the fair Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own Size, and their Defects not to be seen but through a magnifying Glass, where we find by Experiment that the smoothest and whitest Skins look rough and coarse, and ill coloured. (Pp 91-2)

Gulliver's 'only' asserts that it is arbitrary to rely on natural rather than artificial perspective, so to speak. The distortion he sees through the glass is more real to him than what he sees unaided, not simply another perspective on it. The observer's reliance on his sense impressions is a more complex criterion of truth than it seems. Since it is not true that skin defects are visible only under magnification, Gulliver is also vindicating his earlier comment on the weakness of his eyes (p 37) at the same time as he celebrates the power conferred by the glass.

The observer, that is, willingly adopts a point of view at odds with his actual place of observation. In Lilliput, his own relative power becomes more real to him when he adopts an external perspective on himself, wondering that the Lilliputians do not tremble 'at the very Sight of so prodigious a Creature as I must appear to them ' (p 24; my italics). Asserting his power, he prefers the perspective that magnifies him to the equivalent perspective that diminishes his captors. Such self-consciousness seems almost natural to us, but we have become connoisseurs of the chaos imposed by competing points of view. It is more startling in the Travels, in Brobdingnag even more than in Lilliput because Gulliver there adopts a Brobdingnagian perspective but refuses to look at himself. He does bring himself to smile when the Queen places him before a mirror that reflects both of them (p 107), but he usually avoids such glasses (p 147). Although he has been a pygmy among giants, he returns from his second voyage seeing his rescuers as 'little contemptible Creatures' (p 147) and looking on his family 'as if they had been Pigmies, and I a Giant' (p 149). Asserting his power, his chosen point of view increasingly blinds him to himself.

Walter Ong speculates that Gulliver's box in Brobdingnag and other images of insulation and confinement in the Travels express Swift's interest in the scientific conception of the isolated system.¹⁰ In this context, it especially suggests his interest in isolated visual fields. The eagle that carries Gulliver's box from Brobdingnag and the other eagles that force it to drop the box are 'observed' (p 145; Swift's italics) by a sailor, but he cannot comment on their size because they are isolated from objects of comparison. A subtler effect of point of view and relative scale appears in Gulliver's glimpse into the palace in Lilliput:

… lying down upon my Side, I applied my Face to the Windows of the middle Stories, which were left open on Purpose, and discovered the most splendid Apartments that can be imagined. There I saw the Empress, and the young Princes in their several Lodgings, with their chief Attendants about them. Her Imperial Majesty was pleased to smile very graciously upon me, and gave me out of the Window her Hand to kiss. (P 47)

Carefully getting close to a tiny passage and peering through small windows, Gulliver presents the commoner's visit to court, complete with splendid apartments, the royal family and their attendants, and a gracious smile from the Queen. Only when the Queen's favour demands putting her hand out of the window does the original discrepancy of scale between observer and observed reassert itself. Although the Queen's point of view is not recorded, it is presumably much like Gulliver's in the parallel scene when a Brobdingnagian monkey suddenly peers into the door and opened windows of Gulliver's cabinet on a scene 'which he seemed to view with great Pleasure and Curiosity' (p 122). The monkey then reaches in its hand to remove a creature little bigger than its finger from the world that gives him an illusion of normal size.

Like magnified images in the Travels, these miniature worlds in boxes suggest seventeenth-century popular amusements, especially the perspective box. Viewers looked into peepholes located at strategically selected points of view that gave the small, flat, anamorphically painted scenes on the walls within an illusion of depth and reality. A modern viewer of the perspective box by Samuel de Hoogstraten that is now in the National Gallery, London, reveals the power of the illusion:

A Dutch domestic interior is painted on the sides and bottom of the box in such a way that when viewed through the peep-hole, the visual discrepancy between the size of the box's painted interior and the real world seems to disappear. A complete miniature environment is created, in which the spatial illusion is wholly convincing. 'In a perspective box,' wrote Hoogstraten, 'a figure no larger than a finger appears to be as large as life.'¹¹

This trompe l'oeil combines the trickery of perspective with a delight in miniature worlds like those literalized in the Travels. Hoogstraten's delight in his illusion, however, depends on the observer's awareness that the convincing miniature environment is just a clever illusion—that one persuasive point of view is at odds with another. Exactly such a comparison between perspectives explains the microscope's popularity as an instrument of diversion. Similarly, Swift's delight in being taken for a trompe-l 'oeil artist depends on a superior second perspective. Arbuthnot tells the story of a sailor who said he knew Gulliver, but the anecdote's playfulness fulness reminds us that the joke depends on separating delight in an illusion from gullible acceptance of the illusion as fact.¹²

Much of the comedy of the Travels depends on such second perspectives, although the narrator often remains unaware of them in his devotion to his chosen point of view. Queen's hand and monkey's paw mediate between observer and observed. Gulliver emphatically shoves his disproportionate thumb in front of the lens when, in England long after the event, he defends a Lilliputian woman from the charge of an affair with him: his ridiculous pride in being made a Nardac, the Lilliputian equivalent of a Duke, is sufficiently comic, but he could never be as deeply engaged in Lilliputian affairs as this. A second perspective reveals the illusion of the first, as it does more subtly when Gulliver adds a bit of lore about Lilliput's neighbouring kingdom while describing glimigrim, the Lilliputian wine that permits his heroism at the palace fire: 'the Blefuscudians call it Flunec, but ours is esteemed the better Sort' (p 56). That 'ours' presents the transparent recorder as a disproportionate Lilliputian, revealing the absurdity of the perspective he adopts: like the devils in book ÷ of Paradise Lost, what he sees he feels himself now changing. Similarly among the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver records his Master's disapproval of purely speculative knowledge, adding that his Master in this 'agreed entirely with the Sentiments of Socrates, as Plato delivers them; which I mention as the highest Honour I can do that Prince of Philosophers' (p 268). In other words, human knowledge is good, but 'ours' is esteemed the better sort. The observer forgets that he can praise the Houyhnhnms by comparing them to Socrates but cannot convincingly reverse that perspective. Resisting natural constraints, the observer's point of view drifts to a place that flatters his sense of power.

The second perspective that reveals the illusion of the first suggests not only the perspective box but those curious perspectives of self-conscious art that supply two views of a single scene, perspectives in which a second glance comments on something viewed at first from a more conventional point of view. In such art, a second glance could reveal Christ's face in the troubled lake at the centre of a print of the Fall, for example (Baltrušaitis, pp 25-7; Gilman, fig 11). The shift in the physical point of view imitates the shift in theological point of view that reads Genesis from the perspective of the New Testament. Gulliver's 'ours' exploits a shift in grammatical point of view for an analogous effect, while his over-serious defence of a Lilliputian woman's honour forces on the observant reader a second perspective more inclusive than the observing narrator's.

The observer is consequently most averse to those glasses that give him a second perspective on himself. Of the glasses in Brobdingnag that give him 'so despicable a Conceit' (p 147) of himself, Gulliver says that he usually avoided them because 'my Ideas were wholly taken up with what I saw on every Side of me; and I winked at my own Littleness, as People do at their own Faults' (p 148). Indeed, the purpose of telescope and microscope was, as it were, to wink at the littleness of the senses; hence celebration of their power and also Pope's late attempt, in An Essay on Man, to celebrate the great chain of being as a corrective to movement up and down the chain by augmented sight. Gulliver finds a double perspective on himself most offensive on his final voyage, where it pulls him down from observing rationality to brute animality:

When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form in a Lake or Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self; and could better endure the Sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own Person. (P 278)

He rejects the perspective that reveals his 'Person,' his body, because he is not implicated in the sight of a common Yahoo but is implicated in the sight that presents him as, at best, an uncommon Yahoo. That curious perspective yokes by violence together his ugly physical image and his more exalted conception of himself. Although he resists this conceit vigorously, it is inevitable from the moment he looks at a Yahoo and observe[s], in this abominable Animal, a perfect human Figure' (p 230). Indeed, this sudden recognition suggests those aggressive anamorphoses directed at the viewer, like the picture of 'We Three' cited by Feste in Twelfth Night.¹³ A German example of this popular type of picture (Baltrušaitis, pp 26-7) shows a distorted form at once as ass and a fool in cap and bells, the inscription including the viewer as a third. Yahoos are to the Houyhnhnms what asses are to us; in fact, the Houyhnhnms come to lament that reliance on Yahoo labour makes them neglect the more 'comely' race of asses (p 272). Gulliver is also a fool and once compares himself to 'a tame Jack Daw with Cap and Stockings' (p 265). His recognition of himself in the Yahoo mirrors the moments when the reader uncritically accepts Gulliver's point of view—includes himself in his 'ours'—before recognizing Gulliver's folly and so his own. Such a reader becomes the third party in the image when Gulliver sees humanity in a Yahoo.

The conflicting perspectives of Gulliver's final voyage suggest confusions of a kind for which Locke found an analogy in anamorphic painting. Locke tactfully describes a typical, safely classical example rather than a specific painting, although anamorphic paintings of Charles I were popular among English Royalists after 1649 (Baltrušaitis, p 28). Describing 'a sort of pictures, usually shown as surprising pieces of art, wherein the colours, as they are laid by the pencil on the table itself, … have no discernible order in their position,' Locke argues that the confusion results from the discrepancy between the apparently confused picture and the name attached to it. That name, after all, makes sense only from the second perspective. Lack of symmetry does not make an image confused:

That which makes it be thought confused is, the applying it to some name to which it does no more discernibly belong than to some other: v.g. when it is said to be the picture of a man, or Caesar, then any one with reason counts it confused; because it is not discernible in that state to belong more to the name man, or Caesar, than to the name baboon, or Pompey: which are supposed to stand for different ideas from those signified by man, or Caesar. But when a cylindrical mirror, placed right, had reduced those irregular lines on the table into their due order and proportion, then the confusion ceases, and the eye presently sees that it is a man, or Caesar; i.e. that it belongs to those names; and that it is sufficiently distinguishable from a baboon, or Pompey; i.e. from the ideas signified by those names. Just thus is it with our ideas, which are as it were the pictures of things. (Essay, II.xxix.8)¹⁴

Locke is more alert than Gulliver to the dangers of perception and the limitations of imposing a conventional point of view on a novel experience. When he elsewhere postulates 'the idea of the shape of an ass with reason,' for example, Locke simply asserts that this idea would be 'different from either that of man or beast, and be a species of animal between, or distinct from both' (Essay, IV.iv.13; cf III.vi.29). He thus avoids the extremes of literal-minded reliance on appearance and unstable point of view: he assimilates novelty to his usual point of view without denying its novelty.

When Gulliver asserts that the word 'Houyhnhnm … signifies a Horse' despite its more accurate etymological meaning, 'the Perfection of Nature' (p 235), and when he casually refers to men as Yahoos, his confusions take the form of those for which Locke found an analogy in anamorphosis. Unfortunately for simplicity, Locke's approach to the problem of the rational ass is too glib for the final book of the Travels. The Houyhnhnms are, after all, distorted horses and not simply distinct beings; they are horses with a faculty not usually associated with horses—reason, conventionally a human quality—greatly magnified, and animal qualities diminished; so Gulliver, most obviously in the first two books, is a man with one faculty—sight—greatly distorted by perspective glasses. Similarly, Yahoos are men with reason and affection greatly diminished—the observer's body with the observing mind departed for good, as Gulliver would like his mind to do. Observing as a Houyhnhnm, Gulliver forgets to observe the Houyhnhnms. The complementary points of view in Swift's curious perspective are so close together that the result seems blurred rather than simply puzzling. Like the ambiguous eye itself, the Houyhnhnms are borderline creatures, between man and animal, much as the Yahoos, by virtue of their shape, are also at a border between human and animal. Alternatively, these creatures embody diverse perspectives on man, one viewing him (inadequately) as a rational animal and the other (also inadequately) viewing him as a particularly perverse animal, with Gulliver desperately stationed between these perspectives—himself a borderline figure. Both views are sufficiently eccentric, off centre, to cause a distortion very like anamorphosis.

The observer's point of view is the source of this dilemma. Like the resolutely unironic prose espoused by the Royal Society, it asserts a single, 'clear' point of view, a monocular gaze appropriate to the perspective glass or linear perspective. The distortions of the Travels resemble those of self-conscious perspective painting because they—and science—share the same assumptions. Gulliver's final confusions demand not a mirror but binocular vision, an ability to see both man and Yahoo, or Houyhnhnm and Yahoo, in the same image. The Yahoos perhaps have the place in the final book that the anamorphic skull has in The Ambassadors or that an undistorted skull has at the centre of a mirror anamorphosis of Charles I (Baltrušaitis, p 107). They remind man of his animality much as the more conventional skull reminds him of his mortality. The trick Gulliver seems incapable of, because he is too much an observer, is seeing, juxtaposed, both animal and man. His relentlessly single vision, fostered by his reliance on perspective glasses, views Socrates as a member of a different species and himself as a Houyhnhnm. This is all the stranger as the Houyhnhnms embody recognizable human ideals, notably friendship to one's species. In effect, they represent a more traditional point of view than Gulliver, who is blinded by the sense impressions they share with horses. He abandons his species for theirs, as he thinks, but merely affects a whinny in his speech and a trot in his gait (pp 278-9). When he comes to prefer his groom to other Yahoos because of his smell, we recognize that he has abandoned a stable point of view for the point of view of the stable. Because he cannot stand back from the convincing illusion in the perspective box, he cannot see its ludicrously disproportionate container. The final intensity of his vision is analogous to the startling three-dimensionality of rigorous perspective painting, which distorts objects in the interest of a convincing illusion from a fixed point of view.

The extreme development of this detachment of point of view from place of observation is the mind-body dualism of contemporary thought, which so often finds concrete expression in Swift's poetry and prose. Gulliver hates his family, for example, because they force him to consider that he has become a parent of Yahoos 'by copulating with one of the Yahoo-Species'; they consequently fill him with 'the utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror' (p 289). His shame and horror spring from the forced realization of his physical kinship with 'Yahoos' rather than 'Houyhnhnms'; his confusion springs from the discrepancy between the label he would apply to himself and the evidence of the senses that confronts him. The resulting self-loathing, loathing of the self that appears in the glass in contrast to the self that looks through a glass, is the misanthropy resulting from the observer's detachment from his kind. Trying to see as a Houyhnhnm, Gulliver simply worships the idol of a different tribe.

When Gulliver rejects his romantic view of the fair skin of English ladies for the microscope's vision of mottled physicality, he plunges from the ideal into the gross, as he does more complexly when he rejects a human view for a Houyhnhnm view. His fall recalls that in what seems to be one of Swift's favourite stories—that of the philosopher who fell into a ditch while contemplating the stars. That fall, which supplies the witty conclusion to The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, is repeated by Strephon in 'The Lady's Dressing Room.' Strephon's prying gaze displaces an image of the 'Goddess' for one much filthier, but the poet asserts the need for a double perspective, wishing that Strephon could delight to see 'Such Order from Confusion sprung, / Such gaudy Tulips rais'd from Dung.'¹⁵ Even the Houyhnhnms, who are too sexually moderate for either of these extremes, celebrate healthy physicality in their rather Pindaric poetry on the winners of athletic competitions. They also devote poetry to 'exalted notions of Friendship and Benevolence' (p 274), poetry which suggests Swift's tolerant assessment of the Platonism of Charles I's court:

… although we are apt to ridicule the sublime Platonic Nations they had, or personated, in Love and Friendship, I conceive their Refinements were grounded upon Reason, and that a little Grain of the Romance is no ill Ingredient to preserve and exalt the Dignity of human Nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into every Thing that is sordid, vicious and low. (Writings, IV, 95)¹⁶

One need not choose between idealizing romance and Hobbes's state of nature: the rosy perspective of romance complements the filthy perspective of the prying gaze and the magnifying glass. Swift's metaphor for idealism is here the salt that preserves corruptible flesh, a minor theme of the Travels,¹⁷ but his 'had, or personated' indicates a saving irony based on complementary visions from extreme points of view, an irony that need not take one point of view too literally. Accepting the value even of illusion, the binocular view can avoid not only extreme eccentricity but also the blinkered gaze of the hack who sees only the middle road and so imitates respectably the dangers of the single point of view.

Such a composite point of view may be superior to a single view, but a mind can readily lose its bearings in the constant, dizzying shift from one point of view to another. That may be why a final glass suggests an appeal to a traditional point of view. One of Gulliver's last exercises is 'to behold [his] Figure often in a Glass, and thus if possible habituate [him] self by Time to tolerate the Sight of a human Creature' (p 295). Gulliver stops short of identifying himself with what he observes in this glass and in doing so recalls a biblical glass:

For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. (James 1:23-4)

This echo appeals beyond Gulliver's eccentric point of view to a snared, Christian point of view, at least for readers who share that point of view. Now a point of view detached from its moorings, Gulliver neglects St James's admonition to remember his natural face in the glass: having heard the word of friendship to his species, he retreats to misanthropy by denying the face that identifies that species. Indeed, given the emphasis of the final voyage on friendship and Gulliver's rejection of it, the Travels may recall Bacon's allegorical reading of St James in the essay on friendship (Bacon, pp 80-1), which suggests that a friend is such a glass to correct eccentricity. Thus the Travels allows the dizzy reader to appeal beyond his disorientation to a stable point of view.

However, Swift is Hobbesian enough to know very well that social acceptance of a shared point of view depends in part on the vagaries of temporal authority: the shared, Christian point of view is not universally accepted in Swift's form, and even the established church he represents could be displaced by the arbitrary whim of government (Writings, II, 74-5). That, presumably, is why he gives the wise King of Brobdingnag his own views on the need to stifle eccentric opinions (p 131; cf Writings, IX, 261). His very formulation, however, stresses the existence of other, potentially attractive, points of view into which one can readily slide. There is no intrinsically authoritative or logically necessary point of view to which others can be referred: elsewhere we may see face to face, but here we see through a glass anamorphically. Of course, Swift did have fixed beliefs and so did want to fix things—the English language through an academy, the movements of beggars by issuing badges—but when he expresses these beliefs seriously from a fixed point of view, he risks sounding like the fixed, blinkered narrators he elsewhere satirizes. The alternative to such fixity is a constant shifting of point of view—irony rather than the plain style of the Royal Society. Retreating to a fixed point of view, the reader abandons the experience of the Travels, the participation in various points of view that is the source of its unsettling irony. The multiple vision of the Travels is a consequence of its central metaphor and satiric target—the observer's point of view, which makes satire possible while demonstrating that there is no escape from differences of point of view and the appearances that trick the eye.

Notes

¹Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed G.B. Hill, rev L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon 1934-50), II, 319; however, in 'Vexations and Diversions: Three Problems in Gulliver's Travels,'MP, 75 (1978), 351-2, Frank Brady notes the inconsistency of the proportions within books, arguing that Swift called attention to it. On science, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Science and Imagination (1956; Hamden, Conn: Archon 1976), and David Renaker, 'Swift's Laputians as a Caricature of the Cartesians,' PMLA, 94 (1979), 936-44; Nicolson, p 198, relates the perspectives of the Travels to the perspective glass. In chapter 2 of Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969), Denis Donoghue explores the shifting perspectives of the Travels, although less literally than I attempt to do here; drawing on The Gutenberg Galaxy, he anticipates the more detailed work on anamorphosis and conceit by Ernest B. Gilman (see n 7, below).

² With Burton—Anatomy, ed H. Jackson (London: Dent; New York: Dutton 1932), II, 96—compare V. Ronchi on this initial scepticism in The Nature of Light, trans V. Barocas (London: Heinemann 1970), p 95. A.C. Crombie surveys investigations of sight in 'The Mechanist Hypothesis and the Scientific Study of Vision,' in Historical Aspects of Microscopy, ed S. Bradbury and G. L'E. Turner (Cambridge: W. Heffer for the Royal Microscopical Society 1967), pp 3-112; see pp 52-3 for Kepler. On scientific optimism about primary qualities and philosophical scepticism about secondary qualities, see Margaret J. Osier, 'Certainty, Skepticism, and Scientific Optimism: The Roots of Eighteenth-Century Attitudes toward Scientific Knowledge,' in Probability, Time, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed Paula R. Backscheider (New York: AMS 1979), pp 3-28.

³The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed Herbert Davis and others, 14 vols (Oxford: Blackwell 1939-68), XI, 248; hereafter cited parenthetically as Writings with volume and page except that the Travels (volume XI) is cited by page only.

⁴ Francis Bacon, Essays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis, and Other Pieces, ed R.F. Jones (New York: Odyssey 1937), p 258; on Bacon in the Travels, see Dennis Todd, 'Laputa, the Whore of Babylon, and the Idols of Science,' SP, 75 (1978), 93-120. S. Bradbury discusses the limitations of period glasses in 'The Quality of the Image Produced by the Compound Microscope: 1700-1840,' in Bradbury and Turner, pp 151-73, esp fig 5.

⁵The Spectator, ed Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon 1965), III, 544; on vision and space, see William M. Ivins, Jr, On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: Da Capo Press 1973), pp 7-13.

⁶ Claudio Guillén, Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971), pp 291-3; on artists' glasses, see Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650 (New York and London: Garland 1977).

⁷ Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press 1978); his reservation about the eighteenth century appears on pp 235-7. For comment on anamorphosis and, especially, illustrations, I cite the following: Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans W.J. Strachan (New York: Abrams 1977), and Fred Leeman, Hidden Images (New York: Abrams 1976).

⁸ Robert Hooke, Philosophical Experiments and Observations (1726; rpt London: Frank Cass 1967), p 261; S. Bradbury, The Evolution of the Microscope (Oxford: Pergamon 1967), p 105; and Journal to Stella, ed Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon 1948), I, 97, with which compare Nicolson, pp 182-93, on the comic tradition of the female virtuoso. On Gulliver's background, see Edward A. Block, 'Lemuel Gulliver: Middle-class Englishman,' MLN, 68 (1953), 474-77.

⁹ Pat Rogers, 'Gulliver's Glasses,' in The Art of Jonathan Swift, ed Clive T. Probyn (London: Vision 1978), p 183; René Descartes, Discourse on Method; Optics; Geometry; and Meteorology, trans Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis, New York and Kansas City: Bobbs-Merrill 1965), p 65.

¹⁰ Walter Ong, 'Swift on the Mind: Satire in a Closed Field,' in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press 1971), pp 207-8; he sees Swift as a spectator or, in my terms, observer.

¹¹Art in Seventeenth Century Holland (London: National Gallery 1976); I am grateful to Dr Robert Seiler for this reference. See also Leeman, pp 82-3 and pp 67-74.

¹²Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed Harold Williams, III (Oxford: Clarendon 1963), 180.

¹³ Act II, scene iii; annotated editions gloss the passage and Gilman, pp 129-50, reads the play in terms of perspectives, citing this scene on pp 143-34.

¹⁴An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols (1894; New York: Dover 1959); cited by book, chapter, and paragraph as Essay.

¹⁵Poetical Works, ed Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press 1967), p 480 (lines 141-2).

¹⁶ On Swift and Plato's Republic, see John F. Reichert, 'Plato, Swift, and the Houyhnhnms,' PQ, 47 (1968), 179-92; for the debate on Swift's relation to ideal societies, especially More's Utopia, see Eugene R. Hammond, 'Nature-Reason-Justice in Utopia and Gulliver's Travels,' SEL, 22 (1982), 445-68, which fully notes earlier contributions, and Jenny Mezciems, 'Utopia and "the Thing which is not": More, Swift, and Other Lying Idealists,' UTQ, 52(1982), 40-62.

¹⁷ See P. Brückmann, 'Gulliver, Cum Grano Salis,' Satire Newsletter, 1 (1963), 5-11.