* * * * *
In presenting to the public so complete an edition of the works of De
Foe, the publishers feel that they are engaged in a truly national
undertaking, interesting to all ranks of Englishmen, but peculiarly to
the middle classes. De Foe was essentially a practical author, not only
as regards his style, but his turn of mind, his choice of subjects, and
his mode of handling them. He wrote voluminously, upon all kinds of
subjects and for all ranks of men: and by some of his works he has
continued from that time to this, to please all classes and ages of
people in all the countries of Europe. For many years he took an active
part in the political controversies of that troubled time, which were so
much embittered by the factious excitement arising from the expulsion of
the Stuart dynasty, and placing William III. on the throne; and during
the long period of his life in which he engaged in political warfare, he
consistently and constantly maintained the principles of the revolution.
Many of his pamphlets being directed to passing topics have ceased to
possess that general and enduring interest which attaches to his other
works, but they are full of manly sentiments, expressed in a plain,
racy, English style, and well deserve the attentive perusal of all who
may wish thoroughly to understand that period of our history which
elapsed between the accession of William III. and the death of queen
Anne. His History of the Union is a standard work, and peculiarly
valuable as the production of a man who took an active part in the great
national event which it commemorates.
Essentially practical, as we have observed, in his mind, De Foe was ever
anxious to give useful instructions to his countrymen, for the
regulation of their conduct in their homes and their pursuits in life,
and embodied the results of an experienced and sagacious mind in the
Family Instructor, the Religious Courtship, and the Complete English
Tradesman. This last work is one which no young man entering into
business should be without. It is an invaluable manual, full of the
lessons of instructed prudence and good sense. Even his admirable
romances, too, are written in the same spirit. They were not composed in
his youth, in the heyday of his imagination, merely to gratify an idle
curiosity in the reader, but in the evening of his life when his
judgment was matured, and his experience at the full. Some of them were
written to show the bitter fruits of a life of vice; and others to
display in a vivid manner the importance of self-reliance, based on its
proper foundation, a sincere and Christian trust in Providence, under
all circumstances; with the inestimable value of a practical education,
and a thorough acquaintance with the arts of life, and what too many
persons are foolishly apt to despise as common things. That these were
the paramount objects De Foe had in view is evident not only from a
perusal of these valuable works, but from his own strongly asserted
statements in his prefaces both to Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe. In
the former, he says, "as the whole relation is usefully garbled of all
the levity and looseness that was in it, so it is applied with the
utmost care to virtuous and religious uses. None can, without being
guilty of manifest injustice, cast any reproach upon it, or upon our
design in publishing it. The advocates of the stage have in all ages
made this the great argument, to persuade people that their plays are
useful, and that they ought to be allowed in the most civilized, and in
the most religious government; namely, that they are applied to virtuous
purposes, and that, by the most lively representations, they fail not
to recommend virtue and generous principles, and to discourage and
expose all sorts of vice and corruption of manners; and were it true
that they did so, and that they constantly adhered to that rule, as the
test of their acting on the theatre, much might be said in their favour.
"Throughout the infinite variety of this book, this fundamental is most
strictly adhered to; there is not a wicked action in any part of it, but
it is first or last rendered unhappy or unfortunate; there is not a
superlative villain brought upon the stage, but he is either brought to
an unhappy end, or brought to be a penitent; there is not an ill thing
mentioned but it is condemned, even in the relation; nor a virtuous just
thing but it carries its praise along with it. What can more exactly
answer the rule laid down, to recommend even those representations of
things which have so many other just objections lying against them;
namely, of example of bad company, obscene language, and the like." And
in the preface to Robinson Crusoe he states his object to be "a
religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always
apply them, viz., to the instruction of others by this example, and to
justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our
circumstances, let them happen how they will."
The extreme popularity of this justly celebrated work proves the success
with which De Foe's labours were crowned. It is a book essentially
English, one of which an Englishman only would have conceived the
design, and which probably only an Englishman would have been able to
execute. The idea of an inhabitant of a solitary island, "far in the
melancholy main," subsisting in comparative comfort, might be expected
from one of that nautical people whose flag has not only 'braved a
thousand years the battle and the breeze,' but floated in triumph on
every sea, and waved in the winds of every clime. From such a people the
author might expect readers, and he has had them by thousands of every
class and of every age. The interest, however, of the story has not
confined the reputation and popularity of Robinson Crusoe to this
country, but has made it the universal favourite of Europe. The great
characteristics of this remarkable book are the vividness with which the
imaginary scenes are depicted, so as to make it impossible for the
reader to doubt their reality, and the just importance which is given to
the knowledge of what a great man called "doing common things in a
common way." For his power of imparting reality to his fictions De Foe
indeed stands highly distinguished among authors. Dr. Johnson mistook
the Life and Piracies of Captain Singleton, for a real history; and lord
Chatham fell into a similar mistake about the Memoirs of a Cavalier
during the civil wars in England. Dr. Mead quoted the History of the
Plague as an authentic detail by an eyewitness. And this quality marks
the different fictions, Moll Flanders, &c., which the publishers have
collected and reprinted in the present edition. These remarkable tales,
it is true, describe the career of loose and immoral characters, but
only in a way to disgust and deter. There is never any impropriety in
the descriptions of events, however degrading; the nature of De Foe was
abhorrent from indecency: but the heroes and heroines, who tell their
own stories, instead of dwelling with unction or satisfaction on their
past lives, only narrate particular incidents to express their sincere
disgust at them, and repentance for the future, and to warn others from
a life so fruitful of bitter results. Whilst De Foe was so cruelly and
unjustly imprisoned in Newgate for defending the Hanoverian succession!
(strange perversion of party spirit!) he employed his active mind in
acquiring information relative to its unhappy and guilty inmates; and
deeply convinced that mankind would be benefited by an exposure of the
sorrow and distresses that invariably accompany and follow a life of
crime, he embodied the results of his experience in fictions which we
agree with him in thinking to be as useful as they are vivid. Mr.
Alexander Chalmers, in his sketch of De Foe[106], says, "these lives are
too gross for improvement"; we cannot agree with this opinion of the
learned biographer. We hold, that novels, written like De Foe's, not on
the base principle of making a market by pandering to the worst passions
of the multitude, but where all indecency of expression or even of
suggestion, is carefully avoided, and vice is only described as
entailing misery, are instructive and beneficial to the people.
The style of De Foe is plain and homely, but expressive, direct, and
manly. It may be described as thoroughly English. It reflected the
character of his mind, and bespoke the man of firm resolve, and unshaken
integrity.
His principles were those of a sincere dissenter, of the whig school. He
joined most heartily in the Revolution of 1688, and continued a
steadfast friend to its principles and its hero. To William III. De Foe
was devotedly attached; and after the death of that great king,
vindicated his memory from the poisonous shafts of malice and slander.
He was the champion of civil and religious liberty, which he evidently
valued as the most precious of earthly things. Of that cause he
continued the unflinching advocate, and may be regarded as the most
efficient of that day which the press could boast. Through good report
and evil report, under the smiles of sovereigns or incarcerated in
Newgate, in prosperity or poverty, stung by the malevolence of faction,
or by filial ingratitude, in health or in sickness, in gladness or in
sorrow, De Foe held by the same sheet anchor of principle, remained
incorruptible in his love of liberty, and died as he had lived
throughout a long and eventful career, what he so justly felt himself, a
"True-born Englishman," and to use his own admirable expression in
Robinson Crusoe, a "broadhearted man." Honoured be his memory!
The first attempt to do justice to the merits of De Foe, and to rescue
the main events of his useful and laborious life from oblivion, was made
by the late Mr. George Chalmers, of the Board of Trade, whose biography
the present publishers now reprint. Since that period, gentlemen of
learning and ability have followed his steps. Dr. Towers, in the
Biographia Britannica, has sketched the life of De Foe, and Mr.
Alexander Chalmers, in the Biographical Dictionary, has also done
justice to his memory. Sir Walter Scott gave the aid of his great name
to the same object, by publishing an edition of De Foe. Mr. Walter
Wilson, of the Middle Temple, has published lately a long and detailed
Life of De Foe, which is by far the most complete yet compiled, and
should be consulted by every student desirous of becoming thoroughly
acquainted with the events of his chequered career. The present edition
of his works will supply a desideratum in English literature, and enable
his countrymen to possess, at a small cost, the various productions of
his versatile genius, and be instructed by one of the most deservedly
popular and really useful authors that has ever adorned the country.
We subjoin the able critiques on De Foe, by the late Charles Lamb, a man
exactly qualified to appreciate him, by a writer in the Retrospective
Review, and by sir Walter Scott. For the first, the world is indebted to
Mr. Wilson[107]. "It has happened not seldom that one work of some
author has so transcendently surpassed in execution the rest of his
compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal
upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It
has done wisely in this, not to suffer the contemplation of excellences
of a lower standard to abate or stand in the way of the pleasure it has
agreed to receive from the masterpiece.
"Again, it has happened, that from no inferior merit of execution in the
rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some
single work shall have been suffered to eclipse and cast into shade the
deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or
less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which
the beautiful and scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer (we are all
such upon earth!) addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the
bosoms of all, has silenced and made almost to be forgotten, the more
awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the Holy War made by Shaddai
upon Diabolus, of the same author, a romance less happy in its subject,
but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no instance
has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than
against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De Foe.
"While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and shall continue to do so, we trust,
while the world lasts, how few, comparatively, will bear to be told
that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same author, four of
them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less
felicitous choice of situation. Roxana, Singleton, Moll Flanders,
Colonel Jack--are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear
the veritable impress of De Foe. An unpractised midwife that would not
swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and age of every one of them! They
are, in their way, as full of incident, and some of them are every bit
as romantic; only they want the uninhabited island, and the charm that
has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.
"But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot
the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone? Singleton, on
the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the
creatures of any prowling wilderness; is he not alone, with the faces of
men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the mist
of educational and habitual ignorance; or a fellow heart that can
interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised
penitence? or when the boy, Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of the
heart, (the worst solitude,) goes to hide his ill-purchased treasure in
the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and miraculously finds
it again; whom hath he there to sympathise with him? or of what sort are
his associates?
"The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it, beyond that
of any novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true
stories. It is impossible to believe while you are reading them, that a
real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what really
happened to himself. To this, the extreme homeliness of their style
mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest
sense,--that which comes home to the reader. The narrators everywhere
are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they
tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,)
as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition,
and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or
have forgotten some things that had been told before. Hence the emphatic
sentences, marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and hence,
too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial
parenthesis, 'I say,' 'mind,' and the like, when the story-teller
repeats what to a practised reader might appear to have been
sufficiently insisted upon before. What pirates, what thieves, and what
harlots, are the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of De Foe? We would
not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives
of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less
seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission,
or the penitence more earnest or bleeding, or the intervening flashes of
religious visitation, upon the rude and uninstructed soul, more
meltingly or fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the
tenderness of Bunyan; while the lively pictures and incidents in them,
as in Hogarth, or in Fielding, tend to diminish that fastidiousness to
the concerns and pursuits of common life, which an unrestrained passion
for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing."
The writer in the Retrospective Review observes: "We avail ourselves
with some satisfaction of an opportunity of introducing to our readers
an old and valued acquaintance, as one whom they may have had the
misfortune to lose sight of, amidst the perplexities of life and the
competition of more obtrusive candidates for their notice. For our own
part, surrounded as we are by the bustle and cares of middle age, the
mere mention of our author's name falls upon us as cool and refreshing
as a drop of rain in the hot and parched midday; for it never fails to
bring along with it the recollection of the morning of our life, those
green and pleasant years, when the solitary inhabitant of the desert
island was perpetually mingling with the day-dreams of our imagination.
"After a vain attempt to apply to De Foe those laws of criticism which
hold in ordinary cases, we are compelled to regard him as a phenomenon,
and to consider his genius as something rare and curious, which it is
impossible to assign to any class whatever. Throughout the ample stores
of fiction, in which our literature abounds more than that of any other
people, there are no works which at all resemble his, either in the
design or execution. Without any precursor in the strange and unwonted
path he chose, and without a follower, he spun his web of coarse but
original materials, which no mortal had ever thought of using before;
and when he had done it, seems as though he had snapped the thread, and
conveyed it beyond the reach of imitation. To have a numerous train of
followers is usually considered as adding to the reputation of the
writer; we deem it a circumstance of peculiar honour to De Foe that he
had none; for, in general, they are the faults of a great author, the
parts where he exaggerates truth, or deviates from propriety, that
become the prey of the imitator. Whenever he has stolen a 'grace beyond
the reach of art,' whenever the vigour and freshness of nature are
apparent, there he is inaccessible to imitation. The fugitive charms
which are thus imparted, the volatile and subtle spirit which gives life
and animation to the work, baffle and elude the grasp of mere imitative
genius. In the fictions of De Foe we meet with nothing that is
artificial, or that does not breathe the breath of life. The ingenuity
which could counterfeit works of a more elaborate kind, and much more
highly as well as curiously wrought, could make nothing of a simplicity
so naked, and a manner so perfectly natural. The most consummate art was
unable to follow where no vestiges of art were to be seen, for either
none has been employed, or its traces are concealed as carefully as the
Indian hides his footsteps from the observation of his pursuers; since
to the critical eye, nothing is visible but the easy unconstraint of
nature, and the fearlessness of truth. Besides, it must be allowed, that
the temptation to imitate was as small as the difficulties were many and
great; for whilst he transcribed from the volume of life with a fidelity
and closeness that have never been equalled, with a singularly mortified
taste, he chose the plainest and least inviting pages of the whole book.
Those who would imitate De Foe must copy from nature herself; and
instead of dressing her out to advantage, content themselves with
delineating some of her simplest and homeliest features. His language is
always that of the plain and unlettered person he professes himself;
homely in phraseology, in expression rude and inartificial; yet like
that of one who has received a distinct impression of objects which he
has seen, it is often forcible, happy, and strongly descriptive.
Generally speaking, in other fictitious narratives, a tendency to
moralise out of reason or in a vein too elevated for the character
assumed, or a continued effort to be uniformly wise, or elaborately
witty, is almost sure to unmask the impostor, and expose the dreaming
pedant at his desk; or, if these characteristic marks be wanting, either
the narrative is inconsistent with itself, or it contradicts some known
and established fact, or there is some anachronism, or other overt act
against truth is committed, which critical sagacity seldom fails to
detect and punish. But our author is never caught tripping in this way;
he moralises to be sure, as much or more than most writers, but then his
reflections are always in the right vein; he never steps from behind the
curtain to figure away himself upon the stage. Either a vigilance that
was perpetually on the watch preserved him from error, or he went right
by mere instinct; or he so identified himself with his imaginary hero
that he became in fancy the very individual he was creating, and was
therefore necessarily always in character. But whatever vigilance he
used, he has always the art to appear perfectly unconcerned; there is
none of the constraint that usually accompanies a painful effort to
support imposture; his hero is not stiff and awkward like a puppet,
which has no voluntary motion, but moves freely and carelessly along the
stage; talks to us in an honest, open, confidential sort of way; lays
his inmost thoughts and feelings open before us, as before a confessor,
without caution and subterfuge; and by never asking our belief, never
seeming conscious of a possibility of its being denied, fairly compels
us to grant it.
"The grand secret of his art, however, if art it can be called, and were
not rather an instinct, consists doubtless in the astonishing minuteness
of the details, and the circumstantial particularity with which
everything is laid before us. It is by this, perhaps more than anything
else, that fictitious narratives are distinguishable from the genuine
memoirs of those who have been eyewitnesses of what they relate. The
parts in the one case may be as probable as in the other, the
descriptions as vivid and striking, the style as natural and
unconstrained; still there is an indefinable something which seems to be
wanting to the former, though we may not have remarked its presence in
the latter. Some unimportant particular, some minute circumstances,
which none but he who had seen it with his own eyes would have thought
of remarking, will always serve, like the scarcely discernible lines on
a genuine note, to distinguish between the true and the counterfeit. The
eye of the imagination, however strong and piercing, cannot always
pervade the whole scene, and see everything distinctly; the more
prominent features, indeed, it may develope with the clearness and
accuracy of an almost unclouded vision, but all besides is either
obscured with mist, or lost in impenetrable shade; and he who paints
from the ideal must consequently either leave these parts unfinished, or
spread his colours at random. It is the singular merit of De Foe to have
overcome this difficulty, and to have communicated to his fictitious
narratives every characteristic mark by which we distinguish between
real and pretended adventures. The whole scene lay expanded before him
in the fulness of light and life, and, down to the minutest particular,
everything is delineated with truth and accuracy. It is not necessary
that we should have the light fall advantageously, or wink with our
eyes, in order to make the delusion complete, by hiding the defects and
softening down the harsh lines of the representation; the most
penetrating gaze, aided by the strongest light, cannot detect the
imposition, or distinguish between the shade and the substance. Writers
of fiction may, in general, be said rather to shadow forth than fully to
delineate their visions, either because they flit away too early, or are
never seen with sufficient distinctness; like the first discoverers of
countries, they trace out a few promontories on their chart, and give a
faint outline of something indistinctly seen. In the solitude of his
closet, De Foe could travel round the world in idea, seeing everything
with the distinctness of natural vision, and noting everything with the
minuteness of the most accurate observer. His chart presents us not
merely with the bold headland, shooting forth into the deep, or the
clearly defined mountain that rises into middle air behind; we have the
whole coast fully and fairly traced out, with the soundings of every
bay, the direction of every current, and the quarter of every wind that
blows."
Sir Walter Scott says, "The fertility of De Foe was astonishing. He
wrote on all occasions and on all subjects, and seemingly had little
time for preparation on the subject in hand, but treated it from the
stores which his memory retained of early reading, and such hints as he
caught up in society, not one of which seems to have been lost upon him.
His language is genuine English, often simple, even unto vulgarity, but
always so distinctly impressive, that its very vulgarity has an efficacy
in giving an air of truth or probability to the facts or sentiments it
conveys. Exclusive of politics, De Foe's studies led chiefly to those
popular narratives which are the amusement of children and the lower
classes; those accounts of travellers who have visited remote countries;
of voyagers who have made discoveries of new lands and strange nations;
of pirates and buccaneers who have acquired great wealth by their
desperate adventures on the ocean. There is reason to believe, from a
passage in his Review, that he was acquainted with Dampier, a mariner,
whose scientific skill in his profession, and power of literary
composition were at that time rarely found in that profession,
especially among those rough sons of the ocean who acknowledged no peace
beyond the line, and had as natural an enmity to a South American
Spaniard as a greyhound to a hare, and who, though distinguished by the
somewhat milder term of buccaneer, were little better than absolute
pirates. The English government, it is well known, were not, however,
very active in destroying this class of adventurers, while they confined
their depredations to the Dutch and Spaniards, and indeed seldom
disturbed them if they returned from the roving life and sat down to
enjoy their ill-gotten gains. The courage of these men, the wonderful
risks they incurred, their hairbreadth escapes, the romantic countries
through which they travelled, seemed to have had infinite charms for De
Foe. All his works on this topic are entertaining in the highest degree,
and remarkable for the accuracy with which he personates the character
of a buccaneering adventurer. De Foe's general acquaintance with
nautical affairs has not been doubted, as he is said never to misapply
the various sea phrases, or display an ignorance unbecoming the
character under which he wrote. He appears also to have been familiar
with foreign countries, their produce, their manners, and government,
and whatever rendered it easy or difficult to enter into trade with
them. We may therefore conclude that Purchas's Pilgrims, Hakluyt's
Voyages, and the other ancient authorities, had been curiously examined
by him, as well as those of his friend Dampier, of Wafer, and others,
who had been in the South Seas, whether as privateers, or, as it was
then called, 'upon the account.'
"Shylock observes, that there are land thieves and water thieves; and as
De Foe was familiar with the latter, so he was not without some
knowledge of the practices and devices of the former. We are afraid we
must impute to his long imprisonment the opportunity of becoming
acquainted with the secrets of thieves and mendicants, their acts of
plunder, concealment, and escape. But whatever way he acquired his
knowledge of low life, De Foe certainly possessed it in the most
extensive sense, and applied it in the composition of several works of
fiction in the style termed by the Spaniards _Gusto Picaresco_, of which
no man was ever a greater master. This class of fictitious narration may
be termed the Romance of Roguery, the subjects being the adventures of
thieves, rogues, vagabonds, swindlers, viragoes, and courtezans. The
strange and blackguard scenes which De Foe describes, are fit to be
compared to the Gipsy Boys of Murillo, which are so justly admired as
being, in truth of conception and spirit of execution, the very
_chef-d'[oe]uvre_ of art, however low and loathsome the originals from
which they were taken.
"A third species of composition, to which the author's active and
vigorous genius was peculiarly adapted, was the account of great
national convulsions, whether by war, or by the pestilence, or the
tempest. These are tales which are sure when even moderately well told,
to arrest the attention, and which, narrated with that impression of
reality which De Foe knew so well how to convey, make the hair bristle
and the skin creep. In this manner he has written the Memoirs of a
Cavalier, which have been often read and quoted as the real production
of a real personage. Born himself almost immediately after the
Restoration, De Foe must have known many of those who had been engaged
in the civil turmoils of 1642-6, to which the period of these memoirs
refers. He must have lived among them at the age when boys, such as we
conceive De Foe must necessarily have been, cling to the knees of those
who can tell them of the darings, the dangers of their youth, at a
period when their own passions and views of pressing forward in life
have not begun to operate upon their minds, and while they are still
pleased to listen to the adventures which others have encountered on
that stage which they themselves have not yet entered upon. The Memoirs
of a Cavalier have certainly been enriched by some such anecdotes as
were likely to fire De Foe's active and powerful imagination, and hint
to him in what colours the subject ought to be treated. The contrast,
for instance, between the soldiers of the celebrated Tilly and those of
the illustrious Gustavus Adolphus, almost seems too minutely drawn to
have been executed from anything short of oracular testimony. But De
Foe's genius has shown, in this and other instances, how completely he
could assume the character he describes.
"Another species of composition, for which this multifarious author
showed a strong predilection, was that upon, theurgy, magic,
ghost-seeing, witchcraft, and the occult sciences. De Foe dwells on such
subjects with so much unction as to leave little doubt that he was to a
certain point a believer in something resembling an immediate
communication between the inhabitants of this world and of that which we
shall in future inhabit. He is particularly strong on the subject of
secret forebodings, mysterious impressions, bodements of good or evil,
which arise in our own mind, but which yet seem impressed there by some
external agent, and not to arise from the course of our natural
reflections. * * * The general charm attached to the romances of De Foe
is chiefly to be ascribed to the unequalled dexterity with which he has
given an appearance of REALITY to the incidents which he narrates. Even
De Foe's deficiencies in style, his homeliness of language, his
rusticity of thought, expressive of what is called the Crassa Minerva,
seem to claim credit for him as one who speaks the truth, the rather
that we suppose he wants the skill to conceal or disguise it. It is
greatly to be doubted whether De Foe could have changed his colloquial,
circuitous, and periphrastic style for any other, more coarse or more
elegant. We have little doubt it was connected with his nature, and the
particular turn of his thoughts and ordinary expressions, and that he
did not succeed so much by writing in an assumed manner, as by giving
full scope to his own. The air of writing with all the plausibility of
truth must, in almost every case, have its own peculiar value; as we
admire the paintings of some Flemish artists, where though the subjects
drawn are mean and disagreeable, and such as in nature we would not wish
to study or look close upon, yet the skill with which they are
represented by the painter gives an interest to the imitation upon
canvass which the original entirely wants. But, on the other hand, when
the power of exact and circumstantial delineation is applied to objects
which we are anxiously desirous to see in their proper shape and
colours, we have a double source of pleasure, both in the art of the
painter, and in the interest which we take in the subject represented.
Thus the style of probability with which De Foe invested his narrative
was perhaps ill-bestowed, or rather wasted, upon some of the works which
he thought proper to produce; but, on the other hand, the same talent
throws an air of truth about the delightful history of Robinson Crusoe,
which we never could have believed it possible to have united with so
extraordinary a situation as is assigned to the hero. All the usual
scaffolding and machinery employed in composing fictitious history are
carefully discarded. The early incidents of the tale, which in ordinary
works of invention are usually thrown out as pegs to hang the
conclusion upon, are in this work only touched, and suffered to drop out
of sight. Robinson, for example, never hears anything more of his elder
brother, who enters Lockhart's dragoons in the beginning of the work,
and who, in any common romance, would certainly have appeared before the
conclusion. We lose sight at once and for ever of the interesting Xury;
and the whole earlier adventures of our voyager vanish, not to be
recalled to our recollection by the subsequent course of the story. His
father, the good old merchant of Hull; all the other persons who have
been originally active in the drama, vanish from the scene, and appear
not again. This is not the case in the ordinary romance, where the
author, however luxuriant his invention, does not willingly quit
possession of the creatures of his imagination till they have rendered
him some services upon the scene; whereas in common life it rarely
happens that our early acquaintances exercise much influence upon the
fortunes of our future life."
* * * * *
The popularity of De Foe as a writer, added to the circumstance that
most of his writings appeared anonymously, have been the occasion of
many works being attributed to him with which he had no concern; some in
fact that are known as the works of other writers, and some that are
altogether different, not only from his style of writing, but opposed to
the principles which he advocated; and others which by no possibility he
could have written, inasmuch as they relate to events and persons
subsequent to his decease. In the following list care has been taken,
so far as possible, to include such works only as are undoubtedly from
his pen. It is proper to mention, however, that it does not include the
whole of what might by a minute and careful investigation be
satisfactorily identified to him, and that such examination would
probably displace some of those here inserted, and add others not herein
mentioned. In his Appeal to Honour and Justice, he alludes to some of
his early works, without giving the exact titles by which they can be
distinguished. The present list commences with the first work positively
known to be his production.
A LIST
OF
DE FOE'S WORKS,
ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY.
1. An Essay upon Projects. London: printed by R. R., for Thomas
Cockeril, at the corner of Warwick-lane, near Paternoster-row.
1697. 8vo. pp. 350.
2. An Enquiry into the occasional Conformity of Dissenters in Cases of
Preferment: with a Preface to the Lord Mayor, occasioned by his
carrying the Sword to a Conventicle. London: printed An. Dom. 1697.
4to. pp. 28.
3. Some Reflections on a Pamphlet lately published, entituled 'An
Argument, showing that a Standing Army is inconsistent with a free
Government, and absolutely destructive to the Constitution of the
English Monarchy. London: published for E. Whitlock, near
Stationers'-hall. 1697. 4to. pp. 28.
4. An Argument, showing that a Standing Army, with Consent of
Parliament, is not inconsistent with a free Government, and
absolutely destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy.
2. Chronic. ix. 25. London: printed for E. Whitlock, near
Stationers'-hall. 1698. 4to. pp. 26.