telling incidents. We are sometimes in doubt whether the particular
details which occur in other stories are not put in rather by good luck
than from a due perception of their value. He thus resembles a savage,
who is as much pleased with a glass bead as with a piece of gold; but in
the 'History of the Plague' every detail goes straight to the mark. At
one point he cannot help diverging into the story of three poor men who
escape into the fields, and giving us, with his usual relish, all their
rambling conversations by the way. For the most part, however, he is
less diffusive and more pointed than usual; the greatness of the
calamity seems to have given more intensity to his style; and it leaves
all the impression of a genuine narrative, told by one who has, as it
were, just escaped from the valley of the shadow of death, with the awe
still upon him, and every terrible sight and sound fresh in his memory.
The amazing truthfulness of the style is here in its proper place; we
wish to be brought as near as may be to the facts; we want good
realistic painting more than fine sentiment. The story reminds us of
certain ghastly photographs published during the American War, which had
been taken on the field of battle. They gave a more forcible impression
of the horrors of war than the most thrilling pictures drawn from the
fancy. In such cases we only wish the narrator to stand as much as
possible on one side, and just draw up a bit of the curtain which
conceals his gallery of horrors.
It is time, however, to say enough of 'Robinson Crusoe' to justify its
traditional superiority to De Foe's other writings. The charm, as some
critics say, is difficult to analyse; and I do not profess to
demonstrate mathematically that it must necessarily be, what it is, the
most fascinating boy's book ever written, and one which older critics
may study with delight. The most obvious advantage over the secondary
novels lies in the unique situation. Lamb, in the passage from which I
have quoted, gracefully evades this point. 'Are there no solitudes,' he
says, 'out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart, in the midst
of crowds, feel frightfully alone?' Singleton, he suggests, is alone
with pirates less merciful than the howling monsters, the devilish
serpents, and ill-gendered creatures of De Foe's deserts. Colonel Jack
is alone amidst the London thieves when he goes to bury his treasures in
the hollow tree. This is prettily said; but it suggests rather what
another writer might have made of De Foe's heroes, than what De Foe made
of them himself. Singleton, it is true, is alone amongst the pirates,
but he takes to them as naturally as a fish takes to the water, and,
indeed, finds them a good, honest, respectable, stupid sort of people.
They stick by him and he by them, and we are never made to feel the real
horrors of his position. Colonel Jack might, in other hands, have become
an Oliver Twist, less real perhaps than De Foe has made him, but
infinitely more pathetic. De Foe tells us of his unpleasant
sleeping-places; and his occasional fears of the gallows; but of the
supposed mental struggles, of the awful solitude of soul, we hear
nothing. How can we sympathise very deeply with a young gentleman whose
recollections run chiefly upon the exact numbers of shillings and pence
captured by himself and his pocket-picking 'pals'? Similarly Robinson
Crusoe dwells but little upon the horrors of his position, and when he
does is apt to get extremely prosy. We fancy that he could never have
been in want of a solid sermon on Sunday, however much he may have
missed the church-going bell. But in 'Robinson Crusoe,' as in the
'History of the Plague,' the story speaks for itself. To explain the
horrors of living among thieves, we must have some picture of internal
struggles, of a sense of honour opposed to temptation, and a pure mind
in danger of contamination. De Foe's extremely straightforward and
prosaic view of life prevents him from setting any such sentimental
trials before us; the lad avoids the gallows, and in time becomes the
honest master of a good plantation; and there's enough. But the horrors
of abandonment on a desert island can be appreciated by the simplest
sailor or schoolboy. The main thing is to bring out the situation
plainly and forcibly, to tell us of the difficulties of making pots and
pans, of catching goats and sowing corn, and of avoiding audacious
cannibals. This task De Foe performs with unequalled spirit and
vivacity. In his first discovery of a new art he shows the freshness so
often conspicuous in first novels. The scenery was just that which had
peculiar charms for his fancy; it was one of those half-true legends of
which he had heard strange stories from seafaring men, and possibly from
the acquaintances of his hero himself. He brings out the shrewd
vigorous character of the Englishman thrown upon his own resources with
evident enjoyment of his task. Indeed, De Foe tells us very emphatically
that in Robinson Crusoe he saw a kind of allegory of his own fate. He
had suffered from solitude of soul. Confinement in his prison is
represented in the book by confinement in an island; and even a
particular incident, here and there, such as the fright he receives one
night from something in his bed, 'was word for word a history of what
happened.' In other words, this novel too, like many of the best ever
written, has in it the autobiographical element which makes a man speak
from greater depths of feeling than in a purely imaginary story.
It would indeed be easy to show that the story, though in one sense
marvellously like truth, is singularly wanting as a psychological study.
Friday is no real savage, but a good English servant without plush. He
says 'muchee' and 'speakee,' but he becomes at once a civilised being,
and in his first conversation puzzles Crusoe terribly by that awkward
theological question, why God did not kill the devil--for
characteristically enough Crusoe's first lesson includes a little
instruction upon the enemy of mankind. He found, however, that it was
'not so easy to imprint right notions in Friday's mind about the devil,
as it was about the being of a God.' This is comparatively a trifle; but
Crusoe himself is all but impossible. Steele, indeed, gives an account
of Selkirk, from which he infers that 'this plain man's story is a
memorable example that he is happiest who confines his wants to natural
necessities;' but the facts do not warrant this pet doctrine of an
old-fashioned school. Selkirk's state of mind may be inferred from two
or three facts. He had almost forgotten to talk; he had learnt to catch
goats by hunting them on foot; and he had acquired the exceedingly
difficult art of making fire by rubbing two sticks. In other words, his
whole mind was absorbed in providing a few physical necessities, and he
was rapidly becoming a savage--for a man who can't speak and can make
fire is very near the Australian. We may infer, what is probable from
other cases, that a man living fifteen years by himself, like Crusoe,
would either go mad or sink into the semi-savage state. De Foe really
describes a man in prison, not in solitary confinement. We should not be
so pedantic as to call for accuracy in such matters; but the difference
between the fiction and what we believe would have been the reality is
significant. De Foe, even in 'Robinson Crusoe,' gives a very inadequate
picture of the mental torments to which his hero is exposed. He is
frightened by a parrot calling him by name, and by the strangely
picturesque incident of the footmark on the sand; but, on the whole, he
takes his imprisonment with preternatural stolidity. His stay on the
island produces the same state of mind as might be due to a dull Sunday
in Scotland. For this reason, the want of power in describing emotion as
compared with the amazing power of describing facts, 'Robinson Crusoe'
is a book for boys rather than men, and, as Lamb says, for the kitchen
rather than for higher circles. It falls short of any high intellectual
interest. When we leave the striking situation and get to the second
part, with the Spaniards and Will Atkins talking natural theology to his
wife, it sinks to the level of the secondary stories. But for people who
are not too proud to take a rather low order of amusement 'Robinson
Crusoe' will always be one of the most charming of books. We have the
romantic and adventurous incidents upon which the most unflinching
realism can be set to work without danger of vulgarity. Here is
precisely the story suited to De Foe's strength and weakness. He is
forced to be artistic in spite of himself. He cannot lose the thread of
the narrative and break it into disjointed fragments, for the limits of
the island confine him as well as his hero. He cannot tire us with
details, for all the details of such a story are interesting; it is made
up of petty incidents, as much as the life of a prisoner reduced to
taming flies, or making saws out of penknives. The island does as well
as the Bastille for making trifles valuable to the sufferer and to us.
The facts tell the story of themselves, without any demand for romantic
power to press them home to us; and the efforts to give an air of
authenticity to the story, which sometimes make us smile, and sometimes
rather bore us, in other novels are all to the purpose; for there is a
real point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in
giving us for the time an illusory belief in his reality. It is one of
the exceptional cases in which the poetical aspect of a position is
brought out best by the most prosaic accuracy of detail; and we imagine
that Robinson Crusoe's island, with all his small household torments,
will always be more impressive than the more gorgeously coloured island
of Enoch Arden. When we add that the whole book shows the freshness of a
writer employed on his first novel--though at the mature age of
fifty-eight; seeing in it an allegory of his own experience embodied in
the scenes which most interested his imagination, we see some reasons
why 'Robinson Crusoe' should hold a distinct rank by itself amongst his
works. As De Foe was a man of very powerful but very limited
imagination--able to see certain aspects of things with extraordinary
distinctness, but little able to rise above them--even his greatest book
shows his weakness, and scarcely satisfies a grown-up man with a taste
for high art. In revenge, it ought, according to Rousseau, to be for a
time the whole library of a boy, chiefly, it seems, to teach him that
the stock of an ironmonger is better than that of a jeweller. We may
agree in the conclusion without caring about the reason; and to have
pleased all the boys in Europe for near a hundred and fifty years is,
after all, a remarkable feat.
One remark must be added, which scarcely seems to have been sufficiently
noticed by Defoe's critics. He cannot be understood unless we remember
that he was primarily and essentially a journalist, and that even his
novels are part of his journalism. He was a pioneer in the art of
newspaper writing, and anticipated with singular acuteness many later
developments of his occupation. The nearest parallel to him is Cobbett,
who wrote still better English, though he could hardly have written a
'Robinson Crusoe.' Defoe, like Cobbett, was a sturdy middle-class
Englishman, and each was in his time the most effective advocate of the
political views of his class. De Foe represented the Whiggism, not of
the great 'junto' or aristocratic ring, but of the dissenters and
tradesmen whose prejudices the junto had to turn to account. He would
have stood by Chatham in the time of Wilkes and of the American War; he
would have demanded parliamentary reform in the time of Brougham and
Bentham, and he would have been a follower of the Manchester school in
the time of Bright and Cobden. We all know the type, and have made up
our minds as to its merits. When De Foe came to be a subject of
biography in this century, he was of course praised for his
enlightenment by men of congenial opinions. He was held up as a model
politician, not only for his creed but for his independence. The
revelations of his last biographer, Mr. Lee, showed unfortunately that
considerable deductions must be made from the independence. He was, as
we now know, in the pay of Government for many years, while boasting of
his perfect purity; he was transferred, like a mere dependent, from the
Whigs to the Tories and back again. In the reign of George I. he
consented to abandon his character in order to act as a spy upon unlucky
Jacobite colleagues. It is to the credit of Harley's acuteness that he
was the first English minister to make a systematic use of the press and
was the patron both of Swift and De Foe. But to use the press was then
to make a mere tool of the author. De Foe was a journalist, living, and
supporting a family, by his pen, in the days when a journalist had to
choose between the pillory and dependence. He soon had enough of the
pillory and preferred to do very dirty services for his employer. Other
journalists, I fear, since his day have consented to serve masters whom
in their hearts they disapproved. It may, I think, be fairly said on
behalf of De Foe that in the main he worked for causes of which he
really approved; that he never sacrificed the opinions to which he was
most deeply attached; that his morality was, at worst, above that of
many contemporary politicians; and that, in short, he had a conscience,
though he could not afford to obey it implicitly. He says himself, and I
think the statement has its pathetic side, that he made a kind of
compromise with that awkward instinct. He praised those acts only of the
Government which he really approved, though he could not afford to
denounce those from which he differed. Undoubtedly, as many respectable
moralists have told us, the man who endeavours to draw such lines will
get into difficulties and probably emerge with a character not a little
soiled in the process. But after all as things go, it is something to
find that a journalist has really a conscience, even though his
conscience be a little too open to solid arguments. He was still capable
of blushing. Let us be thankful that in these days our journalists are
too high-minded to be ever required to blush. Here, however, I have only
to speak of the effect of De Foe's position upon his fictions. He had
early begun to try other than political modes of journalism. His account
of the great storm of 1703 was one of his first attempts as a reporter;
and it is characteristic that, as he was in prison at the time, he had
already to report things seen only by the eye of faith. He tried at an
early period to give variety to his 'Review' by some of the 'social'
articles which afterwards became the staple of the 'Tatler' and
'Spectator.' When, after the death of Queen Anne, there was a political
lull he struck out new paths. It was then that he wrote lives of
highwaymen and dissenting divines, and that he patched up any narratives
which he could get hold of, and gave them the shape of authentic
historical documents. He discovered the great art of interviewing, and
one of his performances might still pass for a masterpiece. Jack
Sheppard, when already in the cart beneath the gallows, gave a paper to
a bystander, of which the life published by De Foe on the following day
professed to be a reproduction. Nothing that could be turned into copy
for the newspaper or the sixpenny pamphlet of the day came amiss to this
forerunner of journalistic enterprise. This is the true explanation of
'Robinson Crusoe' and its successors. 'Robinson Crusoe,' in fact, is
simply an application on a larger scale of the device which he was
practising every day. It is purely and simply a masterly bit of
journalism. It affects to be a true story, as, of course, every story
in a newspaper affects to be true; though De Foe had made the not very
remote discovery that it is often easier to invent the facts than to
investigate them. He is simply a reporter _minus_ the veracity. Like any
other reporter, he assumes that the interest of his story depends
obviously and entirely upon its verisimilitude. He relates the
adventures of the genuine Alexander Selkirk, only elaborated into more
detail, just as a modern reporter might give us an account of Mr.
Stanley's African expedition if Mr. Stanley had been unable to do so for
himself. He is always in the attitude of mind of the newspaper
correspondent, who has been interviewing the hero of an interesting
story and ventures at most a little safe embroidery. This explains a
remark made by Dickens, who complained that the account of Friday's
death showed an 'utter want of tenderness and sentiment,' and says
somewhere that 'Robinson Crusoe' is the only great novel which never
moves either to laughter or to tears. The creator of Oliver Twist and
Little Nell was naturally scandalised by De Foe's dry and matter-of-fact
narrative. But De Foe had never approached the conception of his art
which afterwards became familiar. He had nothing to do with sentiment or
psychology; those elements of interest came in with Richardson and
Fielding; he was simply telling a true story and leaving his readers to
feel what they pleased. It never even occurred to him, more than it
occurs to the ordinary reporter, to analyse character or describe
scenery or work up sentiment. He was simply a narrator of plain facts.
He left poetry and reflection to Mr. Pope or Mr. Addison, as your
straightforward annalist in a newspaper has no thoughts of rivalling
Lord Tennyson or Mr. Froude. His narratives were fictitious only in the
sense that the facts did not happen; but that trifling circumstance was
to make no difference to the mode of writing them. The poetical element
would have been as much out of place as it would have been in a
merchant's ledger. He could not, indeed, help introducing a little
moralising, for he was a typical English middle-class dissenter. Some of
his simple-minded commentators have even given him credit, upon the
strength of such passages, for lofty moral purpose. They fancy that his
lives of criminals, real or imaginary, were intended to be tracts
showing that vice leads to the gallows. No doubt, De Foe had the same
kind of solid homespun morality as Hogarth, for example, which was not
in its way a bad thing. But one need not be very cynical to believe that
his real object in writing such books was to produce something that
would sell, and that in the main he was neither more nor less moral than
the last newspaper writer who has told us the story of a sensational
murder.
De Foe, therefore, may be said to have stumbled almost unconsciously
into novel-writing. He was merely aiming at true stories, which happened
not to be true. But accidentally, or rather unconsciously, he could not
help presenting us with a type of curious interest; for he necessarily
described himself and the readers whose tastes he understood and shared
so thoroughly. His statement that 'Robinson Crusoe' was a kind of
allegory was truer than he knew. In 'Robinson Crusoe' is De Foe, and
more than De Foe, for he is the typical Englishman of his time. He is
the broad-shouldered, beef-eating John Bull, who has been shouldering
his way through the world ever since. Drop him in a desert island, and
he is just as sturdy and self-composed as if he were in Cheapside.
Instead of shrieking or writing poetry, becoming a wild hunter or a
religious hermit, he calmly sets about building a house and making
pottery and laying out a farm. He does not accommodate himself to his
surroundings; they have got to accommodate themselves to him. He meets a
savage and at once annexes him, and preaches him such a sermon as he had
heard from the exemplary Dr. Doddridge. Cannibals come to make a meal of
him, and he calmly stamps them out with the means provided by
civilisation. Long years of solitude produce no sort of effect upon him
morally or mentally. He comes home as he went out, a solid keen
tradesman, having, somehow or other, plenty of money in his pockets, and
ready to undertake similar risks in the hope of making a little more. He
has taken his own atmosphere with him to the remotest quarters. Wherever
he has set down his solid foot, he has taken permanent possession of the
country. The ancient religions of the primæval East or the quaint
beliefs of savage tribes make no particular impression upon him, except
a passing spasm of disgust at anybody having different superstitions
from his own; and, being in the main a good-natured animal in a stolid
way of his own, he is able to make use even of popish priests if they
will help to found a new market for his commerce. The portrait is not
the less effective because the artist was so far from intending it that
he could not even conceive of anybody being differently constituted from
himself. It shows us all the more vividly what was the manner of man
represented by the stalwart Englishman of the day; what were the men who
were building up vast systems of commerce and manufacture; shoving their
intrusive persons into every quarter of the globe; evolving a great
empire out of a few factories in the East; winning the American
continent for the dominant English race; sweeping up Australia by the
way as a convenient settlement for convicts; stamping firmly and
decisively on all toes that got in their way; blundering enormously and
preposterously, and yet always coming out steadily planted on their
feet; eating roast beef and plum-pudding; drinking rum in the tropics;
singing 'God Save the King' and intoning Watts's hymns under the nose of
ancient dynasties and prehistoric priesthoods; managing always to get
their own way, to force a reluctant world to take note of them as a
great if rather disagreeable fact, and making it probable that, in long
ages to come, the English of 'Robinson Crusoe' will be the native
language of inhabitants of every region under the sun.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Defoe may have had some materials for this story; but there seems to
be little doubt that it is substantially his own.
_RICHARDSON'S NOVELS_
The literary artifice, so often patronised by Lord Macaulay of
describing a character by a series of paradoxes, is of course, in one
sense, a mere artifice. It is easy enough to make a dark grey black and
a light grey white, and to bring the two into unnatural proximity. But
it rests also upon the principle which is more of a platitude than a
paradox, that our chief faults often lie close to our chief merits. The
greatest man is perhaps one who is so equably developed that he has the
strongest faculties in the most perfect equilibrium, and is apt to be
somewhat uninteresting to the rest of mankind. The man of lower eminence
has some one or more faculties developed out of all proportion to the
rest, with the natural result of occasionally overbalancing him.
Extraordinary memories with weak logical faculties, wonderful
imaginative sensibility with a complete absence of self-control, and
other defective conformations of mind, supply the raw materials for a
luminary of the second order, and imply a predisposition to certain
faults, which are natural complements to the conspicuous merits.