The very best First-Novel-To-Read in all fiction is “Robinson Crusoe.”
There is no dogmatism in the declaration; it is the announcement of a
fact as well ascertained as the accuracy of the multiplication table.
It is one of the delights of novel reading that you may have any opinion
you please and fire it off with confidence, without gainsay. Those who
differ with you merely have another opinion, which is not sacred and
cannot be proved any more than yours. All of the elements of supreme
test of imaginative interest are in “Robinson Crusoe.” Love is absent,
but that is not a test; love appeals to persons who cannot read or
write--it is universal, as hunger and thirst.
The book-reading boy is easily discovered; you always catch him reading
books. But the novel-reading boy has a system of his own, a sort of
instinctive way of getting the greatest excitement out of the story, the
very best run for his money. This sort of boy soon learns to sit with
his feet drawn up on the upper rung of a chair, so that from the knees
to the thighs there is a gentle declivity of about thirty degrees;
the knees are nicely separated that the book may lie on them without
holding. That involves one of the most cunning of psychological secrets;
because, if the boy is not a novel reader, he does not want the book to
lie open, since every time it closes he gains just that much relief
in finding the place again. The novel-reading boy knows the trick of
immortal wisdom; he can go through the old book cases and pick the
treasures of novels by the way they lie open; if he gets hold of a new
or especially fine edition of his father's he need not be told to wrench
it open in the middle and break the back of the binding--he does it
instinctively.
There are other symptoms of the born novel reader to be observed in him.
If he reads at night he is careful to so place his chair that the light
will fall on the page from a direction that will ultimately ruin the
eyes--but it does not interfere with the light. He humps himself over
the open volume and begins to display that unerring curvalinearity of
the spine that compels his mother to study braces and to fear that he
will develop consumption. Yet you can study the world's health records
and never find a line to prove that any man with “occupation or
profession--novel reading” is recorded as dying of consumption. The
humped-over attitude promotes compression of the lungs, telescoping of
the diaphragm, atrophy of the abdominal abracadabra and other
things (see Physiological Slush, p. 179, et seq.);
but--it--never--hurts--the--boy!
To a novel reading boy the position is one of instinct, like that of
the bicycle racer. His eyes are strained, his nerves and muscles at
tension--everything ready for excitement--and the book, lying open,
leaves his hands perfectly free to drum on the sides of the chair, slap
his legs and knees, fumble in his pockets or even scratch his head as
emotion or interest demand. Does anybody deny that the highest proof of
special genius is the possession of the instinct to adapt itself to the
matter in hand? Nothing more need be said.
* * * * *
Now, if you will observe carefully such a boy when he comes to a certain
point in “Robinson Crusoe” you may recognize the stroke of fate in his
destiny. If he's the right sort, he will read gayly along; he drums,
he slaps himself, he beats his breast, he scratches his head. Suddenly
there will come the shock. He is reading rapidly and gloriously.
He finds his knife in his pocket, as usual, and puts it back; the
top-string is there; he drums the devil's tattoo, he wets his finger
and smears the margin of the page as he whirls it over and then--he
finds--“The--Print--of--a--Man's--Naked--Foot--on--the--Shore!!!”
Oh, Crackey! At this tremendous moment the novel reader who has genius
drums no more. His hands have seized the upper edges of the muslin lids,
he presses the lower edges against his stomach, his back takes an
added intensity of hump, his eyes bulge, his heart thumps--he is
landed--landed!
Terror, surprise, sympathy, hope, skepticism, doubt--come all ye
trooping emotions to threaten or console; but an end has come to fairy
stories and wonder tales--Master Studious is in the awful presence of
Human Nature.
* * * * *
For many years I have believed that that
Print--of--a--Man's--Naked--Foot was set in italic type in all editions
of “Robinson Crusoe.” But a patient search of many editions has
convinced me that I must have been mistaken.
The passage comes sneaking along in the midst of a paragraph in common
Roman letters and by the living jingo! you discover it just as Mr.
Crusoe discovered the footprint itself!
No story ever written exhibits so profoundly either the perfect
design of supreme genius or the curious accidental result of slovenly
carelessness in a hack-writer. This is not said in any critical spirit,
because, Robinson Crusoe, in one sense, is above criticism, and
in another it permits the freest analysis without suffering in the
estimation of any reader.
But for Robinson Crusoe, De Foe would never have ranked above the level
of his time. It is customary for critics to speak in awe of the “Journal
of the Plague” and it is gravely recited that that book deceived the
great Dr. Meade. Dr. Meade must have been a poor doctor if De Foe's
accuracy of description of the symptoms and effects of disease is not
vastly superior to the detail he supplies as a sailor and solitaire upon
a desert island. I have never been able to finish the “Journal.”
The only books in which his descriptions smack of reality are “Moll
Flanders” and “Roxana,” which will barely stand reading these days.
In what may be called its literary manner, Robinson Crusoe is entirely
like the others. It convinces you by its own conviction of sincerity.
It is simple, wandering yet direct; there is no making of “points” or
moving to climaxes. De Foe did unquestionably possess the capacity to
put into his story the appearance of sincerity that persuades belief at
a glance. In that much he had the spark of genius; yet that same case
has not availed to make the “Journal” of the Plague anything more than
a curious and laborious conceit, while Robinson Crusoe stands among
the first books of the world--a marvelous gleam of living interest,
inextinguishably fresh and heartening to the imagination of every reader
who has sensibility two removes above a toad.
The question arises, then, is “Robinson Crusoe” the calculated triumph
of deliberate genius, or the accidental stroke of a hack who fell upon a
golden suggestion in the account of Alexander Selkirk and increased
its value ten thousand fold by an unintentional but rather perfect
marshaling of incidents in order, and by a slovenly ignorance of
character treatment that enhanced the interest to perfect intensity?
This question may be discussed without undervaluing the book, the
extraordinary merit of which is shown in the fact that, while its idea
has been paraphrased, it has never been equalled. The “Swiss Family
Robinson,” the “Schonberg-Cotta Family” for children are full of merit
and far better and more carefully written, but there are only the desert
island and the ingenious shifts introduced. Charles Reade in “Hard
Cash,” Mr. Mallock in his “Nineteenth Century Romance,” Clark Russel in
“Marooned,” and Mayne Reid, besides others, have used the same theater.
But only in that one great book is the theater used to display the
simple, yearning, natural, resolute, yet doubting, soul and heart of man
in profound solitude, awaiting in armed terror, but not without purpose,
the unknown and masked intentions of nature and savagery. It seems
to me--and I have been tied to Crusoe's chariot wheels for a dozen
readings, I suppose--that it is the pressing in upon your emotions of
the immensity of the great castaway's solitude, in which he appears like
some tremendous Job of abandonment, fighting an unseen world, which is
the innate note of its power.
* * * * *
The very moment Friday becomes a loyal subject, the suspense relaxes
into pleased interest, and after Friday's funny father and the Spaniard
and others appear it becomes a common book. As for the second part of
the adventures I do not believe any matured man ever read it a second
time unless for curious or literary purposes. If he did he must be one
of that curious but simple family that have read the second part of
“Faust,” “Paradise Regained,” and the “Odyssey,” and who now peruse
“Clarissa Harlowe” and go carefully over the catalogue of ships in
the “Iliad” as a preparation for enjoying the excitements of the city
directory.
Every particle of greatness in “Robinson Crusoe” is compressed within
two hundred pages, the other four hundred being about as mediocre trash
as you could purchase anywhere between cloth lids.
* * * * *
It is interesting to apply subjective analysis to Robinson Crusoe. The
book in its very greatness has turned more critical swans into geese
than almost any other. They have praised the marvelous ingenuity with
which De Foe described how the castaway overcame single-handed, the
deprivations of all civilized conveniences; they have marveled at the
simple method in which all his labors are marshaled so as to render his
conversion of the island into a home the type of industrial and even of
social progress and theory; they have rhapsodized over the perfection
of De Foe's style as a model of literary strength and artistic
verisemblance. Only a short time ago a mighty critic of a great
London paper said seriously that “Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver appeal
infinitely more to the literary reader than to the boy, who does
not want a classic but a book written by a contemporary.” What an
extraordinary boy that must be! It is probable that few boys care for
Gulliver beyond his adventures in Lilliput and Brobdignag, but they
devour that much, together with Robinson Crusoe, with just as much
avidity now as they did a century ago. Your clear-headed, healthy boy is
the first best critic of what constitutes the very liver and lights of
a novel. Nothing but the primitive problems of courage meeting peril,
virtue meeting vice, love, hatred, ambition for power and glory, will
go down with him. The grown man is more capable of dealing with social
subtleties and the problems of conscience, but those sorts of books do
not last unless they have also “action--action--action.”
Will the New Zealander, sitting amidst the prophetic ruins of St.
Paul's, invite his soul reading Robert Elsmere? Of course you can't say
what a New Zealander of that period might actually do; but what would
you think of him if you caught him at it? The greatest stories of the
world are the Bible stories, and I never saw a boy--intractable of
acquiring the Sunday-school habit though he may have been--who wouldn't
lay his savage head on his paws and quietly listen to the good old tales
of wonder out of that book of treasures.
* * * * *
So let us look into the interior of our faithful old friend, Robinson
Crusoe, and examine his composition as a literary whole. From the moment
that Crusoe is washed ashore on the island until after the release of
Friday's father and the Spaniard from the hands of the cannibals, there
is no book in print, perhaps, that can surpass it in interest and the
strained impression it makes upon the unsophisticated mind. It is
all comprised in about 200 pages, but to a boy to whom the world is
a theater of crowded action, to whom everything seems to have come
ready-made, to whom the necessity of obedience and accommodation to
others has been conveyed by constant friction--here he finds himself
for the first time face to face with the problem of solitude. He can
appreciate the danger from wild animals, genii, ghosts, battles, sieges
and sudden death, but in no other book before, did he ever come upon a
human being left solitary, with all these possible dangers to face.
The voyages on the raft, the house-building, contriving, fearing,
praying, arguing--all these are full of plaintive pathos and yet of
encouragement. He witnesses despair turned into comfortable resignation
as the result of industry. It has required about twelve years. Virtue is
apparently fattening upon its own reward, when--Smash! Bang!--our young
reader runs upon “the--print--of--a--man's--naked--foot!” and security
and happiness, like startled birds, are flown forever. For twelve more
years this new unseen terror hangs over the poor solitary. Then we
have Friday, the funny cannibals later and it is all over. But the vast
solitude of that poor castaway has entered the imagination of the youth
and dominates it.
These two hundred pages are crowded with suggestions that set a boy's
mind on fire, yet every page contains evidence of obvious slovenliness,
indolence and ignorance of human nature and common things, half of which
faults seem directly to contribute to the result, while the other half
are never noticed by the reader.
How many of you, who sniff at this, know Crusoe's real name? Yet it
stares right out of the very first paragraphs in the book--a clean,
perhaps accidental, proof of good scholarship, which De Foe possessed.
Crusoe tells us his father was a German from Bremen, who married an
Englishwoman, from whose family name of Robinson came the son's name
which was properly Robinson Kreutznaer. This latter name, he explains,
became corrupted in the common English speech into Crusoe. That is an
excellent touch. The German pronunciation of Kreutznaer would sound like
Krites-nare, and a mere dry scholar would have evolved Crysoe out of the
name. But the English-speaking people everywhere, until within the past
twenty years or so, have given the German “eu” the sound of “oo” or “u.”
Robinson's father therefore was called Crootsner until it was shaved
into Crootsno and thence smoothed to Crusoe.
But what was the Christian name of the elder Kreutznaer? Or of the boy's
mother? Or of his brothers or sisters? Or of the first ship captain
under whom he sailed; or any of them; or even of the ship he commanded,
and in which he was wrecked; or of the dog that he carried to the
island; or of the two cats; or of the first and all the other tame
goats; or of the inlet; or of Friday's father; or of the Spaniard he
saved; or of the ship captain; or of the ship that finally saved him?
Who knows? The book is a desert as far as nomenclature goes--the only
blossoms being his own name; that of Wells, a Brazilian neighbor; Xury,
the Moorish boy; Friday, Poll, the parrot; and Will Atkins.
* * * * *
You may retort that all this doesn't matter. That is very true--and be
hanged to you!--but those facts prove by every canon of literary art
that Robinson Crusoe is either a coldly calculated flight of consummate
genius or an accidental freak of hack literature. When De Foe wrote, it
was only a century after Drake and his companions in authorized
piracy had made the British privateer the scourge of the seas and had
demonstrated that naval supremacy meant the control of the world. The
seafaring life was one of peril, but it carried with it honor, glory and
envy. Forty years later Nelson was born to crown British navalry with
deathless Glory. Even the commonest sailor spoke his ship's name--if it
were a fine vessel--with the same affection that he spoke his wife's
and cursed a bad ship by its name as if to tag its vileness with
proverbiality.
When De Foe wrote Alexander Selkirk, able seaman, was alive end had
told his story of shipwreck to Sir Richard Steele, editor of the English
Gentleman and of the Tattler, who wrote it up well--but not half as well
as any one of ten thousand newspaper men of today could do under similar
circumstances.
Now who that has read of Selkirk and Dampierre and Stradling does not
remember the two famous ships, the “Cinque Ports” and the “St. George?”
In every actvial book of the times, ship's names were sprinkled over the
page as if they had been shaken out of the pepper box. But you inquire
in vain the name of the slaver that wrecked “poor Robinson Crusoe”--a
name that would have been printed on his memory beyond forgetting
because of the very misfortune itself. Now the book is the autobiography
of a man whose only years of active life between eighteen and twenty-six
were passed as a sailor. It was written apparently after he was
seventy-two years old, at the period when every trifling incident and
name of youth would survive most brightly; yet he names no ships, no
sailor mates, carefully avoids all knowledge of or advantage attaching
to any parts of ships. It is out of character as a sailor's tale,
showing that the author either did not understand the value of or was
too indolent to acquire the ship knowledge that would give to his work
the natural smell of salt water and the bilge. It is a landlubber's sea
yarn.
Is it in character as a revelation of human nature? No man like unto
Robinson Crusoe ever did live, does live, or ever will live, unless as a
freak deprived of human emotions. The Robinson Crusoe of Despair Island
was not a castaway, but the mature politician. Daniel Defoe of Newgate
Prison. The castaway would have melted into loving recollections; the
imprisoned lampoonist would have busied himself with schemes, ideas,
arguments and combinations for getting out, and getting on. This poor
Robin on the island weeps over nothing but his own sorrows, and,
while pretending to bewail his solitude, turns aside coldly from
companionships next only in affection to those of men. He has a dog, two
ship's cats (of whose “eminent history” he promises something that is
never related), tame goats and parrots. He gives none of them a name,
he does not occupy his yearning for companionship and love by preparing
comforts for them or by teaching them tricks of intelligence or
amusement; and when he does make a stagger at teaching Poll to talk it
is for the sole purpose of hearing her repeat “Poor Robin Crusoe!”
The dog is dragged in to work for him, but not to be rewarded. He dies
without notice, as do the cats, and not even a billet of wood marks
their graves.
Could any being, with a drop of human blood in his veins, do that? He
thinks of his father with tears in his eyes--because he did not escape
the present solitude by taking the old man's advice! Does he recall his
mother or any of the childish things that lie so long and deep in
the heart of every natural man? Does he ever wonder what his old
school-fellows, Bob Freckles and Pete Baker, are doing these solitary
evenings when he sits under the tropics and hopes--could he not at
least hope it?--that they are, thank God, alive and happy at York? He
discourses like a parson of the utterly impossible affection that
Friday had for his cannibal sire and tells you how noble, Christian and
beautiful it was--as if, by Jove! a little of that virtue wouldn't have
ornamented his own cold, emotionless, fishy heart!
He had no sentimental side. Think of those dreary, egotistic, awful
evenings, when, for more than twenty years this infernal hypocrite kept
himself company and tried patiently to deceive God by flattering Him
about religion! It is impossible. Why thought turns as certainly to
revery and recollection as grass turns to seed. He married. What was his
wife's name? We know how much property she had. What were the names of
the honest Portuguese Captain and the London woman who kept his money?
The cold selfishness and gloomy egotism of this creature mark him as a
monster and not as a man.
* * * * *
So the book is not in character as an autobiography, nor does it contain
a single softening emotion to create sympathy. Let us see whether it
be scholarly in its ease. The one line that strikes like a bolt of
lightning is the height of absurdity. We have all laughed, afterward
of course, at that--single--naked--foot--print. It could not have
been there without others, unless Friday were a one legged man, or was
playing the good old Scots game of “hop-scotch!”
But the foot-print is not a circumstance to the cannibals. All the stage
burlesques of Robinson Crusoe combined could not produce such funny
cannibals as he discovered. Crusoe's cannibals ate no flesh but that
of men! He had no great trouble contriving how to induce Friday to eat
goat's flesh! They took all the trouble to come to his island to indulge
in picnics, during which they ate up folks, danced and then went home
before night. When the big party of 31 arrived, they had with them one
other cannibal of Friday's tribe, a Spaniard, and Friday's father. It
appears they always carefully unbound a victim before despatching him.
They brought Friday pere for lunch, although he was old, decrepit and
thin--a condition that always unfits a man among all known cannibals
for serving as food. They reject them as we do stringy old roosters for
spring chickens in the best society. Then Friday, born a cannibal and
converted to Crusoe's peculiar religion, shows that in three years he
has acquired all the emotions of filial affection prevalent at that time
among Yorkshire folk who attended dissenting chapels. More wonderful
still! old Friday pere, immersed in age and cannibalism, has the
corresponding paternal feeling. Crusoe never says exactly where these
cannibals came from, but my own belief is that they came from that
little Swiss town whence the little wooden animals for toy Noah's Arks
also came.
A German savant--one of the patient sort that spend half a life writing
a monograph on the variation of spots on the butterfly's wings--could
get a philosophical dissertation on Doubt out of Crusoe's troubles with
pens, ink and paper; also clothes. In the volume I am using, on page 86,
third paragraph, he says: “I should lose my reckoning of time for want
of books, and pen and ink.” So he kept it by notches in wood, he tells
in the fourth paragraph. In paragraph 5, same page, he says: “We are
to observe that among the many things I brought out of the ship, I
got several of less value, etc., which I omitted setting down as in
particular pens, ink and paper!” Same paragraph, lower down: “I shall
show that while my ink lasted I kept things very exact, but after that
was gone I could not make any ink by any means that I could devise.”
Page 87, second paragraph: “I wanted many things, notwithstanding all
the many things that I had amassed together, and of these ink was one!”
Page 88, first paragraph: “I drew up my affairs in writing!” Now, by
George! did you ever hear of more appearing and disappearing pens, ink
and paper?
The adventures of his clothes were as remarkable as his own. On his very
first trip to the wreck, after landing, he went “rummaging for clothes,
of which I found enough,” but took no more than he wanted for present
use. On the second trip he “took all the men's clothes” (and there were
fifteen souls on board when she sailed). Yet in his famous debit and
credit calculations between good and evil he sets these down, page 88:
EVIL | GOOD
--------------------------------------------------
I have no clothes to | But I am in a hot climate,
cover me. | where, if I had
| clothes (!) I could hardly
| wear them.
On page 147, bewailing his lack of a sieve, he says: “Linen, I had none
but what was mere rags.”
Page 158 (one year later): “My clothes, too, began to decay; as to
linen, I had had none a good while, except some checkered shirts, which
I carefully preserved, because many times I could bear no other clothes
on. I had almost three dozen of shirts, several thick watch coats, too
hot to wear.”
So he tried to make jackets out of the watch coats. Then this ingenious
gentleman, who had nothing to wear and was glad of it on account of the
heat, which kept him from wearing anything but a shirt, and rendered
watch coats unendurable, actually made himself a coat, waistcoat,
breeches, cap and umbrella of skins with the hair on and wore them in
great comfort! Page 175 he goes hunting, wearing this suit, belted by
two heavy skin belts, carrying hatchet, saw, powder, shot, his heavy
fowling piece and the goatskin umbrella--total weight of baggage and
clothes about ninety pounds. It must have been a cold day!
Yet the first thing he does for the naked Friday thirteen years later
is to give him a pair--of--LINEN--trousers! Poor Robin Crusoe--what a
colossal liar was wasted on a desert island!
* * * * *
Of course, no boy sees the blemishes in “Robinson Crusoe;” those are
left to the Infallible Critic. The book is as ludicrous as “Hamlet” from
one aspect and as profound as “Don Quixote” from another. In its pages
the wonder tales and wonder facts meet and resolve; realism and idealism
are joined--above all, there is a mystery no critic may solve. It is
useless to criticize genius or a miracle, except to increase its wonder.
Who remembers anything in “Crusoe” but the touch of the wizard's hand?
Who associates the Duke of Athens, Hermia and Helena, with Bottom and
Snug, Titania, Oberon and Puck? Any literary master mechanic might real
off ten thousand yards of the Greek folks or of “Pericles,” but when you
want something that runs thus:
“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows!
Where oxlip and the nodding violet grows--.”
why, then, my masters, you must put up the price and employ a genius to
work the miracle.
Take all miracles without question. Whether work of genius or miracle of
accident, “Robinson Crusoe” gives you a generous run for your money.