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.
Such reflections naturally occur in speaking of one of our greatest literary reputations, whose popularity is almost in an inverse ratio to his celebrity. Every one knows the names of Sir Charles Grandison and Clarissa Harlowe. They are amongst the established types which serve to point a paragraph; but the volumes in which they are described remain for the most part in undisturbed repose, sleeping peacefully amongst Charles Lamb's biblia a-biblia, books which are no books, or, as he explains, those books 'which no gentleman's library should be without.' They never enjoy the honours of cheap reprints; the modern reader shudders at a novel in eight volumes, and declines to dig for amusement in so profound a mine; when some bold inquirer dips into their pages he generally fancies that the sleep of years has been somehow absorbed into the paper; a certain soporific aroma exhales from the endless files of fictitious correspondence. This contrast, however, between popularity and celebrity is not so rare as to deserve special notice. Richardson's slumber may be deeper than that of most men of equal fame, but it is not quite unprecedented. The string of paradoxes, which it would be easy to apply to Richardson, would turn upon a different point. The odd thing is, not that so many people should have forgotten him, but that he should have been remembered by people at first sight so unlike him. Here is a man, we might say, whose special characteristic it was to be a milksop—who provoked Fielding to a coarse hearty burst of ridicule—who was steeped in the incense of useless adulation from a throng of middle-aged lady worshippers—who wrote his novels expressly to recommend little unimpeachable moral maxims, as that evil courses lead to unhappy deaths, that ladies ought to observe the laws of propriety, and generally that it is an excellent thing to be thoroughly respectable; who lived an obscure life in a petty coterie in fourth-rate London society, and was in no respect at a point of view more exalted than that of his companions. What greater contrast can be imagined in its way than that between Richardson, with his second-rate eighteenth-century priggishness and his twopenny-tract morality, and the modern school of French novelists, who are certainly not prigs, and whose morality is by no means that of tracts? We might have expected à priori that they would have summarily put him down, as a hopeless Philistine. Yet Richardson was idolised by some of their best writers; Balzac, for example, and George Sand, speak of him with reverence; and a writer who is, perhaps, as odd a contrast to Richardson as could well be imagined—Alfred de Musset—calls 'Clarissa' le premier roman du monde. What is the secret which enables the steady old printer, with his singular limitation to his own career of time and space, to impose upon the Byronic Parisian of the next century? Amongst his contemporaries Diderot expresses an almost fanatical admiration of Richardson for his purity and power, and declares characteristically that he will place Richardson's works on the same shelf with those of Moses, Homer, Euripides, and other favourite writers; he even goes so far as to excuse Clarissa's belief in Christianity on the ground of her youthful innocence. To continue in the paradoxical vein, we might ask how the quiet tradesman could create the character which has stood ever since for a type of the fine gentleman of the period; or how from the most prosaic of centuries should spring one of the most poetical of feminine ideals? We can hardly fancy a genuine hero with a pigtail, or a heroine in a hoop and high-heeled shoes, nor believe that persons who wore those articles of costume could possess any very exalted virtues. Perhaps our grandchildren may have the same difficulty about the race which wears crinolines and chimney-pot hats.