Daniel Defoe by William Minto

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Defoe was essentially a journalist. He wrote for the day, and for the
greatest interest of the greatest number of the day. He always had some
ship sailing with the passing breeze, and laden with a useful cargo for
the coast upon which the wind chanced to be blowing. If the Tichborne
trial had happened in his time, we should certainly have had from him an
exact history of the boyhood and surprising adventures of Thomas Castro,
commonly known as Sir Roger, which would have come down to us as a true
record, taken, perhaps, by the chaplain of Portland prison from the
convict's own lips. It would have had such an air of authenticity, and
would have been corroborated by such an array of trustworthy witnesses,
that nobody in later times could have doubted its truth. Defoe always
wrote what a large number of people were in a mood to read. All his
writings, with so few exceptions that they may reasonably be supposed to
fall within the category, were _pieces de circonstance_. Whenever any
distinguished person died or otherwise engaged public attention, no
matter how distinguished, whether as a politician, a criminal, or a
divine, Defoe lost no time in bringing out a biography. It was in such
emergencies that he produced his memoirs of Charles XII., Peter the
Great, Count Patkul, the Duke of Shrewsbury, Baron de Goertz, the Rev.
Daniel Williams, Captain Avery the King of the Pirates, Dominique
Cartouche, Rob Roy, Jonathan Wild, Jack Sheppard, Duncan Campbell. When
the day had been fixed for the Earl of Oxford's trial for high treason,
Defoe issued the fictitious _Minutes of the Secret Negotiations of Mons.
Mesnager_ at the English Court during his ministry. We owe the _Journal
of the Plague in 1665_ to a visitation which fell upon France in 1721,
and caused much apprehension in England. The germ which in his fertile
mind grew into _Robinson Crusoe_ fell from the real adventures of
Alexander Selkirk, whose solitary residence of four years on the island
of Juan Fernandez was a nine days' wonder in the reign of Queen Anne.
Defoe was too busy with his politics at the moment to turn it to
account; it was recalled to him later on, in the year 1719, when the
exploits of famous pirates had given a vivid interest to the chances of
adventurers in far-away islands on the American and African coasts. The
_Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the famous Captain Singleton_, who
was set on shore in Madagascar, traversed the continent of Africa from
east to west past the sources of the Nile, and went roving again in the
company of the famous Captain Avery, was produced to satisfy the same
demand. Such biographies as those of _Moll Flanders_ and the _Lady
Roxana_ were of a kind, as he himself illustrated by an amusing
anecdote, that interested all times and all professions and degrees; but
we have seen to what accident he owed their suggestion and probably part
of their materials. He had tested the market for such wares in his
Journals of Society.

In following Defoe's career, we are constantly reminded that he was a
man of business, and practised the profession of letters with a shrewd
eye to the main chance. He scoffed at the idea of practising it with any
other object, though he had aspirations after immortal fame as much as
any of his more decorous contemporaries. Like Thomas Fuller, he frankly
avowed that he wrote "for some honest profit to himself." Did any man,
he asked, do anything without some regard to his own advantage? Whenever
he hit upon a profitable vein, he worked it to exhaustion, putting the
ore into various shapes to attract different purchasers. _Robinson
Crusoe_ made a sensation; he immediately followed up the original story
with a Second Part, and the Second Part with a volume of _Serious
Reflections_. He had discovered the keenness of the public appetite for
stories of the supernatural, in 1706, by means of his _True Relation of
the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal_.[4] When, in 1720, he undertook to
write the life of the popular fortune-teller, Duncan Campbell--a puff
which illustrates almost better than anything else Defoe's extraordinary
ingenuity in putting a respectable face upon the most disreputable
materials--he had another proof of the avidity with which people run to
hear marvels. He followed up this clue with _A System of Magic, or a
History of the Black Art_; _The Secrets of the Invisible World
disclosed, or a Universal History of Apparitions_; and a humorous
_History of the Devil_, in which last work he subjected _Paradise Lost_,
to which Addison had drawn attention by his papers in the _Spectator_,
to very sharp criticism. In his books and pamphlets on the Behaviour of
Servants, and his works of more formal instruction, the _Family
Instructor_, the _Plan of English Commerce_, the _Complete English
Tradesman_, the _Complete English Gentleman_ (his last work, left
unfinished and unpublished), he wrote with a similar regard to what was
for the moment in demand.

[Footnote 4: Mr. Lee has disposed conclusively of the myth that this
tale was written to promote the sale of a dull book by one Drelincourt
on the _Fear of Death_, which Mrs. Veal's ghost earnestly recommended
her friend to read. It was first published separately as a pamphlet
without any reference to Drelincourt. It was not printed with
Drelincourt's _Fear of Death_ till the fourth edition of that work,
which was already popular. Further, the sale of Drelincourt does not
appear to have been increased by the addition of Defoe's pamphlet to the
book, and of Mrs. Veal's recommendation to the pamphlet.]

Defoe's novel-writing thus grew naturally out of his general literary
trade, and had not a little in common with the rest of his abundant
stock. All his productions in this line, his masterpiece, _Robinson
Crusoe_, as well as what Charles Lamb calls his "secondary novels,"
_Captain Singleton_, _Colonel Jack_, _Moll Flanders_, and _Roxana_, were
manufactured from material for which he had ascertained that there was a
market; the only novelty lay in the mode of preparation. From writing
biographies with real names attached to them, it was but a short step to
writing biographies with fictitious names. Defoe is sometimes spoken of
as the inventor of the realistic novel; realistic biography would,
perhaps, be a more strictly accurate description. Looking at the
character of his professed records of fact, it seems strange that he
should ever have thought of writing the lives of imaginary heroes, and
should not have remained content with "forging stories and imposing them
on the world for truth" about famous and notorious persons in real life.
The purveyors of news in those days could use without fear of detection
a licence which would not be tolerated now. They could not, indeed,
satisfy the public appetite for news without taking liberties with the
truth. They had not special correspondents in all parts of the world, to
fill their pages with reports from the spot of things seen and heard.
The public had acquired the habit of looking to the press, to periodical
papers and casual books and pamphlets, for information about passing
events and prominent men before sufficient means had been organized for
procuring information which should approximate to correctness. In such
circumstances, the temptation to invent and embellish was irresistible.
"Why," a paragraph-maker of the time is made to say, "if we will write
nothing but truth, we must bring you no news; we are bound to bring you
such as we can find." Yet it was not lies but truth that the public
wanted as much as they do now. Hence arose the necessity of fortifying
reports with circumstantial evidence of their authenticity. Nobody
rebuked unprincipled news-writers more strongly than Defoe, and no
news-writer was half as copious in his guarantees for the accuracy of
his information. When a report reached England that the island of St.
Vincent had been blown into the air, Defoe wrote a description of the
calamity, the most astonishing thing that had happened in the world
"since the Creation, or at least since the destruction of the earth by
water in the general Deluge," and prefaced his description by saying:--

"Our accounts of this come from so many several hands
and several places that it would be impossible to bring the
letters all separately into this journal; and when we had
done so or attempted to do so, would leave the story confused,
and the world not perfectly informed. We have therefore
thought it better to give the substance of this amazing
accident in one collection; making together as full and as
distinct an account of the whole as we believe it possible to
come at by any intelligence whatsoever, and at the close of
this account we shall give some probable guesses at the natural
cause of so terrible an operation."

Defoe carried the same system of vouching for the truth of his
narratives by referring them to likely sources, into pamphlets and books
which really served the purpose of newspapers, being written for the
gratification of passing interests. The History of the Wars of Charles
XII., which Mr. Lee ascribes to him, was "written by a Scot's gentleman,
in the Swedish service." The short narrative of the life and death of
Count Patkul was "written by the Lutheran Minister who assisted him in
his last hours, and faithfully translated out of a High Dutch
manuscript." M. Mesnager's minutes of his negotiations were "written by
himself," and "done out of French." Defoe knew that the public would
read such narratives more eagerly if they believed them to be true, and
ascribed them to authors whose position entitled them to confidence.
There can be little doubt that he drew upon his imagination for more
than the title-pages. But why, when he had so many eminent and notorious
persons to serve as his subjects, with all the advantage of bearing
names about which the public were already curious, did he turn to the
adventures of new and fictitious heroes and heroines? One can only
suppose that he was attracted by the greater freedom of movement in pure
invention; he made the venture with _Robinson Crusoe_, it was
successful, and he repeated it. But after the success of _Robinson
Crusoe_, he by no means abandoned his old fields. It was after this that
he produced autobiographies and other _prima facie_ authentic lives of
notorious thieves and pirates. With all his records of heroes, real or
fictitious, he practised the same devices for ensuring credibility. In
all alike he took for granted that the first question people would ask
about a story was whether it was true. The novel, it must be remembered,
was then in its infancy, and Defoe, as we shall presently see, imagined,
probably not without good reason, that his readers would disapprove of
story-telling for the mere pleasure of the thing, as an immorality.

In writing for the entertainment of his own time, Defoe took the surest
way of writing for the entertainment of all time. Yet if he had never
chanced to write _Robinson Crusoe_, he would now have a very obscure
place in English literature. His "natural infirmity of homely plain
writing," as he humorously described it, might have drawn students to
his works, but they ran considerable risk of lying in utter oblivion.
He was at war with the whole guild of respectable writers who have
become classics; they despised him as an illiterate fellow, a vulgar
huckster, and never alluded to him except in terms of contempt. He was
not slow to retort their civilities; but the retorts might very easily
have sunk beneath the waters, while the assaults were preserved by their
mutual support. The vast mass of Defoe's writings received no kindly aid
from distinguished contemporaries to float them down the stream;
everything was done that bitter dislike and supercilious indifference
could do to submerge them. _Robinson Crusoe_ was their sole life-buoy.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the vitality of _Robinson Crusoe_
is a happy accident, and that others of Defoe's tales have as much claim
in point of merit to permanence. _Robinson Crusoe_ has lived longest,
because it lives most, because it was detached as it were from its own
time and organized for separate existence. It is the only one of Defoe's
tales that shows what he could do as an artist. We might have seen from
the others that he had the genius of a great artist; here we have the
possibility realized, the convincing proof of accomplished work. _Moll
Flanders_ is in some respects superior as a novel. Moll is a much more
complicated character than the simple, open-minded, manly mariner of
York; a strangely mixed compound of craft and impulse, selfishness and
generosity--in short, a thoroughly bad woman, made bad by circumstances.
In tracing the vigilant resolution with which she plays upon human
weakness, the spasms of compunction which shoot across her wily designs,
the selfish afterthoughts which paralyse her generous impulses, her fits
of dare-devil courage and uncontrollable panic, and the steady current
of good-humoured satisfaction with herself which makes her chuckle
equally over mishaps and successes, Defoe has gone much more deeply into
the springs of action, and sketched a much richer page in the natural
history of his species than in _Robinson Crusoe._ True, it is a more
repulsive page, but that is not the only reason why it has fallen into
comparative oblivion, and exists now only as a parasite upon the more
popular work. It is not equally well constructed for the struggle of
existence among books. No book can live for ever which is not firmly
organized round some central principle of life, and that principle in
itself imperishable. It must have a heart and members; the members must
be soundly compacted and the heart superior to decay. Compared with
_Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders_ is only a string of diverting
incidents, the lowest type of book organism, very brilliant while it is
fresh and new, but not qualified to survive competitors for the world's
interest. There is no unique creative purpose in it to bind the whole
together; it might be cut into pieces, each capable of wriggling
amusingly by itself. The gradual corruption of the heroine's virtue,
which is the encompassing scheme of the tale, is too thin as well as too
common an artistic envelope; the incidents burst through it at so many
points that it becomes a shapeless mass. But in _Robinson Crusoe_ we
have real growth from a vigorous germ. The central idea round which the
tale is organized, the position of a man cast ashore on a desert island,
abandoned to his own resources, suddenly shot beyond help or counsel
from his fellow-creatures, is one that must live as long as the
uncertainty of human life.

The germ of _Robinson Crusoe,_ the actual experience of Alexander
Selkirk, went floating about for several years, and more than one artist
dallied with it, till it finally settled and took root in the mind of
the one man of his generation most capable of giving it a home and
working out its artistic possibilities. Defoe was the only man of
letters in his time who might have been thrown on a desert island
without finding himself at a loss what to do. The art required for
developing the position in imagination was not of a complicated kind,
and yet it is one of the rarest of gifts. Something more was wanted than
simply conceiving what a man in such a situation would probably feel and
probably do. Above all, it was necessary that his perplexities should be
unexpected, and his expedients for meeting them unexpected; yet both
perplexities and expedients so real and life-like that, when we were
told them, we should wonder we had not thought of them before. One gift
was indispensable for this, however many might be accessory, the genius
of circumstantial invention--not a very exalted order of genius,
perhaps, but quite as rare as any other intellectual prodigy.[5]

[Footnote 5: Mr. Leslie Stephen seems to me to underrate the rarity of
this peculiar gift in his brilliant essay on Defoe's Novels in _Hours in
a Library_.]

Defoe was fifty-eight years old when he wrote _Robinson Crusoe_. If the
invention of plausible circumstances is the great secret in the art of
that tale, it would have been a marvellous thing if this had been the
first instance of its exercise, and it had broken out suddenly in a man
of so advanced an age. When we find an artist of supreme excellence in
any craft, we generally find that he has been practising it all his
life. To say that he has a genius for it, means that he has practised
it, and concentrated his main force upon it, and that he has been driven
irresistibly to do so by sheer bent of nature. It was so with Defoe and
his power of circumstantial invention, his unrivalled genius for "lying
like truth." For years upon years of his life it had been his chief
occupation. From the time of his first connexion with Harley, at least,
he had addressed his countrymen through the press, and had perambulated
the length and breadth of the land in assumed characters and on
factitious pretexts. His first essay in that way in 1704, when he left
prison in the service of the Government, appealing to the general
compassion because he was under government displeasure, was skilful
enough to suggest great native genius if not extensive previous
practice. There are passages of circumstantial invention in the
_Review_, as ingenious as anything in _Robinson Crusoe_; and the mere
fact that at the end of ten years of secret service under successive
Governments, and in spite of a widespread opinion of his
untrustworthiness, he was able to pass himself off for ten years more as
a Tory with Tories and with the Whig Government as a loyal servant, is a
proof of sustained ingenuity of invention greater than many volumes of
fiction.

Looking at Defoe's private life, it is not difficult to understand the
peculiar fascination which such a problem as he solved in _Robinson
Crusoe_ must have had for him. It was not merely that he had passed a
life of uncertainty, often on the verge of precipices, and often saved
from ruin by a buoyant energy which seems almost miraculous; not merely
that, as he said of himself in one of his diplomatic appeals for
commiseration.

"No man hath tasted differing fortunes more,
For thirteen times have I been rich and poor."

But when he wrote _Robinson Crusoe_, it was one of the actual chances of
his life, and by no means a remote one, that he might be cast all alone
on an uninhabited island. We see from his letters to De la Faye how
fearful he was of having "mistakes" laid to his charge by the Government
in the course of his secret services. His former changes of party had
exposed him, as he well knew, to suspicion. A false step, a
misunderstood paragraph, might have had ruinous consequences for him. If
the Government had prosecuted him for writing anything offensive to
them, refusing to believe that it was put in to amuse the Tories,
transportation might very easily have been the penalty. He had made so
many enemies in the Press that he might have been transported without a
voice being raised in his favour, and the mob would not have interfered
to save a Government spy from the Plantations. Shipwreck among the
islands of the West Indies was a possibility that stood not far from his
own door, as he looked forward into the unknown, and prepared his mind,
as men in dangerous situations do, for the worst. When he drew up for
Moll Flanders and her husband a list of the things necessary for
starting life in a new country, or when he described Colonel Jack's
management of his plantation in Virginia, the subject was one of more
than general curiosity to him; and when he exercised his imagination
upon the fate of Robinson Crusoe, he was contemplating a fate which a
few movements of the wheel of Fortune might make his own.

But whatever it was that made the germ idea of _Robinson Crusoe_ take
root in Defoe's mind, he worked it out as an artist. Artists of a more
emotional type might have drawn much more elaborate and affecting
word-pictures of the mariner's feelings in various trying situations,
gone much deeper into his changing moods, and shaken our souls with pity
and terror over the solitary castaway's alarms and fits of despair.
Defoe's aims lay another way. His Crusoe is not a man given to the
luxury of grieving. If he had begun to pity himself, he would have been
undone. Perhaps Defoe's imaginative force was not of a kind that could
have done justice to the agonies of a shipwrecked sentimentalist; he has
left no proof that it was: but if he had represented Crusoe bemoaning
his misfortunes, brooding over his fears, or sighing with Ossianic
sorrow over his lost companions and friends, he would have spoiled the
consistency of the character. The lonely man had his moments of panic
and his days of dejection, but they did not dwell in his memory. Defoe
no doubt followed his own natural bent, but he also showed true art in
confining Crusoe's recollections as closely as he does to his efforts to
extricate himself from difficulties that would have overwhelmed a man of
softer temperament. The subject had fascinated him, and he found enough
in it to engross his powers without travelling beyond its limits for
diverting episodes, as he does more or less in all the rest of his
tales. The diverting episodes in _Robinson Crusoe_ all help the
verisimilitude of the story.

When, however, the ingenious inventor had completed the story
artistically, carried us through all the outcast's anxieties and
efforts, and shown him triumphant over all difficulties, prosperous, and
again in communication with the outer world, the spirit of the iterary
trader would not let the finished work alone. The story, as a work of
art, ends with Crusoe's departure from the island, or at any rate with
his return to England. Its unity is then complete. But Robinson Crusoe
at once became a popular hero, and Defoe was too keen a man of business
to miss the chance of further profit from so lucrative a vein. He did
not mind the sneers of hostile critics. They made merry over the
trifling inconsistencies in the tale. How, for example, they asked,
could Crusoe have stuffed his pockets with biscuits when he had taken
off all his clothes before swimming to the wreck? How could he have
been at such a loss for clothes after those he had put off were washed
away by the rising tide, when he had the ship's stores to choose from?
How could he have seen the goat's eyes in the cave when it was pitch
dark? How could the Spaniards give Friday's father an agreement in
writing, when they had neither paper nor ink? How did Friday come to
know so intimately the habits of bears, the bear not being a denizen of
the West Indian islands? On the ground of these and such-like trifles,
one critic declared that the book seems calculated for the mob, and will
not bear the eye of a rational reader, and that "all but the very
canaille are satisfied of the worthlessness of the performance." Defoe,
we may suppose, was not much moved by these strictures, as edition after
edition of the work was demanded. He corrected one or two little
inaccuracies, and at once set about writing a Second Part, and a volume
of _Serious Reflections_ which had occurred to Crusoe amidst his
adventures. These were purely commercial excrescences upon the original
work. They were popular enough at the time, but those who are tempted
now to accompany Crusoe in his second visit to his island and his
enterprising travels in the East, agree that the Second Part is of
inferior interest to the first, and very few now read the _Serious
Reflections_.

The _Serious Reflections_, however, are well worth reading in connexion
with the author's personal history. In the preface we are told that
_Robinson Crusoe_ is an allegory, and in one of the chapters we are told
why it is an allegory. The explanation is given in a homily against the
vice of talking falsely. By talking falsely the moralist explains that
he does not mean telling lies, that is, falsehoods concocted with an
evil object; these he puts aside as sins altogether beyond the pale of
discussion. But there is a minor vice of falsehood which he considers it
his duty to reprove, namely, telling stories, as too many people do,
merely to amuse. "This supplying a story by invention," he says, "is
certainly a most scandalous crime, and yet very little regarded in that
part. It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, in
which by degrees a habit of lying enters in. Such a man comes quickly up
to a total disregarding the truth of what he says, looking upon it as a
trifle, a thing of no import, whether any story he tells be true or
not." How empty a satisfaction is this "purchased at so great an expense
as that of conscience, and of a dishonour done to truth!" And the crime
is so entirely objectless. A man who tells a lie, properly so called,
has some hope of reward by it. But to lie for sport is to play at
shuttlecock with your soul, and load your conscience for the mere sake
of being a fool. "With what temper should I speak of those people? What
words can express the meanness and baseness of the mind that can do
this?" In making this protest against frivolous story-telling, the
humour of which must have been greatly enjoyed by his journalistic
colleagues, Defoe anticipated that his readers would ask why, if he so
disapproved of the supplying a story by invention, he had written
_Robinson Crusoe_. His answer was that _Robinson Crusoe_ was an
allegory, and that the telling or writing a parable or an allusive
allegorical history is quite a different case. "I, Robinson Crusoe, do
affirm that the story, though allegorical, is also historical, and that
it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortunes,
and of a variety not to be met with in this world." This life was his
own. He explains at some length the particulars of the allegory:--

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