The Common Reader
Stonehenge itself. Something of this we may attribute to the fact that
we have all had _Robinson Crusoe_ read aloud to us as children, and were
thus much in the same state of mind towards Defoe and his story that the
Greeks were in towards Homer. It never occurred to us that there was
such a person as Defoe, and to have been told that _Robinson Crusoe_ was
the work of a man with a pen in his hand would either have disturbed us
unpleasantly or meant nothing at all. The impressions of childhood are
those that last longest and cut deepest. It still seems that the name of
Daniel Defoe has no right to appear upon the title-page of _Robinson
Crusoe_, and if we celebrate the bi-centenary of the book we are making
a slightly unnecessary allusion to the fact that, like Stonehenge, it is
still in existence.
The great fame of the book has done its author some injustice; for while
it has given him a kind of anonymous glory it has obscured the fact that
he was a writer of other works which, it is safe to assert, were not
read aloud to us as children. Thus when the Editor of the _Christian
World_ in the year 1870 appealed to “the boys and girls of England” to
erect a monument upon the grave of Defoe, which a stroke of lightning
had mutilated, the marble was inscribed to the memory of the author of
_Robinson Crusoe_. No mention was made of _Moll Flanders_. Considering
the topics which are dealt with in that book, and in _Roxana, Captain
Singleton, Colonel Jack_ and the rest, we need not be surprised, though
we may be indignant, at the omission. We may agree with Mr. Wright, the
biographer of Defoe, that these “are not works for the drawing-room
table”. But unless we consent to make that useful piece of furniture the
final arbiter of taste, we must deplore the fact that their superficial
coarseness, or the universal celebrity of _Robinson Crusoe_, has led
them to be far less widely famed than they deserve. On any monument
worthy of the name of monument the names of _Moll Flanders_ and
_Roxana_, at least, should be carved as deeply as the name of Defoe.
They stand among the few English novels which we can call indisputably
great. The occasion of the bi-centenary of their more famous companion
may well lead us to consider in what their greatness, which has so much
in common with his, may be found to consist.
Defoe was an elderly man when he turned novelist, many years the
predecessor of Richardson and Fielding, and one of the first indeed to
shape the novel and launch it on its way. But it is unnecessary to
labour the fact of his precedence, except that he came to his
novel-writing with certain conceptions about the art which he derived
partly from being himself one of the first to practise it. The novel had
to justify its existence by telling a true story and preaching a sound
moral. “This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most
scandalous crime,” he wrote. “It is a sort of lying that makes a great
hole in the heart, in which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.”
Either in the preface or in the text of each of his works, therefore, he
takes pains to insist that he has not used his invention at all but has
depended upon facts, and that his purpose has been the highly moral
desire to convert the vicious or to warn the innocent. Happily these
were principles that tallied very well with his natural disposition and
endowments. Facts had been drilled into him by sixty years of varying
fortunes before he turned his experience to account in fiction. “I have
some time ago summed up the Scenes of my life in this distich,” he
wrote:
No man has tasted differing fortunes more,
And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.
He had spent eighteen months in Newgate and talked with thieves,
pirates, highwaymen, and coiners before he wrote the history of Moll
Flanders. But to have facts thrust upon you by dint of living and
accident is one thing; to swallow them voraciously and retain the
imprint of them indelibly, is another. It is not merely that Defoe knew
the stress of poverty and had talked with the victims of it, but that
the unsheltered life, exposed to circumstances and forced to shift for
itself, appealed to him imaginatively as the right matter for his art.
In the first pages of each of his great novels he reduces his hero or
heroine to such a state of unfriended misery that their existence must
be a continued struggle, and their survival at all the result of luck
and their own exertions. Moll Flanders was born in Newgate of a criminal
mother; Captain Singleton was stolen as a child and sold to the gipsies;
Colonel Jack, though “born a gentleman, was put ’prentice to a
pickpocket”; Roxana starts under better auspices, but, having married at
fifteen, she sees her husband go bankrupt and is left with five children
in “a condition the most deplorable that words can express”.
Thus each of these boys and girls has the world to begin and the battle
to fight for himself. The situation thus created was entirely to Defoe’s
liking. From her very birth or with half a year’s respite at most, Moll
Flanders, the most notable of them, is goaded by “that worst of devils,
poverty”, forced to earn her living as soon as she can sew, driven from
place to place, making no demands upon her creator for the subtle
domestic atmosphere which he was unable to supply, but drawing upon him
for all he knew of strange people and customs. From the outset the
burden of proving her right to exist is laid upon her. She has to depend
entirely upon her own wits and judgement, and to deal with each
emergency as it arises by a rule-of-thumb morality which she has forged
in her own head. The briskness of the story is due partly to the fact
that having transgressed the accepted laws at a very early age she has
henceforth the freedom of the outcast. The one impossible event is that
she should settle down in comfort and security. But from the first the
peculiar genius of the author asserts itself, and avoids the obvious
danger of the novel of adventure. He makes us understand that Moll
Flanders was a woman on her own account and not only material for a
succession of adventures. In proof of this she begins, as Roxana also
begins, by falling passionately, if unfortunately, in love. That she
must rouse herself and marry some one else and look very closely to her
settlements and prospects is no slight upon her passion, but to be laid
to the charge of her birth; and, like all Defoe’s women, she is a person
of robust understanding. Since she makes no scruple of telling lies when
they serve her purpose, there is something undeniable about her truth
when she speaks it. She has no time to waste upon the refinements of
personal affection; one tear is dropped, one moment of despair allowed,
and then “on with the story”. She has a spirit that loves to breast the
storm. She delights in the exercise of her own powers. When she
discovers that the man she has married in Virginia is her own brother
she is violently disgusted; she insists upon leaving him; but as soon as
she sets foot in Bristol, “I took the diversion of going to Bath, for as
I was still far from being old so my humour, which was always gay,
continued so to an extreme”. Heartless she is not, nor can any one
charge her with levity; but life delights her, and a heroine who lives
has us all in tow. Moreover, her ambition has that slight strain of
imagination in it which puts it in the category of the noble passions.
Shrewd and practical of necessity, she is yet haunted by a desire for
romance and for the quality which to her perception makes a man a
gentleman. “It was really a true gallant spirit he was of, and it was
the more grievous to me. ’Tis something of relief even to be undone by a
man of honour rather than by a scoundrel,” she writes when she had
misled a highwayman as to the extent of her fortune. It is in keeping
with this temper that she should be proud of her final partner because
he refuses to work when they reach the plantations but prefers hunting,
and that she should take pleasure in buying him wigs and silver-hilted
swords “to make him appear, as he really was, a very fine gentleman”.
Her very love of hot weather is in keeping, and the passion with which
she kissed the ground that her son had trod on, and her noble tolerance
of every kind of fault so long as it is not “complete baseness of
spirit, imperious, cruel, and relentless when uppermost, abject and
low-spirited when down”. For the rest of the world she has nothing but
good-will.
Since the list of the qualities and graces of this seasoned old sinner
is by no means exhausted we can well understand how it was that Borrow’s
apple-woman on London Bridge called her “blessed Mary” and valued her
book above all the apples on her stall; and that Borrow, taking the book
deep into the booth, read till his eyes ached. But we dwell upon such
signs of character only by way of proof that the creator of Moll
Flanders was not, as he has been accused of being, a mere journalist and
literal recorder of facts with no conception of the nature of
psychology. It is true that his characters take shape and substance of
their own accord, as if in despite of the author and not altogether to
his liking. He never lingers or stresses any point of subtlety or
pathos, but presses on imperturbably as if they came there without his
knowledge. A touch of imagination, such as that when the Prince sits by
his son’s cradle and Roxana observes how “he loved to look at it when it
was asleep”, seems to mean much more to us than to him. After the
curiously modern dissertation upon the need of communicating matters of
importance to a second person lest, like the thief in Newgate, we should
talk of it in our sleep, he apologises for his digression. He seems to
have taken his characters so deeply into his mind that he lived them
without exactly knowing how; and, like all unconscious artists, he
leaves more gold in his work than his own generation was able to bring
to the surface.
The interpretation that we put on his characters might therefore well
have puzzled him. We find for ourselves meanings which he was careful to
disguise even from himself. Thus it comes about that we admire Moll
Flanders far more than we blame her. Nor can we believe that Defoe had
made up his mind as to the precise degree of her guilt, or was unaware
that in considering the lives of the abandoned he raised many deep
questions and hinted, if he did not state, answers quite at variance
with his professions of belief. From the evidence supplied by his essay
upon the “Education of Women” we know that he had thought deeply and
much in advance of his age upon the capacities of women, which he rated
very high, and the injustice done to them, which he rated very harsh.
I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the
world, considering us as a civilised and a Christian country, that we
deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day
with folly and impertinence; which I am confident, had they the
advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than
ourselves.
The advocates of women’s rights would hardly care, perhaps, to claim
Moll Flanders and Roxana among their patron saints; and yet it is clear
that Defoe not only intended them to speak some very modern doctrines
upon the subject, but placed them in circumstances where their peculiar
hardships are displayed in such a way as to elicit our sympathy.
Courage, said Moll Flanders, was what women needed, and the power to
“stand their ground”; and at once gave practical demonstration of the
benefits that would result. Roxana, a lady of the same profession,
argues more subtly against the slavery of marriage. She “had started a