THE fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries lest he should find himself measuring a diminishing spectre and forced to foretell its approaching dissolution is not only absent in the case of Robinson Crusoe but the mere thought of it is ridiculous. It may be true that Robinson Crusoe is two hundred years of age upon the twenty-fifth of April, 1919, but, far from raising the familiar speculations as to whether people now read it and will continue to read it, the effect of the bi-centenary is to make us marvel that Robinson Crusoe, the perennial and immortal, should have been in existence so short a time as that. The book resembles one of those anonymous productions of the race rather than the effort of a single mind; and as for celebrating its centenary we should as soon think of celebrating the centenaries of 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 toward Defoe and his story that the Greeks were in toward 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 an individual 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 are most unyielding. 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 bicentenary of the book we are making a slightly unnecessary allusion to the fact that, like Stonehenge and

the Tower of London, 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, as 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 drawingroom 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.

1719, when he was sixty years of age. Even so he was by many years the predecessor of Richardson and Fielding, and might lay claim to be one of the first to give the novel the shape which it now wears. But it is unnecessary to labor 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 re

tain the imprint of them indelibly, as if they had a particular significance, 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 gypsies; 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 judgment, and to deal with each emergency as it arises by a ruleof-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 someone 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. But, 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 humor, which was always gay, continued so to an extreme.' Heartless she is not, nor can anyone 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. 'T is something of relief even to be undone by a man of honor 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 apologizes 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.

Admitting that Defoe would have been the first to deny any more elaborate philosophy than his explicit desire to convert and to warn, we cannot lay aside Moll Flanders or Roxana without suspecting that the matter is far more complex than he allowed. Turning novelist at the age of sixty, having, as he said, 'seen the rough side of the world as well as the smooth,' and acted a bold part in practical affairs, Defoe could not paint a flat unshaded picture of human life with the colors of good and evil unmixed and distinct, however sincerely he attempted it. 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 civilized 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. But Roxana supplies a subtler illustration of the difficult position in which a woman might find herself, and what new thoughts might be bred in her of the crisis. She is of the same profession as Moll Flanders, but in a more exalted sphere; she does not need to mend her fortunes by stealing. Among her entanglements is one with a merchant of Paris who proposes to marry her. She refuses on the ground that she would then become his slave, whereas, at present she keeps her freedom. But if we love each other, he asks, how can there be question of slavery? 'Ay,' she cried. "The pretense of affection takes from a woman everything that can be called herself'; and she treats him to a vehement disquisition upon the case of the wife who has surrendered everything on this plea to be engulphed in misery and beggary.' He then implores her to marry him for the sake of their unborn child. She returns that ‘if the woman

...

marries the man afterwards she bears the reproach of it to the last hour.' It is better to part; 'there is an end of the crime, and an end of the clamor.' After considering this argument the merchant replies 'that I had started a new thing in the world; . . . it was a way of arguing contrary to the general practice.' Roxana, indeed, excites our sympathy more than some of her successors, because she is blessedly unconscious that she is in any good sense an example to her sex and is thus at liberty to own that part of her argument is of an elevated strain which really was not in my thoughts at first, at all.' The knowledge of her own frailties and the honest questioning of her own motives which that knowledge begets have the happy result of keeping her fresh and human, when the martyrs and pioneers of so many problem novels have shrunken and shriveled to the pegs and props of their respective creeds.

But the claim of Defoe upon our admiration does not rest upon the fact that he can be shown to have anticipated some of the views of Meredith, or to have written scenes which might have been turned into plays by Ibsen. Whatever his ideas upon the position of women, they are an incidental result of his chief virtue, which is that he deals with the important and lasting side of things and not with the passing and trivial. He is often dull; he can imitate the matter-of-fact precision of a scientific traveler until we wonder that his pen could trace or his brain conceive what has not even the excuse of truth to soften its dryness; he leaves out the whole of nature and a large part of humanity. All this we may admit, though we have to admit defects as grave in many writers whom we call great. But that does not impair the peculiar merit of what remains. Having at the outset limited

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his scope and confined his ambitions, he achieves a kind of truth which is far rarer and more enduring than the truth of fact which he professed to make his aim. Moll Flanders and her friends recommended themselves to him, not because they were, as we should say, picturesque; nor because they were examples of evil living by which the public might profit. It was their natural veracity, bred in them by a life of hardship, that excited his interest. For them there were excuses; no kindly shelter obscured their motives. Poverty was their taskmaster. Defoe did not pronounce more than a judgment of the lips upon their failings. But their courage and resource and tenacity delighted him. He found their society full of good talk, and pleasant stories, and faith in each other, and morality of a homemade kind. Their fortunes had that infinite variety which he praised and relished and beheld with wonder in his own life. These men and women, above all, were free to talk openly of the passions and desires which have moved men and women since the beginning of time, and thus even now they keep their vitality undiminished. Even the sordid subject of money, which plays so large a part in their histories, becomes not sordid but tragic when it stands, not for ease and social dignity, but for honor, honesty, and life itself. You may object that Defoe is humdrum, but never that he is engrossed with petty things.

He belongs, indeed, to the school of the great plain writers, whose work is founded upon a knowledge of what is most persistent though not most seductive in human nature. The view of London from Hungerford Bridge, gray, serious, massive, and full of the subdued stir of traffic and business, prosaic if it were not for the masts of