Chapter 9 On Defoe

The reporter of a centenary is often terrified lest he beholding a vanishing phantom and having to foretell its impending demise.For the reporter of the two hundredth anniversary of "Robinson Crusoe", not only will he not have such a fear, but even as long as he thinks that he would have such an idea, he will feel ridiculous.This may be true. On April 25, 1919, "Robinson Crusoe" has been born for two hundred years. However, we need not make the usual speculation: whether people still Have read and will continue to read this book.We are amazed by the effect of these two centenaries: the immortal Robinson Crusoe has only existed for such a short period of time.The book seems to be one of the unsung products of an entire people rather than the crystallization of an individual intellect; speaking of its bicentenary we immediately think that we are commemorating the English prehistoric site of Sol, Wiltshire. The massive stone pillars of Wysbury Plain itself.This is partly due to the fact that in our childhood we have all heard Robinson Crusoe read to us, so we feel about Defoe and his novel in the same way that the Greeks felt about Dutch. Horse reverence is very similar.We never thought of Defoe at the time, and if someone told us that Robinson Crusoe was originally written by someone with a pen, it would either offend us or make us feel nothing at all. meaningless.The impression of childhood is the most lasting and deepest impression.The name of Daniel Defoe still seems to have no right to appear on the title page of Robinson Crusoe, and if we commemorate the book's bicentenary we are only alluding to the fact that this book is as Like the huge prehistoric stone pillars, it still remains today.

The great fame of this book does its author a certain injustice; for, while it bestows upon him a kind of obscurity, it also conceals the fact that he is the author of some other works. We may safely assert that we were not read to us as children.Thus, in 1870, when the editor of the Christworld called upon "the boys and girls of England" to erect a monument over Defoe's lightning-damaged grave, inscribed on that marble was: To commemorate the author of "Robinson Crusoe".No mention of Moore Flanders.Considering the subject matter of this book, and of Roxana, Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, and others, we need not be surprised, though we may be outraged, by this omission .We might agree with Mr. Wright, the biographer of Defoe, that these "are not works to be read to people at the drawing-room table."However, unless we regard this useful piece of furniture, the drawing-room table, as the final arbiter of artistic taste, we must regret the fact that because of the crudeness of the appearance of these works, or because of the "Robinson Crusoe" Widespread reputations make them far from the fame they deserve.On any monument, if it deserves to be called a monument, at least the names of Moore Flanders and Roxana should be inscribed as deeply as Defoe's.They rank among the few works of the undeniably great English novel.The bicentenary of their more famous companion may well make us wonder what is their greatness which has so much in common with that of Robinson Crusoe .

When Defoe became a novelist, he was already an elderly man.He was a man who predated Richardson and Fielding by many years, and was one of the founders who really shaped the novel and set it on its course.It is not necessary, however, to dwell on the fact that he was a pioneer, but it must be said that when he set out to write the novel he had certain concepts about the art which he acquired in part by his I am one of the original practitioners of this concept.A novel must tell a true story and promote high morals in order to justify its existence. "To furnish a story through fiction in this way is surely a crime of the ugliest and most shameful kind," he wrote. "It is a certain kind of lie that pokes a big hole in the heart, and a habit of lying gradually gets in." Therefore, in the preface and text of each of his works, he painstakingly insisted on stating that : He never invented anything, but always relied on facts, and his constant aim was that perfectly moral desire to repent the guilty, or to warn the innocent from going astray.Fortunately, these principles were in perfect harmony with his natural temperament and talents.Before he translated his personal experiences into words and narrated them in novels, the various fates he suffered in his sixty years of career had already accumulated rich facts in his mind.He wrote: "Not long ago, I summed up the events of my life in two antithetical lines:

"No one has tasted the ups and downs of fate more than I, "I have gone through vicissitudes and experienced more than ten changes in wealth and poverty." Before he wrote Moore Flanders, he spent eighteen months in London's Newgate Gaol talking to thieves, pirates, highway robbers, and counterfeiters.But it is a case of feeling facts through the deep imprints that life and chance have left on you; to swallow greedily those facts that others say and imprint them indelibly. Preserving it is another matter.Not just because Defoe understood the weight of poverty, because he had spoken to its victims, but also because the insecurity of life at the mercy of circumstances and forced to find ways to make ends meet evoked overwhelmed his imagination, and demanded it as proper material for his art.In the first pages of his great novels he places his heroes and heroines in such callous and miserable situations that their existence must be a constant struggle, and that they survive, by sheer luck and The result of their own hard work.Moore Flanders was a convict's babe at Newgate; Captain Singleton was stolen as a boy and sold to gypsies; Colonel Jack, though "born a gentleman, became a pickpocket's apprentice"; Roxana was relatively secure at first, but she married at fifteen, and then saw her husband go bankrupt, leaving her five children, in "use The most tragic situation that words can express".

In this way, each of these boys or girls has to carve out a world for himself and fight.To deal with the situation in the book in this way is completely in line with Defoe's wishes.The most famous of them all, Moore Flanders, had just been born, or had only half a year's respite, before she was instigated by "the worst of evils—poverty," when she knew how to sew. , had to fend for herself, cast out, wandering about, never asking her creator for that wonderful domestic atmosphere she could not provide herself, but relying on him to attract as many strangers as she could. people and customers.From the very beginning, the heavy burden of proving her own right to exist fell on her shoulders.She was obliged to rely entirely on her own reason and judgment, and when accidents occurred she met them with the moral code of experience, which she had wrought in her own mind.The story is animated in part because, at a very young age, she crosses accepted legal boundaries, thus gaining the freedom of a socially ostracized outcast.The only thing that is impossible is that she can settle down comfortably and safely.From the very beginning, however, the author's peculiar genius asserts itself in strength, avoiding the obvious crisis of falling into the cliches of the adventure novel.He makes us see that Moore Flanders is a woman in her own right, not just some material for a string of adventures.To prove the point, like Roxana, she fell passionately, perhaps unfortunately, in love from the start.The fact that she must raise her spirits to marry someone else, and watch her accounts and fortune very closely, was a factor not to be despised in her ardor, but her birth was responsible for it; and, with Defoe, Like all the women she writes about, she is a character of sound understanding.She has no scruple to lie when it serves her purpose, and so, when she tells the truth about herself, there is always something undeniable in it.She cannot waste time on the subtleties of personal feeling; she sheds a tear, feels a moment's melancholy, and she goes "on with the story" again.She has a spirit that likes to brave the storm.She is happy to display her own abilities.When she discovered that the man she had married in Virginia turned out to be her own brother, she was so disgusted that she insisted on parting with him; I went, for I was young, and my nature was always optimistic, and continued to be optimistic to extremes." She was not heartless, and no one could accuse her of frivolity; but life delighted her, and she was the one who took us A lively heroine who attracts all.What is more, her ambition has an imaginative tinge, which puts it in the category of those noble passions.Despite her savage, practical nature, she was haunted by a certain longing for romantic love, for that quality which (according to her conception) made a man a gentleman.When she caused a highwayman to miscalculate her fortune, she wrote: "He did have a true chivalry, and that is all the more pathetic to me. Better to be ruined by a respectable It is better to be treated by a gentleman than to be spoiled by a rascal, and even this is a kind of comforting thought." The following situation is completely in line with her character.She was proud of her last companion, for when they arrived at the colony he refused to work and preferred to hunt, and she cheerfully bought him a wig and a sword with a silver handle, "to make him look like an elegant Gentleman, for he is such a man." Her preference for hot weather was in perfect harmony with the passion with which she kissed the ground her son trod.She nobly tolerated the transgressions of others, so long as it was not "totally indecent in spirit, imperious, cruel, callous when prevailing, servile and discouraged when disadvantaged".Besides, she treats everyone with kindness.

The list of the various qualities and virtues of this weather-beaten sinner is far from exhausted, and we can fully understand why the woman of Borrow, who sold apples on London Bridge, called her "Mary of God Blessed" , and thought her book was worth more than all the apples in her stall, and that Boro took it up and hid in the back of the shed, reading till his eyes were sore.We dwell upon these signs of character only to prove that the author of Moore Flanders is not, as it has been charged, a mere journalist and objective fact ignorant of the psychological nature of man. faithful recorder.It is true that the image and substance of his characters are formed automatically, they seem to ignore the author, and they do not quite meet his wishes.He never delineated or emphasized any subtlety or pathos, but hurried on with the story calmly, as if they had arisen of their own accord, without his being aware of them. .An imaginative stroke (for example, when the prince sits by his son's cradle, and Roxana notes "how the baby loved to look at him while he was asleep"), seems to us more important than It has more meaning for himself.After a very modern remark on the necessity of conveying important news to such a minor figure as the burglar in Newgate, lest we should speak of it in our sleep, he begged our pardon for his ramblings. Too far off topic.He seemed to imprint his characters so deeply on his mind that he could not understand how he brought them to life; and, like all unconscious artists, he left in his work His wealth is greater than any of his contemporaries could unearth.

He is therefore likely to be perplexed by our interpretations of his characters.We find for ourselves meanings which we carefully camouflage even before his own eyes.So it happened that we admired Moore Flanders far more than we condemned her.Nor can we believe that Defoe was decisive as to the exact extent of her crime, or that he was not aware of the many profound questions he was asking when he considered the lives of those society's outcasts. To these questions, even if he does not answer them publicly, he hints at answers that contradict his professed beliefs.From the evidence given in his treatise, "The Education of Women," we know that he was far ahead of his time in thinking deeply about women's abilities (which he thought highly of) and the injustices they suffered treatment (which he sternly condemned).

Considering that our country is a civilized Christian country, it often occurs to me that we deny women the right to study, which is one of the most barbaric customs in the world.We foolishly and arrogantly blame women every day; I am convinced that if women had the same right to education as we do, they would be less guilty than we are. Advocates of women's rights hardly wanted, perhaps, to include Moore Flanders and Roxana in their list of patron saints; however, this was clear: Defoe not only wanted them to say something about the issue Some very modern rhetoric, and he places them in such a way that their particular suffering is presented in such a way that it must arouse our sympathy.What women needed, Moore Flanders said, was courage and the strength to "stand their ground" and immediately show the benefits they might reap.Roxana, a woman of her convictions, argued more sharply against the slavery of marriage.The businessman told her that marriage would enable her to "start a new career in the world"; she thought "that was a way of saying the opposite of usual practice."Defoe, of all writers, is the least erring in that blatant preaching.Roxana holds our attention firmly because she is so completely unaware that she is a role model for women in any good sense that she is entitled to admit that part of her argument "has a A noble and serious tendency, which I really did not think of at the time."Awareness of her own weaknesses, and the sincere doubts that this awareness engendered as to her own motives, had the pleasing consequence of keeping her image vivid and human; and So many of the martyrs and pioneers of social problem fiction have allowed their work to shrivel and wither, leaving only the dry dogma of their respective convictions.

But Defoe does not admire us for being able to show that he had anticipated some of Meredith's ideas, or written certain scenes that would have been rewritten by Ibsen (this strange Suggestions have been made).Whatever his claims about the place of woman were, they were a by-product of his chief virtue, which consisted in the fact that he dealt with the important and lasting aspects of things, not with their transitory and trivial aspects. aspect.His work often appears monotonous.He was able to imitate the matter-of-fact precision of a scientific traveler, until we marvel at how his pen could describe, or rather his mind could imagine, scenes that could not even be excused by fact to lighten its burden. boring.He ignores most of the properties of vegetables, and he ignores most of human nature.All this we can tolerate, though we have tolerated some equally serious flaws in many of the writers we consider great.But that does not detract from the particular merit of weakening the remainder.From the first he confines his sphere of activity, and limits his ambition, and this gives him an insight into the truth of the truth, which is greater than the reality of the apparent truth which he calls his aim. Far more precious and enduring.Moore Flanders and her friends presented themselves to him and attracted his attention not, as we say, because they were "lifelike," nor, as he asserted, because they were punitive exhortations from which the public might be instructive. Good example.A natural truthfulness bred in them by the upbringing of a life of misery piqued his interest.For them there is no excuse; no benevolent refuge can conceal their motives.Poverty is the overseer who oppresses them.Defoe was never more than a verbal judge for their blunders.But their courage, wit, and tenacity delighted him.He found that their society was full of interesting conversations, good stories, mutual trust and sincerity, and a moral code of his own creation.Their fortunes were endlessly varied, and in his own life he had admired, pondered, watched them.Above all, those men and women speak freely and openly of the passions and desires which have moved men and women since ancient times, so that even now their vitality is not weakened.There is a dignity in everything that is openly looked at.Even the sordid subject of money, which plays such a large part in their experience, becomes a not-so-sounding subject when it signifies not an attitude of leisurely comfort and pomp but honor, honesty, and life itself. Dirty but tragic subject too.You can object that Defoe is commonplace, but you can never say that he was fond of trivial matters.

He is indeed among those great and simple writers whose work is founded on an understanding of the most enduring, if not the most charming, elements of human nature.Standing on Hungry Man's Bridge overlooking London, the landscape is gray, serious, and grand, full of the slight commotion caused by the bustling traffic and merchants, if it were not for the masts of the ships and the spiers of the city As with the Vault, the picture is banal and unpoetic, and it reminds us of Defoe.The ragged girls with violets in their hands at street corners, and the weather-beaten old ladies who waited patiently for customers with their matches and shoelaces on display under arches, seemed They are all characters who escaped from his books.He belonged to the same school as Creb and Gissing, and he was not merely their peer in this exacting place of study, but its originator and master.