-ART. V. DE FOE AS A NOVELIST.

Bohn's British Classics. De Foe's Works. Vols. I.-IV. London, Henry G. Bohn. 1854, 1855.

THE modern novel is the characteristic literature of modern times. It is not difficult to detect some of the leading sources of its growth in the conditions and tendencies of modern society, especially in England. Increase of personal liberty has given increased scope and a greater common importance to individual life and character. A diminishing political and social restraint over men's lives, and a less urgent necessity for active personal engagement in political affairs, combined with a less formal and exigent code of manners in society, have endowed men with both more room and more leisure for the conscious determination of their own lives and characters. The sphere of human duty is not less wide and important than it used to be: but it is more voluntary-less under the law; its claims are less engrossing and less exacting; the relations to God are less distracted-less mediate-more comprehensive. A man may either live that he may act in a certain way, or he may so act that he may live a certain life and be a certain sort of thing. The facilities for the latter arrangement of existence are probably greater now in England than they have ever hitherto been in the world; and the effects of a growing tendency in this direction are visible enough in our literature. An increased interest in our own characters has naturally given us an increased interest in the individual characters of others; and the examination and representation of character has been the most universal object of modern imaginative literature, its most special characteristic, and its highest excellence. The limits of the drama have not sufficed for its wants: it requires to display not only statical forms of character, but its development under the most varied and protracted circumstances; and an intimate union of the dramatic and narrative modes of delineation has been contrived, to give scope to the new requirements of art. The same tendencies may be observed in other sorts of writing. They have somewhat warped history from its true model and objects, and they have given a higher and truer character to biography. The distinguishing use of history lies in the light it throws on the political and social nature of man. Its lessons are for the statesman and the citizen. It investigates, or should do, the principles of common human action in communities, and furnishes its students with comprehensive grounds for judging the

tendencies and estimating the value of legislative changes. Its function is to supply men with guiding knowledge in their capacity as the members of a state. The object of biography is, or should be, to furnish, as complete as possible a view of the whole character and life of its subject, both for its own interest, and as making additions to that sort of knowledge of individual men which may subserve others in moulding their own individual lives and characters. Modern history, as we might expect, tends too much to become biographical in its character; while biography is far less content than it used to be with stringing together the events of a man's life, and aims at as searching as possible an examination and exhibition of the whole nature of the man. The same reasons that have tended to make character a more universal subject of study have also tended to give it a form which has made newer and more exhaustive methods of treating it more necessary for its exhibition. There are fewer sharp diversities in character than there used to be. Men differ, not less completely, but less prominently, than they used to do: there is less one-sided individual development. When men are sharply constrained by an external power, which can grasp only a part of their nature, the very pressure there will make other parts of their nature start out in strange and abnormal excrescences. The more external restraint is removed, the more rounded and the more alike in their general aspects will be the forms of the single particles which together constitute society: differences of character become less apparent on the surface, and a finer discrimination, a more comprehensive insight, and a more delicate expression, are necessary to delineate its diversities.

Modern taste, accustomed to this more refined school of art, finds little to gratify it in the novels of De Foe. Neither his own genius nor that of his times was favourable to a compliance with its more recondite demands. The reigns of William and of Anne were any thing rather than adapted for the unhampered growth and quiet contemplation of character. They were filled with restless petty action. The liberties of the nation itself had been secured; but the respective rights and claims of the several parties within the nation were never more undecided. It was a time of discord and jangling. Arbitrary invasions on the general liberty of the subject were replaced by harassing restrictions on the free action of certain classes; and dangers important enough to unite the mass of the people in resistance had been replaced by a petty tyranny of disqualifications and fines over discordant minorities, which led an anxious life of mixed warfare and occasional conformity. In such times measures were more interesting than men, events occupied attention more than the study of cha

racter. And in such a time the natural bent of De Foe's genius to occupy itself with action and practical affairs was thoroughly confirmed by a long life of thankless political effort, conducted from so independent a point of view as to expose him to the persecution of both the great parties of the day.

Human existence, in all its varied forms and conditions, was the one thing which interested him: but he busied himself rather with what men were doing than with what they were; with how they influenced the external world, rather than with how the external world influenced them. The modes of human life had a curious fascination for him. The way in which people lived and did things, and other imagined ways in which they might live and do the same or other things, were the matters which occupied his attention. The administration of affairs, the conduct of wars, the management of trade, the control of a household, these were his favourite objects of contemplation. Great or small, they pleased him alike. The main labours, on which he spent nearly forty years of his life, were works of survey and practical suggestion in political and social affairs, often the most intricate and important; but he could turn with equal relish to discuss the "pride, insolence, and exorbitant wages of our women-servants" (though "they were pleased to say he undervalued himself to take notice of them"), and to make "proposals for the amendment of the same." Even the most private and delicate arcana of domestic life were not too sacred to escape his curious observation and didactic suggestions.

His novels set forth not so much the life of a particular person as some particular mode of life. They tell us something that happened, or how things happened. Often the hero is a mere mouth-piece for a mass of adventures, told for their own sakes, and carrying their interest entirely in themselves, not deriving any from the light they throw on the supposititious narrator. The Memoirs of a Cavalier is De Foe's notion of how the civil wars were carried on. Captain Carleton is only a device to tell us what he knows of some of the Low-Country campaigns, of Spain, and of Lord Peterborough's exploits there; and the History of the Plague is interesting as history, not as a personal narrative. Of these sort of things one asks, as the children do, "But is it all true?" It professes to be so; every artifice is resorted to to make us believe it authentic; and there can be no doubt that De Foe deliberately intended to pass these narratives off upon the world as literally true, and to obtain the advantage of the interest so excited. But as soon as you get to learn that they are not authentic their main interest is gone. The great mass of the facts may be true, but you have not the slightest clue to enable you to distinguish between the truth and falsehood of any of the minor and

characteristic details: we can be sure only of those broad facts which we know to be true from other sources. In the whole range of imaginative literature there is nothing less satisfactory and more useless than this inextricable mingling of truths and figments. It is not history; it is not fiction. Where, as in Sir Walter Scott, you have an imaginative central interest confessedly fictitious, for which the real facts of history are used to afford a field, their own interest being only a subsidiary one, there, though the historical view may be distorted, and the facts inaccurate, they still have their true artistic bearing. There is a story; and if that be good, we care comparatively little whether the historic material be in strict accordance with fact. We know Cromwell was not as he is represented in Woodstock; the Talisman probably contains a not very correct view of Richard Cœur de Lion; and one would not be willing implicitly to accept all Sir Walter's views of parties and characters in Scottish history; but we don't read him for history, and we willingly accept for the time any view of historic personages which, without being glaringly inaccurate, subserves the interests of his romances. Where, on the other hand, a writer forms his own distinct conception of an historic personage or event, basing it on knowledge, and making it as true to the reality as he can, he may legitimately, perhaps, give play to his fancy in inventing minor incidents and traits for the purpose of reproducing his conception in a work of art with greater vividness and completeness than he could possibly do, were he to confine himself to the bare ascertained facts. If a man is writing history or biography, such a latitude is clearly not to be tolerated, though often taken; but such romances as Harold and Rienzi are doubtless permissible. When we peruse them, we lean on the author, and trust him just as far as we choose; and we know ourselves to be reading, hot history, but the impression history has left on a man of genius. But when a man bases the interest of his narrative on a mass of minute details about the real affairs of the world, professedly gathered by an eye-witness, the pleasure you derive from it is founded on the belief you have in its exact truth; and as soon as you find that the Cavalier who gives you the benefit of his personal experiences was really a tradesman in London of a generation later, the book loses its value. The element of invention destroys the interest you would have had in it as a record of fact, and the inextricable element of real fact destroys your pleasure in the invention. You wonder at it, and are perplexed in the perusal; if it retains any interest at all, it is due to the measure of probability that in the main it is still true.

And in De Foe's case this probability is very strong. His intense love for facts, and his, very accurate and comprehensive

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knowledge and wide experience of the world of men, made him of all writers the one most able to give a true picture of, or at any rate a collection of true incidents relating to, any of the events either of his own times or of those sufficiently close to survive in the memory of the actors or their immediate descendants. On the other hand, his love of invention, his skill in giving the exactest air of reality to his fancied incidents, and his utter want of scruple in palming them off as truths, leave it quite uncertain in what proportion such narratives as the History of the Plague consist of real incidents, and in what of manufactured ones so closely resembling the others as not to be distinguishable from them by any test we now have it in our power to apply. Once resigning yourself to this inevitable confusion of truth and fiction, or rather consoling yourself with the reflection that De Foe's inventions are in such close harmony with the facts that surround them, that we may almost accept the whole as true, and the graphic, matter-of-fact, direct, unadorned narrative has an irresistible charm. It is admirably adapted for the history of such an event as the Plague, whose reality leaves the uninformed imagination behind, whose facts are more strange and frightful than the fancy, unaided by a knowledge of the reality, could ever have summoned up. In such cases, the plain bare recital of things just as they actually happened, has a tragic power superior to any that genius, except perhaps of the very highest order, could confer upon them. We are comparatively familiar with the horrors of the time and its terrors; with Solomon Eagle, with his pan of burning coals on his head, "denouncing of judgment upon the city in a frightful manner;" and with the clergyman who went every evening through Whitechapel streets, repeating continually that passage from the Liturgy, "Spare us, good Lord; spare thy people whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood." We have heard "the fatal bellman," and the rumble of the dead-cart through the darkness thick with pestilence; have stood at the edge of the horrid pit, with its row of candles round it, and its busy and desperate buriers; have seen the dead encumbering the highway, and the dying bursting like frantic ghosts from the imprisonment of their houses;-but to give an impression of quiet desolation, we know nothing like De Foe's account of the solitary waterman, left alone among his dead neighbours, and labouring for the support of his stricken wife and family.

"Much about the same time I walked out into the fields towards Bow; for I had a great mind to see how things were managed in the river, and among the ships; and as I had some concern in shipping, I had a notion that it had been one of the best ways of securing oneself from the infection to have retired into a ship. And musing how to