Chapter 3

We may ask again, therefore, what is the peculiar source of De Foe's power? He has little, or no dramatic power, in the higher sense of the word, which implies sympathy with many characters and varying tones of mind. If he had written 'Henry IV.,' Falstaff, and Hotspur, and Prince Hal would all have been as like each other as are generally the first and second murderer. Nor is the mere fact that he tells a story with a strange appearance of veracity sufficient; for a story may be truth-like and yet deadly dull. Indeed, no candid critic can deny that this is the case with some of De Foe's narratives; as, for example, the latter part of 'Colonel Jack,' where the details of management of a plantation in Virginia are sufficiently uninteresting in spite of the minute financial details. One device, which he occasionally employs with great force, suggests an occasional source of interest. It is generally reckoned as one of his most skilful tricks that in telling a story he cunningly leaves a few stray ends, which are never taken up. Such is the well-known incident of Xury, in 'Robinson Crusoe.' This contrivance undoubtedly gives an appearance of authenticity, by increasing the resemblance to real narratives; it is like the trick of artificially roughening a stone after it has been fixed into a building, to give it the appearance of being fresh from the quarry. De Foe, however, frequently extracts a more valuable piece of service from these loose ends. The situation which has been most praised in De Foe's novels is that which occurs at the end of 'Roxana.' Roxana, after a life of wickedness, is at last married to a substantial merchant. She has saved, from the wages of sin, the convenient sum of 2,056_l._ a year, secured upon excellent mortgages. Her husband has 17,000_l._ in cash, after deducting a 'black article of 8,000 pistoles,' due on account of a certain lawsuit in Paris, and 1,320_l._ a year in rent. There is a satisfaction about these definite sums which we seldom receive from the vague assertions of modern novelists. Unluckily, a girl turns up at this moment who shows great curiosity about Roxana's history. It soon becomes evident that she is, in fact, Roxana's daughter by a former and long since deserted husband; but she cannot be acknowledged without a revelation of her mother's subsequently most disreputable conduct. Now, Roxana has a devoted maid, who threatens to get rid, by fair means or foul, of this importunate daughter. Once she fails in her design, but confesses to her mistress that, if necessary, she will commit the murder. Roxana professes to be terribly shocked, but yet has a desire to be relieved at almost any price from her tormentor. The maid thereupon disappears again; soon afterwards the daughter disappears too; and Roxana is left in terrible doubt, tormented by the opposing anxieties that her maid may have murdered her daughter, or that her daughter may have escaped and revealed the mother's true character. Here is a telling situation for a sensation novelist; and the minuteness with which the story is worked out, whilst we are kept in suspense, supplies the place of the ordinary rant; to say nothing of the increased effect due to apparent veracity, in which certainly few sensation novelists can even venture a distant competition. The end of the story differs still more widely from modern art. Roxana has to go abroad with her husband, still in a state of doubt. Her maid after a time joins her, but gives no intimation as to the fate of the daughter; and the story concludes by a simple statement that Roxana afterwards fell into well-deserved misery. The mystery is certainly impressive; and Roxana is heartily afraid of the devil and the gallows, to say nothing of the chance of losing her fortune. Whether, as Lamb maintained, the conclusion in which the mystery is cleared up is a mere forgery, or was added by De Foe to satisfy the ill-judged curiosity of his readers, I do not profess to decide. Certainly it rather spoils the story; but in this, as in some other cases, one is often left in doubt as to the degree in which De Foe was conscious of his own merits.

Another instance on a smaller scale of the effective employment of judicious silence, is an incident in 'Captain Singleton.' The Quaker of our acquaintance meets with a Japanese priest who speaks a few words of English, and explains that he has learnt it from thirteen Englishmen, the only remnant of thirty-two who had been wrecked on the coast of Japan. To confirm his story, he produces a bit of paper on which is written, in plain English words: 'We came from Greenland and from the North Pole.' Here are claimants for the discovery of a North-west Passage, of whom we would gladly hear more. Unluckily, when Captain Singleton comes to the place where his Quaker had met the priest, the ship in which he was sailing had departed; and this put an end to an inquiry, and perhaps 'may have disappointed mankind of one of the most noble discoveries that ever was made or will again be made, in the world, for the good of mankind in general; but so much for that.'

In these two fragments, which illustrate a very common device of De Foe's, we come across two elements of positive power over our imaginations. Even De Foe's imagination recognised and delighted in a certain margin of mystery to this harsh world of facts and figures. He is generally too anxious to set everything before us in broad daylight; there is too little of the thoughts and emotions which inhabit the twilight of the mind; of those dim half-seen forms which exercise the strongest influence upon the imagination, and are the most tempting subjects for the poet's art. De Foe, in truth, was little enough of a poet. Sometimes by mere force of terse idiomatic language he rises into real poetry, as it was understood in the days when Pope and Dryden were our lawgivers. It is often really vigorous. The well-known verses--

Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The devil always builds a chapel there--

which begin the 'True-born Englishman,' or the really fine lines which occur in the 'Hymn to the Pillory,' that 'hieroglyphic state machine, contrived to punish fancy in,' and ending--

Tell them that placed him here, They're scandals to the times, Are at a loss to find his guilt, _And can't commit his crimes_--

may stand for specimens of his best manner. More frequently he degenerates into the merest doggerel, _e.g._--

No man was ever yet so void of sense, As to debate the right of self-defence, A principle so grafted in the mind, With nature born, and does like nature bind; Twisted with reason, and with nature too, As neither one nor t'other can undo--

which is scarcely a happy specimen of the difficult art of reasoning in verse. His verse is at best vigorous epigrammatic writing, such as would now be converted into leading articles, twisted with more or less violence into rhyme. And yet there is a poetical side to his mind, or at least a susceptibility to poetical impressions of a certain order. And as a novelist is on the border-line between poetry and prose, and novels should be as it were prose saturated with poetry, we may expect to come in this direction upon the secret of De Foe's power. Although De Foe for the most part deals with good tangible subjects, which he can weigh and measure and reduce to moidores and pistoles, the mysterious has a very strong though peculiar attraction for him. It is indeed that vulgar kind of mystery which implies nothing of reverential awe. He was urged by a restless curiosity to get away from this commonplace world, and reduce the unknown regions beyond to scale and measure. The centre of Africa, the wilds of Siberia, and even more distinctly the world of spirits, had wonderful charms for him. Nothing would have given him greater pleasure than to determine the exact number of the fallen angels and the date of their calamity. In the 'History of the Devil' he touches, with a singular kind of humorous gravity, upon several of these questions, and seems to apologise for his limited information. 'Several things,' he says, 'have been suggested to set us a-calculating the number of this frightful throng of devils who, with Satan the master-devil, was thus cast out of heaven.' He declines the task, though he quotes with a certain pleasure the result obtained by a grave calculator, who found that in the first line of Satan's army there were a thousand times a hundred thousand million devils, and more in the other two. He gives a kind of arithmetical measure of the decline of the devil's power by pointing out that 'he who was once equal to the angel who killed eighty thousand men in one night, is not able now, without a new commission, to take away the life of one Job.' He is filled with curiosity as to the proceedings of the first parliament (p--------t as he delicately puts it) of devils; he regrets that as he was not personally present in that 'black divan'--at least, not that he can remember, for who can account for his pre-existent state?--he cannot say what happened; but he adds, 'If I had as much personal acquaintance with the devil as would admit it, and could depend upon the truth of what answer he would give me, the first question would be, what measures they (the devils) resolved on at their first assembly?' and the second how they employed the time between their fall and the creation of the man? Here we see the instinct of the politician; and we may add that De Foe is thoroughly dissatisfied with Milton's statements upon this point, though admiring his genius; and goes so far as to write certain verses intended as a correction of, or interpolation into, 'Paradise Lost.'

Mr. Ruskin, in comparing Milton's Satan with Dante's, somewhere remarks that the vagueness of Milton, as compared with the accurate measurements given by Dante, is so far a proof of less activity of the imaginative faculty. It is easier to leave the devil's stature uncertain than to say that he was eighteen feet high. Without disputing the proposition as Mr. Ruskin puts it, we fancy that he would scarcely take De Foe's poetry as an improvement in dignity upon Milton's. We may, perhaps, guess at its merits from this fragment of a speech in prose, addressed to Adam by Eve: 'What ails the sot?' says the new termagant. 'What are you afraid of?... Take it, you fool, and eat.... Take it, I say, or I will go and cut down the tree, and you shall never eat any of it at all; and you shall still be a fool, and be governed by your wife for ever.' This, and much more gross buffoonery of the same kind, is apparently intended to recommend certain sound moral aphorisms to the vulgar; but the cool arithmetical method by which De Foe investigates the history of the devil, his anxiety to pick up gossip about him, and the view which he takes of him as a very acute and unscrupulous politician--though impartially vindicating him from some of Mr. Milton's aspersions--is exquisitely characteristic.

If we may measure the imaginative power of great poets by the relative merits of their conceptions of Satan, we might find a humbler gauge for inferior capacities in the power of summoning awe-inspiring ghosts. The difficulty of the feat is extreme. Your ghost, as Bottom would have said, is a very fearful wild-fowl to bring upon the stage. He must be handled delicately, or he is spoilt. Scott has a good ghost or two; but Lord Lytton, almost the only writer who has recently dealt with the supernatural, draws too freely upon our belief, and creates only melodramatic spiritual beings, with a strong dash of the vulgarising element of modern 'spiritualism.' They are scarcely more awful beings than the terrible creations of the raw-head-and-bloody-bones school of fiction.

Amongst this school we fear that De Foe must, on the whole, be reckoned. We have already made acquaintance with Mrs. Veal, who, in her ghostly condition, talks for an hour and three-quarters with a gossip over a cup of tea; who, indeed, so far forgets her ghostly condition as to ask for a cup of the said tea, and only evades the consequences of her blunder by one of those rather awkward excuses which we all sometimes practise in society; and who, in short, is the least ethereal spirit that was ever met with outside a table. De Foe's extraordinary love for supernatural stories of the gossiping variety found vent in 'A History of Apparitions,' and his 'System of Magic.' The position which he takes up is a kind of modified rationalism. He believes that there are genuine apparitions which personate our dead friends, and give us excellent pieces of advice on occasion; but he refuses to believe that the spirits can appear themselves, on account 'of the many strange inconveniences and ill consequences which would happen if the souls of men and women, unembodied and departed, were at liberty to visit the earth.' De Foe is evidently as familiar with the habits of spirits generally as of the devil. In that case, for example, the feuds of families would never die, for the injured person would be always coming back to right himself. He proceeds upon this principle to account for many apparitions, as, for example, one which appeared in the likeness of a certain J. O. of the period, and strongly recommended his widow to reduce her expenses. He won't believe that the Virgin appeared to St. Francis, because all stories of that kind are mere impostures of the priests; but he thinks it very likely that he was haunted by the devil, who may have sometimes taken the Virgin's shape. In the 'History of Witchcraft' De Foe tells us how, as he was once riding in the country, he met a man on the way to inquire of a certain wizard. De Foe, according to his account, which may or may not be intended as authentic, waited the whole of the next day at a public-house in a country town, in order to hear the result of the inquiry; and had long conversations, reported in his usual style, with infinite 'says he's' and 'says I's,' in which he tried to prove that the wizard was an impostor. This lets us into the secret of many of De Foe's apparitions. They are the ghosts that frighten villagers as they cross commons late at night, or that rattle chains and display lights in haunted houses. Sometimes they have vexed knavish attorneys by discovering long-hidden deeds. Sometimes they have enticed highwaymen into dark corners of woods, and there the wretched criminal finds in their bags (for ghosts of this breed have good substantial luggage) nothing but a halter and a bit of silver (value exactly 13-1/2_d._) to pay the hangman. When he turns to the owner, he has vanished. Occasionally, they are the legends told by some passing traveller from distant lands--probably genuine superstitions in their origin, but amplified by tradition into marvellous exactitude of detail, and garnished with long gossiping conversations. Such a ghost, which, on the whole, is my favourite, is the mysterious Owke Mouraski. This being, whether devil or good spirit no man knows, accompanied a traveller for four years through the steppes of Russia, and across Norway, Turkey, and various other countries. On the march he was always seen a mile to the left of the party, keeping parallel with them, in glorious indifference to roads. He crossed rivers without bridges, and the sea without ships. Everywhere, in the wild countries, he was known by name and dreaded; for if he entered a house, some one would die there within a year. Yet he was good to the traveller, going so far, indeed, on one occasion, as to lend him a horse, and frequently treating him to good advice. Towards the end of the journey Owke Mouraski informed his companion that he was 'the inhabitant of an invisible region,' and afterwards became very familiar with him. The traveller, indeed, would never believe that his friend was a devil, a scepticism of which De Foe doubtfully approves. The story, however, must be true, because, as De Foe says, he saw it in manuscript many years ago; and certainly Owke is of a superior order to most of the pot-house ghosts.

De Foe, doubtless, had an insatiable appetite for legends of this kind, talked about them with infinite zest in innumerable gossips, and probably smoked pipes and consumed ale in abundance during the process. The ghosts are the substantial creations of the popular fancy, which no longer nourished itself upon a genuine faith in a more lofty order of spiritual beings. It is superstition become gross and vulgar before it disappears for ever. Romance and poetry have pretty well departed from these ghosts, as from the witches of the period, who are little better than those who still linger in our country villages and fill corners of newspapers, headed 'Superstition in the nineteenth century.' In his novels De Foe's instinct for probability generally enables him to employ the marvellous moderately, and, therefore, effectively; he is specially given to dreams; they are generally verified just enough to leave us the choice of credulity or scepticism, and are in excellent keeping with the supposed narrator. Roxana tells us how one morning she suddenly sees her lover's face as though it were a death's-head, and his clothes covered with blood. In the evening the lover is murdered. One of Moll Flanders' husbands hears her call him at a distance of many miles--a superstition, by the way, in which Boswell, if not Johnson, fully believed. De Foe shows his usual skill in sometimes making the visions or omens fail of a too close fulfilment, as in the excellent dream where Robinson Crusoe hears Friday's father tell him of the sailors' attempt to murder the Spaniards: no part of the dream, as he says, is specifically true, though it has a general truth; and hence we may, at our choice, suppose it to have been supernatural, or to be merely a natural result of Crusoe's anxiety. This region of the marvellous, however, only affects De Foe's novels in a subordinate degree. The Owke Mouraski suggests another field in which a lover of the mysterious could then find room for his imagination. The world still presented a boundless wilderness of untravelled land. Mapped and explored territory was still a bright spot surrounded by chaotic darkness, instead of the two being in the reverse proportions. Geographers might fill up huge tracts by writing 'here is much gold,' or putting 'elephants instead of towns.' De Foe's gossiping acquaintance, when they were tired of ghosts, could tell of strange adventures in wild seas, where merchantmen followed a narrow track, exposed to the assaults of pirates; or of long journeys over endless steppes, in the days when travelling was travelling indeed; when distances were reckoned by months, and men might expect to meet undiscovered tribes and monsters unimagined by natural historians. Doubtless he had listened greedily to the stories of seafaring men and merchants from the Gold Coast or the East. 'Captain Singleton,' to omit 'Robinson Crusoe' for the present, shows the form into which these stories moulded themselves in his mind. Singleton, besides his other exploits, anticipated Livingstone in crossing Africa from sea to sea. De Foe's biographers rather unnecessarily admire the marvellous way in which his imaginary descriptions have been confirmed by later travellers. And it is true that Singleton found two great lakes, which may, if we please, be identified with those of recent discoverers. His other guesses are not surprising. As a specimen of the mode in which he filled up the unknown space we may mention that he covers the desert 'with a kind of thick moss of a blackish dead colour,' which is not a very impressive phenomenon. It is in the matter of wild beasts, however, that he is strongest. Their camp is in one place surrounded by 'innumerable numbers of devilish creatures.' These creatures were as 'thick as a drove of bullocks coming to a fair,' so that they could not fire without hitting some; in fact, a volley brought down three tigers and two wolves, besides one creature 'of an ill-gendered kind, between a tiger and a leopard.' Before long they met an 'ugly, venomous, deformed kind of a snake or serpent,' which had 'a hellish, ugly, deformed look and voice;' indeed, they would have recognised in it the being who most haunted De Foe's imaginary world--the devil--except that they could not think what business the devil could have where there were no people. The fauna of this country, besides innumerable lions, tigers, leopards, and elephants, comprised 'living creatures as big as calves, but not of that kind,' and creatures between a buffalo and a deer, which resembled neither; they had no horns, but legs like a cow, with a fine head and neck, like a deer. The 'ill-gendered' beast is an admirable specimen of De Foe's workmanship. It shows his moderation under most tempting circumstances. No dog-headed men, no men with eyes in their breasts, or feet that serve as umbrellas, will suit him. He must have something new, and yet probable; and he hits upon a very serviceable animal in this mixture between a tiger and a leopard. Surely no one could refuse to honour such a moderate draft upon his imagination. In short, De Foe, even in the wildest of regions, where his pencil might have full play, sticks closely to the commonplace, and will not venture beyond the regions of the easily conceivable.

The final element in which De Foe's curiosity might find a congenial food consisted of the stories floating about contemporary affairs. He had talked with men who had fought in the Great Rebellion, or even in the old German wars. He had himself been out with Monmouth, and taken part in the fight at Sedgemoor. Doubtless that small experience of actual warfare gave additional vivacity to his descriptions of battles, and was useful to him, as Gibbon declares that his service with the militia was of some assistance in describing armies of a very different kind. There is a period in history which has a peculiar interest for all of us. It is that which lies upon the border-land between the past and present; which has gathered some romance from the lapse of time, and yet is not so far off but that we have seen some of the actors, and can distinctly realise the scenes in which they took part. Such to the present generation is the era of the Revolutionary wars. 'Old men still creep among us' who lived through that period of peril and excitement, and yet we are far enough removed from them to fancy that there were giants in those days. When De Foe wrote his novels the battles of the great Civil War and the calamities of the Plague were passing through this phase; and to them we owe two of his most interesting books, the 'Memoirs of a Cavalier' and the 'History of the Plague.'