34

CRITICISMS ON "ROBINSON CRUSOE,"

FROM ROUSSEAU.

Since we must have books, this is one which, in my opinion, is a most excellent treatise on natural education. This is the first my Emilius shall read; his whole library shall long consist of this work only, which shall preserve an eminent rank to the very last. It shall be the text to which all our conversations on natural science are to serve only as a comment. It shall be a guide during our progress to maturity of judgment; and so long as our taste is not adulterated, the perusal of this book will afford us pleasure. And what surprising book is this? Is it Aristotle? is it Pliny? is it Buffon? No; it is "Robinson Crusoe." The value and importance of the various arts are ordinarily estimated, not according to their real utility, but by the gratification which they administer to the fantastic desires of mankind. But Emilius shall be taught to view them in a different light: "Robinson Crusoe " shall teach him to value the stock of an ironmonger above that of the most magnificent toy shop in Europe.

My third quotation is less extravagant in its eulogy, and therefore more discriminating.* I believe it, moreover, to approach much nearer to a true estimate of De Foe's real merits. It is taken from a very able article on “De Foe's Novels," in the seventeenth volume of the “ Cornhill Magazine : '

FROM THE "CORNHILL MAGAZINE."

The horrors of abandonment on a desert island can be appreciated by the simplest sailor or schoolboy. The main thing is to bring out the situation plainly and forcibly, to tell us of the difficulties of making pots and pans, of catching goats, and sowing corn, and of avoiding audacious cannibals. This task De Foe performs with unequalled spirit and vivacity. In his first discovery of a new art he shows the freshness so often conspicuous in first novels. The scenery was just that which had peculiar charms for his fancy; it was one of those half-true legends of which he had heard strange stories from seafaring men, and possibly from the acquaintances of his hero himself. He brings out the shrewd, vigorous character of the Englishman thrown upon his own resources, with evident enjoyment of his task. Indeed, De Foe tells us himself that in Robinson Crusoe he saw a kind of allegory of his own fate. He had suffered from solitude of soul. Confinement in his prison is represented in the book by confinement in an island; and even particular incidents, such as the fright he receives one night from something in his bed," was word for word a history of what happened." In other words. this novel too, like many of the best ever written, has in it something of the autobiographical element, which makes a man speak from greater depths of feeling than in a purely imaginary story.

It would indeed be easy to show that the story, though in one sense * We have considerably abridged the original.

BY A RECENT WRITER.

35

marvellously like truth, is singularly wanting as a psychological study. Friday is no real savage, but a good English servant without plush. He says "muchee" and "speakee," but he becomes at once a civilized being, and in his first conversation puzzles Crusoe terribly by that awkward theological question, Why God did not kill the Devil; for, characteristically enough, Crusoe's first lesson includes a little instruction upon the enemy of mankind. Selkirk's state of mind may be inferred from two or three facts. He had almost forgotten how to talk; he had learned to catch goats by running on foot; and he had acquired the exceedingly difficult art of making fire by rubbing two sticks. In other words, his whole mind was absorbed in providing a few physical necessities, and he was rapidly becoming a savage; for a man who can't speak, and can make fire, is very near the Australian. We may infer, what is probable from other cases, that a man living fifteen years by himself, like Crusoe, would either go mad or sink into that semisavage state. De Foe really describes a man in prison, not in solitary confinement. We should not be so pedantic as to call for accuracy in such matters; but the difference between the fiction and what we believe would have been the reality is significant. De Foe, even in “Robinson Crusoe," gives a very inadequate picture of the mental torments to which his hero is exposed. He is frightened by a parrot calling him by his name, and by the strangely picturesque incident of the footmark on the sand; but, on the whole, he takes his imprisonment with preternatural stolidity. His stay on the island produces the same state of mind as might be due to a dull Sunday in Scotland. For this reason-the want of power in describing emotion as compared with the amazing power of describing facts-" Robinson Crusoe" is a book for boys rather than for men; and, as Lamb says, rather for the kitchen than for higher circles. It falls short of any high intellectual interest. When we leave the striking situation, and get to the Second Part, with the Spaniards and Will Atkins talking natural theology to his wife, it sinks to the level of the secondary stories. But for people who are not too proud to take a rather low order of amusement, "Robinson Crusoe" will always be one of the most charming of books. We have the romantic and adventurous incidents upon which the most unflinching realism can be set to work without danger of vulgarity. Here is precisely the story suited to De Foe's strength and weakness. He is forced to be artistic in spite of himself. He cannot lose the thread of the narrative and break it into disjointed fragments, for the limits of the island confine him as well as his hero. He cannot tire us with details, for all the details of such a story are interesting. It is made up of petty incidents as much as the life of a prisoner reduced to taming flies, or making saws out of penknives. The island does as well as the Bastille for making trifles valuable to the sufferer and to us. The facts tell the story of themselves, without any demand for romantic power to press them home to us; and the efforts to give an air of authenticity to the story, which sometimes make us smile, and sometimes

36

BY W. CALDWELL ROSCOE

rather bore us in other novels, are all to the purpose; for there is a real point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in giving us for the time an illusory belief in his reality. When we add that the whole book shows the freshness of a writer employed on his first novel—though at the mature age of fifty-eight-seeing in it an allegory of his own experiences embodied in the scenes which most interested his imagination, we see some reasons why "Robinson Crusoe" should hold a distinct rank by itself amongst his works.

To have pleased all the boys in Europe for nearly a hundred and fifty years is, after all, a remarkable feat.

This, indeed, is the best panegyric that can be pronounced upon De Foe's most celebrated fiction. It has been unapproached for a century and a half as a boy's book, and still holds its own in the face of a thousand competitors. Of all its imitators, "The Swiss Family Robinson" alone has drawn near to it in popularity, though the two, so far as their literary character is concerned, remain separated longo intervallo.

The following able estimate, by William Caldwell Roscoe, will probably be new to most of my readers :

FROM W. CALDWELL ROSCOE.

It would be to impugn the verdict of all mankind to say that "Robinson Crusoe" was not a great work of genius. It is a work of genius-a most remarkable one-but of a low order of genius. The universal admiration it has obtained may be the admiration of men; but it is founded on the liking of boys. Few educated men or women would care to read it for the first time after the age of five-and-twenty. Even Lamb could say it only "holds its place by tough prescription." The boy revels in it. It furnishes him with food for his imagination in the very direction in which, of all others, it loves to occupy itself. It is not that he cares for Robinson Crusoe-that dull, ingenious, seafaring creature, with his strange mixture of cowardice and boldness, his unleavened, coarsely sagacious, mechanic nature, his keen trade-instincts, and his rude religious experiences. The boy becomes his own Robinson Crusoe. It is little Tom Smith himself, curled up in a remote corner of the playground, who makes those troublesome voyages on the raft, and rejoices over the goods he saves from the wreck; who contrives his palisades and twisted cables to protect his cave; clothes himself so quaintly in goat skins; is terrified at the savages; and rejoices in his jurisdiction over the docile Friday, who, he thinks, would be better than a dog, and almost as good as a pony. He does not care a farthing about Crusoe as a separate person from himself. This is one reason why he rejects the religious reflections as a strange and undesirable element in a work otherwise so fascinating. He cannot enter into Crusoe's sense of * W. Caldwell Roscoe, Poems and Essays," ii. 237, 238.

BY PROFESSOR MASSON.

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wickedness, and docs not feel the least concern for his soul. If a grown man reads the book in after years, it is to recall the sensations of youth, or curiously to examine the secret of the unbounded popularity it has enjoyed. How much this popularity is due to the happy choice of his subject, we may better estimate when we remember that the popular" Robinson Crusoe " is in reality only a part of the work, and the work itself only one of many others, not less well executed, from the same hand. No other man in the world could have drawn so absolutely living a picture of the desert-island life; but the same man has exercised the same power over more complex incidents, and the works are little read.

Professor Masson looks upon De Foe as the founder of the modern Fiction. He was a great reader, he says, and a tolerable scholar, and he may have taken the hint of his method from the Spanish picaresque novel. On the whole, however, it was his own robust sense of reality that led him to his style. There is more of the sly humour of the foreign picaresque novel (such as Gil Blas) in his representations of English ragamuffin life; there is nothing of allegory, poetry, or even of didactic purpose; all is hard, prosaic, and matter-of-fact, as in newspaper paragraphs, or the pages of the "Newgate Calendar." In reference to his greatest work of fiction, Professor Masson adds :-* .

FROM PROFESSOR MASSON.

It is a happy accident that the subject of one of his fictions, and that the earliest on a great scale, was of a kind in treating which his genius in matter-of-fact necessarily produced the effect of a poem. The conception of a solitary mariner thrown on an uninhabited island was one as really belonging to the fact of that time as those which formed the subject of De Foe's less-read fictions of coarse English life. Dampier and the bucaniers were roving the South Seas; and there yet remained parts of the landsurface of the Earth of which man had not taken possession, and on which sailors were occasionally thrown adrift by the brutality of captains. Seizing this text, more especially as offered in the story of Alexander Selkirk, De Foe's matchless power of inventing circumstantial incidents made him more a master even of its poetic capabilities than the rarest poet then living could have been; and now that, all round our globe, there is not an unknown island left, we still reserve in our mental charts one such island, with the sea breaking round it, and we would part any day with two of the heroes of antiquity rather than with Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday.

Our critical quotations shall conclude with one from De Foe's most brilliant biographer :-t

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BY MR. JOHN FORSTER.

FROM JOHN FORSTER.

"Robinson Crusoe" is a standard piece in every European language; its popularity has extended to every civilized nation. The traveller Burckhardt found it translated into Arabic, and heard it read aloud among the wandering tribes in the cool hours of evening. It is devoured by every boy; and, as long as a boy remains in the world, he will clamour for "Robinson Crusoe." It sinks into the bosom while the bosom is most capable of pleasurable impressions from the adventurous and the marvellous; and no human work, we honestly believe, has afforded such great delight. Neither the "Iliad" nor the "Odyssey," in the much longer course of ages, has incited so many to enterprise, or to reliance on their own powers and capacities. It is the romance of solitude and self-sustainment; and could only so perfectly have been written by a man whose own life had for the most part been passed in the independence of unaided thought, accustomed to great reverses, of inexhaustible resource in confronting calamities, leaning ever on his Bible in sober and satisfied belief, and not afraid at any time to find himself alone, in communion with nature and with God. Nor need we here repeat, what has been said so well by many critics, that the secret of its fascination is its reality. This, and the "History of the Plague," are the masterpieces of De Foe. These are the works wherein his power is at the highest, and which place him not less among the practical benefactors than among the great writers of our race. "Why, this man could have founded a colony as well as governed it," said a statesman of the succeeding century, amazed at the knowledge of various kinds, and at the intimate acquaintance with all useful arts displayed in "Robinson Crusoe."

Leaving the reader to compare and consider these criticisms, and to form an opinion for himself, which will, I trust, be equally free from inordinate praise and undue depreciation, I resume my narrative of De Foe's labours.

The success of "Robinson Crusoe" was immediate and unquestionable. The second edition was published only seventeen days after the first; the third edition, twenty-five days later; and the fourth on the 8th of August.

The mine which De Foe had thus opportunely discovered, he proceeded to work with his accustomed vigour. On the 20th of August he published a continuation of his immortal fiction, under the title of "The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; being the Second and Last Part of his Life, and of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels round Three Parts of the Globe."

In the preface to this sequel-which like most sequels is inferior in interest and literary merit to the preceding part, though many passages are admirably conceived and carried out-he pretends, as before, to be only the editor of Crusoe's story, and alludes with apparent impartiality to its well deserved good fortune. As a specimen of his quiet matter-of-fact style, it deserves quotation :—