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Realism and Idealism in English Literatur
e
Daniel Defoe I.
In the year of grace, 1660, the exiled, fugitive, and dispossessed Charles Stuart landed on English soil at Dover and, escorted by the fanfare and torches of a jubilant people, headed towards the capital to assume the crown that his father, the martyr king, had removed eleven years previously when he was executed on the gallows in Whitehall by order of the regicide generals. The corpses of Cromwell and Ireton were disinterred and dragged to Tyburn (the Golgotha, site of the skulls, in English history) where they were hanged on the gibbets and then, putrefied as they were, beheaded by the executioner. Merriment returned to Merry England; the gracefulness, culture, pomp, and luxury of the Stuart courts returned. The young king flung open the doors of his palace to flatterers of both sexes. Holding his lapdog in his arms, he gave audience to his ministers. Leaning against the fireplace of the House of Lords he would listen to the discourses of that elevated assembly, swearing by God’s bodikins (his majesty’s favourite oath) that his noblemen entertained him more than his comedians.
But this triumph was misleading and, within a short time, the star of the Stuart dynasty had set forever, and Protestant succession, embodied by the person of William of Nassau, had become the cornerstone of the British constitution. Here, according to the textbooks, the chapter of ancient history comes to an end, and that of modern history begins.
And yet, the constitutional crisis that was then resolved by a covenant between the crown, the church and the legislature is not the only, nor the most interesting, feat accomplished by that prince, who is called in remembrance the pious, glorious and immortal. His victory also signifies a crisis of race, an ethnic revenge. From the days of William the Conqueror onwards, no monarch of Germanic stock had wielded the English sceptre. The Normans were succeeded by the Plantagenets, the Plantagenets by the House of Tudor, the Tudors by the Stuarts.
Even Oliver Cromwell himself, the Lord Protector of civil liberties, was of Celtic origin, son of a Welsh father and a Scottish mother. So, over six centuries had passed since the Battle of Hastings before the true successor of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty was to ascend to the throne of England. The people who acclaimed the coming of the awkward and taciturn Dutch commander were acclaiming themselves, and saluting the human symbol of a true rebirth.
For the first time now the true English spirit begins to appear in literature. Consider how minimal the importance of that spirit was in the earlier times. In Chaucer, a court writer with a polished and comely style, the indigenous spirit can just be discerned as the framework for the adventures of respectable people — meaning Norman clerics and foreign heroes. How is the great English public depicted in the variegated dramas of William Shakespeare, who wrote two hundred years after Chaucer? A boorish peasant, a court jester, a half-mad and half-stupid ragamuffin, a gravedigger. Shakespeare’s characters all come from abroad and afar: Othello, a Moorish prince; Shylock, a Venetian Jew; Caesar, a Roman; Hamlet, a Danish prince; Macbeth, a Celtic usurper; Romeo and Juliet, citizens of Verona. Of all the rich gallery, perhaps the only one who can be called English is the fat knight with the monstrous paunch, Sir John Falstaff. In the centuries following the French conquest, English literature was schooled by masters such as Boccaccio, Dante, Tasso and Messer Lodovico. Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
are a version of the
Decameron
or the
Novellino;
Milton’s
Paradise Lost
is a puritanical transcript of the
Divine Comedy.
Shakespeare, with his Titianesque palette, his eloquence, his epileptic passion, and his creative fury, is an Italianized Englishman, while the theatre of the Restoration takes its cue from the Spanish stage and the works of Calderon and Lope de Vega. The first English writer to write without copying or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models, to instil a truly national spirit into the creations of his pen, and to manufacture an artistic form for himself that is perhaps without precedent (with the exception of the monographs of Sallust and Plutarch) is Daniel Defoe, the father of the English novel.
Daniel Defoe was born in
As soon as he had finished his studies, the young man threw himself into the vortex of politics. When the Duke of Monmouth (one of the merry monarch’s many bastard sons) raised the banner of revolt, he enlisted in the ranks of the pretender. The revolt failed and Defoe barely managed to escape with his life. A few years later we find him engaged in business as a hosiery merchant. In 1689, he rode in the volunteer light-horse regiment that escorted the new sovereigns William and Mary to a solemn banquet in the Guildhall. Later, he began trading in eastern drugs. He travelled to France, Spain and Portugal, stopping over there for a time. He also went to Holland and Germany on his business travels, but when he returned to England, the first of a long series of disasters awaited him. He was declared bankrupt and, as his creditors pursued him mercilessly, he thought it best to flee to Bristol, where the townspeople attached the nickname of Mr Sunday to him, because he only dared leave his house on a Sunday, a day on which the bailiffs could not legally arrest him. An agreement with his creditors freed him from his forced domicile, and for a full twelve years he worked to pay off the enormous debt of seventeen thousand pounds sterling.
From his liberation until the death of King William, Defoe was a director of a Dutch tile factory and actively involved himself in politics, publishing pamphlets, essays, satires, tracts, all in defence of the foreign king’s party, and all, with the exception of
The True-Born Englishman
, of very little literary value. Following the accession of Queen Anne, parliament voted for a coercive law against Protestant Dissenters (that is, those who did not recognize the supremacy of the Anglican church), and Defoe, masquerading as an extremist Anglican, published his famous satire,
The Shortest Way with the Dissenters
, in which he proposed that all those who did not accept the dogmas and rites of the Anglican Church be condemned to the gallows or prison, reserving the honour of crucifixion for the fathers of the Society of Jesus. The satire caused an enormous uproar, at first fooling the very ministers who, having praised its sincerity and wisdom, realized that they were dealing with a solemn hoax. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Defoe and the London
Gazette
published this description of the satirist:
A spare man, middle-aged, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth, born in London, for many years a hose-factor in Cornhill, now owner of a brick and pantile works at Tilbury in Essex County.
The police put a price on his head, and within the month Defoe was imprisoned in Newgate. His book was burnt by the public executioner, and the writer was pilloried for three successive days in front of the Exchange, in Cheapside, at the gates to the City at Temple Bar. He did not lose heart during his punishment. By an act of royal clemency, his ears were not cropped; flower-sellers wreathed the instrument of torture with garlands; copies of his
A Hymn to the Pillory
, which the newsboys were selling for a few pennies, went like hot cakes, while the mob of citizens filled the square reciting the verses and toasting the health of the prisoner and the freedom of speech.
He was then detained in prison, but his literary activity did not cease. While still in prison, he founded and edited one of the first English Journals,
The Review,
and knew so well how to placate the authorities that a little while later he was not only set free, but appointed by the government to go to Edinburgh as a secret envoy.
Another seven years follow in which the figure of the writer is lost in the grey shadows of politics. Then the government levied a heavy tax on newspapers, and the
Review
folded after nine years of existence. Defoe, indefatigable scribbler that he was, launched himself once again into polemic. His pamphlet on the Jacobite succession earned him another trial and, condemned for contempt, he was again imprisoned in Newgate. He owed his release to a violent attack of apoplexy which almost killed him. Had it been fatal, world literature would have one masterpiece less. After the union of Scotland and England and the establishment of the House of Hanover on the English throne, Defoe’s political importance quickly ebbed. He then turned (he had passed his sixtieth year) to literature properly speaking in the first years of the reign of George I (the uneven life of Defoe stretches over seven reigns). He wrote and sent the first part of
Robinson Crusoe
to press. The author offered his book to almost all the publishing houses of the capital which, showing immense foresight, turned it down. It saw the light in April 1719; by the end of August it was already in its fourth reprinting. Eighty thousand copies were sold, an unprecedented circulation for those times. The public could not get enough of the adventures of Defoe’s hero and wanted more. Like Conan Doyle who, bowing to the insistence of the contemporary public, brought his lanky scarecrow Sherlock Holmes back from the dead to set him off once more chasing scroungers and malefactors, the sixty-year-old Defoe also followed up the first part of his novel with a second, in which the hero, nostalgic for his travels, returns to his island home. To this second part there followed a third, the
Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe.
Defoe, bless his soul, realizing a little late that in his prosaic realism he had taken little account of his hero’s spiritual side, wrote a collection of serious reflections on man, human destiny, and the Creator as a third part to his novel. These reflections and thoughts adorn the rough figure of the mariner like votive talismans hanging from the neck and outstretched arms of a miracle-working Madonna. The famous book even had the great fortune to be parodied by a London wit who also made a pile of money through the sales of a whimsical satire entitled
The Life and Surprizing Adventure of a Certain Daniel Defoe, Wool Merchant, Who Lives All Alone in the Uninhabited Island of Great Britain.
The pedants strove to uncover the small mistakes which the great precursor of the Realist movement had run into. How could Robinson Crusoe have filled his pockets with biscuits if he had undressed before swimming from the beach to the stranded ship? How could he have seen the eyes of the goat in the pitch blackness of the cave? How could the Spaniards have given Friday’s father a written agreement if they had no ink or quill pens? Are there bears or not on the islands of the West Indies? And so forth. The pedants are right: the mistakes are there; but the wide river of the new realism sweeps them majestically away like bushes and rushes uprooted by the flood.
From 1719 to 1725 the aged writer’s pen was never still: he wrote almost a dozen romances (the so-called
lives),
pamphlets, tracts, journals, travelogues, and spiritualistic studies. Gout and old age forced him to lay aside his pen. It is thought that he was in prison for the third time in
Perhaps he was on the run, perhaps the quarrel with his son (a downright scoundrel worthy of inclusion in one of his father’s books) had forced him to wander about in misery in a way reminiscent of the tragedy of King Lear. Perhaps the travails of his long life, the excessive writing, the intrigues, the disasters, his ever-increasing avarice had produced a sort of senile atrophy of his quick and fertile intelligence. We are and shall remain uncertain. And yet, there is something meaningful in his strange, solitary death in the little boarding-house in Moorfields. The man that immortalized the strange, solitary Crusoe and many others as lost in their great sea of social misery, as Crusoe was lost in a sea of waters, may have felt a longing for solitude as his end drew nigh. The old lion goes to a secluded place when his final hour approaches. He feels loathing for his worn and tired-out body and wishes to die where no eye may see him. And so, sometimes man, born into shame, will also bow before the shame of death, not wishing others to be saddened by the sight of that obscene phenomenon with which brutal and mocking Nature puts an end to the life of a human being.
James Joyce
It is by no means an easy task to make an adequate study of a writer as prolific as Daniel Defoe who set the presses cranking a good two hundred and ten times over. But if we first of all discard the works which are political in character and the reams of journalistic essays, Defoe’s works fall naturally around two focal points of interest. On the one hand, we have those writings that are based upon everyday occurrences, and on the other, the biographies which, if not true romance novels as we understand them — owing to their absence of love-plots, psychological examination and studied balance of characters and dispositions — are still literary works in which the soul of the modern realist novel can be glimpsed, like the dormant soul within an imperfect, amorphous organism.
The Storm,
for example, is a book which describes the havoc wreaked by a terrifying hurricane that raged over the British Isles in two stages towards the end of the month of November 1703. Modern meteorologists have been able to compile a highly accurate barometric chart from the details that Defoe furnishes. His method is simplicity itself. The book opens with an investigation into the causes of the winds; it then reviews the storms that have become famous in human history; and finally, the narrative, like a large snake, begins to slide slowly over a tangle of letters and reports. These follow one another endlessly. In all the letters, which come from every corner of the United Kingdom, we read of the same things: numerous trees (apple-trees, willows, oaks) uprooted here, numerous houses unroofed there; numerous ships smashed against the embankments in one place, numerous steeples collapsed in another. Then there is a meticulous enumeration of the losses of livestock and buildings suffered by various townships, of the deaths and the survivors, and an exact measurement of all the lead torn off the church roofs. Needless to say, the book attains a phenomenal level of boredom. The modern reader grumbles a lot before he reaches the end; but at the end the aim of the chronicler has been achieved. By dint of repetition, contradictions, details, figures, and rumours, the storm is made to exist, the destruction is visible.
In
Journal of the Plague,
Defoe spreads his wings further. Sir Walter Scott, in the preface which he contributed to the definitive edition of Defoe’s works, writes:
Had he not written
Robinson Crusoe
, Daniel Defoe would have deserved immortality for the genius which he has displayed in this his journal of the plague.
The black plague devastated the City of London during the earlier years of the reign of Charles II. The toll of victims cannot be established with any certainty, but it probably exceeded a hundred and fifty thousand. Of this horrible slaughter Defoe provides an account which is all the more terrifying for its sobriety and gloominess. The doors of the infected households were marked with a red cross over which was written:
Lord, have mercy on us!
Grass was growing in the streets. A dismal, putrid silence overhung the devastated city like a pall. Funeral wagons passed through the streets by night, driven by veiled carters who kept their mouths covered with disinfected cloths. A crier walked before them ringing a bell intermittently and calling out into the night,
Bring out your dead!
Behind the church in Aldgate an enormous pit was dug. Here the drivers unloaded their carts and threw merciful lime over the blackened corpses. The desperate and the criminal revelled day and night in the taverns. The mortally ill ran to throw themselves in with the dead. Pregnant women cried for help. Large smoky fires were forever burning on the street corners and in the squares. Religious insanity reached its peak. A madman with a brazier of burning coals on his head used to walk stark naked through the streets shouting that he was a prophet and repeating by way of an antiphony:
O the great and dreadful God!
In Defoe’s story the person who narrates these horrors is an unknown London saddler, but the narrative style has something majestic and (if you’ll allow the word) orchestral about it that recalls Tolstoy’s
Sebastopol
or Hauptmann’s
Weavers.
But in these two works we sense a lyrical drift, a self-conscious art, a musical theme that wishes to act as the emotive revolt of modern man against human or superhuman iniquity. In Defoe, there is nothing: no lyricism, nor art for art’s sake nor social sentiment. The saddler walks the abandoned streets, he listens to the cries of anguish, he keeps his distance from the sick, he reads the prefect’s edicts, he chats with the garlic and rue-chewing sextons, he argues with a ferry-man in Blackwall, he faithfully compiles his statistics, he takes an interest in the price of bread, he complains about the night watchmen, he climbs to the top of Greenwich Hill and calculates more or less how many people have taken refuge in the ships anchored on the Thames, he praises, he curses, he cries not infrequently and prays now and again: and he rounds off his account with four halting lines of verse, for which he asks, like a good saddler, the reader’s indulgence. They are rough and ready, he says, but sincere. They go like this:
A dreadful plague in London was
In the year ‘sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!
In Defoe, as we can see, the star of poesy is, as they say, conspicuous by its absence — though he has a style of admirable clarity quite free of all pretension, that shines forth unexpectedly in a burst of brief, sweet splendour in certain pages of
Robinson Crusoe
and
Duncan Campbell
. This is why his
History of the Devil
has actually seemed quite nauseating to some. Defoe’s devil has little in common with the strange son of Chaos who wages eternal war against the plans of the Supreme Being. Instead he rather resembles a dealer in hosiery who has suffered a calamitous financial setback. Defoe puts himself in the devil’s shoes with a realism that strikes us, at first, as disconcerting. He has it out roughly with the majestic protagonist of
Paradise Lost.
He wonders how many days it took the devil to fall from Heaven into the Abyss; how many spirits fell with him; when he realized that the world had been created; how he seduced Eve; where he likes to live; why and how he made his wings. This attitude of mind in the presence of the supernatural, a natural consequence of his literary precepts, is the attitude of a reasonable barbarian. Sometimes, as in the awkward and rushed history of the philosopher
Dickory Cronke
, it seems as if a fool is narrating the deeds of a moron; sometimes, as in
Duncan Campbell
(a spiritualistic study, as we would put it, of an interesting case of clairvoyance in Scotland), the writer’s attitude is particularly apt for the subject-matter and reminds us of the precision and innocence of a child’s questions.
This story, which must have been the result of a sojourn in the Scottish Highlands or islands where, as is well-known, telepathy is in the air, marks the limits of Defoe’s method in these impersonal writings. Seated at the bedside of a boy visionary, gazing at his raised eyelids, listening to his breathing, examining the position of his head, noting his fresh complexion, Defoe is the realist in the presence of the unknown; it is the experience of the man who struggles and conquers in the presence of a dream which he fears may fool him; he is, finally, the Anglo-Saxon in the presence of the Celt.
In those works of Defoe which, belonging to the second category, contain more personal interest, we sporadically hear an accompanying intermittent roll of drums or roar of cannons.
The Memoirs of a Cavalier,
which Defoe, in a characteristic preface, pretends to have found among the papers of a secretary of state to William III, are the personal account of an officer who fought under Gustavus Adolphus and then enlisted in the army of Charles I. Although the dubious origins of the book caused a deal of ink to flow, it cannot be of interest today to anyone but a student of that turbid and bloody age. We have read elsewhere the things that the cavalier reports. We reread them here without caring too much about them and the most we remember is some vivid description, some colourful instance.
On the other hand, the Spanish chapters of
Memoirs of Captain Carleton,
crammed full of gallant adventures, bull-fights, and capital executions are, in today’s cinematic jargon, realistic ‘takes’. If Defoe were alive today, his gifts of precision and imagination, his farraginous experience and his neat, precise style would probably enable him to enjoy great fame as a special correspondent for some huge American or English newspaper.
The first female figure to stand out from this background is Mrs Christian Davies, known as the Mother Ross. This lady, along with the adventuress Roxana and the unforgettable harlot Moll Flanders, forms the third of that trio of female characters that reduce present-day critics to stupefied speechlessness. Indeed, the elegant literary gentleman and bibliophile Sir Leslie Stephen wonders with a respectable writer’s curiosity where on earth Defoe found the models for these figures. The latest editor of Defoe, the poet John Masefield, cannot find an explanation for why a writer should have created women with such a cynical, crass, and indecent realism when he lived in the years following the Restoration of the monarchy, happy years, made pleasant by the easy graces of so many consenting ladies, years whose intimate history is studded with female names: Lucy Walters, Nell Gwynne, Martha Blount, the scandalous Susannah Centlivre and the witty Lady Mary Montagu. For the aforementioned gentlemen critics,
The Life of Mrs Christian Davies
will certainly seem like the transcription of the life of Joan of Arc, done by a stable-boy.
Christian, who is a pretty Dublin tavern-girl, gets rid of her demijohns, and, dressed in male clothes, wanders through Europe in search of her husband as a dragoon in the Duke of Marlborough’s army. She catches up with him at the battle of Hochstat, but in the meantime he has taken a Dutch lover. The meeting scene between Christian and her unfaithful husband in the room in the inn presents us with the eternal feminine in an unexpected light. Here is Christian herself speaking.
I saw him in the kitchen drinking with the Dutch woman but, pretending not to see him, I went to the landlady and desired to be shown a private room. She went before me into the room and bringing me a pint of beer which I called for, left me alone with my melancholy thoughts. I sat me down, laid my elbow on the table, and leaning my head on my hand, I began to reflect... But why is he thus changed?... And his fondness for the Dutch woman gave vent to my tears, which flowing in abundance, was some relief to me. I could not stop this flood, which continued a good quarter of an hour. At length it ceased, and, drinking a little of the hougarde (which is a white beer, in colour like whey), I washed my eyes and face with the rest, to conceal my having wept. Then, calling my landlady, I desired she would bring me another pint.
Somewhat different from Tristan and Isolde! Modern musicians, literate or otherwise, would find very little here in the story of this woman who, while still a girl, began her career by rolling down a hill to send the elderly Count of C — (note the delicacy of the initials) into ecstasies and who dies, aged sixty-two, in the Chelsea military hospital, a retired sutler, crippled, scrofulous and suffering from dropsy. They would find less than nothing in the life of Moll Flanders, the unique, the inimitable woman who (I quote the words of the old title-page) was born in Newgate prison and lived a life of continuing variety during her sixty years: she was a prostitute for twelve of them, a wife five times (once with her own brother), a thief for twelve years, eight years as a prisoner in a penal settlement in Virginia, then she became rich, lived honestly and died repentant. The realism of this writer, in effect, defies and surpasses the magical artifice of music.
Perhaps modern realism is a reaction. The great French nation which venerates the legend of the Maid of Orléans defiles her name through the mouth of Voltaire, lewdly sullies her at the hands of the nineteenth-century engravers, and lacerates and cuts her to pieces in the twentieth century through the incisive style of Anatole France. The very intensity and refinement of French realism betrays its spiritual origins. But you will search in vain for that angry fervour of corruption in Defoe that illuminates Huysmans’s sad pages with a blighted phosphorescence. You will search in vain for that studied fervour of lacerating yet soothing indignation and protest in the works of this writer who, two centuries before Gorky or Dostoievsky, introduced the lowest dregs of the populace into European literature: the foundling, the pick-pocket, the crooked dealer, the prostitute, the hag, the robber, the shipwrecked. If anything, you will find an instinct and prophetic sense beneath the rough skin of his characters. His women have the indecency and self-restraint of beasts; his men are strong and silent like trees. English feminism and English imperialism are already lurking in these souls which have but recently emerged from the animal kingdom. The proconsul of Africa, Cecil Rhodes, is a direct descendant of Captain Singleton and the aforementioned Mrs Christian Davies might be presumed to be the notional great-great-grandmother of Mrs Pankhurst.
Defoe’s masterpiece,
Robinson Crusoe,
is the finished artistic expression of this instinct and this prophetic sense. In the life of the pirate-explorer
Captain Singleton,
and in the story of
Colonel Jack,
suffused with such broad and sad charity, Defoe introduces us to the studies and rough drafts of that great solitary figure who later obtains, to the applause of the simple hearts of many a man and boy, his citizenship in the world of letters. The account of the shipwrecked sailor who lived for four years on a lonely island reveals, perhaps as no other book in all English literature does, the cautious and heroic instinct of the rational being and the prophecy of the empire.