embrace heartily a religious sect or a political party, too narrow-minded to rest in the lofty doctrines which conciliate all beliefs, or in the wide sympathies which embrace all parties; condemned by his nature and surroundings to fight without loving a cause, to write without taking a liking to literature, to think without feeling the truth of any dogma, warring as a condottiere against all parties, a misanthrope disliking all men, a sceptic denying all beauty and truth. But these very surroundings, and this very nature, which expelled him from happiness, love, power, and science, raised him, in this age of French imitation and classical moderation, to a wonderful height, where, by the originality and power of his inventions, he is the equal of Byron, Milton, and Shakspeare, and shows pre-eminently the character and mind of his nation. Sensibility, a positive mind, and pride, forged for him a unique style, of terrible vehemence, withering calmness, practical effectiveness, hardened by scorn, truth and hatred, a weapon of vengeance and war which made his enemies cry out and die under its point and its poison. A pamphleteer against opposition and government, he tore or crushed his adversaries with his irony or his sentences, with the tone of a judge, a sovereign, and a hangman. A man of the world and a poet, he invented a cruel pleasantry, funereal laughter, a convulsive gaiety of bitter contrasts; and whilst dragging the mythological trappings, as if it were rags he was obliged to wear, he created a personal poetry by painting the crude details of trivial life, by the energy of a painful grotesqueness, by the merciless revelation of the filth we conceal. A philosopher against all philosophy, he created a realistic poem, a grave parody, deduced like geometry, absurd as

a dream, credible as a law report, attractive as a tale, degrading as a dishclout placed like a crown on the head of a divinity. These were his miseries and his strength: we quit such a spectacle with a sad heart, but full of admiration; and we say that a palace is beautiful even when it is on fire. Artists will add: especially when it is on fire.

CHAPTER VL

The Nobelists.

I.

AMIDST these finished and perfect writings a new kind makes its appearance, suited to the public tendencies and circumstances of the time, the anti-romantic novel, the work and the reading of positive minds, observers and moralists, not intended to exalt and amuse the imagination, like the novels of Spain and the middle ages, not to reproduce or embellish conversation, like the novels of France and the seventeenth century, but to depict real life, to describe characters, to suggest plans of conduct, and judge motives of action. It was a strange apparition, and like the voice of a people buried underground, when, amidst the splendid corruption of high life, this severe emanation of the middle class welled. up, and when the obscenities of Mrs. Aphra Behn, still the diversion of ladies of fashion, were found on the same table with De Foe's Robinson Crusoe.

II.

De Foe, a dissenter, a pamphleteer, a journalist, a novel-writer, successively a hosier, a tile-maker, an accountant, was one of those indefatigable labourers and obstinate combatants, who, ill-treated, calumniated, imprisoned, succeeded by their uprightness, common

VOL. III.

S

sense, and energy, in gaining England over to their side. At twenty-three, having taken arms for Monmouth, he was fortunate in not being hung or sent out of the country. Seven years later he was ruined and obliged to hide. In 1702, for a pamphlet not rightly understood, he was condemned to pay a fine, was set in the pillory, imprisoned two years in Newgate, and only the charity of Godolphin prevented his wife and six children from dying of hunger. Being released and sent as a commissioner to Scotland to treat about the union of the two countries, he narrowly escaped being stoned. Another pamphlet, which was again misconstrued, sent him to prison, compelled him to pay a fine of eight hundred pounds, and only just in time he received the Queen's pardon. His works were copied, he was robbed, and slandered. He was obliged to protest against the plagiarists, who printed and altered his works for their benefit; against the neglect of the Whigs, who did not find him tractable enough; against the animosity of the Tories, who saw in him the chief champion of the Whigs. In the midst of his self-defence he was struck with apoplexy, and continued to defend himself from his bed. Yet he lived on, but with great difficulty; poor and burdened with a family, he turned, at fifty-five, to fiction, and wrote successively Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton, Duncan Campbell, Colonel Jack, the History of the Great Plague in London, and many others. This vein exhausted, he diverged and tried another-the Complete English Tradesman, A Tour through Great Britain. Death came; poverty remained. In vain had he written in prose, in verse, on all subjects political and religious, accidental or moral, satires and novels, histories and poems, travels and pamphlets, commercial

essays and statistical information, in all two hundred and ten works, not of verbiage, but of arguments, documents, and facts, crowded and piled one upon another with such prodigality, that the memory, thought, and application of one man seemed too small for such a labour; he died penniless, in debt. However we regard his life, we see only prolonged efforts and persecutions. Joy seems to be wanting; the idea of the beautiful never enters. When he comes to fiction, it is like a Presbyterian and a plebeian, with low subjects and moral aims, to treat of the adventures, and reform the conduct of thieves and prostitutes, workmen and sailors. His whole delight was to think that he had a service to perform and that he was performing it: "He that opposes his own judgment against the current of the times ought to be backed with unanswerable truth; and he that has truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it, because of the multitude of other men's opinions. 'Tis hard for a man to say, all the world is mistaken but himself. But if it be so, who can help it?" Nobody can help it, but then a man must walk straight ahead, and alone, amidst blows and throwing of mud. De Foe is like one of those brave, obscure, and useful soldiers who, with empty belly and burdened shoulders, go through their duties with their feet in the mud, pocket blows, receive the whole day long the fire of the enemy, and sometimes that of their friends into the bargain, and die sergeants, happy if it has been their good fortune to get. hold of the legion of honour.

De Foe had the kind of mind suitable to such a hard service, solid, exact, entirely destitute of refinement,