DANIEL DE FOE.

PART II.

It has been long a favourite theory of ours, however paradoxical it may appear, that Fiction is far truer than History: that of the qualities and abstract elements by which Truth is distinguished from Falsehood, the former possesses by far the greatest share. Bold and heterodox as our opinion may seem, it is not without the support derived from the suffrages of at least two distinguished names: the one of a person whose genius in prose fiction is perhaps unequalled in the annals of Literature, while the military achievements of the other supply the history of the times in which he lived with its most brilliant and memorable materials.

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Fielding, justly called by Byron « the prose Homer of human nature,» has made the following acute distinction between the description of past ages and human conduct as drawn upon the page of History, and the same pictures limned in brighter colours in the more attractive gallery of Fiction. In His

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tory, says the author of Tom Jones and of Amelia, nothing is true but the names and dates: in Fiction everything « is true but the names and dates,» a proposition which, however startling, we think, after due deduction is made for the

necessary exaggeration incident to an epigrammatically expressed dogma, will be found, on examination, to contain a great deal more truth than the History whose claims to credit are so unceremoniously disposed of.

The other great name to which we have alluded is that of the Duke of Marlborough: who, on being complimented upon his accurate knowledge respecting some rather obscure facts in the annals of his country, confessed that he derived his information from the historical plays of Shakspeare, alledging that the writings of the poet were the sole source of his knowledge on the subject.

And if an acquaintance with names and dates was all that is necessary to form the statesman-if the mind of the student could be enriched and fertilized by these husks and shells of knowledge we could by no means venture to speak so disparagingly of the relative importance of this species of study. It is however Man, his motives, his passions, and his powers, that alone deserve the attention of him who would acquire that noblest and usefullest art, to judge of the future by the past to reach that mighty and almost magic power of predicting,

«As old experience doth attain

«To something of prophetic strain,

with a certainty little short of intuition, what will be the conduct of an individual or of a nation under given circumstances.

When we reflect upon the eternal and never-decided controversies affecting almost every important point in the story of the past-controversies involving not only the motives and secret springs from which events have flowed, but frequently even the elementary truth or falsehood of the facts with what relief do we turn our eyes from the dry and sterile desert of History, varied only by the mirage of fantastic theories— to the rich and abounding plains of Fiction.

For be it remembered that the immortality of Fiction demands, as an indispensable condition, the truth of its own delineations of either the external world of nature or the more vast and wondrous universe of the mind of Man.

And thus the truth is at once a pledge of durability to the Fiction itself, and an earnest of the advantages to be derived from its study. Every one who has even slightly examined the records of past ages, must have been struck and mortified by observing how seldom great events or remarkable characters are exhibited on the scene of the Historian in their true colours or their just dimensions. Party malignity has dwarfed the illustrious, or swelled the mean; whilst events have lost all keeping and relative proportion, distorted by the false medium through which they are viewed.

To the night-wanderer among the mountains, the sparrow, near at hand, takes the semblance, as seen through the mist, of an eagle; a tuft of heath is mistaken for a forest.

In fiction, on the contrary such fiction at least as has passed through the trial of time, and has vindicated the praise of generations-every thing falls naturally into due order and gradation: not exposed to the shifting and uncertain judgments of personal or party feeling, it yields its mine of absolute and eternal truth, not to all in equal proportions indeed, but to all in the measure of the labour, patience, and skill which they employ in developing its deep and precious treasures. It is curious and instructive to mark how events and persons considered in their own time of the most immortal and imperishable importance, have become interesting to posterity from their accidental connection with works then unknown and neglected, but which have since been slowly ripening into glory to see how eagerly the antiquarian disinters from the dust and oblivion of centuries, to illustrate a line of Homer, or an obscure expression in Shakspeare, long-forgotten books which were launched upon the waters amidst the triumphal acclamations of the epoch which produced them destined to be recalled from the portion of weeds and outworn faces, to attain a kind of parasitic notoriety from their connection with the productions of True Fiction.

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In applying to the case of De Foe the remarks which we have ventured to make, we trust to render more apparent the truth of the principle we are endeavouring to establish and we consider that the illustrious subject of our present pages

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will be found an apt instance for our purpose, inasmuch as he was in his own day a distinguished author of History, while he had erected in his fictions—and in particular in his Robinson Crusoe, a monument which must spurn to remotest posterity the impotent attacks of oblivion :

Exegit monumentum aere perennius,
Regalique situ pyramidum altius,

Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere, and innumerabilis

Annorum series, aut fuga temporum.

We do not indeed clearly see in what sense the History of Crusoe can be said to be less true than the account of the Union.

To our minds the shipwrecked mariner, starting back in terror from the footstep in the sand, or wandering beneath the greenwood shade of his fairy isle, is quite as real a personand a much more interesting one-as Harley or Godolphin ; an opinion in which the general consent of mankind will, we apprehend, support us. If it be the essential characteristic of Being that it acts upon others or suffers in itself, every child who has shudderingly followed the mariner of York » in his venturous voyage round the Isle, or hearkened in his dreams to the ringing of the solitary axe among the cedars of Juan Fernandez, will prove an incontestable evidence as to the personality of honest Robinson. To us, what is the Statesman but a name-a phantom?-no more real than

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Stephen Sly, and old John Naps of Greece,

And Peter Turf, and Henry Pimpernell,

And twenty more such naines and men as these,
Which never were, and no man ever saw. »

When we examine De Foe's immortal romance with a view to investigate the causes of its extraordinary power, and to discover the means by which the author has managed to produce an effect upon his readers, which has remained undiminished from the day of its first publication, and which will infallibly exist in all its force, as long as the human mind shall receive pleasure from affecting narrative, we ought to

throw aside the common prejudice that Robinson Crusoe is exclusively addressed to the young and ignorant.

As it has been said of Shakspeare that the physician may study, in his tragedies, the theory of insanity as successfully as in a madhouse-and that the soldier may learn many of the great principles of his art in the pages of Homer; so the Metaphysician, the Moralist, the Statesman, and the Divine, will find many curious problems resolved, many new views of human conduct and human motives, in the unobtrusive narrative of De Foe.

And it is the same artlessness in the manner of narration which gives it so great and inimitable a charm to the young, which induces the old to disbelieve in its possession of higher and graver claims on our attention than those of mere interest. It has been well remarked, that perhaps the most extraordinary peculiarity in this work, is the skill and determination with which the author has avoided to make it a vehicle for any of his own theories and opinions. De Foe never drops the mask for a moment; and though he might easily― and indeed no other could have avoided the temptationhave introduced many speculations of his own-upon Natural History for instance, or upon Theology-in no single instance has he put into the mouth of his hero, one word inconsistent, we will not say with his supposed ignorance and condition of a seaman, but with the circumstances under which he is acting. Swift in the Voyages of Gulliver, has adopted a character to a certain degree similar to Crusoe, but that of a more educated person-but how perpetually the reader observes that under the thin disguise of the Ship-Surgeon it is the learned, sarcastic, and political Dean of St. Patrick's who is pouring out the waters of bitterness upon the follies, the vices, and the inconsistencies, of human society. « Lemuel Gulliver is but the mouth-piece of the sæva indignatio of the satirist-and appears, after the first perusal has satisfied the mere animal curiosity of the reader, no more a real person than the King of Melinda in the puppet-show of Cervantes-while Swift himself is the Gines de Pasamonte behind the curtain, prompting the dialogue of his wooden dramatis persona. We.

VOL. III.

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