Part 2 (2/2)
Crusoe discovered the footprint itself!
No story ever written exhibits so profoundly either the perfect design of supreme genius or the curious accidental result of slovenly carelessness in a hack-writer. This is not said in any critical spirit, because, Robinson Crusoe, in one sense, is above criticism, and in another it permits the freest a.n.a.lysis without suffering in the estimation of any reader.
But for Robinson Crusoe, De Foe would never have ranked above the level of his time. It is customary for critics to speak in awe of the ”Journal of the Plague” and it is gravely recited that that book deceived the great Dr. Meade. Dr. Meade must have been a poor doctor if De Foe's accuracy of description of the symptoms and effects of disease is not vastly superior to the detail he supplies as a sailor and solitaire upon a desert island. I have never been able to finish the ”Journal.”
The only books in which his descriptions smack of reality are ”Moll Flanders” and ”Roxana,” which will barely stand reading these days.
In what may be called its literary manner, Robinson Crusoe is entirely like the others. It convinces you by its own conviction of sincerity.
It is simple, wandering yet direct; there is no making of ”points” or moving to climaxes. De Foe did unquestionably possess the capacity to put into his story the appearance of sincerity that persuades belief at a glance. In that much he had the spark of genius; yet that same case has not availed to make the ”Journal” of the Plague anything more than a curious and laborious conceit, while Robinson Crusoe stands among the first books of the world--a marvelous gleam of living interest, inextinguishably fresh and heartening to the imagination of every reader who has sensibility two removes above a toad.
The question arises, then, is ”Robinson Crusoe” the calculated triumph of deliberate genius, or the accidental stroke of a hack who fell upon a golden suggestion in the account of Alexander Selkirk and increased its value ten thousand fold by an unintentional but rather perfect marshaling of incidents in order, and by a slovenly ignorance of character treatment that enhanced the interest to perfect intensity?
This question may be discussed without undervaluing the book, the extraordinary merit of which is shown in the fact that, while its idea has been paraphrased, it has never been equalled. The ”Swiss Family Robinson,” the ”Schonberg-Cotta Family” for children are full of merit and far better and more carefully written, but there are only the desert island and the ingenious s.h.i.+fts introduced. Charles Reade in ”Hard Cash,” Mr. Mallock in his ”Nineteenth Century Romance,” Clark Russel in ”Marooned,” and Mayne Reid, besides others, have used the same theater.
But only in that one great book is the theater used to display the simple, yearning, natural, resolute, yet doubting, soul and heart of man in profound solitude, awaiting in armed terror, but not without purpose, the unknown and masked intentions of nature and savagery. It seems to me--and I have been tied to Crusoe's chariot wheels for a dozen readings, I suppose--that it is the pressing in upon your emotions of the immensity of the great castaway's solitude, in which he appears like some tremendous Job of abandonment, fighting an unseen world, which is the innate note of its power.
The very moment Friday becomes a loyal subject, the suspense relaxes into pleased interest, and after Friday's funny father and the Spaniard and others appear it becomes a common book. As for the second part of the adventures I do not believe any matured man ever read it a second time unless for curious or literary purposes. If he did he must be one of that curious but simple family that have read the second part of ”Faust,” ”Paradise Regained,” and the ”Odyssey,” and who now peruse ”Clarissa Harlowe” and go carefully over the catalogue of s.h.i.+ps in the ”Iliad” as a preparation for enjoying the excitements of the city directory.
Every particle of greatness in ”Robinson Crusoe” is compressed within two hundred pages, the other four hundred being about as mediocre trash as you could purchase anywhere between cloth lids.
It is interesting to apply subjective a.n.a.lysis to Robinson Crusoe. The book in its very greatness has turned more critical swans into geese than almost any other. They have praised the marvelous ingenuity with which De Foe described how the castaway overcame single-handed, the deprivations of all civilized conveniences; they have marveled at the simple method in which all his labors are marshaled so as to render his conversion of the island into a home the type of industrial and even of social progress and theory; they have rhapsodized over the perfection of De Foe's style as a model of literary strength and artistic verisemblance. Only a short time ago a mighty critic of a great London paper said seriously that ”Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver appeal infinitely more to the literary reader than to the boy, who does not want a cla.s.sic but a book written by a contemporary.” What an extraordinary boy that must be! It is probable that few boys care for Gulliver beyond his adventures in Lilliput and Brobdignag, but they devour that much, together with Robinson Crusoe, with just as much avidity now as they did a century ago. Your clear-headed, healthy boy is the first best critic of what const.i.tutes the very liver and lights of a novel. Nothing but the primitive problems of courage meeting peril, virtue meeting vice, love, hatred, ambition for power and glory, will go down with him. The grown man is more capable of dealing with social subtleties and the problems of conscience, but those sorts of books do not last unless they have also ”action--action--action.”
Will the New Zealander, sitting amidst the prophetic ruins of St.
Paul's, invite his soul reading Robert Elsmere? Of course you can't say what a New Zealander of that period might actually do; but what would you think of him if you caught him at it? The greatest stories of the world are the Bible stories, and I never saw a boy--intractable of acquiring the Sunday-school habit though he may have been--who wouldn't lay his savage head on his paws and quietly listen to the good old tales of wonder out of that book of treasures.
So let us look into the interior of our faithful old friend, Robinson Crusoe, and examine his composition as a literary whole. From the moment that Crusoe is washed ash.o.r.e on the island until after the release of Friday's father and the Spaniard from the hands of the cannibals, there is no book in print, perhaps, that can surpa.s.s it in interest and the strained impression it makes upon the unsophisticated mind. It is all comprised in about 200 pages, but to a boy to whom the world is a theater of crowded action, to whom everything seems to have come ready-made, to whom the necessity of obedience and accommodation to others has been conveyed by constant friction--here he finds himself for the first time face to face with the problem of solitude. He can appreciate the danger from wild animals, genii, ghosts, battles, sieges and sudden death, but in no other book before, did he ever come upon a human being left solitary, with all these possible dangers to face.
The voyages on the raft, the house-building, contriving, fearing, praying, arguing--all these are full of plaintive pathos and yet of encouragement. He witnesses despair turned into comfortable resignation as the result of industry. It has required about twelve years. Virtue is apparently fattening upon its own reward, when--Smas.h.!.+ Bang!--our young reader runs upon ”the--print--of--a--man's--naked--foot!” and security and happiness, like startled birds, are flown forever. For twelve more years this new unseen terror hangs over the poor solitary. Then we have Friday, the funny cannibals later and it is all over. But the vast solitude of that poor castaway has entered the imagination of the youth and dominates it.
These two hundred pages are crowded with suggestions that set a boy's mind on fire, yet every page contains evidence of obvious slovenliness, indolence and ignorance of human nature and common things, half of which faults seem directly to contribute to the result, while the other half are never noticed by the reader.
How many of you, who sniff at this, know Crusoe's real name? Yet it stares right out of the very first paragraphs in the book--a clean, perhaps accidental, proof of good scholars.h.i.+p, which De Foe possessed.
Crusoe tells us his father was a German from Bremen, who married an Englishwoman, from whose family name of Robinson came the son's name which was properly Robinson Kreutznaer. This latter name, he explains, became corrupted in the common English speech into Crusoe. That is an excellent touch. The German p.r.o.nunciation of Kreutznaer would sound like Krites-nare, and a mere dry scholar would have evolved Crysoe out of the name. But the English-speaking people everywhere, until within the past twenty years or so, have given the German ”eu” the sound of ”oo” or ”u.”
Robinson's father therefore was called Crootsner until it was shaved into Crootsno and thence smoothed to Crusoe.
But what was the Christian name of the elder Kreutznaer? Or of the boy's mother? Or of his brothers or sisters? Or of the first s.h.i.+p captain under whom he sailed; or any of them; or even of the s.h.i.+p he commanded, and in which he was wrecked; or of the dog that he carried to the island; or of the two cats; or of the first and all the other tame goats; or of the inlet; or of Friday's father; or of the Spaniard he saved; or of the s.h.i.+p captain; or of the s.h.i.+p that finally saved him?
Who knows? The book is a desert as far as nomenclature goes--the only blossoms being his own name; that of Wells, a Brazilian neighbor; Xury, the Moorish boy; Friday, Poll, the parrot; and Will Atkins.
You may retort that all this doesn't matter. That is very true--and be hanged to you!--but those facts prove by every canon of literary art that Robinson Crusoe is either a coldly calculated flight of consummate genius or an accidental freak of hack literature. When De Foe wrote, it was only a century after Drake and his companions in authorized piracy had made the British privateer the scourge of the seas and had demonstrated that naval supremacy meant the control of the world. The seafaring life was one of peril, but it carried with it honor, glory and envy. Forty years later Nelson was born to crown British navalry with deathless Glory. Even the commonest sailor spoke his s.h.i.+p's name--if it were a fine vessel--with the same affection that he spoke his wife's and cursed a bad s.h.i.+p by its name as if to tag its vileness with proverbiality.
<script>