by James Joyce
James Joyce
Daniel Defoe II.
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 hi
m 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.
European criticism has struggled for several generations with a persistence that is not entirely well-meaning to illuminate the mystery of the immense world conquest achieved by that hybrid race which lives a tough life on a small island in the northern sea, gifted with none of the intellect of the Latin, the forbearance of the Jew, the zeal of the German, nor the sensitivity of the Slav. For some years European caricature has amused itself by contemplating (with a pleasure unmixed with discomfort) an overgrown man with an ape’s jaw, dressed in checkered clothes that are too short and tight and with huge feet; or else John Bull, the plump bailiff with his vacuous and ruddy moon-shaped face and miniature top hat. Neither of these two comic figures would have conquered an inch of land in a thousand centuries. The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe who, shipwrecked on a lonely island, with a knife and a pipe in his pocket, becomes an architect, carpenter, knife-grinder, astronomer, baker, shipwright, potter, saddler, farmer, tailor, umbrella-maker, and cleric. He is the true prototype of the British colonist just as Friday (the faithful savage who arrives one ill-starred day) is the symbol of the subject race. All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe: virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness. Whoever re-reads this simple and moving book in the light of subsequent history cannot but be taken by its prophetic spell.
Saint John the Evangelist saw on the island of Patmos the apocalyptic collapse of the universe and the raising up of the walls of the eternal city splendid with beryl and emerald, onyx and jasper, sapphires and rubies. Crusoe saw but one marvel in all the fertile creation that surrounded him, a naked footprint in the virgin sand: and who knows if the latter does not matter more than the former?
James Joyce
William Blake
[Please note: ten pages of manuscript are missing from the surviving text]
of an ethical and practical interpretation are not moral aphorisms. While looking at St Paul’s Cathedral, he heard in the ear of his soul the cry of the little chimney-sweep who, in Blake’s strange literary language, represented downtrodden innocence. While looking at Buckingham Palace, in his mind’s eye he saw the sigh of the unhappy soldier running down the wall of the palace as a drop of blood. While still young and strong, he could, when he had come round from these visions, engrave the image of them in a hammered verse or in a copper plate; and often engravings such as these in words or metal would assume an entire sociological system. Prison, he writes, is made from the stones of the law; the brothel from the bricks of religion. But the continuous exertion of these journeys into the unknown and the abrupt returns to normal life slowly but infallibly eroded his artistic power. The myriad visions blinded his vision; and, towards the end of his mortal life, the unknown that he had sought covered
him under the shadows of its vast wings. The angels with whom he used to speak as an immortal to immortals cloaked him in the silence of their vestments.
If, through his bitter words and violent poetry, I have called up from the shadows the image of some broken-winded, second or third-rate demagogue, then I have given you the wrong idea of the personality of Blake. From his youth he was a member of the literary-revolutionary coterie that included Miss Wollstonecraft and the celebrated (perhaps I should say notorious) author of the Rights of Man, Thomas Paine. In fact, of the members of that circle, Blake was the only one with the courage to wear the red cap in the street, the emblem of the new age. He soon removed it, though, never to wear it again following the massacres that took place in the Paris prisons in 1792. His spiritual rebellion against the powerful of this world was not made of that type of water-soluble gunpowder to which we have more or less accustomed ourselves. In 1799, he was offered a position as drawing master to the royal family. He refused it, fearing that his art would die of inanition in the artificial environment of the court, but, at the same time, so as not to offend the sovereign, he gave up all his other lower-class students who formed the greater part of his income. After his death, Princess Sophia sent his widow a private gift of one hundred pounds. The widow sent it back with courteous thanks, saying that she could manage without and did not want to accept it because, put to other use, the money might perhaps serve to give life and hope back to someone more unfortunate than herself.
