Watt Crusoe 3

 (b) 

There is a great difference, however, between Bunyan and Defoe, a difference which suggests why it is Defoe, rather than Bunyan, who is often considered to be our first novelist. In the earlier fiction of the Puritan movement—in such works as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, or the stories of Bunyan and his Baptist confrére Benjamin Keach—we have many elements of the novel: simple language, realistic descriptions of persons and places, and a serious presentation of the moral problems of ordinary individuals. But the significance of the characters and their actions largely depends upon a transcendental scheme of things: to say that the persons are allegorical is to say that their earthly reality is not the main object of the writer, but rather that he hopes to make us see through them a larger and unseen reality beyond time and place. 

In Defoe’s novels, on the other hand, although religious concerns are present they have no such priority of status: indeed the heritage of Puritanism is demonstrably too weak to supply a continuous and controlling pattern for the hero’s experience. If, for example, we turn to the actual effect of Crusoe’s religion on his behaviour, we find that it has curiously little. Defoe often suggests that an incident is an act of Divine providence or retribution, but this interpretation is rarely supported by the facts of the story. To take the crucial instance: if Crusoe’s original sin was filial disobedience—leaving home in the first place—it is certain that no real retribution follows, since he does very well out of it; and later he often sets out for further journeys without any fear that he may be flouting Providence, This indeed comes very near to the ‘neglect’ of the ‘Cautions, warning and instruction . .. Providence’ which Crusoe called a ‘kind of Practical Atheism’ in his Serious Reflections. Where Providence is bringing blessings—as, for instance, when he finds the grain: of corn and rice—things are different: Crusoe need only accept. But the trilogy as a whole certainly suggests that any of the less co-operative interventions of Providence can safely be neglected. 

Marx sourly noted this somewhat gratuitous character of Crusoe’s religious life. ‘Of his prayers we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks on them as so much recreation.’2 He would have been pleased to find that Gildon thought that the ‘religious and useful reflections’ were ‘in reality ... put in . . . to swell the bulk of Defoe’s treatise to a five-shilling book’. Both Marx and Gildon were right in drawing attention to the discontinuity between the religious aspects of the book and its action: but their explanations do Defoe some injustice. His spiritual intentions were probably quite sincere, but they have the weakness of all ‘Sunday religion’ and manifest themselves in somewhat unconvincing periodical tributes to the transcendent at times when a respite from real action and practical intellectual effort is allowed or enforced. Such, certainly, is Crusoe’s religion, and we feel that it is in the last analysis the result of an unresolved and probably unconscious conflict in Defoe himself. He lived fully in the sphere of practical and utilitarian action, and could be wholly true to his being when he described this aspect of Robinson Crusoe’s life. But his religious upbringing forced him from time to time to hand over a brilliant piece of narrative by a star-reporter to a distant colleague on the religious page who could be relied on to supply suitable spiritual commentaries quickly out of stock. Puritanism made the editorial policy unalterable; but it was usually satisfied by a purely formal adherence. In this, too. Defoe is typical of the development of Puritanism; in the phrase of H. W. Schneider, ‘beliefs seldom become doubts; they become ritual’. Otherworldly concerns do not provide the essential themes of Defoe’s novels: but they do punctuate the narrative with comminatory codas that demonstrate a lifetime of somewhat mechanical practice. 

The relative impotence of religion in Defoe’s novels, then, suggests not insincerity but the profound secularisation of his outlook, a secularisation which was a marked feature of his age —the word itself in its modern sense dates from the first decades of the eighteenth century. Defoe himself had been born at a time when the Puritan Commonwealth had just collapsed at the Restoration, while Robinson Crusoe was written in the year of the Salters’ Hall controversy, when, after the last hopes of Dissent in a compromise with the Anglican Church had been given up, even their effort to unite among themselves proved impossible. In the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s hero meditates on the ebbing of the Christian religion throughout the world; it is a bitterly divided minority force in a largely pagan world, and God’s final intervention seems remoter than ever. Such, at least, is the conclusion to which Robinson Crusoe is forced by his own experience in the last words of the book: 

. no such zeal for the Christian religion will be found in our days, or perhaps in any age of the world, till Heaven beats the drums itself, and the glorious legions from above come down on purpose to propagate the work, and reduce the whole world to the obedience of King Jesus—a time which some tell us is not far off, but of which I heard nothing in all my travels and illuminations, no, not one word.! 

‘No, not one word’: the dying fall leaves Crusoe to his despair. What he was told to expect and what he has experienced do not agree. Until heaven beats the drums itself he must reconcile himself to a pilgrim’s progress through an effectively secular world, make his own way along a path no longer clearly illumined by God’s particular providences. 

The causes of secularisation in the period are many, but one of the most important, especially as far as Puritanism is concerned, was economic and social progress. In New England, for instance, the Pilgrim Fathers soon forgot that they had originally founded ‘a plantation of religion, not a plantation of Trades’; and it has been said that Governor Bradford, in his History of Plymouth Plantation, shows how a Puritan saint came to write ‘less and less like a Puritan preacher and more and more like the author of Robinson Crusoe’.2 In England. by Defoe’s time, the more respectable dissenting sects at least were dominated by wealthy and somewhat time-serving merchants and financiers; and opportunities for further gain drove many prosperous Dissenters not only to occasional conformity, but into the Anglican Church.! In his early years Defoe had violently denounced occasional conformity, but Robinson Crusoe, we notice, Is an occasional conformist with a vengeance—he even passes as a Papist when it is economically expedient to do so. 

The conflict between spiritual and material values is an old one, but it was perhaps more obvious in the eighteenth century than at any other time; more obvious because so many people thought, apparently in perfectly good faith, that it did not really exist. Bishop Warburton, for example, argued that ‘to provide for utility is, at the same time, to provide for truth, its inseparable associate’.? ‘The reluctance to consider the extent to which spiritual and material values may be opposed is very marked in Defoe’s novels, and it can even be argued that the crucial critical problem which they raise is whether they do not in fact confuse the whole issue. But, whatever our decision on this point, it is at least clear that the mere possibility of such a confusion only exists because Defoe presents us with a narrative in which both ‘high’ and ‘low’ motives are treated with equal seriousness: the moral continuum of his novels is much closer than was that of any previous fiction to the complex combination of spiritual and material issues which moral choices in daily life customarily involve. 

It would seem, then, that Defoe’s importance in the history of the novel is directly connected with the way his narrative structure embodied the struggle between Puritanism and the tendency to secularisation which was rooted in material progress. At the same time it is also apparent that the secular and economic viewpoint is the dominant partner, and that it is this which explains why it is Defoe, rather than Bunyan, who is usually considered to be the first key figure in the rise of the novel. 

De Vogiié, the Catholic opponent of the French Realists, found an atheistic presumption in the novel’s exclusion of the non-natural;' and it is certain that the novel’s usual means —formal realism—tends to exclude whatever is not vouched for by the senses: the jury docs not normally allow divine intervention as an explanation of human actions. It is therefore likely that a measure of secularisation was an indispensable con. dition for the rise of the new genre. The novel could only concentrate on personal relations once most writers and readers believed that individual human beings, and not collectivities such as the Church, or transcendent actors, such as the Persons of the Trinity, were allotted the supreme role on the earthly stage. The novel, Georg Lukacs has written, is the epic of a world forsaken by God; it presents, in de Sade’s phrase, ‘le tableau des meoeurs séculaires’.

This, of course, is not to say that the novelist himself or his novel cannot be religious, but only that whatever the ends of the novelist may be, his means should be rigidly restricted to terrestrial characters and actions: the realm of the spirit should be presented only through the subjective experiences of the characters. Thus Dostoevsky’s novels, for example, 1n no sense depend for their verisimilitude or their significance on his religious views; divine intervention is not a necessary construct for an adequate and complete explanation of the causes and meanings of each action, as it is in Bunyan. Alyosha and Father Zossima are portrayed very objectively: indeed, the very brilliance of Dostoevsky’s presentation shows that he cannot assume, but must prove, the reality of the spirit: and The Brothers Karamazov as a whole does not depend upon any non-naturalistic Causation or significance to be effective and complete. 

To sum up, we can say that the novel requires a world view which is centred on the social relationships between individual persons; and this involves secularisation as well as individualism, because until the end of the seventeenth century the individual was not conceived as wholly autonomous, but as an element in a picture which depended on divine persons for its meaning, as well as on traditional institutions such as Church and Kingship for its secular pattern. 

At the same time the positive contribution of Puritanism, not only to the development of modern individualism but to the rise of the novel, and to its later tradition in England, must not be underestimated. It was through Puritanism that Defoe brought into the novel a treatment of the individual’s psychological concerns that was a tremendous advance in the kind of forensic ratiocination which had previously passed for psychological description in even the best of the romances, such as those of Madame de La Fayette. Nor does the fact that, in the words of Rudolph Stamm, who has given the most complete account of Defoe’s religious position, Defoe’s writings show that his ‘own experience of reality had nothing in common with that of a believing Calvinist’! disprove the positive importance of Defoe’s dissenting background. For we can say of him, as of later novelists in the same tradition, such as Samuel Richardson, George Eliot or D. H. Lawrence, that they have inherited of Puritanism everything except its religious faith. They all have an intensely active conception of life as a continuous moral and social Struggle; they all see every event in ordinary life as proposing an intrinsically moral issue on which reason and conscience must be exerted to the full before right action is possible; they all seek by introspection and observation to build their own personal scheme of moral certainty; and in different ways they all manifest the self-righteous and somewhat angular individualism of the earlier Puritan character. 

Ulysses

 Richard Ellmann narrates the actual events. Joyce was living at the tower, largely at Gogarty’s expense and "sufferance" (the word used by Stanislaus Joyce in his diary). Relations were strained, but Gogarty did not want to endanger his bohemian reputation, and his chance of appearing in a good light in Joyce's fiction, by putting Joyce out. Trench, whom Gogarty knew from Oxford and who had become a fervent follower of the Irish Revival, was living with them in the tower. On the night of September 14, 1904 Trench woke up screaming about a black panther that was about to spring on him, fired his revolver at the fireplace beside which Joyce was sleeping, and then went back to sleep. His nightmare returned and he screamed once more and reached for his revolver, but Gogarty had taken it. Gogarty said, “Leave him to me,” and shot some pots and pans over Joyce’s bed, which crashed down on him. "The terrified Joyce considered this fusillade his dismissal" (175). He got up, dressed, left the tower, and walked all the way to Dublin. The next day, he wrote a note to a friend asking him to go to the tower and pack up his trunk. Ellmann comments: “Perhaps all grand gestures end with someone else packing the trunk.”

Alberto Manguel

“After intercourse all animals are sad,” Aristotle (or perhaps Galen) is supposed to have said, and to have added: “except the rooster, who then sings.” Aristotle was referring to sexual intercourse. Perhaps all intercourse—with pictures, with books, with people, with the virtual inhabitants of cyberspace—breeds sadness because it reminds us that, in the end, we are alone. 

**

Packing and unpacking are two sides of the same impulse, and both lend meaning to moments of chaos. Thus is the existence of. the collector,” wrote Benjamin, “dialectically pulled between the poles of disorder and order.” He might have added: or packing and unpacking. 

There are certain readers for whom books exist in the moment of reading them, and later as memories of the read pages, but who feel that the physical incarnations of books are dispensable. Borges, for instance, was one of these. Those who never visited Borges’s modest flat imagined his library to be as vast as that of Babel. In fact, Borges kept only a few hundred books, and even these he used to give away as gifts to visitors. Occasionally, a certain volume had sentimental or superstitious value for him, but by and large what mattered to him were a few recalled lines, not the material object in which he had found them. For me, it has always been otherwise. 

x Coventry Patmore, in a poem I learned by heart as a child, says that after having struck his young son for disobeying him, he went that night into the boy’s bedroom and saw that on a table drawn beside his head, He had put, within his reach, 

A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone, 

A piece of glass abraded by the beach 

And six or seven shells, 

A bottle with bluebells 

And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art, 

To comfort his sad heart. 

Comfort is of the essence. The comforting objects on my own night table are (have always been) books, and my library was itself a place of comfort and quiet reassurance. It may be that books have this reassuring quality because we don’t really possess them: books possess us. Julio Cortazar, warning against accepting the gift of a watch, tells his readers: “When they give you a watch, they give you the fear of losing it, of having it stolen, of letting it drop on the floor and breaking. They give you its brand and the assurance that it’s a better brand than other brands, they give you the need to compare your watch with other watches. They don’t give you a watch as a gift, it is you who are the gift, it is you who are being given for the birthday of the watch.” Something of the sort can be Said about my books. 

Perhaps the books we choose determine our perdition or salvation in the eyes of whimsical gods. In her “Report on Heaven and Hell,” Silvina Ocampo concluded: “The laws of heaven and hell are versatile. Whether you go to one place or the other depends on a tiny detail. I knoy, people who, because of a broken key or a wicker Cage have gone to hell, and others who because of a newspaper page or a cup of milk, to heaven.” My salvation might depend on having read a certain book by Richard Outram, by William Saroyan, by Jan Morris, by Olga Sedakova. 

The books in my library promised me comfort, and also the possibility of enlightening conversations. They granted me, every time I took one in my hands, the memory of friendships that required no introductions, no conventional politeness, no pretense or concealed emotion. I knew, in that familiar space between the covers, that one evening I’d pull down a volume of Dr. Johnson or Voltaire I had never opened, and I would discover a line that had been waiting for me for centuries. I was certain, without having to retrace my way through it, that Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday or a volume of Cesare Pavese’s poems would be exactly what I required to put into words what I was feeling on any given morning. Books have always spoken for me, and have taught me many things long before these things came materially into my life, and the physical volumes have been for me something very much like breathing creatures that share my bed and board. This intimacy, this trust, began early on among readers. 

Sennett on the development of the city

 The street 

We would expect a large trading city like medieval Paris to have well-made roads to move goods through the city. Along the banks of the Seine River they existed; from 1000 to 1200, these banks were lined with stone walls so that trade on the river could be moved more efficiently. But inland, the growth of the city did not create a system of roads easily accommodating transport. “Roads were in a poor state,” Le Goff notes; “there was a limited number of carts and waggons, which were expensive, and useful vehicles were absent’; even the lowly wheelbarrow did not appear on Parisian streets until the end of the Middle Ages. The Roman city, with its beautifully engineered roads bedded deep into the earth, was a construction miracle of the past. 

The messy form as well as sorry physical condition of the medieval street resulted from the very processes of growth. The roads of one commune had seldom been laid out to join those of a neighboring commune, since its boundaries were originally the end of a smaller, villagelike settlement turning inward. Nor were the bourgs laid out to connect to other bourgs. The chaotic shape of the streets also arose from the use the owners made of the land they controlled. 

Most pieces of land in a cité or bourg were leased, or the building rights on them sold, to individuals. These diverse builders had the right to construct as they saw fit on the land owned by a large instituion like the Crown or the Church; moreover, the various parts of a single building, on different floors or the same floor, might be owned and developed by different persons. “There was,” says the urbanist Jacques Heers, “a veritable colonization of building land within the city of in its immediate environs.” Rarely did the landholder attempt to influence the builder in terms of urban design; indeed, on a purely economic level only in exceptional cases could the King or Bishop seize a building or force its owner to sell to someone else. In Paris, King or Bishop invoked “eminent domain” mostly to add to a palace or a church. 

Only medieval cities which had been founded in Roman times were likely to have a street plan or an overall design, and the Roman grids had, save in a very few cities like Trier and Milan, been cracked by the growth process into disconnected bits and pieces. Neither King nor Bishop nor bourgeois had an image of how the city as a whole should look. “The cramped, fragmented nature of the public sphere reflected, in the very topography of the city, the weakness, lack of resources, and limited ambitions of the state,” claims one historian. Builders put up whatever they could get away with; neighbors fought each other’s constructions with lawsuits, and often more brutally with hired gangs of thugs who ripped down a neighbor’s work. From this aggression came the Parisian urban fabric, “mazes of twisting, tiny streets, impasses, and courts; squares were small, and there were few broad vistas or buildings set back from the street; traffic was always clogged.”° 

Medieval Cairo and medieval Paris formed a telling contrast, though to the modern eye they might have seemed equally jumbled. The Koran lays down precise instructions for the placement of doors and the spatial relationship of doors to windows. In medieval Cairo, land owned by a Muslim had to be built according to these instructions, which were enforced by charitable foundations in the city. Such buildings, moreover, had to relate in form to one another, had to be aware of one another; one could not, for instance, block a neighbor’s door. Religion decreed contextual architecture, though the context was not one of linear streets. The buildings of medieval Paris were under no such divine—or royal, or noble—command to take account of one another. Each was fenestrated and floored according the single owner’s will; it was common for builders to block access to other buildings with impunity. 

The space of the Parisian medieval street was no more and no less than the space which remained after buildings had been constructed. Before the great Renaissance palaces arose in the Marais, for instance, this swampy settlement on the Right Bank had streets which suddenly narrowed so that a single person could barely pass berween buildings that different owners had built out to the edge of the lot lines. The abbeys and the King’s quarter had more serviceable streets, since the owner was also the builder, though even in the episcopal district around Notre-Dame different orders pushed into the street according to their own desires, and to test the limits of their privileges. 

The street bore the imprint of aggressive assertion, then, it was the space left over after people asserted their rights and powers. The street was no garden, no coenobitic place created by common labor. If the street lacked those qualities of place, however, it did possess certain visual features which made it function well as an economic space. These features could be read on its walls. 

In the non-ceremonial and poorer districts of ancient Greece and Rome, the wall related to the street as a solid barrier. The medieval urban economy made the street wall permeable. In the Parisian district of leather workers on the Right Bank, for example, the windows of each shop displayed goods to people walking in the streets through an innovation in window architecture: the windows had wooden shutters that folded down to serve as counters. The first building with windows known to be designed in this fashion dates from the early 1100s. Using the walls in this way, the merchants focused on the display of their goods, to make people on the street aware a shop contained something worth looking at inside as well. The buyer walking the street looked to the walls, their surfaces now active economic zones. 

The medieval courtyard became tied in the same way to the economic activity of the street. The courtyard  Served as a showroom as well as a workroom its entrance gradually enlarged so that people passing by could see what was happening within. Even in very grand palaces in the Marais district as late as the 16th century the ground floor Courtyard was planned as a bee hive of shops producing and selling to the general public as well as provisioning the noble household above. 

The development of this porous economic street space encouraged a change in street time. The ancient city depended on daylight; trade in medieval Paris extended the hours of the street. People went into the streets to shop before or after they had finished their own labors; the dusk as well as dawn became hours of consumption, the bakery at dawn, for instance, and the butcher shop late at night, after the butcher had purchased, prepared, and roasted his meats during the day. The counter stayed down and the courtyard stayed unlocked as long as there were people in the street. 

These streets whose buildings arose from the aggressive assertion of rights, whose porous surfaces and volumes encouraged economic competition, were also famously violent. Modern experiences of urban street crime give us no way to imagine the viciousness which ruled the medieval street. But this medieval street violence was not also what we might logically deduce, a simple consequence of economics. 

Violence in the street was aimed far more frequently at persons rather than property. In 1405—06 (when the first reliable crime figures are available for Paris), 54 percent of the cases that came before the criminal courts of Paris concerned “passionate crimes,” while 6 percent arose from robberies; in the decade from 1411 to 1420, 76 percent of the cases were about impulsive violence against persons, 7 percent concerned thefts.’ One explanation for this lay in the nearly universal practice among merchants of hiring guards; indeed, the very wealthy maintained little private armies to protect their mansions. There were municipal police in Paris from 1160 onward, but their numbers were small, and their duties consisted mostly in guarding public officials when they travelled through the city. 

The crime statistics from the High and late Middle Ages are far too crude for us to know who was attacked, whether family and friends or strangers on the street. It is a plausible inference, from the existence of so many hired guards and soldiers among the affluent classes, that most of the violence practiced by poor people was directed at other poor people. We do know, however, one of the main causes of such attacks; it was drink. 

Drinking was linked to about 35 percent of the murders or grave violent attacks in the Touraine, largely a rural region of France. In Paris the correlation was even higher, for drinking occurred not only at home, where a drunk could go to sleep, but in the public cellars \ wine shops which lined the streets of the city.8 Groups of people got drunk together and then late at night erupted into the street, picking fights. 

The need to drink had a compelling origin: it came from the need for bodily heat. In this northern city, wine warmed people’s bodies in buildings that lacked effective heating; the fireplace set against a reflecting wall, with a flue leading to an external chimney, made its appearance only in the fifteenth century. Prior to this, open braziers or fires built directly on the floor provided a building’s heat, and the smoke of these fires kept people from settling too close. Moreover, the heat was quickly dissipated, as few ordinary urban buildings had windows sheathed with glass. Wine served also as a narcotic that dulled pain. Like heroin or cocaine in modern cities, fortified wine created a drug culture in the Middle Ages, particularly in the public cellars and wine shops. 

To be sure, street violence could take a political turn, in Paris as jn other medieval cities. “Urban revolts were born, were propagated, and were aggravated in the street.”” These revolts had impersonal causes, such as corrupt officials charged with distributing grain. But jn Paris the constables of both King and Bishop suppressed these uprisings quickly; most lasted for only a few hours, at most a few days. The usual physical violence people experienced on the street was unpredictable—an unprovoked knife thrust, a fist in one’s stomach by a man who lurched by, blind drunk. We need to imagine, then, a street marked by different but discontinuous forms of aggression: purposeful economic competition and impulsive non-economic violence. 

Verbal violence did play an important role in economic competition, if it rarely translated into violent action. People came to houses to threaten, without restraint and in the most gory detail, the person or the families of debtors. Some historians believe the very violence of this language served as a kind of emotional discharge, permitting competitors to act aggressively without in fact coming to blows. Be that as it may, the political and ecclesiastical powers ruling the city made little effort to punish sellers who threatened to punch or stab buyers who resisted concluding a sale, or who harassed other sellers in the street. 

The low levels of property crime signalled that an effective but peculiar order reigned in urban space. It might have been invisible to the contemporary resident of Cairo, whose trading followed the overt dictates of religion. Beyond injunctions against usury and stealing, neither the Old nor the New Testament offered much guidance about how to behave economically. And perhaps this was why John of Salisbury also could not make sense of economic behavior. Competition was not choleric, in the sense the Ars medica described choler, the violent choler of the fighting soldier. It bore little resemblance to the sanguine civic command of the ruler, none to the phlegmatic considerations of the scholar. Competition certainly was not melancholic, nor nurturing. Just who was this economic creature became a little more evident in the organization of fairs and markets, spaces subject to more overt civic control than the streets. 

Watt Crusoe 2

 

Economic individualism explains much of Crusoe’s character; economic specialisation and its associated ideology help to account for the appeal of his adventures; but it is Puritan individualism which controls his spiritual being. 

Troeltsch has claimed that ‘the really permanent attainment of individualism was due to a religious, and not a secular movement, to the Reformation and not the Renaissance’. It is neither feasible nor profitable to attempt to establish priorities in such matters, but it is certainly true that if there is one element which all forms of Protestantism have in common it is the replacement of the rule of the Church as the mediator between man and God by another view of religion in which it is the individual who is entrusted with the primary responsibility for his own spiritual direction. Two aspects of this new Protestant emphasis—the tendency to increase consciousness of the self as a spiritual entity, and the tendency to a kind of democratisation of the moral and social outlook—are particularly important both to Robinson Crusoe and to the development of the presuppositions on which the formal realism of the novel is based. 

The idea of religious self-scrutiny as an important duty for each individual is, of course, much older than Protestantism; 

it derives from the individualist and subjective emphasis of primitive Christianity, and finds its supreme expression in St. Augustine’s Confessions. But it is generally agreed that it was Calvin, in the sixteenth century, who re-established and systematised this earlier pattern of purposive spiritual introspection, and made it the supreme religious ritual for the layman as well as for the priest: every good Puritan conducted a continual scrutiny of his inner man for evidence of his own place in the divine plot of election and reprobation. 

This ‘internalisation of conscience’ is everywhere manifested in Calvinism. In New England, it has been said, ‘almost every literate Puritan kept some sort of journal’; and, in England, Grace Abounding is the great monument of a way of life which Bunyan shared with the other members of his sect, the Baptists, who were, with one or two minor additions and subtractions, orthodox Calvinists. In later generations the introspective habit remained even where religious conviction weakened, and there resulted the three greatest autobiographical confessions of the modern period, those of Pepys, Rousseau and Boswell, all of whom were brought up under the Calvinist discipline; their fascination with self-analysis, and indeed their extreme egocentricity, are character traits which they shared both with later Calvinism in general and with Defoe’s heroes. 

(a) 

The importance of this subjective and individualist spiritual pattern to Defoe’s work, and to the rise of the novel, is very evident. Robinson Crusoe initiates that aspect of the novel’s treatment of experience which rivals the confessional autobiography and outdoes other literary forms in bringing us close to the inward moral being of the individual; and it achieves this closeness to the inner life of the protagonist by using as formal basis the autobiographical memoir which was the most immediate and widespread literary expression of the introspective tendency of Puritanism in general. 

Defoe himself, of course, was born and bred a Puritan. His father was a Dissenter, perhaps a Baptist, more probably Presbyterian, in any case a Calvinist; and he sent his son to a dissenting academy, probably intending him for the ministry Defoe’s own religious beliefs changed a good deal, and he expressed in his writings the whole gamut of doctrines, from intransigent predestinarianism to rational deism, which Puritanism held during its varied course of development; nevertheless, there is no doubt that Defoe remained and was generally considered to be a Dissenter, and that much of the outlook revealed in his novels is distinctively Puritan. 

There is nothing to suggest that Robinson Crusoe was intended to be a Dissenter. On the other hand, the note of his religious reflections is often Puritan in character—their tenor has been seen by one theologian as very close to the Presbyterian Shorter Catechism of the 1648 Westminster Assembly." Crusoe certainly exhibits frequent signs of Bibliolatry: he quotes some twenty verses of the Bible in the first part of Robinson Crusoe alone, besides making many briefer references; and he sometimes seeks divine guidance by opening the Bible at random. But the most significant aspect of his spiritual life is his tendency to rigorous moral and religious self-examination. Each of his actions is followed by a passage of reflection in which Crusoe ponders over the problem of how it reveals the intentions of divine providence. If the corn sprouts, it is surely a divine miracle ‘so directed for my sustenance’; if he has a bout of fever ‘a leisurely review of the miseries of death’? eventually convinces him that he deserves reprobation for neglecting to show his gratitude for God’s mercies to him. The modern reader no doubt tends to pay little attention to these parts of the narrative; but Crusoe and his author showed their point of view very clearly by allotting the spiritual realm as much importance as the practical, both in space and emphasis. It would therefore appear that what are probably the vestigial remnants of the Calvinist introspective discipline helped to provide us for the first time in the history of fiction with a hero whose day-by-day mental and moral life is fully shared by the reader. 

This crucial literary advance was not, of course, brought about by the introspective tendency of Puritanism alone. As we have seen, the gospel of work had a similar effect in giving the individual’s daily economic task almost as much importance as his daily spiritual self-examination; and the parallel effects of both tendencies were supplemented by another closely related tendency in Puritanism. 

If God had given the individual prime responsibility for his own spiritual destiny, it followed that he must have made this possible by signifying his intentions to the individual in the events of his daily life. The Puritan therefore tended to see every item in his personal experience as potentially rich in moral and spiritual meaning; and Defoe’s hero is acting according to this tradition when he tries to Interpret so many of the mundane events of the narrative as divine pointers which may help him to find his own place in the eternal scheme of redemption and reprobation. In that scheme, of course, all souls had equal chances, and it therefore followed that the individual had as full an opportunity of showing his spiritual qualities in the ordinary conduct of life as in its rarer and more dramatic exigencies. This was one reason for the general Puritan tendency towards the democratisation of the moral and social scale, and it was assisted by several other factors. ‘There were, for instance, many social, moral and political reasons why the Puritans should be hostile to the aristocratic scale of values; nor could they fail to disapprove of its literary expression in the traditional heroes of romance, extrovert conquerors whose victories are won, not in the spirit or in the counting-house but on the battlefield and in the boudoir. It is at all events clear that Puritanism brought about a fundamental and in a sense democratic orientation in the social and literary outlook of its adherents, an orientation which was described by Milton’s lines in Paradise Lost: ‘To know / That which before us lies in daily life / Is the prime wisdom’,' and which evoked one of Defoe’s most eloquent pieces of writing, an essay in Applebee’s Journal (1722) on the funeral of Marlborough. The essay’s peroration begins: 

What then is the work of life? What the business of great men, that pass the stage of the world in seeming triumph as these men, we call heroes, have done? Is it to grow great in the mouth of fame, and take up many pages in history? Alas! that is no more than making a tale for the reading of posterity, till it turns into fable and romance. Is it to furnish subject to the poets, and live in their immortal rhymes, as they call them? That is, in short, no more than to be hereafter turned into ballad and song, and be sung by old women to quiet children; or, at the corner of a street, to gather crowds in aid of the pickpocket and the whore. Or is their business rather to add virtue and piety to their glory, which alone will pasg them into Eternity, and make them truly immortal? What is glory without virtue? A great man without religion is no more than a great beast without a soul. 

Then Defoe modulates into something more like the narrowly ethical evaluation of merit which was to be one of the legacies of Puritanism to the middle-class code: ‘What is honour without merit? And what can be called true merit, but that which makes a person a good man, as well as a great man’.! 

Neither Crusoe, nor indeed any of Defoe’s heroes, it must be admitted, are conspicuous by these standards of virtue, religion, merit and goodness; and, of course, Defoe did not intend them to be so. But these standards do represent the moral plane on which Defoe’s novels exist, and by which his heroes must be judged: the ethical scale has been so internalised and democratised that, unlike the scale of achievement common in epic or romance, it is relevant to the lives and actions of ordinary people. In this Defoe’s heroes are typical of the later characters of the novel: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and even Colonel Jacque never think of glory or honour; they have their being on the moral plane of day-to-day living more completely than those of previous narratives, and their thoughts and actions only exhibit an ordinary, a democratic goodness and badness. Robinson Crusoe, for instance, 1s Defoe’s most heroic character, but there is nothing unusual about his personality or the way he faces his strange experiences; as Coleridge pointed out, he 1s essentially ‘the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute himself . . . nothing 1s done, thought, suffered, or desired, but what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing for’.? 

Defoe’s presentation of Robinson Crusoe as the ‘universal representative’ is intimately connected with the egalitarian tendency of Puritanism in yet another way. For not only did this tendency make the way the individual faced every problem of everyday life a matter of deep and continuing spiritual concern; it also encouraged a literary outlook which was suited to describing such problems with the most detailed fidelity. 

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In Mimesis, a brilliant panorama of realiatic representation in literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Erich Auerbach has demonatrated the general connection between the Christian view of man and the serious literary portrayal of ordinary people and of common life. ‘The classical theory of genres had reflected the social and philosophical orientation of Greece and Rome: tragedy described the heroic vicissitudes of people better than ourselves in appropriately elevated language, whereas the domain of everyday reality belonged to comedy which was supposed to portray people ‘inferior to ourselves’ in an appropriately ‘low’ style. Christian literature, however, reflecting a very different social and philosophical outlook, had no place for this Stiltrennung or segregation of styles according to the class status of the subject-matter. The gospel narratives treated the doings of humble people with the utmost seriousness and on occasion, indeed, with sublimity; later, this tradition was continued in many of the mediaeval literary forms, from the lives of the saints to the miracle plays; and it eventually found its greatest expression in Dante’s Divina Commedia.! 

The classicising tendencies of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, however, re-established the old doctrine of genre, and indeed elaborated it to an extent that would certainly have surprised Aristotle. The supreme example of this elaboration is found in French literature of the seventeenth century, and especially in tragedy; not only was the unremitting use of a fully codified 'style noble' prescribed, but even the objects and actions of everyday life were banished from the stage. 

In Protestant countries, however, the Stiltrennung never achieved such authority, especially in England where neoclassicism was confronted by the example of Shakespeare and that characteristic mingling of the tragic and comic modes which was part of his legacy from the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, in one important respect even Shakespeare followed the Sultrennung: his treatment of low and rustic characters is very similar to that of the protagonists of the neo-classical tradition from Ben Jonson to Dryden, and there is nothing egalitarian about it, It is  Very significant that the main exceptions to this derogatory attitude are found in the works of puritan writers. In Adam Milton created the 1st epic hero who is essentially a universal representative Bunyan seeing all souls is equal before God accorded the humble and their lives a much more serious and sympathetic attention than they received in the other literature of his period. While the works of Defoe are the supreme illustration in the novel of the connection between the democratic individualisation of puritanism and the objective representation of the world and all those who inhabit it.