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.
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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.
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