BY PROFESSOR MASSON. 37

wickedness, and does not feel the least concern for his soul. If a grown
man reads the book in after years, it is to recall the sensations of youth, or
curiously to examine the secret of the unbounded popularity it has enjoyed.
How much this popularity is due to the happy choice of his subject, we may
better estimate when we remember that the popular “ Robinson Crusoe ”
is in reality only a part of the work, and the work itself only one of many
others, not less well executed, from the same hand. No other man in the
world could have drawn so absolutely living a picture of the desert-island
life; but the same man has exercised the same power over more complex
incidents, and the works are little read.

Professor Masson looks upon De Foe as the founder of the modern Fiction.
He was a great reader, he says, and a tolerable scholar, and he may have
taken the hint of his method from the Spanish picaresque novel. On the
whole, however, it was his own robust sense of reality that led him to his
style. There is more of the sly humour of the foreign picaresque novel
(such as Gil Blas) in his representations of English ragamuffin life; there
is nothing of allegory, poetry, or even of didactic purpose; all is hard,

. prosaic, and matter-of-fact, as in newspaper paragraphs, or the pages of the
“Newgate Calendar.” In reference to his greatest work of fiction, Pro-
fessor Masson adds :—*

FROM PROFESSOR MASSON.

It is a happy accident that the subject of one of his fictions, and that the
earliest on a great scale, was of a kind in treating which his genius in
matter-of-fact necessarily produced the effect of a poem. The conception of
a solitary mariner thrown on an uninhabited island was one as really
belonging to the fact of that time as those which formed the subject of De
Foe’s less-read fictions of coarse English life. Dampier and the bucaniers
were roving the South Seas; and there yet remained parts of the land-
surface of the Earth of which man had not taken possession, and on which
sailors were occasionally thrown adrift by the brutality of captains. Seizing
this text, more especially as offered in the story of Alexander Selkirk, De
Foe’s matchless power of inventing circumstantial incidents made him more
a master even of its poetic capabilities than the rarest poet then living could
have been; and now that, all round our globe, there is not an unknown
island left, we still reserve in our mental charts one such island, with the
sea breaking round it, and we would part any day with two of the heroes
of antiquity rather than with Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday.

Our critical quotations shall conclude with one from De Foe’s most brill-
iant biographer :—t

* Masson, “ British Novelists and their Styles,” pp. 96-98.
t Forster, “‘ Historical and Biographical Essays,” ii. 94-96.