Daniel Defoe - The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton

That all Defoe's novels, with the exception of "Robinson Crusoe," should have been covered with the dust of neglect for many generations, is a plain proof of how much fashions in taste affect the popularity of the British classics. It is true that three generations or so ago, Defoe's works were edited by both Sir Walter Scott and Hazlitt, and that this masterly piece of realism, "Captain Singleton," was reprinted a few years back in "The Camelot Classics," but it is safe to say that out of every thousand readers of "Robinson Crusoe" only one or two will have even heard of the "Memoirs of a Cavalier," "Colonel Jack," "Moll Flanders," or "Captain Singleton." It is indeed distressing to think that while many scores of thousands of copies of Lord Lytton's flashy romance, "Paul Clifford," have been devoured by the public, "Captain Singleton" has remained unread and almost forgotten. But the explanation is simple. Defoe's plain and homely realism soon grew to be thought vulgar by people who themselves aspired to be refined and genteel. The rapid spread of popular education, in the middle of last century, was responsible for a great many aberrations of taste, and the works of the two most English of Englishmen, Defoe and Hogarth, were judged to be hardly fitting for polite society, as we may see from Lamb's Essay on Hogarth, and from an early edition of Chambers's "Cyclopaedia of English Literature" (1843), where we are told: "Nor is it needful to show how elegant and reflective literature, especially, tends to moralise, to soften, and to adorn the soul and life of man." "Unfortunately the taste or circumstances of Defoe led him mostly into low life, and his characters are such as we cannot sympathise with. The whole arcana of roguery and villany seems to have been open to him. It might be thought that the good taste which led Defoe to write in a style of such pure and unpretending English, instead of the inflated manner of vulgar writers, would have dictated a more careful selection of his subjects, and kept him from wandering so frequently into the low and disgusting purlieus of vice. But this moral and tasteful discrimination seems to have been wholly wanting," etc. The 'forties were the days when critics still talked learnedly of the "noble style," etc., "the vulgar," of "sinking" or "rising" with "the subject," the days when Books of Beauty were in fashion, and Rembrandt's choice of beggars, wrinkled faces and grey hairs, for his favourite subjects seemed a low and reprehensible taste in "high art." Though critics today still ingenuously confound an artist's subject with his treatment of it, and prefer scenes of life to be idealised rather than realised by writers, we have advanced a little since the days of the poet Montgomery, and it would be difficult now to find anybody writing so confidently"Unfortunately the taste or circumstances of Defoe led him mostly into low life," however much the critic might believe it. But let us glance at a few passages in "Captain Singleton," which may show us why Defoe excels as a realist, and why his descriptions of "low life" are artistically as perfect as any descriptions of "higher life" in the works of the English novelists. Take the following description of kidnapping:

"The woman pretending to take me up in her arms and kiss me, and play with me, draws the girl a good way from the house, till at last she makes a fine story to the girl, and bids her go back to the maid, and tell her where she was with the child; that a gentlewoman had taken a fancy to the child and was kissing it, but she should not be frightened, or to that purpose; for they were but just there; and so while the girl went, she carried me quite away.Page 2.

Now here, in a single sentence, Defoe catches for us the whole soul and character of the situation. It seems very simple, but it sums up marvellously an exact observation and knowledge of the arts of the gipsy childstealer, of her cunning flattery and brassy boldness, and we can see the simple little girl running back to the house to tell the nurse that a fine lady was kissing the child, and had told her to tell where they were and she should not be frightened, etc.; and this picture again calls up the hue and cry after the kidnappers and the fruitless hopes of the parents. In a word, Defoe has condensed in the eight simple lines of his little scene all that is essential to its living truth; and let the young writer note that it is ever the sign of the master to do in three words, or with three strokes, what the ordinary artist does in thirty. Defoe's imagination is so extraordinarily comprehensive in picking out just those little matteroffact details that suggest all the other aspects, and that emphasise the character of the scene or situation, that he makes us believe in the actuality of whatever he is describing. So real, so living in every detail is this apocryphal narrative, in "Captain Singleton," of the crossing of Africa by a body of marooned sailors from the coast of Mozambique to the Gold Coast, that one would firmly believe Defoe was committing to writing the verbal narrative of some adventurer in the flesh, if it were not for certain passagessuch as the description of the impossible desert on page 90, which proves that Defoe was piecing together his description of an imaginary journey from the geographical records and travellers' tales of his contemporaries, aided perhaps by the confused yarns of some sailor friends. How substantially truthful in spirit and in detail is Defoe's account of Madagascar is proved by the narrative of Robert Drury's "Captivity in Madagascar," published in 1729. The natives themselves, as described intimately by Drury, who lived amongst them for many years, would produce just such an effect as Defoe describes on rough sailors in their perilous position. The method by which Defoe compels us to accept improbabilities, and lulls our critical sense asleep, is well shown in the following passages:

"Thieving, lying, swearing, forswearing, joined to the most abominable lewdness, was the stated practice of the ship's crew; adding to it, that with the most unsufferable boasts of their own courage, they were, generally speaking, the most complete cowards that I ever met with."Page 7.

"All the seamen in a body came up to the rail of the quarterdeck, where the captain was walking with some of his officers, and appointing the boatswain to speak for them, he went up, and falling on his knees to the captain, begged of him in the humblest manner possible, to receive the four men on board again, offering to answer for their fidelity, or to have them kept in chains, till they came to Lisbon, and there to be delivered up to justice, rather than, as they said, to have them left, to be murdered by savages, or devoured by wild beasts. It was a great while ere the captain took any notice of them, but when he did, he ordered the boatswain to be seized, and threatened to bring him to the capstan for speaking for them. Upon this severity, one of the seamen, bolder than the rest, but still with all possible respect to the captain, besought his honour, as he called him, that he would give leave to some more of them to go on shore, and die with their companions, or, if possible, to assist them to resist the barbarians."Page 18.

Now the first passage we have quoted about the cowardice, etc., of the Portuguese crew is not in keeping with the second passage, which shows the men as "wishing to die with their companions"; but so actual is the scene of the seamen "in a body coming up to the rail of the quarterdeck," that we cannot but believe the thing happened so, just as we believe in all the thousand little details of the imaginary narrative of "Robinson Crusoe." This feat of the imagination Defoe strengthens in the most artful manner, by putting in the mouths of his characters various reflections to substantiate the narrative. For example, in the description, on page 263, of the savages who lined the perilous channel in a halfmoon, where the European ship lay, we find the afterthoughts are added so naturally, that they would carry conviction to any judge or jury: