to the world we live in by specific dates, actual places, and the thousand links of circumstance. This implies, of course, that the writer of strict prose, such, for instance, as the unimaginative prose of the eighteenth century, has no option but to be a realist; he is left with no alternative to this use of verisimilitude; and, as a consequence, he is strictly circumscribed as to his choice of subject, which must be a phase of reality. Should he attempt fantastic themes, he has to pretend that they are real; and this is what the composers of prose fantasies have done, from Swift to Poe, unless they have abandoned the stricter prose canons, and like Jean Paul Richter, De Quincey, and their congeners, laid lawless hands on the arts of diction usually monopolized by the poets.
Defoe's work in the reconstruction of prose fiction was to bring the novel down at once from the region where the plastic imagination roams at large, and fix it firmly on the solid earth. He showed, more forcibly than any novelist before or since, the irresistible cogency of the circumstantial method. In fact, he overdid the thing, and took upon him to hoodwink his readers. Not content with poetic faith, he deluded them with the pretence that he was relating actual occurrences; and so, to this day, it is not quite settled whether certain stories are fictions by Defoe or records of authentic experiences by the supposed narrators. Some of his more elaborate frauds certainly go beyond all bounds of literary artifice. In order to pass off his account of the career of Jack Sheppard as an actual dying confession, he got the condemned man, as he stood on the scaffold, to hand a document, purporting to be the manuscript of the book, to a messenger who brought it to Defoe. There are instances of this kind of deception in both Moll Flanders and Roxana, which are brought into line with those memoirs of illustrious malefactors for which the general reader of the time showed such avidity. Here is the beginning of Moll Flanders:—
'My true name is so well known in the records or registers at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey, and there are some things of such consequence still depending there, relating to my particular conduct, that it is not to be expected I should set my name or the account of my family to this work; perhaps after my death it may be better known; at present it would not be proper, no, not though a general pardon should be issued, even without exceptions of persons or crimes.
'It is enough to tell you, that as some of my worst comrades, who are out of the way of doing me harm (having gone out of the world by the steps and the string, as I often expected to go), knew me by the name of Moll Flanders, so you may give me leave to go under that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am.'
No evidence has yet been adduced by the efforts of many editors that these two works are not mainly fiction, though, of
