DEFOE was writing Roxanna, or, The Fortunate Mistress in 1720, twenty years before Richardson produced Pamela. He was a writer in much the same sense that he was a bosier, and drove both trades as well as he could. A practical journalist, he wrote on politics, commerce, religion, publishing in pamphlets because there was no periodic press. When he was past fifty, and had been writing all his life, he discovered that there was a much larger public for narratives than for political articles. The success of Robinson Crusoe astonished him, and he decided to follow a winning lead. His family expenses were heavy, he was burdened with marriageable daughters, and his hosiery business in London was not flourishing enough to provide portions for them. Stories, he saw, could be made to pay better than either hose or instructive pamphlets.

The material for Robinson Crusoe Defoe came upon by chance – by one of those chances which are always happening to the born journalist. He met Alexander Selkirk at the house of a friend in Bristol and got the story of the shipwrecked man's adventures from his own lips. Selkirk afterward declared that he had handed over his papers to this sympathetic listener. Defoe's literal method never worked out so well again as in Robinson Crusoe – at least, not for readers of our time. Robinson, like all his other heroes, lived by his wits, but since he practised his ingenuity upon a desert island and the untamed forces of nature, the details are not so revolting as in the narratives in which the hero uses his wits upon the persons and pocket-books of his fellow mortals. Moreover, since Robinson has the scene to himself, the modern reader does not miss so much the thousand flowers of courtesy and sympathy and fine feeling he has come to expect in the narrative that deals with human intercourse.

Defoe was upwards of sixty when he began The Fortunate Mistress: the story of a daughter of French Protestant parents who fled to England in 1683, married at fifteen to a London brewer, with whom she lives for more than eight years and by whom she has five children. The husband dissipates his own fortune and hers in drinking and hunting, finally deserts her, and goes abroad to enlist in foreign military service. Young and handsome, with five children, no money, and many debts, Roxanna is left to shift for herself – and she demonstrates that she is mightily competent to do so. She embarks almost at once upon a career which it would be absurdly euphuistic to call a career of amatory adventure. A life of adventure it certainly is, though the adventure is always the same. The monetary gains vary somewhat in her various engagements, but they are always large. Defoe undertook to tell the story of a fortunate mistress, one who concerned herself only with men of quality, wealth, and boundless good nature; one who managed her affairs successfully and practised her profession with good sense, shrewdness, and economy until she was well past fifty.

Roxanna's story is told by herself; the entire novel is written in the first person, the fortunate mistress being the narrator. She leaves nothing untold, and there is much to relate. Her story ought to be absorbingly interesting, but it is only inversely so. The most interesting thing about it is that, with such a warehouse of inflammatory material to draw from, it remains so dull.

Here we have the novel (or we may be academic and call it the "romance"), stripped to its bare bones; and have we? It happens to be much easier to say what we have not. Defoe is a writer of ready invention but no imagination – with none of the personal attributes which, fused together somehow, make imagination. His narrative runs smoothly, evenly, convincingly; the best thing about it is his vigorous, unornamented English. There is a strong weave in the sentences as tehy follow each other that gives pleasure to the eye, as the feel of good hand-woven linen does to the fingertips. But after a while one demands something more. There is never a change of tempo, never a modulation of voice, or a quickening of sympathy. The episodes of Roxanna's narrative never emerge from the level text and become "scenes." Fifty years before Defoe, Bunyan had written much of The Pilgrim's Progress in scenes of the most satisfying kind; where little is said but much is felt and communicated: one has only to recall the delightful episodes of Christiana's sojourn at the House Beautiful, or Mercy's descent into the Valley of Humiliation. The "scene" in fiction is not a mere matter of construction, any more than it is in life. When we have a vivid experience in social intercourse, pleasant or unpleasant, it records itself in our memory in the form of a scene; and when it flashes back to us, all sorts of apparently unimportant details are flashed back with it. When a writer has a strong or revelatory experience with his characters, he unconsciously creates a scene; gets a depth of picture, and writes, as it were, in three dimensions instead of two. The absence of these warm and satisfying moments in any work of fiction is final proof of the author's poverty of emotion and lack of imagination.

There are no scenes in Roxanna's narrative, and there is no atmosphere. Her adventures in France are exactly like those in England; one is not conscious of the slightest change in her surroundings of way of living. Defoe had travelled, and so does his heroine. But all countries and all cities are alike to Roxanna, just as well-to-do men are alike to her. When she is touring with her French Prince, she goes to Venice for her "lying-in" – but it is all one with Spitalfields. The child died after two months, and she says that she was on the whole not sorry, considering the inconvenience of travelling with an infant. About the city itself, or her way of living there, she does not drop a remark. While one may much prefer this reticence to the travelogue school of fiction, it certainly adds to the evidence of a curious insensibility in Roxanna and her author. The whole book, indeed, is a mass of evidence upon that point, and that is its chief interest. The reader gets no impression of Roxanna's physical surroundings at any time; her houses and retinues in England, France, and Holland are mere names. The only things in her material investiture which interest either her or her creator are her clothes. She does enumerate at some length the gowns and jewels the Prince bought for her – enumerates them more like a merchant taking stock than like a pretty woman describing her costumes. We are never told anything so foolish as that the Prince liked her in this or that. One can say this for Roxanna; she is never sentimental.

There are no scenes in thsi novel, there is no atmosphere, no picturing of rooms or gardens or household gear which for one reason or another were dear to the narrator – as a particular cushion is dear to a cat, or a corner by the fire to a dog. There is no conversation, or almost none. Talk is used chiefly to present arguments. While conversation was slow to develop in the English novel, there is living human intercourse through conversation in The Pilgrim's Progress, and many of the theological discussion sbetween Christian and Faithful are more lively and full of feeling than any of Roxanna's dialogues with her lovers.

Roxanna had enough sense of character for her purpose. Of her hard-riding, ahrd-drinking first husband she paints a good picture; one gets a sense of the man's personality. Her maid, the sprightly and resouceful Amy, the companion and sharer of her her adventures, is, after Roxanna herself, the most living person in the book. In discussing her lovers, our heroine is concerned with only one quality, their generosity. WHen she deigns to be personal, her strokes tell, and one does manage to find out something about these men beyond the ample provision they made for Roxanna. If she and her author had not been so blind to everything but francs and pounds, they might have passed on a good deal to us.

As against so many things that are absent from Defoe's story, one thing is amazingly, powerfully, unflaggingly present: verisimilitude. From the first paragraph one never doubts that this is a woman's actual story, told by a woman. The author never gets outside his character, never insinuates anything through her, has no feelings about her beyond those she has about herself. The reader forgets Daniel Defoe altogether; he is reading a woman's autobiography. And what a woman! One cannot imagine the most starved little girl drudge, int he cruelest age of domestic service, if this book had fallen into her hands, lingering wistfully over its pages and coveting Roxanna's Prince or her diamonds. One cannot believe that the most mush-headed boy would long to take her over from the Prince. The starved and the mush-headed are romantic; they want what goes with the Prince and the diamonds, they believe in their own capacity for pleasure. But Defoe and Roxanna knew well enough that they had none, and no more unromantic pair ever got themselves into print. Their great, their saving quality is that they do not try to be what they are not, and never for one moment pretend to any of the fine feelings they do not possess. This mental integrity makes the narrative, as a piece of writing, almost flawless; as self-sufficient as a column of figures correctly added. Lewd situations are dispatched without lewdness. The book is as safe as sterilized gauze. One is bumped up smartly against the truth, old enough but always new, that in novels, as in poetry, the facts are nothing, the feeling is everything.

Open any volume of M. Fabre's studies of insect life, and one can find passages about the life-struggle of beetles, the love-makings and domestic cares of ants or grasshoppers, passages that are so warm and rich and full of colour, so full of wisdom and humour and the sense of tragedy and beauty, that they make poor Roxanna, with her thirty years of profitable engagements, seem not animal, but mineral. With Fabre, the poetic Provençal was always getting the better of the scientist. When the lights are put out, and the moths he has vainly enticed for weeks at last come flying through the summer night to court the lady under a gauze tent on his study table, it is Fabre, and his breathless children, hidden in the dark, who have the romance and the adventure, not the moths. And they have more in their silent half-hour than Defoe is able to beat up for Roxanna and her dozen lvoers in five hundred pages. M. Fabre is much more wonderful than his insects; but Defoe is not at all more remarkable than Roxanna. They are both most remarkable in that, lacking all the most valuable gifts a writer can have except one, they made themselves an immortal place in English, in European, literature.

Defoe seems to have had only one deep interest, and that was in making a living. Read The Complete British Tradesman and marvel at how intensely, how acutely, every mean device and petty economy appealed to him; how every stingy trim, every possible twist and sharp practice in shopkeeping and servant-grinding, stirred him and gratified him. All the misers in fiction are sentimental, inexpert, and unresourceful, judged by the standards advocated in this work written for the guidance of Defoe's fellow tradesmen. It is one of the meanest and most sordid books ever written. It makes one ashamed of being human.

Defoe was concerned not only about the matter of making his own living, he was intensely interested in the way other people made theirs; ina ll the shifts by which we feed and clothe ourselves, and buy a business and get together a property. It must have been much harder ot wring a livelihood from a stony world then than it is now; in the profound concern of this small, mean, vigorous spirit, we get some aching sense of the cruel pressure of the times.

In one book Defoe's theme was quite enough. It happened that the way in which Robinson Crusoe made a living was extremely interesting: nearly everyone would like to try it for a month or two. Except for the moralizing, which few of us read, Defoe's immortal work is an account of how Robinson maintained himself and acquired property on a desert island.

The Fortunate Mistress is an account of how a woman maintained herself and acquired property – and her way of doing it is not interesting. Her profession, of course, is an old theme in art; and of the queens of that profession great artists have left portraits of enduring beauty in sculpture and painting and literature. But such a theme, in the hands of Roxanna and that thrifty hosier, Daniel Defoe —! Shakespeare himself could never have created two such characters; he wouldn't have had the patience. They remind us of what Heine said, that no irony can compete with God's irony.

Some sentimental critics, of the kind that Defoe himself called "high-flying," have tried to make out a case for The British Tradesman as a masterpiece of irony. Its author would have said that you might as well call the multiplication table irony. Defoe attempted ironical treatment more than once, in imitation of Swift, but he could never sustain that mood for long. He was as devoid of humour as he was of idealism, of romance, and of geniality. Robinson Crusoe and The Fortunate Mistress splendidly illustrate to what different ends a writer can put the same talent. The one book has what Stevenson called charm of circumstance, the other emphatically has not; but in both the same nature is effectively asserting itself; mean enough and vital enough – invulnerable because it never affects qualities which it neither comprehends nor admires.

Willa Cather.