ll, Jack,
William the Quaker in _Singleton_, even Roxana the cold-blooded and
covetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real--they and almost every
one of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and
bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But they still want
_something_--the snap of the fingers of the artist. Moll is perhaps the
most real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of her
being--never sees her standing out against soft blue sky or
thunder-cloud as one sees the great characters of fiction; never hears
her steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does theirs.

So again his description is sufficient: and the enumerative
particularity of it is even great part of the _secret de Polichinelle_
to which we are coming. But it is far from elaborate in any other way
and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality. Well as we know
Crusoe's Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressed
as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's--it is either of the
human figures--Crusoe's own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday,
the Spaniards, Will Atkins--or of the works of man--the stockade, the
boat, and the rest--that we think. A little play is made with Jack's
glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence _de mauvais lieu_, but not
much: the gold-dust and deserts of _Singleton_ are a necessary part of
the "business," but nothing more. _Moll Flanders_--in some respects the
greatest of all his books--has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in
scenery and properties--it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a
bed to furnish it.

Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond--even making his personages
soliloquise in this after a fashion--and it plays a very important part
in "the secret:" yet it can hardly be classed very high _as_ dialogue.
And this is at least partly due to the strange _drab_ shapelessness of
his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint
individual form.

Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited
the method so well, or would even have suited it at all. For this
method--to leave off hinting at it and playing round it--is one of
almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail,
and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an
insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's part, of the facts
presented to him. The process has been more than once a