of mind of the newspaper
correspondent, who has been interviewing the hero of an interesting
story and ventures at most a little safe embroidery. This explains a
remark made by Dickens, who complained that the account of Friday's
death showed an 'utter want of tenderness and sentiment,' and says
somewhere that 'Robinson Crusoe' is the only great novel which never
moves either to laughter or to tears. The creator of Oliver Twist and
Little Nell was naturally scandalised by De Foe's dry and matter-of-fact
narrative. But De Foe had never approached the conception of his art
which afterwards became familiar. He had nothing to do with sentiment or
psychology; those elements of interest came in with Richardson and
Fielding; he was simply telling a true story and leaving his readers to
feel what they pleased. It never even occurred to him, more than it
occurs to the ordinary reporter, to analyse character or describe
scenery or work up sentiment. He was simply a narrator of plain facts.
He left poetry and reflection to Mr. Pope or Mr. Addison, as your
straightforward annalist in a newspaper has no thoughts of rivalling
Lord Tennyson or Mr. Froude. His narratives were fictitious only in the
sense that the facts did not happen; but that trifling circumstance was
to make no difference to the mode of writing them. The poetical element
would have been as much out of place as it would have been in a
merchant's ledger. He could not, indeed, help introducing a little
moralising, for he was a typical English middle-class dissenter. Some of
his simple-minded commentators have even given him credit, upon the
strength of such passages, for lofty moral purpose. They fancy that his
lives of criminals, real or imaginary, were intended to be tracts
showing that vice leads to the gallows. No doubt, De Foe had the same
kind of solid homespun morality as Hogarth, for example, which was not
in its way a bad thing. But one need not be very cynical to believe that
his real object in writing such books was to produce something that
would sell, and that in the main he was neither more nor less moral than
the last newspaper writer who has told us the story of a sensational
murder.

De Foe, therefore, may be said to have stumbled almost unconsciously
into novel-writing. He was merely aiming at true stories, which happened
not to be true. But accidentally, or rather unconsciously, he could not
help presenting us with a type of curious interest; for he n