be soon forgotten after a temporary fit of repentance, and a long
course of evil living in no wise interferes with a comfortable and
respectable old age. His pirates have none of the desperation and brutal
heroism of sin. Stevenson's John Silver or Israel Hands is worth a
schooner-load of them. Neither they nor their author seem to value
virtue very highly, though they are acutely sensitive to the discomfort
of an evil reputation. Possibly such people may be true to a certain
type of humanity, but they are exceedingly uninteresting. A writer who
takes so narrow a view cannot produce a great book, even though his lack
of moral scope and insight is partly compensated by a vivid presentation
of life on the low plane from which he views it.

'Moll Flanders' and 'Roxana' are very coarse books, but it can hardly be
said that they are harmful or corrupting. They are simply vulgar. Vice
has preserved all its evil by preserving all its grossness. Passion is
reduced to mere animalism, and is depicted with the brutal directness of
Hogarth. This may be good morals, but it is unpleasant art. It is true
that Defoe's test of a writer was that he should "please and serve his
public," and in providing amusement he was not more refined nor more
coarse than those whom he addressed; but a writer should look a little
deeper and aim a little higher than the average morality of his day.
Otherwise he may please but will not serve his generation, in any true
sense of literary service.

Defoe is sometimes spoken of as the first great realist. In a limited
sense this may be true. No doubt he presents the surface of a limited
area of the eighteenth-century world with fidelity. With the final
establishment of Protestantism, the increase of trade, and the building
of physical science on the broad foundations laid down by Newton,
England had become more mundane than at any other period. The intense
faith and the imaginative quality of the seventeenth century were
deadened. The eighteenth century kept its eyes on the earth, and though
it found a great many interesting and wonderful things there, and though
it laid the foundations of England's industrial greatness, it was
neither a spiritual nor an artistic age. The novel was in its infancy;
and as if a "true story" was more worthy of respect than an invention,
it received from Defoe an air of verisimilitude and is usually based on
some real events. He is careful to embellish his fictions with little