ictitious heroes and heroines? One can only
suppose that he was attracted by the greater freedom of movement in pure
invention; he made the venture with _Robinson Crusoe_, it was
successful, and he repeated it. But after the success of _Robinson
Crusoe_, he by no means abandoned his old fields. It was after this that
he produced autobiographies and other _prima facie_ authentic lives of
notorious thieves and pirates. With all his records of heroes, real or
fictitious, he practised the same devices for ensuring credibility. In
all alike he took for granted that the first question people would ask
about a story was whether it was true. The novel, it must be remembered,
was then in its infancy, and Defoe, as we shall presently see, imagined,
probably not without good reason, that his readers would disapprove of
story-telling for the mere pleasure of the thing, as an immorality.

In writing for the entertainment of his own time, Defoe took the surest
way of writing for the entertainment of all time. Yet if he had never
chanced to write _Robinson Crusoe_, he would now have a very obscure
place in English literature. His "natural infirmity of homely plain
writing," as he humorously described it, might have drawn students to
his works, but they ran considerable risk of lying in utter oblivion.
He was at war with the whole guild of respectable writers who have
become classics; they despised him as an illiterate fellow, a vulgar
huckster, and never alluded to him except in terms of contempt. He was
not slow to retort their civilities; but the retorts might very easily
have sunk beneath the waters, while the assaults were preserved by their
mutual support. The vast mass of Defoe's writings received no kindly aid
from distinguished contemporaries to float them down the stream;
everything was done that bitter dislike and supercilious indifference
could do to submerge them. _Robinson Crusoe_ was their sole life-buoy.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the vitality of _Robinson Crusoe_
is a happy accident, and that others of Defoe's tales have as much claim
in point of merit to permanence. _Robinson Crusoe_ has lived longest,
because it lives most, because it was detached as it were from its own
time and organized for separate existence. It is the only one of Defoe's
tales that shows what he could do as an artist. We might have seen from
the others that he had the genius of a great artist; here we have the
possibility realized, t