The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 72, October, 1863 by Various
page 14 of 295 (04%)
page 14 of 295 (04%)
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"The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it beyond that
of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what really happened to himself. To this the extreme _homeliness_ of their style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest sense,--that which comes _home_ to the reader. The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, 'I say,' 'Mind,' and the like, when the story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before: which made an ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe can never again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers than that of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough prescription; Singleton, the pirate--Colonel Jack, the thief,--Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot,--Roxana, harlot and something worse,--would be startling ingredients in the bill-of-fare of modern literary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what harlots is _the thief, the harlot_, and _the pirate_ of De Foe? We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening |
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