Novelists From England

"When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him."

"The mountain sheep are sweeter But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met a host, and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it...As we drove our prize at leisure, The king marched forth to catch us: His rage surpassed all measure, But his people could not match us. He fled to his hall-pillars; And, ere our force we led off, Some sacked his house and cellars, While others cut his head off."

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."

"MR. PANSCOPE. (suddenly emerging from a deep reverie.) I have heard, with the most profound attention, everything which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the authority of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides, Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis. MR. ESCOT. I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an authority more than a reason. MR. PANSCOPE. The authority, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which I maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable. SQUIRE HEADLONG. Bravo! Pass the bottle. The very best speech that ever was made. MR. ESCOT. It has only the slight disadvantage of being unintelligible. MR. PANSCOPE. I am not obliged, Sir, as Dr Johnson remarked on a similar occasion, to furnish you with an understanding. MR. ESCOT. I fear, Sir, you would have some difficulty in furnishing me with such an article from your own stock. MR. PANSCOPE. 'Sdeath, Sir, do you question my understanding? MR. ESCOT. I only question, Sir, where I expect a reply, which from what manifestly has no existence, I am not visionary enough to anticipate. MR. PANSCOPE. I beg leave to observe, sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous, and etymologically correct; and, I conceive, I have demonstrated what I shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms, that all your opinions are extremely absurd. MR. ESCOT. I should be sorry, sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd. MR. PANSCOPE. Death and fury, Sir! MR. ESCOT. Say no more, Sir - that apology is quite sufficient. MR. PANSCOPE. Apology, Sir? MR. ESCOT. Even so, Sir. You have lost your temper, which I consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument. MR. PANSCOPE. Lightnings and devils!"

"Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond."

"There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it. The first is obvious, mechanical, and plebeian; the second is most refined, abstract, prospicient, and canonical."

"The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity."

"The accidents of history, then, treated Defoe fortunately, although he courted them as no other writer has done, and deserves his reward. They impelled him to a step which was decisive in the history of the novel. His blind and almost purposeless concentration on the actions of his heroes and heroines, and his unconscious and unreflective mingling of their thoughts and his about the inglorious world in which they both exist, made possible the expression of many motives and themes which could not, perhaps, have come into the tradition of the novel without Defoe's shock tactics: motives such as economic egoism and social alienation; and themes such as the conflicts between old and new sets of values as they are manifested in daily life. Very few writers have created for themselves both a new subject and a new literary form to embody it. Defoe did both. In his somewhat monocular concentration on making his matter seem absolutely convincing, there was much he did not see. But what is left out is probably the price for what is so memorably and unprecedentedly put in."

"Defoe's writings are of the highest value as an historical indication of the state of the middle and lower classes of his time."

"Robinson Crusoe did not deal with love. Defoe's other stories, which are happily forgotten, are bad in their very essence. Roxana is an accurate example of what a bad book may be. It relates the adventures of a woman thoroughly depraved, and yet for the most part successful, -- is intended to attract by licentiousness, and puts off till the end the stale scrap of morality which is brought in as a salve to the conscience of the writer. Putting aside Robinson Crusoe, which has been truly described as an accident, Defoe's teaching as a novelist has been altogether bad."

"So far as I can tell, no narrator in realistic prose fiction before H. F. [the narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year] reveals this type of general sympathy for the human condition. I do not find it in those fictions of Defoe influenced by picaresque models. In Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack there is too much of a concern with self and individual experience to have the kind of combination of sympathy and detachment to be found in H. F. And the same may said of "poor Robinson Crusoe," as the parrot calls Defoe's castaway. Crusoe obviously has to teach his parrot to repeat that self-pitying title. Like Fielding's humane historian, H. F. resists all temptation to blame and scold. He is the invention of a moment in English history when Defoe wanted to spread feelings of hope and charity. In the process, he set a pattern for fictional narrators that has been central to the development of the novel."

"Daniel Defoe's Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain has long been recognized as a key book of its age. It has been lauded by the most eminent historians as a prime source of understanding for Britain in the eighteenth century (indeed, for understanding the birth of the modern, on a global scale), and remains one of the most-quoted works in general surveys of the period."

"[Moll Flanders is a] novel of lust, survival and protofeminist spirit. Virginia Woolf loved the book. So would Howard Stern."

"Roxana adds feminist ideology to Moll's praxis. But instead of violently appropriating the masculine like Mrs. Manley's grotesque Zarah, she aspires to a new category and actually declares that her ultimate ambition lies in a powerful androgyny. When an eminent merchant proposes marriage, she refuses in the name of liberty: "and seeing Liberty seem'd to be the Men's Property, I wou'd be a Man-Woman; for as I was born free, I wou'd die so". Roxana has a fully articulated ideology of freedom which grasps very clearly the central problem that she solves in her book, the loss of self attendant upon being merely a woman."

"The allegory does not come from nowhere; a certain culture offers it to us, imposes it on us for its own purposes, fictively reducing us to the condition of being completely cut off in order to force us—even while dazzling us with its own "riches"—to judge our needs, our productions, our values, our cultural heritage, by the sole light of necessity. Robinson's adventure takes its place in the economic history of the West at the precise moment when the relation between the rates of population growth and those of good supplies inverted itself, the latter finally surpassing the former: Robinson is the man for whom population, or reproduction, is not an issue, at least in its natural, biological form; he's the producer who has to know about nothing but his own sustenance."

"[Robinson Crusoe is] fam'd from Tuttle Street to Limehouse-hole. There is not an old Woman, that can go the Price of it, but buys thy ‘Life and Adventures,’ and leaves it as a Legacy with the ‘Pilgrim's Progress’, the ‘Practice of Piety,’ and ‘God's Revenge against Murther,’ to her Posterity."

"Daniel Defoe is one of the great professionals in all these centuries of secret service, a discreet giant among the legions of straining, posturing and boastfully "confiding" amateurs. Defoe, be it known, was in himself almost a complete secret service during the reign of the last Stuart sovereign of Britain; and he is our strongly endorsed candidate for everybody's "favorite secret agent" of these annals."

"In relation to eighteenth-century English mercantilism Moll Flanders, travelling from London to the American colonies, born in Newgate and familiar with high and low society, reveals as much as Robinson Crusoe: in her path social relations, class conflicts and the growth of capital appear in a cruder light. For this reason it has been called one of the earliest realist novels. Moll Flanders is also poor, economically destitute, though in a less romantic fashion – born in poverty, the daughter of a temporarily reprieved thief; and if her destiny appears instrumental by the meditations of providence, this is because it embodies an absolute authority of explanation or of accusation. A prostitute, a spouse, a pickpocket, a proprietor, always accompanied by continuously catalogued commodities (which have a value whatever their source), she is the eloquent, simple critic of love, commerce and marriage, those basic categories of the society which – by special privilege – she knows only from below. Social relations appear to her as things, because she deals with them directly, and not by intermediaries as others do. Like Crusoe she reveals; but, like him, she escapes from the imaginary to become the site of the only reality."

"He [Adam Smith] quoted some passages in Defoe, which breathed, as he thought, the true spirit of English verse."

"That Robertson, however, had carefully studied the best writers, with a view to acquire genuine Anglicism, cannot be doubted. He was intimately acquainted with Swift's writings; indeed, he regarded him as eminently skilled in the narrative art. He had the same familiarity with Defoe, and had formed the same high estimate of his historical powers. I know, that when a Professor in another University consulted him on the best discipline for acquiring a good narrative style, previous to drawing up John Bell of Antermony's Travels across Russia to Tartary and the Chinese Wall, the remarkable advice he gave him was to read Robinson Crusoe carefully; and when the Professor was astonished, and supposed it was a jest, the historian said he was quite serious: but if Robinson Crusoe would not help him, or he was above studying Defoe, then he recommended Gulliver's Travels."

"Defoe is a writer of ready invention but no imagination—with none of the personal attributes which, fused together somehow, make imagination. His narrative runs smoothly, evenly, convincingly; the best thing about it is his vigorous, unornamented English. There is a strong weave in the sentences as they follow each other that gives pleasure to the eye, as the feel of good hand-woven linen does to the fingertips. But after a while one demands something more. There is never a change of tempo, never a modulation of voice, or a quickening of sympathy."

"Used on a more limited scale, these schemes of balance can seem impressively artless, especially when they bring to an aphoristic point a loosely strung series of thoughts or events: one celebrated example is Moll's summary of the joint career of two fellow criminals: "In short, they robb'd together, lay together, were taken together, and at last were hang'd together." My object, however, is not to vindicate Defoe's endeavors toward stylistic balance and formality, let alone to maintain that they are the most common or distinctive feature of his prose, but simply to suggest, by calling attention to their existence, that immethodical homespun garrulity is not Defoe's only style."

"For I cannot think that God Almighty ever made them so delicate, so glorious creatures; and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind; with souls capable of the same accomplishments with men: and all, to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks, and Slaves."

"As the Consumption of Provisions increase, more Lands are cultivated; waste Grounds are inclosed, Woods are grubb’d up, Forrests and common Lands are till’d, and improv’d; by this more Farmers are brought together, more Farm-houses and Cottages are built, and more Trades are called upon to supply the necessary Demands of Husbandry: In a Word, as Land is employ’d, the People increase of Course, and thus Trade sets all the Wheels of Improvement in Motion; for from the Original of Business to this Day it appears, that the Prosperity of a Nation rises and falls, just as Trade is supported or decay’d."

"A woman well bred and well taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behaviour, is a creature without comparison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments, her person is angelic, and her conversation heavenly. She is all softness and sweetness, peace, love, wit, and delight. She is every way suitable to the sublimest wish, and the man that has such a one to his portion, has nothing to do but to rejoice in her, and be thankful."

"Thus Trade is the Foundation of Wealth, and Wealth of Power."

"I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence; while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves."

"All the reproaches and ill names we bestow on the sex, as fickle, weak, and inconstant, are owing to the want of education."

"[T]he Art of War is so well study’d, and so equally known in all Places, that ’tis the longest Purse that conquers now, not the longest Sword. If there is any Country whose People are less martial, less enterprising, and less able for the Field; yet, if they have but more Money than their Neighbours, they shall soon be superior to them in Strength, for Money is Power."

"The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond; and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear. And ’tis manifest, that as the rational soul distinguishes us from brutes; so education carries on the distinction, and makes some less brutish than others."

"How frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into."

"What is one man's safety is another man's destruction."

"It is never too late to be wise."

"There are some secret springs in the affections which, when they are set a-going by some object in view, or, though not in view, yet rendered present to the mind by the power of imagination, that motion carries out the soul, by its impetuosity, to such violent, eager embracings of the object, that the absence of it is insupportable."

"To-day we love what to-morrow we hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun; to-day we desire what to-morrow we fear, nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of."

"My man Friday."

"But let us turn our Eyes now and view the Effects of the improving English Genius, the Colonies of New-England and Virginia, despis’d by the Spaniards, as well before we discover’d them, as afterwards; for the same Columbus, which discover’d New-Spain, discoverd all the Northern Coast, but left it again as not worth while to plant and possess it. I say, these barren, cold, poor and uncultivated Climates, the Leavings of the Spaniards, How have we improved upon them to infinite Advantages?"

"Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself."

"Now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it."

"In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to me, upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world are no farther good to us than they are for our use; and that, whatever we may heap up to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more."

"And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction."

"I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed rather than what I wanted; and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that He has not given them. All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have."

"He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing - viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches. He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters."

"I have since often observed, how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth, to that reason which ought to guide them in such cases - viz. they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent. Not ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which can only make them be esteemed wise men."

"We never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it."

"All evils are to be considered with the good that is in them, and with what worse attends them."

"And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst."

"When kings the sword of justice first lay down, They are no kings, though they possess the crown. Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things, The good of subjects is the end of kings."

"For Englishmen are ne'er contented long."

"For justice is the end of government."