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the
scheme of moral significance that may lend it order. Perhaps
this problem is ultimately insoluble, Defoe himself having been so un–
certain as to what he was doing. Yet Mr. 'Watt's treatment of Moll as
Defoe's moral and spiritual surrogate and his consequent minimizing
of the possibility that an ironic distance exists between Defoe and his
characters, seems to me at least debatable.
The problem of the moral intention and effect of Defoe's novels,
which has interested not only the recent critics but such earlier students
of his work as Gildon, Coleridge and Leslie Stephen, can finally be
settled-if at all-only by a close scrutiny of his text. Mr. Watt does
provide such a scrutiny, but despite its many points of illumination it
does not seem to me quite convincing. For one thing, he fails to allow
for the likelihood that Defoe's worldliness-the worldliness of a secular
mind expressing itself through an inherited religious vocabulary and
"sincerely" devoted to vestigial religious emotions when remembering
to feel them---came through not merely in a bourgeois preoccupation
with money and things but also in a certain shrewdness of perception.
This shrewdness, it is true, does not reach the full moral criticism im–
plied by the modern usage of the word "irony"; nor does
it
involve a
full critique of the mercantile ethic; but it does result in a sly and
humorous discounting of Moll's pretensions. To suppose that we must
choose irrevocably between Defoe as a purveyor of spicy and scandalous
anecdotes and Defoe as a deep ironic critic of Moll's morality seems
to me a mistake; the truth is probably that at different moments he
approached these roles with whatever emphasis struck him as opportune
or pleasing.
Defoe was not merely an exemplar of the bourgeois mind: he was
also a spunky rascal, a spy and double agent, an adventurer who prob–
ably forged for Robert Harley a memoir supposed to have been writ–
ten by an envoy of Louis XIV and who composed the far more re–
markable forgery called
The Shortest Way With the Dissenters.
One
reason modern critics tend to see Defoe's mind as more drab and
humorless than it need be seen, is that our notion of the bourgeois,
largely shaped for us by the nineteenth century French novel, is too nar–
row. We tend to forget that at the stage of "risk capital" the bourgeois
can be adventurous. Defoe, after all, lived in London, not next door to
Charles Bovary; he was a man of the world, even if generally on its
lower margin.
A German scholar, Rudolf Stamm, has provided us with a version
of Defoe that best
fits
what we know of
his life
and can make of
his
work.
Stamm sees Defoe as a figure of protean and elusive
worldliness
,
