11 AUGUST 1923, Page 16

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MRS. FLANDERS.*

THE publishers of the new edition of Moll Flanders deserve the thanks of all who admire fine printing ; the book is comely and unpretentious, and the fact that this edition, a reprint of the original, is limited to a few hundred copies will complete the undemocratic, private joy of the true lover.

It is quite two years since the present writer last read Moll Flanders, and hence it appears irresistibly as a new book, and must be treated as new. The publishers have printed the name of Daniel Defoe as author, but the first edition title- page is anonymous and declares the book to be written from the memorandums of Mrs. Flanders herself ; and indeed in many pages, especially towards the close of her story, she has given plain indications that it is to be regarded as an auto- biography. What part, then, had Defoe in preparing it for the press ? Was it entirely his invention, as fictitious as Robinson Crusoe or Captain Singleton ? Was Defoe, after all, a great inventive genius ? The writer of the signed preface to the original edition acknowledges the co-operation of a revising hand, but ingeniously avoids defining his own responsibility, saying :—

" The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the person are con- cealed, and on this account we must be content to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing sheets and take it just as he pleases."

It is possible to construe this as an avowal that Moll Flanders is pure fiction, and equally possible to contend on the same • The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. By Daniel Defoe. Printed from the First Edition. London: Constable. [243.]

evidence that it is sober, solid truth seeking a popular advan- tage by simulating fiction. Little need be made of the fact that the original edition was published when Defoe was sixty-three (the memoirs purport to have been written nearly forty years before), for miracles were yet possible in the eighteenth century. But how was it read by Mrs. Flanders's contemporaries ? Did it never seize on their excited minds as the Crippen trial seized on ours ? Was it fact or fiction to the voracity of 1722, or did men in that astonished hour read it without staying to ponder these vain and abstract distinctions ?

Scrutinizing it now, the vivid, lightly-laboured narrative; and reading once again this preface, it is hard not to receive the story as simple fact ; and one is confirmed in this by noting the difference between the style of the story and the style of the preface. The preface seems clearly by a cleverer and later hand, and has its own interest by reason of its concern with aesthetics—a subject which Mrs. Flanders probably never found time or temptation to study. How can anyone, the prefacer asks, relate the history of a wicked life repented of without making it as wicked as the real history will bear in order to give a beauty to the penitent part ? " It is suggested there cannot be the same life, the same brightness and beauty, in relating the penitent part as in the criminal part. If there is any truth in that suggestion, I must be allowed to say, 'tis because there is not the same taste and relish in the reading." He says the reader's taste is at fault, and argues that, to a just discernment, the penitent parts have more real beauty than the amorous. It is an argument faintly echoing, to our frivolous ear, an unctuous note and the sound of a tongue thrust into a loose cheek. He claims, indeed, both an aesthetic and a moral justification for allowing certain passages of the autobiography to stand, and blends the two when he asserts the presence of " brightness and beauty " throughout the narrative.

It is impossible now, alas ! to know what passages have been suppressed in the desire to preserve a balanced and discreet interest, how much aesthetic beauty has been dulled in order to intensify the moral brightness. And it is difficult to keep these modern distinctions in mind at all in reading the nimble narrative of the light-witted, light-fingered woman who preyed upon life so greedily, so luckily, so long, and who was so little punished on earth. Whether heaven was hood- winked by her penitence we cannot yet know, but heaven must be very indulgent if a rich prosperity is the only reward of a life of crime. Mrs. Flanders was a criminal of the most flagrant kind, a bigamist (and worse), a thief, a painted thing and her short sufferings on being arrested did but bring her a greater satisfaction than any she had previously stolen. Might we not say that the prefacer, Defoe or another, sup- pressed the inordinate misdeeds of his subject, not for the sake of a perfectly reciprocal beauty and brightness, not to spare blushes and placate morality, but merely because he admired her ? It would be absurd, on the slender evidence before us, to say that he fell in love with his author, but surely it was admiration of her courage, her countenance (he must often have seen her), her adroit success, rather than pity for her errors that tempted hint to display her so vivaciously, slurring what must needs offend, sharpening what must needs charm. She " at last grew rich, lived honest, and died a penitent "—yet still cunning and schemeful. She speaks with abhorrence of her old " governess," for whom earlier times would have found another name—yet praises her fidelity and kindness above all. From birth to near seventy Mrs. Flanders lived greedily, warming both hands at the fire of life : an engaging, piratical creature, fond and faithful, of cold blood and quick mind ; and at the end of her story you can but join with Defoe (or whoever it was) in admiring her. She blames women for being too easy with men in placing themselves below the common station of a wife, which was low enough already ; she candidly acknowledges that poverty is the sure bane of virtue, the worst of all snares ; repents of her iniquities when, being enisled in comfort, she has no occasion to repeat them ; and in the very act of a fraudulent marriage innocently cries out : " Oh 1 what a felicity is it to mankind that they cannot see into the hearts of one another 1 " She has the same detached regard of her adven- tures in telling of an odder affair, the stealing of a white elephant. For the mere zest of thieving she had clothed herself as an old beggar-woman, peeping and prying through the

streets to see what she could devour, when a groom called her to hold a horse for a while and she soberly led it off :-

"This had been a booty to those that had understood it ; but never was poor thief more at a loss to know what to do with any- thing that was stolen ; for when I came home my governess was quite confounded, and what to do with the creature we neither of us knew. To send him to a stable was doing nothing, for it was certain that public notice would be given in the Gazette and the horse described, so that we durst not go to fetch it again. All the remedy we had for this unlucky adventure was to go and set up the horse at an inn and send a note by a porter to the tavern that the gentleman's horse that was lost such a time was left at such an inn, and that he might be had there ; that the poor woman that held him, having led him about the street, not being able to lead him back again, had left him there. We might have waited till the owner had published and offered a reward, but we did not care to venture the receiving the reward."

It is such an incident as this, one of a thousand, that must persuade the reader that he is reading not fiction, but plain fact. The like overpowering conviction follows a perusal of the pages in which Mrs. Flanders sets out the details of three bills for her lying-in at the governess's, and the amiable chaffering for the cheapest accommodation offered. It appears again in a sentence touching her passage in a convict ship, when the very vagueness is more persuasive than any positive assertion might be :— " Nor did we touch any more at any place till, being driven on the coast of Ireland by a very hard gale of wind, the ship came to an anchor in a little bay, near the mouth of a river, whose name I remember not, but they said the river came down from Limerick and that it was the largest river in Ireland."

There is, on the other hand, one circumstance which, when it is noticed, might suggest a question of the veracity of the autobiography, and that is the absence of names. Of all the persons with which this prose Odyssey is crammed, scarce one is named, even Christian names being lacking ; yet the general absence is only noticed when the Lancashire husband is called James. It is an Occasion, too, of a singular character, for the Lancashire husband left Mrs. Flanders on learning that each had deceived the other and that each was penniless. She ran raving about the room for hours, moaning her forsaken- ness, crying his name aloud ; and suddenly he ran into her chamber and caught her in his arms.

" When our ecstacies were a little over he told me he was gone about fifteen miles, but it was not in his power to go any further without coming back to see me again and to take his leave of me once more. I told him how I had passed my time, and how loud I had called him to come back again. He told me he heard me very plain upon Delamere Forest at a place about twelve miles off. I smiled. ' Nay,' says he, do not think I am in jest, for if ever I heard your voice in my life, I heard you call me aloud, and sometimes I thought I saw you running after me.' Why,' said I, what did I say ? — for I had not named the words to him. ' You called aloud,' says he, ' and said. 0 Jemmy, 0 Jemmy. come back, come back ! ' I laughed at him. My dear,' says he, do not laugh, for, depend upon it, I heard your voice as plain as you hear mine now ; if you please. I'll go before a magistrate and make oath of it.' I then began to be amazed and surprised, and indeed frighted, and told him what I had really done, and how I had called after him, as above."

Such things as these leave the pretended realism of fiction exposed. Either Moll Flanders is simple autobiography, with

pages infelicitously excised for the benefit of a nicer time than ours, or Defoe was an even greater imaginative artist than the readers of Robinson Crusoe have thought him.

Yet extravagant admiration may admit a repulse when some of the commonplace pages are repeated almost endlessly. Leslie Stephen found the Memoirs dull, and often there is an equal lack of brightness and beauty. The truthfulness of Mrs. Flanders's recital is too unquestionable, her lies have more of utility than of art, and she forgets to embellish her story with the same cunning as she applied to her middle- aged face. She lived a life free from common restraints and misgivings, but gives no sense of freedom and felt none. She was too coarse-minded to be aware of freedom as anything beyond freedom from prison : the material was all her world. All the more startling, then, are the rare pathetic human touches, as when she beholds after so many years her veritable

son

" I was perfectly confounded, for I knew not whether it was peace or war, nor could I tell how to behave ; however, I had but a very few moments to think, for my son was at the heels of the messenger, and coming up into my lodgings, asked the fellow at the door something. I suppose it was, for I did not hear it so as to understand it, which was the gentlewoman that sent him ; for the messenger said, There she is, sir,' at which he comes directly up to me, kisses me, took me in his arms and embraced me with so much passion that be could not speak, but I could feel his breast

heave and throb like a child that cries, but sobs and cannot cry it out."

Such a touch is so true and simple that it becomes a universal touch, and one is no longer teased with asking or caring who indeed wrote it.

JOAN FREEMAN.