relief. But judged in the setting of his time, this writer did a
wonderful thing not only as the Father of the Modern Novel but
one of the few authors in the whole range of fiction who holds
his conspicuous place amid shifting literary modes and fashions,
because he built upon the surest of all foundations--the social
instinct, and the human heart.

If the use of the realistic method alone denoted the Novel,
Defoe, not Richardson, might be called its begetter. "Robinson
Crusoe," more than twenty years before "Pamela," would occupy
the primate position, to say nothing of Swift's "Gulliver's
Travels," antedating Richardson's first story by some fifteen
years. Certainly the observational method, the love of detail,
the grave narrative of imagined fact (if the bull be permitted)
are in this earlier book in full force. But "Robinson Crusoe" is
not a rival because it does not study man-in-society; never was
a story that depended less upon this kind of interest. The
position of Crusoe on his desert isle is so eminently unsocial
that he welcomes the black man Friday and quivers at the human
quality in the famed footprints in the sand. As for Swift's chef
d'oeuvre, it is a fairy-tale with a grimly realistic manner and
a savage satiric intention. To speak of either of these fictions
as novels is an example of the prevalent careless nomenclature.
Between them and "Pamela" there yawns a chasm. Moreover,
"Crusoe" is a frankly picaresque tale belonging to the elder
line of romantic fiction, where incident and action and all the
thrilling haps of Adventure-land furnish the basis of appeal
rather than character analysis or a study of social relations.
The personality of Crusoe is not advanced a whit by his
wonderful experiences; he is done entirely from the outside.