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Imaginary
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WAS Edith Wyatt
The Author of Robinson
Crusoe!
North American Reviews
July 1915.

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THE AUTHOR OF
""
ROBINSON CRUSOE”
BY EDITH WYATT
If one were asked to name offhand the story-book hero
most widely known among English-speaking people, one
would undoubtedly choose at a guess the vivid figure of
Robinson Crusoe.
His fame scarcely differs from that of a celebrity not
fictional at all, but historical. Many persons who have
never glanced at the book describing his adventures under-
stand quite as concretely and definitely as they understand
that George Washington spent a winter at Valley Forge,
that Robinson Crusoe owned a gun, a parrot, and a dog;
that he was cast upon a desert island; and that he found
there a strange footprint in the sand.
Who conceived an image of such enduring charm? Who
created Crusoe? For long I had vaguely supposed that the
life of Daniel De Foe, the author of our most celebrated
fictive hero, was a subject like that of the Wars of the
Roses, or all the shipping insurance news in small print
on the back page of the newspapers-one of those very well-
known and complicated topics which always appear to be
made simply for other people to know about. When an ac-
cidental circumstance I will describe presently inspired me
to face the chilling fog of special information I feared, and
to hunt up De Foe's name, in the library, it was a surprise
to find that the tale of De Foe's life, after all, apparently
required no wide, allied, historical reading for its compre-
hension, but had been, it would seem, composed by fate for
the understanding of any layman.¹
De Foe was the son of a family of Dissenters: his father,
Malay
1
Mr. Walter Wilson's, thick, old-fashioned biography, Mr. George Saints-
bury's monograph, and his various delightful prefaces for Aitken's edition
of the novels of De Foe, a sketch of Mrs. Oliphant's, the pages of Greene's
Puritan England, the appreciations by Sir Walter Scott and Charles
Lamb, and De Foe's own personal references in various pamphlets of his,
are the chief sources of the account gathered here.
1
? ?
88
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
a butcher, at Cripplegate in London. Daniel was a little
child of about four, when the city was overwhelmed with
the horror of the Great Plague of 1665; and the pestilence
pouring through London, one of the most Titanic catas-
trophes of history was killing people in the streets, literal-
ly by myriads-ten thousand, in a week, four thousand, in
one terrific night.
Mag
It was under these circumstances that the De Foes left
London, in the reign of Charles II, at the very time when
Pepys was being importuned by his wife to buy her a pearl
necklace, and when he says of the government of the Merry
Monarch: "At court, there being so much emulation, and
the vices of drinking . . . and loose amours that I know
not what will be the end of it but confusion: and the clergy
so high that all people I meet with do protest against their
practice."
The bigotry and partisanship of these Episcopal and
Tory churchmen of the ruling powers against the Dissenters
were becoming so extreme, that only a few years later it was
not safe for a Dissenting or as we should say a Presbyterian
minister to be seen in the streets of London: and their re-
ligious meetings were held at night, like conspiracies. While
De Foe was still a boy, the great Test Act was passed by the
Houses of Parliament. This excluded from all civil offices,
that is to say from all governmental honors, and all posi-
tions of any considerable standing or power, those who
would not become communicants of the Church of England.
So that, in sending De Foe to be educated at a Dissenting
Academy, his family destined him to a career of social ad-
venture.
Apparently, from Mr. Morton's Dissenting Academy, the
boy entered into trade at eighteen as a commission agent for
a hosiery house in Cornhill. He seems to have published at
about this time a rather dull pamphlet on the gowns of the
clergy. From his range, volume, and genius De Foe was
to become the most brilliant and influential pamphleteer
England, or perhaps the world has ever known. Of his one
hundred and ninety productions in this kind, however, he
wrote nothing of value, until he was thirty-five or thirty-six
years of age. and the seven pamphlets he composed before
then may be left unnoticed.
1
There is some, but very little doubt, as to whether this pamphlet may
be certainly attributed to De Foe.
THE AUTHOR OF
“ROBINSON CRUSOE " 89
In the mean time, when De Foe was about twenty-five,
Charles II died, surrounded on his death-bed by all his un-
married wives and mistresses, and all his natural children
but one, his eldest son, the Duke of Monmouth. A few days
after the Roman Catholic, James II, came to the throne,
the Protestant Monmouth, landed at Lyme to support his
right of succession: and here De Foe, in company with great
numbers of other Nonconformists and Dissenting tradesmen
from the clothier towns hastened to his standard.
Monmouth's popularity rose. Garlands were hung on the
doors where he passed. "At Taunton a troop of young girls
presented him with a flag and a Bible." His army received
constant accession. But it was too untried to withstand
the great force of James's followers which faced it at Sedge-
moor. De Foe and his companions were now to see King
James's victory, and the beheading of their own leader fol-
lowed by a bigoted persecution hard and senseless enough
to outrage even the ruthless Marlborough who was forced
to execute it.
Over a thousand Dissenters were scourged and im-
prisoned. Women were whipped from town to town. Eight
hundred Nonconformists were sold into slavery across the
sea. Judge Jeffreys passing through the country in the
famous " bloody circuit" condemned and hung three hun-
dred and fifty Englishmen. Three of these men had been
De Foe's classmates at Mr. Morton's Dissenting Academy.
De Foe himself chanced to be released on the singular
ground that he was not a resident of the west of England,
but had come there from London.
Through the miseries and persecutions of the six years'
reign of James II, De Foe was chiefly occupied by his
mercantile trade. He became an important figure in the
market at Cornhill and owner or part owner of the hosiery
house. At the time when Parliament voted the expulsion of
James he had been married some time, though we know
little of his marriage, except that he had several children,
of whom he wrote afterward that he loved them past his
power to express.
At the time of the coronation of William and Mary, he
rode with an escort of the richest tradesmen of London.
However, his affairs must even then have begun to go
wrong, for in 1692 he failed for what was then the very
large mercantile investment of £17,000. He made a com-
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
position with his creditors, gave what he could on his debts,
and afterward is said to have paid every cent of his obliga-
tion.
90
It was at this time of his fallen fortunes that he wrote,
though he did not publish till two years afterward, The
Essay on Projects of which Benjamin Franklin said that its
opinions had influenced the chief events of his life.
The essay outlines for the better guidance of the affairs
of the country a number of policies of such foresight that
nearly all of them have since come to form a part of the
customs of England-a scheme for a National Bank, for
Road Improvements, for a bankruptcy Commission, Aid and
Benefit societies, for raising Internal Revenue, and for an
institution for the education of women.
S
But the chief interest of the Essay on Projects is its ex-
hibition of De Foe's constant clear curiosity about the man-
agement of life and what Samuel Butler calls the Ways
and Farings of Men. To be forming a plan-and an ad-
mirable plan for establishing a bank for his country at a
moment when he chanced to be £17,000 in debt-here was a
spirit of no common strength.
-
The Essay on Projects was, even before its publication,
the source of a change in De Foe's prospects. An acquaint-
ance brought to the attention of William III, De Foe's in-
ternal-revenue scheme. This was in part adopted, and
in the furtherance of the plan De Foe was made the govern-
ment accountant for the tax on the glass industry. Partly
through the prestige his occupation gave him, he formed a
company for manufacturing the tiles the country had here-
tofore imported from Holland, and became the manager of
this company which was established on the Thames at Toot-
ing. Here he lived in good style and kept a coach and a
pleasure-boat.
-
When it is said that among the nine or ten pamphlets
issued by De Foe within the next few years, one was a
commentary on the government's protection of vice among
persons with means-what we should call police protection
—and one an attack on the bribery, stock-jobbing, and cor-
ruption prevailing in the disposal of seats in Parliament,
it will be seen that exposure by means of special articles
published in an inexpensive form is by no means a recent
invention.
One of these stock-jobbing Parliaments, in 1701, refused
THE AUTHOR OF ROBINSON CRUSOE" 91
to consider King William's request for subsidies for that
continental campaign against the horrors of the Inquisition,
which was certainly then what no military campaign can
be now, a part of the liberation war of humanity. One
thousand freeholders and electors of Kent sent to the
House of Commons, through five representatives, a signed
petition asking the House to hear and pass upon the meas-
ure. The five Kentish petitioners' request was denied by
the House: their petition voted scandalous, insolent, and
seditious, and they were cast into prison. Eight days later,
as Robert Harley the Speaker was entering the House of
Commons, De Foe, guarded by sixteen gentlemen, handed
him a letter headed with this note: "Mr. Speaker: The
enclosed memorial you are charged with in behalf of many
thousands of the good people of England. . . . You are
commanded by 200.000 Englishmen to deliver it to the House
of Commons."
(C
The inclosure was De Foe's famous Legion Letter. It
demanded the release of the petitioners and the hearing of
their petition; and stated the grievances of the nation at
the hands of the present Parliament, and the legal rights
of the electors to control their representatives.
It concludes eloquently:
Thus, gentlemen, you have your duty laid before you, which 'tis
hoped you will think of; but if you continue to neglect it, you may expect
to be treated according to the resentment of an injured nation.
Englishmen are no more to be slaves to parliaments than to kings.
For
Our name is Legion and we are many.
Postscript. If you require to have this Memorial signed with our
Names, it shall be done on your first order, and personally presented."
Wilson says:
"The Paper struck such a terror into the party in the house that
from this time there was not a word ever spoken of proceeding against
the Kentish Petitioners, and the members of that party began to drop
off and to get into the country."
When Parliament adjourned a few weeks later, the Kentish
gentlemen were released; and the succeeding Parliament
considered and indorsed the grant of subsidies for the King.
De Foe's yeoman service to his party in all this, brought
him back much of the favor he had lost by a pamphlet on
the Test Act written two years before-a pamphlet now
destined to have in connection with his next considerable
piece of public work a very strange effect upon his future
history.
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Since the time when Dissenters had been excluded from
all government offices unless they took the Sacrament of the
Episcopal Church, or were fined for breaking the law, many
had evaded the stringency of the act by assuming gov-
ernment office, and fulfilling the provisions of the ordinance
by an occasional attendance at Episcopal churches for re-
ceiving Communion. This practice was called Occasional
Conformity. As the good feeling between Episcopalians
and Dissenters increased in William's reign, Occasional Con-
formity became more frequent, and Dissenters more and
more pharisaical and complacent in their assent to a rite
in which they had no faith. De Foe who seems, in holding
his own office, always to have stoutly paid his fine, and
never to have asserted a belief not his, criticized adversely
his party's and sect's increasing custom in an essay which
roused wide indignation throughout England.
Four years afterward, when King William died, and his
sister-in-law Anne, a strong though not a bigoted Episco-
palian came to the throne, her coronation roused the Tory
party and the Established Church to introduce in Parlia-
ment a bill excluding Dissenters from all participation in
the government of England upon any terms. It was called
the bill against Occasional Conformity; and, naturally,
caused a party struggle of the fiercest virulence.
At this moment De Foe struck the bill a body blow by a
highly original device. This was an anonymous pamphlet,
purporting to be written by an Episcopalian: and is an iron-
ical though well-merited statement of the High Church posi-
tion. It is called "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.
92
T
"Shall any law be given to such wild creatures (as these Dissenters)?
Some beasts are for sport, and the huntsmen give them the advantages of
ground: but some are knocked on the head by all possible means of
violence and surprise. . . . If one severe law were made and punctually
executed, that whoever was found at a Conventiele should be banished the
Nation, and the preacher hanged we should soon see an end of the tale."
As De Foe afterward tells us: "The case the book pointed
at was to speak the first person of the party and then there-
by not only speak their language but acknowledge it to be
theirs which they did so openly that confounded all their
attempts afterward to deny it, and to call it a scandal thrown
upon them by another."
This is exactly what happened. The High Church party
applauded with delight and entire gravity the arguments
THE AUTHOR OF "ROBINSON CRUSOE 93
and plans of "The Shortest Way. One of the Tory
leaders wrote: "Next to the Holy Bible and the Sacred Com-
ments I take it for the most valuable piece I have." The
more moderate of the High Church party were, however,
so shocked at the unfairness of spirit on their own side
the pamphlet had revealed and proven, that they would not
push the Bill against Occasional Conformity. It was de-
feated in the House of Lords.
>>
The world is very literal-minded. Not only the Tories,
but the Dissenters misunderstood "The Shortest Way."
They were raising a great hue and cry against the anony-
mous Episcopalian author, when it became known that he
was a Dissenter, that he was Daniel De Foe. At this both
parties turned the more furiously against him. De Foe
was proclaimed an enemy of the State who had stirred up
sedition. A reward of £50 was offered for his arrest.
(
The government proclamation and advertisement gives
us the clearest description we have of his appearance, that
of a middle-aged, spare man about forty years old, of
a brown complexion and dark-brown colored hair (but wears
a wig), a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large
mole near his mouth."
Upon his arrest he received an unfair trial with treacher-
ous counsel. He was sentenced to pay 200 marks to the
Queen, to stand three times in the pillory, and to be im-
prisoned during the Queen's pleasure. The moderate Har
ley was out of power. William Penn appeared before the
House of Commons to plead in vain for a commutation of
this mean and brutal sentence.
De Foe was pilloried on July 29th in 1703 at Temple Bar:
during the next day at Cheapside, near the place where he
had once ridden so proudly with the escort of William and
Mary and through the 31st at Cornhill, where he had once
been an owner of one of the richest textile houses in the
trade of London. On each occasion, admiring and cheering
crowds guarded him to and from his punishment as though
it had been a position of state. They hung the pillory with
garlands and placed tables in the streets, where they sat
drinking his health and singing the satirical "Hymn to the
Pillory" which De Foe had composed in Newgate: and was
now cried and sold from the sidewalks of Cheapside, Corn-
hill, and Temple Bar.
Inspiring is defiance in the face of squalid adversities.
Y
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Undoubtedly it was the sheer pluck of De Foe's character
that stirred popular enthusiasm. Probably only a very
few
persons in the cheering throngs understood that De Foe was
pilloried because while he had ridiculed the Dissenters for
their conformity when this bad been a mere demoralizing
hypocrisy among them, he now opposed the Episcopalian's
effort against this same conformity of the Dissenters, be-
cause the Episcopalians' effort was the expression of a hate-
ful bigotry and tyranny.
De Foe remained in Newgate for two years. In this space
of time, on account of his absence from his tile-factory he
became again a ruined man. His family fell into poverty.
He occupied his hours in prison by an unlucrative but ab-
sorbing undertaking. From the walls of Newgate he sent
out by his devoted printer, at first once a week, and then
three times a week, a periodical called The Review. This
sheet presented at regular intervals for the first time in the
print of our language public and domestic topics of general
interest. It is impossible to say whether one feels more
glory or more shame for journalism in the fact that our first
newspaper was written and edited by a man imprisoned in
the interest of a just testimony to truth.
In the following year, Harley again came into power in
Parliament: and at once released De Foe, and found govern-
ment employment for him as an agent in the negotiation of
the Union with Scotland.
94
Now for more than ten years De Foe was engaged in
serving the government in this capacity, in publishing his
Review and in pamphleteering. In a fairly short time after
his release he had again repaired his fallen fortunes.
But it must not be thought his prosperity was peaceful.
This, a writer of De Foe's temper of mind, a follower of
truth irrespective of party, and a discusser on these terms
of the affairs and politics of his time, could hardly have ex-
pected or perhaps desired in a world whose standard of
honor was even more than to-day simply a standard of con-
tinuous and undiscriminating partisanship.
Says Windsor:
Though a Protestant, when the bill for preventing the growth of
Popery in Ireland had been forced upon the Queen, De Foe took part
with the Roman Catholics against the bigotry of Protestantism. Though
a friend of Godolphin he was always regarded with esteem by Harley.
Though a friend of IIarley he refused to support him on the subject of
Peace."
((
THE AUTHOR OF " ROBINSON CRUSOE 95
This is no road to popularity. De Foe had bitter enemies
in all the political camps. At the time of Anne's death, De
Foe was so surrounded by controversial and slanderous
attacks one of these last made by no less a person than
Alexander Pope-that on his retirement from office in 1715,
he published a pamphlet entitled "An Appeal to Honour
and Justice," explaining his public stand on all the policies
and sects he had defended and those he had opposed.
We have said that he retired from his open connection
with the government, on Queen Anne's death. But not long
afterward he began and continued for many years a secret
service of the most singular character for the Crown. The
successive ministers of George I privately paid him for con-
tributing to and partly owning, first one Jacobite newspaper,
and later as many as three of these Tory journals, on a
secret understanding of his with the administration that he
would as he says "take the sting out of them."
Much controversy has surrounded the ethics of this piece
of conduct on De Foe's part. Controversy and disapproval
may rage as they will. In his letters on the subject De Foe
clearly prides himself on his masquerade among "the en-
raged High Tories." There can be no doubt that he loved
to lead national parties by the nose. He did not in the least
object to being the center of brilliant and novel political
schemes, and was clearly all his life long the kind of man-
so often darkly disapproved by persons of more native
obscurity-who "does not mind attracting attention."
This trait easily accounts for the peculiar irascibility and
somewhat self-righteous air of slight displayed against him
by many of his contemporaries.
De Foe was now in his sixtieth year; and while in the
thick of his Jacobite journal scheme, he wrote and published
anonymously his first work of fiction-Robinson Crusoe.
At the age of sixty he set forth on the pioneer work of a
great English novelist--literally the first English novelist.
For the next eleven years he exercised iu fresh fields his
ruling passion for original design.
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the Journal of the
Plague Year, the Memoirs of a Cavalier, History of Colonel
Jack, the Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders.
Roxana or the Fortunate Mistress, all these following nar-
ratives of the next decade are unique and creative composi-
tions executed with first-hand force and conviction.
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Impossible in this brief account of the work of De Foe to
describe his other tales of lesser merit, or the many pam-
phlets, books of travel, and writings in other forms also pro-
duced in this period of his life.
Every one knows Robinson Crusoe-the footprint-the
death of the goat-the making of the umbrella and the table
and the chair-the inimitable conversations with Friday-
and the return with the rescued captain and, his crew, among
them a man who chanced also to be named Robinson. (It
may be parenthetically remarked that this last touch alone
would reveal a born master in methods of realizing a scene.
to his readers in all the bright mosaic of the curious colors.
of life.)
Every one knows Crusoe. Less familiar is the Journal
of the Plague Year-a history of the Plague purporting to
have been written by a citizen living in London during the
pestilence. No one who reads it will, I think, question De
Foe's editorial power of synthetic statement, of choosing
well the various materials, voices, journals, letters, and offi-
cial documents that make the truth of a great actual story
really live in the public mind.
The dread of contagion-the horror of the frequent toll-
ing bells and dead-carts-the silent streets-the lines of the
doorways of the afflicted houses guarded by sentinels, and
marked with a tall red cross-the presence of pain and mor-
tality-and then the rising breath of relief, the lessened
fatality of the disease, the lessening numbers of the sick-
the returning of the citizens who had fled the stricken city-
and at last again the merciful flow and hurry of London's
full normal activity. All these are experiences the reader
lives in the Journal of the Plague Year: and here De Foe
shows at its height his genius for writing like Legion.
Like the writing of Legion too is the Memoirs of a Cava-
lier. Battle after battle, siege after siege-Magdeburg,
Leipsic, Augsburg, Naseby, and Marston Moor-armies
marching and counter-marching, camp and slaughter and
rapine-you sit and watch all this passing before you with
the full consciousness of the presence and movement of
multitudes.
96
A
In Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana, as in this
war-chronicle, and in the Journal of the Plague Year, De
Foe is a guide through the wilds of civilization. No swamp
of misery is too miasmatic or tangled for him to push
THE AUTHOR OF "ROBINSON CRUSOE ” 97
through. He will walk among the worst jungles of the
wretchedness, cruelty, and brutishness of men. Some one
has said that many of the novels of Zola are indecent but
moral: and the same discrimination may be truthfully re-
peated of these three tales of De Foe's. It would I think
betray a shallow lack of human sympathy and imagination
on De Foe's part, if he had told these stories to the reader
without conveying any sense of shock. It is right that they
should be as shocking as they are.
The Life of Moll Flanders is the autobiography of a
thief, of a middle-class woman a parish-charge and a waif,
educated to be a servant, wronged by one master, married
by another who dies, and then by a husband who deserts
her. In her poverty she falls among pickpockets and evil
and vicious companions. She is condemned to the gallows
for attempting to steal two pieces of flowered silk. Through
the efforts of a clergyman her sentence is commuted, she is
transported to the American colonies, and here contrives to
work out her salvation on land of her own with her desert-
ing and returned husband.
Colonel Jack is the autobiography of a thief who reforms.
rather early in life-at the age of twenty-six-becomes a
planter, then a half-hearted Jacobite and adventurer-and
at last goes back again to the soil and an evangelical repent-
ance.
The beautiful Roxana is the most considerable creature
portrayed in any of De Foe's vivid narratives of vicious
lives. After Roxana with her five children is deserted by
her husband, a conceited brewer, she abandons the children
to various hard fates with his relatives, and becomes the
mistress of a jeweler who dies, leaving her a large fortune.
The account of her days is first that of a triumphant prog-
ress attended by royal lovers and patrons through vice till
she wearies of it; and then, in the guise of a Quaker widow,
through respectability to a marriage with a rich and noble
merchant. When he learns her past, he can forgive every-
thing but her meanness to the children. This estranges him
completely. He goes away from her, settling on her the
merest provision for the necessities of life. After his death,
she rashly ventures this in unwise speculation; loses it all;
Within the last decade M. Marcel Schwob's translation of the For-
lunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders has been one of the most suc-
cessful books of the day in France.
VOL. CXCVI.-No 699
1
98
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
and is thrown for debt into the debtor's prison where she
dies.
Undoubtedly in all these epic stories of human warfare,
success, and defeat there are passages both dull and crass-
moments when one feels that the author's habit of constant
mental reference to the Nonconformist faith limits the free
truth of his chronicle. Nevertheless here are epic stories
of mortal struggle, moving and vital world-stories unafraid
to show all the colors of truth.
In the composition of these great novels De Foe seems
at the last, like the Japanese artist of Mr. La Farge's anec-
dotes to walk into his own painting and disappear. We have
little record of the end of his days. He died of a lethargy,
away from home. From a sad letter of his to a son-in-law,
he appears to have been in poverty from giving up all his
estate in trust for himself and his daughters to a son who
deceived him. He mentions his religion, however, in this
letter, with courage and hope: and it is impossible to con-
ceive De Foe in any circumstances where he would not have
found a considerable mental consolation.
One afternoon before I had ever read anything of De
Foe's but Robinson Crusoe, I chanced to see quoted in a
book some one had left lying open on a library table these
words of his :
"He that hath truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is
afraid to own it because of the multitude of other men's opinions. Tis
hard for a man to say all the world is mistaken but himself. But if it
be so who can help it?"
What makes style? It was as though the voice of Daniel
De Foe spoke from the book, as actually as the voice of my
friend who now came in ready for walking. And when this
chance word led me to read De Foe and his biography, these
were the story of a man who would have thought himself a
fool not to own the truth he knew.
He could own it by following the cause of the Duke of
Monmouth through Sedgemoor and the Bloody Circuit: and
in the Essay on Projects: and in the defiance of Parliament
in the Legion Letter: he could own it by being pilloried for
justice to Dissenters and Churchmen alike: and by mas-
querading as a Jacobite to mitigate the excesses of the Tory
press: and by telling in many forms of fiction that true story
THE AUTHOR OF "ROBINSON CRUSOE"
99
which was after all the history of his own life and will be
the history of ours-the story of the soul of man in the
midst of an unknown wilderness.
When Friday cuts his father's bonds, and Moll Flanders
sleeps on the deck-planks of the transport, you breathe with
them the wide air of the stories of peoples. You traverse the
globe. You are a part of the march of events; of the state
of civilization and of the responsible world of men.
-
Besides this fine pleasure, you feel with Crusoe and
Colonel Jack and with Roxana too a quick pride in the
human faculty of moving toward the light. This peculiar
tone of bright and merciful curiosity and clear-thinking in-
genuity throughout De Foe's work is indescribably beauti-
ful and imparts a crystal splendor to all his life's labors.
With a deep realization of the struggles, baseness, and in-
justice of the world, you turn away at last from the spec-
tacle of his brave existence of ups and downs, and from the
multitudinous universe his writings present as you turn
away from mountain forests in the morning light-re-
freshed with new wonder and courage.
EDITH WYATT.
A PIONEER OF AVIATION
BY NORMAN DOUGLAS
It was an odd coincidence.
I had arrived in Naples, and was anxious to have news
of the proceedings of a certain aviation meeting in the
North at which a rather inexperienced friend of mine had
insisted upon taking a part: the newspaper reports of daily
accidents at these entertainments are enough to disquiet
anybody. While admiring the prodigious achievements of
modern science in this direction, I wished devoutly at that
particular moment that flying had never been invented; and
it was something of a coincidence, I say, that stumbling in
this frame of mind down one of the unspeakable little side
streets in the neighborhood of the University, my glance
should have fallen upon an eighteenth-century engraving in
a bookseller's window which depicted a man raised above
the ground without any visible means of support-flying, in
short. He was a monk, floating before an altar; a com-
panion, near at hand, was portrayed as gazing in rapturous
wonder at this feat of levitation. I stepped within and
demanded the volume to which this was the frontispiece.
The salesman, a hungry-looking old fellow with incredibly
dirty hands and face, began to explain:
"The Flying Monk, sir; Joseph of Copertino. A mighty
saint and conjurer! Or perhaps you would like some other
book? I have many, many lives of santi here. Look at this
one of the great Egidio, for instance. I can tell you all
about him, for he raised my mother's grand-uncle from the
dead; yes, out of the grave, as one may say. You'll find out
all about it in this book; and it's only one of his thousand
miracles. And here is the biography of the renowned
Giangiuseppe, a mighty saint and—”
I was paying little heed; the “ flying monk" had fasci-
A PIONEER OF AVIATION
101
nated me.
An unsuspected pioneer of aviation . . . here
was a discovery!
"He flew?" I queried, my mind reverting to the much-
vaunted triumphs of modern science.
66
Why not? The only reason why people don't fly like
that nowadays is because--well, sir, because they can't.
They fly with machines, and think it something quite new
and wonderful. And yet it's as old as the hills! There
was Iscariot, for example-Icarus, I mean-”
ܕ
"Pure legend, my good man.'
Everything becomes legend, if the gentleman will have
the goodness to wait. And here is the biography of—”
"How much for Joseph of Copertino?" Cost what it
may, I said to myself, that volume must be mine.
He took it up and began to turn over the pages lovingly,
as though handling some priceless Book of Hours.
66
""
ܕ
"A fine engraving," he observed, sotto voce.
"And this
is the best of many biographies of the flying monk. It is
by Rossi, the Minister-General of the Franciscan Order to
which our monk belonged; the official biography, it might be
called-dedicated, by permission, to his Holiness Pope
Clement XIII., and based on the documents which led to
the Saint's beatification; altogether a most remarkable vol-
ume.
-
And he broke off, in eloquent aposiopesis. Then con-
tinued:
"I possess a cheaper biography of him, also with a
frontispiece, by Montanari, which has the questionable ad-
vantage of being printed as recently as 1853. And here is
yet another one, by Antonio Basile-oh, he has been much
written about: a most celebrated taumaturga (conjurer)!
As to this Life of 1767, I could not, with a good conscience,
appraise it at less than five francs."
-
"I respect your feelings. But-five francs! I have cer-
tain scruples of my own, you know, and it irks my sense of
rectitude to pay five francs for the flying monk unless you
can supply me with six or seven additional books to be in-
cluded in that sum. Twelve soldi (sous) apiece—that strikes
me as the proper price of such literature; for foreigners, at
least. Therefore I'll have the great Egidio as well, and
Montanari's life of the flying monk, and that other one by
Basile, and Giangiuseppe, and—”
"By all means! Pray take your choice."
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And so it came about that, relieved of a tenuous but very
sticky five-franc note, and loaded down with three biog-
raphies of the flying monk, one of Egidio, two of Giangi-
useppe I had been hopelessly swindled, but there! no man
can bargain in a hurry, and my eagerness to learn some-
thing of the life of this early airman had made me oblivious
of the natural values of things-and with sundry smaller
volumes of similar import bulging out of my pockets, I
turned in the direction of my hotel, promising myself some
interesting if not exactly light reading.
But hardly had I proceeded twenty paces before the shop-
keeper came running after me, with another formidable
bundle under his arm. More books! An ominous symptom
-the clearest demonstration of my defeat; I was a marked
man, a "good" customer already; it was humiliating, after
my long years' experience of the South.
And there resounded an unmistakable note of triumph in
his voice as he said:
"Some more saintly biographies, sir. Read them at your
leisure, and pay me what you like. You cannot help being
generous: I see it in your face."’
"I always try to encourage polite learning, if that is
what you think to decipher in my features. But it rains
santi this morning," I added, rather sourly.
"The gentleman is pleased to joke! May it rain soldi
to-morrow."
ܕ
"A little shower, possibly. But not a cloudburst like
to-day. . .
Now as to the flying monk, there is no doubt whatever
that he deserved his name.
He flew. Being a monk, these feats of his were naturally
confined to convents and their immediate surroundings, but
that does not alter the facts of the case.
Of the flights that he took in the little town of Copertino
alone, more than seventy, says Father Rossi, whom I follow
throughout, are on record in the depositions which were
taken on oath from eye-witnesses after his death. This is
one of them, for example:
"Stupendous likewise was the ratto (flight or rapture)
which he exhibited on a night of Holy Thursday. . . . He
suddenly flew toward the altar in a straight line, leaving
untouched all the ornaments of that structure: and after
A PIONEER OF AVIATION
103
some time, being called back by his superior, returned flying
to the spot whence he had set out."
And another:
"He flew similarly upon an olive-tree, . . . and there re-
mained in kneeling posture for the space of half an hour.
A marvelous thing it was to see the branch which sustained
him swaying lightly, as though a bird had alighted upon it.'
99
But Copertino is a remote little place in South Italy, and
it may be urged that a kind of enthusiasm for their dis-
tinguished brother monk may have tempted the inmates of
his convent to exaggerate his rare gifts. Nothing of the kind.
He performed flights not only in Copertino, but in various
large towns of Italy, such as Naples, Rome, and Assisi.
And the spectators were by no means an assemblage of
ignorant personages, but men whose rank and credibility
would have weight in any section of society.
•
"While the Lord High Admiral of Castile, Ambassador
of Spain at the Vatican, was passing through Assisi in the
year 1645, the custodian of the convent commanded Joseph
to descend from the room into the church, where the Ad-
miral's lady was waiting for him, desirous of seeing him
and speaking to him; to whom Joseph replied: I will obey,
but I do not know whether I shall be able to speak to her.'
And, as a matter of fact, hardly had he entered the church
and raised his eyes to a statue . . . situated above the altar,
when he threw himself into a flight in order to embrace its
feet at a distance of twelve paces, passing over the heads
of all the congregation; then, after remaining there some
time, he flew back over them with his usual cry, and im-
mediately returned to his cell. The Admiral was amazed
his wife fainted away; and all the onlookers became piously
terrified."
A similar feat was accomplished in the presence of Pope
Urban VIII., who was highly astonished, and declared that
"if Joseph were to die during his pontificate, he himsel
would bear witness to this successo.""
But his most remarkable flights took place at Fossom-
brone, where once, " detaching himself in swiftest manner
from the altar with a cry like thunder, he went, like light-
ning, gyrating hither and thither about the chapel, and with
such an impetus that he made all the cells of the dormitory
tremble, so that the monks, issuing thence in consternation,
cried: An earthquake! An earthquake!'"' At Fossom-
w
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brone he reached what seems to be his outdoor record-two
hours without descent to earth.
Sometimes, furthermore, he took a passenger, if such a
term can properly be applied.
6
So once he was observed to run swiftly toward the con-
fessor of his monastery, and, "seizing him by the hand, he
raised him from the ground by supernatural force and with
jubilant rapture drew him along, turning him round and
round in a violento ballo.” At Assisi, too, there was a
gentleman, a suffering invalid, whom he "snatched by the
hair, and, uttering his customary cry of Oh!' raised him-
self from the earth while he drew the other after him by
his hair, carrying him in this fashion for a short while
through the air, to the intensest admiration of the spec-
tators." The patient, whose name was Chevalier Baldas-
sarre, discovered, on touching earth again, that he had been
cured by this flight of the grievous mental malady which
had hitherto afflicted him.
Saint Joseph of Copertino lived during the time of the
Spanish Viceroys of Naples, and his notoriety spread not
only over all Italy, but to France, Germany, and Poland.
Among his intimates and admirers were no less than eight
Cardinals, Prince Leopold of Tuscany, the Duke of Bouil-
lon, Isabella of Austria, Duchess of Mantua, the Infanta
Maria of Savoy, and the Duke of Brunswick, who, during
a visit to various Courts of Europe in 1649, purposely went
to Assisi to see him, and was there converted from the
Lutheran heresy by the spectacle of one of his flights. Prince
Casimir, heir to the throne of Poland, was his particular
friend, and kept up a correspondence with him after the
death of his father and his own succession to the throne.
G
Toward the close of his life, the Flying Monk became so
famous that his superiors were obliged to shut him up in the
convent of Osimo, in close confinement, for more than six
years preceding his death, in order that his aerial voyages
should not be disturbed by the concourse of the vulgar."
And here he expired, in his sixty-first year, on the 18th of
September, 1663. He had been suffering and infirm for
some little time previous to that event, but managed to take
a short flight on the very day preceding his demise.
Forthwith the evidences of his miraculous deeds were
collected and submitted to the inspired examination of the
Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome. Their conscientious-
A PIONEER OF AVIATION
ness in sifting and weighing the depositions is sufficiently
attested by the fact that ninety years were allowed to elapse
ere Joseph of Copertino was solemnly received into the num-
ber of the Blessed-in 1753.
105
Not long ago, in the late spring, the train took me along
the shores of the Ionian Sea into that venerable and fertile
land of Japygia, the heel of Italy, which rises in heliotrope-
tinted undulations toward the Adriatic watershed. I looked
out of the window; old Tarentum and its milk-white palaces
were glimmering in lordly fashion across the tranquil wa-
ters; a sense of immemorial culture seemed to pervade this
region of russet tilth, and olives, and golden corn.
Soon we halted at a small town, in the glowing heat of
morning. Here I thought to interrupt my journey and dis-
cover how much is still known of the flying monk, who spent
some years of his life in a convent on the spot. A prodigy
like this, I argued, cannot be wholly forgotten.
They led me to the only monastery now in actual use. In
the sacristy of its church, where I was requested to wait,
a slender young priest was praying rapturously; and the
clock, that stood at hand, recorded the flight of twenty
minutes ere his devotions were ended. Then he arose slow-
ly, and turned upon me a pair of large and dreamy eyes,
as though awakened from another world.
This was quite a new convent, he explained; it could not
possibly be the one I was seeking. But there was another
one near at hand, almost a ruin, and now converted into
a public asylum for a flock of poor old women; he would
gladly show me the way. Was I a German?
66
No," I replied; "I came from Scotland.'
"A Calvinist," he remarked, without bitterness.
"A Presbyterian," I gently corrected.
"To be sure, a Presbyterian. How many names?"
As we walked along the dusty streets, I set forth the object
of my visit. He had never heard of the flying monk-it was
astonishing, he said. The flying monk! He would look up
the subject without delay. That a Protestant should come
all the way from the other end of the world" to make
inquiries about a Catholic saint of whose existence he him-
self was unaware, seemed not so much to surprise as posi-
tively to alarm him.
At the door of the decayed convent my guide left me, with
??
ܕ
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sundry polite expressions of esteem. I entered a spacious
open courtyard; a well stood in the center of a bare middle
nclosure, whereon in olden days the monks may have cul-
tivated their fruit and vegetables; round this court there
ran an arched passage, its walls adorned with frescos, now
dim and faded, depicting sacred subjects. The monastery
itself was a somber maze of stairways and cells and corri-
dors-all the free spaces, including the very roof, en-
cumbered with gleaming potteries of every size and shape,
that are made somewhere near the premises.
I wandered about this sunless and cobwebby labyrinth,
the old women-pensioners flitting round me like bats in the
twilight. I peered into many dark closets: which of them
was it-Joseph's famous blood-bespattered cell?
"He tormented his body so continuously and obstinately
with pins, needles, and blades of steel, and with such effusion
of blood that even now, after entire years, the walls of his
cell and other places of retirement are discolored and actual-
ly incrusted with blood." Which of them was it-the cham-
ber that witnessed these atrocious macerations? It was all
so gloomy and forlorn.
Then, pushing aside a door in this shadowy underworld,
I found myself suddenly bathed in dazzling light. A loggia
opened here, with a view over stretches of gnarled olives,
shining all silvery under the immaculate sky of noonday,
and bounded by the sapphire belt of the Ionian sunshine and
blue sea! Often must the monks have taken pleasure in this
fair prospect; and the wiser among them, watching the
laborers returning home at nightfall, the children at play,
and all the happy life of a world alien to their own, may well
have heaved a sigh.
Meanwhile, a crowd of citizens had assembled below, at-
tracted by the unusual novelty of a stranger in their town.
The simple creatures appeared to regard my investigations
in the light of a good joke; they had heard of begging monks,
and thieving monks, and monks of another variety whose
characteristics nothing would induce me to set down here;
but a flying monk-no, never!
"The Dark Ages," said one of them-the mayor, I dare
say with an air of grave authority. "Believe me, dear sir,
the days of such fabulous monsters are over.
""
So they seem to be, for the present
No picture or statue records the life of this flying wonder,
A PIONEER OF AVIATION
107
this masterpiece of Spanish priestcraft; no mural tablet-
in this land of commemorative stones-has been erected to
perpetuate the glory of his signal achievements; no street
is called after him. It is as if he had never existed. On
the contrary, by a queer irony of fate, the roadway leading
past his convent bears the name of a misty heathen poet,
likewise native of these favored regions, a man of whom
Joseph of Copertino had assuredly never heard-Ennius,
who never so much as tried to fly, but contented him with
singing, in rather bad Latin, of the things of this earth.
Via Ennio..
It is the swing of the pendulum. The old pagan at this
moment may be nearer to our ideals and aspirations than
the flying monk who died only yesterday, so to speak.
But a few years hence-who knows?
NORMAN Douglas.
THE RELATION OF DRAMA TO
LITERATURE
BY DONALD CLIVE STUART
SOMETIMES in journalistic criticism one reads that a cer-
tain play has a "real literary value." The phrase causes
surprise and the reader immediately wonders whether the
play will succeed. He is inclined to bestow silent praise
upon the manager for undertaking the dangerous attempt
to present a drama of so-called literary value to the modern
public; and a few weeks later, when the play is taken off,
he indulges in a threnody or a philippic in regard to the
decline of dramatic taste, or he may content himself with a
satisfied "I told you so!"
The opinion seems to prevail that a play no longer suc-
ceeds because of its literary value, but in spite of it. If
a manager suspects that a play sacrifices one iota of the
action to literary or poetic beauty, he will hardly take the
trouble to read it; and he doubts the success of any play
which attempts to reach the audience mostly through the
lines. Of course, one can assume and many people do
assume that the modern manager is a creature endowed
with the sole faculty of making money. One can indulge
in futile, high-browed talk about the degeneration of the
drama. One can put the blame on that precious and long-
suffering scapegoat called the public-that vague, intangible
mass of bad taste which the individual makes the cause
of all that is wrong and of which the individual never con-
siders himself a part. There are many ways for the modern
literary Pharisee to look down upon those who believe that
modern drama is a legitimate form of art. Yet in what
relation does dramatic art stand to literature? In a classi-
fication of the arts ought modern drama to stand as a sub-
head under literature, or ought it to stand as an independent
head? Ought it to be judged by literary criteria? Few