Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond—­even making his personages soliloquise in this after a fashion—­and it plays a very important part in “the secret:”  yet it can hardly be classed very high as dialogue.  And this is at least partly due to the strange drab shapelessness of his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint individual form.

Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited the method so well, or would even have suited it at all.  For this method—­to leave off hinting at it and playing round it—­is one of almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail, and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader’s part, of the facts presented to him.  The process has been more than once analysed in that curious and convenient miniature example of it, the “Mrs. Veal” supercherie:  but you may open the novels proper almost anywhere and discover it in full operation.  Like most great processes of art, this is an adoption and perfecting of habits usual with the most inartistic people—­a turning to good account of the interminably circumstantial superfluities of the common gossip and newsmonger.  Very often Defoe actually does not go beyond this—­just as in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters he had simply reproduced the actual thoughts and wishes of those who disliked dissent.  But sometimes he got the better of this also, as in the elaborate building up of Robinson’s surroundings and not a little in the other books.  And there the effect is not only verisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude.  At any rate, in him, and for English prose and secular fiction, we have first that mysterious charm of the real that is not real—­of the “human creation”—­which constitutes the appeal of the novel.  In some of the books there is hardly any appeal of any other sort.  Moll Flanders, though not unkindly, and “improper” rather from the force of circumstances than from any specially vicious inclination, is certainly not a person for whom one has much liking.  Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences in pocket-picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a fellow of no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of any kind.  Singleton is a rascal who “plays Charlemagne,” as the French gambling term has it, and endows his repentance with the profits of his sin.  As for Roxana there are few more repulsive heroines in fiction—­while the Cavalier and the chief figure in the Voyage Round the World are simply threads on which their respective adventures are strung.  Even Robinson himself enlists no particular sympathy except of the “put-yourself-in-his-place” kind.  Yet these sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God, we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in the newspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content us perfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands of solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again after a reasonable interval.