the rarest of gifts.  Something more was wanted than simply conceiving what a man in such a situation would probably feel and probably do.  Above all, it was necessary that his perplexities should be unexpected, and his expedients for meeting them unexpected; yet both perplexities and expedients so real and life-like that, when we were told them, we should wonder we had not thought of them before.  One gift was indispensable for this, however many might be accessory, the genius of circumstantial invention—­not a very exalted order of genius, perhaps, but quite as rare as any other intellectual prodigy.[5]

[Footnote 5:  Mr. Leslie Stephen seems to me to underrate the rarity of this peculiar gift in his brilliant essay on Defoe’s Novels in Hours in a Library.]

Defoe was fifty-eight years old when he wrote Robinson Crusoe.  If the invention of plausible circumstances is the great secret in the art of that tale, it would have been a marvellous thing if this had been the first instance of its exercise, and it had broken out suddenly in a man of so advanced an age.  When we find an artist of supreme excellence in any craft, we generally find that he has been practising it all his life.  To say that he has a genius for it, means that he has practised it, and concentrated his main force upon it, and that he has been driven irresistibly to do so by sheer bent of nature.  It was so with Defoe and his power of circumstantial invention, his unrivalled genius for “lying like truth.”  For years upon years of his life it had been his chief occupation.  From the time of his first connexion with Harley, at least, he had addressed his countrymen through the press, and had perambulated the length and breadth of the land in assumed characters and on factitious pretexts.  His first essay in that way in 1704, when he left prison in the service of the Government, appealing to the general compassion because he was under government displeasure, was skilful enough to suggest great native genius if not extensive previous practice.  There are passages of circumstantial invention in the Review, as ingenious as anything in Robinson Crusoe; and the mere fact that at the end of ten years of secret service under successive Governments, and in spite of a widespread opinion of his untrustworthiness, he was able to pass himself off for ten years more as a Tory with Tories and with the Whig Government as a loyal servant, is a proof of sustained ingenuity of invention greater than many volumes of fiction.

Looking at Defoe’s private life, it is not difficult to understand the peculiar fascination which such a problem as he solved in Robinson Crusoe must have had for him.  It was not merely that he had passed a life of uncertainty, often on the verge of precipices, and often saved from ruin by a buoyant energy which seems almost miraculous; not merely that, as he said of himself in one of his diplomatic appeals for commiseration.