“No man hath tasted differing fortunes more,
   For thirteen times have I been rich and poor.”

But when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, it was one of the actual chances of his life, and by no means a remote one, that he might be cast all alone on an uninhabited island.  We see from his letters to De la Faye how fearful he was of having “mistakes” laid to his charge by the Government in the course of his secret services.  His former changes of party had exposed him, as he well knew, to suspicion.  A false step, a misunderstood paragraph, might have had ruinous consequences for him.  If the Government had prosecuted him for writing anything offensive to them, refusing to believe that it was put in to amuse the Tories, transportation might very easily have been the penalty.  He had made so many enemies in the Press that he might have been transported without a voice being raised in his favour, and the mob would not have interfered to save a Government spy from the Plantations.  Shipwreck among the islands of the West Indies was a possibility that stood not far from his own door, as he looked forward into the unknown, and prepared his mind, as men in dangerous situations do, for the worst.  When he drew up for Moll Flanders and her husband a list of the things necessary for starting life in a new country, or when he described Colonel Jack’s management of his plantation in Virginia, the subject was one of more than general curiosity to him; and when he exercised his imagination upon the fate of Robinson Crusoe, he was contemplating a fate which a few movements of the wheel of Fortune might make his own.

But whatever it was that made the germ idea of Robinson Crusoe take root in Defoe’s mind, he worked it out as an artist.  Artists of a more emotional type might have drawn much more elaborate and affecting word-pictures of the mariner’s feelings in various trying situations, gone much deeper into his changing moods, and shaken our souls with pity and terror over the solitary castaway’s alarms and fits of despair.  Defoe’s aims lay another way.  His Crusoe is not a man given to the luxury of grieving.  If he had begun to pity himself, he would have been undone.  Perhaps Defoe’s imaginative force was not of a kind that could have done justice to the agonies of a shipwrecked sentimentalist; he has left no proof that it was:  but if he had represented Crusoe bemoaning his misfortunes, brooding over his fears, or sighing with Ossianic sorrow over his lost companions and friends, he would have spoiled the consistency of the character.  The lonely man had his moments of panic and his days of dejection, but they did not dwell in his memory.  Defoe no doubt followed his own natural bent, but he also showed true art in confining Crusoe’s recollections as closely as he does to his efforts to extricate himself from difficulties that would have overwhelmed a man of softer temperament.  The subject had fascinated him, and he found enough in it to engross his powers without travelling beyond its limits for diverting episodes, as he does more or less in all the rest of his tales.  The diverting episodes in Robinson Crusoe all help the verisimilitude of the story.