An inherent improbability.

At all events it will not square with our conception of Defoe’s character.  Those of us who have an almost unlimited admiration for Defoe as a master of narrative, and next to no affection for him as a man, might pass the heartlessness of such conduct.  “At first sight,” Mr. Wright admits, “it may appear monstrous that a man should for so long a time abstain from speech with his own family.”  Monstrous, indeed—­but I am afraid we could have passed that.  Mr. Wright, who has what I may call a purfled style, tells us that—­

“To narrate the career of Daniel Defoe is to tell a tale of wonder and daring, of high endeavour and marvellous success.  To dwell upon it is to take courage and to praise God for the splendid possibilities of life....  Defoe is always the hero; his career is as thick with events as a cornfield with corn; his fortunes change as quickly and as completely as the shapes in a kaleidoscope—­he is up, he is down, he is courted, he is spurned; it is shine, it is shower, it is couleur de rose, it is Stygian night.  Thirteen times he was rich and poor.  Achilles was not more audacious, Ulysses more subtle, AEneas more pious.”

That is one way of putting it.  Here is another way (as the cookery books say):—­“To narrate the career of Daniel Defoe is to tell a tale of a hosier and pantile maker, who had a hooked nose and wrote tracts indefatigably—­he was up, he was down, he was in the Pillory, he was at Tooting; it was poule de soie, it was leather and prunella; and it was always tracts.  AEneas was not so pious a member of the Butchers’ Company; and there are a few milestones on the Dover Road; but Defoe’s life was as thick with tracts as a cornfield with corn.”  These two estimates may differ here and there; but on one point they agree—­that Defoe was an extremely restless, pushing, voluble person, who could as soon have stood on his head for twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days as have kept silence for that period with any man or woman in whose company he found himself frequently alone.  Unless we have entirely misjudged his character—­and, I may add, unless Mr. Wright has completely misrepresented the rest of his life—­it simply was not in the man to keep this foolish vow for twenty-four hours.

No, I am afraid Mr. Wright’s hypothesis will not do.  And yet his plan of adding twenty-seven years to each important date in Crusoe’s history has revealed so many coincident events in the life of Defoe that we cannot help feeling he is “hot,” as they say in the children’s game; that the wreck upon the island and Crusoe’s twenty-eight years odd of solitude do really correspond with some great event and important period of Defoe’s life.  The wreck is dated 30th September, 1659.  Add the twenty-seven years, and we come to September 30th, 1686.  Where was Defoe at that date, and what was he doing?  Mr. Wright has to confess that of his movements in 1686 and the two following years “we know little that is definite.”  Certainly we know of nothing that can correspond with Crusoe’s shipwreck.