enormously since Defoe. The inexhaustible interest and variety of human character has become the finest theme of fiction. Yet the naturalists, as a class, still cleave to the principle observed by Defoe. In Maupassant, Zola, Hardy, there are few figures that stand out as strongly marked individuals, independently of the drama in which they are involved; the workings of individual minds are exposed, but not the points in which minds differ one from the other. The interest is still, not in peculiar traits, but in what the persons of the story undergo, and in what they become as ordinary men and women. One thing, however, the modern naturalist knows that was a sealed book to Defoe—the phenomena of temperament, the shades and differences of which play such a dominating part on the psychological stage of all modern novelists. The absence of any sense of the meaning of temperament accounts for the peculiar impression which the modern reader gets on first opening Defoe.
This characteristic deficiency comes out prominently if we compare a book like Moll Flanders with the character-drawing of modern naturalists. Take for example one of the most recent, the Journal d'une femme de chambre by Octave Mirbeau, a book that has many points of similarity with both the novels included in this volume. Mirbeau is one of the novelists who have abandoned the fallacies of experimental fiction; but whose Realism, in its minuteness, closeness to actual life, and the repudiation of any scruples interfering with absolute truth, shows the effect of several decades of Naturalism. The purpose of the Journal is to satirise the present corruption of society in France, but the satire is dissembled under the form of a naturalistic account of the life it holds up to execration. The style is not comic, nor ironical, nor denunciatory; the book purports to be, under the form of a novel, an exact statement and diagnosis of terrible truths. The satirical intention may be left, for the time being, out of sight; and what remains, the autobiographical record of a woman's life, one of those women who are born in sin, flung helpless to the cruel mercies of the world, and driven eventually by sheer force of circumstances into the ranks of the criminal classes, is material enough for our comparison. Le Journal d'une femme de chambre is, in fact, the latest of a long family that are derived from one ancestress, Moll Flanders. Mirbeau's Celestine is a French Moll Flanders, and a Moll Flanders modernized. The object of both men was to paint a natural woman, a woman having no true place in society, and therefore at war with the world for her own existence. Neither Celestine nor Defoe's heroine is bad by nature: their moral downfall is the work of those who should have been their protectors. They become sinners through being sinned against; and the immediate result is, not that they are transformed into abandoned creatures and enemies to their kind, they simply become non-moral; the question of right and wrong has no longer
