any appreciable effect upon conduct. Be it objected that Moll Flanders never loses her moral sense, but is continually a prey to pangs of remorse; the answer is, that her moralizations are not really a part of her character. Her mind is engrossed by other interests altogether; in her acutest throes of conscience, her eye is always on the main chance. Both women cease at an early stage of their careers to pay more than a formal obeissance to the name of feminine virtue. Few compunctions about her missing husbands trouble Moll Flanders, when an opportunity presents itself of getting a new one. Celestine takes the world as she finds it, surrendering herself to any lover who will save her from the one thing she loathes and shrinks from with a horrible dread-destitution. 'Après tout, je n'avais pas de choix; et cela vaut mieux que rien.' This is the regular method of the Naturalists, to reduce life to its elements, to present mankind freed from the fetters ot law and the trappings of conventionality.
Of course, characters like Celestine and Moll Flanders must he carefully distinguished from such characters as Fielding's Jonathan Wild and Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, in whom conscience is represented as absolutely dead. In Defoe's heroine and Mirbeau's, the moral nature is paralysed into inactivity by the pressure of things outside; at the back of their minds there is still a semi-conscious perception of right and wrong, which throws the incidents recorded in their autobiography into moral relief, and makes us feel that they are human creatures. The moral sentiment must have a place in the book, or such narratives of ill-doing would be unreadable. In Fielding and Thackeray it is supplied by the continuous irony of the novelist: but their two masterpieces of iniquity being devoid of it cease to be human, and are little else than idealisations of vice. Neither Moll Flanders nor Celestine ever lose their hold on our sympathies entirely, although Roxana, who has none of their good nature and never shows a trace of real affection or passion, has but a feeble claim even on our pity.
The ups and downs of Celestine have many resemblances to the two stories included here. In their candour and honesty, the two authors are alike, save, perhaps, that the French novelist has bitten in his lines with a sharper acid. But Defoe's patient transcription of the smallest essential detail; his resolute adherence to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and his contempt for every romantic or sentimental motive that would gloze over real causes, and represent the conduct of human beings rather as we would have it to be than as it is,—these characteristics reproduce themselves in the author of the Journal, and prove him the lineal successor of Defoe. It is to some extent a confirmation of this view, that one of the most successful books in France at the time when interest in the works of the Naturalist school was particularly absorbing, should be Marcel Schwob's translation of Moll Flanders.
