THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE.
It was a bold undertaking for a prisoner in Newgate to engage to furnish
a newspaper written wholly by himself, "purged from the errors and
partiality of news-writers and petty statesmen of all sides." It would,
of course, have been an impossible undertaking if the _Review_ had been,
either in size or in contents, like a newspaper of the present time. The
_Review_ was, in its first stage, a sheet of eight small quarto pages.
After the first two numbers, it was reduced in size to four pages, but a
smaller type was used, so that the amount of matter remained nearly the
same--about equal in bulk to two modern leading articles. At first the
issue was weekly; after four numbers it became bi-weekly, and so
remained for a year.
For the character of the _Review_ it is difficult to find a parallel.
There was nothing like it at the time, and nothing exactly like it has
been attempted since. The nearest approach to it among its predecessors
was the _Observator_, a small weekly journal written by the erratic John
Tutchin, in which passing topics, political and social, were discussed
in dialogues. Personal scandals were a prominent feature in the
_Observator_. Defoe was not insensible to the value of this element to a
popular journal. He knew, he said, that people liked to be amused; and
he supplied this want in a section of his paper entitled "Mercure
Scandale; or, Advice from the Scandalous Club, being a weekly history of
Nonsense, Impertinence, Vice, and Debauchery." Under this attractive
heading, Defoe noticed current scandals, his club being represented as a
tribunal before which offenders were brought, their cases heard, and
sentence passed upon them. Slanderers of the True-Born Englishman
frequently figure in its proceedings. It was in this section also that
Defoe exposed the errors of contemporary news-writers, the _Post-man_,
the _Post-Boy_, the _London Post_, the _Flying Post_, and the _Daily
Courant_. He could not in his prison pretend to superior information
regarding the events of the day; the errors which he exposed were
chiefly blunders in geography and history. The Mercure Scandale was
avowedly intended to amuse the frivolous. The lapse of time has made its
artificial sprightliness dreary. It was in the serious portion of the
_Review_, the Review proper, that Defoe showed most of his genius. The
design of this was nothing less than to give a true picture, drawn with
"an impartial and exact historical pen," of the domestic and foreign
affairs of all the States of Europe. It was essential, he thought, that
at such a time of commotion Englishmen should be thoroughly informed of
the strength and the political interests and proclivities of the various
European Powers. He could not undertake to tell his readers what was
passing from day to day, but he could explain to them the policy of the
Continental Courts; he could show how that policy was affected by their
past history and present interests; he could calculate the forces at
their disposal, set forth the grounds of their alliances, and generally
put people in a position to follow the great game that was being played
on the European chess-board. In the _Review_, in fact, as he himself
described his task, he was writing a history sheet by sheet, and letting
the world see it as it went on.
This excellent plan of instruction was carried out with incomparable
brilliancy of method, and vivacity of style. Defoe was thoroughly master
of his subject; he had read every history that he could lay his hands
on, and his connexion with King William had guided him to the
mainsprings of political action, and fixed in his mind clear principles
for England's foreign policy. Such a mass of facts and such a maze of
interests would have encumbered and perplexed a more commonplace
intellect, but Defoe handled them with experienced and buoyant ease. He
had many arts for exciting attention. His confinement in Newgate, from
which the first number of the _Review_ was issued on the 19th February,
1704, had in no way impaired his clear-sighted daring and self-confident
skill. There was a sparkle of paradox and a significant lesson in the
very title of his journal--_A Review of the Affairs of France_. When, by
and by, he digressed to the affairs of Sweden and Poland, and filled
number after number with the history of Hungary, people kept asking,
"What has this to do with France?" "How little you understand my
design," was Defoe's retort. "Patience till my work is completed, and
then you will see that, however much I may seem to have been digressing,
I have always kept strictly to the point. Do not judge me as you judged
St. Paul's before the roof was put on. It is not affairs _in_ France
that I have undertaken to explain, but the affairs _of_ France; and the
affairs of France are the affairs of Europe. So great is the power of
the French money, the artifice of their conduct, the terror of their
arms, that they can bring the greatest kings in Europe to promote their
interest and grandeur at the expense of their own."
Defoe delighted to brave common prejudice by throwing full in its face
paradoxes expressed in the most unqualified language. While we were at
war with France, and commonplace hunters after popularity were doing
their utmost to flatter the national vanity, Defoe boldly announced his
intention of setting forth the wonderful greatness of the French nation,
the enormous numbers of their armies, the immense wealth of their
treasury, the marvellous vigour of their administration. He ridiculed
loudly those writers who pretended that we should have no difficulty in
beating them, and filled their papers with dismal stories about the
poverty and depopulation of the country. "Consider the armies that the
French King has raised," cried Defoe, "and the reinforcements and
subsidies he has sent to the King of Spain; does that look like a
depopulated, country and an impoverished exchequer?" It was perhaps a
melancholy fact, but what need to apologise for telling the truth? At
once, of course, a shout was raised against him for want of patriotism;
he was a French pensioner, a Jacobite, a hireling of the Peace-party.
This was the opportunity on which the chuckling paradox-monger had
counted. He protested that he was not drawing a map of the French power
to terrify the English. But, he said, "there are two cheats equally
hurtful to us; the first to terrify us, the last to make us too easy and
consequently too secure; 'tis equally dangerous for us to be terrified
into despair and bullied into more terror of our enemies than we need,
or to be so exalted in conceit of our own force as to undervalue and
contemn the power which we cannot reduce." To blame him for making clear
the greatness of the French power, was to act as if the Romans had
killed the geese in the Capitol for frightening them out of their sleep.
"If I, like an honest Protestant goose, have gaggled too loud of the
French power, and raised the country, the French indeed may have reason
to cut my throat if they could; but 'tis hard my own countrymen, to whom
I have shown their danger, and whom I have endeavoured to wake out of
their sleep, should take offence at the timely discovery."
If we open the first volume, or indeed any volume of the _Review_, at
random, we are almost certain to meet with some electric shock of
paradox designed to arouse the attention of the torpid. In one number we
find the writer, ever daring and alert, setting out with an eulogium on
"the wonderful benefit of arbitrary power" in France. He runs on in this
vein for some time, accumulating examples of the wonderful benefit, till
the patience of his liberty-loving readers is sufficiently exasperated,
and then he turns round with a grin of mockery and explains that he
means benefit to the monarch, not to the subject. "If any man ask me
what are the benefits of arbitrary power to the subject, I answer these
two, _poverty_ and _subjection"_ But to an ambitious monarch unlimited
power is a necessity; unless he can count upon instant obedience to his
will, he only courts defeat if he embarks in schemes of aggression and
conquest.
"When a Prince must court his subjects to give him leave
to raise an army, and when that's done, tell him when he
must disband them; that if he wants money, he must assemble
the States of his country, and not only give them good
words to get it, and tell them what 'tis for, but give them an
account how it is expended before he asks for more. The
subjects in such a government are certainly happy in having
their property and privileges secured, but if I were of his
Privy Council, I would advise such a Prince to content himself
within the compass of his own government, and never
think of invading his neighbours or increasing his dominions,
for subjects who stipulate with their Princes, and make
conditions of government, who claim to be governed by laws
and make those laws themselves, who need not pay their
money but when they see cause, and may refuse to pay it
when demanded without their consent; such subjects will
never empty their purses upon foreign wars for enlarging the
glory of their sovereign."
This glory he describes as "the leaf-gold which the devil has laid over
the backside of ambition, to make it glitter to the world."
Defoe's knowledge of the irritation caused among the Dissenters by his
_Shortest Way_, did not prevent him from shocking them and annoying the
high Tories by similar _jeux d'esprit_. He had no tenderness for the
feelings of such of his brethren as had not his own robust sense of
humour and boyish glee in the free handling of dangerous weapons. Thus
we find him, among his eulogies of the Grand Monarque, particularly
extolling him for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. By the
expulsion of the Protestants, Louis impoverished and unpeopled part of
his country, but it was "the most politic action the French King ever
did." "I don't think fit to engage here in a dispute about the honesty
of it," says Defoe; "but till he had first cleared the country of that
numerous injured people, he could never have ventured to carry an
offensive war into all the borders of Europe." And Defoe was not content
with shocking the feelings of his nominal co-religionists by a light
treatment of matters in which he agreed with them. He upheld with all
his might the opposite view from theirs on two important questions of
foreign policy. While the Confederates were doing battle on all sides
against France, the King of Sweden was making war on his own account
against Poland for the avowed purpose of placing a Protestant prince on
the throne. Extreme Protestants in England were disposed to think that
Charles XII. was fighting the Lord's battle in Poland. But Defoe was
strongly of opinion that the work in which all Protestants ought at that
moment to be engaged was breaking down the power of France, and as
Charles refused to join the Confederacy, and the Catholic prince against
whom he was fighting was a possible adherent, the ardent preacher of
union among the Protestant powers insisted upon regarding him as a
practical ally of France, and urged that the English fleet should be
sent into the Baltic to interrupt his communications. Disunion among
Protestants, argued Defoe, was the main cause of French greatness; if
the Swedish King would not join the Confederacy of his own free will, he
should be compelled to join it, or at least to refrain from weakening
it.
Defoe treated the revolt of the Hungarians against the Emperor with the
same regard to the interests of the Protestant cause. Some uneasiness
was felt in England at co-operating with an ally who so cruelly
oppressed his Protestant subjects, and some scruple of conscience at
seeming to countenance the oppression. Defoe fully admitted the wrongs
of the Hungarians, but argued that this was not the time for them to
press their claims for redress. He would not allow that they were
justified at such a moment in calling in the aid of the Turks against
the Emperor. "It is not enough that a nation be Protestant and the
people our friends; if they will join with our enemies, they are
Papists, Turks, and Heathens, to us." "If the Protestants in Hungary
will make the Protestant religion in Hungary clash with the Protestant
religion in all the rest of Europe, we must prefer the major interest to
the minor." Defoe treats every foreign question from the cool
high-political point of view, generally taking up a position from which
he can expose the unreasonableness of both sides. In the case of the
Cevennois insurgents, one party had used the argument that it was
unlawful to encourage rebellion even among the subjects of a prince with
whom we were at war. With this Defoe dealt in one article, proving with
quite a superfluity of illustration that we were justified by all the
precedents of recent history in sending support to the rebellious
subjects of Louis XIV. It was the general custom of Europe to "assist
the malcontents of our neighbours." Then in another article he
considered whether, being lawful, it was also expedient, and he answered
this in the negative, treating with scorn a passionate appeal for the
Cevennois entitled "Europe enslaved if the Camisars are not relieved."
"What nonsense is this," he cried, "about a poor despicable handful of
men who have only made a little diversion in the great war!" "The haste
these men are in to have that done which they cannot show us the way to
do!" he cried; and proceeded to prove in a minute discussion of
conceivable strategic movements that it was impossible for us in the
circumstances to send the Camisards the least relief.
There is no reference in the _Review_ to Defoe's release from prison.
Two numbers a week were issued with the same punctuality before and
after, and there is no perceptible difference either in tone or in plan.
Before he left prison, and before the fall of the high Tory Ministers,
he had thrown in his lot boldly with the moderate men, and he did not
identify himself more closely with any political section after Harley
and Godolphin recognized the value of his support and gave him liberty
and pecuniary help. In the first number of the _Review_ he had declared
his freedom from party ties, and his unreserved adherence to truth and
the public interest, and he made frequent protestation of this
independence. "I am not a party man," he kept saying; "at least, I
resolve this shall not be a party paper." In discussing the affairs of
France, he took more than one side-glance homewards, but always with the
protest that he had no interest to serve but that of his country. The
absolute power of Louis, for example, furnished him with an occasion for
lamenting the disunited counsels of Her Majesty's Cabinet. Without
imitating the despotic form of the French Government, he said, there are
ways by which we might secure under our own forms greater decision and
promptitude on the part of the Executive. When Nottingham was dismissed,
he rejoiced openly, not because the ex-Secretary had been his
persecutor, but because at last there was unity of views among the
Queen's Ministers. He joined naturally in the exultation over
Marlborough's successes, but in the _Review_, and in his _Hymn to
Victory_, separately published, he courteously diverted some part of the
credit to the new Ministry. "Her Majesty's measures, moved by new and
polished councils, have been pointed more directly at the root of the
French power than ever we have seen before. I hope no man will suppose I
reflect on the memory of King William; I know 'tis impossible the Queen
should more sincerely wish the reduction of France than his late
Majesty; but if it is expected I should say he was not worse served,
oftener betrayed, and consequently hurried into more mistakes and
disasters, than Her Majesty now is, this must be by somebody who
believes I know much less of the public matters of those days than I had
the honour to be informed of." But this praise, he represented, was not
the praise of a partisan; it was an honest compliment wrung from a man
whose only connexion with the Government was a bond for his good
behaviour, an undertaking "not to write what some people might not
like."
Defoe's hand being against every member of the writing brotherhood, it
was natural that his reviews should not pass without severe criticisms.
He often complained of the insults, ribaldry, Billingsgate, and
Bear-garden language to which he was exposed; and some of his
biographers have taken these lamentations seriously, and expressed their
regret that so good a man should have been so much persecuted. But as he
deliberately provoked these assaults, and never missed a chance of
effective retort, it is difficult to sympathise with him on any ground
but his manifest delight in the strife of tongues. Infinitely the
superior of his antagonists in power, he could affect to treat them with
good humour, but this good humour was not easy to reciprocate when
combined with an imperturbable assumption that they were all fools or
knaves. When we find him, after humbly asking pardon for all his errors
of the press, errors of the pen, or errors of opinion, expressing a wish
that "all gentlemen on the other side would give him equal occasion to
honour them for their charity, temper, and gentlemanlike dealing, as for
their learning and virtue," and offering to "capitulate with them, and
enter into a treaty or cartel for exchange of good language," we may, if
we like, admire his superior mastery of the weapons of irritation, but
pity is out of place.
The number of February 17, 1705, was announced by Defoe as being "the
last Review of this volume, and designed to be so of this work." But on
the following Tuesday, the regular day for the appearance of the
_Review_, he issued another number, declaring that he could not quit the
volume without some remarks on "charity and poverty." On Saturday yet
another last number appeared, dealing with some social subjects which he
had been urged by correspondents to discuss. Then on Tuesday, February
27, apologising for the frequent turning of his design, he issued a
Preface to a new volume of the _Review_, with a slight change of title.
He would overtake sooner or later all the particulars of French
greatness which he had promised to survey, but as the course of his
narrative had brought him to England, and he might stay there for some
time, it was as well that this should be indicated in the title, which
was henceforth to be A Review of the Affairs of France, with
Observations on Affairs at Home. He had intended, he said, to abandon
the work altogether, but some gentlemen had prevailed with him to go on,
and had promised that he should not be at a loss by it. It was now to be
issued three times a week.