wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the
pulling the flesh from the bones; and also it brought to my mind the
many hardships, miseries, and wants, that my poor family was like to
meet with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind
child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the thoughts of
the hardships I thought my poor blind one might go under would break
my heart to pieces. Poor child! thought I, what sorrow art thou like
to have for thy portion in this world! thou must be beaten, must beg,
suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I
cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee. But yet, thought I,
I must venture you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave
you. Oh! I saw I was as a man who was pulling down his house upon the
heads of his wife and children; yet I thought on those 'two milch kine
that were to carry the ark of God into another country, and to leave
their calves behind them."
"But that which helped me in this temptation was divers
considerations: the first was, the consideration of those two
Scriptures, 'Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them
alive; and let thy widows trust in me;' and again, 'The Lord said,
Verily it shall go well with thy remnant; verily I will cause the
enemy to entreat them well in the time of evil.'"
He was arrested in 1660, charged with "devilishly and perniciously
abstaining from church," and of being "a common upholder of
conventicles." At the Quarter Sessions, where his trial seems to have
been conducted somewhat like that of Faithful at Vanity Fair, he was
sentenced to perpetual banishment. This sentence, however, was never
executed, but he was remanded to Bedford jail, where he lay a prisoner
for twelve years.
Here, shut out from the world, with no other books than the Bible and
Fox's "Martyrs," he penned that great work which has attained a wider
and more stable popularity than any other book in the English tongue.
It is alike the favorite of the nursery and the study. Many
experienced Christians hold it only second to the Bible; the infidel
himself would not willingly let it die. Men of all sects read it with
delight, as in the main a truthful representation of the Christian
pilgrimage, without indeed assenting to all the doctrines which the
author puts in the mouth of his fighting sermonizer, Greatheart, or
which may be deduced from some other portions of his allegory. A
recollection of his fearful sufferings, from misapprehension of a
single text in the Scriptures, relative to the question of election,
we may suppose gave a milder tone to the theology of his Pilgrim than
was altogether consistent with the Calvinism of the seventeenth
century. "Religion," says Macaulay, "has scarcely ever worn a form so
calm and soothing as in Bunyan's allegory." In composing it, he seems
never to have altogether lost sight of the fact, that, in his
life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessed promise recorded by
the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generally found on the Genevan
side of the argument.
Little did the short-sighted persecutors of Bunyan dream, when they
closed upon him the door of Bedford jail, that God would overrule
their poor spite and envy to His own glory and the world-wide renown
of their victim. In the solitude of his prison, the ideal forms of
beauty and sublimity which had long flitted before him vaguely, like
the vision of the Temanite, took shape and coloring; and he was
endowed with power to reduce them to order, and arrange them in
harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination, no longer
self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace, expanded
his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the display of its
wonders.
Few who read Bunyan nowadays think of him as one of the brave old
English confessors, whose steady and firm endurance of persecution
baffled, and in the end overcame, the tyranny of the Established
Church in the reign of Charles II. What Milton and Penn and Locke
wrote in defence of liberty, Bunyan lived out and acted. He made no
concessions to worldly rank. Dissolute lords and proud bishops he
counted less than the humblest and poorest of his disciples at
Bedford. When first arrested and thrown into prison, he supposed he
should be called to suffer death for his faithful testimony to the
truth; and his great fear was, that he should not meet his fate with
the requisite firmness, and so dishonor the cause of his Master. And
when dark clouds came over him, and he sought in vain for a sufficient
evidence that in the event of his death it would be well with him, he
girded up his soul with the reflection that, as he suffered for the
word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadth
from it. "I will leap," he says, "off the ladder blindfold into
eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if thou
wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture in thy name!"
The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled
the false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal
in the development of the real nobility of the mind and heart. Its
history is bright with the footprints of men whose very names still
stir the hearts of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. Say
what we may of its fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant
enjoyment of newly-acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now
venture to deny that it was the golden age of England? Who that
regards freedom above slavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and
lamentation of those interested in the continuance of the old order of
things, against the prevalence of sects and schism, but who at the
same time, as Milton shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of
their pontifical sleeves than the rending of the Church? Who shall now
sneer at Puritanism, with the "Defence of Unlicensed Printing" before
him? Who scoff at Quakerism over the "Journal" of George Fox? Who
shall join with debauched lordlings and fat-witted prelates in
ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers, after rising from the
perusal of "Pilgrim's Progress?" "There were giants in those days."
And foremost amid that band of liberty-loving and God-fearing men,
"The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time,
Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight,"
stands the subject of our sketch, the "Tinker of Elstow." Of his high
merit as an author there is no longer any question. The _Edinburgh
Review_ expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it
declared that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century
were those which produced "Paradise Lost" and the "Pilgrim's
Progress."
DANIEL DEFOE[2]
[Footnote 2: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
By CLARK RUSSELL
(1661-1731)
[Illustration: Daniel Defoe.]
Daniel Defoe, whose "Robinson Crusoe" remains, at the end of two
centuries, the most popular work of fiction in a literature abounding
in imaginative works of superlative excellence, was born in London in
1661. His father was plain Mr. Foe, a butcher, of St. Giles,
Cripplegate. Though Defoe speaks gratefully and respectfully of his
father, he implies here and there in his writings a pride of birth
which probably did not induce him to talk freely of the parental
calling. He must needs be of Norman extraction, and go back with the
best of those whose family claims he sneers at; and that posterity
might be in no doubt of the antiquity of his descent, he, at the age
of about forty, changed the plain sturdy name of Foe into De Foe; but
the accepted name is as it is spelt in this contribution.
His father wished to make a Dissenting teacher of him, and sent him to
Morton's Academy, in Newington Green. Morton thoroughly grounded him
in knowledge of a practical and useful sort; and Defoe claimed for his
preceptor's system of education that the pupils became masters of the
English tongue. But language is a genius. No teacher could make a
writer of a boy who was without the talent of words. In after years
Defoe appears to have picked up several tongues, as may be judged by
his challenge to John Tutchin, to translate with him any Latin,
French, or Italian author for twenty pounds each book; one sees his
proficiency also in the character he gives of himself in a paper in
_Applebee's Journal_. But at the very heart of the genius of Defoe lay
the spirit of the tradesman. It burns like a farthing rushlight in the
midst of a richly furnished room. Whoever wants to understand Defoe
must study his mind by this light. He declined to fill a pulpit
because, in the language of the shop, "it did not pay." Already, that
is when he was about two-and-twenty years old, he was writing
pamphlets on Protestantism, on Popular Liberties, and the like, and he
also appears to have taken part in the Duke of Monmouth's rising.
In 1685 he opened a shop as a hosier in Freeman's Court, Cornhill.
There is nothing memorable to record of him while he was in this line
of trade, saving that in 1688, at the Revolution, he made haste to
accentuate his adhesion to William III. by joining a company of
volunteer horse, a royal regiment made up of the principal citizens of
London: these men, gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, with Defoe
in their midst and the Earl of Monmouth at their head, guarded the
king and queen to a banquet at Whitehall. His prosperity as a hosier
ended in 1692, in which year he fled to Bristol, a bankrupt, with
debts, according to his own showing, amounting to seventeen thousand
pounds. He did not, however, long lie in hiding. In recognition of his
services as a pamphleteer, the post of accountant to the Commissioners
of the Glass Duty was given to him. We then find him prospering again.
He started a brick-making manufactory at Tilbury, and set up a coach
and a pleasure-boat. His pen, moreover, was ceaselessly employed; the
titles of the productions of a single month would more than fill the
slender space allotted me. He fought for Non-conformity till 1698,
then broke with the Dissenters because of their practice of occasional
conformity, which, he pretends, disgusted him. His argument was, let a
man be wholly a Dissenter, or wholly a Churchman. But don't let him go
to chapel one Sunday and church the next. He can never be taken
seriously, however, in these short flights any more than in his long
novels. There is no consistency in his writings, because there is no
conscience in his opinions. In his "The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters," he faces about, and the man who was at war with Howe, the
most eloquent of Non-conformist divines, second only to Jeremy Taylor
in richness of thought and splendor of diction, is, on the merits of
that piece of irony, accepted by posterity as the foremost champion of
Dissent.
Defoe's loyalty to King William, however, must pass unquestioned. "The
True Born Englishman" procured him the notice of the king, whose
confidence he claims to have been honored with. His real character as
a journalist and publicist grows quickly visible after the death of
William III. His genius as a "trimmer" makes sheer irony of his most
appealing and eloquent pieces. Swift says of himself that he wrote
that reputation might stand him in the room of a title and coach and
six; Defoe flourished his pen as a tradesman, for money. Swift claims
to have been the greatest master of irony of his day, nay, to have
invented that form of writing. But Defoe surely is his equal, and in
"The Shortest Way" out and away his superior. The writer's gravity
completely deceived the world. When it was known who was the author,
the Dissenters were hardly less indignant than the High Churchmen. The
satiric recommendations were indeed in the highest degree alarming.
The Tory party had approved with complacency while they thought the
piece a serious proposal. When they found out Defoe wrote it, they
hunted him down and forced him to surrender himself. A hue-and-cry
advertisement in the papers while he was a fugitive, survives as one
of the best pen-and-ink sketches in the language: "He is a
middle-aged, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion
and dark brown coloured hair, but wears a wig: a hooked nose, a sharp
chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth." "The Shortest Way"
was ordered to be burnt, and Defoe sentenced to pay a fine of 200
marks to Queen Anne, to stand three times in the pillory, to be
imprisoned during the queen's pleasure, and to find sureties for his
good behavior for seven years.
The genius of Eyre Crowe has given a wonderful life and color to this
memorable incident. This dead thing seems charged with a very passion
of vitality in the charming illustration that accompanies this sketch.
It is impossible to recur to the degradation of one of Great Britain's
finest geniuses, at the instance of men of no more importance to
posterity than the worms which have eaten them up, without wrath and
disgust. But he was popular, and the crowd used him handsomely. They
pelted him with flowers and drank his health. Pope, in a famous line,
speaks of the London Monument that, like a tall bully, lifts its head
and lies, because of the inscription upon it that charged the Papists
with causing the great fire. The malignant little hunchback, as
malevolent as an ape for all his genius, could tell lies as great as
any the chisel could grave, and unfortunately, infinitely more
lasting. When he wrote: "Earless on high stands unabash'd Defoe," he
knew he lied. Defoe did not lose his ears. He was pilloried simply,
and for three days successively, stood in Cornhill, in Cheapside, and
at Temple Bar, where our illustration exhibits him. He went to
Newgate; the government dared not hinder him from writing, and it was
while a prisoner that he heroically started "The Review," at first a
weekly, and afterward a bi-weekly, issue. It was also in Newgate that
he learnt much of those secrets of the prison-house which, translated
into "Moll Flanders" and "Colonel Jack," are transcripts so
exquisitely faithful that one knows not how to parallel them in art
save by the paintings of Hogarth. He had a wife and six children at
this time, and it is difficult to guess how he provided for them. His
works at Tilbury were a failure: it may be supposed that his pen was
his sole resource.
[Illustration: Defoe in the Pillory.]
The Earl of Nottingham resigned office in 1704, and was succeeded by
Robert Harley, afterward Earl of Oxford. Harley, who had a high sense
of Defoe's genius, sent a messenger to the author lying in jail to
inquire what he could do for him. This was in May, yet it does not
seem that he was released until August. The government forthwith
employed him. His career from this period, whether as a journalist, or
whether as a government hireling employed on secret services, is, to
say the least, dishonest. In short he was a needy man, willing to
write for anybody and say anything for money. In 1706 he was sent as a
spy to Scotland. Nothing was then talked about but the union of the
two kingdoms; on both sides of the Tweed the masses of the people were
crazy with the excitement of the subject. Of what value Defoe's
services were, it is hard now to imagine. Professor Minto supposes
that his business "was to ascertain and report the opinions of
influential persons, and keep the government informed as far as he
could of the general state of feeling." When Harley fell, Godolphin
continued to employ Defoe as a government secret emissary and writer.
He was again sent to Scotland in 1708, in relation to the suspected
invasion of that country by the French; but he found time to keep his
"Review" going. We see him "trimming" afresh, with masterly disregard
to every appeal save that of his purse, when Godolphin surrendered the
treasurer's staff, and Harley once more became prime minister. "My
duty," says he, with that wonderful countenance of gravity, and that
fine air of outraged honor, which express him in his political
writings certainly, as the very prince of humbugs, "was to go along
with every ministry, so far as they did not break in upon the
constitution and the laws and liberty of my country." At what price
did he value the constitution? And how much, leaning across the
counter of his literary calling would he ask for the laws and
liberties of his country? Both Godolphin and Harley, no doubt, exactly
knew.
But enough in this brief sketch has been said of him as politician,
journalist, controversialist, spy. He heaped pamphlet upon pamphlet,
volume upon volume, and in July, 1715, was found guilty of what was
called a scandalous libel against Lord Anglesea. Sentence was
deferred, but he was never brought up for judgment. His
representations of ardent devotion to the Whig interest seem to have
procured his absolution. Be this as it may, it is extraordinary to
reflect that he should live to be fifty-eight years of age before he
could find it in him to produce that masterpiece of romance, "Robinson
Crusoe," the delight, I may truly call it, of all reading nations. The
fiction is based upon the experiences of Alexander Selkirk. He had
read Steele's story of that man lonely in the South Sea island, and
Woodes Roger's account of the discovery of him. Sir Walter Scott has
pointed out that Defoe was known to the great circumnavigator Dampier,
and he assumes with good reason that he drew many hints from the
conversation and recollections of that fine seaman. He was a
prosperous man when he wrote "Robinson Crusoe," had built a house at
Stoke Newington, and drove in his own coach. This had come about
through his successful connection with certain journals; he was also
rapidly producing, and nearly all that he wrote sold handsomely.
Almost as many fine things have been said about "Robinson Crusoe" as
about Niagara Falls, or sunrise and sunset. The world has decided to
consider it Defoe's masterpiece, and to neglect all else that he wrote
for it. Nor can the world be blamed. The deliberate and dangerous
lewdness of Defoe is one of the most deplorable things in letters. We
shelve much of Smollett, much of Fielding, without great regret, but
it is lamentable that works of powers and perceptions so supreme as
"Moll Flanders" and "Colonel Jack" should be found unfit and
unreadable, infinitely more perilous to the young than the coarser,
but honester, freedoms of Smollett and Fielding, because of Defoe's
base tradesman-like trick of representing in colors as tempting as
possible the sins which with formal, pulpitic, hypocritical gravity he
entreats you to avoid. "Robinson Crusoe" is wholesome: one can see
one's daughter with that book in her hand and feel easy. Yet it has
not the strength nor the art of "Roxana," "Colonel Jack," and "Moll
Flanders." In fact, it may be said that when Defoe set about to write
this book he had no thoughts whatever of art in his head. He was to
relate what happened to a castaway, and the skill shown is that of a
sailor who writes up his log-book. No one could have been more
astonished by the success of the book than Defoe himself. He afterward
went to work to communicate a needless significance to the narrative,
whose charm is its eternal grace of freshness and simplicity, by
writing the "Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe," in which he
would have us believe that Crusoe's story is an allegory based on
Defoe's own life. This is accepted by some even in our own time. It is
easy to understand that Defoe should lose no opportunity to recommend
his works by every species of advertisement; no man could lie in a
literary sense with more self-complacency, and a clearer conception of
the business value of the falsehood; but it is wonderful to find
people choosing to travesty the palpably obvious, sooner than accept
the plain truth as it lies naked on the face of the printed page.
But if Defoe had never written a line of "Robinson Crusoe," we should
know him to be a great genius and a fine artist by the opening pages
of "Colonel Jack." All about the lives of the three boys, their
sleeping in glass houses, their picking of pockets, the loss of the
money in the hollow tree, and then the recovery of it, is in its kind
matchless in fiction. Wonderfully fine too are many of the touches in
"Moll Flanders": the whole story of her descent from the honesty of a
simple serving-maid to the horrors of Newgate and transportation, is
so masterful, the art is so consummate, the impersonation by Defoe of
the character of a subtle trollop full of roguish moralizings and thin
sentimentalities, is so extraordinary, that one can never cease to
deplore that, not the subject of the book, but Defoe's indecent
handling of it, should compel the world virtually to taboo it.
"Roxana" is also on the condemned list for the same reason. But
literature could sooner spare this book than the other two. It was
completed by another hand, and Defoe's own share might have very well
been the work of the person who wrote the sequel.
Another masterpiece is his "History of the Plague." This shows his
imagination at its highest, and it is not impossible but that its
composition may have cost him more trouble than "Robinson Crusoe"
itself. There is no space left to deal with his other works. Reference
can only be made to "Captain Singleton," "A System of Magic," "A
History of the Devil," "The Family Instructor," "The Plan of English
Commerce," "A New Voyage Round the World," etc. In naming these I
abbreviate the titles. Most of Defoe's title-pages epitomize his
works, and merely as a list would fill a stout volume.
It has been suggested that Defoe in his old age became insane, and hid
himself from his family for no discoverable reasons. It is certain
that in September, 1729, he mysteriously removed from his house, and
went into hiding in the neighborhood of Greenwich. From his secret
retreat he addressed letters to his son-in-law Baker, complaining of
his having been inhumanly ill-used by someone whom Mr. Lee, one of his
biographers, conjectures was Mist, the proprietor of _Mist's Journal_,
with whom Defoe had been associated in business. Other biographers
seem to think that Defoe was merely hiding from the pursuit of his
creditors, and dodging in his old dexterous manner the obligation of
making over property to his daughter Hannah, who was married to Baker.
For two years he was homeless and fugitive; it is not asserted,
however, that he was in actual distress at the time of his death. He
died in a lodging in a then respectable neighborhood called
Ropemaker's Alley, Moor Fields, April 26, 1731, in his seventieth
year.
[Signature of the author.]
DEAN SWIFT
By SAMUEL ARCHER
(1667-1745)
[Illustration: Dean Swift.]
Jonathan Swift's father died before the boy was born, and the care of
his education was kindly undertaken by Mr. Godwin Swift, his uncle, a
very eminent attorney at Dublin, who likewise took his mother and his
sister under his protection, and thus became a guardian to the family.
When his nephew was six years of age he sent him to school at
Kilkenny, and about eight years afterward he entered him a student of
Trinity College in Dublin, where Swift lived in perfect regularity and
in an entire obedience to the statutes; but the moroseness of his
temper often rendered him unacceptable to his companions, so that he
was little regarded and less beloved; nor were the academical
exercises agreeable to his genius.
He held logic and metaphysics in the utmost contempt, and he scarcely
attended at all to mathematics and natural philosophy, unless to turn
them into ridicule. The studies which he chiefly followed were history
and poetry, in which he made great progress; but to other branches of
science he had given so very little application, that when he appeared
as a candidate for the degree of bachelor of arts, after having
studied four years, he was set aside on account of insufficiency, and
at last obtained his admission _speciali gratia_, a phrase which in
that university carries with it the utmost marks of reproach. Swift
was fired with indignation at the treatment he had received in
Ireland, and therefore resolved to pursue his studies at Oxford.
However, that he might be admitted _ad eundem_, he was obliged to
carry with him a testimonial of his degree. The expression _speciali
gratia_ is so peculiar to the university of Dublin, that when Mr.
Swift exhibited his testimonial at Oxford, the members of the English
university concluded that the words _speciali gratia_ must signify a
degree conferred in reward of some extraordinary diligence and
learning. He was immediately admitted _ad eundem_, and entered himself
at Hart Hall, now Hartford College, where he constantly resided (some
visits to his mother, at Leicester, and to Sir William Temple, at
Moose Park, excepted) till he took his degree of master of arts, which
was in the year 1691. And in order to recover his lost time he now
studied eight hours daily for seven years.