THE AUTHOR OF “ROBINSON CRUSOE”
The age of Queen Anne was one which abounded in paradoxes, and loved
them. It was an age when England was full of patriotic policy, yet every
statesman was a traitor; when tradition was dear, yet revolution
practicable; when speech was gross and manners unrefined, yet the laws
of literary composition rigid, and correctness the test of poetry. It
was full of high ecclesiasticism and strict Puritanism, sometimes united
in one person. In it ignorance was most profound, yet learning most
considered and prominent. An age when Parson Trulliber was not an unfit
representative of the rural clergy, yet the public could be interested
in such a recondite pleasantry as the “Battle of the Books,” seems the
strangest self-contradiction; yet so it was in this paradoxical age. No
man lived who was a more complete paradox than Defoe. His fame is
world-wide, yet all that is known of him is one or two of his least
productions, and his busy life is ignored in the permanent place in
literary history which he has secured. His characteristics, as apart
from his conduct, are all those of an honest man, but when that most
important part of him is taken into the question it is difficult to
pronounce him anything but a knave. His distinguishing literary quality
is a minute truthfulness to fact which makes it almost impossible not to
take what he says for gospel. But his constant inspiration is fiction,
not to say, in some circumstances, falsehood. He spent his life in the
highest endeavors that a man can engage in: in the work of persuading
and influencing his country, chiefly for her good; and he is remembered
by a boy’s book, which is indeed the first of boy’s books, yet not much
more. Through these contradictions we must push our way before we can
reach to any clear idea of Defoe, the London tradesman who by times
composed almost all the newspapers in London, wrote all the pamphlets,
had his finger in every pie, and a share in all that was done, yet
brought nothing out of it but a damaged reputation and an unhonored end.
It is curious that something of a similar fate should have happened to
the other and greater figure, his contemporary, his enemy, in some
respects his fellow-laborer, another and more brilliant slave of the
government, which in itself had so little that was brilliant,--the great
dean whose name has already appeared so often in these sketches. Swift,
too, of all his books, is remembered chiefly by the book of the travels
of “Gulliver,” which, though full of a satirical purpose unknown to
Defoe, has come to rank along with “Robinson Crusoe.” We may say indeed
that these two books form a class by themselves, of perennial
enchantment for the young, and full of a curious and enthralling
illusion which even in age we rarely shake off. Swift rises into bitter
and terrible tragedy, while Defoe sinks into matter of fact and
commonplace; but the shipwrecked sailor on his desolate island, and the
exile at the courts of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, both in the beginnings
of their careers hold our imaginations captive, and are as fresh and as
powerful to-day as when, the one in keen satire, the other in the
legitimate way of business, they first made their appearance in the
world. It is a singular link between the men who both did Harley’s dirty
work for him, and were subject to a leader so much smaller than
themselves.
Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1661, of what would seem to have
been a respectable burgher family, only one generation out of the
country, which probably was why his father, with yeomen and grazier
relations in Northamptonshire, was a butcher in town. The butcher’s
name, however, was Foe; and whether the Defoe of his son was a mere
pleasantry upon his signature of D. Foe, or whether it embodied an
intention of setting up for something better than the tradesman’s
monosyllable, is a quite futile question upon which nobody can throw any
light. The boy was well educated, according to the capabilities of his
kindred, in a school at Newington, probably intended for the sons of
comfortable dissenting tradesmen, who were to be devoted to the
ministry, with the assistance in some cases of a fund raised for that
purpose. The master was good, and if Defoe attained there even the
rudiments of the information he afterward showed, and laid claim to, the
education must have been excellent indeed. He claims to have known
Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, “and could read the Greek,”--which
latter is as much as could have been expected had he been the most
advanced of scholars,--besides an acquaintance with science, geography,
and history not to be surpassed, apparently, by any man of his time. “If
I am a blockhead,” he says, “it was nobody’s fault but my own,” his
father having “spared nothing” on his education. Much of this
information, however, was no doubt picked up in the travels and much
knocking about of his early years, of which there is little record. He
would seem to have changed his mind about becoming a dissenting minister
at an early age, and was probably a youth of somewhat wandering
tendencies, as he claims to have been “out” with Monmouth, and does not
appear in any recognized occupation till after that unfortunate attempt.
He must have been twenty-four when he first becomes visible as a hosier
in Cornhill, which seems a very natural and indeed rather superior
beginning in life for the son of the butcher in Cripplegate. He laid
claim afterward to having been a trader,--not a shopkeeper,--a claim
supported more or less from a source not favorable to Defoe, by
Oldmixon, who says that his only connection with the trade was that of
“peddling to Portugal,” whatever that may mean. We may take it for
granted that he had occasions of visiting the Continent in connection,
one way or other, with his trade. The volume of advice to shopkeepers
which is entitled the “Complete English Tradesman,” written and
published in the latter part of his life, though it does not seem to be
taken by his biographers in general as any certain indication that he
himself made his beginning in a shop, is nevertheless full of curious
details of the life of the London shopkeeper of his time, to which class
he assuredly belonged. We learn from this curious production that vanity
was even more foolish in the eighteenth century than it is now. We are
acquainted with sporting shopkeepers who ride to hounds, and with
foolish young men who fondly hope to be mistaken for “swells”; but a
shopkeeper in a wig and a sword passes the power of imagination. It is a
droll example of the fallacy of all our fond retrospections and
preference of the good old times to find that in Defoe’s day this was by
no means an extraordinary circumstance. “The playhouses and balls,” he
says, “are more filled with citizens and young tradesmen than with
gentlemen and families of distinction; the shopkeepers wear different
garbs than what they were wont to do, are decked out with long wigs and
swords, and all the frugal badges of trade are quite disdained and cast
aside.”
We may take from this book as an illustration of the habits of the age
the following description of a young firm which is clearly on the way to
ruin:
They say there are two partners of them, but there had as good be
none, for they are never at home or in the shop. One wears a long
peruke and a sword, I hear, and you see him often at the ball and
at court, but very seldom in his shop, or waiting on his
customers; and the other, they say, lies abed till eleven o’clock
every day, just comes into the shop and shows himself, then stalks
about to the tavern to take a whet, then to the coffee-house to
hear the news, comes home to dinner at one, takes a long sleep in
his chair after it, and about four o’clock comes into the shop for
half an hour or thereabouts, then to the tavern, where he stays
till two in the morning, gets drunk, and is led home by the watch,
and so lies till eleven again; and thus he walks round like the
hand of a dial. And what will it all come to? They’ll certainly
break. They can’t hold long.
The account of the shop kept by these two idle masters is equally
characteristic.
There is a good stock of goods in it, but there is nobody to serve
but a prentice boy or two and an idle journeyman. One finds them
all at play together rather than looking out for customers; and
when you come to buy, they look as if they did not care whether
they showed you anything or no. Then it is a shop always exposed;
it is perfectly haunted with thieves and shoplifters. They are
nobody but raw boys in it that mind nothing, so that there are more
outcries of stop thief! at their door, and more constables fetched
to that shop than to all the shops in the street.
The households of the soberer and more sensible members of the craft are
also open to grave animadversion. The ladies are too fine; they treat
their friends with wine or punch or fine ale, and have their parlors set
off with the tea-table and the chocolate-pot, and the silver coffee-pot,
and oftentimes an ostentation of plate into the bargain, and they keep
“three or four maid servants, nay, sometimes five,” and some a footman
besides, “for ’tis an ordinary thing to see the tradesmen and
shopkeepers of London keep footmen, as well as the gentlemen. Witness
the infinite number of blue liveries which are so common now that they
are called the tradesmens’ liveries, and few gentlemen care to give blue
to their servants for that very reason.” Of the maids themselves, who
ask “six, seven, nay eight pounds per annum” for their services, a
terrible account is given in a pamphlet published about 1725, where
there is a humorous description in the first person of a young woman who
comes to apply for the place of housemaid, evidently maid of all work to
the speaker, who lives with his sister, with a man and maid for their
household. She is so fine that Defoe himself shows her into the parlor
and keeps her company till his sister is ready, thinking her a
gentlewoman come to pay a visit. Perhaps it is not Defoe, but, with his
usual skill, he makes us think so. All these details bring before us the
London of his time. The mercers had their shops in Paternoster Row,
“where the spacious shops, back warehouses, skylights, and other
conveniences, made on purpose for their trade, are still to be seen,”
where “they all grew rich and very seldom any failed or miscarried,” and
also in Cornhill, where Defoe’s own establishment was, though there,
apparently, business was carried on wholesale. It appears to him that
trade is going downhill fast when this order is changed, when Paul’s
Churchyard is filled with cane-chair makers, and Cornhill with the
meanest of trades, even Cheapside itself, “how is it now filled up with
shoemakers, toy shops, and pastry cooks?” Everything is going to
destruction, the old trader thinks, shaking his head as he goes through
the well-known streets, where once the fine ladies came in their fine
coaches standing in two rows; he cannot think but that trade itself is
coming to an end when such changes can come to pass. Trade, he says,
like vice, has come to a height, and as things decline when they are at
their extremes, so trade not only must decline, but does already
sensibly decline. It ought to be a comfort to the many timid persons who
have lived and prophesied evil since then to hear that Defoe a hundred
and fifty years ago had come to this sad conclusion.
He was born into a world he thus describes, into the atmosphere of
shops and counting-houses, where the good tradesman lived in the parlor
above or behind his shop, and was called with a bell when need was, and
was constant at business “from seven in the morning till twelve, and
from two to nine at night,” the interval being occupied with dinner;
where the appearance of the long, flowing periwig and the sword and the
man in blue livery were the danger-signals, and showed that he must
break, he could not hold; where the cry of “Stop, thief!” might suddenly
get up in the midst of the traffic, and the constable be called to some
fainting fine lady who had got a piece of taffeta or a lace in her muff
or under her hoop; and where, perhaps the greatest risk of all, a young
man of genius, who was but a hosier, might betray himself in a
coffee-house and be visited afterward by great personages veiling their
lace and embroidery under their cloaks, who wanted a seasonable pamphlet
or a newspaper put into the right way. A strange old London, more
difficult to put on record in its manners and features than it is to
record in pasteboard its outward aspect; where town could be convulsed
by a chance broadsheet, and the Government propped or wounded to death
by an anonymous essayist; when men of letters were secretaries of state,
and other men of letters starved in Grub street, and the masses thanked
God they could not read; when a revolution was made for liberty of
conscience, yet every office and privilege was barred by a test, and
intolerance was the habit of the time. The author of “Robinson Crusoe”
must have got all his ideas in the narrow, bustling streets, full of
rumors, of wars and commotions, and talk about the scandals of the
court, and sight of the finery and license which revolted, yet exercised
some strange fascinations upon the sober dissenting tradesmen who had
found the sway of Oliver a hard one. He was born the year after the
Restoration, and was no doubt carried out of London post-haste with the
rest of his family in the early summer when the roads were crowded with
wagons and carts full of women, children, and servants, all flying from
the plague. The butcher’s little son was but four, but very likely
retained a recollection of the crowded ways and strange spectacles of
the time; and no doubt he saw, with eyes starting out of their little
sockets with excitement and terror, the glare of the great fire which
burned down all the haunts of the pestilence and cured London by
destroying it. Then, both at school, at Newington, and in the parlor
behind the shop, there would be many a grave talk over what was to come
of all the wickedness in high places; and when the papist king came to
the throne, many discussions as to how much his new-born liberality was
good for, and whether there was any safety in trusting to his
indulgences and declarations of liberty of conscience. Defoe by this
time was old enough to speak his own mind. He had left school at
nineteen, and till he was twenty-four there is no appearance that he was
doing anything, save, perhaps, picking up notions on trade in general,
and as much as a young dissenter could, among his own class, or in the
coffee-houses where it was safe, delivering his sentiments upon
questions so vital to the welfare of the country. According to his own
statement, he had written a pamphlet in 1683 to prove that a Christian
power, though popish, was better than the Turk. He was now so bold as to
tell the dissenters “he had rather the Church of England should pull our
clothes off by fines and forfeitures than the papists should fall both
upon the church and the dissenters, and pull our skins off by fire and
faggot.” No doubt he was then about in London noticing everything,
discoursing largely with a wonderful, long-winded, sober enthusiasm,
making every statement that occurred to him look like the most certain
truth; talking everywhere, in the coffee-house, at the street corners,
down in Cripplegate in the paternal parlor, never silent; a swarthy
youth, with quick gray eyes and keen, eager features,
[Illustration: DANIEL DEFOE.
ENGRAVED BY C. A. POWELL, AFTER COPPERPLATE BY M. VAN DER GUCHT, IN
THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]
and large, loquacious mouth. Better be fined and silenced than let in
popery to burn you into the bargain. Better stand fast in all those
deprivations and hold your faith in corners, than accept suspicious
favor from such a source, and help to bring in again the Jesuit and the
Pope. While Penn, with his plausible speech and amiable temper, drew his
Quaker brethren into a strange harmony with the courtier’s arts, and
presented addresses to James, and accepted his grace, the young
tradesman would be pressing his very different argument upon the
suspicious somber groups far from St. James’s, where there was no
finery, but a great deal of determination. And when in the disturbed and
confused wretchedness of the time, no man knowing what was about to
happen, but sure that some change must come, young Monmouth set up his
hapless standard, could it be Defoe’s own impulse, or the catch of some
eddy of feeling into which he had been swept, which carried him off into
the ranks of the adventurer? It is said that three of his
fellow-students at Newington figure among the victims of the Bloody
Assize. Defoe would always be more disposed to talk than fight. He must,
we cannot help thinking, have thought it a feeble proceeding to put
yourself in the way of getting your head cut off, when you could use it
so much more effectually in convincing your fellow-creatures. His mind,
ever so ready to slip through every loophole, carried his body off
safely out of the clutches of Jeffreys. Probably when he turned up at
home against all hope after this unlucky escapade, his friends were too
thankful to thrust him into the hosier’s warehouse, where no doubt he
would give himself the air of having sold and bought hose all his life.
There is, however, nothing to build any account of his life upon in
these earlier years. The revolution filled him with enthusiasm, and King
William gained his full and honest support--a support both bold and
serviceable, and with nothing in it which was not to his credit. But
apparently a man cannot be so good a talker, so active a politician, and
follow the rules which he himself laid down for a successful tradesman
at the same time. Most likely his mind was never in his hose, and the
world was full of so many more exciting matters. Seven years after he
had been set up in business he “broke,” and had to fly, though no
further than Bristol, apparently, where he made an arrangement with his
creditors. He would seem to have failed for the large sum at that time
of seventeen thousand pounds, which he honestly exerted himself to pay,
and so far succeeded in doing so that he reduced in a few years his
debts to five thousand pounds in all; and, what was still more, finding
certain of the creditors with whom he had compounded to be poor, after
he had paid his composition fully, he made up to them the entire amount
of his debt--an unlooked-for and exceptional example of honorable
sentiment. Some years later, when Defoe had got into notoriety, and was
the object of a great deal of violent criticism, a contemporary gives
this fact, on the authority indeed of an anonymous gentleman in a
coffee-house only, but it seems to have been generally received as true.
The writer was in a company “where I and everybody else were railing at
him,” when “the gentleman took us up with this short speech:
“‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘I know this Defoe as well as any of you, for I
was one of his creditors, compounded with him and discharged him fully.
Several years afterward he sent for me, and, though he was clearly
discharged, he paid me all the remainder of his debt, voluntarily and of
his own accord, and he told me that, as far as God should enable him, he
intended to do so with everybody. When he had done he desired me to set
my hand to a paper to acknowledge it, which I readily did, and found a
great many names to the paper before me, and I think myself bound to own
it.’”
This has a suspicious resemblance to Defoe’s own style, but the fact
seems to be generally received as true.
Neither his business nor his failure, however, kept him from the active
exercise of his literary powers, which he used in the service of King
William with what seems to have been a most genuine and hearty sympathy.
Pamphlet after pamphlet came from his pen with an influence upon public
opinion which it is difficult to estimate nowadays, but which was
certainly much greater than any fugitive political publications could
have now. He wrote in defense of a standing army, the curious insular
prejudice against which was naturally astonishing as well as annoying to
the continental prince who had become king of Great Britain. He wrote in
support of the war, which to William was a vital necessity, but which
England was somewhat slow to see in the same light. And, most
effectively of all, he answered the always ready national grumble
against foreigners, which was especially angry and thunderous against
the Dutchmen, by the triumphant doggerel of “The True-born Englishman,”
the first of Defoe’s works which takes a conspicuous place. In this
strange and not very refined production he held up to public admiration
the pedigree of the race which complained so warmly of every new
invasion, and held so high an opinion of itself. “A true-born Englishman
’s a contradiction,” he cries, and sets forth, step by step, the
admixtures of new blood which have gone to the formation of the English
people--Roman, Saxon, Dane, Norman.
From this amphibious, ill-born mob began
That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
It is not a very delicate hand which traces these, and many another wave
of strange ancestors. “Still the ladies loved the conquerors.” But
Defoe’s rude lines went straight to the mark. The public had no
objection to a coarse touch when it was effective, and Englishmen are
rarely offended by ridicule; never, we may say, when it is home-born.
The stroke was so true that the native sense of humor was hit. Perhaps
England did not, on account of Defoe’s verses, like the Dutchmen any
better, but she acknowledged Tutchin’s seditious assault upon the
foreigners to be fully answered, and the universal laugh cleared the
air. Eighty thousand copies of this publication were sold, it is said,
in the streets, where everybody bought the “lampoon,” which, assailing
everybody, gave no individual sting. It also procured for Defoe a
personal introduction to the king. Whether it was to this or to his
former services that he owed a small appointment he held for some years,
it is difficult to say, but evidently he did not serve King William for
nothing. In the mean time Defoe resumed his business occupations, and
set up a manufactory of pantiles at Tilbury, where he employed a hundred
poor laborers, and throve, or seems to have thriven, in his new
industry, living in something like luxury, and paying off, as described,
his previous debts. His head was full of the projects upon which one of
his most successful pamphlets was written, and he recommended many
sweeping schemes and made many bold suggestions on all subjects, from
the institution of an income tax to that of an academy like the French.
It was a period when the air was swarming with schemes, and Defoe was
not necessarily original in his suggestions; but his brain was teeming
with life and energy, and there is no saying which was absolutely his
own thought, and which the thought of others. He was a man to whom ideas
came as he was writing, and were flung off into the air, to fly or fall
as they might. One thought, one fancy, suggested another. For instance,
after arguing long and well in favor of the war with France, which was
the object of King William’s life, and the only thing that could
save--according to the ideas of his party on the Continent, and
eventually of most sound Protestants in England--the Protestant faith,
Defoe, with a sudden whimsical perception of certain possibilities on
the other side, came out with a pamphlet entitled, “Reasons Against a
War with France,” which was founded on the suggestion that a war with
Spain instead would be very profitable, and that the Spanish Indies were
a booty well worth having: a sudden dash into new fields which must have
brought up the public which he had persuaded to fight France with a
certain gasp of breathless inability to follow this rapid reasoner in
the instantaneous change of front, which meant no real change of
opinion, but only the flash of a sudden happy thought.
When William died, however, and the times changed, the High Church came
back with Anne into a potency which had been impossible in the
unsympathetic reign of that Dutchman. Defoe had written some time before
against the practice of occasional conformity; that is, the device by
which dissenters managed to hold public offices in despite of existing
tests, by kneeling now and then at the altars of the established church,
and receiving the communion there. Defoe took the highest view of
principle in this respect, and denounced the nonconformists who thus
secured office to themselves by the sacrifice of their consciences,
“bowing in the House of Rimmon.” There seems no reason, in fact, why a
moderate dissenter should not do this, except that any religious duty
specially performed for the sake of a secular benefit is always suspect
and odious. Yet the obvious argument that a man who could reconcile it
with his conscience to attend the worship of the church should not be a
dissenter, was unquestionably sound and unassailable in point of logic.
Defoe had deeply offended the dissenters, to whom he himself belonged,
by his protest; but this did not prevent him from rushing into print in
defense of the expedient of occasional conformity as soon as it was
threatened from the other side. There is little difficulty in following
the action of his mind in such a question. It was wrong and a deflection
from the highest point of duty to sacrifice one’s conscience, even
occasionally, for the sake of office; but, on the other hand, it was
equally wrong to abolish an expedient which broke the severity of the
test, and made life possible to the nonconforming classes. The views
were contradictory, yet both were true, and it was his nature to see
both sides with most impartial good sense, while he felt it to be, if a
breach of external consistency, no wrong to defend or assail one side or
the other, as might seem most necessary. He allowed himself so complete
a license on this point that it is curious he should be found the public
champion of the higher duty. No doubt his utterance to his dissenting
brethren on that question was to himself no reason why he should not
defend their right to use the expedient if they had a mind. But this is
too fine a distinction for the general intelligence.
The discussions on this subject were the occasion of one of the most
striking episodes in his life. When the bill against occasional
conformity was introduced, to the delight of the High Church party, from
the queen downward, and when the air began to buzz around him with the
bluster, hitherto subdued by circumstances, of the reviving party, who
would have made short work with the dissenters had their power been
equal to their will, a grimly humorous perception of the capabilities of
the occasion seems to have seized Defoe. Notwithstanding that he had
angered all the sects by his plain speaking, he was a dissenter born,
and there is no such way of reconverting a stray Israelite as to hear
the Philistines blaspheme. He seized upon the extremest views of the
high-fliers with characteristic insight, and, with a keen consciousness
of the power of his weapon, used it remorselessly. The “Shortest Way to
Deal with Dissenters” is a grave and elaborate statement of the wild
threats and violent talk in which, in the intoxication of newly
acquired power, the partizans of the church indulged, with noise and
exaggeration proportioned to the self-suppression which had been forced
upon them by the panic of a papal restoration under James, and by the
domination of the more moderate party during William’s unsympathetic
reign. They were now at the top of the wave, and could brandish their
swords in the eyes of their adversaries. Their talk in some of their
public utterances was as bloodthirsty as if they intended a St.
Bartholomew. Defoe took up this frenzied babble, and put it into the
form of a grave and practical proposal. As serious as was Swift when he
proposed to utilize the superabundant babies of the poor by eating them,
Defoe propounded the easy way to get rid of the dissenters and the
necessity of settling this question forever. “Shall any law be given to
such wild creatures? Some beasts are for sport, and the huntsman gives
them advantages of ground, but some are knocked on the head by all
possible ways of violence and surprise.” He says:
’T is vain to trifle in this matter. The light, foolish handling of
them by mulcts, fines, etc., ’t is their glory and their advantage.
If the gallows instead of the counter, and the galleys instead of
the fines, were the reward of going to a conventicle to preach or
to hear, there would not be so many sufferers. The spirit of
martyrdom is over. They that will go to church to be chosen
sheriffs and mayors would go to forty churches rather than be
hanged. If one severe law were made and punctually executed, that
whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished, the nation
and the preacher be hanged, we should see an end of the tale. They
would all come to church, and one age would make us all one again.
To talk of 5s. a month for not coming to this sacrament, and 1s.
per week for not coming to church, this is such a way of converting
people as never was known. This is selling them a liberty to
transgress for so much money. If it be not a crime, why don’t we
give them full license? And if it be, no price ought to compound
for committing it, for that is selling a liberty to people to sin
against God and the government.
If it be a crime of the highest consequence, both against the peace
and welfare of the nation, the glory of God, the good of the
church, and the happiness of the soul, let us rank it among
capital offences, and let it receive a punishment in proportion to
it.
We hang men for trifles and banish them for things not worth
naming. But an offence against God and the church, against the
welfare of the world, and the dignity of religion shall be bought
off for 5s.--this is such a shame to a Christian Government that
’tis with regret I transmit it to posterity.
If men sin against God, affront his ordinances, rebel against his
church, and disobey the precepts of their superiors, let them
suffer as such capital crimes deserve: so will religion flourish,
and this divided nation be once again united.... I am not supposing
that all the dissenters in England should be hanged or banished,
but as in cases of rebellions and insurrections, if a few of the
ringleaders suffer, the multitude are dismissed; so a few obstinate
people being bad examples, there’s no doubt but the severity of the
law would find a stop in the compliance of the multitude.
The reader will perceive by what a serious argument the hot-headed
fanatic was betrayed and the wiser public put upon their guard. The
mirror thus held up to nature, with a grotesque twist in it which made
the likeness bewildering, gave London such a sensation as she had not
felt for many a day. The wildest excitement arose. At first all parties
in the shock of surprise took it for genuine. “The wisest churchmen in
the nation were deceived by it,” and while some were even so foolish as
to receive it with unthinking applause, which was the case, according to
Oldmixon, “in our two famous Universities,” the more sensible reader of
the church party was first indignant with the high-flyers for expressing
such opinions, and then furious with the satirist who had insulted the
church by putting them into her mouth. Nobody indeed saw the joke. The
fellow of Cambridge who thanked his bookseller for packing up “so
excellent a treatise” along with the books he had ordered, and
considered it “next to the Sacred Bible and Holy Comments the best book
he ever saw”; the “soberer churchman” who “openly exclaimed against the
proposal, condemned the
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. GILES, CRIPPLEGATE,
WHERE DEFOE IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN BAPTIZED.
DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY H. E. SYLVESTER.]
warmth that appeared in the clergy, and openly professed that such a man
as Sacheverell and his brethren would blow up the foundations of the
church”; the dissenters who were at once insulted and alarmed by the
extraordinary threats thus set forth against them--all alike turned upon
the perpetrator of the hoax when he was discovered. Some “blushed when
they reflected how far they had applauded,” some labored to prove that
it was “a horrible slander against the church.” The government, sharing
the general commotion, placed Defoe in the position of a revolutionary
leader who, “by the villainous insinuations of that pamphlet, would have
frightened the dissenters into another rebellion.” Defoe himself seems
to have had a moment of panic, and fled. He was proclaimed in the
“Gazette,” and a reward offered for his discovery. His biographers in
general assert that he gave himself up with some generosity to save the
printer and publisher, who had been arrested, but there are public
documents which seem to prove a different procedure, showing how “My
Lord Nottingham hunted him out,” and how “the person who discovered
Daniel Foe” claimed and was paid the reward of fifty pounds offered for
the offender, described as a “middle-aged, spare man, about forty years
old, of a brown complexion and dark brown colored hair (but wears a
wig), a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his
mouth.” However that might be, he was arrested and committed to Newgate
in the spring of 1703, and the obnoxious publication--“this little book,
a contemptible pamphlet of but three sheets of paper,” as he describes
it--was burned by the common hangman. It was not, however, till the
summer, three or four months after his arrest, that he was tried, and
that period he seems to have spent in Newgate in perfect freedom, at
least for literary productions, since he filled the air with a mist of
pamphlets explaining that he meant nothing but a harmless satire at one
moment, at another exhorting the dissenters to be content with
spiritual freedom, and again bursting into the rude but potent strains
of the “Hymn to the Pillory.” He was sentenced to fine and imprisonment,
as well as to that grotesque but sometimes terrible instrument of
torture; but the pillory was no torture to Defoe. On the last three days
of July--once before the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, where his shop had
been, and where no doubt everybody knew him, once in Cheapside, and
again at Temple Bar--he stood aloft with the crowd surging round and
performed his penance. The crowd in those days was not a soft or civil
one when it indorsed the sentence pronounced by law. Its howls and
cries, its missiles and its curses, made the punishment horrible. But
the crowd had by this time found time to take in the joke,--banter, when
it is broad enough to be intelligible, always pleases the general,--and
there must have been some bonhomie about the sufferer, some good repute
as a merry fellow and one who loved a jest, which conciliated the
populace. Instead of dead cats, they flung him nosegays; they gathered
about his platform under the low deep arch which once made a mock gate
to the city, and behind the bustling ’Change, and between the shops of
Cheapside, holding a series of impromptu festivals, drinking his health,
shouting out his new verses, which were sold by thousands in the
streets:
Hail, hieroglyphic state machine,
Contriv’d to punish fancy in;
Men that are men, in thee can feel no pain,
And all thy insignificants disdain;
Exalted on thy stool of state,
What prospect do I see of sovereign fate.
The bold satirist, looking through those “lofty loops,” recalls all the
good men that have stood there, reminding himself that even the learned
Selden had the pillory in prospect, and that, had he “triumphed on thy
stage,” no man could have shunned it more. Contempt, “that false new
word for shame,” has no power where there is no crime, he declares. The
lines are rough, but the sentiments are manly and full of honest scorn,
which here and there reaches a high tone. From his platform where he
stood in all the emancipation of feeling that the worst had happened, he
throws a bold glance upon the disorders of the time, political and
social, and summons to this post of scorn the firebrands, the cowards,
the failures of the age. One can imagine those keen gray eyes inspecting
through the loops the hoarse and roaming groups, not sure perhaps what
his reception was to be, gathering courage as the shouts became
intelligible and turned into hurrahs for Defoe. No doubt he marked the
fluctuating crowd as keenly as if he had been a careless spectator at a
window, and saw Colonel Jack and his brother pickpockets threading
devious ways among the multitude, with here and there a gallant from St.
James in his long curled periwig fluttering on the edge, and the
tradesmen, half curious, half unwilling to join in the riot, looking on
from their doors. A pillory is a coign of vantage when the man upon it
has eyes like Defoe’s. “Tell ’em,” he says, apostrophizing his platform
contemptuously--
Tell ’em the men that placed him here
Are friends unto the times,
But at a loss to find his guilt,
They can’t commit his crimes.
Mr. Burton, in his “Reign of Queen Anne,” quotes from manuscript
authority a statement that Penn had been commissioned by Defoe to offer
“an account of all his accomplices in whatsoever he has been concerned,”
on condition that he should be freed from the pillory, which is a very
confusing statement, since it seems impossible to understand what
accomplices he could have had. This, according to the same authority,
was considered important enough to call for a special meeting of the
cabinet council; but “the Queen seems to think that his confession
amounts to nothing.” Another account is that Nottingham visited him in
prison and offered him his liberty if he would say who set him on to do
it. Thus this _jeu d’esprit_--the first exercise of Defoe’s special and
most characteristic gift, that of endowing a fictitious production with
every appearance of reality--set the world aflame. It is almost a more
astonishing feat than the narratives which look so like literal
transcripts of experience; for the subtle power which, by a cunning
fitting together of actual utterances, could thus indicate the alarming
tendency and danger of a great party, is more wonderful than to create
an imaginary man and trace his every action as if he were a real one.
The art may be less noble, but it is more difficult. Indeed, the
“Shortest Way” is about the only example of such an extraordinary
achievement. Swift’s tremendous satire was more bitter, more scathing,
and treated not so much the exaggerated opinions of a class as the cruel
and callous indifference of human nature to the sufferings of its slaves
and victims.
This curious episode once more ruined Defoe. It is to be supposed that
when he went into hiding his business had to be abandoned, and all his
affairs got into confusion. The official document already quoted
describes him as “living at Newington Green with his father-in-law, who
is a lay elder of a conventicle there.” This description, however, is
evidently drawn up by an enemy, since his previous bankruptcy is spoken
of as fraudulent, an assertion made nowhere else. His biographer,
Wilson, informs us that though he had “kept his coach” before this
period, the pantile works had now to be broken up, and his business was
ruined. He had, though there is no information about her, a wife and six
children--perhaps supported by the elder at Newington, who very likely
thought, like his brethren, but badly of Defoe.
He lay in Newgate for nearly a year, without, however, to all
appearance, losing any opportunity for a pamphlet during the whole time,
and laying in grist for his mill amid the strange and terrible
surroundings of an eighteenth-century prison. Mr. Minto, in the
admirable sketch of Defoe which he has contributed to the “English Men
of Letters” series, seems to think that his hero must have enjoyed
himself in this teeming world of new experiences, and that “he spent
many pleasant hours” listening to the tales of his fellow-prisoners. No
doubt there must have been some compensation to such a man in making
acquaintance with a new aspect of life, but it is, perhaps, going too
far to attribute a possibility of enjoyment to any undegraded man in the
pandemonium described in so many contemporary narratives. Defoe did,
however, what, so far as we are aware, no other man before or after him
has ever done (except, perhaps, Leigh Hunt, in whose case we have a
vague recollection of similar activity): he originated, wrote, and
published a newspaper in his prison. “The Review,” so called, “of the
Affairs of France”--that is, of the affairs of Europe and the
world--that is, of any political subject that might be uppermost--was
published twice a week, and appeared during the whole time of his
imprisonment. A brilliant, familiar, graphic commentary upon all that
was happening, a dialogue between the imprisoned spectator of life and
the busy world outside, in which he was both questioner and answerer,
pouring out upon the country with the keenest understanding of other
people’s views, and the most complete mastery of his own, his remarks
and criticisms, his judgment and advice. A newspaper in those days was
not, of course, the huge broadsheet which it has now become. The
“Review” was a sheet of eight, but afterward of only four small quarto
pages. It was no assemblage of paragraphs, trivial or important, the
work of many anonymous persons whose profession it is to manufacture a
newspaper, but one man’s eager and lively conversation with his
countrymen, full of the vigor of personal opinion and the unity of an
individual view. A keener intelligence was never brought to the
treatment of public affairs, nor a mind more thoughtful, reasonable, and
practical. His prejudices were few--too few, perhaps. Granted that the
aim was good, Defoe was disdainful of punctilio in the way of carrying
it out. He was not above doing evil that good might come, but he had a
far higher refinement of meaning than could be embraced by any such
vulgar statement in his subtle faculty of discovering, and all but
proving, that what might have seemed evil to a common intelligence was
in reality a good, if not the best, way of carrying his excellent
purpose out. Up to the moment of his leaving Newgate, however, there was
nothing equivocal in the use he made of his extraordinary faculties. He
was a free man discussing boldly on his own responsibility, and without
any _arrière pensée_, the affairs of England. If he had first keenly
assailed the dissenters, who were his own people, in respect of the
compliances by which they made themselves capable of bearing office, and
then exposed to grimmest ridicule the adversaries who aimed at rendering
them altogether incapable, there was in this no real inconsistency. His
championship of King William had been honest and thorough. If he loved
to have a finger in every pie, and let loose his opinion at every
crisis, there was no contemporary opinion which was better worth having.
But now this unwearying critic, this keen observer, this restless,
brilliant casuist, this practical man of business, had come to the
turning-point of his life.
His liberation from Newgate followed closely upon the advent of Harley
to power. When this event happened, it is said that one of the first
things the new minister did was to send a message to Defoe in prison:
“Pray ask that gentleman what I can do for him.” Whether it was in
direct sequence to this question, or whether the Queen had formed an
independent intention of freeing the prisoner, we need not inquire; but
he was set free, Queen Anne furnishing the means of paying his fine. She
is said also to have taken an interest in his family, and contributed to
their support during his confinement. He declared himself to be
liberated on the condition of writing nothing (further modified as
nothing “which some people might not like”) for some years; a condition
which he immediately fulfilled by publishing an “Elegy on the Author of
the True-born Englishman,” to tell the world so, and took no further
notice of the prohibition, so far as appears. The real meaning of this
curious statement would seem by all evidence to have been that Defoe
there and then accepted the position of a secret servant of the
government, a writer pledged to support their measures and carry out
their views. At the moment, and perhaps in reality during the greater
part of his career, their measures were those which he approved; and
certainly at this period of his history he has never been accused of
writing against his conscience. Even when, after eager championship of
peace, he was obliged by political changes to veer into what looked like
support of war, he was never without the strong defense to fall back
upon, that he demanded peace only after securing certain indispensable
conditions, and that war might be, and was, the only means of gaining
them--an argument most simple and evident to his mind.
Harley has never appeared in history as a great man, but when we
consider that he was able thus to subjugate and secure to his own
service two of the greatest intelligences of his time, it is impossible
not to respect his influence and judgment. The great and somber genius
of Swift, the daring, brilliant, and ever-ready intellect of Defoe,
became instruments in the hands of this ordinary and scheming statesman.
Once more, with a curious parallelism, these two men stand before us--no
friends to each other. “An illiterate fellow, whose name I forget,”
says Swift, with the almost brutal scorn which was part of his
character; while Defoe replies to the taunt with angry virulence,
setting forth his own acquirements, “though he wrote no bill at his
door, nor set Latin on the front of his productions,” a piece of
pretension, habitual to the time, of which the other was guilty. But
Harley, who was not worthy, so far as intellect went, to clean the shoes
of either, had them both at his command, serving his purposes, doing his
bidding. Which of them suffered most by the connection it is not easy to
say. It turned Swift’s head, and brought into humiliating demonstration
the braggart and the bully in his nature. Defoe had not the demoralizing
chance of being the lord treasurer’s boon companion; but Harley made a
dishonest partizan, a paid and slippery special pleader and secret
agent, out of the free-lance of politics. From this moment the defenders
and champions of Defoe have to turn into casuists, as he himself did.
They have to give specious explanations to suppress and account for his
shifts and changes, though at first they were sufficiently innocent. The
evil grew, however, so that toward the end of his career even the
apologist must keep silence; but this is the nature of all evil.
If excuses are to be sought for Defoe’s conduct in this first beginning
of his slavery, it will not be difficult to find them. The age, for one
thing, was corrupt through and through. There was not a statesman but
had two strings to his bow, nor a politician of any description who did
not attempt to serve two masters. To hold the balance between Hanover
and St.-Germain, ready to perform a demi-volt in the air at any moment
as the scale should turn, was the science of the day. On the other hand,
Defoe was now a ruined man, with a family to support, and nothing but
his busy and inexhaustible pen to do it with. The material inducement of
a certain income to fall back upon, whatever
[Illustration: ROBERT HARLEY, EARL OF OXFORD.
ENGRAVED BY JOHN P. DAVIS, AFTER THE ORIGINAL PAINTING BY SIR GODFREY
KNELLER, IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]
might be the chances of journalism, must have been very strong. And what
was stronger still was the delight of his own vivacious, restless, ready
mind, with its sense of boundless power and infinite resource, to which
difficulty was a delight and the exercise of walking over hot coals or
dancing on a sword-point the most exhilarating possibility, in making
its triumphant way over obstacles which would have baffled almost all
his contemporaries. “The danger’s self was lure alone” to this skilled
and cunning fencer, this master of all the arts. In a very different
sense from that of Tennyson’s noble hero, “Faith Unfaithful” was
inspiration and strength to him, and to be falsely true the most
delightful situation. He loved to support his principles by a hundred
dodges, and plead them from the other side, and make of himself the
devil’s advocate in the interest of heaven. All this was life to his
mind. He must have had a positive pleasure in proving to himself first,
and then to all England, that the happiest thing a Whig could do was to
find the Tory measures exactly those which he would have recommended,
and that his allegiance to the queen required a change of policy on his
part whenever circumstances compelled her to change her ministry. It was
all devotion--not time-serving, as the vulgar thought. Defoe took
infinite pleasure in proving that it was so, in making everything clear.
The commonplace and humdrum expedient of following your party would have
been dull to him--a proceeding without interest as without danger. He
wanted excitement, obstacles to get over; a position which would make
sudden claims upon his ingenuity to account for and fortify it. Such a
mind is rare, and still more rarely is it accompanied by genius. But
when such a combination does occur it is a very curious spectacle.
In the mean time, however, all that Defoe had to do was simple enough.
He had to support peace and the union--two things which in his free
estate he had already advocated with all his powers. He did it with the
utmost skill, fervor, and success, and to all appearance contributed
much to the great public act which was the subject of so many struggles
and resistances on the part of the smaller nation--the union. This great
expedient, of which from the first he had seen the advantage, Defoe
worked for with unwearying zeal. He praised and caressed Caledonia--upon
which subject he wrote one of those vigorous essays in verse which he
called poetry--and the tolerance of the Presbyterian Church, and the
good sense of the nation generally, which was not always perceptible to
English politicians; and even risked a visit to Edinburgh in performance
of the orders of the government, though at the risk of rude handling to
himself. In all this there cannot be the slightest doubt that he was
entirely honest and patriotic, and acted from an enlightened personal
view of the necessities of the case. When the curious incident of the
Sacheverell prosecution occurred, he had once more a subject entirely to
his own mind, and expressed his own feelings in supporting with all his
might the measures of the government against that High Church firebrand,
one of the chief of those whom he had held up to public ridicule in the
“Shortest Way.” So far he was fortunate, being employed upon subjects
entirely congenial to his mind, and on which he had already strong
convictions. The equivocal part of the matter is that he never ceased to
assert and insist upon his independence. “Contemn,” he says, “as not
worth mentioning, the suggestions of some people of my being employed to
carry on the interests of a party. I have never loved any party, but
with my utmost zeal have sincerely espoused the great and original
interest of this nation and of all nations--I mean truth and
liberty”--which was the truth, yet not all the truth. Again, with still
more violent protestations, he refers to his private circumstances, of
which nothing is known, to prove how little he was protected by power.
It would seem from this statement that he was still being pursued for
the remnant of old debts, or those new ones with which the failure of
his tile factory and his long imprisonment had saddled him.
If paid, gentlemen, for writing [he cries], if hired, if employed,
why still harassed with merciless and malicious men; why pursued to
all extremities of law for old accounts which you clear other men
of every day? Why oppressed, distressed, and driven from his
family, and from all his prospects of delivering them and himself?
Is this the fate of men employed and hired? Is this the figure the
agents of courts and princes make?
The argument is a feeble one for such a practised reasoner as Defoe,
without considering the trifling detail that it was untrue, for debts
are by no means unknown to favorites of the crown. Nor could he have
been saved by Harley’s pay, which probably was never very great, from
the consequences of previous misfortunes. The reader will think that a
judicious silence would have been more appropriate, but that was not
Defoe’s way. The only wonder is that he did not adduce such detailed
evidence of his own freedom as would have deceived any man, and shown to
demonstration that it was he who subsidized the ministry, and not they
him. The wonderful thing is that he was free through all, maintaining
his own favorite opinions, working as an independent power. Servile
journalists have existed in plenty, but seldom one who took the pay of
his masters and served their interests, yet fought under his own flag
with honesty and a good conscience all the while.
This happy state, however, did not last. Harley fell, but with his last
breath (as a minister) adjured his champion not to sacrifice himself,
but to come to an understanding with his successor, Godolphin. This
necessitated a certain revolution in respect to peace, which Defoe
managed cleverly with the excellent device above mentioned. And there
was still higher ground which he felt himself entitled to take. The
public safety was involved in the stability of the new ministry such as
it was. And he faces the dilemma with boundless pluck and assurance.
“Though I don’t like the crew, I won’t sink the ship; I’ll pump and
heave and haul and do everything I can, though he that pulls with me
were my enemy. The reason is plain. We are all in the ship and must sink
or swim together.” These admirable reasonings brought him at last to the
calm rectitude of the following conclusion:
It occurred to me instantly as a principle for my conduct that it
was not material to me what ministers her Majesty was pleased to
employ. My duty was to go along with every ministry so far as they
did not break in upon the constitution and the laws and liberties
of my country, my part being only the duty of a subject, viz: to
submit to all lawful commands, and to enter into no service that
was not justifiable by the laws, to all of which I have exactly
obliged myself.
When Harley returned to power, another modification became necessary,
but Defoe piously felt it was providential that he should thus be thrown
back upon his original protector; and had the matter ended here, as was
long supposed, it is difficult to see what indictment could be brought
against him. It is not expedient certainly that a director of public
opinion should have state pay, and does not look well when the secret is
betrayed. But so long as the scope of all his productions is good,
honest, and patriotic, with only as much submission in trifles as is
inevitable, the bargain is a personal meanness rather than a public
crime, and this was long supposed to have been the case. It was believed
that after the death of Queen Anne and Harley’s final fall, Defoe’s
eloquent mouth was closed, and he disappeared into the calm of private
life to earn a better hire and a more lasting influence through the two
immortal works of fiction by which alone, but for the painful labors of
biographers, his name would have been known. Had the matter been left
so, how much happier would it have been for the hero of this romance of
literary life, how much more edifying for posterity! We could have
imagined the tired warrior retiring from that hot and painful field in
which even the laurels were not worth the plucking, where defeat was
miserable and success mean, and scarcely any combatant could keep his
honor intact, to the quietness of some suburban house in which his three
pretty daughters could care for him and idolize him, and where his
wonderful imagination, no longer a slave to the exigencies of political
warfare, could weave its dreams into a sober certainty of life awake. We
should then have said of the author of “Robinson Crusoe” and the
“Journal of the Plague,” that in his poverty and anxiety and overhaste
he had been beguiled into a bargain which might have been a shameful one
had not his marvelous power of seeing every side of a subject, and that
insight of genius which divines the real unity of honest souls through
all the external diversities which fill the limited vision of common
men, carried him triumphantly through. And upon what real fault there
was we should have thrown a veil. The age would have borne the blame--an
age which was corrupt to the core, and in which men changed their
principles every day. In the garden at Newington, where the young ladies
entertained their lovers, we could have pictured him benevolent and
friendly in the flowing peruke under which his keen eyes sparkled,
looking on at the love-making with prudent, tradesmanlike thoughts of
Sophia’s portion, and how much the young people would have to set up
housekeeping upon, coming in not inappropriately between the pages of
Crusoe--perhaps taking a suggestion about Robinson’s larder from some
passing talk about the storeroom, or modifying for the use of Friday
some rustical remark of the young serving-man from the country, or in
the renewing of old recollections produced by some old friend’s visit
finding an anecdote, a detail, to incorporate into the “Journal of the
Plague.” And we should have asked ourselves by what strange play of
genius the unenchanted island, where all the sober elaborations of fact
clothed so completely the vivid realizations of imagination, should have
risen out of the mists amid those trim, old-fashioned alleys, and green
plots, and stiff parterres of flowers.
Alas! That demon of research which in its poking and prying sometimes
puts old bones together, and sometimes scatters to the winds the ashes
of the dead, has spoiled this pleasant picture. Impelled by its
influence, an unwary or else too painstaking student, some twenty years
ago, was seized with the idea of roaming the earth in search of relics
of Defoe. And the diabolical powers which put this fatal pursuit into
his mind directed him to a bundle of yellow papers in the State Paper
Office which has, alas! for ever and ever made an end of our man of
genius. These treacherous papers give us to wit under his own hand that
he was in reality in full action in the most traitorous of employments
during the period of his supposed retirement. The following, which is
the first of these fatally self-elucidatory letters, will reveal at once
the inconceivable occupation to which Defoe in his downfall lent
himself. He had perhaps compromised himself too much, and been too
completely identified with Harley at the end to be considered capable of
more honorable and evident employment. The letter is addressed to the
secretary of the minister who had given him his disgraceful office:
It was proposed by my Lord Townsend that I should appear as if I
were as before under the displeasure of the government, and
separated from the Whigs, and that I might be more serviceable in a
kind of disguise than if I appeared openly. In the interval of
this, Dyer, the “News-Letter” writer, being dead, and Dormer, his
successor, being unable by his troubles to carry on that work, I
had an offer of a share in the property as well as in the
management of that work.
I immediately acquainted my Lord Townsend of it, who, by Mr.
Buckley, let me know it would be a very acceptable piece of
service, for that letter was really very prejudicial to the
public, and the most difficult to come at in a judicial way in case
of offense given. My Lord was pleased to add, by Mr. Buckley, that
he would consider my service in that case, as he afterwards did.
Upon this I engaged in it, and that so far, that though the
property was not wholly my own, yet the conduct and government of
the style of news was so entirely in me, that I ventured to assure
His Lordship the sting of that mischievous paper should be entirely
taken out, though it was granted that the style should continue
Tory, as it was, that the party might be amused and not set up
another, which would have destroyed the design, and this part I
therefore take entirely on myself still.
This went on for a year before my Lord Townsend went out of the
office, and His Lordship, in consideration of the service, made me
the appointment which Mr. Buckley knows of, with promise of a
further allowance as service presented.
My Lord Sunderland, to whose goodness I had many years ago been
obliged, when I was in a secret commission sent to Scotland, was
pleased to approve and continue this service, and the appointment
annexed, and, with His Lordship’s approbation I introduced myself,
in the disguise of a translator of the foreign news, to be so far
concerned in this weekly paper of Mist’s as to be able to keep it
within the circle of a secret management, also prevent the
mischievous part of it, and yet neither Mist, or any of those
concerned with him, have the least guess or suspicion by whose
direction I do it.
There is nothing, it seems to us, for any apologist to say in
explanation of this extraordinary statement. The emissary of a Whig and
Hanoverian government acting as editor of a Tory and Jacobite
newspaper,--nay, of three newspapers,--in order to take the harm out of
them, to amuse the Tory party with a pretense of style and subjects
suitable to their views, while balking all their purposes, is at once
the most ingenious and the most shameless of all devices. It continued
for a long period, and was very successful. But when the deceit was
discovered at last, Mist, the deluded publisher, made a murderous
assault upon the deceiver, and the journalists of the period seem to
have risen unanimously against him. That Defoe must have fallen sadly
before he came to this is very evident; but how he fell, except by the
natural vengeance of deterioration, which makes a man who has long
paltered with the truth unable at last to distinguish the gradations
which separate the doubtful from the criminal, no one can say. He must,
however, have fallen indeed in position and importance before he could
be put to such miserable work; and he must have fallen more fatally,
like that other son of the morning, deep down into hades, where he
became the father of lies and the betrayer of mankind, before he could
have been capable of this infamous mission.
We turn with relief to the work which, of all these manifold labors, is
the only portion which has really survived the effects of time. Defoe’s
political writings, with all their lucidity, their brilliant good sense,
daring satire, and astonishing readiness and variety, are for the
student, and retain a place among the materials of history, studied no
longer for their own sake, but for the elucidations they may give. But
“Robinson Crusoe” lives by his own right, and will, we may confidently
affirm, after the long trial he has had, never die. We need not discuss
the other works of fiction which are all as characteristic as distinct
narratives of apparent fact, as carefully elaborated in every detail.
They are almost all excellent in their beginning, but, a fault which is
shared by Crusoe himself, run into such a prodigality of detail toward
their close, that the absence of dramatic construction and of any real
inspiration of art, becomes painfully (or rather tediously, which is
worse) apparent. We do not, however, share the opinion of those critics
who disparage Defoe’s marvelous power of narrative. “The little art he
is truly master of, of forging a story and imposing it on the world for
truth,” is an art which he possesses in common with but very few who
have ever lived; and even among these few he has it in a very high
degree. The gift is peculiar; we are not moved by it to pity or
tenderness, and not much to admiration of the hero. The inner circle of
our emotions is seldom, if ever, entered; but, on the other hand, there
is nothing in that island where the shipwrecked mariner finds a shelter,
and which he makes into a home, which we do not know and see, as well as
if we had dwelt in it like Robinson. It is an island which is added to
the geography of the world. Not only would no child ever doubt of its
existence, but to the most experienced reader it is far more true and
real than half of those of which we have authentic histories, which our
relatives and countrymen have visited and colonized. Those South Sea
Islands, about which we have so many flowery volumes, are not half so
certain. And every detail of the life of its solitary inhabitant comes
up before us like our own personal proceedings--more than visible,
incontestable experiences. Not one of us but could draw the picture of
the solitary in his furs, with all his odd implements about him; and,
more wonderful still, not a child from four upward but could tell who it
was. The tale does not move us as do imaginative histories on a more
poetic level; but in its humbler range it is as living as the best. And
there is something in this very absence of emotion which gives a still
more wonderful force to the tale. Men in such desperate circumstances,
driven to the use of all their faculties for the mere preservation of
their lives, have presumably but little time for feeling. The absorption
of every faculty in this one primitive need brings a certain serenity, a
calm which is like the hush of the solitude--the silence of the seas.
The atmosphere is full of this stillness. There is the repose of Nature,
not filled with reflections of human sentiment, but imposing her
patience, her calm repetition of endless endeavor upon the solitary
flung into her bosom; and there is a sobriety in the story which adds
immensely to the power. Other unknown islands have been in fiction, but
none where the progress of events was so gradual, where there were so
few miraculous accessories. One of the most able of English romancers,
the late Charles Reade, is the last who has carried us to a desolate
island. His story is full of charm, of humor, and sentiment far beyond
the reach of Defoe. Nothing could be more tender, more delightful, than
the idyl of the two lovers cut off from all mankind, lost in the silence
of the seas. But in every way his isle is an enchanted isle. Not only is
it peopled with love and all the graces, but it is running over with
every convenience,--everything that is useful and beautiful. The
inexhaustible ingenuity of the lover is not more remarkable than the
wealth of necessary articles of every kind that turns up at every step.
He builds his lady a bower lined with mother-of-pearl; he clothes her in
a cloak of sealskin; he finds jewels for her; she has but to wish and to
have, as if Regent street had been within reach. Very different is the
sober sanity of the elder narrative. Defoe knows nothing about lovers;
all his heroes marry with prodigality; but he has no love, any more than
he has pearls or gutta-percha, on his island. Conveniences come very
slowly to Robinson Crusoe; he has to grope his way, and find his living
hardly, patiently. Day after day, and year after year, the story-teller
goes on working out the order of events. It is as leisurely as nature,
as little helped by accident, as sober even as matter of fact, and yet
what a potent, clear, all-realizing fancy--a faculty which in its
limited sphere saw and felt and acted in completest appropriation of the
circumstances--this sober imagination was!
He was fifty-eight at the time this book was written--a man worn with
endless work and strife, but ever ready for more--a man who had fallen
and failed, and made but little of his life. It is said that he was at
his highest point of external prosperity when he published “Robinson
Crusoe”; but when we remember that he was at that time engaged in the
inconceivable muddle of “Mist’s Journal,” it seems almost impossible to
believe this, or to understand how anything but poverty could drive him
into such a disgraceful employment. No doubt, to a man who at heart had
once been an honest man, and was so no more, it must have been a relief
and blessed deliverance to escape away into the distant seas, to refresh
his ever-active soul with the ingenious devices of the shipwrecked
sailor, and bury himself in that life so different from his own, the
savage necessities, the primitive cares. The goats and the parrot and
poor Friday: what an ease and comfort to escape into their society after
bamboozling Mist, and reporting to my lord at St. James’s! Was it a
desperate expedient of nature to save him from utter self-contempt? Such
a man, even if his conscience had grown callous, must have required some
outlet from the dreadful slavery to which he had bound himself.
“Robinson Crusoe” is the work by which Defoe is best known, which is,
after all, the most effectual guarantee that it is his best work. But it
is not, to our thinking, worthy of being placed in competition with the
“Journal of the Plague”--a history so real, so solemn and impressive, so
full of the atmosphere and sentiment of the time, that it reaches a far
higher point of literary art than anything else Defoe has written. For
this is not prose alone, nor that art of making fiction look like truth,
which is supposed to be his greatest excellence: it is one of the most
impressive pictures of a historical incident which has struck the poetic
imagination everywhere, and of which we have perhaps more authentic
records than of any other historical episode. Neither Boccaccio nor
Manzoni have equaled Defoe in the story of the plague. To the old
Italian it was a horror from which the life-loving fled with loathing as
well as fear, and which they tried to forget and put out of their sight.
Defoe’s minute description of the argument carried on within his own
mind by the narrator is curiously characteristic of the tendency to
elaborate and explain which enters so largely into all his works. The
mental condition of the respectable citizen, divided between concern for
his life and concern for his property, seeing with reasonable eyes that
death was not certain, but that in case of flight ruin was,--moved by
the divination which he uses in all good faith, yet perhaps not with
sufficient devoutness to have allowed himself to be guided by it had it
been contrary to his previous dispositions, and at bottom by a certain
_vis inertiæ_ and disinclination to move, which is clearly indicated
from the beginning,--is in his best manner, and so real that it is
impossible to resist its air of absolute truthfulness. But the state of
the shut-up streets, the dreadful sounds and sights, the brooding heat
and stillness of the long and awful days, the cloud of fate that is
about the doomed city, are beyond description impressive. This curious
spectator of all things, this impartial yet eager looker-on, determined
to see all that can be seen, prudent yet fearless, adopting every
precaution, yet neglecting no means of investigation, inquiring
everywhere, always with his eyes and ears open, at once a philosophical
inquirer and an eager gossip, is without doubt Defoe himself. But he is
also a marked figure of the time. He is like Pepys; he is almost, but
for the unmistakable difference between the bourgeois and the fine
gentleman, like Evelyn. He is one of the special kind of man born to
illustrate that period. Pepys would have found means for some piece of
junketing even in the midst of his alarm, whereas Defoe thinks of his
property, when he has time to think of anything but the plague, which is
a very natural modification consequent on the changes of the times. But
they are at bottom the same. While, however, this central figure remains
the characteristic but not elevated personage with whom we are already
acquainted, the history which he records is done with a tragic force and
completeness which it is impossible to surpass. In this there is nothing
commonplace, no wearying monotony; the very statistics have a tragic
solemnity in them; the awful unseen presence dominates everything. We
scarcely breathe while we move about the streets emptied of all
passers-by, or with a suspicious throng in the middle of the way keeping
as far apart as possible from the houses. This is not mere prose: it is
poetry in its most rare form; it is an ideal representation, in all its
sober details, of one of the most tragical moments of human suffering
and fate.
Nothing else that Defoe has done is on the same level. It is pitched on
too high a key perhaps for the multitude. His innocent thief, “Colonel
Jack,” begins with a picture both amusing and touching of the curious
moral denseness and confusion of a street boy; his “Cavalier” is a
charming young man. But both these and all the rest of Defoe’s heroes
and heroines grow heavy and tedious at the end. The “Journal of the
Plague” is not like them in this respect. The conclusion--the sudden
surprise and delicious sense of relief, the joy which makes the
passers-by stop and shake hands with one another in the streets, and the
women call out from windows with tears and outcries of gladness--is
sudden and overwhelming as the reality. We are caught in the growing
despair, and suddenly in a moment deliverance comes. Here alone Defoe is
not too long; the unexpected is brought in with a skill and force not
less remarkable than that which in the previous pages has portrayed the
slow growth and inevitable development of the misery. Up to this
anticlimax of unlooked-for joy the calamity has grown, every new touch
intensifying the awful reality. But the recovery is sudden, and told
without an unnecessary word. It is the only instance in which Defoe has
followed the instinct of a great artist and shown that he knew how to
avail himself of the unwritten code and infallible methods of art.
We forget his shortcomings when we discuss this which is to our mind
much his greatest work, and it is well that we should leave him in this
disposition. He died mysteriously alone, after a period of wandering and
hiding which nobody can explain. Whether he was in trouble with
creditors, or with political enemies, or with the exasperated party
which he had managed to outwit; whether he kept out of the way that his
family might make better terms for themselves, or that he might keep the
remains of his money out of the hands of an undutiful son, or a grasping
son-in-law, nobody can tell. He died in remote lodgings, all alone, and
his affairs were administered by a stranger, perhaps his landlady, no
one knows. His domestic circumstances have been referred to during his
life only in the vaguest way. He had a wife and a numerous family when
he was put in the pillory; he had a wife, a son who was unkind, and
three daughters at the end; but that is all we know. He died at
seventy-two “of a lethargy,” no doubt fallen into the feebleness and
hopelessness of lonely old age; and that is all. His life overflowed
with activity and business. To be doing seems to have been a necessity
of his being. But he never seems to have enjoyed the importance due to
his powers, and in an age when men of letters filled the highest posts
never would appear to have risen above his citizen circle, his
shop-keeping ways. Something in the man must have accounted for this,
but it is difficult to say what it was; for the age did not require a
high standard of truthfulness, and the worst of his misdoings were kept
secret from the public. Perhaps his manners were not such as society,
though very easy in those days, could tolerate; perhaps--but this is
simple guesswork. All we know of Defoe is that as a writer he was of the
greatest influence and note, but as a man nothing. He died poor and
alone; he had little reward for unexampled labor. When Addison was
secretary of state, and Prior an ambassador, he was nobody--a sword in
the hand of an unscrupulous statesman; a shopkeeper manufacturing his
genius and selling it by the yard. A sadder conclusion never was told.