CHAPTER VI

DEFOE AND THE ESSAYISTS

WE proceed to enumerate in the present chapter those miscellaneous figures belonging to the Augustan era which have not been hitherto examined. The oldest of the writers who became greatly distinguished in the reign of Anne was Daniel Defoe (1661 ?-1731), whose baptismal name was Daniel Foe. He was a Londoner, the son of a Nonconformist butcher in the City. He was trained to be a dissenting minister, and was well educated, although, as his enemies never ceased to remind him, “this Man was no Scholar." At four-and-twenty he went into the hosiery business in Cornhill, and seven years later he had to fly from his creditors, owing £17,000. It is believed that he became a pamphleteer long before this, but his biographers have discovered no printed matter indubitably Defoe's earlier than 1691. From 1695 to 1699 he was accountant to the Commissioners of the Glass Duty, and was in prosperous circumstances. His first important tract, the first pamphlet in favour of a Standing Army, appeared in 1697, when its author was thirty-six; Defoe became active in supporting William III.'s measures, and published in the king's interest his Essay on Projects (1698). Hitherto Defoe had been a pronounced dissenter, but in 1698 he printed an opportunist pamphlet on Occasional Conformity. All these exercises, however, amounted to little more than what we should now call journalism. Defoe's first distinct literary success was made

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in 1701 with his satire in verse, the True-born Englishman, in which he ridiculed the popular suspicion of the Dutch in England. He tells us that 80,000 copies of this rough poem were sold in the streets, and the king honoured him for the first time, on this occasion, with an audience. The death of William (March 8, 1702) was a very serious blow to the prospects of his active servant of the pen.

Defoe hailed the advent of Queen Anne with several very poor poems; he was slow to learn that his talents were not those of a versifier. At the close of 1702 he returned to the safer paths of prose with a famous pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a satire upon the High Church Tories, whose extreme tone in private conversation it parodied with daring bluntness. Defoe ironically recommended that "whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished the nation, and the preacher be hanged," and his speech was so plain that while the Highfliers gasped for breath, the Dissenters, on their side, were too much frightened to see the irony. When the truth was perceived, Defoe was prosecuted, and tried in July 1703; he stood for three days in the pillory, but Pope was incorrect in saying that "earless on high stood unabashed Defoe." He was a popular favourite, and admiring crowds wreathed the instrument of his discomfort with garlands of flowers. To the "hieroglyphic state-machine" itself he now addressed a Hymn. His punishment in the pillory was succeeded by a long imprisonment in Newgate, and during this latter his tile-works at Tilbury, which were important to his livelihood, failed through his absence from business. He was set free by Harley in the summer of 1704. During his imprisonment he had written A Collection of Casualties and Disasters, a bold fancy picture of that famous storm which Addison alluded to in the Campaign, “such as of late o'er pale Britannia past." This was undoubtedly issued to a credulous public as veritable history. It was in prison, too, that he started his influential political newspaper, the Review, which continued to appear twice a week until February 1705, after which it was published three times a week.

After existing ten years, an extraordinary period for a newspaper in those days, the Review expired in June 1713.

Defoe's history after his release is a somewhat perplexing one. He openly pretended to be gagged, and to have promised to write no more polemic for seven years; but in reality he had undertaken an agency for the Government, and presently he went to Scotland, not, it is regretted, so entirely for patriotic purposes as he pretended. He had become, to put it plainly, a paid official spy and secret pamphleteer. He even used his debts as decoys, and as Professor Minto has said, "when he was despatched on secret missions, departed wiping his eyes at the hardship of having to flee from his creditors." The fall of Harley did not deprive Defoe of the Queen's favour; on the contrary, he was immediately sent to Edinburgh on another private errand. Into the history of Defoe's innumerable political writings, one of the vexed questions of bibliography, it is needless to go here. He was exceedingly plausible and adroit, but his personal chronicle, when exposed to the light, has a very unpleasing air of insincerity. He wished, doubtless, to be a patriot, but he could not resist the temptation, as he puts it, of bowing in the house of Rimmon; nor could he conquer his insatiable desire to govern by journalism, to be putting his oar daily and hourly into every species of public business. Among less ephemeral writings of the period may be mentioned The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706), afterwards constantly republished with a dreary work of divinity by Drelincourt (1595-1669), which the ghost of Mrs. Veal had recommended. This was, it is needless to say, a little piece of realistic romance. In 1709 Defoe printed his History of the Union, and in 1715-18 his Family Instructor, a solid didactic work which long enjoyed a great popularity.

Defoe was nearly sixty before he began the series of books which have given him the unique place he holds in English literature. Between 1719 and 1728 he composed with extraordinary vigour, rapidity, and fulness, at an age at which the strength of the most ardent writer is usually abated. His un

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doubted masterpiece, the first part of Robinson Crusoe, appeared on the 25th of April 1719; the second followed in August, and in August 1720 was published the third part, being Crusoe's "Serious Reflections." It is scarcely necessary to say that Robinson Crusoe is the earliest great English novel, and that in certain respects it has never been surpassed. Crusoe had been the name of one of the author's schoolfellows, and it is plain from many passages in Defoe's works that he had long looked forward to the possibility of exile in distant seas. The story of a certain Alexander Selkirk or Selcraig, who had been left on shore at Juan Fernandez, was the ultimate germ round which the amazing creation of Robinson Crusoe took form. The book instantly succeeded, as well it might, and Defoe turned to supply the new demand caused by a fresh sort of literary merchandise. In 1720 he published three romances of no small importance, Mr. Duncan Campbell, Memoirs of a Cavalier, and The Life of Captain Singleton. Of these, the third, a tale of piracy on the southern seas, with its pictures of tropical Africa, has been a main favourite with some lovers of Defoe. In 1722 the indefatigable novelist produced three other notable books, Moll Flanders, The Plague Year, and Colonel Jack. In 1724 were published The Fortunate Mistress (Roxana), perhaps the best of his novels after Robinson Crusoe, and the Tour through Great Britain. In 1725 appeared another romance, The New Voyage round the World, and The Complete English Tradesman, a rather vulgar handbook to the arts of mercantile success. In 1726 he printed The Political History of the Devil, and in 1727-28 The Plan of English Commerce. When it is said that Mr. William Lee, the most laborious of Defoe students, attributes to the pen of his hero no less than two hundred and fifty-four distinct publications, it will not be a matter for surprise that so few can be mentioned here. Defoe was prosperous during the period we have just described, and installed himself in a handsome house at Stoke Newington, in the company of "three lovely daughters," and two rather scandalous sons. probably lived beyond his income, for late in 1729 he absconded,

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and hid himself not far from Greenwich. It has been conjectured, on the other hand, that he may have been insane, and have falsely supposed that it was needful he should fly. In any case he died apart from his family, in a respectable lodging in Ropemaker's Walk, Moorfields, on the 26th of April 1731. It is very difficult to regard the personal character of Defoe with any sympathy. He was dishonest, and yet always prating about honesty. He was writing in a Jacobite newspaper with one hand, while accepting secret money from the Government with the other. He was, as his latest biographer has to admit, "perhaps the greatest liar that ever lived." There is something very sordid about his ambitions, very mean and peddling in his scheme of life. His great genius alone preserves for him a little of our sympathy, and yet, even here, it is probably to Defoe's advantage that his best books make us entirely forget their author.

The secondary novels of Defoe, in this day very little read, belong to the same class as Robinson Crusoe, and repeat the manner of that far abler work. When great stress is laid on what has been aptly called Defoe's "absolute command over the carpentry and scaffolding of realism," it should not be forgotten that this realism is seldom antiquarian. The novelist writes of the seventeenth century as if it were the eighteenth. He is reckless with dates, as when we are told that Roxana, a fine lady of the time of Charles II., was born in 1673, and died in the sixtyfifth year of her age, in 1742, that is to say, eighteen or fourteen years, as we choose to compute it, after the date of the publication of the volume. Moll Flanders must begin in the year 1613, but the manners are those of 1713. In all these romances the style is the same, that of the publicist. Defoe now writes diurnals no longer; but he sits at home and forges column after column of minute newspaper incidents. The mode is almost always that of autobiography, and no very palpable advance in narrative has been made since Meriton Latroon told his own adventures in The English Rogue, 1665-1680, of Richard Head (1630?-1678). The type is still that of the Spanish Picaroon novel of adventure,