You will wonder, perhaps, that a man without academic graces of speech should have made a book that wears so and that wins so. But it wears and wins, because—for one thing—it is free from any extraneous graces of rhetoric; because he was not trying to write a fine book, but only to tell in clearest way a plain story. And if you should ever have any story of your own to tell, and want to tell it well, I advise you to take Robinson Crusoe for a model; if you ever want to make a good record of any adventures of your own by sea, or by land, I advise you to take Robinson Crusoe for a model; and if you do, you will not waste words in painting sunsets, or in decorating storms and sea-waves; but, without your straining, and by the simple colorless truth of your language, the sunsets will show their glow, and the storms rise and roar, and the waves dash and die along the beach as they do in nature.
Of Queen Anne.
Though not in great favor with the courtiers of Queen Anne, Defoe did serve her government effectively upon the Commission in Edinburgh, which brought about in this Queen’s time (and to her great honor) the legislative union of England and Scotland. She came, you know, to be called the “Good Queen Anne;” and we must try and get a better glimpse of her before we push on with our literary story. Royal duties brought more ripeness of character than her young days promised. I have said that she was not so attractive personally as her sister Mary; not tall, but heavy in figure—not unlike the present good Queen of England, but less active by far; sometimes dropsical—gouty, too, and never getting over a strong love for the table. She had great waves of brown hair—ringleted and flowing over her shoulders; and she had an arm and hand which Sir Godfrey Kneller—who painted her—declared to be the finest in all England; and whoso is curious in such matters can still see that wonderful hand and arm in her portrait at Windsor. Another charm she possessed was a singularly sweet and sympathetic voice; and she read the royal messages to the high court of Parliament with a music that has never been put in them since. If she had written them herself, I am afraid music would not have saved them; for she was not strong-minded, and was a shallow student; she would spell phonetically, and played havoc with the tenses. Nor was she rich in conversation, or full. Swift—somewhere in his journal—makes merry with her disposition to help out—as so many of us do—by talk about the weather; and there is a story that when, after King William’s death, the great Marquis of Normanby came on a visit of sympathy and gratulation to the new sovereign, the Queen, at an awkward pause, piped out, in her sweet voice: “It’s a fine day, Marquis!” Whereat the courtier, who was more full of dainty speech, said—in pretty recognition of its being the first day of her reign—“Your Majesty must allow me to say that it’s the finest day I ever saw in my life!” But this good Queen was full of charities, always beloved, and never failed to show that best mark of real ladyhood—the utmost courtesy and kindliness of manner to dependants and to her servants.
An Irish Dragoon.
Among the writers specially identified with this Queen’s reign was Sir Richard Steele;[99] not a grand man, or one of large influence; and yet one so kindly by nature, and so gracious in his speech and writing, that the world is not yet done with pardoning, and loving, and pitying that elegant author of the Tatler—though he was an awful spendthrift, and a fashionable tippler, and a creature of always splendid, and always broken, promises.
He was Irish born; was schooled at the Charter-house in London, where he met with that other master of delicate English, Joseph Addison—they being not far from the same age—and knitting a boy friendship there which withstood a great many shocks of manhood. They were together at Oxford, too, but not long; for Steele, somehow, slipped College early and became a trooper, and learned all the ways of the fast fellows of the town. With such a training—on the road to which his Irish blood led him with great jollity—one would hardly have looked to him for any early talk about the life of a true Christian Hero. But he did write a book so entitled, in those wild young days, as a sort of kedge anchor, he says, whereby he might haul out from the shoals of the wicked town, and indulge in a sort of contemplative piety. It was and is a very good little book;[100] but it did not hold a bit, as an anchor. And when he came to be joked about his Christian Heroship, he wrote plays (perhaps to make averages good) more moral and cleanly than those of Etherege or Wycherley—with bright things in them; but not enough of such, or of orderly proprieties, to keep them popular. Of course, this fun-loving, dusky, good-hearted, broad-shouldered Irish trooper falls in love easily; marries, too, of a sudden, some West Indian lady, who dies within a year, leaving him a Barbadoes estate—said to be large—does look large to Captain Steele through his cups—but which gives greater anxieties than profits, and is a sort of castle in Spain all through his life. With almost incredible despatch—after this affliction—he is in love again; this time with the only daughter of a rich Welsh lady. This is his famous Prue, who plays the coquette with him for a while; but writes privily to her anxious mamma that she “can never, never love another;” that “he is not high—nor rich—but so dutiful; and for his morals and understanding [she says] I refer you to his Christian Hero.”
Steele’s marriage comes of it—a marriage whose ups and downs, and lights and shadows have curious and very graphic illustration in the storm of notelets which he wrote to his wife—on bill-heads, perfumed paper, tavern reckonings—all, singularly enough, in existence now, and carefully kept in the Library of the British Museum.
Here is a part of one, written just before his marriage: