[46] Life of Swift, p. 299.
[47] Jonathan Swift, a Biographical and Critical Study, by J. Churton Collins, p. 267.
[48] See The Life and Works of Dr. Arbuthnot, by George A. Aitken. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
CHAPTER VI.
DANIEL DEFOE—JOHN DENNIS—COLLEY CIBBER—LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU—EARL OF CHESTERFIELD—LORD LYTTELTON—JOSEPH SPENCE.
Daniel Defoe (1661-1731).
The most voluminous writer of his century is popularly remembered as the author of one book, published in old age. Everybody has read Robinson Crusoe, and knows the name of its author; but few readers outside the narrow circle of literary students are aware of Defoe's exhaustless labours as a politician, social reformer, projector, pamphleteer, and novelist.
It would be well for the author's reputation if we knew less about him than we do. There was a time when he was regarded as a noble sufferer in the cause of civil and religious liberty. His faults were credited to his age while his virtues were supposed to place him on an eminence far above the time-servers who despised him. He has been praised as a man courageously living for great aims, who was maligned by the malice of party, and to whose memory scant justice has been done. 'No one,' says Henry Kingsley, 'could come up to the standard of his absolute precision,' and his 'inexorable honesty alienated everyone.' These words were written in 1868. Four years previously, however, the discovery of six letters in the State Paper Office, in Defoe's own hand, had entirely destroyed his character for inexorable honesty, and the researches of his latest and most exhaustive biographer,[49] who regards his hero's vices as virtues, do but serve to give greater prominence to the baseness of his conduct. Defoe, by his own confession, was for many years in the pay of the Government for secret services, taking shares in Tory papers and supervising them as editor, in order to defeat the aims of the party to which he professed to be allied, and of the proprietors with whom he was in partnership. Thus in 1718, he writes as a plea that his labours should be remembered: 'I am, Sir, for this service, posted among Papists, Jacobites, and enraged High Tories—a generation who I profess my very soul abhors; I am obliged to hear traitorous expressions and outrageous words against his majesty's person and government, and his most faithful servants, and smile at it all as if I approved it; I am obliged to take all the scandalous and indeed villainous papers that come, and keep them by me as if I would gather materials from them to put them into the News; nay, I often venture to let things pass which are a little shocking that I may not render myself suspected. Thus I bow in the House of Rimmon, and must humbly recommend myself to his lordship's protection, or I may be undone the sooner, by how much the more faithfully I execute the commands I am under.' It would not be fair to judge Defoe altogether by the moral standard of our own day, but the part he played as a servant and spy of the government would have been an act of baseness in any age, and of this he seems to have been conscious.
Daniel Foe, who about 1703 assumed the prefix of De, for no assignable reason, was the son of a butcher and Nonconformist in Cripplegate, who had the youth educated for the ministry. Daniel, however, preferred a more exciting occupation, and took part in the unfortunate expedition of the Duke of Monmouth. Escaping from that peril he began business as a hose factor in Cornhill, and carried it on until he failed about the year 1692. Already he had learnt to use the pen, and a loyal pamphlet secured for him a public appointment which lasted for some years. He was also connected with a brick manufactory at Tilbury. Meanwhile he wrote for the press, and showed himself the possessor of a clear and masculine style, which could be 'understanded of the people.'