But Swift, unfortunately for himself and her, loved Ireland as little when he thus made himself her champion as he had done throughout his life. At all times his longing eyes were turned toward the country in which life was, and power, and friends, and fame. Though he was aware he was growing old and ought to be “done with this world,” he yet cries aloud his desire “to get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage like a poisoned rat in a hole,”—a terrific image, and one of those phrases that burn and glow with a pale light of despair. But he never got into that better world he longed for. The slow years crept over him, and he lived on, making existence tolerable by such expedients as he could, a wonderful proof how the body will resist all the frettings of the soul, yet growing more angry, more desperate, more subject to the bitter passions which had broken forth even in his best days, as he grew older and had fewer reasons for restraining himself. At last the great dean, the greatest genius of his age, the man of war and battle, of quip and jest, he who had thirsted to be doing through all his life, fell into imbecility and stupor, with occasional wild awakenings into consciousness which were still more terrible. He died, denuded of all things, in 1745, having lived till seventy-eight in spite of himself.
Ubi saeva indignatio
Cor ulterius lacerare nequit
is written on his tomb. No more can fiery wrath and indignation reach him where he lies by Stella’s side in the aisle over against his chamber window. The touch of her quiet dust must have soothed, one would think, the last fever that lingered still in him even after death had done its worst.
Chapter IV
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.