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.