If men sin against God, affront his ordinances, rebel against his church, and disobey the precepts of their superiors, let them suffer as such capital crimes deserve: so will religion flourish, and this divided nation be once again united.... I am not supposing that all the dissenters in England should be hanged or banished, but as in cases of rebellions and insurrections, if a few of the ringleaders suffer, the multitude are dismissed; so a few obstinate people being bad examples, there’s no doubt but the severity of the law would find a stop in the compliance of the multitude.
The reader will perceive by what a serious argument the hot-headed fanatic was betrayed and the wiser public put upon their guard. The mirror thus held up to nature, with a grotesque twist in it which made the likeness bewildering, gave London such a sensation as she had not felt for many a day. The wildest excitement arose. At first all parties in the shock of surprise took it for genuine. “The wisest churchmen in the nation were deceived by it,” and while some were even so foolish as to receive it with unthinking applause, which was the case, according to Oldmixon, “in our two famous Universities,” the more sensible reader of the church party was first indignant with the high-flyers for expressing such opinions, and then furious with the satirist who had insulted the church by putting them into her mouth. Nobody indeed saw the joke. The fellow of Cambridge who thanked his bookseller for packing up “so excellent a treatise” along with the books he had ordered, and considered it “next to the Sacred Bible and Holy Comments the best book he ever saw”; the “soberer churchman” who “openly exclaimed against the proposal, condemned the
CHURCH OF ST. GILES, CRIPPLEGATE,
WHERE DEFOE IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN BAPTIZED.
DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY H. E. SYLVESTER.
warmth that appeared in the clergy, and openly professed that such a man as Sacheverell and his brethren would blow up the foundations of the church”; the dissenters who were at once insulted and alarmed by the extraordinary threats thus set forth against them—all alike turned upon the perpetrator of the hoax when he was discovered. Some “blushed when they reflected how far they had applauded,” some labored to prove that it was “a horrible slander against the church.” The government, sharing the general commotion, placed Defoe in the position of a revolutionary leader who, “by the villainous insinuations of that pamphlet, would have frightened the dissenters into another rebellion.” Defoe himself seems to have had a moment of panic, and fled. He was proclaimed in the “Gazette,” and a reward offered for his discovery. His biographers in general assert that he gave himself up with some generosity to save the printer and publisher, who had been arrested, but there are public documents which seem to prove a different procedure, showing how “My Lord Nottingham hunted him out,” and how “the person who discovered Daniel Foe” claimed and was paid the reward of fifty pounds offered for the offender, described as a “middle-aged, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion and dark brown colored hair (but wears a wig), a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.” However that might be, he was arrested and committed to Newgate in the spring of 1703, and the obnoxious publication—“this little book, a contemptible pamphlet of but three sheets of paper,” as he describes it—was burned by the common hangman. It was not, however, till the summer, three or four months after his arrest, that he was tried, and that period he seems to have spent in Newgate in perfect freedom, at least for literary productions, since he filled the air with a mist of pamphlets explaining that he meant nothing but a harmless satire at one moment, at another exhorting the dissenters to be content with spiritual freedom, and again bursting into the rude but potent strains of the “Hymn to the Pillory.” He was sentenced to fine and imprisonment, as well as to that grotesque but sometimes terrible instrument of torture; but the pillory was no torture to Defoe. On the last three days of July—once before the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, where his shop had been, and where no doubt everybody knew him, once in Cheapside, and again at Temple Bar—he stood aloft with the crowd surging round and performed his penance. The crowd in those days was not a soft or civil one when it indorsed the sentence pronounced by law. Its howls and cries, its missiles and its curses, made the punishment horrible. But the crowd had by this time found time to take in the joke,—banter, when it is broad enough to be intelligible, always pleases the general,—and there must have been some bonhomie about the sufferer, some good repute as a merry fellow and one who loved a jest, which conciliated the populace. Instead of dead cats, they flung him nosegays; they gathered about his platform under the low deep arch which once made a mock gate to the city, and behind the bustling ’Change, and between the shops of Cheapside, holding a series of impromptu festivals, drinking his health, shouting out his new verses, which were sold by thousands in the streets:
Hail, hieroglyphic state machine,
Contriv’d to punish fancy in;
Men that are men, in thee can feel no pain,
And all thy insignificants disdain;
Exalted on thy stool of state,
What prospect do I see of sovereign fate.
The bold satirist, looking through those “lofty loops,” recalls all the good men that have stood there, reminding himself that even the learned Selden had the pillory in prospect, and that, had he “triumphed on thy stage,” no man could have shunned it more. Contempt, “that false new word for shame,” has no power where there is no crime, he declares. The lines are rough, but the sentiments are manly and full of honest scorn, which here and there reaches a high tone. From his platform where he stood in all the emancipation of feeling that the worst had happened, he throws a bold glance upon the disorders of the time, political and social, and summons to this post of scorn the firebrands, the cowards, the failures of the age. One can imagine those keen gray eyes inspecting through the loops the hoarse and roaming groups, not sure perhaps what his reception was to be, gathering courage as the shouts became intelligible and turned into hurrahs for Defoe. No doubt he marked the fluctuating crowd as keenly as if he had been a careless spectator at a window, and saw Colonel Jack and his brother pickpockets threading devious ways among the multitude, with here and there a gallant from St. James in his long curled periwig fluttering on the edge, and the tradesmen, half curious, half unwilling to join in the riot, looking on from their doors. A pillory is a coign of vantage when the man upon it has eyes like Defoe’s. “Tell ’em,” he says, apostrophizing his platform contemptuously—
Tell ’em the men that placed him here
Are friends unto the times,
But at a loss to find his guilt,
They can’t commit his crimes.
Mr. Burton, in his “Reign of Queen Anne,” quotes from manuscript authority a statement that Penn had been commissioned by Defoe to offer “an account of all his accomplices in whatsoever he has been concerned,” on condition that he should be freed from the pillory, which is a very confusing statement, since it seems impossible to understand what accomplices he could have had. This, according to the same authority, was considered important enough to call for a special meeting of the cabinet council; but “the Queen seems to think that his confession amounts to nothing.” Another account is that Nottingham visited him in prison and offered him his liberty if he would say who set him on to do it. Thus this jeu d’esprit—the first exercise of Defoe’s special and most characteristic gift, that of endowing a fictitious production with every appearance of reality—set the world aflame. It is almost a more astonishing feat than the narratives which look so like literal transcripts of experience; for the subtle power which, by a cunning fitting together of actual utterances, could thus indicate the alarming tendency and danger of a great party, is more wonderful than to create an imaginary man and trace his every action as if he were a real one. The art may be less noble, but it is more difficult. Indeed, the “Shortest Way” is about the only example of such an extraordinary achievement. Swift’s tremendous satire was more bitter, more scathing, and treated not so much the exaggerated opinions of a class as the cruel and callous indifference of human nature to the sufferings of its slaves and victims.