If paid, gentlemen, for writing [he cries], if hired, if employed, why still harassed with merciless and malicious men; why pursued to all extremities of law for old accounts which you clear other men of every day? Why oppressed, distressed, and driven from his family, and from all his prospects of delivering them and himself? Is this the fate of men employed and hired? Is this the figure the agents of courts and princes make?
The argument is a feeble one for such a practised reasoner as Defoe, without considering the trifling detail that it was untrue, for debts are by no means unknown to favorites of the crown. Nor could he have been saved by Harley’s pay, which probably was never very great, from the consequences of previous misfortunes. The reader will think that a judicious silence would have been more appropriate, but that was not Defoe’s way. The only wonder is that he did not adduce such detailed evidence of his own freedom as would have deceived any man, and shown to demonstration that it was he who subsidized the ministry, and not they him. The wonderful thing is that he was free through all, maintaining his own favorite opinions, working as an independent power. Servile journalists have existed in plenty, but seldom one who took the pay of his masters and served their interests, yet fought under his own flag with honesty and a good conscience all the while.
This happy state, however, did not last. Harley fell, but with his last breath (as a minister) adjured his champion not to sacrifice himself, but to come to an understanding with his successor, Godolphin. This necessitated a certain revolution in respect to peace, which Defoe managed cleverly with the excellent device above mentioned. And there was still higher ground which he felt himself entitled to take. The public safety was involved in the stability of the new ministry such as it was. And he faces the dilemma with boundless pluck and assurance. “Though I don’t like the crew, I won’t sink the ship; I’ll pump and heave and haul and do everything I can, though he that pulls with me were my enemy. The reason is plain. We are all in the ship and must sink or swim together.” These admirable reasonings brought him at last to the calm rectitude of the following conclusion:
It occurred to me instantly as a principle for my conduct that it was not material to me what ministers her Majesty was pleased to employ. My duty was to go along with every ministry so far as they did not break in upon the constitution and the laws and liberties of my country, my part being only the duty of a subject, viz: to submit to all lawful commands, and to enter into no service that was not justifiable by the laws, to all of which I have exactly obliged myself.
When Harley returned to power, another modification became necessary, but Defoe piously felt it was providential that he should thus be thrown back upon his original protector; and had the matter ended here, as was long supposed, it is difficult to see what indictment could be brought against him. It is not expedient certainly that a director of public opinion should have state pay, and does not look well when the secret is betrayed. But so long as the scope of all his productions is good, honest, and patriotic, with only as much submission in trifles as is inevitable, the bargain is a personal meanness rather than a public crime, and this was long supposed to have been the case. It was believed that after the death of Queen Anne and Harley’s final fall, Defoe’s eloquent mouth was closed, and he disappeared into the calm of private life to earn a better hire and a more lasting influence through the two immortal works of fiction by which alone, but for the painful labors of biographers, his name would have been known. Had the matter been left so, how much happier would it have been for the hero of this romance of literary life, how much more edifying for posterity! We could have imagined the tired warrior retiring from that hot and painful field in which even the laurels were not worth the plucking, where defeat was miserable and success mean, and scarcely any combatant could keep his honor intact, to the quietness of some suburban house in which his three pretty daughters could care for him and idolize him, and where his wonderful imagination, no longer a slave to the exigencies of political warfare, could weave its dreams into a sober certainty of life awake. We should then have said of the author of “Robinson Crusoe” and the “Journal of the Plague,” that in his poverty and anxiety and overhaste he had been beguiled into a bargain which might have been a shameful one had not his marvelous power of seeing every side of a subject, and that insight of genius which divines the real unity of honest souls through all the external diversities which fill the limited vision of common men, carried him triumphantly through. And upon what real fault there was we should have thrown a veil. The age would have borne the blame—an age which was corrupt to the core, and in which men changed their principles every day. In the garden at Newington, where the young ladies entertained their lovers, we could have pictured him benevolent and friendly in the flowing peruke under which his keen eyes sparkled, looking on at the love-making with prudent, tradesmanlike thoughts of Sophia’s portion, and how much the young people would have to set up housekeeping upon, coming in not inappropriately between the pages of Crusoe—perhaps taking a suggestion about Robinson’s larder from some passing talk about the storeroom, or modifying for the use of Friday some rustical remark of the young serving-man from the country, or in the renewing of old recollections produced by some old friend’s visit finding an anecdote, a detail, to incorporate into the “Journal of the Plague.” And we should have asked ourselves by what strange play of genius the unenchanted island, where all the sober elaborations of fact clothed so completely the vivid realizations of imagination, should have risen out of the mists amid those trim, old-fashioned alleys, and green plots, and stiff parterres of flowers.
Alas! That demon of research which in its poking and prying sometimes puts old bones together, and sometimes scatters to the winds the ashes of the dead, has spoiled this pleasant picture. Impelled by its influence, an unwary or else too painstaking student, some twenty years ago, was seized with the idea of roaming the earth in search of relics of Defoe. And the diabolical powers which put this fatal pursuit into his mind directed him to a bundle of yellow papers in the State Paper Office which has, alas! for ever and ever made an end of our man of genius. These treacherous papers give us to wit under his own hand that he was in reality in full action in the most traitorous of employments during the period of his supposed retirement. The following, which is the first of these fatally self-elucidatory letters, will reveal at once the inconceivable occupation to which Defoe in his downfall lent himself. He had perhaps compromised himself too much, and been too completely identified with Harley at the end to be considered capable of more honorable and evident employment. The letter is addressed to the secretary of the minister who had given him his disgraceful office:
It was proposed by my Lord Townsend that I should appear as if I were as before under the displeasure of the government, and separated from the Whigs, and that I might be more serviceable in a kind of disguise than if I appeared openly. In the interval of this, Dyer, the “News-Letter” writer, being dead, and Dormer, his successor, being unable by his troubles to carry on that work, I had an offer of a share in the property as well as in the management of that work.
I immediately acquainted my Lord Townsend of it, who, by Mr. Buckley, let me know it would be a very acceptable piece of service, for that letter was really very prejudicial to the public, and the most difficult to come at in a judicial way in case of offense given. My Lord was pleased to add, by Mr. Buckley, that he would consider my service in that case, as he afterwards did.
Upon this I engaged in it, and that so far, that though the property was not wholly my own, yet the conduct and government of the style of news was so entirely in me, that I ventured to assure His Lordship the sting of that mischievous paper should be entirely taken out, though it was granted that the style should continue Tory, as it was, that the party might be amused and not set up another, which would have destroyed the design, and this part I therefore take entirely on myself still.
This went on for a year before my Lord Townsend went out of the office, and His Lordship, in consideration of the service, made me the appointment which Mr. Buckley knows of, with promise of a further allowance as service presented.