Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

That Defoe intended to write history and not fiction, there is no reason to doubt. Judged only by the accuracy of his facts it is history, but it is in the facts that he omits, just because he had never heard of them, that he unconsciously lapses into fiction. Comparison of details and incidents with the unimpeachable record of Pepys confirms his accuracy, but it shows also that, by separating incidents from their surroundings and by compressing his description to the exclusion of all but selected incidents, the picture, as a whole, does not accurately represent the aspect of the city, as it was. Pepys, who was an actual eye-witness, has noted not only the most striking events but those of everyday commonplace interest, so that his narrative is far more true to life. Defoe, on the other hand, has removed his picture from its setting. Pepys shows us that, though the spectre of plague was everywhere, everyday life went on, though in subdued fashion. Defoe would have us believe that all activity was paralysed.

For all this, however, as one reads the Journal the narrative has such an air of verisimilitude, that one instinctively pictures the writer as describing what he has seen with his own eyes, so perfect is the illusion. Mead, indeed, himself an authority on the plague and so soon after the event, believed that the Journal was the authentic record of an eye-witness. Defoe’s faculty of visualizing what he has not seen is inferior only to the vividness with which he describes what he has visualized.

What is the secret of this vividness? More than all else, extreme simplicity of language. The simple style was Defoe’s natural style, and for that reason his use of it is fluent and easy, and knowing this he fitly puts his story into the mouth of a simple saddler. Defoe wrote for a growing class of readers of a lowly social order. He is the apostle of the common people: that is why he imitates their way of speaking. Not only is his narrative colloquial, but it deliberately affects the language a saddler would use in reciting to his intimates the memories of what he had lived through. There is no striving for dramatic effect, no drawing of lurid pictures, no literary artifice, but always the same sustained simplicity of diction, even in describing the most appalling occurrences. There must be no chance of missing the smallest point, so he even does such thinking as is necessary by running comments on his own story.

The educated reader, particularly in these days, when even literature is administered in tabloid form, must needs be wearied by the prolixity, and irritated by the redundancy of the narrative. But again it must be pleaded in extenuation that these very defects are deliberate. Constant repetition, as every teacher knows, sooner or later penetrates the densest brain.

But the Journal is something more than a mere chronicle, vivid enough at that, of what happened, and how men behaved, during the plague. Defoe regards the plague as the judgement of God, and this attitude imparts a strong moral purpose to the work. This is why he dwells so much on the mental and moral effects of the catastrophe, inculcating his lesson without the appearance of undue insistence. Pepys, as we know, could find heart to make merry during the plague, just as Boccaccio depicted his company of Florentines: to Defoe the mere idea of merriment is revolting. Pepys, on New Year’s Eve, as he looked back over the abomination of desolation, could make this entry in his Diary:

‘December 31, 1665. I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time ... and great store of dancings we have had at my cost (which I am willing to indulge myself and wife) at my lodgings. The great evil of this year, and the only one indeed, is the fall of my Lord of Sandwich, whose mistake about the prizes hath undone him.’

Pepys was a stranger to imagination: his pleasures and his griefs were things of the surface and matters of the moment. His creed is egoistic hedonism in all its naked brutishness. He is far more concerned over the fire, where there is a chance of losing his property, than over the plague where the chance is of losing his life. His New Year’s Eve retrospect is not the only glimpse he gives us of callous indifference to the horrors of the plague. Look at September 30, 1665, when the fiercest spell was only just past:

‘So to sleep with a good deal of content, and saving only this night and a day or two about the same business a month or six weeks ago, I do end this month with the greatest content, and may say that these three months, for joy, health, and profit, have been much the greatest that ever I received in all my life, having nothing upon me but the consideration of the sicklinesse of the season during this great plague to mortify mee. For all which the Lord God be praised!’

It was not that Pepys was unconscious of the terrible scenes of suffering around him, only that he was unmoved by them. Into one short letter to Lady Cartaret, at the height of the plague, he compresses all the grim details that fill a volume for Defoe.

Historians frequently lay it down that the fire of London swept away the plague. As a fact it probably had little to do with its departure. Several English towns were as hard hit as London, and yet in the absence of any conflagration subsidence and disappearance of plague followed the same course as in London. At Salonica,[188] about a.d. 1500, a fire which destroyed 8,000 houses was actually followed by an outbreak of plague. It was a common contemporary belief that the departure of plague from London was hastened by the coming of pit-coal into general use, so that the atmosphere was constantly permeated by sulphurous fumes.