contrasts strangely with the time-serving, vain, versatile, and unprincipled character of that minister; and Mr. Wilson ought to have written a good book, for he has spoiled the effect of some of the finest lines in the English language. It was a bold step in Pope to put the author of Robinson Crusoe into the Dunciad at all; Swift also has a fling at him as ‘the fellow that was pilloried;’ and Gay is equally sceptical and pedantic, as to his possessing more than ‘the superficial parts of learning.’ We know of no excuse for the illiberality of the literary junto with regard to a man like Defoe, but that he returned the compliment to them; and in fact, if we were to take the character of men of genius from their judgment of each other, we must sometimes come to a very different conclusion from what the world have formed.
That Defoe should have incurred the hatred, and been consigned to the vengeance, of the High-Church party for thus honestly exposing their designs against the Dissenters, is but natural; the wonderful part is, that he equally excited the indignation and reproaches of the Dissenters themselves; who disclaimed his work as a scandalous and inflammatory performance, and called loudly (in concert with their bitterest foes,) for the condign punishment of the author. They almost with one voice, and as if seized with a contagion of folly, cried shame upon it, as an underhand and designing attempt to make a premature breach between them and the established church; to sow the seeds of groundless jealousy and ill-will; and to make them indirectly participators in, and the sufferers by, a scurrilous attack on the reverence due to religion and authority. Defoe was made the scapegoat of this paltry and cowardly policy, and was given up to the tender mercies of the opposite party without succour or sympathy. This extreme blindness to their own interests can only be explained by the consideration that the Dissenters, as a body, were at this time in a constant state of probation and suffering; they had enough to do with the evils they actually endured, without ‘flying to others that they knew not of;’ they stood in habitual awe and apprehension of their spiritual lords and masters;—would not be brought to suspect their further designs lest it should provoke them to realise their fears; and as they had not strength nor spirit to avert the blow, did not wish to see till they felt it. The alacrity and prowess of Defoe was a reproach to their backwardness; the truth of his appeal implied a challenge to meet it; and they answered, with the old excuse, ‘why troublest thou us before our time?’ The Dissenters too, at this period, were men of a formal and limited scope of mind, not much versed in the general march of human affairs; they required literal and positive proof for every thing, as well as for the points of faith on which they held out so manfully; and their obstinacy in maintaining these, and suffering for them, was matched by their timid circumspection and sluggish impracticability with respect to every thing else. Their deserting Defoe, who marched on at the head of the battle,—pushed forward by his keen foresight and natural impatience of wrong,—is not out of character; though equally repugnant to sound policy or true spirit. They fixed a stigma on him, therefore, as a breeder of strife, a false prophet, and a dangerous member of the community; and, what is certainly inexcusable, when, afterwards, his jest was turned to melancholy earnest;—when every thing he had foretold was verified to the very letter, when the whole force of the government was arrayed against them, and Sacheverell in person unfurled ‘his bloody flag,’ and paraded the streets with a mob at his heels, pulling down their meeting-houses, burning their private dwellings, and making it unsafe for a Dissenter to walk the streets,—they did not take off the stigma they had affixed to the author of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; did not allow that he was right and they were wrong, but kept up their unjust and illiberal prejudices, and even aggravated them in some instances, as if to prove that they were well-founded. Bodies of men seldom retract or atone for the injuries they have done to individuals. It will hardly seem credible to the modern reader, that in pursuance of this old sectarian grudge, and in conformity with the same narrow spirit, some years after this, when Queen Anne, who, from the death of her son, Prince George, had no hope of leaving an heir to the crown, turned her thoughts to the restoration of the Pretender, and when Defoe, in the general alarm and agitation which this uncertainty of the designs of the Court occasioned, endeavoured to ridicule and defeat the project, by pointing out, in his powerful and inimitable way, the incalculable benefits that would ensue from setting aside the Hanoverian succession, and bringing in the right line, one William Benson, (a Dissenter, a stanch friend to the House of Hanover, and the same who had a monument erected to Milton,) in his absurd prejudice against Defoe,—in his conviction that he was a renegado and a Marplot, and in his utter incapacity to conceive the meaning of irony,—actually set on foot a prosecution against the author as in league with the Pretender; wanted to have him accused of high treason, and obstinately persisted in, and returned to the charge; and that it was only through the friendly zeal and interest of Harley, and his representations to the queen, that he was pardoned and released from Newgate, whither he had been committed on the judges’ warrant, for writing something in defence of his pamphlet, after its presentation by the Grand Jury, and his being compelled to give bail to appear for trial! ‘The force of dulness could no farther go.’
Defoe had before this given violent offence to the Dissenters, by dissenting from and ‘disobliging’ them on a number of technical and doubtful points—a difference of which they seemed more tenacious than of the greatest affronts or deadliest injuries. Among others, he had opposed the principles of occasional conformity; that is, the liberty practised by some Dissenters, of going to church during their appointment to any public office, as they were prohibited from attending their own places of worship in their official costume. Nothing could be clearer, than that, if it was a point of conscience with these persons not to conform to the service of the established church, their being chosen mayor, sheriff, or alderman, did not give them a dispensation to that purpose. But many of the demure and purse-proud citizens of London, (among whom Mr. William Benson was a leader and a shining light,) resented their not being supposed at liberty to appear at church in their gold chains and robes of office, though contrary to their usual principles of nonconformity;—as children think they have a right to visit fine places in their new clothes on holidays. Their rage against Defoe was at its height, when he had nothing to say against Harley’s Tory administration, for bringing in The Occasional Conformity Bill, to debar Dissenters of this puerile and contradictory privilege. It was to the kindness and generosity of Harley, on this as well as on former occasions, in affording our author pecuniary aid, of which he was in the utmost need, (being without means, friends, and in prison,) and in rescuing him from the grasp of his own party, that we owe his silence on political and public questions during the last years of Queen Anne; and a line of conduct that, in the present day, seems wavering and equivocal. His gratitude for private benefits hardly condemned him to withhold his opinions on public matters; but at that time, personal and private ties bore greater sway over general and public duties than is the case at present. We entirely acquit Defoe of dishonest or unworthy motives. He might easily have gone quite over to the other side, if he had been inclined to make a market of himself: but of this he never betrayed the remotest intention, and merely refused to join in the hue and cry against a man who had twice saved him from starving in a dungeon. Be this as it may, Defoe never recovered from the slur thus cast upon his political integrity, and was under a cloud, and discountenanced during the following reign; though the establishment of this very Protestant succession had been the object of the labours of his whole life, and was the wish that lay nearest his heart to his latest breath.
Defoe had, in the former reign, been at various times employed at her majesty’s desire, and in her service, particularly in accomplishing the Union with Scotland in 1707. He displayed great activity and zeal in accommodating the differences of all parties; and his History of that event has been pronounced by good judges to be a masterpiece. But as to the numerous transactions in which he was concerned, and his various publications and controversies, we must refer the reader to Mr. Wilson, who has furnished ample details and instructive comments. For ourselves, we must ‘hold our hands and check our pride,’ or we should never have done. Of all Defoe’s multifarious effusions, the only one in which there is a want of candour and good faith, or in which he has wilfully blunted and deadened his moral sense, is his Defence, or (which is the same thing) his Apology for the Massacre of Glencoe. But King William was his idol, and he could no more see any faults in him than spots in the sun. Our old friend Daniel also tries us hard, when he rails at the poor servants, or ‘fine madams,’ as he calls them, who get a little better clothes and higher wages when they come up to London, than they had in the country; when he runs a-muck at stage-plays, and the triumphs of the mimic scene;—confounding ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, with Lucifer, Prince of Darkness.’ But these were the follies and prejudices of the time, aided by a little tincture of vulgarity, and the sourness of sectarian bigotry.
We pass on to his Novels, and are sorry that we must hasten over them. We owe them to the ill odour into which he had fallen as a politician. His fate with his party reminds one a little of the reception which the heroine of the Heart of Mid-Lothian met with from her sister, because she would not tell a lie for her; yet both were faithful and true to their cause. Being laid aside by the Whigs, as a suspected person, and not choosing to go over to the other side, he retired to Stoke-Newington, where, as already mentioned, he had an attack of apoplexy, which had nearly proved fatal to him. Recovering, however, and his activity of mind not suffering him to be idle, he turned his thoughts into a new channel, and, as if to change the scene entirely, set about writing Romances. The first work that could come under this title was The Family Instructor;—a sort of controversial narrative, in which an argument is held through three volumes, and a feverish interest is worked up to the most tragic height, on ‘the abomination’ (as it was at that time thought by many people, and among others by Defoe) of letting young people go to the play. The implied horror of dramatic exhibitions, in connexion with the dramatic effect of the work itself, leaves a curious impression. Defoe’s polemical talents are brought to bear to very good purpose in this performance, which was in the form of Letters; and it is curious to mark the eagerness with which his pen, after having been taken up for so many years with dry debates and doctrinal points, flies for relief to the details and incidents of private life. His mind was equally tenacious of facts and arguments, and fastened on each, in its turn, with the same strong and unremitting grasp. Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, was the first of his performances in the acknowledged shape of a romance; and from this time he brought out one or two every year to the end of his life. As it was the first, it was decidedly the best; it gave full scope to his genius; and the subject mastered his prevailing bias to religious controversy, and the depravity of social life, by confining him to the unsophisticated views of nature and the human heart. His other works of fiction have not been read, (in comparison)—and one reason is, that many of them, at least, are hardly fit to be read, whatever may be said to the contrary. We shall go a little into the theory of this.
We do not think a person brought up and trammelled all his life in the strictest notions of religion and morality, and looking at the world, and all that was ordinarily passing in it, as little better than a contamination, is, a priori, the properest person to write novels: it is going out of his way—it is ‘meddling with the unclean thing.’ Extremes meet, and all extremes are bad. According to our author’s overstrained Puritanical notions, there were but two choices, God or the Devil—Sinners and Saints—the Methodist meeting or the Brothel—the school of the press-yard of Newgate, or attendance on the refreshing ministry of some learned and pious dissenting Divine. As the smallest falling off from faith, or grace, or the most trifling peccadillo, was to be reprobated and punished with the utmost severity, no wonder that the worst turn was given to every thing; and that the imagination having once overstepped the formidable line, gave a loose to its habitual nervous dread, by indulging in the blackest and most frightful pictures of the corruptions incident to human nature. It was as well (in the cant phrase) ‘to be in for a sheep as a lamb,’ as it cost nothing more—the sin might at least be startling and uncommon; and hence we find, in this style of writing, nothing but an alternation of religious horrors and raptures, (though these are generally rare, as being a less tempting bait,) and the grossest scenes of vice and debauchery: we have either saintly, spotless purity, or all is rotten to the core. How else can we account for it, that all Defoe’s characters (with one or two exceptions for form’s sake) are of the worst and lowest description—the refuse of the prisons and the stews—thieves, prostitutes, vagabonds, and pirates—as if he wanted to make himself amends for the restraint under which he had laboured ‘all the fore-end of his time’ as a moral and religious character, by acting over every excess of grossness and profligacy by proxy! How else can we comprehend that he should really think there was a salutary moral lesson couched under the history of Moll Flanders; or that his romance of Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress, who rolls in wealth and pleasure from one end of the book to the other, and is quit for a little death-bed repentance and a few lip-deep professions of the vanity of worldly joys, showed, in a striking point of view, the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice? It cannot be said, however, that these works have an immoral tendency. The author has contrived to neutralise the question; and (as far as in him lay) made vice and virtue equally contemptible or revolting. In going through his pages, we are inclined to vary Mr. Burke’s well-known paradox, that ‘vice, by losing all its grossness, loses half its evil,’ and say that vice, by losing all its refinement, loses all its attraction. We have in them only the pleasure of sinning, and the dread of punishment here or hereafter;—gross sensuality, and whining repentance. The morality is that of the inmates of a house of correction; the piety, that of malefactors in the condemned hole. There is no sentiment, no atmosphere of imagination, no ‘purple light’ thrown round virtue or vice;—all is either the physical gratification on the one hand, or a selfish calculation of consequences on the other. This is the necessary effect of allowing nothing to the frailty of human nature;—of never strewing the flowers of fancy in the path of pleasure, but always looking that way with a sort of terror as to forbidden ground: nothing is left of the common and mixed enjoyments and pursuits of human life but the coarsest and criminal part; and we have either a sour, cynical, sordid sell-denial, or (in the despair of attaining this) a reckless and unqualified abandonment of all decency and character alike:—it is hard to say which is the most repulsive. Defoe runs equally into extremes in his male characters as in his heroines. Captain Singleton is a hardened, brutal desperado, without one redeeming trait, or almost human feeling; and, in spite of what Mr. Lamb says of his lonely musings and agonies of a conscience-stricken repentance, we find nothing of this in the text: the captain is always merry and well if there is any mischief going on; and his only qualm is, after he has retired from his trade of plunder and murder on the high seas, and is afraid of being assassinated for his ill-gotten wealth, and does not know how to dispose of it. Defoe (whatever his intentions may be) is led, by the force of truth and circumstances, to give the Devil his due—he puts no gratuitous remorse into his adventurer’s mouth, nor spoils the keeping by expressing one relenting pang, any more than his hero would have done in reality. This is, indeed, the excellence of Defoe’s representations, that they are perfect fac-similes of the characters he chooses to pourtray; but then they are too often the worst specimens he can collect out of the dregs and sink of human nature. Colonel Jack is another instance, with more pleasantry, and a common vein of humanity; but still the author is flung into the same walk of flagrant vice and immorality;—as if his mind was haunted by the entire opposition between grace and nature—and as if, out of the sphere of spiritual exercise and devout contemplation, the whole actual world was a necessary tissue of what was worthless and detestable.
We have, we hope, furnished a clue to this seeming contradiction between the character of the author and his works; and must proceed to a conclusion. Of these novels we may, nevertheless, add, for the satisfaction of the inquisitive reader, that Moll Flanders is utterly vile and detestable: Mrs. Flanders was evidently born in sin. The best parts are the account of her childhood, which is pretty and affecting; the fluctuation of her feelings between remorse and hardened impenitence in Newgate; and the incident of her leading off the horse from the inn door, though she had no place to put it in after she had stolen it. This was carrying the love of thieving to an ideal pitch, and making it perfectly disinterested and mechanical. Roxana is better—soaring a higher flight, instead of grovelling always in the mire of poverty and distress; but she has neither refinement nor a heart; we are only dazzled with the outward ostentation of jewels, finery, and wealth. The scene where she dances in her Turkish dress before the king, and obtains the name of Roxana, is of the true romantic cast. The best parts of Colonel Jack are the early scenes, where there is a spirit of mirth and good fellowship thrown over the homely features of low and vicious life;—as where the hero and his companion are sitting at the three-halfpenny ordinary, and are delighted, even more than with their savoury fare, to hear the waiter cry, ‘Coming, gentlemen, coming,’ when they call for a cup of small-beer; and we rejoice when we are told as a notable event, that ‘about this time the Colonel took upon him to wear a shirt.’ The Memoirs of a Cavalier are an agreeable mixture of the style of history and fiction. These Memoirs, as is well known, imposed upon Lord Chatham as a true history. In his History of Apparitions, Defoe discovers a strong bias to a belief in the marvellous and preternatural; nor is this extraordinary, for, to say nothing of the general superstition of the times, his own impressions of whatever he chose to conceive are so vivid and literal, as almost to confound the distinction between reality and imagination. He could ‘call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and they ‘would come when he did call for them.’ We have not room for an enumeration of even half his works of fiction. We give the bust, and must refer to Mr. Wilson for the whole length. After Robinson Crusoe, his History of the Plague is the finest of all his works. It has an epic grandeur, as well as heart-breaking familiarity, in its style and matter.
Notwithstanding the number and success of his publications, Defoe, we lament to add, had to struggle with pecuniary difficulties, heightened by domestic afflictions. To the last, when on the brink of death, he was on the verge of a jail; and the ingratitude and ill-behaviour of his son in embezzling some property which Defoe had made over for the benefit of his sisters and mother, completed his distress. He was supported in these painful circumstances by the assistance and advice of Mr. Baker, who had married his youngest daughter, Sophia. The subjoined letter gives a melancholy but very striking picture of the state of his feelings at this sad juncture:—
‘Dear Mr. Baker,—I have yor very kind and affecc’onate Letter of the 1st: But not come to my hand till ye 10th; where it had been delay’d I kno’ not. As your kind manner, and kinder Thought, from wch it flows, (for I take all you say to be as I always believed you to be, sincere and Nathaniel like, without Guile) was a particular satisfacc’on to me; so the stop of a Letter, however it happened, deprived me of that cordial too many days, considering how much I stood in need of it, to support a mind sinking under the weight of an afflicc’on too heavy for my strength, and looking on myself as abandoned of every Comfort, every Friend, and every Relative, except such only as are able to give me no assistance.
‘I was sorry you should say at ye beginning of your Letter, you were debarred seeing me. Depend upon my sincerity for this, I am far from debarring you. On ye contrary, it would be a greater comfort to me than any I now enjoy, that I could have yor agreeable visits wth safety, and could see both you and my dearest Sophia, could it be without giving her ye grief of seeing her father in tenebris, and under ye load of insupportable sorrows. I am sorry I must open my griefs so far as to tell her, it is not ye blow I recd from a wicked, perjur’d, and contemptible enemy, that has broken in upon my spirit, wch as she well knows, has carryed me on thro’ greater disasters than these. But it has been the injustice, unkindness, and, I must say, inhuman dealing of my own son, wch has both ruined my family, and, in a word, has broken my heart; and as I am at this time under a weight of very heavy illness, wch I think will be a fever, I take this occasion to vent my grief in ye breasts who I know will make a prudent use of it, and tell you, that nothing but this has conquered, or could conquer me. Et tu! Brute! I depended upon him, I trusted him, I gave up my two dear unprovided children into his hands; but he has no compassion, and suffers them and their poor dying mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as if it were an alms, what he is bound under hand and seal, besides the most sacred promises, to supply them with; himself, at ye same time, living in a profusion of plenty. It is too much for me. Excuse my infirmity, I can say no more; my heart is too full. I only ask one thing of you as a dying request. Stand by them when I am gone, and let them not be wrong’d, while he is able to do them right. Stand by them as a brother; and if you have any thing within you owing to my memory, who have bestow’d on you the best gift I had to give, let ym not be injured and trampled on by false pretences, and unnatural reflections. I hope they will want no help but that of comfort and council; but that they will indeed want, being too easie to be manag’d by words and promises.