A DISCOURSE ON DEFOE.*
BIOGRAPHERS of Defoe labour under great disadvantages. His manifold activity of pen and brain make it almost impossible to present a picture of his life or writings which
"composes" into artistic form, or leaves a vivid impression of either. With material so full and so various, it is difficult to be at once complete and brilliant. Mr. Wright has done his best to meet the former demand. He brings to the treat- ment of his work a liking for his subject, together with great industry; and though his book is not likely to take the place of that by Mr. William Lee, which, with those of George Chalmers, Walter Wilson, and William Chadwick, he has laid under contribution, he has brought together a great mass of material, to which readers of short biographies, such as Professor Minto's bright and well-balanced Life of Defoe, in the "English Men of Letters" series, may turn with profit and satisfaction.
Mr. Wright's aim has been to write a biography, not a literary criticism. His wish is to give a picture of a "man of flesh and blood, the hero, Defoe." It may be doubted whether we are so likely to arrive at the truth as to the character of the man, from a study of his life, as from that of his writings. This may seem a paradox. Yet the character of Defoe must be judged rather from what he wrote than from what he did. He was a man of action when he 3ould be. Baffled by ill-fortune he became a writer and journalist, and provided ideas for others to carry out. He grasped by sheer force of brain principles of commer- cial and social economy, which are to-day the truisms of finance and the common institutions of State socialism. His Essay on Projects is a series of schemes of social reform, sconomic reform, industrial reform, set out with the com- pleteness of a Parliamentary draughtsman. Ideas show the real man in this case, and to know Defoe the practical we must read his Essays on Banks, Pensions, Insurances, Colleges for Women, his projects for a Woolwich Academy and Sand- hurst, for Highways, and Lunatic Asylums, as well as the story of his commercial failures and of the origin of Robinson Crusoe.
How the writer of the Essay on Projects could also be the writer of Robinson Crusoe, and how the genial author of Robinson Crusoe ever came to be put in the pillory, are ques- tions which naturally occur. Defoe did not write Robinson Crusoe till he was sixty, though his interviews with Alexander Selkirk, of which Mr. Wright gives fall and interesting par- ticulars, took place seven years earlier. Bat Defoe was not always genial. His was a very kindly nature. Much that he wrote was for the practical benefit of mankind. He had none of Swift's gratuitous malignity to his species. But stupidity, wrong-headedness, and political spite in others always caused his wrath to flame. Then Defoe was dangerous. He took up his pen quickly, and used it with surprising readi- ness and subtlety, and not without traces of Swift's influence. In his satire of the "True-Born Englishman," though amply justified, as Lord Macaulay shows, by the usage which William III. was receiving from an English party, he dwells on the baser side of the common English mind :—
"Seldom contented, often in the wrong, Hard to be pleased at all, and never long,"
.—with a force and bitterness unrelieved by a grain of kindli- ness. The following " appreciation " is a mild sample of Defoe's doggerel when in this vein :—
"The lab'ring poor, in spite of double pay, Are saucy, mutinous, and beggarly,
So lavish of their money and their time That want of forecast is the nation's crime.
Good drunken company is their delight, And what they get by day they spend by night."
The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, for writing which he was put in the pillory, and condemned to Newgate, was a bitter hoax, taken for a genuine High Church pamphlet
• The Life of Daniel Defoe. By Thomas Wright. London: Cassell and Co.
because it was a serious parody of the invective of that party against the toleration of Nonconformists, worked up to a logical climax, and taken for truth by men who forget that "anger makes blind." The pamphlet is remarkable for style and sustained irony; but more remarkable, because it is Defoe's first success in that peculiar device of style—we will call it "literary personation "—which he developed and used later with such surprising power. "It was so like a brat of their own begetting," he wrote afterwards, "that like two apples they could not know them asunder." No wonder his enemies were furious, and declared it a "damnable style of writing." But it is strange that it should be made ground for cavil by others than those who fell victims to the irony of the Shortest Way. It was, as we have said, a device of style by which Defoe, who wrote to please matter-of-fact people, gave to his stories an added appearance of reality by putting them into the month of a narrator who is as fictitious, and as carefully vouched for by facts, as the other characters in the book. It became so dear to him that be used it indiscriminately for the more striking presentation of history in his Journal of the Plague, and in the Memoirs of a Cavalier, as well as in fiction like Robinson Crusoe. The appearance of reality so given has never been equalled by any other writer. It is hardly strange that the Journal of the Plague should have been quoted as a contemporary document, or that Lord Chatham referred to the Memoirs of a Cavalier as original data, when "every schoolboy," who, if not the erudite person presumed by Lord Macaulay, is a born critic of matters of fact, believes that Robinson Crusoe is mutate nomine a verbatim report of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk. But matter-of-fact people are sometimes quite hurt by the discovery that the Journal of the Plague should have been written in the third person, and are almost ready to accuse Defoe of forgery, and denounce him as untruthful and dishonest. As some of Defoe's biographers have taken this view somewhat seriously, Mr. Wright perhaps does well to urge a rather warm defence of the general honesty of Defoe's character. He need hardly have done more than cite the admission of one of Defoe's creditors, quoted by Tutchin, one of Defoe's keenest adversaries :—" Some years after his bank- ruptcy and composition with his creditors, he sent for me, and though' he was clearly discharged, he paid me all the remainder of his debt, voluntarily and of his own accord; and he told me that, so far as God should enable him, he intended to do so with everybody. When he had done, he desired me to set my hand to a paper to acknowledge it, which I readily did, and found a great many names on the paper before me; and I think myself bound to own it, though I am no friend to the book he wrote, no more than you." The book was the Short et Way with Dissenters.
With this much said in defence of Defoe, we will glance at a short and amusing example, perhaps the completest existing, of his peculiar art. It is a ghost-story, "The Apparition of Mrs. -Peale." Most ghosts are those of interesting people, who appear in haunted rooms at midnight. It is in keeping with Defoe's art that his apparition was that of "a maiden gentlewoman of about thirty years of age, who had for some years past been troubled with fits ;" and that it appeared in a parlour as the clock struck twelve at noon. As usual, the title prefixed sets out the coming narrative in full form. It is a "True relation of the appearance of Mrs. Veale, the next day after her death, to Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the eighth of September, 1705, which apparition recommends the perusal of Drelincourt's book of consolations against the fear of Death." Though first published separately, it was afterwards added as a puff to a book by a French Protestant, popular at the time, and likely to be more so, if the fourth edition were prefaced by Defoe. The story purports to be sent by a gentleman, a Justice of the Peace at Maidstone, and attended with such circumstances as may "induce any reasonable man to believe it." These circumstances are so artlessly dropped into the tale, then assumed as undoubted evidence, as Defoe steps demurely from the last-laid stone to the next, and drops another slily into the shallow stream of fiction across which he leads us, that the reader turns back the leaves, and laughs, and laughs again, as he surrenders himself to its chain of sober and serious conviction. We learn that Mrs. Bargrave, the lady to whom the apparition appeared, "is calumniated by some people who are friends to the brother of Mrs. Veale who en- deavour what they can to blast Mrs. B ,rgrave's reputation, and laugh the story out of countenance." In this they are rebuked "by the cheerful disposition of Mrs. Bargrave, notwithstanding the ill-usage of a very wicked husband." The story flows on in rare artless narrative, to which the "attendant circumstances" are supplied with a delicate circumstantiality which the author of the evidence in "Barden v. Pickwick" might have envied. Mrs. Veale had been acquainted with Mrs. Bargrave since childhood. They would often condole with each others' misfortunes, and read together Drelincourt on Death, the merits of which work formed the topic of their conversation when the apparition appeared. This occurred when "Mrs. Bargrave had taken up her sewing work, which she had no sooner done than she hears a knocking at the door. She went to see who was there, and this proved to be Mrs. Veale, her old friend, who was in a riding-habit, and said, am come to renew our old friendship again, and beg your pardon for the breach of it ; and if you can forgive me you are the best of women." After this, Mrs. Veale " spake in that heavenly and pathetical manner that Mrs. Bargrave wept several times, she was so deeply affected by it." "They also read a fine copy of verses, called Friendship in Perfection." In these verses there is twice used the word "Elysian." "Ah !" says Mrs. Veale, "these poets have such names for Heaven ! " To divert Mrs. Veale, Mrs. Bargrave took hold of her gown-sleeve several times and commended it. "Mrs. Veale told her it was a scoured silk, and newly made up, and spoke of her will, and how she would give her rings to such and such, and that there was a purse of gold in her cabinet, and she would have two broad pieces given to her cousin Watson." Then comes the extra- ordinary fact that Mrs. Veale had died the very day before this visit, and "her escutcheons were then making !" Yet it appeared that Mrs. Bargrave's recollections were supported by facts, even to the existence of the purse of gold, "though it was found not in the cabinet, but in a comb-box." Added to which several particular gentlemen have had the story from Mrs. Bargrave's own month. "Since this happened, Drelin- court an Death is bought up strangely," remarks Defoe in an artless parenthesis. If the "apparition "could only be had at the price of buying Drelincourt, that work would still deserve a sale.
As a political pampleteer, Defoe's chief claim to honour is his work in aid of the union with Scotland. But his literary reputation will always be based on his unrivalled gift of presenting fiction in the form of fact. It was on this that he fell back in his old age, a power of imagination used, not for presenting fancy, but for constructing reality passing that of any other man. To discuss his minor novels would be to follow too nearly where Charles Lamb has already trodden. In some respects they are the finest examples of Defoe's clean-cut veracious style. In lioxana and Moll Flanders the imagination is left with nothing to play with. The story seems cut in brass, and the events to follow their causes as inevitably as if set by fate. Robinson Crusoe needs no com- ment. It stands alone. But time is always bringing fresh tributes to the genius of Defoe. Those who care to read the story of the journey from China to Muscovy in the second part will find an appreciation of the Tartar cavalry, which would probably be corroborated verbatim by the despatches of the Japanese Generals on the Manchurian frontier.
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