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DEFOE 



Consolidator ; or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions 

 from the World in the Moon, a political satire, 

 which some have supposed may have supplied a 

 hint for Gulliver's travels; and the year after 

 (5th July 1706) his masterpiece of verisimilitude 

 and plausibility, The True Relation of the Appari- 

 tion of one Mrs Veal. Mr Lee, in his life of Defoe 

 (vol. i. pp. 127-8), disproves the old story that this 

 fiction was a mere tour de force, written to sell an 

 unsaleable book, Drelincourt on the Fear of Death, 

 by showing that Drelincourt's book was already 

 popular, being then rapidly running through its third 

 English edition, while Defoe's pamphlet was only 

 attached to its fourth edition by the author's con- 

 sent. His next work was his Jure Divino, a 

 tedious political satire, in twelve books of poor 

 verse. About the close of 1705 Defoe was sent by 

 Harley on a secret mission to the West of England, 

 and in October of the next year we find him sent to 

 Scotland by Godolphin, to whom Harley had recom- 

 mended him as a secret agent to promote the Union, 

 and here he lived for sixteen months. His History 

 of the Union appeared in 1709, and in the same year 

 Sacheverell's famous sermon gave him the oppor- 

 tunity of a fling at an old enemy. At the beginning 

 of 1708 Harley's fall had made his political position 

 somewhat precarious, but he found himself able to 

 be a staunch Whig under Godolphin's government, 

 until the fall of the Whigs after the error of Sache- 

 verell's impeachment, and the return to power of 

 his old benefactor Harley ( 1710), left him under the 

 necessity of arguing that Englishmen should sup- 

 port the country even under a Tory ministry. In 

 the pages of his Review he did his best to preserve 

 the semblance of consistency, but not all his clever- 

 ness could save him from the contemporary reproach 

 of being a time-server and a renegade. It is itself 

 significant that his journalism was always anony- 

 mous from his second employment by Harley. He 

 played a difficult and dubious part in the strange 

 intrigues that preceded the accession of the House 

 of Hanover, with the result that at length he found 

 himself in a general discredit, which his apology, 

 entitled An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), 

 did not remove. Letters of his found in the State 

 Paper Office in 1864, and printed in Mr Lee's intro- 

 duction, revealed the fact that in 1718 he was in 

 somewhat equivocal government service, subediting 

 Jacobite and High Church organs, as the Mercurius 

 Politicus, Dormer's News-Letter, and Mist's Jour- 

 nal, in such a dexterous way that ' the sting should 

 be entirely taken out, although it was granted that 

 the style should continue Tory' (second letter). 

 Further, in the same letter he describes his purpose 

 more fully, that these papers ' will be always kept 

 (mistakes excepted) to pass as Tory Papers, and 

 yet be disabled and enervated, so as to do no Mis- 

 chief, or give any Offence to the Government.' He 

 describes himself further as ' for this Service, posted 

 among Papists, Jacobites, and enraged High 

 Tories a generation who, I profess, my very Soul 

 Abhors. . . . Thus I bow in the House of Rimmon.' 

 Defoe was not exactly scrupulous in his point of 

 honour, but it is certain he never was a Tory, and 

 it would not be difficult for him to construct an 

 argument by which he could persuade himself that 

 by this dangerous and ambiguous means he was 

 doing good service to the cause of liberty and 

 religion. 



Although Mr Lee maintains that he wrote busily 

 in the journals almost to the close of his life, hence- 

 forward his interest for us is mainly literary. In 

 1715 appeared the first volume of the Family In- 

 structor, and four years later the first volume of the 

 immortal Robinson Crusoe, which at once leaped 

 into that popularity which it will never cease to 

 retain. The same year appeared the second volume, 

 and the year after the greatly inferior sequel. 



Defoe's realistic imagination worked most freely on 

 a basis, however slight, of fact, and this was found 

 for him in the four years' solitary residence of a 

 marooned sailor, Alexander Selkirk, on the island 

 of Juan Fernandez. Perhaps no man at fifty-eigjit 

 in the whole history of literature ever devised a 

 more splendid masterpiece of creative imagination 

 than this marvellous story, which carries with it 

 the irresistible conviction of very truth. In 1720 

 his most prolific year he gave to the world the 

 Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell ; the 

 famous Memoirs of a Cavalier, the most real and 

 truthful of all our historical romances, which the 

 great Chatham accepted as genuine history ; and 

 Captain Singleton, a book of such brilliancy, 

 vigour, and interest as would alone have given a 

 reputation to any other writer. His next great 

 creative year was 1722, in which he issued The For- 

 tunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, which is 

 at least a marvel of the novelistic art ; The 

 Journal of the Plague Year, better known by the 

 title in the second edition, A History of the Placjue, 

 a fresh masterpiece of verisimilitude and reality ; 

 and the History of Colonel Jack, which, though 

 unequal throughout, and actually feeble towards 

 its close, is in its commencement, and in episodes 

 here and there, the most charming and, perhaps, 

 the greatest of all his books. Later works were 

 Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress ( 1724), a weaker 

 Moll Flanders; A Tour through the Whole Island 

 of Great Britain (1724-26) ; A New Voyage round 

 the World ( 1725) ; The Complete English Tradesman 

 (1725-27), a glorification of mere money-getting, 

 which Charles Lamb condemned for its ' vile and 

 debasing tendency ;' The Political History of the 

 Devil (1726), which may be grouped with his 

 System of Magic (1726) and Essay on the Reality 

 of Apparitions (1727). The only other works that 

 may here be mentioned are his Religious Courtship 

 (1722), and The Treatise concerning the Use and 

 Abuse of the Marriage Bed (1727), which reveal 

 the strangely limited and vulgarly profit-and-loss 

 character of his conception of religious duty. His 

 Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business ( 1725) is 

 an amusing diatribe upon the insolence of domestic 

 servants a subject to which he frequently recurs. 



Meantime Defoe had been prospering in his 

 affairs. He built himself ' a very handsome house ' 

 at Stoke-Newington, where he amused himself with 

 gardening and the company of his three daughters. 

 A mystery not yet satisfactorily explained hangs 

 around his last days. His affairs seem to have 

 fallen into confusion, one of his sons had behaved 

 undutifully, and he was under apprehensions of 

 some trouble, which may, however, have been due 

 merely to a degree of mental derangement. He 

 died ' of a lethargy ' in Ropemakers' Alley, Moor- 

 fields, 26th April 1731, and Avas buried in Bunhill 

 Fields. 



Defoe remains one of our greatest English writers, 

 and his greatness is of a kind unlikely to be dis- 

 turbed by a competitor. His immense vitality and 

 energy, clearsightedness, and ready power of forcing 

 plain arguments either in prose or verse to an 

 irresistible conclusion, make him the typical 

 iournalist to be surpassed only by Swift at his 

 best;, but it is to a much rarer quality than this 

 that he owes his fame his incomparable realism 

 and faithfulness in fiction, the secret of which 

 must be looked for not in his singularly plain 

 and direct language, his simple-looking but 

 most effectively artistic digressions, or his perfect 

 though artless preservation of dramatic propriety, 

 but in that subtle and impalpable genius which 

 informs his style. For his character he was shifty, 

 and perhaps somewhat low in his moral percep- 

 tions ; but with all his political inconsistencies ho 

 remained true to the principles of the Revolution. 



