No More Learning

He continued Mercator almost to the time of
>
1 Perhaps it may not be amiss to give a concrete illustration of Defoe's casuistry.
This is furnished by a comparison of the evasive language he used in his Appeal
(1715) with regard to his editorship of Mercator, and the frank language about his
share in that journal which he permitted himself to use in a short-lived trade paper of
1719, The Manufacturer, which has escaped his bibliographers but was attributed to
him by his contemporaries and is certainly his. Moreover, in the Appeal, he stated
categorically that he had never had any payment or reward for writing any part of
Mercator ; but in his letter to Oxford of 21 May 1714, he wrote that Arthur Moore,
6


## p. 15 (#39) ##############################################

Date of An Appeal to Honour and Justice 15
the queen's death. The paper, together with numerous pamphlets
of the period, including the four which form A General History
of Trade, gives abundant proof of the liberality of his com-
mercial views, although it scarcely justifies his modern admirers in
styling him the father of free trade. He also wrote voluminously
in opposition to the schism bill; and he entered into obscure
intrigues against his old enemy George Ridpath, which resulted in
his forming a connection with a rival Flying Post. In this, he
published a glowing eulogy of the new king and an indiscreet
attack upon one of the lords regent, which led to his indictment
for libel and, in the following year, to his trial and conviction. How
he escaped punishment will soon appear. Meanwhile, apparently
with Oxford's connivance, he published the first of the three parts
of his notorious apology for the administration of that statesman,
The Secret History of the White Staff. This was the signal for a
swarm of acrimonious whig tracts, which made much capital out
of Defoe's careless admissions with regard to his patron's intrigues
with the Scottish Jacobites. A second part, in which Bolingbroke
was treated more leniently, speedily followed, and then, at the end
of the year 1714, Defoe's health broke down-or else he deemed it
expedient to pose as an apoplectic who had not long to live.
A full discussion of this tangled matter would be tedious.
Lee, who did not know the date of publication of Defoe's Appeal
to Honour and Justice, tho' it be of his worst enemies, the
masterly account of the journalist's career which closed with
a pathetic note to the effect that he had been ill for six weeks
and was still in grave peril, seems, by assigning the tract to
January 1715, to have fixed the date of his hero's illness in
November and December 1714, thus managing to make the
bibliography of Defoe square not only with these dates but
with high conceptions of his probity. Unfortunately, it has been
discovered that the Appeal was published on 24 February 1715.
This brings the period of the illness into the early weeks of 1715,
that is, into a time when, according to Lee, Crossley and a con-
temporary of Defoe, the pamphleteer William Pittis, our journalist
was actively plying his trade. It does not follow that Defoe may
.
not have been out of health about this time—his situation, with
an expensive family, no fixed source of income, a worse than
6
who undertook to support the paper, had declined any consideration for it ever since
Lady Day last. ' There is little reason to doubt that Defoe was a poorly paid editor;
bat it is very certain that his relations with Mercator were much closer than he wished
readers of that periodical to believe.


## p. 16 (#40) ##############################################

16 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
doubtful reputation and an indictment for libel hanging over him,
might well have undermined an even stronger constitution than
his; but it does seem to be clear that, on Oxford's repudiating
the White Staff tracts, Defoe published several others designed to
throw dust round the whole controversy and to minimise his own
part in it, and that, these attempts failing, he wrote his Appeal,
upon which he expended all the resources of his genius for
casuistry, without succeeding in changing the opinions of his con-
temporaries one iota. It is a proof of his literary skill, however,
that this adroit and moving pamphlet has misled many a confiding
biographer and uninformed modern reader.
Belief in a serious breakdown of Defoe's health is rendered
almost ridiculous by an examination of his bibliography, certain
and plausible, for the year 1715. It contains at least thirty
pamphlets and two thick volumes, the first instalments of The
Family Instructor and of a History of the Wars of Charles XII
of Sweden. No newspaper now taxed his pen for regular contri-
butions, he had to support his family and, perhaps, drown his
apprehensions as to the trial awaiting him, and he had every
inducement to display his loyalty. Hence, a multitude of
certain and suspected tracts on nearly every phase of affairs,
especially on the rebellion of the autumn. Meanwhile, in July,
he had been convicted of libel; but sentence had not been
passed. It never was passed, probably because Defoe managed,
through an appealing letter and by pointing to numerous loyal
pamphlets, to secure the favour of that very chief justice Parker
whom he had offended in 1713. Parker introduced him, as a
valuable secret agent and journalist, to Lord Townshend, the
principal secretary of state. A bargain was soon struck, the gist
of which was that Defoe should continue to pass as a tory journalist
still labouring under the displeasure of the government, and that,
as such, he should edit mildly tory periodicals and secure employ-
ment with more rabid Jacobite organs, in order that he might be
able to tone down or suppress treasonable articles and keep
the administration posted upon what was going on in Jacobite
circles. The arrangement seems to have lasted for some ten years,
1716—26, and, by his discovery of the letters attesting it, Lee
succeeded, not only in showing that the older biographers were in
error in supposing that Defoe's activity as a political journalist
had ceased with queen Anne's death, but, also, in disinterring from
the newspapers of the time, particularly from the weeklies pub-
lished by Mist and Applebee, a mass of articles surely from Defoe's


## p. 17 (#41) ##############################################

Discreditable Later Tracts
17
pen and illustrative of his not inconsiderable powers as an essayist.
His chief activity as a spy dates from 1716 to 1720 and is mainly
connected with the office of the Jacobite publisher, Nathaniel
Mist. Whether he was Mist's good or evil genius, whether,
as Lee opined, Mist tried to kill Defoe on discovering his treachery
and pursued him maliciously for many years, whether, on the
other hand, Defoe's gradual abandonment of journalism was not
due to advancing years and the competition of younger men, are
questions we cannot discuss here. It seems enough to say that,
prior to, and throughout, his short career as a writer of fiction,
Defoe was almost preternaturally active as a journalist and
pamphleteer.
His tracts for the year 1717 alone are sufficiently numerous and
discreditable to warrant all that his contemporaries said of him as
a mercenary scribbler. To this bad year, that of his exemplary
Memoirs of the Church of Scotland, belong his forged Minutes of
Meenager, his unprincipled tracts against Toland, his impertinent
and, in the main, overlooked contributions to the Bangorian con-
troversy. As remarkable, however, as his industry, his versatility,
his unscrupulousness and his impudence, is the confidence some
modern students, notably Lee, have been able to maintain in him.
Many of his tracts belonging to this period have been rejected
because of the assumption that Defoe was too virtuous or too
dignified to have written them, or that no mortal man could
have written so much. It may be safely held that Defoe was
capable of writing almost anything, and that few pens have ever
filled with greater facility a larger number of sheets. On the
other hand, no condemnation of Defoe the spy and scribbler is
just that does not also include statesmen who, like Townshend
and Stanhope, employed him, rivals, who, like Toland and Abel
Boyer, were for ever hounding him, religious controversialists who
set him a bad example and partisan publishers and public who
suffered themselves to be exploited by him. With all his faults,
he was probably the most liberal and versatile writer of his age;
with his comparative freedom from rancour, he seems a larger and
more humane figure than any of the more aristocratic men of letters
that looked down on him, including Pope and Swift; though an
Ishmael, he managed to secure comfort for his family and a partial
amnesty for himself in his old age; and he wrote the most authentic
and widely read classic of his generation.
Our reference to Robinson Crusoe brings us to 25 April 1719,
the date of the publication of the first part of that immortal
E. L. IX.
2
CH. I.


## p. 18 (#42) ##############################################

18 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
story. Defoe was nearly sixty years old, but he had hitherto written
almost nothing that would have preserved his name for the general
public. During the next five years, most of his fiction was
to be composed, and, during the ensuing six, he was to become
perhaps the most extraordinarily prolific old man in the history
of English literature. Although he never ceased to be a journalist
and pamphleteer, he became, for the last eleven years of his life,
primarily a writer of books, and especially of fiction. The change
has surprised many, and a word or two must be given to an attempt
to describe in outline his evolution.
Although there is evidence that Defoe was rather widely read
in English belles lettres, particularly in Rochester and other authors
of the restoration, there is little or no direct evidence that he
was a wide reader of fiction. It would be rash, however, to assume
that he had not dipped into some of the reprinted Elizabethan
romances; that he had not tried to read one or more of the in-
terminable heroic romances, whether in the original French or in
English versions or imitations; that he was ignorant of the comic
and the satiric anti-romances, or that he had not read with some
enjoyment the novels of his own time—the stories of intrigue by
Aphra Behn, the highly coloured pictures of the court and of the
aristocracy by Mrs Manley, and the attempts at domestic fiction
by Mrs Eliza Haywood and other more or less forgotten women.
If some bibliographers are right, we must hold that he wrote more
than one tract which shows the influence of Mrs Manley's New
Atalantis, and that he translated at least one picaresque story,
abbé Olivier's Life and Adventures of Signior Rozelli (1709,
1713). It is much more certain, however, that he must have been
familiar with lives of criminals, with chapbooks and compilations
such as those of Nathaniel Crouch (ʻR. Burton'), with the work of
Bunyan and with The Tatler and The Spectator. In other words,
it is chiefly to the popular narratives of his day and to con-
tributory forms like the essay and biography that Defoe owes
whatever in his fiction is not due to his own genius and experience
as a writer.
As a matter of fact-setting aside the possibility that he trans-
lated the story of Rozelli and even added a somewhat questionable
appendix to the edition of 1713 and a Continuation in 1724—one
can find in Defoe's writings, prior to 1719, grounds for believing
that he may have evolved into a novelist of adventure and of low
a
life with comparatively little indebtedness to previous writers of
fiction. He had had great practice in writing straightforward
a


## p. 19 (#43) ##############################################


Evolution as a Novelist. Robinson Crusoe 19
prose since 1697; and, by 1706—witness Mrs Veal—he had learned
how to make his reporting vivid and credible by a skilful use of
circumstantial detail. In his political allegory The Consolidator, ,
he had begun, though crudely, to use his imagination on an
extended scale, and he had already, in The Shortest Way, dis-
played only too well his gifts as an impersonator. In some of the
tracts written between 1710 and 1714, notably in the two parts of
The Secret History of the October Club, he had shown great
ability in satiric portraiture and considerable skill in reporting
speeches and dialogue. In 1715, he had introduced some mild
religious fiction into The Family Instructor, and, three years
later, in the second part of this book, he had made still greater
use of this element of interest. In the same year, 1715, he had
assumed the character of a quaker in some of his tracts; and,
since 1711, he had been publishing predictions supposed to be
made by a second-sighted highlander. Again, in 1715, he had
described the career of Charles XII of Sweden as though he
himself were 'A Scots Gentleman in the Swedish Service'; and
there is reason to believe that, in the following year, he wrote, as
'A Rebel,' a tract dealing with the rebellion in Scotland. In
1717, he skilfully assumed the character of a Turk who was
shocked by the intolerance displayed by English Christians in the
Bangorian controversy, and it seems almost certain that, in 1718,
he wrote for Taylor, the publisher of Robinson Crusoe, a continua-
tion of the Letters of the famous Turkish Spy. Finally, when it
is remembered that, in 1718, he was contributing to Mist's, week
by week, letters from fictitious correspondents, that his wide
reading in geography had given him a knowledge of foreign
countries, particularly of Africa and both Americas and that he
had long since shown himself to be a skilful purveyor of instruc-
tion and an adept at understanding the character of the average
man, we begin to see that, given an incident like the experiences
of Alexander Selkirk and an increasing desire to make money
through his pen in order to portion his daughters, we have a
plausible explanation of the evolution of Defoe the novelist out of
Defoe the journalist and miscellaneous writer.
The immediate and permanent popularity of Robinson Crusoe
is a commonplace of literary history. Defoe, who had a keen eye
for his market, produced, in about four months, The Farther Ad-
ventures of his hero, which had some, though less, vogue, and, a
year later, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a volume of essays which had no
2—2


## p. 20 (#44) ##############################################

20 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
vogue at all. The original part, The Strange and Surprizing
Adventures, at once stirred up acrimonious critics, but, also, at-
tracted many imitators and, in the course of years, became the
occasion of legends and fantastic theories. All these—for example,
the story that Harley was the real author of the book-may be
dismissed without hesitation. Almost equally without foundation,
despite his own statements, is the notion that Robinson Crusoe is
an allegory of Defoe's life. It may even be doubted whether he
ever hawked his manuscript about in order to secure a publisher.
Some things, however, may be considered certain with regard to
this classic. Defoe wrote it primarily for the edification, rather
than for the delectation, of his readers, although he did not evade
giving them pleasure and although, assuredly, he took pleasure him-
self in his own creation. It is equally clear that, in many of its
pages, Defoe the writer of pious manuals is to be discovered ; in
others, Defoe the student of geography and of volumes of voyages;
in others, Defoe the minute observer and reporter. The book is a
product that might bave been expected from the journalist we
know, save only for the central portion of the story, the part that
makes it a world classic, the account of Crusoe alone on his
island. Here, to use a phrase applied by Brunetière to Balzac,
Defoe displays a power of which he had given but few indications,
the power to make alive. This power to make alive is not to be
explained by emphasis upon Defoe's command of convincing details
or by any other stock phrase of criticism. It is a gift of genius,
denied to preceding English writers of prose fiction, displayed by
Defoe himself for a few years in a small number of books, and
rarely equalled since, although after him the secret of writing an
interesting and well constructed tale of adventure was more or
less an open one. The form of his story could be imitated, but not
its soul. The universal appeal implied in the realistic account of
the successful struggle of one man against the pitiless forces of
nature was something no one else could impart to a book of
adventure, something Defoe himself never caught again. It is
this that links Robinson Crusoe with the great poems of the
world and makes it perhaps the most indisputable English classic
of modern times, however little of a poet, in a true sense, its
author may have been.
That Robinson Crusoe was written 'all in the day's work' is
clear to the student of Defoe's bibliography for 1719, which in-
cludes, in addition, an attack on bishop Hoadly, a biography of
baron de Goertz, a tract on stock-jobbing—precursor of many


## p. 21 (#45) ##############################################


Miscellaneous Later Writings
21
pamphlets on the South Sea Bubble—a life of captain Avery,
introducing the long series of tracts devoted to pirates and other
criminals, an account of that extraordinary prodigy Dickory
Cronke, otherwise known as “the Dumb Philosopher,' contributions
to Mercurius Politicus, Mist's, The Whitehall Evening Post, and
a new paper founded by Defoe, The Daily Post—but the list
seems endless. There is little reason, however, for believing that he
kept his copy by him and poured it forth at specially favourable
times, or that he had a 'double’ whose style is undistinguishable
from his. He was, rather, the most practised and versatile journalist
and hack writer of the day, known to publishers as willing to turn
every penny, unhampered by regular official or commercial em-
ployment, and obliged to keep up his income in order that he
might continue, as during the past five or six years, to live at
Stoke Newington in a condition approaching affluence. One
change, however, as has been noted, is apparent in Defoe's literary
habits during the last twelve years of his life. Throughout his
early career, the pamphlet was the form of composition best
adapted to his genius, and the books he attempted were somewhat
laboured and amorphous. During his later period, while he still
wrote pamphlets freely, he tended more and more to the production
of elaborate books, in the construction of which, despite continual
lapses into garrulity, he displayed remarkable skill. Except for
the summer journeys, which, from 1722 to 1725, may be presumed
to have furnished him with materials for that delightful and in-
valuable guidebook in three volumes, A Tour thro' the Whole Island
of Great Britain, and for short periods when he was disabled by the
stone, Defoe's old age, up to the autumn of 1729, must have been
that of an animated writing machine. Was he seeking to dull the
pangs of conscience, or to live down a scandalous past? Probably
the latter, and, more probably still, to lay by money for his
daughter Hannah, who was certain to be an old maid.
The next book of importance after the two parts of Robinson
Crusoe was The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr Duncan
Campbell, the deaf and dumb conjurer, which appeared at the
end of April 1720. A bibliographical mystery hangs over this
curious production as well as over other books and tracts relating
to Campbell. That Defoe is the main author of the original
History and of a pamphlet entitled The Friendly Demon (1726)
seems clear: that he may have been aided in the first of these
either by William Bond or by Mrs Eliza Haywood is probable,
and that he had nothing to do with the other works relating to


## p. 22 (#46) ##############################################

22 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
Campbell, save, possibly, the posthumous Secret Memoirs of 1732,
is likely. In May 1720 came the book, which, together with A
Journal of the Plague Year (1722), shows that Defoe possessed,
not only a genius for producing effects of verisimilitude, but, also,
a considerable share of something which it is hard to distinguish
from historical imagination. This is, of course, The Memoirs of a
Cavalier, the absorbing story of the wars in Germany and England,
for the accuracy of which so many untrained persons have been
willing to vouch that some critics have assumed for it a superfluous
manuscript source. A month later appeared that fine example of
the fiction of adventure, The Life, Adventures and Piracies of
the Famous Captain Singleton, which is a proof at once of Defoe's
extensive knowledge of geography and of his power to extend his
imagination, not only back into the past, as in The Memoirs of a
Cavalier, but out into the regions of the far away and the strange.
Singleton also holds attention by that interest in criminals which
Defoe naturally began to display in greater degree so soon as he
formed his six years' editorial connection with John Applebee, the
chosen publisher of the confessions and biographies of noted male-
factors. It has, moreover, another link with Defoe's next great
book, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
(January 1722), for, in Singleton, we find Defoe beginning to
display a power of characterisation which is seen in very respect-
able measure in Moll Flanders and, also, in Colonel Jacque and
Roxana. It is, however, as a realistic picture of low life in the
large that Moll Flanders is supreme, just as the book of the next
month, Religious Courtship, is the unapproachable classic of
middle class smugness and piety. It is pious middle class folk
that figure in the two books devoted to the great plague; but it is
the pestilence itself that dominates our imagination and fills us
with unstinted admiration for Defoe's realistic power. That power
is seen to a less extent in The Impartial History of Peter Alexowitz
the Present Czar of Muscovy and in The History and Remarkable
Life of the truly Honourable Colonel Jacque; but, so long as the
latter book has readers, Charles Lamb's praise of the affecting
picture of the little thief will command grateful assent. If Lamb had
gone farther and asserted that the year 1722, the year of Moll
Flanders, of Religious Courtship, of the Due Preparations and
A Journal of the Plague Year, of The History of Peter the Great,
and of Colonel Jacque, was the greatest annus mirabilis in the
career of any English writer, who would have been rash enough
to say him nay?
a


## p. 23 (#47) ##############################################


Miscellaneous Later Writings
23
The next year is almost a blank unless we accept indecorous
contributions to a controversy about the use of cold water as a
specific in fevers—and an undignified Defoe is a person of whom
some credulous students will form no conception. By March
1724, however, we have our prolific and masterly writer once
more, for that is the date of The Fortunate Mistress, better known
as Roxana, the story in which Defoe makes his greatest advance,
not a very great one after all, toward the construction of a well
ordered plot. This, also, is the year of one of the best of his
sociological works, his treatise on the servant question, The Great
Law of Subordination Considered, as well as of the first volume
of the Tour. Before the year closed, he had written his popular
tracts on Jack Sheppard, and the last of his generally accepted
works of fiction, A New Voyage round the World, notable for its
description of the lower parts of South America and for the proof
it affords that its author's powers of narration and description were
on the wane. From 1725 to his death, Defoe is a writer of books
of miscellaneous information rather than a pioneer novelist, yet
there is reason to believe that he did not abandon the field of
narration so entirely as has been generally held. The Four Years
Voyages of Capt. George Roberts (1726), may be, in considerable
measure, the dull record of the experiences of a real seaman, but
it bears almost certain traces of Defoe's hand. The far more
interesting Memoirs of Captain George Carleton (1728) has for its
nominal hero a man who is known to have existed, and who may
have taken a direct or indirect share in its composition ; but it is
now clear, almost beyond dispute, that the shaper of Carleton's
book, the writer who has vitiated many of the accounts given of
the career of Peterborough in Spain, is not dean Swift, as has
acutely argued, but our protean scribbler Daniel Defoe. It
is less certain, perhaps, that Defoe, in 1729, performed for Robert
Drury's entertaining Journal of his captivity in Madagascar pre-
cisely the services he had rendered to Carleton's Memoirs ; but
there is very strong evidence to support this view, which is that of
Pasfield Oliver, the latest editor of the book.
But, apparently, there was no limit, save death, to Defoe's
productiveness. Accordingly, we must pass over, with scarcely a
word, the numerous pamphlets and volumes of the years 1725—31.
The most important of the tracts are those of a sociological character,
for example, the astonishingly suggestive Augusta Triumphans: or
the Way to make London the Most Flourishing City in the
Universe. The most interesting and important of the books is,


## p. 24 (#48) ##############################################

24 Defoe—the Newspaper and the Novel
most surely, The Complete English Tradesman, which, for variety
of information, shrewd practical wisdom, engaging garrulousness
and sheer carrying power of easy vernacular style, is nothing
short of a masterpiece. Charles Lamb seems to have been rather
.
fantastic in discovering in it a source of corruption for its author's
countrymen. The book has probably corrupted just as many
promising young men as Roxana—see the exemplary pages of
Lee’s biography of Defoe-has reclaimed wayward young women.
Next to The Tradesman in interest, some would place the curious
group of books dealing in a half sceptical, half credulous and
altogether gossipping, fashion with occult subjects—The Political
History of the Devil, A System of Magic and An Essay on the
History and Reality of Apparitions. Others, with quite as much
reason, will prefer A Plan of the English Commerce, or that
sound and well written treatise The Complete English Gentleman,
which, ironically enough, was left incomplete and was not published
until about twenty years ago. The wiser lover of quaint and
homely books will read, or, at least, glance over, all the productions
of Defoe's last years on which he can lay his hands, will wish that
the world might see a collected edition of them and will not
allow the biographers to persuade him that there was any marked
falling off in the old man's productivity, save for a mysterious
period which stretched from the autumn of 1729 to the midsummer
of 1730.
What happened to Defoe during these months we do not know
and probably shall not know unless new documents unexpectedly
come to light. In the spring of 1729, he had married his favourite
daughter Sophia to the naturalist Henry Baker; in the autumn,
he had been taken ill, just as the opening pages of The Complete
English Gentleman were going through the press. In August
1730, he was writing from Kent to his son-in-law Baker a letter
full of complaints about his own bad health, his sufferings at the
hands of a wicked enemy and his betrayal by one of his sons. It
seems likely that he had transferred some property to his eldest
son, Daniel, on condition that the latter would provide for his
mother and her unmarried daughters, but that the shifty son of
a shifty father had not lived up to his obligations. It is certain
that, for some reason or other, the home at Newington, a pleasant
one according to Baker's description, had been broken up after
Defoe's recovery from his illness in the autumn of 1729. It seems
probable that he believed it necessary to separate from his
family and to take refuge in London and, later, in Kent. Was he


## p. 25 (#49) ##############################################

His Posthumous Reputation 25
the victim of hallucinations—had he any real enemy whose
malice he must avoid—was he trying, as he had tried before the
marriage, to elude certain financial demands made by the canny
Baker-had he reverted to the practices of his early manhood and
engaged in hazardous speculations? Who can tell ? All that we
now seem to know definitely is that, during the autumn of 1730 and
the early winter of 1731, he was writing pamphlets and revising
books in a way that indicates little falling off of energy and absolutely
no decay of mental powers, and that, on 26 April 1731, he died of
a lethargy at his lodgings in Ropemaker's alley, Moorfields, not far
from where he was born,
He was buried in what is now Bunhill fields. The newspapers
of the day took slight, but not unfavourable, notice of his death; his
library was sold in due course; his reputation as a writer went into
a partial eclipse which lasted until the close of the century; and
then, mirabile dictu, he was hailed by admiring biographers and
critics, not merely as a great writer, but as a consistent patriot
and a Christian hero. Of late, it has become impossible to view
him, as a man, in any such favourable light; but it seems probable
that he was more sinned against than sinning, and it is coming to be
more and more admitted that, as a writer and an important figure
of his age, he is second only to Swift, if even to him. Some incline
to regard him as the most wonderfully endowed man of his times,
seeing in him a master journalist, an adroit and influential
politician with not a few of the traits of a statesman, an econo-
mist of sound and advanced views, a purveyor of miscellaneous
information vast in its range and practical in its bearings, an
unequalled novelist of adventure and low life and, last but not
least, a writer whose homely raciness has not been surpassed and
a man the fascinating mystery of whose personality cannot be
exhausted. It is impossible to sum him up, but those who are
not satisfied with calling him 'the author of Robinson Crusoe
may content themselves with affirming that he is the greatest of
plebeian geniuses.


## p. 26 (#50) ##############################################

CHAPTER II
STEELE AND ADDISON
STEELE and Addison are writers of talent who rose almost
to genius because they intuitively collaborated with the spirit
of their age. They came to London at a time when, quite apart
from politics, society was divided into two classes, apparently so
irreconcilable that they seemed like two nations. On the one side
was the remnant of the old order, which still cherished the renas-
cence ideals of self-assertion and irresponsibility and had regained
prominence at the restoration. They followed the old fashion of
ostentation and self-abandonment, fighting duels on points of honour,
vying with each other in quips and raillery, posing as atheists and
jeering at sacred things, love-making with extravagant odes and
compliments, applauding immoral plays, while the more violent, the
'gulls' and 'roarers,' roamed through the town in search of
victims to outrage or assault. The women, in these higher circles,
read and thought of little but erotic French romances, wore false
eyebrows and patches, painted themselves, gesticulated with their
fans and eyes, intrigued in politics and passed the time in dalliance.
But, on the other hand, the citizens of London, who, since Tudor
times, had stood aloof from culture and corruption, were now no
longer the unconsidered masses. Each new expansion of trade
gave them a fresh hold on society, while the civil war, which had
decimated or ruined the nobility, conferred on the middle class
a political importance of which their fathers had never dreamt.
As a rule, members of the citizen class who have risen in the social
scale intermarry with the aristocracy and imitate the manners, and
especially the vices, of the class into which they enter. But, in the
great political revolution of the seventeenth century, merchants and
traders had triumphed through their moral character even more
than by their material prosperity. The time had come when England
was weary of all the medieval fanaticism, brutality and prejudice
which had risen to the surface in the civil war, and it was the citizen
class, apart from the zealots on both sides, which had first
upheld moderation. The feud which Greene, a century before,


## p. 27 (#51) ##############################################


-
Beginnings of the new Civilization 27
had symbolised as a quaint dispute between the velvet breeches
and cloth breeches had entered upon its last phase. Votaries of
Caroline elegance and dissipation had become a set apart. They still
had all the glamour of wealth and fashion; but they had lost their
influence on the civilization of the country. The middle class had
broken away from their leadership and had pressed forward to the
front rank of national progress. It has already been shown? how they
had trodden down the relics of a less humane and less reasonable
age, reforming the laws for debt and the administration of prisons,
refuting the superstition of witchcraft, attacking scholasticism in
the universities and founding the Royal Society-nay, more, how
the more enlightened had pleaded for a purer and simpler morality,
for gentler manners, for a more modest yet dignified self-respect.
To the superficial observer, these protests and appeals must have
sounded like isolated voices in a confused multitude. In reality,
they were indications of a new civilization which was already
fermenting underneath. A new London had sprung up since the
great fire and, with it, a generation of Londoners whose tempera-
ment and occupations led them to form a standard of culture,
honour and religion peculiar to themselves. Such progress is the
work of a whole class. It is never initiated by individuals, though
one or two thinkers are generally needed to give form and ex-
pression to the tendencies of the rest. In this case, the victory of
'cloth breeches' was not complete until Steele and Addison had
discovered in what quarter to look for the movement and in what
form to reveal to men their own ideas. These writers saw further
and deeper than their contemporaries, because each, according to
his own character, had first been born again.
It was Steele who led the way. Nature had endowed him with
the instincts and temperament of one of king Charles I's cavaliers.
He had the same generosity, love of pleasure, restlessness, chivalry
and tincture of classical culture. Like many others of this class,
he was extremely impressionable; but, unlike his prototypes, he
lived in an age when recklessness and self-indulgence, though still
fashionable in some circles, ran counter to the better tendencies of
the time. Thus, the conviviality and gallantry which were popular
in the guardroom caused him many searchings of heart, when
confronted by the disapproval of scholars and moralists. In such
moments of inward discontent, the gay life of the capital lost its
glamour; the puritan spirit came over him, and he perceived that the
1 Ante, vol. VII, chap. XVI, pp. 385–97.


## p. 28 (#52) ##############################################

28
Steele and Addison
dissipation of the young man-about-town was, at best, a pose and
the moral teaching of the ancients a lamentable protection against
the temptation of the senses. Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch had
proved persuasive monitors to many a Jacobean and Caroline
essayist, because the renascence had endowed the classics with
almost scriptural authority. But, though Steele belonged to the
class which still clung to these guides from respect for the old
times, he also came daily into contact with the new enlightened
religion of the middle class. He committed to paper the thoughts
which passed through his mind in these moments of reflection and
published them in 1701 for the edification of others under the title
The Christian Hero.
This booklet is an attempt to persuade educated men into
accepting the Bible as a moral counsellor. Steele describes how
Cato, Caesar, Brutus and Cassius died, and argues that heathen
philosophy failed each in the great crisis of his life. He then
tells over again the story of the creation of Adam and Eve and
how, after their fall, men became corrupt and so a prey to ambition
and the love of ostentation. This dependence on the applause
of the world is, to Steele, the root of all evil ; even the tales
which young fellows tell of debauches and seductions are prompted
by 'fame'; even 'heathen virtues, which were little else but dis-
guised or artificial passions (since the good was in fame) must rise
or fall with disappointment or success. ' Christ, and then St Paul,
by their labours and death, first brought men help, teaching them
that the true guide in conduct is conscience. Man sins or suffers
through dependence on the world; he is saved by the inwardness
and self-effacement of Christianity. In the spiritual distress which
drove Steele to write this pamphlet, he had learnt to think for
himself. The description of Eve's creation shows that he had
studied Milton, then an unfashionable author; the passage on
chivalrous respect for women's virtue was a defiance to the con-
ventionality which regarded immorality as a sign of high spirits ;
the advice that a man should do a kindness as if he would rather
have his generosity appear an enlarged self-love than a diffusive
bounty' was a new ideal for good taste; in his contention that the
false ideals of society led men to err, he touched the true weakness
of his times.
Thus, The Christian Hero is important because it foreshadows
Steele's message to his age. But, though the book passed through
a second edition within the same year and continued to be popular
i Chap. II.


## p. 29 (#53) ##############################################


Steelė's Comedies
29
6
with readers of a certain religious temperament, it was not other-
wise a success. The prosperous middle class, busy with the peaceful
round of city life, did not need to be warned against choosing
Caesar or Brutus for their model or Seneca for their spiritual
pastor. Nor, again, if they ever. opened this little manual of
meditations, would they find it clearly explained how the self-
sacrifice of St Paul and the divinity of Christ could guide them
amid the thousand little perplexities of their growing social
system. Steele sermonised on heroism to readers who were
interested in manners, and deserved the fate that from being
thought no undelightful companion, he was soon reckoned a
disagreeable fellow?
'
This missionary spirit, when roused, impelled him to other forms
of expression. Having not yet found his peculiar bent, he was
inevitably attracted to the drama. During a century, comedy and
tragedy, with intervals of repression, had been one of the most
popular outlets for an author and must have seemed exactly the
medium for a man with Steele's sense of humour and knowledge
of character. Besides, the moral movement among the people,
which had been influencing Steele, had also caught the theatre.
Sir Richard Blackmore and Jeremy Collierº were calling for a
pure and reformed drama, and so Steele's conscience, as well as his
tastes, urged him to put his ideas on the stage. Since the restora-
tion, writers of comedies had aimed at brilliance and cleverness.
As the court was amused at cuckoldry, they represented seducers
and seduced as endowed with all the wit, ingenuity, or beauty which
society admired, while intrigues leading to adultery could always
be rounded off into a well constructed, if somewhat unoriginal,
plot. Steele went over the same ground-love, courtship, married
life, intrigue; his purpose, however, was avowedly to paint virtue
and vice in their true colours. Following the example of
Molière, from whom he borrowed freely, he covered his bad
characters with ridicule and confusion. But he was not content
to let them occupy the front of the stage, as Molière had done.
He wished to champion virtue; so his villains, for the most part,
are minor characters, dismissed with humiliation at the dénouement,
while his leading figures are quite ordinary people, whose careers
begin and end in the triumph of homely virtues. Such characters,
however desirable in a book of devotions, lack true comic interest,
and Steele was obliged to lead his heroes and heroines through a
1 Mr Steele's Apology for Himself and his Writings, 1714.
9 Cf. ante, vol. VIII, pp. 163 ff.
a


## p. 30 (#54) ##############################################

30
Steele and Addison
6
series of domestic calamities and surprises, in order to sustain
sympathy. In The Funeral, or Grief-à-la-mode (1701), his first and
best constructed comedy, the defunct Lord Brumpton has to be kept
secretly alive all through the play, in order to shame his worldly
widow's enjoyment of affluence and freedom, and to reward his
daughters' two suitors. In The Lying Lover (1703), copied from
Corneille's Menteur, young Bookwit becomes drunk, then fights
and appears to kill his rival, is arrested, suffers all the pangs of
remorse and the horrors of Newgate and, after this gruesome
lesson against intemperance and duelling, learns that his victim
still lives and ends by marrying the sweetheart whom he had
courted with a fidelity rare on the stage. In The Tender
Husband (1705), the third and last of Steele's plays at this
period of his career, he rises to one of Molière's leading ideas,
in the conception that a son tyrannised till manhood in a boorish
home will end by deceiving his father and contracting a foolish
marriage, and that a girl, left to the companionship of French
romances, will become a 'Quixote in petticoats. ' But, when the
elder Clerimont is represented as despatching his mistress,
disguised as a gallant, to tempt the virtue of his wife and then,
on the failure of the seducer, tearfully seeking a reconciliation,
all dramatic propriety is sacrificed, in order to give a by no means
convincing picture of conjugal tenderness. Such was the tone
which the moral movement of queen Anne's reign introduced into
the theatre, and, since succeeding dramatists came under this
influence, Steele may be regarded as the founder of sentimental
comedy? Unhappily, as in the case of most comedies with a
purpose, plots are sacrificed to the moral, and, apart from im-
probability of incident, Steele’s plays show but little of that
correctness of construction which the age exacted.
If Steele's dramatic work added scant laurels to his reputation,
it was of the first importance in forming his mind. He had come
to his task with the same stock of ideas as had served him in
composing The Christian Hero. But, as a playwright, he had
to make these ideas talk and act. He had to penetrate be-
neath the surface of life, and to show how often a profession or
training degrades a man; how servants inevitably become mimics
of their masters' excesses and frivolities; how women, who are
untrained in the serious responsibilities of life, fall victims
to fulsome adulation and often end in a marriage of convenience;
i Ward, A. W. , A History of English Dramatic Literature, revised ed. 1899, vol. m
P. 493.


## p. 31 (#55) ##############################################


Influence of the Coffeehouses 31
how the best of them, for lack of moral sense, become
tyrannical and fastidious before wedlock, and how others prey
like vampires on their deluded husbands. Thus, Steele had
learnt to look inside the domestic circle and to note how fashion
and conventionality were warping the natural goodness of his
fellow creatures. Here and there, he hints at the conception of the
purer and simpler, though rather emotional, family life which he
was afterwards to depict. But, as we have seen, comedy was not
a suitable medium for teaching of this nature. Although an
atmosphere of earnest enquiry and reflection bad formed itself
in London, and had reached the stage, the public of the play.
house was not yet in a mood for social and moral speculation.
It still expected wit and amusement. Steele had yet to discover
where the world of thought that embodied the qualities which he
had in mind was to be found, and how he was to approach it.
He discovered it five years later in the coffeehouses. Here
could be met serious-minded, progressive citizens, who were
steadily outnumbering and overbearing the votaries of the old
social regime. Matthew Arnold has said that, when 'England
entered the prison of Puritanism,' it 'turned the key on its in-
tellectual progress for two hundred years. ' In reality, it was
precisely this class, made up of inheritors of puritan narrowness
and perseverance, which created a new culture for England out of
its coffeehouses. It has already been shown how Londoners, as
early as the protectorate, began to assemble in these rendezvous
and how, by daily intercourse, they learned to feel interest in each
other's manners and habits of thought. As they cared little for
the more frivolous diversions of the capital, they tended more and
more to seek the pleasures of news and conversation, until, by the
beginning of the eighteenth century, coffeehouses had become the
most striking feature of London life? Men who gathered day
after day in these resorts were not only interested in their com-
panions' ideas and demeanour; they cultivated an eye for trivial
actions and utterances, a gift for investigating other people's
prejudices and partialities, and they realized the pleasure of
winning their way into the intricacies of another man's mind.
Hence, they acquired a new attitude towards their fellow
creatures. Characters which would formerly have been ridiculed
or despised were now valued as intellectual puzzles, eccentricities
attracted sympathetic attention, and it became the note of
1 Ante, vol. vii, chap. XVI, pp. 389, 390.
2 Macaulay, History of England, chap. III.


## p. 32 (#56) ##############################################

32
Steele and Addison
intelligent men to be tolerant. Besides this sentiment of friend-
liness, the mere conditions of clublife imposed a new code of
manners. If men were to enjoy daily intercourse, they had to
respect each other's opinions and to cultivate self-suppression.
Thus, consideration for others became the fashion, and the
middle class, besides studying character, came to regard courtesy
as a part of civilization
Men learned other things in coffeehouses besides the amenities
of social intercourse. Clubland had taken so universal a hold on
London that nearly every man of intelligence frequented some
resort of this kind. Now, these were just the people who read
and wrote books; they created thought and taste; the future of
literature depended on their ideas and ways of expression. Until
the time of the restoration, neither writers nor readers had
practised the studied simplicity of true conversation. Even
pamphleteers like Nashe, Dekker or Rowlands, whose one aim
was to follow popular taste, had never broken away from
book knowledge, despite their slipshod style, and the literary
cliques which handed round manuscript essays and characters
had reproduced in their writings only such conversation as
might be a vehicle for their clinches and conceits. Men
had confined their literary interests to the library and, as a
consequence, their style was either ponderous or precious. The
Royal Society had already started a movement against redundance
of phrase; but it may well be doubted whether the protests of
Sprat, Evelyn and South? would have had lasting effect with-
out the influence of coffeehouses. It was here that, besides
,
practising benevolence in small things, men learnt to unravel
literary ideas in a style that was colloquial as well as cultured.
Conversation has a mysterious power of awakening thought.
Commonplaces and trifles appear in a new light, and fresh notions
are continually struck off like sparks. The man who has formed
his mind by intercourse is more versatile and alert than he whose
intellect has grown by reading, and he has learnt to speak in short
simple sentences, because the ear cannot, like the eye, follow long
periods. Moreover, he must abandon the phraseology of books,
* It is true that one has only to read The Dunciad (though not written by a coffee-
house habitué) to be convinced that St Grobian still had votaries no less ardent than
Nashe or Harvey. Flytings' continued as a literary tradition, and their existence
does not disprove the taste for gentler manners, which grew up in coffeehouses and
influenced literature. Compare The Coffee Scuffle (1662) or A Coffee-House Dialogue
(1679) (see ante, vol. vni, p. 390) with any scene from The Tatler or The Spectator.
Ante, vol. Vini, chap. XVI.
2


## p. 33 (#57) ##############################################


Beginnings of The Tatler
33
because the written word had long assumed a formal, almost im-
personal, air, and must borrow turns and phrases from daily
parlance to give an individual touch to his theories.
Thus, the middle classes were accomplishing their own
education. They were becoming thinkers with a culture and a
standard of manners born of conversation and free from pedantry
of thought or expression. Coffeehouses had given them a kind
of organisation; a means of exchanging ideas and forming the
public opinion of their class. But this spirit was at present manifest
only in the atmosphere where it had been formed. It was not
found in theatres, universities or salons. Coffeehouses bad
unconsciously become fraternities for the propagation of a new
humanism, and a writer could come into touch with the ideas and
sentiments of the age only in those centres.
This movement was so inchoate that the middle classes them-
selves were hardly conscious of it. Steele certainly did not perceive
into what a world of thought and sentiment he was penetrating
when he ventured, in The Tatler, to appeal to coffeehouses. After
writing The Tender Husband, he seems to have relinquished the
theatre for the more lucrative career of a court favourite. He,
probably, never lived within his income and, after losing, in 1708,
his position of gentleman-waiter to prince George of Denmark and
failing to obtain two other posts, he returned to literature in order
to meet his debts. Since the censorship had been removed from
the press, journalism had become a profitable enterprise, and
Steele's chief motive in starting The Tatler on 12 April 1709, was,
undoubtedly, the fear of bankruptcy. However, the desire to
improve his fellow creatures was as strong as in the days of The
Christian Hero. Steele was himself a frequenter of coffeehouses.
He knew how confused and misguided their political discussions
often were, thanks to the irresponsible news-sheets which flooded
London ; and he also realized how many other topics were wrongly
or superficially canvassed in those daily and nightly gatherings.
So, he set himself to enlighten, as well as to entertain, his fellow
talkers. As gazetteer, he could give the most trustworthy foreign
news, and, as a man of culture and society, he could tell them
what to think concerning other matters which occupied a discursive
and critical generation. The paper came out three times a week,
and each issue (unlike The Spectator) contained several essays,
dated, according to their subjects, from particular coffeehouses ? .
1 All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the
article of White's Chocolate house; poetry, under that of Will's coffee-house; learning,
E, L. IX. CH. II.
3


## p. 34 (#58) ##############################################

34
Steele and Addison
Thus, in its original conception, The Tatler was hardly more
than an improved imitation of Defoe's Review and The Athenian
Mercury. From the first, Steele aimed at making his paper
more comprehensive. He perceived that different coffeehouses
stood for widely different interests, and he laid them all under
contribution. He persevered in finding instruction or amusement
for every taste, till The Tatler became almost as diversified as the
opinions of its readers. In the hands of most editors, so undis-
criminating a policy would soon have reduced a journal to a
periodical miscellany, and Steele the essayist is certainly not free
from charges of inconsistency and confusion. But it must be re-
membered that his long struggle after a sober, scholarly existence,
though hardly successful in his personal life, had rendered him
keenly responsive to kindred influences around him, and enabled
him to discover and give expression to the spirit of humanised
puritanism which existed beneath the babel of coffeehouses.
Like all originators, he had to feel his way. He began by making
a feature of foreign intelligence and theatrical news and, full of
middle-class disgust at frivolity and incompetence, exposed the
vagaries of prominent social characters, apparently convinced
that offenders would mend, if pilloried under a pseudonymº.
Inspired by the same respect for order and regularity, he gave
expression, in some rather commonplace articles“, to the public
antipathy against gambling, and argued, in a series of papers 5,
that duelling was a senseless, guilty practice, observed by exquisites
as an affectation of bravery but secretly condemned by level-
headed burghers. He warned his readers against swindlers, pointing
at certain wellknown sharpers as dogs, but without a touch of the
old English amusement at roguery. Indeed, except for two jestbook
stories, a mock testament and a few sentimental extravagances
in the style of seventeenth century romancese, his earlier attempts
in a lighter vein consist of coffeehouse discussions on literary
9
under the title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from St James's
coffee-house; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from
my own apartment. ' The Tatler, no. 1.
i See ante, chap. I.
Nos. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14, 20, 21, 59 and 66 (by Swift), 191, 203 (Swift and Steale).
3 E. g. Colonel Pickel and Florimel, no. 7; Florimel and Prudentia at Bath, no. 16;
Lord Hinchinbroke, nos. 22, 58, 85; Tom Colson, no. 46; Dr John Radcliffe, no. 44 ;
Henry Cromwell, no. 47; Beau Feilding, nos. 50, 51; Duke of Ormond, no. 54.
• Nos. 13, 14, 15, 56.
5 Nos. 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 38, 39.
6 Nos. 2, 42.
7 No. 7.
8 E. g. Unnion and Valentine, no. 5.
1


## p. 35 (#59) ##############################################


Character of Isaac Bickerstaff 35
questions and talks on current topics of city life such as changes
in slanga and the abuse of the title esquires.
These and similar performances were half-hearted, because
Steele was finding his true level in the alleged lucubrations of
Isaac Bickerstaff. He had borrowed this pseudonym from Swift's
famous pamphlet, as being the best known type of intellectual
detective and watchman. Soon, coffeehouses began to make
their influence felt, and, as he gradually marked out as his
province the intimate world of conduct and courtesy, he tended
more and more to invest his figurehead with a new personality.
The literature of coffeehouses must be as light and informal as
their discussions*; so, he puts his moral counsels into the mouth of
Bickerstaff, in order to preserve a conversational style and an air
of persuasive authority quite acceptable to men who looked up to a
self-constituted oracle in all their debates. As his readers were
interested in eccentricity, Bickerstaff becomes an aged recluse
living a lonely and mysterious life, surrounded, as Swift had sug-
gested, by the old-fashioned paraphernalia of astrology and
attended by his familiar Pacolet®, like the now discredited ma-
gicians of the previous century. And yet this atmosphere of
unreality gives effectiveness to Bickerstaff's character. His isola-
tion enables him to study his fellow creatures dispassionately, and
Pacolet, like the diable boiteux of Lesage, reveals to him the
inaccessible secrets of other people. As the numbers of The Tatler
increased, he developed into the first, and rather roughdrawn,
portrait of eighteenth century civilization. He has the reason-
ableness and insight of coffeehouses, a sympathy with common
things, out of which the domestic novel was to come, and a spirit of
independent thought, coupled with respect for order and religion,
such as the seventeenth century never knew.
In this thin disguise, Steele touched on all those questions of
breeding, good taste, courtesy and chivalry where the middle class
had discarded old aristocratic ideals, without having yet learnt to
trust entirely to their own. No wonder The Tatler became im-
mensely popular when its readers found their half-formed notions
· Nos. 6, 17, 43.
No. 12.
8 No. 19.
See no. 62, on the propriety of words and thoughts, in which it is maintained
that conversation 'is not to savour in the least of study' and that literary style . is to
adrit of something like the freedom of discourse. '
See The Character of a Coffee-house, 1673, The Spectator, no. 24.
• The name appears to have been taken from a character in the romance of Valentine
and Orson, whose horse was enchanted. Sir Philip Sidney alludes to the horse in An
Apologie for Poetrie (1581).
3-2


## p. 36 (#60) ##############################################

36
Steele and Addison
confirmed and proclaimed. One of their perplexities centred
round the ideal of what they called a gentleman. In aristocratic
circles, men still emulated the type set forth by Jacobean
essayists? and affected 'warmth of imagination, quick relish of
?
pleasure and the manner of becoming it? ' Such lubricity and
self-assertion would be intolerable where friendly intercourse was
the foundation of culture, and Steele points out that the first
quality of a gentleman is not brilliance but forbearance and the
art of accommodating another's susceptibilities without sacrificing
one's own. Many recognise this ideal, but have not the tact to
combine compliance with self-respect, and become 'pretty fellows3'
or even 'very pretty fellows*,' or, again, affect an unwarrantable
familiarity and merely succeed in becoming 'whisperers without
business and laughers without occasion. ' Society being now
mosaic of different units, all of them seeking some common ground
of intellectual fellowship, men of one interest, such as are many
scholars and soldiersº, are shown to be as superficial as those who
think that boisterous good humour will make up for a lack of
ideas? . But, again and again, Steele insists that a man's first duty
is to please his hearers, showing how often the 'wag' and the
wit’ of the old school still abuse the privileges of acquaintanceship
merely to gain a reputation for smartness and satire 8.
The puritan desire to see the seriousness of life in every word
and deed was now being humanised into a standard of good taste,
and, if Londoners refused to admire cleverness devoid of charity,
they were even more ready to be warned against coarser methods
of self-advertisement. Affectation in dress and manner, such as
the manipulation of the snuff-box or the wearing a cane on the
fifth button, is mercilessly ridiculedº; the man who uses ex-
pletives to make his conversation forcible is declared to be merely
empty-headed 10; the whole fraternity of fops is characterised as
'the order of the insipids 11'; but the severest strictures are passed
on the pretence of viciousness which was part of the dandies'
pose 12. Thus, the two nations pass before us. On the one hand,
the degenerate imitators of Jacobean cavaliers and restoration
a
a
6
(
i Ante, vol. IV, chap. XVI. · The Tatler, no. 21.
3 No. 21.
4 No. 24.
6 No. 38.
6 No. 61, nicknamed by Steele 'men of fire. '
7 No. 63.
8 Nos. 184, 219, 225, 244, 264.