MR. DE FOE Defoe. By James Sutherland. (Methuen. I2S. 6d.)
MODERN writers on Defoe have mainly devoted themselves to criticism of his work ; for biography we have had to turn to useful but cursory shorter lives or grope with lagging step and growing dismay through The Life and Times, by Walter Wilson —and " using that shapeless work," as Prof. Sutherland says, " is almost a minor form of research." His new and substan- tial biography is therefore very welcome. Defoe who has enjoyed—and how he would have enjoyed it /.—much specu- lative, moral and admonitory handling, is at last treated intelli- gently and without prejudice. Intelligence is indeed the quality- most necessary in the biographer of this slippery and engaging Protestant. In two directions Professor Sutherland claims also to have added the propitiatory mite of " new material"—on Defoe's career as a merchant and about the last two years of his life. His sudden flight to Greenwich just before his death, his quarrel with Mary Brooke, who for long was supposed to be his landlady but who turns out upon investiga- tion to be a go-getting widow trying to prevent his estate from going to his heirs, make a not astonishing end for the man who was hauled up before the King's Bench eight times in two years by indignant litigants when a young man. In this final adven- ture Defoe shows up for once in a better light, if Professor Sutherland's analysis is correct.
Professor Sutherland has, however, sought to avoid the old irrelevance of giving' good and bad conduct marks to Defoe. This is a habit which has sprung either from making him a Protestant martyr and hero or from surveying him from the comfortable moral pasturage of a security he never knew. Defoe was more interested in publicity than in heroism, spent all his business years in breathless speculation and the rest of his life as a secret agent and in laying the unethical foundations of popular journalism. If Defoe was a martyr, he was, as Profes- sor Sutherland says, a martyr to journalism as topers are martyrs in the cause of gout., The chief and almost only interest the morality of Defoe has lies in the light that may be thrown upon the foundation of modern capitalist morality, and this interest happens to be considerable. For Defoe was typical of the new capitalist, those competitive individualists who like his Crusoe were building a new society. No longer condemned by an unchanging world to continue the shopkeeping and apprentice traditions of their class, they were becoming, with the growth of foreign trade, merchants and speculators. Mocked on the stage where the aristocrats seduced their wives and
escaped their bills, these new men were nevertheless fighting their way to the top, joining the factions of their day, no doubt, but at the same time, like Defoe, being concerned fundamen- tally with the practical rather than the ideal or passionate course. Defoe admired them. And they, like him, paid their lip service to the decent virtues in the hurry and probably understood that a man who writes pamphlets at two or three guineas a piece will inevitably be " bright " rather than remark- able for his principles. -
The main difference one sees between the modern journalist and Defoe is that the former is rueful because the system is rotten and on the down grade, whereas Defoe, in the optimistic early life of the system, enjoyed every moment of the game. Where we are cynical, he has gusto. The disguises and com- promises which to us seem shameful, he found irresistible. He had all the advantages of being an innovator. There was, one is sure, an unholy joy for him in being a Whig and a dissenter and yet acting as a Tory agent. He loved the disguise and he was not so very dishonest, for he was a moderate man in his mature years and was constitutionally unable to take the rigid and fact io sal view with its heated but sterile loyalties. He was—and Professor Sutherland's analysis of his views in the pamphlets show it—a pragmatist. The disguises gave an excitement to the otherwise prosaic ways of common sense and, when they did not get him into trouble with thick-witted authority, were a delight in themselves. To be Mr. De Foe and not plain Mr. Foe, to be on a spuriou's business journey for Harley in Edinburgh, to deferid the Dis- senters by pretending to attack them, all the numerous equivo- cations of his career, are a parallel to his favourite literary device ; here passing himself off as Moll Flanders, here as a Cavalier, a pirate, a pretty gold-digger, a witness of the Plague and another Alexander Selkirk.
Professor Sutherland has extracted the full flavour from this picaresque career. The touch of the chapel, the counter and the cheque at the end of the month, prevent it, fascinating as it is, from attaining the more picturesque heights of genuine roguery. Defoe was a fluid and harassed man, not a rogue. There is too much of the main chance and ready explanation in him to make him cut such a figure as, say, Beaumarchais cut too years later when, under the powerful impetus of the growth of a new class, he rose from the clockmaker's shop to Versailles and intrigued in the courts of Europe. Defoe is of more stolid and meaner make. He is extraordinarily English. Dissent was in his blood : that failure for E17,000 when he was 4o was a bad and chastening knock. A man who had no money and who was bold enough to play a lone hand soon found that the price of independence was the humiliation of feeding on the crumbs from some rich man's table.
V. S. PRITCHETT.
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