Daniel Defoe by William Minto

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"It is not the blow I received from a wicked, perjured,
and contemptible enemy that has broken in upon my spirit;
which, as she well knows, has carried me on through greater
disasters than these. But it has been the injustice, unkindness,
and, I must say inhuman, dealing of my own son, which
has both ruined my family, and in a word has broken my
heart.... I depended upon him, I trusted him, I gave up
my two dear unprovided children into his hands; but he
has no compassion, but suffers them and their poor dying
mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as it
were an alms, what he is bound under hand and seal, besides
the most sacred promises, to supply them with, himself at
the 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
wronged while he is able to do them right. Stand by them
as a brother; and if you have anything within you owing to
my memory, who have bestowed on you the best gift I have
to give, let them 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 easy to be managed by words and
promises."

The postscript to the letter shows that Baker had written to him about
selling the house, which, it may be remembered, was the security for
Mrs. Baker's portion, and had inquired about a policy of assurance. "I
wrote you a letter some months ago, in answer to one from you, about
selling the house; but you never signified to me whether you received
it. I have not the policy of assurance; I suppose my wife, or Hannah,
may have it." Baker's ignoring the previous letter about the house seems
to signify that it was unsatisfactory. He apparently wished for a
personal interview with Defoe. In the beginning of the present letter
Defoe had said that, though far from debarring a visit from his
son-in-law, circumstances, much to his sorrow, made it impossible that
he could receive a visit from anybody. After the charge against his son,
which we have quoted, he goes on to explain that it is impossible for
him to go to see Mr. Baker. His family apparently had been ignorant of
his movements for some time. "I am at a distance from London, in Kent;
nor have I a lodging in London, nor have I been at that place in the
Old Bailey since I wrote you I was removed from it. At present I am
weak, having had some fits of a fever that have left me low." He
suggests, indeed, a plan by which he might see his son-in-law and
daughter. He could not bear to make them a single flying visit. "Just to
come and look at you and retire immediately, 'tis a burden too heavy.
The parting will be a price beyond the enjoyment." But if they could find
a retired lodging for him at Enfield, "where he might not be known, and
might have the comfort of seeing them both now and then, upon such a
circumstance he could gladly give the days to solitude to have the
comfort of half an hour now and then with them both for two or three
weeks." Nevertheless, as if he considered this plan out of the question,
he ends with a touching expression of grief that, being near his
journey's end, he may never see them again. It is impossible to avoid
the conclusion that he did not wish to see his son-in-law, and that
Baker wished to see him about money matters, and suspected him of
evading an interview.

Was this evasion the cunning of incipient madness? Was his concealing
his hiding-place from his son-in-law an insane development of that
self-reliant caution, which for so many years of his life he had been
compelled to make a habit, in the face of the most serious risks? Why
did he give such an exaggerated colour to the infamous conduct of his
son? It is easy to make out from the passage I have quoted, what his
son's guilt really consisted in. Defoe had assigned certain property to
the son to be held in trust for his wife and daughters. The son had not
secured them in the enjoyment of this provision, but maintained them,
and gave them words and promises, with which they were content, that he
would continue to maintain them. It was this that Defoe called making
them "beg their bread at his door, and crave as if it were an alms" the
provision to which they were legally entitled. Why did Defoe vent his
grief at this conduct in such strong language to his son-in-law, at the
same time enjoining him to make a prudent use of it? Baker had written
to his father-in-law making inquiry about the securities for his wife's
portion; Defoe answers with profuse expressions of affection, a touching
picture of his old age and feebleness, and the imminent ruin of his
family through the possible treachery of the son to whom he has
entrusted their means of support, and an adjuration to his son-in-law to
stand by them with comfort and counsel when he is gone. The inquiry
about the securities he dismisses in a postscript. He will not sell the
house, and he does not know who has the policy of assurance.

One thing and one thing only shines clearly out of the obscurity in
which Defoe's closing years are wrapt--his earnest desire to make
provision for those members of his family who could not provide for
themselves. The pursuit from which he was in hiding, was in all
probability the pursuit of creditors. We have seen that his income must
have been large from the year 1718 or thereabouts, till his utter loss
of credit in journalism about the year 1726; but he may have had old
debts. It is difficult to explain otherwise why he should have been at
such pains, when he became prosperous, to assign property to his
children. There is evidence, as early as 1720, of his making over
property to his daughter Hannah, and the letter from which I have quoted
shows that he did not hold his Newington estate in his own name. In this
letter he speaks of a perjured, contemptible enemy as the cause of his
misfortunes. Mr. Lee conjectures that this was Mist, that Mist had
succeeded in embroiling him with the Government by convincing them of
treachery in his secret services, and that this was the hue and cry from
which he fled. But it is hardly conceivable that the Government could
have listened to charges brought by a man whom they had driven from the
country for his seditious practices. It is much more likely that Mist
and his supporters had sufficient interest to instigate the revival of
old pecuniary claims against Defoe.

It would have been open to suppose that the fears which made the old man
a homeless wanderer and fugitive for the last two years of his life,
were wholly imaginary, but for the circumstances of his death. He died
of a lethargy on the 26th of April, 1731, at a lodging in Ropemaker's
Alley, Moorfields. In September, 1733, as the books in Doctors' Commons
show, letters of administration on his goods and chattels were granted
to Mary Brooks, widow, a creditrix, after summoning in official form the
next of kin to appear. Now, if Defoe had been driven from his home by
imaginary fears, and had baffled with the cunning of insane suspicion
the efforts of his family to bring him back, there is no apparent reason
why they should not have claimed his effects after his death. He could
not have died unknown to them, for place and time were recorded in the
newspapers. His letter to his son-in-law, expressing the warmest
affection for all his family except his son, is sufficient to prevent
the horrible notion that he might have been driven forth like Lear by
his undutiful children after he had parted his goods among them. If they
had been capable of such unnatural conduct, they would not have failed
to secure his remaining property. Why, then, were his goods and chattels
left to a creditrix? Mr. Lee ingeniously suggests that Mary Brooks was
the keeper of the lodging where he died, and that she kept his personal
property to pay rent and perhaps funeral expenses. A much simpler
explanation, which covers most of the known facts without casting any
unwarranted reflections upon Defoe's children, is that when his last
illness overtook him he was still keeping out of the way of his
creditors, and that everything belonging to him in his own name was
legally seized. But there are doubts and difficulties attending any
explanation.

Mr. Lee has given satisfactory reasons for believing that Defoe did not,
as some of his biographers have supposed, die in actual distress.
Ropemaker's Alley in Moorfields was a highly respectable street at the
beginning of last century; a lodging there was far from squalid. The
probability is that Defoe subsisted on his pension from the Government
during his last two years of wandering; and suffering though he was from
the infirmities of age, yet wandering was less of a hardship than it
would have been to other men, to one who had been a wanderer for the
greater part of his life. At the best it was a painful and dreary ending
for so vigorous a life, and unless we pitilessly regard it as a
retribution for his moral defects, it is some comfort to think that the
old man's infirmities and anxieties were not aggravated by the pressure
of hopeless and helpless poverty. Nor do I think that he was as
distressed as he represented to his son-in-law by apprehensions of ruin
to his family after his death, and suspicions of the honesty of his
son's intentions. There is a half insane tone about his letter to Mr.
Baker, but a certain method may be discerned in its incoherencies. My
own reading of it is that it was a clever evasion of his son-in-law's
attempts to make sure of his share of the inheritance. We have seen how
shifty Defoe was in the original bargaining about his daughter's
portion, and we know from his novels what his views were about
fortune-hunters, and with what delight he dwelt upon the arts of
outwitting them. He probably considered that his youngest daughter was
sufficiently provided for by her marriage, and he had set his heart upon
making provision for her unmarried sisters. The letter seems to me to be
evidence, not so much of fears for their future welfare, as of a
resolution to leave them as much as he could. Two little circumstances
seem to show that, in spite of his professions of affection, there was a
coolness between Defoe and his son-in-law. He wrote only the prospectus
and the first article for Baker's paper, the _Universal Spectator_, and
when he died, Baker contented himself with a simple intimation of the
fact.

If my reading of this letter is right, it might stand as a type of the
most strongly marked characteristic in Defoe's political writings. It
was a masterly and utterly unscrupulous piece of diplomacy for the
attainment of a just and benevolent end. This may appear strange after
what I have said about Defoe's want of honesty, yet one cannot help
coming to this conclusion in looking back at his political career before
his character underwent its final degradation. He was a great, a truly
great liar, perhaps the greatest liar that ever lived. His dishonesty
went too deep to be called superficial, yet, if we go deeper still in
his rich and strangely mixed nature, we come upon stubborn foundations
of conscience. Among contemporary comments on the occasion of his death,
there was one which gave perfect expression to his political position.
"His knowledge of men, especially those in high life (with whom he was
formerly very conversant) had weakened his attachment to any political
party; but, in the main, he was in the interest of civil and religious
liberty, in behalf of which he appeared on several remarkable
occasions." The men of the time with whom Defoe was brought into
contact, were not good examples to him. The standard of political
morality was probably never so low in England as during his lifetime.
Places were dependent on the favour of the Sovereign, and the
Sovereign's own seat on the throne was insecure; there was no party
cohesion to keep politicians consistent, and every man fought for his
own hand. Defoe had been behind the scenes, witnessed many curious
changes of service, and heard many authentic tales of jealousy,
intrigue, and treachery. He had seen Jacobites take office under
William, join zealously in the scramble for his favours, and enter into
negotiations with the emissaries of James either upon some fancied
slight, or from no other motive than a desire to be safe, if by any
chance the sceptre should again change hands. Under Anne he had seen
Whig turn Tory and Tory turn Whig, and had seen statesmen of the highest
rank hold out one hand to Hanover and another to St. Germains. The most
single-minded man he had met had been King William himself, and of his
memory he always spoke with the most affectionate honour. Shifty as
Defoe was, and admirably as he used his genius for circumstantial
invention to cover his designs, there was no other statesman of his
generation who remained more true to the principles of the Revolution,
and to the cause of civil and religious freedom. No other public man saw
more clearly what was for the good of the country, or pursued it more
steadily. Even when he was the active servant of Harley, and turned
round upon men who regarded him as their own, the part which he played
was to pave the way for his patron's accession to office under the House
of Hanover. Defoe did as much as any one man, partly by secret intrigue,
partly through the public press, perhaps as much as any ten men outside
those in the immediate direction of affairs, to accomplish the two great
objects which William bequeathed to English statesmanship--the union of
England and Scotland, and the succession to the United Kingdom of a
Protestant dynasty. Apart from the field of high politics, his powerful
advocacy was enlisted in favour of almost every practicable scheme of
social improvement that came to the front in his time. Defoe cannot be
held up as an exemplar of moral conduct, yet if he is judged by the
measures that he laboured for and not by the means that he employed, few
Englishmen have lived more deserving than he of their country's
gratitude. He may have been self-seeking and vain-glorious, but in his
political life self-seeking and vain-glory were elevated by their
alliance with higher and wider aims. Defoe was a wonderful mixture of
knave and patriot. Sometimes pure knave seems to be uppermost, sometimes
pure patriot; but the mixture is so complex, and the energy of the man
so restless, that it almost passes human skill to unravel the two
elements. The author of _Robinson Crusoe_, is entitled to the benefit of
every doubt.

THE END.

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