The result was that Queen Anne was prevailed upon to release Defoe from prison, and Defoe proceeded to travel the country and build up a network of agents. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call him the father of the police state. He laid down the basic rules for spying. Each agent had to appear to be an ordinary citizen; every one had to be unknown to the others. The aim was unobtrusive thought-control of the people of England. And the scheme was amazingly successful – in fact, Defoe’s network became the foundation of the British Secret Service. And he quickly established its value by playing a significant part in the union of England and Scotland into one country called Great Britain. The English liked the idea; the Scots were dubious. Defoe went off to Scotland in 1706, with half a dozen plausible cover stories – that he was a ship-builder, a wool merchant, a fish merchant, and so on. He became intimate with various government ministers in Scotland, and quietly influenced opinion. In May 1707, Scotland and England became Great Britain, and Defoe returned home well satisfied.
In 1710, the Whig (i.e. Liberal) government fell; Defoe, who had made his reputation as a fighter for liberal principles, quickly switched sides, declaring, with his usual glibness, that he cared more for his country than for party prejudice. But in 1714, Harley – who had become an alcoholic – was dismissed; Queen Anne died a few days later, and a Whig administration came into power under George I. Defoe was thrown into prison, and although he obtained his freedom, he was soon back in jail again on a charge of libelling the Earl of Anglesey. Once again, he offered his services as a spy. And the Whigs, who knew his abilities, decided that a discredited Tory might make an excellent spy – particularly if everyone assumed he was still in disgrace. He might, as an ‘enemy’ of the government, find out what their opponents were planning. And at the moment, their opponents were not the Tories so much as the Jacobites -supporters of the house of Stuart. Under the guise of a government opponent, Defoe gained the confidence of various anti-government newspapers, and was soon using his Machiavellian skills to suppress anything the government disliked.
Sooner or later, he was bound to be found out. One of his dupes was a man called Mist, who ran a Jacobite newspaper. Mist printed a letter criticising the government without showing it to Defoe, and when he was summoned before government ministers tried to put the blame on Defoe. The Whigs began to suspect that Defoe was doubly treacherous. The breach was healed, but Defoe seems to have realised that his days as a double-dealer were numbered. He had to find some other way of making a living. He recollected that he possessed the material for an interesting narrative. In 1704, a Scottish pirate named Alexander Selkirk had quarrelled with his pirate captain and been marooned, at his own request, on an uninhabited island called Juan Fernandez. He spent five years there before he was rescued, and when he returned to England, became a celebrity. Defoe probably went to see him in Bristol in 1713, and bought his papers for a trifling sum. Using this material as a basis, Defoe dashed off Robinson Crusoe. The book appeared in 1719, and immediately became a classic. Unfortunately for Defoe, it instantly appeared in several pirated editions, so he made less from it than he might. But he went on to write more novels – Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Journal of the Plague Year and others. By the early 1720s, his credit as a spy had collapsed completely, and he lived mainly from his novels. But these were highly popular – particularly novels of ‘low life’ like Moll Flanders, which may well have inspired Osborn to bring out his Lives of the Notorious Criminals.
His end was typical. In August 1730, at the age of seventy, he suddenly disappeared. Until recently, the reason has been a mystery, but research has revealed that old debts – his tile factory had gone bankrupt while he was in prison for his dissenters pamphlet – were catching up with him. He could almost certainly have paid them off with the money from his novels. Instead, he preferred to abscond again. He died in the April of the following year in an obscure lodging house, not far from the spot where he was born.
For us, Defoe is a figure of symbolic importance. Shaw remarked that we judge the artist by his highest moments, the criminal by his lowest. It is rare to find a man who combines elements of both, and it enables us to see clearly the relationship between these two elements in human nature itself.
As a human being, Defoe was essentially a compromiser, a man who was always on the lookout for short-cuts, who believed that it is impossible to prosper in this world unless you cheat – in short, a crook. Yet we only have to look at his career to see that he was totally mistaken. Like all crooks, he suffered from a peculiar form of stupidity that made him unaware that bending the rules is not the best way of achieving what you want. In creating the secret service Defoe undoubtedly thought he was being brilliantly Machiavellian, placing his natural immorality at the service of his craving for security and influence. In fact, he gained neither security nor influence; he merely placed himself at the mercy of the political weather. His eventual downfall – after the Mist affair – strikes us as completely inevitable, the obligatory third-act downfall of any comedy villain. (It seems odd how often the lives of criminals seem to follow the pattern of a morality play – until we recognise that this is not divine retribution but the inevitable consequence of stupidity.)
What Defoe did possess was a certain wry honesty about his own dishonesty. This probably explains why Moll Flanders – the story of a woman with no principles – is his best novel; like Moll, Defoe was an honest whore. And it is this element in Defoe that made him a great novelist, and led to the only real success he ever achieved. He gained security only when he made honest use of his writing talent, without any attempt to be Machiavellian.
So in Defoe we can see with exceptional clarity the two great opposing tendencies of human nature which are also the two main currents of human history: crime and creativity, violence and intelligence, expediency and integrity. We can also see that the real objection to crime is that it is basically a mistake, a miscalculation. It is, quite simply, the wrong way of going about the business of survival. If dishonesty achieves its immediate aims, it does so at the cost of a long-term self-undermining.
The irony about Defoe is that his core of honesty – the instinctive honesty of the artist – not only brought him his only real success, but changed the direction of European culture. We could say that Defoe’s career symbolises the conflict between the outer and the inner man, the personality and the soul. His dubious personal morality died with him; his artistic integrity went marching on, and created a revolution whose importance it would be impossible to underestimate. This is why we must now consider it in some detail.
Robinson Crusoe was not, of course, quite the first novel – possibly the Morte d’Arthur deserves that title; and there had been many others, from Sidney’s Arcadia to Don Quixote and Lesage’s Gil Bias. But most of these works would be described as sophisticated fairy stories, relying almost wholly on fantastic plots to hold the reader’s interest.
By contrast, Robinson Crusoe is a sustained flight of imagination. When Crusoe struggles ashore, then builds a raft and removes food, ammunition and wine from the wrecked ship and constructs a tent of sailcloth, the reader is there on the island with him. Robinson Crusoe is a long book, and the story is extremely simple. But no one objects to the slowness of the narrative because the reader’s time scale has changed. Crusoe has been there for twenty-four years before he finds the footprint of Man Friday. Why did Defoe extend Selkirk’s five years to decades? Because he had become so fascinated by his own narrative that he felt it would be a pity to shorten it. Unlike earlier novels, unlike Don Quixote and Gil Bias, Robinson Crusoe is one single sustained narrative, like a flight from London to New York.
In the history of European culture, Robinson Crusoe is perhaps the most important single event since Thespis invented the Greek drama in the sixth century B.C. Like the drama, it was a kind of magic carpet, making human beings aware that life is not ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, that the material reality around us is not the only reality. All animals feel themselves to be at the mercy of the material world, so that when serious problems arise, they are inclined to run away or surrender. Human beings have emerged from the purely animal stage far too recently not to be victims of this instinctive assumption. The result is that we habitually underestimate ourselves and our strength. But when a man can explore a desert island without leaving his armchair, when he can charge into battle without risking his life, when he can cross Africa – in company with Defo’s Captain Singleton – without fatigue or thirst, then he also begins to experience a new courage to face his own problems. More: he begins to experience a desire to explore the unknown. Defoe enabled his middle-class reader to share the excitement of Columbus and Magellan, of Galileo and Newton. He revealed that human beings do not have to be limited by the narrowness of their physical experience.