T II E

EABLE

OF THE

BEES:

OR,

Private Vices
Publick Benefits.

it on a bonfire before St. James's Palace in 1728. He denied this tale with indignation, and The Fable of the Bees, in spite of (or on account of) the countless attacks which were made against it, was steadily reprinted for half a century. The heresies of Mandeville were plausible, and were put forward in a bold, attractive form. He believed that extravagant private expenditure led to private wealth, and that the spendthrift was a benefactor. He thought that the "private vices" of mankind, the indulgence of evil desires, was of general advantage to the world. Whether in arguing that virtue was a mere fallacy, and that human nature was hopelessly and radically bad, Mandeville was partly serious, or was wholly enjoying the jest of mocking at the optimism of Shaftesbury, is uncertain. He was certainly a coarse, clear-eyed person, of great acumen and no delicacy, who saw, faintly and imperfectly, many of the discoveries of later science, which were not dreamed of by his contemporaries. It is remarkable that while all decent people still affected to be shocked by the immoral paradoxes of Mandeville, Dr. Johnson had the candour to admit that The Fable of the Bees had "opened his views into real life very much." Johnson also admired a medical treatise of Mandeville's on hypochondria, which appeared first in 1711, and was often reprinted. In 1725 the Dutch doctor published an Inquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions in Tyburn, a very picturesque volume, the best written of his works. Some of the books he published were of a class which gave his enemies juster occasion for scandal than The Fable of the Bees, but he was left untroubled. Franklin, when he came to England in 1724, found Mandeville the "soul" of a tavern club, and describes him as "a most entertaining, facetious companion." Lord Macclesfield enjoyed his conversation, which was apparently of the same paradoxical character as his writings. Why Mandeville came to England, and how he learned to write English with such perfect mastery, will probably never be known. No portrait of him is supposed to exist.

CONTAINING,
Several Difcourfes, to demonftrate,
That Human Frailties, during the de
Feneracy of MANKIND, may be turn'd
To the Advantage of the CIVIL
SOCIETY, and made to fupply

the Place of Moral Virtues.

Luxe Tenebris.

LONDON:

Printed for J. ROBERTS, near the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane, 1714.

Title-page of Bernard Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees"

If the great ones of the clergy, as well as the laity, of any country whatever had no value for earthly pleasures, and did not endeavour to gratify their appetites, why are envy and revenge so raging among them, and all the other passions improved and refined upon in courts of princes more than anywhere else; and why are their repasts, their recreations, and whole manner of living, always such as are approved of, coveted, and imitated by the most sensual people of the same country? If despising all visible decorations, they were only in love with the embellishments of the mind, why should they borrow so many of the implements, and make use of the most darling toys, of the luxurious? Why should a lord treasurer, or a bishop, or even a Grand Signior, or the Pope of Rome, to be good and virtuous, and endeavour

the conquest of his passions, have occasion for greater revenues, richer furniture, or a more numerous attendance as to personal service, than a private man? What virtue is it the exercise of which requires so much pomp and superfluity as are to be seen by all men in power? A man has as much opportunity to practise temperance that has but one dish at a meal, as he that is constantly served with three courses and a dozen dishes in each. One may exercise as much patience and be as full of self-denial on a few flocks, without curtains or tester, as in a velvet bed that is sixteen foot high. The virtuous possessions of the mind are neither charge nor burden a man may bear misfortunes with fortitude in a garret, forgive injuries afoot, and be chaste, though he has not a shirt to his back; and therefore I shall never believe but that an indifferent skulker, if he was entrusted with it, might carry all the learning and religion that one man can contain, as well as a barge with six oars, especially if it was but to cross from Lambeth to Westminster; or that humility is so ponderous a virtue that it requires six horses to draw it.

Another writer who was kept outside the sacred ring of the Anne wits was DANIEL DEFOE, who comes in certain aspects close to Mandeville, but has a far wider range and variety. Several dissimilar writers are combined in Defoe, all, with one exception, of a pedestrian and common-place character. He was in his earlier years the very type of what was called "a hackney author," that is to say, a man of more skill than principle, who let out his pen for hire, ready at his best to support the Ministry with a pamphlet, at his worst to copy documents. for stationers or lawyers. In these multifarious exercises Defoe was as copious as any journalist of our own time, and for a quarter of a century had a very large share in the miscellaneous

Daniel Defoe

writing of the day. The literary character which these humdrum productions illustrate seems to have been far from fascinating. All that we can praise in this Defoe of the pamphlets and journals is industry and a sort of lucid versatility. He was a factor in the vulgarisation of English, and he helped, in no small measure, to create a correct, easy, not ungraceful style for common use in the eighteenth century.

But as he approached the age of sixty, Defoe suddenly appeared in a new light, as the inaugurator of a new school of English prose fiction.

In 1719 he published the immortal romance of Robinson Crusoe. Everything which had been written earlier than this in the form of an English novel faded at once into insignificance before the admirable sincerity and reality of this relation. It is difficult to conjecture what it was that suggested to the veteran drudge this extraordinary departure, so perfectly fresh, spirited, and novel.

The idea of the European sailor marooned on an oceanic island had been used in 1713 by Marivaux in his novel of Les Effets Surprenants, but there is no further similarity of treatment. In his later picaresque romances Defoe is manifestly influenced by Le Sage, but Robinson Crusoe can scarcely be traced to French or Spanish models. It was an invention, a great, unexpected stroke of British genius, and it was immediately hailed as such by the rest of Europe. It was one of the first English books which was widely imitated on the Continent, and it gave direction and impetus to the new romantico-realistic conception of fiction all over the world. The French, indeed, followed Defoe more directly than the English themselves, and his most obvious disciples are Prévost, Rousseau, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. It

THE

LIF

I FE

AND

STRANGE SURPRIZING

ADVENTURES

OF

ROBINSON CRUSOE,
Of YORK, MARINER:

Who lived Eight and Twenty Years,
all alone in an un-inhabited Ifland on the
Coaft of AMERICA, near the Mouth of,
the Great River of ORO ONOQUE;

Having been caft on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perifhed but himself. WITH

An Account how he was at laft as ftrangely deliver'd by PYRATES.

Written by Himfelf.

LONDON:

Printed for W. TAYLOR at the Ship in Pater-Nofter
Row. MDCCXIX.

was in his Émile, where he prefers Defoe as an educator to Aristotle, Pliny, or Buffon, that Rousseau finally drew the full admiration of Europe upon Robinson Crusoe. In England, however, the bourgeois romances of Defoe long remained without influence and without prestige, widely read indeed, but almost furtively, as vulgar literature fit for the kitchen and the shop.

Title-page of "Robinson Crusoe." First Edition, 1719

Daniel Foe, who called himself in later life Defoe (1661-1731), was the son of a Northamptonshire butcher, of the name of Foe, settled at the time of the writer's

Daniel Defoe (1661-1731)

birth, in St. Giles', Cripplegate. The butcher was a dissenter, and intended his son for the ministry; he seems to have been at a Nonconformist training college on Newington Green from 1675 to 1680. He gave up the idea of becoming a minister, but his career is vague to us until 1685, when we find him engaged in the wholesale hosiery business in a court leading out of Cornhill. He went abroad occasionally, sometimes certainly to Spain; but his trade failed, and in 1692, being bankrupt, he had to fly his creditors. About this time he seems to have published the earliest of his innumerable pamphlets. We hear of him at Bristol, where he was called "The Sunday Gentleman," because he dared not face the bailiffs on week-days; and the next thing is that, for no apparent reason, he is appointed, in 1694, Accountant to the Glass Commissioners. This enabled him, perhaps, to pay his debts, and he started a factory for bricks and pantiles at Tilbury, which for a while was highly successful. Defoe now kept a coach and a private yacht. His post under Government was probably a mere decoy for the work of a mercenary jour

nalist, and we find Defoe beginning to use his active. pen in the King's service. It was probably under direction from the court that he now separated from the Nonconformists in his Occasional Conformity of 1698. In the year 1701 he first adopted the surname Defoe, and engaged with fervour in a national, royal, and Protestant propaganda. His first great popular success was with the rough and daring satire in verse, The True-Born Englishman, in which he hammered into his

countrymen some hard facts. This "poem " sold to the amount of 80,000 copies, and Defoe was presented to the King. He was now, at the age of forty, a famous man, or at least a very popular one, but the death of William III. in 1702 was unfortunate for him. He wrote recklessly and vaguely, in prose and verse, and at last he scandalised all parties by his grotesque and ironical Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1703). Defoe fled, but presently determined to surrender; he was found guilty of seditious libel, and had his famous experience of the pillory. Pope, however, was not warranted in saying that Defoe stood "earless" or "unabashed," and the populace flung posies of flowers about him and drank enthusiastically in his honour at the foot of the pillory. He was taken to Newgate Prison, where he lay until the following summer, when he was released to be used for secret service by the Government. While he was imprisoned, he wrote as usual incessantly, and published a very remarkable newspaper, the Review, of which he wrote the whole himself; under several forms, this influential periodical continued to appear until 1715, all the time supporting whatever Ministry "Her Majesty was pleased to employ." All

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