ultimate analysis the champion of every strong vested interest. Automatically, without the intervention of any gross agency such as bribery, our Press strengthens in every way the hands of the upper class, who in England direct everything, absorb everything, pay for everything, disguise everything. Like the Reformed Parliament" and the "New Police," the free and independent Press has become a bulwark of the system by which all power is concentrated in upper-class hands-the more effectually since, to all outward appearances, borough-mongering and bribery are as extinct as the dodo and the avenues to every kind of distinction in England are absolutely free.

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Of anything in the nature of intelligent guidance of the humbler classes, the labouring poor, the exploited, the downtrodden, and the impenetrably stupid, the English Press has no idea. When it has supplied the mob with the latest cricket, the latest football, the latest police news, and the latest racing, it thinks it has done as much as can be expected. It is not a philanthropic concern, of course, the Press. Primarily, each newspaper is a perfectly independent going business concern, representing ordinarily a large amount of capital, the value of which is estimated by the extent of the paper's popularity. Nevertheless, having regard to the large part which the imagination must play in the healthy activity of the mind, and to the need that there is in the imagination for altruistic and patriotic stimulus, one cannot but regard the neglect of the altruistic emotions by the modern newspaper Press as a source of considerable danger to the commonwealth.

With all its defects, the British Press has rendered great services to this same commonweal, and it is a common opinion among unprejudiced persons that the benefits due to it have outweighed the abuses to which it has shown itself liable. When, however, we confine ourselves to the direct influence which the Press has produced upon English literature, with which we are more nearly concerned, this common opinion. is no longer tenable. It can hardly be denied that the effect of the newspaper Press upon our literature has been preponderantly bad.

In the first place it tends to make the literature of the passing moment even more ephemeral than it ordinarily would be. It is the Press that consecrates such phrases as "the book of the week," the book of the season," and that enshrines in

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the place of literature the credentials of celebrities and the memoirs of men (and women) of the time." Every one knows what is implied by a newspaper general," a newspaper statesman," a newspaper lawyer," or "a newspaper divine." To the modern journalist, as to the modern actor, the part is greater than the whole. A pungent extract is more effective than a new point of view; a snapshot has more actuality than an artistic composition. By the praise of such qualities, which make good copy, the Press warms up numbers of ephemeral fragments into heterogeneous books. For a serious work, it instinctively feels and sometimes ingenuously admits its incapacity. We have a good instance of this in the treatment accorded by The Athenæum to Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. Briefly speaking, the newspaper distracts the public, and by feeding it with hors d'œuvres and rélevés unfits it for a more sustained course. Instead of being something new that is of value to the world at large, literature is degraded to a disproportionately increasing extent to subserve the distraction known as reading," by acting as an anodyne to the monotony of the life of machine driversthe monotony to which so many of the vices of our town dwellers are attributed, and to which so many of the evils of modern life are so incontrovertibly due. For a great portion of the nineteenth century it will be readily admitted that the Press (through the agency of such organs as the Edinburgh and Saturday Reviews) exercised a strong deterrent influence upon triflers and amateurs in letters. Its unsympathetic attitude won for it a reputation of ferocity, and it has now gone to the opposite extreme. It welcomes everything on condition that its vogue does not outlast a single season. Remarkable as the managerial capacity displayed by English journals has beentheir enterprise in getting best news and best comments-the amount of space it has found for pure literature has hitherto been small. Latterly, however, it has followed continental example in admitting alike contes, romans, and literary papers. The free library, funereal in most of its effects upon literature. has hitherto combated the monopolising influence of the Press with some success. But the larger is evidently destined to swallow up the less, and the newspaper will eventually supersede the book altogether as far as the great mass of the population are concerned. The dream of popularising the first of the arts is already exploded, and the study of literature in

its highest sense must inevitably become restricted more and more to the small elements in our Anglo-Saxon population in whom the power of artistic appreciation is actively developed.

In one respect the collective Press of the English-speaking world has been gravely maligned. The popular view that the purity of the English language is endangered by slovenly writing in the Press is diametrically opposed to the facts of the case. Slovenly writing is committed not to the columns of the Press (which are criticised with Argus eyes both before, by the pick of professional readers, and after publication by all and sundry) but to the pages of long-winded academic studies-to books by scientific experts who are not expert with the pen, and to the increasing multitude of books by amateur authors who happen to be notorieties. Cacophonies, tautologies, and solecisms of grammar have no effect whatever upon the reputation of these worthies. They would be simply fatal to that of a skilled workman upon the Press. The standard of workmanship and esprit de corps among members of this body is high, and when once a form of expression or a grammatical usage is recognised by a leading authority in the Press to be objectionable, it is stamped out quite mercilessly (one of the earliest precisians and reformers in this respect was that greatest of all our journalists, Jonathan Swift), and with a severity which makes small allowance for the catholicity of our older English literature in such matters. Far from degrading the English speech, the Press operates far more than any other agency to purify and to unify it.

CHAPTER VI

DEFOE

"Les livres de De Foe ne sont que le développement des deux supplications de l'humanité: Mon Dieu, donnez-nous notre pain quotidien ;-mon Dieu, préservez-nous de la tentation!" Ce furent les paroles qui hantèrent sa vie et son imagination."-M. SCHWOв, Préface à Moll Flanders."

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Early education-The True-born Englishman-Political pamphlets-Robinson Crusoe-A great mystifier-Minor novels -Defoe's realism.

DANIEL DEFOE was born in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, in the year of Charles II.'s joyful Restoration. Whether he was born shortly after or shortly before the exact date of that auspicious event is still uncertain, but the latest authorities incline to the winter of 1659-60. Daniel's father, James Foe, a butcher of Fore Street, was a younger son of a substantial yeoman farmer of Northamptonshire. (Disliking a monosyllabic surname, the writer changed his name to Defoe about 1703.) As a boy, in the streets about Smithfield Daniel observed the secrets of basket and candle-making, which he turned to such good purpose in Robinson Crusoe. Already he evinced a desire. to talk with seamen and soldiers about "the great seafights or battles on shore that any of them had been in." He must have heard, too, many relations of the wars of Oliver's time, also of the Great Plague, and of the Great Fire, which occurred when he was five and six respectively. He may well have had pointed out to him the blind poet Milton, whose house in Bunhill Row was little more than a stone's-throw from Fore Street. The fact that he was

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intended for the Nonconformist ministry implied that he had a thoroughly good educational grounding (in the academy at Newington Green) by Charles Norton, rank Independent," both in languages and logic. But Daniel drew back and went into business as a hose-factor (or dealer in and exporter of stockings) in the early 'eighties. On January 1st, 1684, being already in business, he married Mary Tuffley, aged twenty, of St. Botolph's, Aldgate. He was a thorough-going Nonconformist in politics, a supporter of Oates and his Protestant perjurers in 1680, while it is stated, somewhat improbably, that he "out with Monmouth in 1685 and had to leave England. It is certain that in 1688 he joined William's army in its advance on London.

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Shortly after this Defoe's business went smash, and for a time he disappeared from London, though he managed by extraordinary diligence to make a composition with his creditors and eventually to pay many of them in full. Even at this time his pen was far from idle, and it was now that he wrote his remarkable Essay upon Projects (1688), containing suggestions for a national bank, for a system of assurance, for friendly societies, for pension offices or savings banks, for idiot asylums, for a reform of the bankruptcy laws, and for various academies. Many of these suggestions were already, it is true, in the air; most of them anticipate later ameliorations in our social system. In 1695 he obtained a small government appointment, and soon after he became a profitable shareholder in some brick and pantile works at Chadwell, near Tilbury. He removed thither from Hackney, set up a coach, and began rapidly paying off his debts. He was apparently established at Tilbury by 1696 or 1697, and in that year he commenced political pamphleteer with a trenchant pamphlet in support of William's design of maintaining a standing army. In 1700 appeared his wonderful metrical satire, The True