A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

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 selfundermining.
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.