THERE IS NOT a name in the entire range of English literature to which so full and universal an appreciation has been given by posterity as that of Addison. He had his critics in his day. He had, indeed, more than critics, and from one quarter at least has received in his breast the finest and sharpest sting which a friend estranged could put into poetic vengeance. But the burden even of contemporary voices was always overwhelmingly in his favor, and nowadays there is no one in the world, we believe, that has other than gentle words for the gentle writer — the finest critic, the finest gentleman, the most tender humorist of his age. It is not only admiration, but a sort of personal affection with which we look back, detecting in all the bustling companies of that witty and depraved period his genial figure, with a delightful simplicity in the midst of all the formalism, and whole-heartedness among the conceits and pretensions, of the fops and wits, the intriguing statesmen and busy conspirators, of an age in which public faith can scarcely be said to have existed at all. He had his little defects, which were the defects of the time. And perhaps his age would not have loved him as it did had he been entirely without a share in its weaknesses. As it was, no one could call him a milksop then, as no one would venture to record any offensive name against him now. The smile of benevolent good nature, of indulgent humor, of observation always as sweet and merciful as it is acute and refined, is never absent from his countenance. He treats no man hardly; the ideal beings whom he creates are the friends of all: we could, indeed, more easily spare dozens of living acquaintances than we could part with Sir Roger de Coverley. Addison is the very embodiment of that delightful gift of humor on which we pride ourselves so much as a specially English quality; his soft laugh touches all the chords of sympathy and loving comprehension with a tender ridicule in which the applauses of admiration are conveyed with double effect. That his style is the perfection, in its way, of English style is less dear and delightful to us than that what it conveys is the perfection of feeling. His art is the antipodes of that satirical art which allows human excellence only to gird at it, and insinuate motives which diminish or destroy. Addison, on the other hand, allows imperfections which his interpretation turns into something more sweet than virtue, and throws a delightful gleam of love and laughter upon the eccentricities and characteristic follies of individual nature. That he sees everything is one of the conditions of his genial forgiveness of everything that is not mean or base or cruel. With these he makes no terms. They are not within the range of his treatment. Non ragionam di lor. He passes by to the genial rural circle where all is honest, simple, and true; or to town, where in the coffee-houses themselves a kind soul will find humors enough to keep him cheerful without harm to any of his fellow-creatures — even the post-writers whom he jocularly recommends to a supplementary Chelsea as having killed more men in the wars than any general ever did, or the “needy persons” hungry for news, whom he promises to keep supplied with good and wholesome sentiments. He was at the same time the first of his kind. Thackeray associates Congreve — one does not exactly know why — with this nobler name: but at once makes it clear that there could be no comparison between them, since the world of the comedy-writer was an entirely fictitious world, altogether unlike the human nature of the essayist. Of the humorists we may venture to say that Addison is the first, as well as the most refined and complete. Swift draws a heavier shaft, which lacerates and kills, and Pope sends his needle-pointed arrows, all touched with poisonous venom, to the most vulnerable points; but Addison has no heart to slay. He transfixes the veil of folly with light, shining, irresistible darts, and pins it aloft in triumph, but he lets the fool go free — perhaps lets you see even, by some reflection from his swift-flying polished spear, a gleam of human meaning in the poor wretch’s face which touches your heart. Even when he diverts himself with Tom Folio or Ned Softly, instead of plunging these bores into a bottomless gulf of contempt, he plays with them as one might with a child, a twinkle of soft fun in his eye, drawing out their simple absurdities. That habit of his which Swift describes to Stella, as one which she herself shared, of seeming to consent to follies which it is not worth while contradicting, and which Pope venomously characterizes as “assents with evil leer,” lures him, and us along with him, into byways of human nature which the impatient critic closes with a kick, and in which there is much amusement and little harm. Molière’s Trissotin is a social conspirator meaning to build advancement upon his bad verses; but Addison’s poetaster is only an exposition of harmless vanity, humored by the gently malicious, but kind and patient, listener, who amid his laughter finds a certain pleasure in pleasing the victim too. There is sympathy even in the dissection, a conjunction of feelings which is of the very nature of the true humorist. These, no doubt, are of a very different caliber from that creation which still charms the reader — the delightful figure of Sir Roger, and all the simple folks full of follies and of virtues who surround him; but they are scarcely less remarkable. The lesser pictures, taken at a sitting in which the author has had no time to elaborate those features of human character which always draw forth his tenderness, are yet full of this instinctive sweetness, as well as of insight, keen, though always tempered, as the touch of Ithuriel’s spear. The angel, indeed, was far more severe, disclosing the demon under his innocent disguise; but Addison has nothing to do with demons, he has no deep-laid plan of mischief to unveil. The worst he does is to smile and banter the little absurdities out of us — those curious little delusions which deceive ourselves as well as the world.
This most loved of English writers was the son of one of those English parsons who confuse our belief in the extremely unfavorable account, given by both the graver and the lighter historians of the time, of the condition of country clergymen. Neither Parson Adams in his virtue, nor Parson Trulliber in his grossness, nor Macaulay’s keen and clear picture, nor Thackeray’s fine disrespectful studies of the chaplain who marries the waiting-maid, seem to afford us any guidance to the nature of the household which the Rev. Launcelot Addison, after many wanderings and experiences, set up in the little parish of Milston in Wiltshire somewhere about the year 1670. Steele’s description of it has, no doubt, the artificial form affected by the age, and sets it forth as one of those models of perfection and examples to the world which nowadays we are more disposed to distrust and laugh at than to follow. “I remember among all my acquaintances,” he says, “but one man whom I have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace”; and he goes on to describe the “three sons and one daughter whom he bred with all the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenious way — their thoughts turned into an emulation for the superiority in kind and generous affection toward each other,” the boys behaving themselves with a manly friendship, their sister treated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. “It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in this family,” he adds. “I have often seen the old man’s heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident wherein he saw his children’s good will to one another created in him the Godlike pleasure of loving them because they loved one another.” The family tenderness thus inculcated no doubt came from a mind full of the milk of human kindness, and happily transmitting that possession to the gentle soul of the eldest son, who probably was the one whom the father “had the weakness to love much better than the others” — a weakness which “he took as much pains to correct as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind.” Such a paternity and training does something to account for the prevailing gentleness of Addison’s temper and judgments.
Dr. Addison had seen the world not in a very brilliant or luxurious way. He had been chaplain at Dunkirk, and afterward at Tangier among the Moors, upon which latter strange experience he wrote a book: and he rose afterward to be Dean of Lichfield, a dignified clergyman. One of the brothers went to India, and attained to some eminence; the other was eventually, like Joseph, a fellow of Magdalen. They dispersed themselves in the world as the children of a clergyman might very well do at the present day, and it is evident belonged distinctly to the caste of gentlemen. The sons, or at least the son with whom we have specially to do, after sundry local schoolings went to Charterhouse, which he left at fifteen for Oxford, perhaps because of his unusual advancement, more probably because the custom of the time sent boys earlier to the university, as is still the practice in Scotland. Addison was much distinguished in that elegant branch of learning, the writing of Latin verse, a kind of distinction which remains dear to the finest minds, in spite of all the remarks concerning its inutility and the time wasted in acquiring the art, which the rest of the world has so largely indulged in. A copy of verses upon the accession of King William, written while he was still a very youthful scholar at Queen’s College, no more than seventeen, got him his first promotion. The boy’s verses came — perhaps from some proud tutor at Queen’s, boasting what could be done under the cupola in the High street, finer than anything attempted in more distinguished seats of learning — into the hands of the Provost of Magdalen, to the amazement and envy of that more learned corporation. There had been no election of scholars in the previous year, during the melancholy time when the college was embroiled with King James, and the courtly Quaker Penn had all the disturbed and troubled fellows under his heel; but now that freedom had returned with the revolution and the heaven-sent William, there was room for a double number of distinguished poor demies. Dr. Lancaster of Magdalen decided at once that to leave such Latinity as that of the young author of these verses to a college never very great in such gifts would be a sin against his own: and young Addison was accordingly elected to all the privileges of a Magdalen demyship. It is with this beautiful college that his name is connected in Oxford. There could be no more fit association. The noble trees and velvet lawns of Magdalen speckled with deer, shy yet friendly creatures that embellish the retired and silent glades — the long-winding walk by the Cherwell round the meadows where the fritillaries grow, the time-worn dignity of the place with its graceful old-world architecture and associations, are all in the finest keeping with the shy and silent student who talked so little and thought so much, living among his books in his college rooms, keeping his lamp alight half through the night, or musing under the elms, where the little stream joins the greater. It is dreadful to think that in all probability Addison thought the imposing classicism of Queen’s, at which the cultivated scholar of to-day shudders, much finer than Magdalen: for he had no opinion of Gothic, and lamented the weakness, if not wickedness, of those mistaken ages which wasted ornament upon such antiquated forms; but at least he loved his retired promenade under the trees, with all its sweetness of primrose and thrush in spring, and the wonderful yellow sunsets over the floods in winter, and the pleasant illusions of the winding way. There the stranger may realize still in the quiet of the cloistered shades how the shy young student wandered in Addison’s Walk and pondered his verses, and formed the delicate wealth of speech which was to distinguish him from all his fellows. He spent about ten years in his college, first as a student and then as a fellow, in the position which, perhaps, is more ideal for a scholar than any other in Christendom. But the young man was not much more enlightened than the other young men of his age, notwithstanding his genius at Latin verses, and that still finer genius which had not as yet come to utterance. He wrote an “Account of the Greatest English Poets,” not much wiser than the school-boy essays of our own day which set Lord Tennyson and Mr. Browning down in their right places. Addison went further. He leaves out all mention of Shakspere, and speaks of Cowley as a “mighty genius.” He describes “the spacious times of great Elizabeth” as “a barbarous age,” amused by “Old Spenser” with “long-spun allegories” and “dull morals,” which have lost all power to charm an age of understanding. The youth, indeed, ran amuck among all the greatest names till we shiver at his temerity. But he knew better afterward; and, if he still condescended a little to his elders and betters, learned to love and comprehend them too.
It would seem that he wavered for a time whether he should not take orders, a step necessary to retain his fellowship, and dedicate himself to the church, as was the wish of his father. It would have been entirely suitable to him one cannot but think; to his meditative mood, and shy temper, and high moral tone. He would have missed the humors of town, the coffee-houses, and the wits, and the vagaries of the beaus and belles; but with still a tenderer and more genial humor might have made his villagers live before us, and found out all the amusing follies of the knights and squires, which even in London town did not escape his smiling observation. The manner in which the question was decided is curiously characteristic of the age. That he was not himself inclined that way seems probable, since he bids his muse farewell after the fashion of the time, when this ending seemed imminent, with something like regret, and it is said that he distrusted his own fitness for the sacred office. At all events, the matter came to the ears of Charles Montague, afterward Lord Halifax, himself an elegant scholar, and at that time in office. Young Addison had addressed to him, on the occasion of the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, one of those pieces of Latin verse for which the young man was known among the scholars of his time. He accompanied the gift with a letter couched in the hyperbole of the age, deprecating his patron’s possible disapproval of “the noble subject debased by my numbers,” and justifying himself by the poverty of the verses already published on the same theme. “For my part,” he says, “I never could prevail on myself to offer you a poem written in our native tongue, since you yourself deter all others by your own Compositions from such an Attempt, as much as you excite them by your Favour and Humanity.” Montague returned this compliment by interfering in the young poet’s concerns as soon as he heard of the danger that so promising a youth might fall into the gulf of the church, and be lost to the other kinds of work more useful to statesmen. He wrote to the authorities of Magdalen begging that Addison might not be urged into holy orders, and in the mean time took more active measures to secure him for the state. Lord Somers had also received the dedication of some of Addison’s verses, and was equally interested in the young man’s career. Between them the two statesmen secured for him a pension of three hundred a year, on no pretense of work to be done or duty fulfilled, but merely that he might be able to prepare himself the better for the public service, and be thus at hand and ready when his work was wanted. Public opinion has risen up nowadays against any such arrangement, and much slighter efforts at patronage would be denounced now over all England as a job. And yet one wonders whether it was so profitless a proceeding as we think it. Addison was worth more than the money to England. To be sure, without the money he would still have been Addison; yet something, no doubt, of the mellow sweetness of humanity in him was due to this fostering of his youth.
He went abroad in 1699, and addressed himself in the first place to the learning of French, which he did slowly at Blois, without apparently gaining much enlightenment as to the state of France or the other countries which he visited in his prolonged tour. No doubt, with his pension and the income of his fellowship, Addison traveled like a young man of fortune and fashion in those times of leisure, with excellent introductions everywhere, seeing the best society, and the greatest men both in rank and letters. Boileau admired his Latin verses as much as the English statesmen did, and the young man went upon his way more and more convinced that Latin verses were the highroad to fame. From France he went to Italy, making a classical pilgrimage. “Throughout,” says Mr. Leslie Stephen, quaintly, “if we are to judge by his narrative, he seems to have considered the scenery as designed to illustrate his beloved poets.” The much-debated uses of travel receive a new question from the records of such a journey, pursued with the fullest leisure and under the best auspices; and one wonders whether the man who hurries across a continent in a few weeks, catching flying impressions, and forming crude judgments, is, after all, much less advantaged than he who, oblivious of all the human interests around him, discusses Rome, for instance, as if it had no interest later than Martial or Silius Italicus — as if neither Church, nor Pope, nor all the convulsions of the Middle Ages, nor Crusader, nor Jesuit, had ever been. This extraordinary impoverishment of the imagination was the fashion of the time, just as it has been the fashion in other days to fix upon the vile records of the Renaissance as the one thing interesting in the history of a noble country. According to that fashion, however, Addison did everything that a young man of the highest culture could be expected to do. He traced the footsteps of Æneas, and remembered every spot on which a classical battle had been fought, or an ode sung. He wrote an eloquent essay upon medals, and lingered among the sculptures of the museums; and he picked up a subject for a heroic tragedy from the suggestion of a foolish play which he saw at a Venetian theater. With his head full of such themes, he had gone out from Oxford, and with a deepened sense of their importance he came back again. Though in after days he touches lightly with his satiric dart the young man who can talk of nothing better on his return than how “he had like to have been drowned at such a place; how he fell out of a chaise at another”; yet in the hymn of praise with which he celebrates his own return from all the dangers of foreign travel something like the same record is made, though in a more imposing manner:
In foreign Realms and Lands remote,
Supported by thy care,
Thro’ burning Climes I passed unhurt,
And breath’d in Tainted Air.
Thy mercy sweetened every Soil,
Made every Region please,
The hoary Alpine Hills it warmed,
And smooth’d the Tyrrhene Seas.
JOSEPH ADDISON.
ENGRAVED BY T. JOHNSON, FROM MEZZOTINT BY JEAN SIMON, AFTER PAINTING BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER.
It is only the vulgarity of our modern imagination that makes us think of hot water-pipes when the idea of warming the Alps is presented to our profane minds. The burrowing of the railway that climbs the St. Gothard may be taken as a large contribution to the carrying out of this suggestion.
When Addison returned home after these four years of classical wanderings, it was to prospects sadly overcast. King William had died a year before, which had stopped his pension; Halifax was out of office, and all the hopes of public life, for which he had been training himself, seemed to drop as he came back. It is said that during the last year he had charge of a pupil; but there is no proof of the statement, nor has any pupil ever been identified by name. An offer was made to him to accompany upon his travels a son of the Duke of Somerset, his services to be paid by the present of a hundred guineas at the year’s end, which did not seem to Addison an advantageous offer: but this, which came to nothing, is the only authentic reference to any possible “bear-leading” such as Thackeray refers to in “Esmond”; and fine as is the sketch made by that kindred humorist, he seems to exaggerate at once the poverty and the neglect into which for the moment Addison fell.
He returned to England in 1703, being then thirty-one, full of every accomplishment, but with only his fellowship to depend upon, and the uncertain chances of Jacob Tonson’s favor instead of the king’s. He is said to have sunk, or rather risen, to a poor lodging in London, in the Haymarket, up three pairs of stairs, which was indeed a sad change from the importance of his position as a rich young Englishman making the grand tour. But if he carried a disappointed or despondent heart to those elevated quarters, he never made any moan on the subject, and it is very likely enjoyed his freedom and the happy sense of being at home like other young men; and he seems to have been at once advanced to the membership of the Kit-Cat Club, which would supply him with the finest of company, and a center for the life which otherwise must have appeared as if it had come to a broken end. It was not long, however, that this period of neglect was suffered to last, and once more the transaction which elevated Addison to the sphere in which he passed the rest of his life is admirably characteristic of the period, and alas! profoundly unlike anything that could happen to a young man of genius now.
We will not return again to any bewildering discussion of the Whigs and Tories of Queen Anne, but only say that Godolphin and Marlborough, those “great twin brethren” of the state, had come into possession of England at this great crisis, and that every means by which they could secure the suffrages of both parties were doubly necessary, considering the disappointment on one side that the policy of the country remained unchanged, and on the other that it had to be carried out by Whig, not Tory, hands. Nothing could be better adapted than the great victory of Blenheim to arouse an outburst of national feeling, and sweep, for a time at least, the punctilios of party away. The lord treasurer, who had everything in his hands at home, while his great partner fought and conquered abroad, was almost comically at a loss how to sound the trumpet of warlike success so as to excite the country, and, if possible, turn the head of the discontented. In one of Leopardi’s fables there is an account of the tremendous catastrophe with which the world was threatened when his illustrious excellency the Sun declined one morning to rise and tread his old-world course around the earth for the comfort of mankind. “Let her in her turn go round me if she wants my warmth and light,” says the potentate — with great reason, it must be allowed, since Copernicus was born, and everything in the celestial spheres was about to be set right. But how to persuade the earth that she must now undertake this circuit? Let a poet be found to do it is the first suggestion. “La via più spedita è la più sicura è di trovare un poeta ovvero un filosofo che persuada alla Terra di muoversi.” Godolphin found himself in the same position as that in which the luckless agencies of the Universe were left when the Sun struck work. A poet! — but where to find a poet he knew not, being himself addicted to other modes of exercise and entertainment. He went to Halifax to ask where he should find what was wanted — a poet. But that statesman was coy and held back. He could, indeed, produce the very man; but why should he interfere to betray neglected merit and induce a man of genius to labor for those who would leave him to perish in obscurity? Godolphin, however, was ready to promise anything in the great necessity of the case; and Halifax permitted himself to be persuaded to mention the name which no doubt was bursting from his lips. He would not, however, undertake to be the ambassador, but insisted that the real possessors of power should ask in their own persons, and with immediate and substantial proofs of their readiness to recompense the service they demanded. That day, all blazing in gold lace and splendor, the coach of the chancellor of the exchequer stopped before the little shop in the Haymarket over which the young scholar had his airy abode: and that great personage clambered up the long flights of stairs carrying with him, very possibly, the patent of the appointment which was an earnest of what the powers that were could do for Addison. This was how the great poem of the “Campaign,” that illustrious composition, was brought into being. Poems made to order seldom fulfil expectation, but in this case there was no disappointment. Godolphin and England alike were delighted, and Addison’s life and success were at once secured.
No one now, save as an illustration of history, would think of reading the “Campaign,” though most readers are familiar with the famous simile which dazzled a whole generation:
‘T was there great Marlborough’s mighty soul was proved,
That in the shock of charging hosts unmoved,
Amidst confusion, horror, and despair
Examined all the dreadful scenes of war,
In powerful thought the field of death surveyed,
To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,
Inspired repulsed battalions to engage,
And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.
So when an angel by Divine command
With rising tempest shakes a guilty land,
Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past,
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleased the Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.
Macaulay points out with much felicity how the fact of the Great Storm — so called in English history — which had passed over England in the previous year, and was yet full in the memory of all, gave strength and meaning to this famous simile, which at once opened to Addison the gates of fortune and of fame. Two years after he was promoted to be one of the undersecretaries of state, and from that time languished no more in the cold shade of obscurity where Halifax had upbraided the Government for leaving him. He was not a man born to linger there. Shy though he was, and little apt to put himself forward, this favorite of the muses — to use the phraseology of his time — was also the favorite of fortune. Everything that he touched throve with him. The gifts he possessed were all especially adapted to the requirements of his time. At no other period, perhaps, in history did the rulers of the country bethink themselves of a poet as the auxiliary most necessary: and his age was the only one that relished poetry of Addison’s kind.
This event brought more than mere prosperity to the fortunate young man. If he had been already of note enough to belong to the Kit-Cat Club, with what a blaze of modest glory would he now appear — not swelling in self-conceit, like so many of the wits; not full of silent passion, like the strange big Irish clergyman who pushed into the chattering company in the coffee-house and astounded them with his masterful and arrogant ways: but always modest — never heard at all in a large company, opening out a little when the group dispersed, and an audience fit but few gathered around him — but with one companion half divine. The one companion by and by became often that very same Irishman whose silent prowl about the room in which he knew nobody had amused all the luckier members. Swift found himself in a kind of coffee-house paradise when he got Addison alone, and the two took their wine together, spending their half-crowns according to the stranger’s thrifty record, and wishing for no third. They were as unlike as could be conceived in every particular, and yet what company they must have been, as they sat together, the wine going a little too freely — though Swift was always temperate, and Addison, notwithstanding that common peccadillo, the most irreproachable of men! It was then that the “Travels in Italy” were published, while still the fame of the “Campaign” was warm; and Addison gave his new friend a copy inscribed to “Jonathan Swift, the most Agreeable Companion, the Truest Friend, and the Greatest Genius of his Age.” What quick understanding, what recognition as of two who had been born to know each other! They were both in their prime — Swift thirty-eight, Addison five years younger, still young enough to hope for everything that can befall a man; the one fully entered upon the path of fortune, the other surely so much nearer it for being thus received and welcomed. Addison gave “his little senate laws” for many years in these convivial meetings, and all who surrounded him adored him. But Swift was never again so close a member of the little company. Politics, and the curious part which the Irish parson took in them, separated him from the consistent and moderate politician, who acted faithfully with his party, and who was always true whoever might be false. But Swift held fast to Addison so far at least as feeling was concerned. Over and over he repeated the sentiment, that “if he had a mind to be king he would hardly be refused.” Their meetings ceased, and all those outflowings of wit and wisdom, and the talk long into the night which was the most delightful thing in life; but for years after Swift still continued to say that there was nothing his friend might not be if he would: that his election was carried without a word of opposition when every other member had to fight for his life, and that he might be king in Ireland, or anywhere else, had he the mind. They were used to terms of large applause in those days, but to no one else did it take this particular form.
In 1708 Addison lost his post as under-secretary by a change of the ministry, or rather of the minister, it being the habit in those days to form a government piecemeal, a Whig here, a Tory there, as favor or circumstances required, so that it was by no means needful that all should go out or come in together. In fact, no sooner was the under-secretary deprived of one place than he obtained another, that of secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the same office, we presume, as that which is now called chief secretary for Ireland, though its seriousness and power are now so much greater. In those days there was no Irish people to deal with, but only a very lively, contentious, pushing, and place-hunting community — the Protestant English-Irish, which, so far as literature and public knowledge go, has been accepted as the type of the much darker and less simple character of the Celt. The wild, mystic, morose, and often cruel nature of the native race, with its gleams of poetry and dreams of fortune, has turned out a very different thing to reckon with. No such problem was presented to the statesmen of that time. The admixture of Irish blood would seem to go to the head of the Saxon and endow him with a gaiety and sparkle which does not exist either in one race or the other unmixed; and it was with the society formed on this basis, the ascendant minority, contemptuous of every possible power of the people so-called, yet far less unsympathetic than the anxious politicians of to-day, that Addison had to deal. His post was “very lucrative,” we are told — in fees and pieces of patronage, no doubt, for the income was but £2000 a year — and he soon acquired an even greater popularity on the one side of the channel than on the other. Something amiable and conciliatory must have rayed out of the man: otherwise it is curious to understand the popularity in brilliant and talkative Dublin of a stranger whose chief efforts in conversation were only to be accomplished tête-a-tête. But he had the foil of a detestable and detested chief — Wharton, whose corrupt and brutal character gave double acceptance to the secretary’s charm and goodness, and the Tories contended with the Whigs, says Swift, which should speak best of this favorite of fortune. “How can you think so meanly of a kingdom,” he exclaims, “as not to be pleased that every creature in it who hath one grain of worth has a veneration for you?” It is not often that even in hyperbole such a thing can be said.
It was while Addison was in Ireland thus gathering golden opinions that an event occurred which was of the utmost importance to his reputation, so far especially as posterity was concerned. Among the little band of friends over whom he held a kind of genial sway, and who acknowledged his superiority with boundless devotion, was one who was more nearly his equal than any other of the band; a friend of youth, one of those erratic but generous natures whose love of excellence is almost rapturous, though they are unable themselves to keep up to the high level they approve. Steele can never be forgotten where Addison is honored. He had been at Charterhouse and at Oxford along with his friend, and no doubt it was a wonder among the reading men in their earlier days how it was that the correct, the polished, the irreproachable scholar of Magdalen, with his quiet ways, could put up with that gay scapegrace who was perpetually in trouble. Such alliances, however, have not been rare. The cheerful, careless Dick, full of expedients, full of animal spirits, always amusing, friendly, generous in his impulses, if unintentionally selfish in the constant breaches of his better meaning, must have had a charm for the steadier and purer nature which was formed with pulses more orderly. No doubt Steele’s perpetual self-revelation, his unfolding of a hundred quips and cranks of human nature, and unsuspicious rendering up of all his natural anomalies and contradictions to the instinctive spectatorship of his amused companion, helped to endear him to the humorist, who must have laughed till he cried on many an occasion over poor Dick’s amazing wisdoms and follies, without any breach of that indulgent affection which between two men who have grown up together can rarely be said to be mingled with anything so keen as contempt. Steele, it is evident, must have known Addison “at home,” as school-boys say, or he could not have made that little sketch of the household where brothers and sisters were taught to be so loving to each other. While the young hero who had, as in the favorite allegories of the time, chosen the right path, and taken the steady hand of Minerva, instead of that more lovely one of fatal Venus to guide him, was reaching the heights of applause and good fortune, the unlucky youth who chose pleasure for his pursuit had gone disastrously the other way, and fallen into all sorts of adventures, extremely amusing for his friend to hear of, though he disapproved, and no doubt very amusing to the actual actor in them, though he suffered. But Addison was not a mere “spectator” so far as the friend of his youth was concerned. When he began to rise there seems little reason to doubt that he pulled Steele up with him, introducing him to the notice of the fine people, who in those days might make the fortune of a gentlemanly and clever adventurer, and that either by his own interest or that of one of his powerful friends he procured him a place and started him in public life. Steele had already floated into literature, and, whether it is true or not that Addison helped him in the concoction of one play at least, it is clear that he kept his purse and his heart well open to his friend, now a man about town ruffling at the coffee-houses with the best, and full of that energy and readiness which so often strike out new ways of working, though it may require steadier heads to carry them out.
It was, however, while Addison was in Ireland that Steele was moved by the most important of these original impulses, an idea full, as it proved, of merit and practical use. Journalism was then in its infancy. A little “News Letter,” or “Flying Post” — a shabby broadsheet containing the bulletin of a battle, a formal and brief notice of parliamentary proceedings, an account of some monstrous birth, a child with two heads, or that perennial gooseberry which has survived into our own time — and an elaborate list of births, deaths, and marriages, was almost all that existed in the way of public record. The post to which Steele had been appointed was that of Gazetteer, which naturally led him to the consideration of such matters: and among the crowd of projects which worked together in his “barmy noddle,” there suddenly surged uppermost the idea of a paper which should come out on the post days, the Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays which were, up to that time, the only days of communication with the country; a paper written after the fancy of the time, in itself a letter from the wits and the knowing persons in town, revealing not only the existing state of public affairs, but all those exquisite particulars of society which have always been the delight of country circles, and which were doubly sure to please at a time when society was governed by talk, when all public criticism was verbal, and the echoes of the wits in the coffee-houses were blown about on all the breezes. Happy the Sir Harry who, sitting mum over his wine in a corner, could hear these gentlemen discussing what Sunderland or Somers had said, what my Lord Treasurer intended, or, more delightful, the newest incident in the tragedy-comedy of the great duchess — how the queen looked glumly at her over the card-table, or let her stand unnoticed at a drawing-room; and still more deeply blest the parson who had Mr. Addison pointed out to him, and heard the young Templars and scholars pressing him with questions as to when his “Cato” was coming out, or asking his opinion on a set of verses. Such worthies would go back to the country full of these reflections from the world, and tell how the gallants laughed at the mantua which was going out of fashion, and made fun of the red heels which, perhaps, were just then appearing at the Manor or the Moated Grange. Steele saw at once what a thing it would be to convey these impressions at first hand in a privileged “Tatler” direct to the houses of the gentry all over the country. Perhaps he did not perceive at first what a still finer thing to have them served up with the foaming chocolate or fragrant tea at every breakfast in Mayfair.
It is an idea that has occurred to a great many heads since with less success. In these latter days there have been many literary adventurers, to whom the starting of a new paper has seemed an opening into El Dorado. But the opening in the majority of cases does not prove a practicable one — for, in fact, there is no longer any need of news; and the concise little essays and elegant banterings of those critics of the time have fallen out of date. News means in our day an elaborate system, and instantaneous reports from all the world; and one London newspaper — far more one of the gigantic journals proper to America — contains as much matter as half a hundred “Tatlers.” One wonders, if Addison’s genius, and the light hand of Steele, and Swift’s tremendous and scathing humor could be conjured up again, whether such a production, with its mingled thread of the finest sentiments and the pettiest subjects, metaphysics and morals, and the “Eneid” and “Paradise Lost,” and periwigs and petticoats, would find sufficient acceptance with “the fair” and the wise to keep it afloat, or would still go up to sages and fine ladies with their breakfast trays.
It was on the immediate foundation of one of Swift’s savage jeux d’esprits that the new undertaking was begun, a mystification which greatly amused the wits then, but which does not, perhaps, appear particularly delightful now. Swift had been seized by a freak of mischief in respect to a certain Partridge, an astrologer, who made an income out of the public by pretended revelations of the future, as is still done, we believe, among those masses, beneath the ascertained audience of literature, who spend their sixpences at Christmas upon almanacs and year-books containing predictions of what is to happen. It occurred to Swift in some merry moment to emulate and to doom the Merlin of the day: and with the prodigious gravity which characterizes his greatest jests he wrote “Predictions for the year 1708,” in which, among many other things, he announced that he had consulted the stars on behalf of Partridge, and had ascertained that the wizard would certainly die on March 29, at eleven o’clock at night, of a raging fever. The reader will probably remember that the jest was kept up, and that, notwithstanding Partridge’s protest that he was not dead at all, Isaac Bickerstaff insisted on asserting that his prophecy had been fulfilled, to the grave confusion of various serious affairs, and the inextinguishable laughter of the wits. It was not a pretty jest, but it brought into being a visionary critic of public matters, a new personage in the literary world, in whom other wits saw capabilities. Steele in particular perceived that Isaac Bickerstaff was just the personality he wanted, and therewith proceeded to make of that shadowy being the Mentor of the time. The design was excellent, the immediate execution cleverly adapted to seize the interest of the public, which had been already amused and mystified under that name. Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff presented his readers with the first number of his journal without charge. “I earnestly desire,” he says, “all persons, without distinction, to take it in for the present gratis, and hereafter at the price of one penny, forbidding all hawkers to take more for it at their peril.” The idea took the town. No doubt there would be many an allusion to this and that which the wits would guess at, and which would to them have a double meaning; but, to do the “Tatler” justice, the kind of gossip which fills the so-called society newspapers in our day was unknown to the witty gentlemen who sometimes satirize a ruffle or a shoe-tie, but never personally a woman. The types of fine ladies who flutter through his pages could never raise a pang in any individual bosom; and when he addressed himself to the reform of the theater, to the difficult duty of checking play and discouraging duels, he had all the well-thinking on his side.
Steele had gone on for some numbers before his new venture attracted the attention of Addison. He recognized whose the hand was from a classical criticism in the sixth number which he had himself made to Steele; and he must have been pleased with the idea, since he soon after appears as a coadjutor, sending his contributions from the Secretary’s office in Dublin. There has been a great and prolonged controversy upon the respective merits of these two friends: some, and first among them Macaulay, will have it that Addison had all the merit of the publication. “Almost everything good in the ‘Tatler’ was his,” says the historian. But there are many who, despite Macaulay’s great authority, find a certain difficulty in distinguishing Addison from Steele and Steele from Addison, and are inclined to find the latter writer as entertaining and as gifted as the former. No question could be more difficult to settle. As we glance over the little gray volumes which bring back to us dimly the effect which the little broadsheet must have had when it appeared day by day, there is no doubt that the eye is oftenest caught by something which, when we look again, proves to be from Addison’s hand. We open, it is by chance, and yet not altogether by chance, upon Tom Folio and his humors; upon the poor poet and his verses; upon some group of shabby heroes, or stumbling procession of country gentlemen which there is no mistaking. But on the other hand it is Steele who gives us that family picture, which reads like the Vicar of Wakefield, yet with a more tender touch (for Mrs. Primrose was never her husband’s equal), showing us the good woman among her family, the husband half distracted with the fear of losing her, the wife for his sake smiling her paleness away. Indeed, we think, in these early essays at least, it would be a mistake for the critic to risk his reputation on the superiority of Addison. He set up no higher standard than that which his friend had raised, but fell into the same humor, adding his contribution of social pictures with less force of moral generally, and more delicacy of workmanship, but no remarkable preëminence. The character of the publication changed gradually as the great new pen came into it; but whether by Addison’s influence or by the mere action of time, and a sense of what suited the audience he had obtained — which a soul so sympathetic as Steele’s would naturally divine with readiness — no one can tell. Gradually the news which at first had regularly filled a column dropped away. It had been, no doubt, well authenticated news, the freshest and best, as it came from the authorized hand of the Gazetteer; but either Steele got tired of supplying it, or a sense of the inexpediency of publishing anything which might displease his patrons and the government, convinced him that it was unnecessary. It is scarcely possible, either, to tell why the “Tatler” came to an end. Mr. Austin Dobson, in his recent life of Steele, gives sundry reasons which do not seem, however, of any particular weight. Steele’s own account is that he had become known, and his warnings and lessons were thus made of no avail:
I considered [he says] that severity of manners was absolutely necessary to him who would censure others, and for that reason and that only chose to talk in a mask. I shall not carry my humility so far as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time confess my life is at best but pardonable. And with no greater character than this a man could make an indifferent progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom of spirit that would have lost both its beauty and efficacy had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele.
This reason is, however, — though pretty and just enough had its writer renounced the trade, — a somewhat fantastic one when we reflect that though the “Tatler” ended in January, 1711, the “Spectator” began in March of the same year. The one died only to be replaced by the other. It is said that Addison did not know of his friend’s intention to cut the “Tatler” short, and it was he who was the chief agent in beginning the “Spectator.” Therefore it may have been that the breach was but an impatience of Steele’s, which his slow and less impulsive and more constant comrade could not permanently consent to. No doubt Addison had by this time learned the advantage of such a mode of utterance, and felt how entirely it suited his own manner of work and constitution of mind. The fictitious person of Isaac Bickerstaff was relinquished in the new series: it no longer assumed to give any news. Its contents were less varied, consisting generally of a single essay, and, notwithstanding the impression which the casual reader often has, and which some critics have largely dwelt upon, that the comments of this critic are upon the merest vanities of the time, the hoops, the gold-lace, the snuff-boxes, and patches of the period, it is astonishing how little space is actually taken up with these lighter details, and how many graver questions, how many fine sentiments and delicate situations, afford the moralist occasion for those remarks which he makes in the most beautiful and picturesque English to the edification of all the generations. There is, perhaps, no book which is so characteristic of an epoch in history, and none which gives so clear a conception of the English world of the time. We sit and look on, always amused, often instructed, while the delicate panorama unfolds before us — and see everything pass, the fine coaches, the gentlemen on foot, the parsons in their gowns, the young Templars jesting in the doorways: but always with the little monologue going on, which accompanies the movement, and runs off into a hundred byways of thought, sometimes serious, sometimes gay, often with no particular connection with the many-colored streams of passers-by, yet never obscuring our sight of them as they come and go. There is, perhaps, a noisy group at the door while Mr. Spectator talks, with their wigs in the last fashion, and their clouded canes hung to a button, while they discourse. In one corner there are some two or three grave gentlemen putting their heads together over the latest news; and in another the young fellows over their wine eager in discussion of Mrs. Oldfield and Mrs. Bracegirdle at the theater, or of Chloe and Clarissa, the reigning beauties of society; or perhaps it is a poet, poor Ned Softly, as the case may be, who is reading his last sonnet to his mistress’s eyebrow, amid the laughing commentaries or the ridicule of his companions. What is Mr. Spectator talking of all the while? His discourse does not prevent us hearing the impertinences of the others. Perhaps he is talking of honest love, a favorite theme of his, at which the wits do not dare to laugh in his presence, — or he is telling one of his fables, to which everybody in the midst of his levity or his business gives half an ear at least; or by a caprice he has turned aside to metaphysics, and is discussing the processes of the mind, and how “no thought can be beautiful that is not just”; how “‘t is a property of the heart of man to be diffusive, its kind wishes spread abroad over the face of the creation,” and such like; not to speak of graver subjects still to which he will direct our minds on Saturdays, perhaps to prepare us for Sunday, when he is silent. Or he will read aloud a letter from some whimsical correspondent, which the wits will pause to hear, for gossip is ever sweet, but which before they know lands them in a case of hardship or trouble which touches their consciences and rouses their pity. Sometimes the hum of life will stop altogether and even Softly put his verses in his pocket to listen: and on the brink of tears the fine gentlemen, and we too along with them, incontinently burst out a-laughing at some touch that no one expected. But whether we laugh or cry, or are shamed in our levity, or diverted in our seriousness, outside the windows the crowd is always streaming on. There is no separating the “Spectator” from the lively, crowded, troublous, and perplexing scenes upon which all his reflections are made. The young lady looking out of her coach — at sight of whom all the young fellows doff their hats and make their comments, how much her fortune is, who is in pursuit of her, or if any mud has yet been flung upon her — shows to the philosopher a face disturbed with all the puzzles of an existence which nobody will allow her to take seriously. The poor wit who endeavors so wistfully to amuse my lord in
SIDNEY, EARL OF GODOLPHIN.
ENGRAVED BY PETER AITKEN, FROM MEZZOTINT BY JOHN SMITH, IN BRITISH
MUSEUM. PAINTED BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER.
his dullness betrays to that critic not so much the soul of a toady, as that of the anxious father with children that starve at home. His young fellows, though they look so careless, have their troubles too. Wherever that keen eye turns another group shows through the crowd, or a lonely whimsical figure as distinct as if there was no one but he. Save perhaps on those Saturdays when he plays his soft accompaniment to Milton’s grand, sonorous organ he is never abstracted or retired from men: on all other occasions, though he is thinking of a great deal else, and has his mind absorbed in other themes, this busy world of which he forms a part is always with him. Sometimes he permits us to see him over their heads only, seated on his familiar bench at his table, from whence he delivers his homilies, with all these figures moving and re-moving on the busy pavement in the foreground; sometimes we are admitted inside, and watch them through open door and window by his side: but he is never to be parted from the society in which he finds his models, his subjects, his audience. Like other men he takes it for granted that the fashion of his contemporaries is to go on forever. For posterity that smiling, keen observer takes no thought.
But of all things else that Addison has done there remains one preëminent figure which is his chief claim to immortality. The “Campaign” has disappeared out of literature; “Cato” is known only by a few well-known lines; the “Spectator” itself, though a work which no gentleman’s library can be without, dwells generally in dignified retirement there, and is seldom seen on any table but the student’s, though we are all supposed to be familiar with it: but Sir Roger de Coverley is the familiar friend of most people who have read anything at all, and the acquaintance by sight, if we may so speak, of everybody. There is no form better known in all literature. His simple rustic state, his modest sense of his own importance, his kind and genial patronage of the younger world, which would laugh at him if it were not overawed by his modesty and goodness, and which still sniggers in its sleeve at all those kind, ridiculous ways of his as he walks about in London, taken in on all sides, with his hand always in his purse and his heart in its right place, are always familiar and delightful. We learn with a kind of shock that it was Steele who first introduced this perfect gentleman to the world, and can only hope that it was Addison’s idea from the first, and that he did not merely snatch out of his friend’s hands and appropriate a conception so entirely according to his own heart. To Steele, too, we are indebted for some pretty scenes in the brief history: for Will the Huntsman’s wooing, which is the most delicate little enamel, and for the knight’s own love-making, which, however, is pushed a little too near absurdity. But it is Addison who leads him forth among his country neighbors, and to the assizes, and meets the gipsies with him, and brings him up to town, carrying him to Westminster and to Spring Gardens, in the wherry with the one-legged waterman, and to the play. The delightful gentleman is never finer than in this latter scene. He has to be conveyed in his coach, attended by all his servants, armed with “good oaken plants,” and Captain Sentry in the sword he had worn at Steinkirk, for fear of the Mohocks, those brutal disturbers of the public peace whom Addison justly feels it would be unbecoming to bring within sight of his noble old knight.
As soon as the house was full and the candles lighted my old friend stood up and looked about him with that pleasure which a mind seasoned with humanity naturally feels in itself at the sight of a multitude of people who seem pleased with one another, and partake of the same common entertainment. I could not but fancy to myself as the old man stood up in the middle of the pit that he made a very proper centre to a tragick Audience. Upon the entering of Pyrrhus the Knight told me that he did not believe the King of France had a better strut. I was indeed very attentive to my old friend’s remarks because I looked upon them as a piece of natural criticism and was well pleased to hear him, at the conclusion of almost every scene, telling me that he could not imagine how the play would end; one while he appeared much concerned for Andromache, and a little while after as much for Hermione; and was extremely puzzled to know what would become of Pyrrhus. When Sir Roger saw Andromache’s obstinate refusal to her lover’s importunities, he whispered me in the ear that he was sure she would never have him; to which he added with a more than ordinary vehemence, “You can’t imagine, sir, what ‘t is to have to do with a widow.” Upon Pyrrhus, his threatening afterwards to leave her, the Knight shook his head and murmured, “Ay! do it if you can.” This part dwelt so much upon my friend’s imagination that at the close of the third act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered in my ear, “These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray,” says he, “you that are a critick, is this play according to your dramatick rules, as you call them? Should your People in Tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of!”
The fourth act very luckily began before I had time to give the old gentleman an answer. “Well,” says the Knight, sitting down with great satisfaction, “I suppose we are now to see Hector’s Ghost?” He then renewed his attention, and from time to time fell a-praising the widow. He made, indeed, a little mistake as to one of her pages, whom, at his first entering, he took for Astyanax; but we quickly set him right in that particular, though at the same time he owned he should have been very glad to see the little boy, who, says he, must needs be a very fine child by the account that is given of him.
Could anything be more delightful than this genial picture? We have all met in later years a certain Colonel Newcome, who is very like Sir Roger, one of his descendants, though he died a bachelor. But the Worcestershire knight was the first of his lineage, and few are the gifted hands who have succeeded in framing men after his model. Those little follies which are so dear to us, the good faith which makes the young men laugh, yet feel ashamed of themselves for laughing, and all the circumstances of that stately simple life which are so different from anything we know, yet so lifelike and genuine, have grown into the imagination of the after-generations. We seem to know Sir Roger from our cradle, though we may never even have read the few chapters of his history. This is the one infallible distinction of genius above all commoner endowments. Of all the actors in that stirring time Sir Roger remains the most living and real. The queen and her court are no more than shadows moving across the historic stage. Halifax, and Somers, and Harley, and even the great Bolingbroke, what are they to us? Figures confused and uncertain, that appear and disappear in one combination or another, so that our head aches in the effort to follow, to identify, to make sure what the intrigues and the complications mean. But we have no difficulty in recollecting all about Sir Roger. We would not have the old man mocked at any more than Mr. Addison would, but kiss his kind old hand as we smile at those little foibles which are all ingratiating and delightful. In that generation, with all its wars and successes, there was, perhaps, no such gain as Sir Roger. Marlborough’s victories made England feared and respected, but cost the country countless treasure, and gave her little advantage; the good knight cost nobody anything, and made all the world the richer. He is one of those inhabitants who never grow old or pass away, and he gives us proof undeniable that when we speak of a corrupt and depraved age, as we have reason to do, we have still nobler reason for believing — as the despairing prophet was taught by God himself in far older times: that however dark might be the prospect there were still seven thousand men in Israel who had never bowed the knee to Baal — what we learn over again, thank Heaven! from shining example everywhere, that there are always surviving the seed of the just, the salt of the earth, by whose silent agency, and pure love, and honest truth, life is made practicable and the world rolls on.
Sir Roger is the great point of the “Spectator,” as the “Spectator” is the truest history of the time. It contains, however, beside, much that is admirable and entertaining, as well as a good deal that was temporary, and is now beyond the fashion of our understanding, or, at least, of our appreciation. Addison’s criticism, or rather exposition, of Milton, which no doubt taught his age a far more general regard for that great poet, is well enough known, but yet not nearly so well known as Sir Roger, and not necessary now as it was then. When these criticisms began it is evident that Addison, as well as his friend Steele, had made a great advance from the time when the young Oxford scholar left Shakspere out of his reckoning altogether, and considered “Old Spenser” only fit to amuse a barbarous age. Though the balance of things had not been redressed throughout the English world, yet these scholars had come to perceive that the greatness of their predecessors had been, perhaps, a little mixed up; that Cowley was not so mighty a genius as their boyhood believed, and that there were figures as of gods behind which it was shame to have misconceived. Throughout all, the meaning was wholesome, and tended toward the elevation of the time. Steele had it specially at heart to discourage gambling, and to put down the hateful tyranny of the duel. And both writers used all their powers to improve and raise the character of theatrical representations, keeping a watch not only over the plays that were performed, but also over the manners of the audience, who crowded the stage so that the players could scarcely be seen, and played cards in their boxes, and used the public entertainment for their own private quarrels and assignations. It is curious, too, to note how these authorities regarded the opera, the new form of amusement which had pushed its way, against all the prejudices of the English, into fashion. Addison himself, indeed, wrote an opera which was not successful; but he did not love that new-fangled entertainment. He devotes two or three numbers to the description of it, for, says he, “There is no question our grandchildren will be very anxious to know the reason why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own country, and to hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue which they did not understand.” It is evident by this that his age had not reached to the further sublimity of believing that when the utterance is musical there is no need of understanding at all. “One scarce knows how to be serious,” he adds, “in the confutation of an absurdity that shows itself at the first sight. It does not want any great measure of sense to see the ridicule of this monstrous practice. If the Italians have a genius for music above the English, the English have a genius for other performances of a much higher nature, and capable of giving the mind a much nobler entertainment.” We wonder if our “Spectator” would be less affronted now by the constant adaptation of equivocal French plays to the English stage, than by the anomaly of a representation given in language which nobody understood? He would, perhaps, feel it to be an advantage often not to understand, and doubt whether the English after all “have a genius for other performances of a much higher nature.”
We are not informed that the “Tatler” and “Spectator,” the real foundation of his fame, gave Addison any help in his career. That was assured by the “Campaign.” He received his first post, that of “a commissionership with £200 a year,” at once, in the end of 1704: his pension having ceased at King William’s death in 1702: the interval is not a very long one, and during this time he had retained his college fellowship. In 1706 he became under-secretary. In 1708, his chief, Lord Sunderland, was dismissed, and Addison along with him; but the latter stepped immediately into the Irish secretaryship, which was worth £2000 a year. Two years afterward occurred the political convulsions brought about by the trial of Sacheverell and the intrigues of the back stairs, which brought Harley into power, and Addison with his leaders was once more out of office; but in 1714 they came triumphantly back, and he rose to the height of political elevation as secretary of state with a seat in the Cabinet. Though he did not retain this position long on account of his failing health, he retired on a pension of £1500 a year. In 1711, at a period when he was supposed to be at a low ebb of fortune, in the cold shade of political opposition, he was able to buy the estate of Bilton, near Rugby, for which he paid £10,000 — which is not bad for a moment of misfortune. Altogether Addison was provided for as the deserving and honorable hero — the wise youth of one of his own allegories, the good apprentice — should be, by poetic justice, but is not always in the experience of the world. The success of the “Spectator,” however, which was more his than Steele’s (as the “Tatler” had been much more Steele’s than Addison’s), was apparently very considerable; Addison himself says, in an early number, that it had reached the circulation of three thousand copies a day. On a special occasion fourteen thousand copies are spoken of; and the passing of the Stamp Act, which destroyed many of the weaker publications of the time, did comparatively little harm to the “Spectator,” which doubled its price without much diminishing its popularity. It had also what no other daily, and very few periodicals of any time, ever reach, the advantage of a permanent issue afterward, in a succession of volumes, of which the first edition seems to have reached an issue of ten thousand copies. Fortunate writers! pleasant public! The “Times,” and the rest of our great newspapers, boast a circulation beyond that which the eighteenth century could have dreamed of; and thirty years ago it was the fashion among public orators more indebted to genius than education — Mr. Cobden for one, and, we think, Mr. John Bright — to say that the leading articles of that day were more than equal to Thucydides and all the other writers of whom classical scholars made their boast. But we wonder how the “Times” leaders would read collected into a volume, against those little dingy books (tobacco paper, as a contemporary says) with all their wisdom and their wit. “I will not meddle with the ‘Spectator,’” says Swift to Stella, “let him fair sex it to the world’s end.” And so he has, at least so far as the world has yet advanced toward that undesirable conclusion.
The “Spectator” ended with the year 1712, having existed less than two years. Whether the authors had found their audience beginning to fail, or their inspiration, or had considered it wise (as is most likely) to forestall the possibility of either catastrophe, we are not informed. Almost immediately after the conclusion of this greatest undertaking of his life, Addison plunged into what probably appeared to the weakness of contemporary vision a much greater undertaking, the production of his tragedy “Cato,” which made a commotion in town such as few plays did even at that period. It was partly as a political movement, to stir up the patriotism and love of liberty which were supposed to be failing under the dominion of the Tories, suspected of all manner of evil designs, that his Whig friends urged Addison to bring out the great play which had been simmering in his brain since his travels, and which had no doubt been read in detached acts and pieces of declamation to all his literary friends. These friends had received several additions in the mean time, especially in the person of Pope, who was still young enough to be proud of Addison’s notice, yet remarkable enough to be intrusted with the composition of a prologue to the great man’s work. Swift, notwithstanding the coldness which had ensued between them on his change of politics, was still sufficiently in Addison’s friendship to be present at a rehearsal, and the whole town on both sides was moved with excitement and expectation. On the first night, “our house,” says Cibber, “was in a manner invested and entrance demanded by twelve o’clock at noon; and before one it was not wide enough for many who came too late for their places.” The following account of its reception is given in a letter by Pope:
The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of the theatre were echoed back by the Tories on the other; while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeding more from the hand than the head. This was the case, too, with the Prologue-writer, who was clapped into a sound Whig at the end of every two lines. I believe you have heard that, after all the applause of the opposite faction, my lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as he expressed it, for defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, and therefore design a present to the same Cato very speedily.
Bolingbroke’s speech about a perpetual dictator was a gibe which everybody understood, directed against the devotion of the Whigs to Marlborough, and was quite honest warfare; but what, we wonder, would Mr. Irving think if Mr. Gladstone sent for him to his box, and “presented him with fifty guineas”? The actor who considers himself one of the most distinguished members of good society had not been thought of in those days. One wonders, too, in passing, where a fine gentleman kept his money, and whether the purse of the stage, which is always ready to be flung to a deserving object, was a reality in the days of Queen Anne? Fifty guineas is a somewhat heavy charge for the pocket; however, perhaps, Lord Bolingbroke had come specially provided, or he had a secretary handy who did not mind the bulging of his coat.
Of this great tragedy, which turned the head of London, and which the two great political parties vied with each other in applauding, there are but a few lines virtually existing nowadays. To be sure, it is in print with the rest of Addison’s works, to be read by whosoever will; but very few avail themselves of that privilege.
‘T is not in mortals to command success.
But we ‘ll do more, Sempronius; we ‘ll deserve it
is the chief relic, and that of a very prosaic common sense and familiar kind, which the great tragedy has left us. “Plato, thou reasonest well!” is another quotation, which is, perhaps, more frequently used in a jocular than serious sense. But for these scraps Cato is as dead as most of his contemporaries; and we do not even remember the great tragedy when we hear the name of its author. We think, indeed, only of the “Spectator” if we have read a little in the literature of the period; but if we have no special tastes and studies that way, of Sir Roger de Coverley alone; for Sir Roger is Addison’s gift to his country and the world, the creation by which his name will always be known.
The end of a man’s life is seldom so interesting as its beginning. After he has achieved all of which he is capable, our interest is more usually a sad than a cheerful one. Addison made in 1716 what seems to have been an ambitious marriage, though he was not the man, one would think, to care for the rank which gave his wife always a distinct personality and another name than his. The Countess of Warwick, however, was, it would appear, a beautiful woman. She had the charge of a troublesome boy, for whom, no doubt, she would be eager to have the advice of such a man as Mr. Addison, whom all the world respected and admired. The little house at Chelsea (the house was called Sandford Manor House, and was some years ago figured against its present doleful background of gasometers, in the Century) which that statesman had acquired, and where he delighted to withdraw from the noise and contention of town, was within reach through the fields of Holland House, the residence of Lady Warwick. They had known each other for years, and Addison had written exquisite little letters to the boy-earl — no doubt with intentions upon the heart of the mother, to which, as is well known, that method is a very successful way — long before. It was, Dr. Johnson says, a long and anxious courtship; and perhaps — who knows? — when Steele performed that picture of the beloved knight sitting silent before the two fine ladies and unable to articulate the desires of his honest heart, it was some similar performance of the shy man of genius who found utterance with such difficulty, which was in Dick’s mind. But perhaps Addison grew bolder when he was a secretary of state. The great Mr. Addison, the delightful “Spectator,” the author of “Cato,” the man whose praises were in everybody’s mouth, and whom Whig and Tory delighted to honor, was no insignificant fine gentleman for a lady of rank to stoop to; and finally those evening walks over the fields, and pleasant rural encounters — for Chelsea was the country in those days, and Holland House quite retired among all the songsters of the grove, and out of town — came to a legitimate conclusion. Addison was forty, and her ladyship had been a widow for fifteen years; but there is no reason for concluding that there was no romance in the wedding, which, however, is always a nervous sort of business under such circumstances. There was the boy, too, to be taken into account, who evidently was not a nice boy, but a tale-bearer, who did not love his mother’s faithful lover, and made mischief when he could. There seems no evidence, however, that the marriage was unhappy, beyond a malicious note of Pope’s, which all the commentators have enlarged. The poor women who have the misfortune to be married to men of genius, fare badly at the hands of the critics. There seems no warrant whatever for Thackeray’s picture of the vulgar vixen whom he calls Mrs. Steele. Steele’s letters exist, but not those of poor Prue, who was so sadly tried in her husband; and so that suffering woman had to suffer over again in her reputation after her life’s trouble is over. It is very unfair to the poor women who have left no champions behind.
The end of our “Spectator’s” life was, however, clouded with more than one unfortunate quarrel, the greatest of which has left its sting behind to quiver in Addison’s name as long as Pope and he are known. It is neither necessary nor edifying to enter at length into the bitternesses of the past. Pope fancied himself aggrieved in various ways by the man who had warmly acknowledged his youthful merits, and received him (though so much his senior in years and fame) on a footing of equality, and who all through never spoke an ill-natured word of the waspish little poet. He believed, or persuaded himself to believe, in his malignant little soul that Addison was jealous of his greatness, and had set up Tickell to rival him in the translation of Homer; and he believed, or pretended to believe, on the supposed authority of young Warwick, that Addison had hired a vulgar critic to attack him. There seems not the slightest reason to believe that either of these grievances was real. Tickell had written simultaneously a translation, which Addison had read and corrected, on account of which he courteously declined to read Pope’s translation of the same, telling him the reason, but accepting the office of critic to the second part of Pope’s work. He had himself, according to the poet’s brag, accepted Pope’s corrections of “Cato,” leaving “not a word unchanged that I objected to”; and he was not moved to any retaliation by Pope’s attack upon him, but continued serenely to praise his envious little assailant with a magnanimity which is wonderful if he had seen the brilliant and pitiless picture so cunningly drawn within the lines of nature, with every feature travestied so near the real, that even Addison’s most faithful partizan has to pause with alarm lest the wicked thing so near the truth might perhaps be true. We hesitate to add to the serene and gentle story of our man of letters this embittered utterance of spite and malice and genius. The lines are sufficiently well known.
Addison did not end his periodical work with the “Spectator.” He took up that familiar character once again for a short time, long enough to produce an additional volume, — the eighth, — in which he had no longer the help of his old vivacious companion. The series is full of fine things, but we are not sure, though Macaulay thinks otherwise, that we do not a little miss the light and shade which Steele helped to supply. And other publications followed. Steele himself set up the “Guardian,” in which Addison had little share; and various others after that in which he had no share at all. And Addison himself had a “Freeholder,” in which he said some notable things; but these are all dead and gone, like so much of the contemporary furnishings of the age. Students find and read them in the old, collected editions; but life and recollection have gone out of them. Perhaps his own time even had by then got as much as it could enjoy and digest out of Addison. We, at least, have done so after these hundred and fifty years, and are capable of no more.
He died in 1719, at the early age of forty-seven. The story goes that he sent for young Warwick when he was on his death-bed, that he might see how a Christian could die: which we should say was unlike Addison, save for the reason that he had been drawing morals all his life, and might at that supreme moment be beyond seeing the ridicule of a last exhibition. Perhaps it was in reality a message of charity and forgiveness to the wayward boy, who, there seems reason to believe, was not fond of his stepfather. And thus the great writer glided gently out of a life in which he had more honor than falls to the lot of most men, and, let us hope, a great deal of mild satisfaction and pleasure. Thackeray has a little scoff at him as a man without passion. “I doubt until after his marriage whether he ever lost his night’s rest or his day’s tranquillity about any woman in his life.” Neither, perhaps, did Sir Roger, whose forty years’ love-making and unrequited affection was a sentimental luxury of the most delicate kind, as his maker intended it to be. But Addison’s fine and meditative genius had no need of passion. He is the “Spectator” of humankind. He had little temptation in his own calm nature to descend into the arena; the honors of the fight came to him somehow without any soil of the actual engagement. No smoke of gunpowder is about his laurels, no spot of blood upon his sword. He looks on at the others fighting, always with a nod of encouragement for the man of honor and virtue, of keen scorn for the selfish and evil-minded, of pity for the fallen. But it is not his part to fight. He makes no pretense of any inclination that way. He is the looker-on; and, as such, more valuable than a thousand men-at-arms.
He died at Holland House, that fine historical mansion sacred to the wits of a later age, but which in Addison’s time contained no tyrannical tribunal of literary patronage, whatever else there might be there which was contrary to peace. His life and death there make an association more touching, and at the same time of sweeter meaning, than the after-struggles of the Whig men of letters for Lady Holland’s arbitrary favors. The great humorist died in the middle of summer, in June, 1719, and was carried from that leafy retirement to the Jerusalem Chamber, where he lay in state: why, it seems difficult to understand — but his position had in it a kind of gentle royalty unlike that of other men. He was buried at Westminster by night, the wonderful solemn arches over the funeral party, half seen by the wavering lights, going off into vistas of mysterious gloom, echoing with the hymns of the choir, who sang him to his rest. Did they sing, one wonders, one of those verses which had been the most intimate utterance of his life: that great hymn of creation, scarcely inferior to the angelic murmurings of medieval Francis in his cell at Assisi? —
Soon as the evening shades prevail
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.
Or one of those humble and more fervent human utterances of faith and humility and thanksgiving? —
Through every period of my life,
Thy goodness I’ll pursue,
And after death, in distant worlds,
The glorious theme renew.
When nature fails, and day and night
Divide thy works no more,
My ever-grateful heart, O Lord,
Thy mercy shall adore.
Through all eternity to thee
A joyful song I’ll raise,
But, oh! eternity’s too short
To utter all thy praise.
With such a soft, yet rapturous, strain the lofty arches and half-seen aisles, perhaps with a summer moon looking in, taking up the wondrous tale, might have echoed over Addison — the gentlest soul of all those noble comrades who lie together awaiting the restitution of all things — when our great humorist, our mildest kind “Spectator,” all his comments over, was laid in the best resting-place England can give to those whom she loves.