Steele’s Literary Qualities.
Nor must we forget the work by which he is chiefly known, I mean his establishment of the Tatler—the forerunner of all those delightful essays which went to the making of the Spectator and the Guardian; these latter having the more credit for their dignity and wise reticence, but the Tatler being more vivacious, and quite as witty. Addison came to the help of Steele in the Tatler, and Steele, afterward joined forces with Addison in the Spectator. I happen to be the owner of a very old edition of these latter essays, in whose “Table of Contents” some staid critic of the last generation has written his (or her) comments on the various topics discussed; and I find against the papers of Addison, such notes as—“instructive, sound, judicious;” and against those of Steele, I am sorry to say, such words as “flighty, light, witty, graceful, worthless;” and I am inclined to think the criticisms are pretty well borne out by the papers; but if flighty and light, he was not unwholesome; and he did not always carry the rollicking ways of the tavern into the little piquant journalism, where the grave and excellent Mr. Addison presided with him. Nay, there are better things yet to be said of him. He argued against the sin and folly of duelling with a force and pungency that went largely to stay that evil; and he never touches a religious topic that his manner does not take on an awe and a respect which belongs to the early pages of the Christian Hero. There are touches of pathos, too, in his writing, quite unmatchable; but straight and quick upon these you are apt to catch sound of the jingling spurs of the captain of dragoons. Thus, in that often quoted allusion to his father’s death (which happened in his boyhood), he says:
“I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a beating the coffin, and calling ‘Papa.’… My mother catched me in her arms, and almost smothered me in her embraces, and told me, in a flood of tears, ‘Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more.’”
This is on page 364 of the Tatler, and on page 365 he says: “A large train of disasters were coming into my memory, when my servant knocked at my closet door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put to sale on Thursday next, at Garraway’s coffee-house.” And he sends for three of his friends—which was so like him!
So he goes through life—a kindly, good-hearted, tender, intractable, winning fellow; talking, odd-whiles, piously—spending freely—drinking fearlessly—loving widely—writing archly, wittily, charmingly.
We have a characteristic glimpse of him in his later years—for he lived far down into the days of the Georges (one of whom gave him his knighthood and title)—when he is palsied, at his charming country home in Wales, and totters out to see the village girls dance upon the green, and insists upon sending off to buy a new gown for the best dancer; this was so like him! And it would have been like him to carry his palsied steps straight thereafter to the grave where his Prue and the memory of all his married joys and hopes lay sleeping.