Now this was something new in English literature. Sir Roger is the earliest person in English imaginative prose that is really still alive. There are men and women in our poetry before his day—in the drama there is, of course, a great host of them; but in prose literature Sir Roger is the first. Furthermore, the men and women of the drama, even in that comedy of manners which professed to reflect most accurately contemporary society, were almost always drawn with some romantic or satiric exaggeration; but there is no exaggeration in the character of Sir Roger. Here was the beginning of a healthy realism. It was only necessary for Richardson and Fielding, thirty years later, to bring together several such genuine characters into a group, and to show how the incidents of their lives naturally ran into plot or story—and we have a novel.
The original suggestion for the character of Sir Roger seems to have come from Steele, who wrote that account of the Spectator Club (Spectator, No. 2) in which the knight first appears. But it is to Addison's keener perception and nicer art that we owe most of those subtle and humorous touches of characterization which make the portrait so real and so human. There is more of movement and incident in Steele's papers, and there is more of sentiment. It is Steele, for example, who tells the story of the Journey to London, and recounts the adventures of the Coverley ancestry; it is Steele, too, who has most to say of the widow. But in the best papers by Addison, like the Visit to the Abbey or the Evening at the Theater, there is hardly a line that does not reveal, in speech, or manner, or notion, some peculiarity of the kindly gentleman we know and love so well. If Steele outlined the portrait, it was left for Addison to elaborate it. Moreover, a careful reading of the papers will show that Steele's conception of the character was slightly different from Addison's. Steele's Sir Roger is whimsical and sentimental, but a man of good sense; not only beloved but respected. Addison dwells rather upon the old knight's rusticity, his old-fashioned, patriarchal notions of society, his ignorance of the town, his obsolete but kindly prejudices. The truth is that in Addison's portrait there is always a trace of covert satire upon the narrow conservatism of the Tory country gentleman of his day. Addison's Sir Roger is amiable and humorous; but he does not represent the party of intelligence and progress—he is not a Whig.
Yet there are no real inconsistencies in the character of Sir Roger. His whimsical humor, his sentiment, his credulity, his benevolence, his amiable though obstinate temper, are all combined in a personality so convincing that we must always think of him as an actual contemporary of the men who created him. He is the typical conservative English country gentleman of the Queen Anne time, not taking kindly to new ideas, but sturdy, honest, order-loving, of large heart and simple manners. To such men as he England owes the permanence of much that is best in her institutions and her national life. As one walks through Westminster Abbey to-day, listening to the same chattering verger that conducted Sir Roger—he has been going his rounds ever since—one almost expects to see again the knight sitting down in the coronation chair, or leaning on Edward Third's sword while he tells the discomfited guide the whole story of the Black Prince out of Baker's Chronicle. If, indeed, we try in any way to bring back to imagination the life of that bygone age, Sir Roger is sure to come to mind at once, at the assizes, at Vauxhall, or, best of all, at home in the country. He is part of that life; as real to our thought as Swift or Marlborough, or as Steele or Addison themselves.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
No attempt is here made to give an exhaustive bibliography. The following paragraphs contain only such a selection from the literature of the subject as may be most accessible and of most service both to the student and the teacher.
TEXTS
Steele and The Tatler
There is no complete and uniform edition of the writings of Steele. The best edition of The Tatler is that of Chalmers, 4 volumes, 1822 (reissued 1855-1856). A new edition, however, in 4 volumes, edited by George A. Aitken, is now in preparation. Two well-chosen and well-edited volumes of selections from Steele's work are, Selections from Steele, edited by G. R. Carpenter (Athenæum Press Series, 1897), and Selections from Steele's Contributions to the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, edited by Austin Dobson, 1897. Steele's Plays, edited by George A. Aitken (1896), make one volume of The Mermaid Series. For the letters of Steele, see The Epistolary Correspondence of Richard Steele, edited by John Nichols, 2 volumes, 1789 (reissued 1809).
Addison and The Spectator