Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne

by Mrs. Oliphant

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.