Addison

by William John Courthope

The first blow against fashionable immorality having been boldly struck, was followed up systematically. In 1690 was founded “The Society for the Reformation of Manners,” which published every year an account of the progress made in suppressing profaneness and debauchery by its means. It continued its operations till 1738, and during its existence prosecuted, according to its own calculations, 101,683 persons. William III. showed himself prompt to encourage the movement which his subjects had begun. The London Gazette of 27th February, 1698-99, contains a report of the following remarkable order:

“His Majesty being informed, That, notwithstanding an order made the 4th of June, 1697, by the Earl of Sunderland, then Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty’s Household, to prevent the Prophaneness and Immorality of the Stage, several Plays have been lately acted containing expressions contrary to Religion and Good Manners: and whereas the Master of the Revels has represented, That, in contempt of the said order, the actors do often neglect to leave out such Prophane and Indecent expressions as he has thought proper to be omitted. These are therefore to signifie his Majesty’s pleasure, that you do not hereafter presume to act anything in any play contrary to Religion and Good Manners as you shall answer it at your utmost peril. Given under my Hand this 18th of February, 1698. In the eleventh year of his Majesty’s reign.”

It is difficult to realise, in reading the terms of this order, that only thirteen years had elapsed since the death of Charles II., and undoubtedly a very large share of the credit due for such a revolution in the public taste is to be assigned to Collier. Collier, however, did nothing in a literary or artistic sense to improve the character of English literature. His severity, uncompromising as that of the Puritans, inspired Vice with terror, but could not plead with persuasion on behalf of Virtue; his sweeping conclusions struck at the roots of Art as well as of Immorality. He sought to destroy the drama and kindred pleasures of the Imagination, not to reform them. What the age needed was a writer to satisfy its natural desires for healthy and rational amusement, and Steele, with his strongly-developed twofold character, was the man of all others to bridge over the chasm between irreligious licentiousness and Puritanical rigidity. Driven headlong on one side of his nature towards all the tastes and pleasures which absorbed the Court of Charles II., his heart in the midst of his dissipation never ceased to approve of whatever was great, noble, and generous. He has described himself with much feeling in his disquisition on the Rake, a character which he says many men are desirous of assuming without any natural qualifications for supporting it:

“A Rake,” says he, “is a man always to be pitied; and if he lives one day is certainly reclaimed; for his faults proceed not from choice or inclination, but from strong passions and appetites, which are in youth too violent for the curb of reason, good sense, good manners, and good nature; all which he must have by nature and education before he can be allowed to be or to have been of this order.... His desires run away with him through the strength and force of a lively imagination, which hurries him on to unlawful pleasures before reason has power to come in to his rescue.”

That impulsiveness of feeling which is here described, and which was the cause of so many of Steele’s failings in real life, made him the most powerful and persuasive advocate of Virtue in fiction. Of all the imaginative English essayists he is the most truly natural. His large heart seems to rush out in sympathy with any tale of sorrow or exhibition of magnanimity; and even in criticism, his true natural instinct, joined to his constitutional enthusiasm, often raises his judgments to a level with those of Addison himself, as in his excellent essay in the Spectator on Raphael’s cartoons. Examples of these characteristics in his style are to be found in the Story of Unnion and Valentine,[34] and in the fine paper describing two tragedies of real life;[35] in the series of papers on duelling, occasioned by a duel into which he was himself forced against his own inclination;[36] and in the sound advice which Isaac gives to his half-sister Jenny on the morrow of her marriage.[37] Perhaps, however, the chivalry and generosity of feeling which make Steele’s writings so attractive are most apparent in the delightful paper containing the letter of Serjeant Hall from the camp before Mons. After pointing out to his readers the admirable features in the serjeant’s simple letter, Steele concludes as follows:

“If we consider the heap of an army, utterly out of all prospect of rising and preferment, as they certainly are, and such great things executed by them, it is hard to account for the motive of their gallantry. But to me, who was a cadet at the battle of Coldstream, in Scotland, when Monk charged at the head of the regiment now called Coldstream, from the victory of that day—I remember it as well as if it were yesterday; I stood on the left of old West, who I believe is now at Chelsea—I say to me, who know very well this part of mankind, I take the gallantry of private soldiers to proceed from the same, if not from a nobler, impulse than that of gentlemen and officers. They have the same taste of being acceptable to their friends, and go through the difficulties of that profession by the same irresistible charm of fellowship and the communication of joys and sorrows which quickens the relish of pleasure and abates the anguish of pain. Add to this that they have the same regard to fame, though they do not expect so great a share as men above them hope for; but I will engage Serjeant Hall would die ten thousand deaths rather than that a word should be spoken at the Red Lettice, or any part of the Butcher Row, in prejudice to his courage or honesty. If you will have my opinion, then, of the Serjeant’s letter, I pronounce the style to be mixed, but truly epistolary; the sentiment relating to his own wound in the sublime; the postscript of Pegg Hartwell in the gay; and the whole the picture of the bravest sort of men, that is to say, a man of great courage and small hopes.”[38]

With such excellences of style and sentiment it is no wonder that the Tatler rapidly established itself in public favour. It was a novel experience for the general reader to be provided three times a week with entertainment that pleased his imagination without offending his sense of decency or his religious instincts. But a new hand shortly appeared in the Tatler, which was destined to carry the art of periodical essay-writing to a perfection beside which even the humour of Steele appears rude and unpolished. Addison and Steele had been friends since boyhood. They had been contemporaries at the Charter House, and, as we have seen, Steele had sometimes spent his holidays in the parsonage of Addison’s father. He was a postmaster at Merton about the same time that his friend was a Fellow of Magdalen. The admiration which he conceived for the hero of his boyhood lasted, as so often happens, through life; he exhibited his veneration for him in all places, and even when Addison indulged his humour at his expense he showed no resentment. Addison, on his side, seems to have treated Steele with a kind of gracious condescension. The latter was one of the few intimate friends to whom he unbent in conversation; and while he was Under-Secretary of State he aided him in the production of The Tender Husband, which was dedicated to him by the author. Of this play Steele afterwards declared with characteristic impulse that many of the most admired passages were the work of his friend, and that he “thought very meanly of himself that he had never publicly avowed it.”

The authorship of the Tatler was at first kept secret to all the world. It is said that the hand of Steele discovered itself to Addison on reading in the fifth number a remark which he remembered to have himself made to Steele on the judgment of Virgil, as shown in the appellation of “Dux Trojanus,” which the Latin poet assigns to Æneas, when describing his adventure with Dido in the cave, in the place of the usual epithet of “pius” or “pater.” Thereupon he offered his services as a contributor, and these were of course gladly accepted. The first paper sent by Addison to the Tatler was No. 18, wherein is displayed that inimitable art which makes a man appear infinitely ridiculous by the ironical commendation of his offences against right, reason, and good taste. The subject is the approaching peace with France, and it is noticeable that the article of foreign news, which had been treated in previous Tatlers with complete seriousness, is here for the first time invested with an air of pleasantry. The distress of the news-writers at the prospect of peace is thus described:

“There is another sort of gentlemen whom I am much more concerned for, and that is the ingenious fraternity of which I have the honour to be an unworthy member; I mean the news-writers of Great Britain, whether Post-men or Post-boys, or by what other name or title soever dignified or distinguished. The case of these gentlemen is, I think, more hard than that of the soldiers, considering that they have taken more towns and fought more battles. They have been upon parties and skirmishes when our armies have lain still, and given the general assault to many a place when the besiegers were quiet in their trenches. They have made us masters of several strong towns many weeks before our generals could do it, and completed victories when our greatest captains have been glad to come off with a drawn battle. Where Prince Eugene has slain his thousands Boyer has slain his ten thousands. This gentleman can indeed be never enough commended for his courage and intrepidity during this whole war: he has laid about him with an inexpressible fury, and, like offended Marius of ancient Rome, made such havoc among his countrymen as must be the work of two or three ages to repair.... It is impossible for this ingenious sort of men to subsist after a peace: every one remembers the shifts they were driven to in the reign of King Charles the Second, when they could not furnish out a single paper of news without lighting up a comet in Germany or a fire in Moscow. There scarce appeared a letter without a paragraph on an earthquake. Prodigies were grown so familiar that they had lost their name, as a great poet of that age has it. I remember Mr. Dyer, who is justly looked upon by all the foxhunters in the nation as the greatest statesman our country has produced, was particularly famous for dealing in whales, in so much that in five months’ time (for I had the curiosity to examine his letters on that occasion) he brought three into the mouth of the river Thames, besides two porpusses and a sturgeon.”

The appearance of Addison as a regular contributor to the Tatler gradually brought about a revolution in the character of the paper. For some time longer, indeed, articles continued to be dated from the different coffee-houses, but only slight efforts were made to distinguish the materials furnished from White’s, Will’s, or Isaac’s own apartment. When the hundredth number was reached a fresh address is given at Shere Lane, where the astrologer lived, and henceforward the papers from White’s and Will’s grow extremely rare; those from the Grecian may be said to disappear; and the foreign intelligence, dated from St. James’, whenever it is inserted, which is seldom, is as often as not made the text of a literary disquisition. Allegories become frequent, and the letters sent, or supposed to be sent, to Isaac at his home address furnish the material for many numbers. The Essay, in fact, or that part of the newspaper which goes to form public opinion, preponderates greatly over that portion which is devoted to the report of news. Spence quotes from a Mr. Chute: “I have heard Sir Richard Steele say that, though he had a greater share in the Tatlers than in the Spectators, he thought the news article in the first of these was what contributed much to their success.”[39] Chute, however, seems to speak with a certain grudge against Addison, and the statement ascribed by him to Steele is intrinsically improbable. It is not very likely that, as the proprietor of the Tatler, he would have dispensed with any element in it that contributed to its popularity, yet after No. 100 the news articles are seldom found. The truth is that Steele recognised the superiority of Addison’s style, and with his usual quickness accommodated the form of his journal to the genius of the new contributor.