Addison

by William John Courthope

It is a peculiarity in Addison’s life that Fortune, as if conspiring with the happiness of his genius, constantly furnished him with favourable opportunities for the exercise of his powers. The pension granted him by Halifax enabled him, while he was yet a young man, to add to his knowledge of classical literature an intimate acquaintance with the languages and governments of the chief European states. When his fortunes were at the lowest ebb on his return from his travels, his introduction to Godolphin by Halifax, the consequence of which was The Campaign, procured him at once celebrity and advancement. The appearance of the Tatler, though due entirely to the invention of Steele, prepared the way for development of the genius that prevailed in the Spectator. But the climax of Addison’s good fortune was certainly the successful production of Cato, a play which, on its own merits, might have been read with interest by the scholars of the time, but which could scarcely have succeeded on the stage if it had not been appropriated and made part of our national life by the violence of political passion.

Addison had not the genius of a dramatist. The grace, the irony, the fastidious refinement which give him such an unrivalled capacity in describing and criticising the humours of men as a spectator did not qualify him for imaginative sympathy with their actions and passions. But, like most men of ability in that period, his thoughts were drawn towards the stage, and even in Dryden’s lifetime he had sent him a play in manuscript, asking him to use his interest to obtain its performance. The old poet returned it, we are told, “with many commendations, but with an expression of his opinion that on the stage it would not meet with its deserved success.” Addison, nevertheless, persevered in his attempts, and during his travels he wrote four acts of the tragedy of Cato, the design of which, according to Tickell, he had formed while he was at Oxford, though he certainly borrowed many incidents in the play from a tragedy on the same subject which he saw performed at Venice.[52] It is characteristic, however, of the undramatic mood in which he executed his task that the last act was not written till shortly before the performance of the play, many years later. As early as 1703 the drama was shown to Cibber by Steele, who said that “whatever spirit Mr. Addison had shown in his writing it, he doubted that he would ever have courage enough to let his Cato stand the censure of an English audience; that it had only been the amusement of his leisure hours in Italy, and was never intended for the stage.” He seems to have remained of the same opinion on the very eve of the performance of the play. “When Mr. Addison,” says Pope, as reported by Spence, “had finished his Cato he brought it to me, desired to have my sincere opinion of it, and left it with me for three or four days. I gave him my opinion of it sincerely, which was, ‘that I thought he had better not act it, and that he would get reputation enough by only printing it.’ This I said as thinking the lines well written, but the piece not theatrical enough. Some time after Mr. Addison said ‘that his own opinion was the same with mine, but that some particular friends of his, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on its being acted.’”[53]

Undoubtedly, Pope was right in principle, and anybody who reads the thirty-ninth paper in the Spectator may see not only that Addison was out of sympathy with the traditions of the English stage, but that his whole turn of thought disqualified him from comprehending the motives of dramatic composition. “The modern drama,” says he, “excels that of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable—but, what a Christian writer would be ashamed to own, falls infinitely short of it in the moral part of the performance.” And the entire drift of the criticism that follows relates to the thought, the sentiment, and the expression of the modern drama, rather than to the really essential question, the nature of the action. It is false criticism to say that the greatest dramas of Shakespeare fail in morality as compared with those of the Greek tragedians. That the manner in which the moral is conveyed is different in each case is of course true, since the subjects of Greek tragedy were selected from Greek mythology, and were treated by Æschylus and Sophocles, at all events, in a religious spirit, whereas the plays of Shakespeare are only indirectly Christian, and produce their effect by an appeal to the individual conscience. None the less is it the case that Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear have for modern audiences a far deeper moral meaning than the Agamemnon or the Œdipus Tyrannus. The tragic motive in Greek tragedy is the impotence of man in the face of moral law or necessity; in Shakespeare’s tragedies it is the corruption of the will, some sin of the individual against the law of God, which brings its own punishment. There was nothing in this principle of which a Christian dramatist need have been ashamed; and as regards Shakespeare, at any rate, it is evident that Addison’s criticism is unjust.

It is, however, by no means undeserved in its application to the class of plays which grew up after the Restoration. Under that régime the moral spirit of the Shakesperian drama entirely disappears. The king, whose temper was averse to tragedy, and whose taste had been formed on French models, desired to see every play end happily. “I am going to end a piece,” writes Roger, Earl of Orrery, to a friend, “in the French style, because I have heard the King declare that he preferred their manner to our own.” The greatest tragedies of the Elizabethan age were transformed to suit this new fashion; even King Lear obtained a happy deliverance from his sufferings in satisfaction of the requirements of an effeminate Court. Addison very wittily ridicules this false taste in the fortieth number of the Spectator. He is not less felicitous in his remarks on the sentiments and the style of the Caroline drama, though he does not sufficiently discriminate his censure, which he bestows equally on the dramatists of the Restoration and on Shakespeare. Two main characteristics appear in all the productions of the former epoch—the monarchical spirit and the fashion of gallantry. The names of the plays speak for themselves: on the one hand, The Indian Emperor, Aurengzebe, The Indian Queen, The Conquest of Granada, The Fate of Hannibal; on the other, Secret Love, Tyrannic Love, Love and Vengeance, The Rival Queens, Theodosius, or the Power of Love, and numberless others of the same kind. In the one set of dramas the poet sought to arouse the passion of pity by exhibiting the downfall of persons of high estate; in the other he appealed to the sentiment of romantic passion. Such were the fruits of that taste for French romance which was encouraged by Charles II., and which sought to disguise the absence of genuine emotion by the turgid bombast of its sentiment and the epigrammatic declamation of its rhymed verse.

At the same time, the taste of the nation having been once turned into French channels, a remedy for these defects was naturally sought for from French sources; and just as the school of Racine and Boileau set its face against the extravagances of the romantic coteries, so Addison and his English followers, adopting the principles of the French classicists, applied them to the reformation of the English theatre. Hence arose a great revival of respect for the poetical doctrines of Aristotle, regard for the unities of time and place, attention to the proprieties of sentiment and diction—in a word, for all those characteristics of style afterwards summed up in the phrase “correctness.”

This habit of thought, useful as an antidote to extravagance, was not fertile as a motive of dramatic production. Addison worked with strict and conscious attention to his critical principles: the consequence is that his Cato, though superficially “correct,” is a passionless and mechanical play. He had combated with reason the “ridiculous doctrine in modern criticism, that writers of tragedy are obliged to an equal distribution of rewards and punishments, and an impartial execution of poetical justice.”[54] But his reasoning led him on to deny that the idea of justice is an essential element in tragedy. “We find,” says he, “that good and evil happen alike to all men on this side the grave; and, as the principal design of tragedy is to raise commiseration and terror in the minds of the audience, we shall defeat this great end if we always make virtue and innocence happy and successful.... The ancient writers of tragedy treated men in their plays as they are dealt with in the world, by making virtue sometimes happy and sometimes miserable, as they found it in the fable which they made choice of, or as it might affect their audience in the most agreeable manner.”[55] But it is certain that the fable which the two greatest of the Greek tragedians “made choice of” was always of a religious nature, and that the idea of Justice was never absent from it; it is also certain that Retribution is a vital element in all the tragedies of Shakespeare. The notion that the essence of tragedy consists in the spectacle of a good man struggling with adversity is a conception derived through the French from the Roman Stoics; it is not found in the works of the greatest tragic poets.

This, however, was Addison’s central motive, and this is what Pope, in his famous Prologue, assigns to him as his chief praise:

“Our author shuns by vulgar springs to move
The hero’s glory or the virgin’s love;
In pitying love we but our weakness show,
And wild ambition well deserves its woe.
Here tears shall flow from a more generous cause,
Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws:
He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise,
And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes.
Virtue confessed in human shape he draws—
What Plato thought, and godlike Cato was:
No common object to your sight displays,
But what with pleasure heav’n itself surveys;
A brave man struggling in the storms of fate,
And greatly falling with a falling state.”

A falling state offers a tragic spectacle to the thought and the reason, but not one that can be represented on the stage so as to move the passions of the spectators. The character of Cato, as exhibited by Addison, is an abstraction, round which a number of other lay figures are skilfully grouped for the delivery of lofty and appropriate sentiments. Juba, the virtuous young prince of Numidia, the admirer of Cato’s virtue, Portius and Marcus, Cato’s virtuous sons, and Marcia, his virtuous daughter, are all equally admirable and equally lifeless. Johnson’s criticism of the play leaves little to be said:

“About things,” he observes, “on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right; and of Cato it has not been unjustly determined that it is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or possible in human life. Nothing here ‘excites or assuages emotion;’ here is ‘no magical power of raising fantastic terror or wild anxiety.’ The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered without joy or sorrow. Of the agents we have no care; we consider not what they are doing or what they are suffering; we wish only to know what they have to say. Cato is a being above our solicitude; a man of whom the gods take care, and whom we leave to their care with heedless confidence. To the rest neither gods nor men can have much attention, for there is not one among them that strongly attracts either affection or esteem. But they are made the vehicles of such sentiments and such expressions that there is scarcely a scene in the play which the reader does not wish to impress upon his memory.”