Addison

by William John Courthope

That is to say, his design was “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature,” so that the conscience of society might recognise in a dramatic form the character of its lapses from virtue and reason. The indispensable instrument for the execution of this design was the Spectator himself, the silent embodiment of right reason and good taste, who is obviously the conception of Addison.

“I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artizan, without ever meddling with any practical part in life. I am very well versed in the theory of a husband, or a father, and can discern the errors in the economy, business, and diversion of others better than those who are engaged in them, as standers-by discover blots which are apt to escape those who are in the game. I never espoused any party with violence, and am resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and Tories unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my life as a looker-on, which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper.”

In order, however, to give this somewhat inanimate figure life and action, he is represented as the principal member of a club, his associates consisting of various representatives of the chief “interests” of society. We can scarcely doubt that the club was part of the original and central conception of the work; and if this be so, a new light is thrown on some of the features in the characters of the Spectator which have hitherto rather perplexed the critics.

“The Spectator’s friends,” says Macaulay, “were first sketched by Steele. Four of the club—the templar, the clergyman, the soldier, and the merchant—were uninteresting figures, fit only for a background. But the other two—an old country baronet and an old town rake—though not delineated with a very delicate pencil, had some good strokes. Addison took the rude outlines into his own hands, retouched them, coloured them, and is in truth the creator of the Sir Roger de Coverley and the Will Honeycomb with whom we are all familiar.”

This is a very misleading account of the matter. It implies that the characters in the Spectator were mere casual conceptions of Steele’s; that Addison knew nothing about them till he saw Steele’s rough draft; and that he, and he alone, is the creator of the finished character of Sir Roger de Coverley. But, as a matter of fact, the character of Sir Roger is full of contradictions and inconsistencies; and the want of unity which it presents is easily explained by the fact that it is the work of four different hands. Sixteen papers on the subject were contributed by Addison, seven by Steele, three by Budgell, and one by Tickell. Had Sir Roger been, as Macaulay seems to suggest, merely the stray phantom of Steele’s imagination, it is very unlikely that so many different painters should have busied themselves with his portrait. But he was from the first intended to be a type of a country gentleman, just as much as Don Quixote was an imaginative representation of many Spanish gentlemen whose brains had been turned by the reading of romances. In both cases the type of character was so common and so truly conceived as to lend itself easily to the treatment of writers who approached it with various conceptions and very unequal degrees of skill. Any critic, therefore, who regards Sir Roger de Coverley as the abstract conception of a single mind is certain to misconceive the character. This error lies at the root of Johnson’s description of the knight:

“Of the characters,” says he, “feigned or exhibited in the Spectator, the favourite of Addison was Sir Roger de Coverley, of whom he had formed a very delicate and discriminated idea, which he would not suffer to be violated; and therefore when Steele had shown him innocently picking up a girl in the Temple and taking her to a tavern, he drew upon himself so much of his friend’s indignation that he was forced to appease him by a promise of forbearing Sir Roger for the time to come.... It may be doubted whether Addison ever filled up his original delineation. He describes his knight as having his imagination somewhat warped; but of this perversion he has made very little use. The irregularities in Sir Roger’s conduct seem not so much the effects of a mind deviating from the beaten track of life, by the perpetual pressure of some overwhelming idea, as of habitual rusticity and that negligence which solitary grandeur naturally generates. The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design.”

But Addison never had any design of the kind. Steele, indeed, describes Sir Roger in the second number of the Spectator as “a gentleman that is very singular in his behaviour,” but he added that “his singularities proceed from his good sense, and are contradictions to the manners of the world, only, as he thinks, the world is in the wrong.” Addison regarded the knight from a different point of view. “My friend Sir Roger,” he says, “amidst all his good qualities is something of a humourist; his virtues as well as imperfections are, as it were, tinged by a certain extravagance which makes them particularly his, and distinguishes them from those of other men. This cast of mind, as it is generally very innocent in itself, so it renders his conversation highly agreeable and more delightful than the same degree of sense and virtue would appear in their common and ordinary colours.”

The fact is, as I have already said, that it had evidently been predetermined by the designers of the Spectator that the Club should consist of certain recognised and familiar types; the different writers, in turns, worked on these types, each for his own purpose and according to the bent of his own genius. Steele gave the first sketch of Sir Roger in a few rough but vigorous strokes, which were afterwards greatly refined and altered by Addison. In Steele’s hands the knight appears indeed as a country squire, but he has also a town-house in Soho Square, then the most fashionable part of London. He had apparently been originally “a fine gentleman,” and only acquired his old-fashioned rusticity of manners in consequence of a disappointment in love. All his oddities date from this adventure, though his heart has outlived the effects of it. “There is,” we are told, “such a mirthful cast in his behaviour that he is rather beloved than esteemed.” Steele’s imagination had evidently been chiefly caught by the humour of Sir Roger’s love affair, which is made to reflect the romantic cast of poetry affected after the Restoration, and forms the subject of two papers in the series; in two others—recording respectively the knight’s kindness to his servants, and his remarks on the portraits of his ancestors—the writer takes up the idea of Addison; while another gives an account of a dispute between Sir Roger and Sir Andrew Freeport on the merits of the moneyed interest. Addison, on the other hand, had formed a far finer conception of the character of the country gentleman, and one that approaches the portrait of Don Quixote. As a humourist he perceived the incongruous position in modern society of one nourished in the beliefs, principles, and traditions of the old feudal world; and hence, whenever the knight is brought into contact with modern ideas, he invests his observations, as the Spectator says, with “a certain extravagance” which constitutes their charm. Such are the papers describing his behaviour at church, his inclination to believe in witchcraft, and his Tory principles; such, in another vein, are his criticisms in the theatre, his opinions of Spring Gardens, and his delightful reflections on the tombs in Westminster Abbey. But Addison was also fully alive to the beauty and nobility of the feudal idea, which he brings out with great animation in the various papers describing the patriarchal relations existing between Sir Roger and his servants, retainers, and tenants, closing the series with the truly pathetic account of the knight’s death. It is to be observed that he drops altogether Steele’s idea of Sir Roger having once been a man of fashion, which is indeed discarded by Steele himself when co-operating with his friend on the picture of country life. Addison also quite disregards Steele’s original hint about “the humble desires” of his hero; and he only once makes incidental mention of the widow.

Budgell contributed three papers on the subject—two in imitation of Addison; one describing a fox-hunt, and the other giving Sir Roger’s opinion on beards; the third, in imitation of Steele, showing Sir Roger’s state of mind on hearing of the addresses of Sir David Dundrum to the widow. The number of the Spectator which is said to have so greatly displeased Addison was written, not, as Johnson says, by Steele, but by Tickell. It goes far to confirm my supposition that the characters of the Club had been agreed upon beforehand. The trait which Tickell describes would have been natural enough in an ordinary country gentleman, though it was inconsistent with the fine development of Sir Roger’s character in the hands of Addison.

In his capacity of critic Addison has been variously judged, and, it may be added, generally undervalued. We find that Johnson’s contemporaries were reluctant to allow him the name of critic. “His criticism,” Johnson explains, “is condemned as tentative or experimental rather than scientific; and he is considered as deciding by taste rather than by principles.” But if Aristotle is right in saying that the virtuous man is the standard of virtue, the man of sound instincts and perceptions ought certainly to be accepted as a standard in the more debatable region of taste. There can, at any rate, be no doubt that Addison’s artistic judgments, founded on instinct, were frequently much nearer the mark than Johnson’s, though these were based on principle. Again, Macaulay says, “The least valuable of Addison’s contributions to the Spectator are, in the judgment of our age, his critical papers;” but he adds, patronisingly, “The very worst of them is creditable to him when the character of the school in which he had been trained is fairly considered. The best of them were much too good for his readers. In truth, he was not so far behind our generation as he was before his own.” By “the school in which he had been trained,” Macaulay doubtless meant the critical traditions established by Boileau and Bouhours, and he would have justified the disparagement implied in his reference to them by pointing to the pedantic intolerance and narrowness of view which these traditions encouraged. But in all matters of this kind there is loss and gain. If Addison’s generation was much more insensible than our own to a large portion of imaginative truth, it had a far keener perception of the laws and limits of expression; and, granted that Voltaire was wrong in regarding Shakespeare as an “inspired barbarian,” he would never have made the mistake which critics now make every day of mistaking nonsense for poetry.